Genesis 8:20 Commentary and Bible Study

The first thing he did – ‘Noah builded an altar unto the Lord; and took of every clean beast, and of every clean fowl.’ Here they were on the side of Ararat where God had caused the ark to rest, looking out across a vast landscape, and aware that their lives were entirely in the hands of the living God. They knew he is the Lord who hates sin, who hates it such much that he is ready to destroy his own workmanship in part, in order to cleanse it from wickedness. They were aware no doubt that the people outside the ark would have cried to the Lord to spare them, but too late. The Lord had refused to hear their cries because they had refused to him for so long. But Noah and his sons and their wives knew that they too were sinners, and they needed an atonement for their sins. They therefore made it their priority to worship God and give thanks for his deliverance, and to acknowledge their unworthiness of his mercy. It was a service of thanksgiving, thanksgiving for safe deliverance from the flood. It was worship, gratitude, dedication of themselves. And surely, although we are not told so, there was an element of propitiation. Even those earliest sacrifices would undoubtedly have had that element in them, that they pictured God, somehow, taking away sin. One day he would fulfil those pictures and send the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. They did what he had taught them to do, and offered up an animal sacrifice, from one of the clean beasts that they had housed on the ark. God had told them to take seven of each of these precisely so that there would be enough to offer in sacrifice and still leave sufficient to breed from. This distinction between clean and unclean is further evidence that the pre-flood people had at an early stage been taught to offer animal sacrifices to God.