Unfortunately, the relationship between man and animals unraveled. God created them friendly and compatible to mankind, but we find that after the Flood the relationship is anything but compatible.
The Flood marked the end of an age. Here God is using the relationship between man and animals to show that now life is going to be dominated by fear. I want you to think about that. It is not just the relationship between man and animals (that is just an illustration), but now life is going to be dominated by fear—and not only that—by a measure of force that God never intended was going to have to be required to exercise man's dominion. The dominion is still there. But the relationship has changed.
Remember Genesis 4:1-5. Abel brought to God an animal sacrifice. That shows us that God had already showed them that their dominion over animals extended to the place that they were able to take an animal's life. God was well pleased with Abel's animal sacrifice. He was so well pleased that it is recorded back in Hebrews 11 that it still witnesses. So God was not overly concerned about the killing of an animal, but what we need to understand is that they understood about sacrificing, and some of the sacrifices had to be eaten. That was a requirement of God. The sin offering was to be eaten, part of it anyway, and the peace offering was to be eaten.
They deduced that a man must feed his animals before himself. And so, in doing it this way, he was showing his concern for the fearful (Genesis 9:1-2), the weak, the helpless, and the dependent. Let us begin to pursue this.
Genesis 9:2 is an interesting one. The flood is over, so God tells Noah to leave the ark and replenish the earth.
"The dread of you." I think that it implies very clearly that God did something to their very little brain, so that now there was an enmity between man and animal. God did that. It wasn't Satan. God did it. So we see an indication of a change of the relationship between man and animals. God built into them something to alter the relationship that previously existed, but this does not mean that the attitude of Satan, or the attitude of human beings, cannot intensify the dread, or in the case of a demon, actually possess an animal and use it to its end. But the original dread, the original fear, was something that God did.
