Welcome to EBible Fellowship’s Bible study in the Book of Genesis. This is study #25 of Genesis, chapter 6 and we are going to read Genesis 6:17-18:

And, behold, I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh, wherein is the breath of life, from under heaven; and every thing that is in the earth shall die. But with thee will I establish my covenant; and thou shalt come into the ark, thou, and thy sons, and thy wife, and thy sons' wives with thee.

I will stop reading there. In verse 17, God is for the first time getting specific about how He intends to destroy the earth. He had already told Noah of his intention to destroy the earth, but this is the first time God mentions a flood: “And, behold, I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh.” Noah may have assumed it was God’s intention to do so because He was being commanded to build an ark and that is a vessel that floats upon the water, but it is not until verse 17 that God tells him that He is going to bring a flood.

The Hebrew word translated as “flood” is Strong’s #3999 and it is used 12 times from here in Genesis, chapter 6 through Genesis, chapter 11. Of course, when the flood begins in Genesis 7 and then proceeds in Genesis 8 and 9, those chapters are central to the flood. However, it is also used in Genesis 10:1:

Now these are the generations of the sons of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth: and unto them were sons born after the flood.

Then it says in Genesis 10:32:

These are the families of the sons of Noah, after their generations, in their nations: and by these were the nations divided in the earth after the flood.

Then it is used once more in Genesis 11:10:

These are the generations of Shem: Shem was an hundred years old, and begat Arphaxad two years after the flood:

In every instance where this Hebrew word translated as “flood” is found in Genesis 6 through Genesis 11 it has to do with the historical flood. There is no other usage that refers to something else. This word is only translated as “flood” in the Bible and it is only found one other time in the entire Old Testament and that is in the Psalms. In Psalm 29 this Hebrew word translated as “flood” appears just once and you will not find it anywhere else in the Old Testament. You can find other words translated as “flood,” but not this word, which is Strong’s #3999. So that means that this verse in Psalms has everything to do with the flood of Noah’s day. It says in Psalm 29:10:

JEHOVAH sitteth upon the flood; yea, JEHOVAH sitteth King for ever.

It is an unusual statement that the Lord is making here. JEHOVAH sits upon the flood. One thing we can see (and we have mentioned this before) is that “to sit” in the Bible means “to rule.” A king sits upon the throne. Here, God draws on that as He uses Hebrew parallelism: the second part of the verse restates the first part of the verse: “yea, JEHOVAH sitteth King for ever.” So JEHOVAH sitting upon the flood is equivalent to JEHOVAH sitting as King for ever. It has to do with ruling and having dominion as the King, but why does God say that He “sitteth upon the flood”? That is a curious thing to say. Why would God use a word that in the other 12 instances where it is used it identifies with the historical flood of Noah’s day? He is sitting as King, ruling for ever. That is the idea.

All we can do is to consider some of the things the Bible tells us about the flood. Let us go back to Genesis and look at Genesis 7:17:

And the flood was forty days upon the earth; and the waters increased, and bare up the ark, and it was lift up above the earth.

In a sense, the ark is “sitting” upon the flood, is it not? The ark is the only thing that has come up from the earth and risen to the point that it sits upon the flood. The ark is a picture of the Lord Jesus Christ and the Bible tells us that Christ is King of kings and LORD of lords. Christ is also JEHOVAH. Remember what it says in Isaiah 43:11: “I, even I, am JEHOVAH; and beside me there is no saviour.” The New Testament tells us in Luke 2:11: “For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.” JEHOVAH is Saviour. Christ is Saviour. The name JEHOVAH points to His saving work and “JEHOVAH sitteth upon the flood.” The ark, a picture of the Saviour Jesus Christ, sits upon the flood.

More than that, it goes on to say in Genesis 7:18-20:

And the waters prevailed, and were increased greatly upon the earth; and the ark went upon the face of the waters. And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered. Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered.

Then it says in Genesis 7:24:

And the waters prevailed upon the earth an hundred and fifty days.

