‘Image of God’ and sanctity of life: Noah’s enduring lessons for the world (Genesis 8–9)

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Exiting the Ark and Its Symbolism

The exit of Noah, his family and all of the animals from the Ark after the Flood represents their exit from the protection of God, akin to a baby leaving the womb and entering into a new world. The Ark represents safety during the flood, and its exit symbolizes humanity’s transition from protection to restoration. This is the theme picked up by the authors of the New Testament who considered Noah’s ark a representation of the Messianic Kingdom. The Apostle Peter emphasizes this in 1 Peter 3:18-20. 

The eighth day of the Feast of Tabernacles is highlighted as a new beginning, marking the end of judgment and the start of God’s dwelling with mankind.

One of the things we celebrate on the Shemini Atzeret, or the Eighth Day, is the new beginning that comes after Sukkot. The number eight is significant in biblical patterns, symbolizing completion and oaths, emphasizing the importance of fulfilling promises.

The order of the Fall Feasts teach us the pattern of the restoration of the world. 

• • The Feast of Trumpets is the warning, the wake up call to the coming judgement of God. 

• • Yom Kippur is the judgement seat of the world when God judges all of mankind according to their deeds and their fruit. 

• • Sukkot is the celebration of God living with His people. 

• • The Eight Day is the celebration of the new beginning as God has fulfilled His promise to mankind to restore to humanity what Adam and Eve gave up. 

The significance of the Hebrew word sheva (“seven” and “to make an oath”) and shavu’ah (“oath”) and its connection to the number seven.

The “bonus” celebration after the seven days of Sukkot (Tabernacles) is the Eighth Day, Shemini Atzeret. From its name and descriptions from prophetic books in the Hebrew and Greek books of the Bible see gather from this mysterious celebration that it is a reminder of a promised new beginning, symbolizing the dwelling place of God with mankind forever. 

The Importance of Oaths and Promises

God takes His vows and oaths very seriously and He expects us to do the same. This is why Yeshua actually discourages us from making oaths and vows flippantly. He said that if we have any doubt that we won’t bring something to completion, He warns us in Matthew 5:37 to “Let your Yes be Yes and your No be No,” or as as the song goes, “Don’t Let Your Mouth Write a Check That You Can’t Cash.” So that is with an oath, a promise that if you cannot see it through to completion, you had better not even make an oath at all. 

We often hear the phrase, “A man’s word is his bond.” In construction and certain other industries, this idea is taken literally through the requirement of being “bonded.” Bonding companies serve as a guarantee that if a construction company fails to deliver on its promises, the bonding company steps in to ensure the project is completed. One way or another, they ensure the work gets done and brought to completion.

We focus so much on the Death of Messiah that we don’t give enough emphasis on the Resurrection and Ascension of Yeshua. 

God’s oath is His bond and if we use His name in making an oath, we must follow through with it. 

Humanity’s Role Post-Flood

Noah and his family were saved through the deluge and they must leave the familiarity and safety of the Ark, and it is the same with us. God has saved us from the Evil One and then He releases us into the safety of the new world, to enter His rest. Noah’s family and all the creatures who left the Ark were commanded by God to not only leave the ark but also to repopulate and swarm over the earth. 

The exit from the Ark parallels to Israel’s journey from Egypt, emphasizing the ultimate destination of entering the LORD’s rest (the Promised Land).

The problems started short thereafter because Noah’s descendants did not want to spread out and take over the earth. They were more comfortable together and “mighty hunters” such as Nimrod were able to exercise undue control over the people. The Lord actually has to miraculously confuse the languages, to get people to separate from each other and to swarm the earth, as He had originally commanded.

When Israel came into the land after the Exodus, they did not swarm over the Promised Land. Instead, they allowed the Philistines to gain a foothold in the Land and colonize part of the Promised Land and they were a thorn in the side of the Israelites until the Babylonian exile. 

God told the people of Israel that wherever their feet would tread, they would own but they did not have faith to swarm across their land, instead preferring the convenience of congregating rather than establishing new frontiers. 

At the Tower of Babel, God had to compel the people to scatter. Similarly, the ten northern tribes of Israel were forced by God to disperse because they failed to preserve their unique culture, choosing instead to adopt the ways of the surrounding pagan nations. As a result, God allowed them to be taken into exile, where they quickly lost their identity and were assimilated into other nations. Modern historians, archaeologists and anthropologists have been sleuthing to various degrees of accuracy to find where all these people went.

