There are amazing and purposeful parallels between the story of creation and the story of the Flood. When the Flood is described, the language of Creation is used. When the new creation after the Flood is described, the language of Creation is used again. In other words, God used the language of the past to describe His working in the present. When you compare the two stories, it becomes evident that, in these two mighty acts, God was acting according to a consistent pattern. You could say that God’s actions in the creation story predicted His actions in the time of the Flood. Since God is consistent, His past actions are predictive of His future actions.

But while the pattern between the two accounts is plain, there are also differences between the Flood and the creation story. There is no serpent in the Noah story, no testing tree, nor a Tree of Life, and no woman plays a prominent role. So not all the elements of the creation story are repeated in the flood story. God is consistent, but not mindlessly so. God uses the language of the past to describe His later actions, but the correspondence is not point by point. God is consistent, but He is not predictable. We will see this pattern again in God’s third mighty act of the Old Testament, the Exodus.