We might think that God would say these things about the ark and not the waters. The word “prevailed” means to be triumphant in victory and, yet, God speaks of the waters as prevailing and being victorious. The waters covered the earth. The waters slew the wicked of the world and everything that had the breath of life. The waters identify with the Word of God, the Bible.

We mentioned this verse in our last study, but it says in 2Peter 3:5-6:

For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water: Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished:

By the Word of God, the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished. That is why God emphasizes that the waters prevailed, because the waters identify with His Word and His Word was victorious. His Word warned the world and commanded Noah to build the ark. His Word fulfilled His promises and brought everything to pass that He said would come to pass. The Word gets the glory and the Word is triumphant when the judgment that God decreed to happen did happen.

The Word also identifies with Christ, just as the ark did. JEHOVAH sits upon the flood and the flood is the water that relates to God’s Holy Word, the Bible. God “sits” upon His Word, ruling as a triumphant and glorious King. I think that this is one of the reasons why both the ark and the waters point to the Lord Jesus Christ and Christ winning the battle against all enemies of God and His kingdom.

Let us go back to Genesis and move on to Genesis 6:18:

But with thee will I establish my covenant; and thou shalt come into the ark, thou, and thy sons, and thy wife, and thy sons' wives with thee.

Just as the word “flood” first appeared in the previous verse, in verse 18 we find the word “covenant” used for the first time in the Bible. It is the Hebrew word “ber-eeth.” God said to Noah, “But with thee will I establish my covenant.”

There are a great many things said in regard to “covenants” in the Bible. If you read the commentaries of some theologians (especially modern theologians who have lost sight of all truth), they talk about all kinds of different covenants. They talk about a covenant with Abraham and, here, they would call it a Noachian Covenant and they also make reference to the Pauline Covenant in the New Testament – it is almost endless. Wherever we find God making reference to a covenant as He speaks to a particular Biblical character, they get all carried away in trying to create particulars of that covenant with that specific individual. It is really the same mistake they make when God speaks to people in a particular time period and they make a big deal out of it: “How would the people of that time period have understood it?” They lack basic understanding. This is nothing too deep and it is nothing that a child of God would not understand, but the problem with many theologians throughout history is that they were never saved; they were men with natural minds and when they approached the Bible they looked at it in a natural way – a physical, historical or grammatical way. They wanted to make it understood like other “sciences,” but the hidden things of the Bible are things they cannot understand because there is no ability within them to understand. It has not been given to them to understand.

The Hebrew word “ber-eeth” that is translated as “covenant” is really not that complicated. To simply it, we just follow the same methodology in understanding other words in the Bible. We do not get caught up in trying to fit it into a “Noachian Covenant,” and so forth. So when we get to Genesis, chapter 7, God is speaking to Abram and has just changed his name to Abraham. It says in Genesis 17:7-8:

And I will establish my covenant between me and thee and thy seed after thee in their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be a God unto thee, and to thy seed after thee. And I will give unto thee, and to thy seed after thee, the land wherein thou art a stranger, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession; and I will be their God.

Again, we have God speaking to Abraham and there are certain key elements that are involved with this. I have struggled in time past because of reading some of the theological writings concerning “covenants,” as they are almost boundless in their abilities to confuse the reader. But, by God’s grace, all we have to do to understand the covenant God made with Noah or the covenant with Abraham or the covenant made with anyone else in the Bible, is to search out the word “covenant” in the Bible.

For instance, it says in Exodus 34:27-28:

And JEHOVAH said unto Moses, Write thou these words: for after the tenor of these words I have made a covenant with thee and with Israel. And he was there with JEHOVAH forty days and forty nights; he did neither eat bread, nor drink water. And he wrote upon the tables the words of the covenant, the ten commandments.

God calls the Ten Commandments the “covenant” and not only in this verse, but we see it in Deuteronomy 9:15:

So I turned and came down from the mount, and the mount burned with fire: and the two tables of the covenant were in my two hands.