The Legacy of the Kingdom of God

They did not keep the legacy, although God knew who they were. This is the theme of Romans chapter one, which says in part: 

“And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do those things which are not proper, being filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, evil; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice; they are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, arrogant, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, without understanding, untrustworthy, unloving, unmerciful; and although they know the ordinance of God, that those who practice such things are worthy of death, they not only do the same, but also give hearty approval to those who practice them.” (Romans 1:28-32 NAS95)

They did not treat the knowledge of God as something to be preserved, protected, and passed down through generations. As a result, they became indistinguishable from the surrounding nations. While genetic research might reveal traces of their lineage, what significance does that hold in terms of the legacy of God’s kingdom? Many people are genetically connected to Abraham without any awareness of it, yet as John the Baptist reminds us, God can raise descendants of Abraham from stones. A genetic link to Abraham is meaningless without a faithful relationship with Abraham’s God. Your DNA cannot save you—only trusting in God, listening to Him, and remaining faithful to the covenant will bring the blessings promised in it.

Paul elaborates on this point through his discussion of the Olive Tree in Romans 9-11 with its natural olive branches and its wild branches. 

For those who are naturally on the tree that don’t want to stay on the tree, will be cut off and those who are not naturally on the tree but want to be connected will be grafted in. 

At a recent wine conference, a major topic of discussion was the oversupply of certain grape varieties like Zinfandel, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Pinot Noir, which are sitting unsold on the vine. The issue lies in low demand and prices that don’t cover farming costs. For example, Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon costs growers $5,000–$10,000 per ton to produce, but the current market price without contracts is only $2,500 per ton—a sharp drop from $10,000 per ton just two years ago.

As a result, many growers are considering grafting over their vineyards to produce more in-demand varieties like Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc, rather than ripping up the existing vines to replant new varietals. Regardless of whether they graft the more popular varieties onto existing stock or rip out the existing stock and plant the more popular varietals from scratch, this is a lengthy and costly process, taking years to transition and bearing the risk that market trends could change again during that time. This uncertainty leaves grape growers facing tough decisions about adapting to shifting consumer preferences.

Bringing this analogy from horticulture into the spiritual realm: if you are not bearing fruit—or if the fruit you produce is not meaningful or in demand—you might be pruned from the vine. The Master may decide it’s time to graft someone new in your place. Similarly, just as grape brokers and winemakers are cautious about hasty decisions, we should reflect on the spiritual lesson here. Producing fruit that lacks purpose or alignment with God’s will is like offering something no one wants. 

The Global Impact of the Flood

The significance of the Hebrew word כָּל kol (“all,” “every,” “whole”) in the context of the Flood, emphasizing that it refers to everything on the planet. Some contend from other uses of the word in the Bible that it can be hyperbole (Genesis 41:57; Exodus 9:25, 10:15; Deuteronomy 2:25; 1Kings 10:24), so the Flood could have been local and not global.⁰

Yet since ‘all’ is known to be used in a relative sense, the writer removes all possible ambiguity by adding the phrase ‘under all [kol] the heavens’. A double ‘all’ (kol) cannot allow for so relative a sense. It almost constitutes a Hebrew superlative.⁰

In the account of the Flood and the Ark, we are told that the waters covered the entire earth, the mountains were completely covered, the valleys were completely covered. There was no dry land as far as the eye could see. Modern scholars dismissed the Flood narrative in the Bible as divine hyperbole. They don’t believe that the Flood encompassed the entire Earth. 

There are many different accounts of the Flood as well as different accounts of what happened after the Flood, but what we read in the Bible and the covenant that God made with Noah and everything that came out of the ark is a parallel to what God said when they entered the ark. 

The Flood didn’t just happen to the people who were in the Ark but it affected everyone and everything on the planet and we have permanent consequences of that event. 

If the Flood was just a local or regional event in Mesopotamia, then why do the Chinese, Aboriginal Australians, African tribes and Native Americans have Flood narratives that correspond to the story in Genesis? We also see evidence of turbulent geological change and massive damage all over the earth, not just in Mesopotamia. 

This upheaval is evident in places like the Grand Canyon, where layers of soil, plant life, and sediment are stacked like pancakes, stretching across hundreds of miles. Remarkably, the same distinct layers of dirt and sediment can be traced consistently over vast distances, highlighting the immense scale of the Flood that shaped them.

The Significance of the Altar and Offering

Just as the Flood encompassed the entire world, so will the final judgment. When the Son of Man returns, there will be no need for a text message or an emergency alert to announce it. The entire planet will witness it simultaneously, unmistakably, and in real time.

“Then Noah built an altar to the LORD, and took of every clean animal and of every clean bird and offered burnt offerings on the altar. The LORD smelled the soothing aroma; and the LORD said to Himself, “I will never again curse the ground on account of man, for the intent of man’s heart is evil from his youth; and I will never again destroy every living thing, as I have done.” (Genesis 8:20-21 NAS95)

The phrase “soothing aroma” appears in Leviticus to describe how God views the burning sacrifices. If you’ve ever smelled burnt hair or flesh, you know it’s far from pleasant. This indicates that the term isn’t about a literal aesthetic or physical scent but is communicating something deeper—something spiritual or symbolic.

