Welcome to EBible Fellowship’s Bible study in the Book of Genesis. this is study #6 of Genesis, chapter 7 and we are continuing to look at Genesis 7:4-6:

For yet seven days, and I will cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights; and every living substance that I have made will I destroy from off the face of the earth. And Noah did according unto all that JEHOVAH commanded him. And Noah was six hundred years old when the flood of waters was upon the earth.

I will stop reading there. In our last study we were discussing the “seven days,” and we saw how God gave us this statement in 2Peter 3:8:

… one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.

We talked about how 7,000 years from the flood date landed on the year 2011AD and how the day the flood began was the “seventeenth day of the second month” and matched with the date May 21, 2011.

Let us continue here in Genesis 7:4:

For yet seven days, and I will cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights…

It is interesting that God brought judgment on the world of Noah’s day and the judgment was not an “hour” and it was not a single “day.” For example, when we look at the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah it appears that God caused it to rain down fire and brimstone in a single day. But in the case of the flood, there needed to be enough water to flood the entire earth to 15 cubits above the highest mountain. By the way, that is very significant because everything in all the world – every valley, every mountain and everything with the breath of life – was covered over. Lord willing, when we get further into this chapter, we will talk about why that is significant and it is extremely significant that God covered the entire earth with water.

But in order to bring forth that much water, it did not happen in a day. God is God and He could have done it in one day with His power and might. However, the way it was done there was a torrential downpour and there was water coming up from beneath. In all likelihood, the earth was brought into the path of deep space clouds full of water that added to the downpour and, yet, it still took forty days and forty nights for the water to lift up the ark and prevail over all the earth. Even beyond the forty days and forty nights, the waters were rising for 150 days, according to the language of the Bible. We do not read of the waters beginning to abate until after that five months, so to work that out it required a prolonged judgment. It was necessary for God to rain this water down from heaven above for quite some time to bring the waters that He desired would cover the whole earth.

Of course, the number of days and nights it rained is not a coincidence. When God says, “For yet seven days, and I will cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights,” it does not mean that God could not have caused it to rain for thirty-seven days and nights or forty-two days and nights. In either case, it would have been possible to bring all the water required to flood the entire world, but very deliberately God caused it to rain “forty days and forty nights” because it was important to God that it rain forty days and forty nights. We also have to remember that when it began to rain was after the “seven days” and after God shut the door of the ark, securing all within the ark. He locked everyone else out. Again, that date identifies with May 21, 2011, the day that was exactly 7,000 years later on the equivalent date of the underlying Hebrew calendar. That was the day God shut the door of heaven and began the spiritual judgment on this world. It is a spiritual judgment that primarily involves God ending His salvation program.

Also, it would be a prolonged period of time that the judgment of God would be worked out upon the earth. While all the unsaved people of the earth are being punished, God’s elect that are alive and remain on the earth to go through the judgment are going through a period of testing. God worked it out so Judgment Day would be a time of punishment and wrath of God against all the unsaved inhabitants of the earth and, simultaneously, God would bring His people through the judgment to make an appearance or manifestation before the judgment seat of Christ. They are “alive and remain” because they are hidden in Christ in salvation and this provided their safety and security, just as it did for the people of God in the ark.

God’s purpose for Judgment Day is to punish the wicked and to bring His people to appear before the judgment seat of Christ in a tableau that would “fill up” the wrath of Christ as His spiritual body and to serve as a means of “testing” and “trial” of God’s elect. None of the wicked are being tried or tested. They have already failed the test. All the professed Christians in the churches had their day of “testing” during the Great Tribulation period. Their test was to come out of the churches in obedience to His Word, but when they failed the test they were bundled as tares for the burning and as soon as we entered into Judgment Day on May 21, 2011 it was as though they were burned in the fire and destroyed.

