Noah was a man who chose to live faithful to the principle of honoring his creator by living up to the image and likeness of God. As he so lived, at a given point in time, God spoke to this good man. God used this man in an effort of 120 years to warn his neighbors and all whom he could reach of a coming doom. This preacher of righteousness tried to get all whom he could have influence over to change their lifestyles and come back to the image and likeness of God. No matter what the rest of the world was doing, Noah and his family remained faithful to the image and likeness of God.
Eight souls and eight souls only came out of the ark after the universal flood that destroyed all living creatures, including man (I Peter 3:20). All the creatures in the ark that departed from the ark were not in possession of a soul. It is a major failure of the teaching of evolution being taught today that man evolved from animals. When then did man get a soul? There is no evidence in animals of a desire to do what is right or wrong. We look at animals and state they are governed by instinct, not by choice. Animals cannot therefore be righteous or unrighteous.
After the days of the universal flood we have knowledge of certain ones who maintained this faithful conduct of choosing to be like God as He desired. One such man whom we are introduced to in Genesis 11 is the man Abraham. As Genesis 12 opens up God speaks to him directly and tells him to leave Haran and go toward a land that God would show him. We know through study of the scriptures that the land was Canaan. We find God giving him directions about where to go. What we do not find is a statement about the code of conduct.
We find Abraham moving along and building altars at different places. In the absence of any written code, why did Abraham live the way he did? His conduct was based on him being faithful to the Creator and striving to honor the Creator by living up to the image and likeness of God. Consider this example from the early life of Abraham. He and Sarah agreed to lie about Sarah being the wife of Abraham. Abraham and Sarah were in Egypt and Pharaoh took Sarah to his house. Egypt was the wrong place for this man to be and the problem created with Pharoah shows us this.
Note that God plagued the house of Pharaoh and it caused Pharaoh to come to speak to Abraham. Pharaoh said to Abraham, “…what is this that thou hast done unto me? (Gen.12:18). Where did Pharaoh get the idea that it was wrong for him to take another man’s wife? There was no written code at this time so how did he know that it was wrong for him to have another man’s wife? Think back once more to the idea that man was made in the image and likeness of God. God’s original purpose was for a man to leave his own home of his parents and start a new home with his wife (Gen. 2:24). The first written departure from this principle was Lamech (Gen. 4:19). Traveling all the way down to the time of Genesis 12, this Pharaoh would say to Abraham take your wife and leave. Surely a man of power in Egypt could take this woman if he wanted to. Therein we raise once more the issue of “choice”. He chose to not have Sarah.
Righteousness was at this early stage of man’s history a matter of being faithful to what God expected out of man by virtue of man being made in the image and likeness of God. God would continue to speak to individuals until the time of Mount Sinai and the man Moses. God for the first time gave a particular people a code to live by. What about all the history prior to the events of Mount Sinai? Men were faithful to God based on the image of God. Beginning then with the Israelite nation God gave a written code in which He expected the nation of Israel to live by.