The Ten Commandments that were written on two tables of stone are called the “covenant.” Later on these two stone tables were placed within the ark, the ark became known as the “ark of the covenant.” I am sure that some theologians get carried away with that and they would call that a separate covenant of God to the people of Israel and, again, they would go off course. The number “ten” in the Bible points to completeness and the Ten Commandments point to the completeness of God’s commandments. And where can all the commandments of God be found? They can be found throughout the Word of God, the Bible. The Ten Commandments represent the entire Scriptures and all the Words that God has spoken are typified by the Ten Commandments. They are really a representation of the entire Bible from Genesis through Revelation.

The two table of stones that are called the “covenant” tells us that the Bible itself is the covenant that God has made with His people. This is confirmed in 2Kings, chapter 22 where they found the “book of the law” during the reign of King Josiah, the last good king of Judah. It says in 2Kings 22:8:

And Hilkiah the high priest said unto Shaphan the scribe, I have found the book of the law in the house of JEHOVAH. And Hilkiah gave the book to Shaphan, and he read it.

Then it says in 2Kings 22:10-11:

And Shaphan the scribe shewed the king, saying, Hilkiah the priest hath delivered me a book. And Shaphan read it before the king. And it came to pass, when the king had heard the words of the book of the law, that he rent his clothes.

They found more than the Ten Commandments. They found the Book of the Law and that can refer to the first five Books of the Bible that God moved Moses to write: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. This is also known as the Pentateuch, but it can refer to even more than those five Books of the Old Testament, but even if it was just those five Books it serves the purpose to illustrate what the “covenant” is because it says in 2Kings 23:2-3:

And the king went up into the house of JEHOVAH, and all the men of Judah and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem with him, and the priests, and the prophets, and all the people, both small and great: and he read in their ears all the words of the book of the covenant which was found in the house of JEHOVAH. And the king stood by a pillar, and made a covenant before JEHOVAH, to walk after JEHOVAH, and to keep his commandments and his testimonies and his statutes with all their heart and all their soul, to perform the words of this covenant that were written in this book. And all the people stood to the covenant.

The “covenant” is the Word of God, the Bible. When God came to Noah or when God came to Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, David or anyone else in the Bible and He referred to His covenant, what God said is part of the whole covenant, the Word of God, the Bible. In the Bible God said certain things to Noah and certain things to Abraham and He made specific promises, but they are all a part of His league with His people. If people keep His covenant, they are keeping the commandments of God and the commandments of God are in the Bible. They keep the “covenant” in their soul existence because when God saves His people they obey Him from the heart; there is perfection in the heart and there is a keeping of the commandments of God. They are keeping His covenant, in that sense, and because of the perfect work and obedience of the Lord Jesus Christ, His people are counted as covenant keepers, rather than covenant breakers (unsaved mankind). Remember what God said in Isaiah 24, a chapter where God goes into detail about the final judgment of this world and all the inhabitants of the earth. God says in Isaiah 24:5:

The earth also is defiled under the inhabitants thereof; because they have transgressed the laws, changed the ordinance, broken the everlasting covenant.

How did the unsaved of the world make a covenant? When did God make a covenant with them? It was in the Garden of Eden when God said to Adam, “In the day that thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die.” Mankind broke the everlasting covenant because the covenant is any commandment of God.

In our verse in Genesis, it says in Genesis 6:18:

But with thee will I establish my covenant…

God delivered His Word to Noah. Noah found grace in the eyes of God. He was a recipient of the Word of God or the commandments of God concerning the things we have been looking at in this chapter. God established with him and included in that covenant was the covenant of grace and predestination. We do not have time to get into this right now, but 120 years in advance (of the flood) God said in the next part of our verse, “and thou shalt come into the ark, thou, and thy sons, and thy wife, and thy sons' wives with thee.” This statement was made in 5110BC and the flood would take place in 4990BC, 120 years later. At this point God is still giving instruction to Noah concerning the building of the ark and, included in these instructions, God declared the total number of people that would eventually enter into the ark 120 years later.