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Back in Summary of God’s Righteousness, I summarized some of God’s characteristics that we should find when we see Him being just:

He listens to the prayers of the righteous (those who believe and obey Him)
He saves the righteous (those who believe and obey Him) from the unrighteous (those who do not believe and obey Him)
His justice is immeasurable
He is genuinely deserving of praise and thanksgiving
He is unique
 - An immeasurable source of righteousness (accounts righteousness for believing Him)
 - The greatest source of justice
 - The only one deserving of praise (the rest of us are not righteous per se, but God willingly sees us righteous when we believe and obey Him)

While our righteousness is from believing and obeying God, God’s righteousness is …

Skeptics argue that by creating man as a creature that can sin, and then not stopping them from doing so, God is therefore responsible for (read as “causing”) all sin, and so cannot be all good. Many Christians respond that acts of omission are not necessarily wrong, that it is acts of commission that are wrong. But the skeptic sees the active creation of a free-willed person, a person God knows will sin, as an act of commission, and this true as far as it goes. To this, Christians will typically respond with descriptions of God’s majesty, quoting scripture that tells us (truthfully!) that God’s ways are higher than ours, and that it’s only in human arrogance that we even attempt …

Thought I’d take a break from Noah’s family this morning.  There is a blog entry I found a few years ago called, Wrestling with Evolution, by Tim Challies. I like his article, because he is a Young Earther with an air of civility toward us Old Earthers… something I appreciate very much.  He opens with the following…
Christians are accustomed to treating evolution as an account of the world’s origins that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever and something that a person could only believe in the absence of God or in the absence of faith. But this is not quite fair. There are now many Christians—Christians who treasure the Bible and who affirm the truths of the historic Christian faith—who …

As I wrote about in Genesis 9:8-11 - The Recipients of God’s Covenant with Noah (Part 3) - The others were in God’s image, too, most of the world today is not descended form Adam.  They were created in God’s image long before Adam.  Adam however is the first person to have been given a command to believe and obey from God, and so the first person to actually fall from grace.  The rest of the world was given no law from God, and so had no law to fall from.  What does that say …

With the flood over, it would seem that God is looking back over the circumstances that led to the flood, and is given Noah and his family a slightly different set of rules by which to live.

Before the fall, God gave man plants to eat (Gen 1:29, 2:16), and animals to subdue (Gen 1:28, 2:18).  After the fall, God cursed the ground (Gen. 3:17), making it hard to till.  Rather than farm the ground, Abel decided to raise animals for food (Gen 4:2,4); Cain tilled the ground (Gen 4:2,3).  Now, how do we know Abel’s flocks were for food? Because he knew to give God the fat most flavorful part… the fat portions. 

Cain, it would seem, was the more obedient …

 4 “But you must not eat meat that has its lifeblood still in it. 5 And for your lifeblood I will surely demand an accounting. I will demand an accounting from every animal. And from each man, too, I will demand an accounting for the life of his fellow man.
 6 “Whoever sheds the blood of man,
       by man shall his blood be shed;
       for in the image of God
       has God made man.

 7 As for you, be fruitful and increase in number; multiply on the earth and increase upon it.”
What a curious passage.  Not because it’s inconsistent with Christianity or Judaism or something I already believe however. It …

In Genesis 9:1-3 - When did man start eating animals? (Part 1) and Genesis 9:1-3 - When did man start eating animals? (Part 2), I make the assertion that mankind outside Adam and his descendants were eating animals long before Adam was even born.  Adam however was put into a garden, and given plants to eat and animals to care for.  When God cursed the ground, Adam’s descendants sinned further by eating the animals around them.  So, God used Noah to save representative samples of the animals there, killed off the people and remaining animals in their land, and then made the saved animals wild …

Here are the particulars of God’s promise that he would never again “curse the ground because of man” or “destroy all living creatures”…
 22 “As long as the earth endures,
       seedtime and harvest,
       cold and heat,
       summer and winter,
       day and night
       will never cease.”
It is an interesting promise, because it reiterates God’s promises above, but it is not immediately clear how so.

“Seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night,” are now conditional on the earth enduring.  Enduring what?  Well, the word translated “endures” is “yowm”.  As used, it refers to the remaining designated time of something.  In this case, for the time the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, etc., will never cease.  In …

In Jesus, the Father’s Proxy on Earth and Jesus on Mount Sinai, I establish the idea of Christophanies in the Old Testament, essentially making the case that where we see God on earth, it is Jesus.  In Genesis 6 - Who Regretted Creating Mankind?, I use the same principals to suggest there was interplay between Jesus and God the Father in the Flood narrative.  It resolves a key problem skeptics point out, where God does not appear omniscient when He speaks (emphasis mine)…
 5 The LORD saw how great man’s wickedness on the earth had become, and that …

 1 The LORD then said to Noah, “Go into the ark, you and your whole family, because I have found you righteous in this generation.
Apparently God is not referring to Noah’s extended family or relatives.  He is only referring to Noah’s wife, sons, and their wives.  It would seem he had no other children, and no grandchildren yet.
2 Take with you seven of every kind of clean animal, a male and its mate, and two of every kind of unclean animal, a male and its mate, 3 and also seven of every kind of bird, male and female, to keep their various kinds alive throughout the earth.
As I wrote in …