Genesis 8:22

The waters have gone down, the ark has come to rest, and Noah, his family and the animals have gone out onto dry ground (Genesis 8:13–19). Before he builds a house or plants a field, Noah builds an altar unto the LORD. Genesis records no command for it. God had given Noah careful instructions for the ark, and this altar comes from Noah himself, a thankful man answering the God who had kept him alive through the judgment that swept away the world around him. So worship comes first in the new world, and the fitting response to being saved is to give thanks to the one who saved you.

The verb bânâh is the ordinary Hebrew word to build, make or set up. The altar itself, mizbêach, is a place of sacrifice, and this is the first altar Scripture mentions. Offerings to God were older than Noah, since Cain and Abel brought theirs in Genesis 4, but here for the first time we read of an altar and of burnt offerings upon it. Noah raises it “unto the LORD”, to the God who had delivered him, and it stands at the head of humanity’s life on the renewed earth, set against the wickedness that filled the world before the flood.

“And the LORD smelled a sweet savour” means that God accepted the offering and was pleased with it. The Hebrew phrase is rêyach nîychôwach, literally a smell of rest, a soothing or pleasing odour, and it is Scripture’s way of saying that an offering has been received with favour. After the judgment of the flood, this is the restoration of fellowship between God and the man who worships him. Scripture speaks of God smelling, and of his speaking in his heart, in human terms, so that we can understand what he did: he accepted the offering, and he made a settled decision.

The verse names him twice as the LORD, Yᵉhôvâh, his personal covenant name, often explained as the self-existent or eternal one. The resolve that follows comes from the God who keeps covenant and does not change.

“The LORD said in his heart” (ʼâmar ʼel-libbô) describes a decision made within God himself before anything is spoken to Noah. The spoken covenant comes in the next chapter, where God tells Noah and his sons what he has promised and gives them the rainbow (Genesis 9:8–17). Here we are allowed to hear his inner resolve first. The promise flows from God’s own character and will, and Noah had asked for none of it.

God knows that a flood can wash the earth and leave the human heart as it was, so he chooses patience toward the world. The words “for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth” give the reason for the promise, and they show that God’s mercy here rests entirely on himself. People came out of the ark with the same hearts that had gone into it, and God sets his course with his eyes open to that.

The word for imagination, yêtser, comes from a root meaning to form or fashion, and it speaks of the shape or bent of the heart: its inclination, its frame, the direction its plans take. Evil, raʻ, is a broad word that covers wickedness, badness and harm. Joined together, they describe a heart whose whole tendency leans away from God, and “from his youth” says that this bent shows itself early in life. Jeremiah says the same: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” (Jeremiah 17:9).

The ground had been cursed after the fall, when God said to Adam, “cursed is the ground for thy sake” (Genesis 3:17), and the flood was a judgment that devastated the whole earth. Now God commits himself to keep the created order and its fruitfulness going in spite of human sin. The last clause, “neither will I again smite any more every thing living, as I have done”, widens the promise from the ground to every living creature. God will not again sweep away all life in one universal judgment as he did in the flood. In the next chapter he puts it in words to Noah: “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” (Genesis 9:11).

This is grace in its plainest form, the same grace Paul describes when he writes that “where sin abounded, grace did much more abound” (Romans 5:20). God later points his people back to this very oath to assure them of his kindness: “For this is as the waters of Noah unto me: for as I have sworn that the waters of Noah should no more go over the earth; so have I sworn that I would not be wroth with thee, nor rebuke thee” (Isaiah 54:9). The evil heart is still there after the promise, and that leaves room for the deeper remedy God would one day send.

“While the earth remaineth” sets the length of the promise. The word for earth, ʼerets, means the earth at large, the whole world as the stage of human life, and the promise holds for as long as this present earth lasts.

Four pairs follow: seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night. Each pair names the two ends of a cycle to stand for the whole of it, a figure called merism, so that together they cover the full round of the year and of every day. Seedtime and harvest are planting and reaping, the work that feeds people and animals alike. Cold and heat, summer and winter take in the changes of weather and season. Day and night are the plainest rhythm of all, the alternation of light and darkness that orders work and rest. The word for day, yôwm, here means the daylight hours set against the night, and the same word can also mean a longer span of time.

“Shall not cease” translates shâbath, a verb meaning to cease, desist or rest, the same verb used of keeping the sabbath. God guarantees that these rhythms will run on and will not again be halted by a judgment like the flood. For people in the lands of the patriarchs, whose lives depended on planting and harvest, this was the assurance that they could sow a field and expect to reap it. It gives every generation the settled world it needs to work, rest, plan and build.

This is order restored after chaos, as at the beginning, when God brought order out of a formless earth and divided the day from the night (Genesis 1). The psalmist praises the same steady hand: “He appointed the moon for seasons: the sun knoweth his going down” (Psalm 104:19). Through Jeremiah, God makes the day and the night the measure of his other promises: “Thus saith the LORD; If ye can break my covenant of the day, and my covenant of the night, and that there should not be day and night in their season; Then may also my covenant be broken with David my servant, that he should not have a son to reign upon his throne; and with the Levites the priests, my ministers” (Jeremiah 33:20–21). Each sunrise is a sign that God keeps his word.

Noah’s burnt offering, wholly given and rising to God, points ahead to the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. The animal sacrifices had to be offered again and again, and Hebrews says of them, “For it is not possible that the blood of bulls and of goats should take away sins” (Hebrews 10:1–4). By contrast, “we are sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all” (Hebrews 10:10). Jesus is the truly clean and sinless Lamb, as John announced: “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). He offered himself, and his own blood obtained eternal redemption and cleanses the conscience to serve the living God (Hebrews 9:11–14). Paul even uses the language of this passage, saying that Christ “hath given himself for us an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweetsmelling savour” (Ephesians 5:2).

The evil heart of verse 21 is the problem Noah’s offering could leave untouched, and it is the very problem Christ came to answer. Through him God gives a new covenant (Hebrews 8:6–13) and keeps the promise he made through Ezekiel: “A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you” (Ezekiel 36:26). So “if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature” (2 Corinthians 5:17). God’s patience after the flood preserves the world, and Christ redeems the people in it.

The steady seasons of verse 22 are also in Christ’s hands. All things were created by him, and “by him all things consist” (Colossians 1:16–17), and he is “upholding all things by the word of his power” (Hebrews 1:3). The promise lasts while this earth remains, and beyond it God promises a new heaven and a new earth where he makes all things new (Revelation 21:1–5). The holy city there has no need of the sun or the moon, for the glory of God gives it light and the Lamb is its light (Revelation 21:23).

Noah’s altar shows what to do when God brings you through. The first thing is to thank him, and the thanks Noah gave was costly and whole. Paul asks the same of us in Christ: “present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service” (Romans 12:1). Worship like that grows freely out of a grateful heart.

Verse 21 keeps us honest about ourselves and sure of God. Our hearts are as God describes them, and our hope rests in his steady patience and the grace he has given in Christ.

And every harvest, every change of season and every morning is God keeping a promise he made to the whole earth thousands of years ago. You can sow, work, rest and plan in a world he has pledged to sustain, and give thanks for it each day.