When God instructed Noah to prepare for the Flood, He told him to bring multiple pairs of sacrificial animals but only one pair of non-sacrificial animals onto the ark. God didn’t require Noah to save every species and subspecies; instead, He preserved animal life at the “kind” level. After the Flood, Noah offered one of each sacrificial animal to God, leaving plenty of mating pairs to repopulate the earth. This approach ensured the continuity of life without the need to include every variation of creature on the ark.

God’s primary desire wasn’t the sacrifices themselves but the communion they represented with Noah. When God saw Noah’s sacrifice, His heart was moved, and He made the promise never to destroy the earth in the same way again. The true significance of a sacrifice, whether an animal offering, grain offering or a drink offering lies in the intention of the one offering it. Just as God remembered Noah while he was on the Ark, now Noah remembers God after leaving the Ark, expressing gratitude and reverence through his offering.

The Role of the Yetzer Hara and Yetzer Hatov

When God says, “intent of man’s heart is evil from his youth,” He is simply stating the reality that started with the events of Gen. 3. We have to fight the evil inclination from the moment we are born.

We live with this tension between the  yetzer ha-ra (evil inclination) and yetzer ha-tov (good inclination), with humanity’s inclinations being towards the raw and bad.

We have to take captive our selfish and evil thoughts and submit them to Messiah Yeshua with the Golden Rule. 

“You shall not take vengeance, nor bear any grudge against the sons of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself; I am the LORD.” (Leviticus 19:18 NAS95)

Yeshua commands us to you seek the good for our neighbors. And if our neighbor is headed off the path, we know we are not called to lord it over him, but gently warn them that they are headed down a bad path and encourage them to repent. 

Because our natural inclination is selfish and evil from the beginning, our conscience has to become educated and informed with the Scriptures. We have to give our brains a righteous filter so we can temper the evil inclination. 

When the computer programmers started with the machine programming that we call AI, it would brainstorm without any filter and without a filter, the thoughts that the AI were developing were completely evil, and they had to disconnect it and start putting in ethical filters. 

The New Atheist movement provides a clear example of this dynamic. They have benefited from the remnants of the Christian foundations of European culture, but now that they’ve pushed Christianity out of the public sphere—schools, government, and public spaces—they’ve begun to recognize a problem. They aren’t pleased that once-sacred cathedrals are now yoga studios, or that former parish churches have been converted into restaurants. The guardrails Christianity provided were taken for granted, and now, as those very guardrails are gone, the atheists find themselves dissatisfied with the culture they’ve helped create, one that no longer offers the structure and values they once overlooked.

The Noahide Covenant and Its Implications

“And God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth. The fear of you and the terror of you will be on every beast of the earth and on every bird of the sky; with everything that creeps on the ground, and all the fish of the sea, into your hand they are given. Every moving thing that is alive shall be food for you; I give all to you, as I gave the green plant.” (Genesis 9:1-3 NAS95)

Was the philosopher Malthus correct? Did God really command us to “Be fruitful and multiply until we get up to a certain limit, and then we have to do reduce the excess population by whatever means necessary? Is there such a thing as “overpopulation”? Are we running out of land for people to live on? I don’t think so. There are large parts of the earth that are emptiness. 

There are vast, empty places on the earth, and over time, people tend to congregate together in the more favorable areas. This isn’t inherently bad—families gather, and societies come together to accomplish collective goals. But what happens when the evil inclination, the yetzer hara, isn’t kept in check? When we don’t address our negative desires, they can take over, especially when we gather in large groups. Fear begins to spread—fear of our neighbors, fear for our safety. We can see this happening today in many cities where the pullback of law enforcement has led to rising fear and disorder. As a result, there’s a call to restore law enforcement, which we might view as a necessary evil. 

Violence and predation, as we read in today’s passage, remind us that taking someone’s life is an attack on the image of God. The Torah provides guidance on how society should address the loss of life and the shedding of blood. We see how this unfolds in the Torah, showing us the importance of balancing justice and mercy without going to extremes. It’s a constant struggle to find the right response to violence in society while maintaining righteousness.

The Fear of Mankind and Its Implications

When God tells Noah, “The fear of you and the terror of you will be on every beast of the earth and on every bird of the sky; with everything that creeps on the ground, and all the fish of the sea, into your hand they are given.” 

This is not just about expanding the dinner menu. God is telling Noah that from here on out, all the animals will fear humanity. 

A study on animals’ fear of human voices⁰ published in Current Biology in 2023 about a study done by Western University in South Africa points to the historical veracity of the Noahide covenant. The researchers played recordings of voices of different animals, birds interspersed with human voices and the animals and birds, which did not have regular contact with humans, were much more likely to flee from the voice of humans than from the voices of other animals. The fear of the voices of people are indeed imprinted in the DNA of animals. 

