And the LORD said unto Noah, Come thou and all thy house into the ark; for thee have I seen righteous before me in this generation.
And the Lord said unto Noah, Come ... The ark was finished; and Noah now, in the spirit of implicit faith, which had influenced his whole conduct, waited for directions from God. This address was not an order or call for him to enter immediately, but only, as appears (Genesis 7:7-9), to make preparations for entering on a specified day.
For thee have I seen righteous before me in this generation. The universal wickedness of the antediluvians is here implied, in opposition to the piety of Noah, which was fervent as well as habitual (Ezekiel 14:14); and the punitive character of the impending dispensation is distinctly marked as contrasted with the display, at the same time, of remunerative justice to the holy patriarch-not that he was entitled to exemption from the general destruction by any intrinsic merits of his own; but he "found grace in the eyes of the Lord," only as trusting to "a better righteousness," in which he placed confidence; and in that view his salvation may be regarded as a reward. The marvelous preservation of this patriarch and his family showed in the clearest manner that the destruction of all the world besides was not the effect of blind chance, or the work of a supreme agent who made no distinction between the righteous and the wicked, but the reward of the Judge of all the earth, who did what was right.