“And God spake unto Noah, and to his sons with him, saying, And I, behold, I establish my covenant with you, and with your seed after you; And with every living creature that is with you, of the fowl, of the cattle, and of every beast of the earth with you; from all that go out of the ark, to every beast of the earth. And I will establish my covenant with you; neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of a flood; neither shall there any more be a flood to destroy the earth.”
Earlier the Lord promised that He would never again kill all the animals on the earth with a flood. He also said that as long as the earth remained He would make sure that there was summer and winter, seedtime and harvest, day and night. The Lord confirmed that promise. Some people suggest that these two promises mean that this a combination of two separate traditions so this must mean that there were two documents in existence and some, very clever, editor sewed these stories together to make sure that his priorities were met in the form of the text we see today. There is a much better explanation than that. Hebrew poetry is full of parallelism, that is, the same message is repeated in various ways. This allows us to get a better meaning of the text. Now if “All scripture is given by inspiration of God.” Then God must have been the first Person to use parallelism and He made sure that Noah understood the message properly. This does not preclude the possibility that God will bring local flooding as part of the chaotic world in which we live but it does mean the whole earth will never again be flooded. God is always consistent and, as such, can always be trusted.
Would you like to support this ministry? Please click this link: http://jamesmcnaught.blogspot.com/ and then click “Follow” and encourage all your friends to follow as well.
(The view expressed in this blog are my own and should not be taken as inspired in any way.)
No comments:
Post a Comment