Genesis 7'1

Genesis 7:1 says, 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.  God instructed Noah to go into the ark with his family.  Though following God's instructions to build the ark was important, going into the Ark was what would ultimately save Noah and his family.  Salvation is already provided for every person, but until we enter into a personal relationship with God through faith in Christ as our Savior and Lord, we cannot be saved.  Verse two states, Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens, the male and his female: and of beasts that are not clean by two, the male and his female.  I know we normally say that Noah took two of every animal into the ark, but he took seven pairs of the clean animals.  Since God is the One Who declared animals as clean or unclean, I am sure He was able to specify which animals were which to Noah.  Then verse three adds, Of fowls also of the air by sevens, the male and the female; to keep seed alive upon the face of all the earth.  Also, the birds were taken aboard in pairs of seven.  Verse four declares, For yet seven days, and I will cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights; and every living substance that I have made will I destroy from off the face of the earth.  Noah and his family and the animals were to be in the ark seven days before the rain started.  I am not sure if the significance of the seven days was because that was the duration of God's creative activity or not, but what He had declared good at the end of that first week He now declared very bad.  I personally am not certain that this was the first time that it had rained, but it is the first time rain is mentioned.  Verse five says, And Noah did according unto all that the LORD commanded him.  Noah had obeyed God in building the ark, and now he obeyed God in doing what God had commanded him to do about getting in the ark.  We cannot be saved by simply getting ready to some day follow Christ.  We must fully enter into that personal relationship with Christ.  Verse six states, And Noah was six hundred years old when the flood of waters was upon the earth.  Verse seven adds,, And Noah went in, and his sons, and his wife, and his sons’ wives with him, into the ark, because of the waters of the flood.  Noah's whole family went into the ark.  We could debate whether the rest of Noah's family were saved because of his faith in God, but even if they were physically saved by the faith of Noah, their spiritual salvation was still dependent on their own belief in God.  We may do everything possible to bring our children to salvation, but each must make their own personal choice in order to be saved.  Verse eight states, Of clean beasts, and of beasts that are not clean, and of fowls, and of every thing that creepeth upon the earth,  Verse nine adds, There went in two and two unto Noah into the ark, the male and the female, as God had commanded Noah.  Though this says they went in two by two, it also says that they went as God had ordered, so there would have been seven pairs of the clean beasts going in two by two.  Verse ten declares, And it came to pass after seven days, that the waters of the flood were upon the earth.  After a week, the rain came, as God had said it would.  The rains lasted for forty days.  God could have easily flood the earth in the blink of an eye, but He chose this method.  We do not need to question God's methods, but we need to simply obey His word.  Verse eleven adds,  In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.  Not only was the earth flooded by rain, but it was also flooded by the fountains of the deep.  Verse twelve adds, And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights.  As already stated, the time to flood the earth lasted for forty days.