The wicked outside of the churches and congregations were tested by the worldwide proclamation of May 21, 2011 as Judgment Day. They had time to seek the Lord upon hearing this message until May 21, 2011 in order that they might be hid in the day of His anger, as it said in Zephaniah, chapter 2 and, yet, most did not seek the Lord. Just like the people of Noah’s day, they heard the message because Noah was a preacher of righteousness. They saw the construction of the ark and, possibly, its completion and some may have witnessed the animals being brought on board and, yet, they continued “eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage” because they did not believe God. They did not trust the Word of God. That was their time of testing, but once the door shut, it proved they had failed the test and judgment came as the time of punishment for them.

And, yet, there is another group of people, God’s elect. We were not raptured before the Great Tribulation, as some theologians had claimed. We learned that the true believers would go through this time. Also, the true believers were not raptured at the beginning of Judgment Day, as other theologians had claimed would happen. Both ideas were wrong – the elect remained on the earth to go through the judgment and to make an appearance before the judgment seat of Christ, in order to make manifest that they had already been judged in Christ at the foundation of the world. However, the completion of Judgment Day will be what demonstrates this by their endurance to the end. Only the elect will endure to the end of this terrible time, but there is something else that God had in mind for the elect and that is a severe testing and a severe time of trial. We already see an indication of that in Genesis 7, verse 4, when God says that He will cause it to rain (to pour out His wrath) for “forty days and forty nights” because the number “40” is the number for “testing.” It is the number for “punishment” and for “testing.” For instance, we can know this from the experience of the Jews in the wilderness, where it says in Hebrews 3:8-11:

Harden not your hearts, as in the provocation, in the day of temptation in the wilderness: When your fathers tempted me, proved me, and saw my works forty years. Wherefore I was grieved with that generation, and said, They do alway err in their heart; and they have not known my ways. So I sware in my wrath, They shall not enter into my rest.)

God swore in His wrath. God punished (poured out His wrath) against the murmurers and complainers that sought to usurp the authority of Moses and Aaron and God punished them throughout a forty-year period and their carcasses fell in the wilderness. Again, God swore in His wrath that they would not enter into His rest. It was a forty-year period, a time of testing and punishment combined.

We also know that during the forty-year period God Moses went up into the mount to receive the commandments of God. It says in Deuteronomy 9:7:

Remember, and forget not, how thou provokedst JEHOVAH thy God to wrath in the wilderness: from the day that thou didst depart out of the land of Egypt, until ye came unto this place, ye have been rebellious against JEHOVAH.

Notice it says they provoked God “to wrath” and that period of wrath was the entire forty years. God was provoked to wrath from the very first day they came out of Egypt and for the entire forty years it was a time of the wrath of God, but also a time of “testing.”

It goes on to say in Deuteronomy 9:8-12:

Also in Horeb ye provoked JEHOVAH to wrath, so that JEHOVAH was angry with you to have destroyed you. When I was gone up into the mount to receive the tables of stone, even the tables of the covenant which JEHOVAH made with you, then I abode in the mount forty days and forty nights, I neither did eat bread nor drink water: And JEHOVAH delivered unto me two tables of stone written with the finger of God; and on them was written according to all the words, which JEHOVAH spake with you in the mount out of the midst of the fire in the day of the assembly. And it came to pass at the end of forty days and forty nights, that JEHOVAH gave me the two tables of stone, even the tables of the covenant. And the LORD said unto me, Arise, get thee down quickly from hence; for thy people which thou hast brought forth out of Egypt have corrupted themselves; they are quickly turned aside out of the way which I commanded them; they have made them a molten image.

Here, God indicates that during the time when Moses was in the mount to receive the Ten Commandments, God was testing the people of Israel and they failed the test: “Up, make us gods, which shall go before us; for as for this Moses, the man that brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we wot not what is become of him.” They forced Aaron to make a golden calf and he gave it to them: “These be thy gods, O Israel.” They worshipped the idol. It was a total failure of the test that God had designed for them, so forty days and forty nights passed and Moses returned and it became known that God’s wrath was upon the congregation. The number “40” points to both “wrath” and “testing.”

