That word "household" is the Hebrew word "house." If you have a King James version of the Bible, you will see that it is translated there as "house." But, what they have done here, in the New King James Version is they have clarified it showing that God's intention here was not to save a building, He wanted to save what was contained within the receptacle, and that is the family, the household.
What I want you to get here now is that, throughout the Bible, this literary device is being used. We will find then that certain words are used interchangeably. We saw a little of that in the sermon yesterday where the words Passover and Unleavened Bread are used interchangeably in the Bible thus indicating a season sometimes in the Bible rather than a specific day.
The same principle applies to clean and unclean foods. It appears in Genesis 7:1-2, when Noah was filling up the ark. By the time we get to Leviticus, it was not new. It, too, I am sure, existed right from the very beginning.
How did Abel know to sacrifice a clean animal? Where does it appear? It appears way back at the beginning, just like the marriage and divorce law—that is, God&39;s intention. Then it is assigned in the laws in Leviticus and Deuteronomy. Again, in the New Testament we find Peter, in Acts 10, stoutly defending himself because nothing common or unclean—both of them—had ever passed his lips.
Here we have very clear evidence of an escape that was originated, planned and engineered by God. It required the cooperative preparation of those who were escaping, because Noah and his sons had to prepare by building the place in which they were going to escape. They were surrounded by worldwide trouble that they could not completely flee from, and so God gathered them into one place while the devastation was going on.
They were prepared both physically in making the ark and spiritually in being righteous before God. The two were working together, the physical and the spiritual.