““Only you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood.” (Genesis 9:4 NAS95)

This commandment is repeated in Acts 15, which emphasizes its relevance and importance. God wanted His people to be holy and separate. 

Many pagan cultures placed great spiritual importance on drinking blood, to connect with the animal that was killed but God warns His people not to do that. In the early Church, the new believers coming in from the Gentile communities that they would have to give up this practice to be in fellowship with the Church. 

God warned the Israelites repeatedly not to pick up any of the practices of the nations around them. They were not to mix His practices with the practices of the nation. They were suppose dot be distinct and separate from the nations. When they didn’t want to be separate from the nations, they ended up being absorbed into the other nations. 

Archaeologists in Israel have dug up small male and female idols with inscription that say that said things such as “YHWH and His ashoreth” so the archaeologists use the finding of these figurines as an excuse to claim that the Biblical account of monotheism is a lie. The Bible shows us why those figurines were in the land, it’s because the Israelites did not swarm the land and clean out these practices so they were slowly incorporated by the Israelites and caused profound spiritual confusion. 

Another example is the example of circumcision, the secular historians will reflect on the fact that the Egyptians practiced circumcision to dismiss the unique position that circumcision played in Israelite culture, ignoring the fact that just because the Egyptians practiced circumcision for hygiene doesn’t negate the fact that God told His people to practice  circumcision as a spiritual and covenantal practice. 

“Surely I will require your lifeblood; from every beast I will require it. And from every man, from every man’s brother I will require the life of man.  “Whoever sheds man’s blood, By man his blood shall be shed, For in the image of God He made man.
 “As for you, be fruitful and multiply; Populate the earth abundantly and multiply in it.” (Genesis 9:5-7 NAS95)

Human beings are uniquely made in the image of God, that is our lineage. We have the ability to communicate with each other with language in all its forms. Just as God can speak, so can we. Everywhere there is language, there is evidence of a mind. Language can only exist between two minds. You have to have an encoder and a decoder. 

At the Tower of Babel, God created chaos when He created different languages, forcing the people to separate with those whose language they would distinguish and understand.  

Animals may have a rudimentary understanding of certain words but they do not have the ability to communicate with us. Whales, dolphins, crows and ravens can communicate, and even plants, and fungus have some ability to communicate with each other but it’s still not on the level of human language. 

Two Sides of the Promise: God’s Mercy and Humanity’s Duty

“Then God spoke to Noah and to his sons with him, saying, “Now behold, I Myself do establish My covenant with you, and with your descendants after you; and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the cattle, and every beast of the earth with you; of all that comes out of the ark, even every beast of the earth. “I establish My covenant with you; and all flesh shall never again be cut off by the water of the flood, neither shall there again be a flood to destroy the earth.” (Genesis 9:8-11 NAS95)

Who are the parties to the covenant? God, Noah, Noah’s descendants and every living creature. These are all parties to this agreement in which God promises not to “cut off” living beings from the earth world wide flood. 

Before the Flood, the world was full of violence with little consequence but going forward, murder has profound consequences. Part of the covenant is that killing of a human life must be acknowledged and recompensed. Mankind has a duty to investigate and ascertain how a person died and not ignore homicide. 

With both the death penalty and abortion, we have to be intellectually honest and admit that in both cases, a human being has died and that the death of a human being is a tragedy. 

One of the most important lessons of this covenant is that there are two sides. God promises not to destroy humanity with a flood but the people who survived are supposed to respond by also promising not to wipe out those made in God’s image. 

The one who created us is the one who saved us and then took us out the other side. This is the pattern we see with Noah and this is the pattern we will witness in the last days.  

Summary: Tammy

1. Austel, Hermann J. Harris, R. Laird, Gleason L. Archer, and Bruce K. Waltke, eds. Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament. Accordance electronic edition, version 2.8. Chicago: Moody Press, 1980. ↩︎
2. Ortlund, G., “Why a Local Flood?” truthunites.org, 3 Jan 2015; video “Was Noah’s Flood Local?” youtube.com, 14 Jan 2024. Cited in Sarfati, Jonathan, “Refuting Gavin Ortlund’s local flood compromise,” creation.com, 24 September 2024, accessed 7 December 2024. ↩︎
3. Leupold, H.C., Exposition of Genesis 1:301–302, 1942. Cited in Sarfati, Jonathan, “Refuting Gavin Ortlund’s local flood compromise,” creation.com, 24 September 2024, accessed 7 December 2024. ↩︎
4. “Animal Fear Research Confirms Genesis,” Creation 47(1) 2025, p. 11. ↩︎