08.30.23
Was There a Global Flood?
But Noah found grace in the eyes of the LORD. (Genesis 6:8)
A world-wide flood? How we decide the answer to this question has much to do with how we view the Bible. Is it authoritative? Does it mean what it says? Or, is it a ‘religious’ book full of stories and principles but not something to be taken literally?
The answer to the question will impact how we view many other things: life/death, sin, human behavior/relations, heaven/hell, etc.
First, it might be thought that early man would have been unable to construct a vessel the size of a mid-size cargo vessel of our day. The Bible tells us that the descendants of Adam were making complex musical instruments, forging metal, and building cities [Genesis 4]. These were not primitive people with primitive tools. Because Adam was made perfect before he sinned, mankind may have been more intelligent in his day than in ours. We have suffered from thousands of years of sin and decay. The idea that early man was simply a primitive cave-dweller who grunted is an evolutionary idea.
We might wonder how Noah would have gotten all the animals into the ark. We are told (Genesis 6:20) that God sent the animals to Noah. They simply showed up. They were likely given a divine homing instinct, much as many animals and birds migrate today.
How could Noah have gotten all of the animals on the ark? We need to understand that it was only two of each ‘kind’ of animal [seven of the clean animals] that would have needed to be on the ark. For example, only two cats were needed—all the other types of cats, wild and domestic, would have developed over the ensuing years from those two cats.
Furthermore, it would likely have been juveniles of each ‘kind’ that would have come to the ark. They would have taken up less space, needed less food, and produced less waste.
Where did all that water come from? Scripture tells us that the water came from two sources: above and below (Genesis 7:11, 12). The heavens were opened, and the fountains of the great deep broke open.
And where did the water go? It stayed right here forming our lakes, oceans, rivers, and aquifers. Were the earth to be leveled out, there is enough water to cover its entirely over 1 ½ miles deep.
Was the Great Flood global? The Bible says it was. If not, would Noah have needed to build an ark to escape it? Jesus taught that it was universal (Matthew 24:37-39).
The evidence for the Flood is everywhere. The earth’s crust has extensive amounts of layered sedimentary rock, sometimes miles deep. These layers of sand, soil and material were laid down by water. Millions of dead things are encased in these layers, fossils of plants and animals, buried very quickly. Only a cataclysmic world-wide flood can explain this.
Why did God destroy the earth? “And the LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” (Genesis 6:5)
God judged mankind for his sin. He offered the ark for his salvation. The Ark is a picture of Christ—it offered safety, but there was only one door. Jesus said, “I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved, and shall go in and out, and find pasture.” (John 10:9)