Genesis Chapter 9

¹ And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.

² And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hand are they delivered.

When God created Man and Woman in the garden of Eden, animals weren’t intimidated by mankind, they all dwelled together. Back at that time, mankind was vegetarian….they didn’t eat meat, so the animals had no reason to be afraid of man. Now, however, things have changed. The fall of man has caused the ground to be harder to grow crops from…it takes so much time and so many things can go wrong. If people are going to grow and multiply, they are going to need more than what can be gotten from the hard earth.

³ Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things.

God gives mankind animals for food the same way he gave them plants before.

⁴ But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat.

Blood is life. No blood, no life. When the Law was given to the children of Israel, sin was defined clearly…. the people were sinning before, but there wasn’t a rule in place that told them straight out that the behavior was a sin, but with the Law, that was cleared up and sin became easily defined. All sin separates us from God, so God also provided a way to ATONE for the sins. Atonement was a way of reconciling to God before the final sacrifice for sin came, that being, before Jesus came and laid down his life and shed his blood to completely forgive us of our sins…ONCE AND FOR ALL. With the atonement (sacrifice of animals) the sacrifice had to be done over and over…. but with Jesus, it was once and for all….we just needed to receive. The Law and sacrificing of animals was looking forward toward the day when Jesus would pay the price for our sins. Romans 8:3-4 ³ For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh:⁴ That the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.
We must drain the blood from an animal before we eat it, the blood is life. We need to be aware that we are taking the life of an animal for our own survival, and we need to honor the life we are taking by not consuming its blood. The flesh is ok to eat, though. This is a little off topic but.. PERSONALLY, I have no problem with people hunting deer for food…. I do have a problem with the animal being dishonored by mounting its head like a trophy. Taking pride in taking the life of an animal God gave you dominance over by creating a trophy to display, is shameful. I can’t imagine how I would explain doing something like that to God.

⁵ And surely your blood of your lives will I require; at the hand of every beast will I require it, and at the hand of man; at the hand of every man’s brother will I require the life of man.

Here God shifts from the way we kill and eat the flesh of animals to the way he will deal with the shedding of the blood of a person. God clearly says that if we kill another person, we shall be put to death…. and if an animal kills a person, then the animal will be put to death.

⁶ Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man.

⁷ And you, be ye fruitful, and multiply; bring forth abundantly in the earth, and multiply therein.

⁸ And God spake unto Noah, and to his sons with him, saying,

⁹ And I, behold, I establish my covenant with you, and with your seed after you;

¹⁰ And with every living creature that is with you, of the fowl, of the cattle, and of every beast of the earth with you; from all that go out of the ark, to every beast of the earth.

¹¹ 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.

¹² And God said, This is the token of the covenant which I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for perpetual generations:

¹³ I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth.

¹⁴ And it shall come to pass, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud:

¹⁵ And I will remember my covenant, which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh.

¹⁶ And the bow shall be in the cloud; and I will look upon it, that I may remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth.

¹⁷ And God said unto Noah, This is the token of the covenant, which I have established between me and all flesh that is upon the earth.

Token from the Oxford Dictionary
a thing serving as a visible or tangible representation of a fact, quality, feeling, etc.
There is a lot to say about the passages. The first being that God is creating a Covenant with mankind, and also EVERY LIVING CREATURE OF ALL FLESH UPON THE EARTH. This covenant starts off the new beginning with Noah and his family. We read about this and I think glaze over it. God is putting a reminder of his promise in the clouds…. so now all mankind has to do is look up when it rains and feel confident that God is not going to destroy them with the rain coming down. I mean, I’d be a little nervous when it rained if I was on the ark when the rain came down and everything was wiped out… especially if it hadn’t rained before the flood. So, God gave mankind a way to calm themselves when the rain came down, they just needed to look at the rainbow and know that God will not destroy them with a flood again. When we see a rainbow in the clouds now, we are seeing the token of God’s covenant that he made with all living things on the earth after the flood of Noah. Of course, the evil one wants to pervert this token of God’s covenant by claiming it as a symbol of Satan sinful coalition. The sins that the gay pride rainbow is representing is the same sin that was present at the time of Noah’s flood…. it’s part of the sinful behavior that led to the flood, so using the rainbow as a gay pride symbol is a mockery.

¹⁸ And the sons of Noah, that went forth of the ark, were Shem, and Ham, and Japheth: and Ham is the father of Canaan.

¹⁹ These are the three sons of Noah: and of them was the whole earth overspread.

²⁰ And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard:

²¹ And he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent.

²² And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without.

²³ And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father’s nakedness.

²⁴ And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him.

These scriptures aren’t exactly clear as to what happened or what Ham did to Noah. In some instances uncovering the nakedness of a man is to have sex with his wife…. and in others it is to have sex with him…. and then again, maybe Ham entered his father’s tent and saw him naked and exposed in his drunken state and came out to make fun of him….these texts aren’t completely clear as to what exactly happened. One clue is that Noah knew what happened to him at the hands of Ham when he woke up, and the event was vile enough to warrant Noah cursing Ham’s son Canaan.

²⁵ And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.

²⁶ And he said, Blessed be the Lord God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.

²⁷ God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.

²⁸ And Noah lived after the flood three hundred and fifty years.

²⁹ And all the days of Noah were nine hundred and fifty years: and he died.