In the New Testament we know that the Lord Jesus Christ was tested by the devil. It says in Matthew 4:1-4:

Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil. And when he had fasted forty days and forty nights, he was afterward an hungred. And when the tempter came to him, he said, If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread. But he answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.

Here, there is the same time period of “forty days and forty nights” and, without any doubt, a time of testing is identified with this time period because the “tempter” came and the temptation concerned the Word of God. Satan would make a statement that was contrary to the Word of God and Christ would respond with a faithful understanding of the Word of God. After this Satan would tempt with a perversion of the Word of God, but Christ would respond with the truth: “It is written…” This happened three times with Christ responding, “It is written,” and this is important because it lets us know that “tests” have to do with being tested and tried concerning the Word of God and that brings us back to Genesis 7, verse 4. It would be 7,000 years and then God would bring the “flood;” that is to say, after 7,000 years there would be the outpouring of His wrath. It would rain “forty days and forty nights.” It was May 21, 2011 and it was the day that identifies with the “seven days,” and beginning on that date God shut the door of heaven and began to punish the world and, simultaneously, He began to test and try His people and all those that profess to be true believers; by this time there was a group that had come out of the congregations and they had even helped proclaim May 21, 2011 as Judgment Day. They identified with the elect of God and they appeared to trust the Bible over the churches because they had departed out of the midst. They helped proclaimed that “one day was as a thousand years and a thousand years as one day” and they pointed to the date of May 21, 2011 as the day the door was shut and the beginning of Judgment Day. And it was Judgment Day, but not in the way we had thought it would happen. When there was no physical earthquake and events did not transpire as expected in regard to a rapture, the Word of God began to test. It was the Word of God that had locked in that date from the Biblical calendar and had put its finger upon that date as the start of Judgment Day that was now being questioned by this other group of people that had identified with God’s elect. They had appeared to be confident that this was the day, but all of a sudden they were not sure any more. As God pointed out, it did not take long for the Jews to begin murmuring after they came out of Egypt and neither did it take long for some that professed to be the elect to turn and distance themselves from the Word of God after May 21,2011 and immediately they failed the test.

We have to say this because the Bible indicates this – that is why it rained forty days and forty nights. Right from the beginning of Judgment Day God is letting it be known, “I have in mind a severe test for you that claim to be my people and it involves my Word, the Bible, and whether, or not, you trust it. Do you really trust and have faith in the Word of God? You believe, but do you really hear the voice of Christ?”

They said they understood the Day of Judgment and they told others that the Bible guaranteed it and it was absolute truth. There was an exclamation point on the proclamation of May 21, 2011 as Judgment Day. Then overnight, there was doubt and, in some cases it took a few days or a few months. They began to wonder and they were being tried by “water,” really. What does the water of the flood typify? Turn to1Peter 3:20-21:

…while the ark was a preparing, wherein few, that is, eight souls were saved by water. The like figure whereunto even baptism doth also now save us…

“Water” saved them. The Word of God is likened to “water.” The “water” of God’s judgment lifted up the ark and also served as a time of testing and grievous trial at the beginning of the historical flood. The Word of God was poured out upon the earth and, likewise, served as “waters” of testing and intense trial. Will you believe? Will you wait on the Lord patiently?

The fact is that whenever we go back to the Bible and we reinvestigate the Biblical information, we still come to the same conclusion. Today, five years later, we go back to the Bible and we check it all out again and we find that 7,000 years comes to 2011AD and the 23-year Great Tribulation started May 21, 1988 and it has the underlying Hebrew calendar date of 2/17. It still all fits perfectly. No one that has turned back to the world or to the churches or to former doctrines because they found an error or because they saw an inconsistency in the Word. They turned back because their physical eyes did not see certain things and because things did not work out in the way they expected. But no one has turned back because of error in doctrine concerning the Biblical calendar of history. That has not happened even one time.