Genesis 9:11-17 “Thus I establish My covenant with you: Never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of the flood; never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth." (12) And God said: "This is the sign of the covenant which I make between Me and you, and every living creature that is with you, for perpetual generations: (13) I set My rainbow in the cloud, and it shall be for the sign of the covenant between Me and the earth. (14) It shall be, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the rainbow shall be seen in the cloud; (15) and I will remember My covenant which is between Me and you and every living creature of all flesh; the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh. (16) The rainbow shall be in the cloud, and I will look on it to remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth." (17) And God said to Noah, "This is the sign of the covenant which I have established between Me and all flesh that is on the earth.”
Because of the absence of oceans in the new earth, the atmosphere in the new earth will be completely different to the atmosphere in the current earth. In the current earth, we experience evaporation in the oceans from the heat of the sun, and that water vapour is carried up into the atmosphere where it forms clouds. Those clouds are then carried inland by the winds and produce rain on the land. The rain flows into rivers which in turn flow into the sea, and then the whole cycle begins again. The absence of oceans in the new earth prevents that cycle from occurring. And so, we will not see any clouds in the new earth, and as a consequence there will also be no rain in the new earth. And without clouds there will be no rainbows, for rainbows form in clouds. In the above passage of scripture, God describes the rainbow that He set in place to remind Him of the covenant that He has made with this current earth, never to destroy it by flood again. In God’s new earth, He will no longer need the rainbow to remind Him of His covenant, because God has promised that the new earth that He creates will remain forever.
Genesis 2:4-6 “This is the history of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, (5) before any plant of the field was in the earth and before any herb of the field had grown. For the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the earth, and there was no man to till the ground; (6) but a mist went up from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground.”
The question is then asked, if there is no rain, how will God water the earth so that plants and trees can grow? The answer to that question is contained in the above passage of scripture, for in this passage, the Holy Spirit reveals to us how God watered the earth before the flood of Noah. The scripture says that a mist went up from the earth and watered the whole earth. And so, we see that God will once again cause a mist to rise from the earth, to water the plants and trees of the new earth. But also, as we will see later in this series, there will be rivers and streams that will flow in the new earth. But the question is then asked, that if there is no rain in the new earth, where will the rivers come from? Many of the rivers in the earth today, have their source from a spring of water that comes up from within the earth, and there is no reason to believe that that will not be the case in the new earth. And so, if there will be rivers in the new earth, but no sea for those rivers to flow into, where will the rivers end up? Again, in the earth today there are a number of rivers that do not flow into the sea, but are rather absorbed back into the earth at the end of their course, and there is no reason to believe that it will be any different in the new earth.
Michael E.B. Maher
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