Chapter
14 – What about the Flood?
Seven
days from now I will send rain on the earth for forty days and forty
nights, and I will wipe from the face of the earth every living creature
I have made." (Gen
7:4)
Contents
of Chapter 14
14.1
The Complaint Observed
14.2
Recap: What we know of God
14.3
The Uncertainties about the Record
14.4
The State of the Earth
14.5
The Alternatives for Action
14.6
Keeping Perspective
14.7
Finally
14.1
The Complaint Observed
It
is a strange thing that, although I have received a number of questions
about God killing women and children in Canaan, I have never received
a question about all the people presumably killed in the flood as
recorded in Genesis 6-8, though I have noted that in the beginning
of 2010 Richard Dawkins has started referring to the Flood! That rather
suggest that either the Flood story is virtually unknown or that it
is known but not believed. Thus when we come to consider the possible
complaint that might be made here against God being a God of love,
we need to consider a) The theoretical possibilities about the flood
and then b) What the record says about it.
Very
simply any thinking person must ask themselves about a God who is
willing to wipe out the inhabitants of the earth. The answer may challenge
our whole thinking about God, and not be comfortable! Our starting
place, though, is simply to remind ourselves what we have seen of
God in the chapters of this book so far.
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14.2
Recap: What we know of God
Again
and again we have seen the claim throughout the Bible that God
is a God of love and of goodness, and a God of forgiveness.
We have seen it through many of the assertions to that effect
that are found in the whole Bible. |
What
could make a God of love flood the world? |
We
have acknowledged that a primary task before us is to examine those
claims in the light of God's activity throughout the Old Testament
where, often, people die at His behest.
In
the first of the complaints observed in the previous two chapters
we have observed God's dealing with Adam and Eve which didn't result
in immediate physical death but in exclusion from God's presence,
in which is life. We saw a number of reasons why that was necessary.
When
we considered, previously, the subject of God's blessing and God's
judgment, we saw that blessing comes through obedience and judgment
follows disobedience and rebellion against God.
We
have observed previously that God's judgment comes in three
ways:
1.
Death, where God sees that nothing He can say or
do will change the heart or mind of the individual in question,
and so He stops their ongoing misdemeanour by removing the person,
or
2.
A Corrective action, in order to bring people to
their senses so that they will return to God, to a place where they
are able to live as He designed them to live, receiving all the
goodness He has planned for them, i.e. it stops a person following
the course they are following so that they follow a new path that
is not hurtful, harming or destructive, or
3.
A Corrective action designed to bring change as
above, but which, if not heeded, will bring death.
In
that previous chapter we emphasised this again and again, and it is
imperative that we observe it again here. We need to understand why
it is that God is, we suggest, ‘forced' to take action to remedy a
bad situation and prevent it getting worse.
We
also need to note that in a Fallen World, sometimes the lesser of
two evils has to be chosen.
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14.3
The Uncertainties of the Record
There
is a sense where this if of only academic interest, but truth
requires it be considered. If the story of the flood is merely
a myth then it reveals nothing about God. |
What
is the historical truth about the Flood? |
If
it is true, then we perhaps have to completely think again about what
we think we know of God. Moving on a few chapters in the Bible from
where we were reading in our previous study, we find ourselves being
confronted with God bringing a flood to the earth:
Gen
6:17 “
I
am going to bring floodwaters on the earth to destroy all life under
the heavens, every creature that has the breath of life in it. Everything
on earth will perish.”
- These
were God's words to Noah, but there are two main options for understanding
what happened.
- Option
1 : Without doubt
these words could be taken to mean all life wherever it was
on the whole of the planet.
- Option
2 : It could,
we have to acknowledge, also be true if it meant all living
creatures on a limited part of the earth.
- Thus
it appears we cannot be completely certain.
- Arguments
for the former speak of the signs of floods, and the stories of
floods in ancient history, from all round the world.
- Arguments
for the latter suggest that it would be impossible to get two creatures
from every part of the globe and that there would not have been
enough room in the ark.
- From
the text, despite some of our ‘logical' sounding arguments, the
former argument for a global flood seems to be described: Gen
7:19 “
They
(the waters)
rose greatly on the earth, and all the high mountains under
the entire heavens were covered.”
- There
seems little doubt, therefore, that the record more likely
suggests a global disaster.
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14.4
The State of the Earth
This
is of even more importance and gives us the reason for action by God:
Gen
6:5-7 The
LORD saw how great man's wickedness on the earth had become, and that
every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the
time. The LORD was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and
his heart was filled with pain. So the LORD said, "I will wipe
mankind, whom I have created, from the face of the earth--men and
animals, and creatures that move along the ground, and birds of the
air--for I am grieved that I have made them." But Noah found
favor in the eyes of the LORD.”
- It
is a severe condemnation of mankind: “the
thoughts of his heart was / only evil / all the time.”
- In
terms of nature this is total corruption – “
only evil”
- In
terms of the extent of this perverse thinking, it was “
all the time.”
- Twice
we are told that this sorry state grieved God and
once that it caused Him pain.
- Now
when we look elsewhere at the Lord's forbearance in respect of sin,
we have to suggest that at this point in history, mankind's
sinful propensity had reached such a climax that it would move God
in such a way.
- The
result is a judgment by God that the only way out is to remove mankind.
- Yet
there is one man who is an exception – Noah.
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14.5
The Alternatives for Action
Thinking
behind the Scene
Now
a first casual viewing of this account may leave us feeling quite
negative about God's actions, but the more we think about it, I suggest,
although we may not relish it, we may be forced to conclude that God's
actions were the right ones.
Now
this should not surprise us because we have already, previously, noted
that the Bible teaches that God's acts are always righteous, i.e.
they are always right. But maybe to justify such a conclusion we have
to look at the Flood scenario and think about it a little more deeply.
What
ARE
the likely possibilities IF all that we have said so far is true,
that
a)
God has given mankind free will to choose how to act and
b)
that often leads them to act in a downward spiral of behaviour?
It is perhaps difficult to comprehend the meaning behind those words,
“saw how great man's wickedness on
the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts
of his heart was only evil all the time,.” yet
they are the cause for God to feel grieved and filled with pain (anguish).
We
picture mankind at its best so often and would rather forget
that around the world at any time there are murders, rapes,
torturing, slave trading i.e. all forms of harm of one human
being by another. Likewise there are injustices of every form
possible. |
Sin
around the world causes immense hurt and harm |
That
IS how life is; we know it is true for we read it in our papers and
we see it on our televisions – and this in a day of a great deal of
thought about behaviour and religious belief.
Perhaps
the best we can say is that without the trends of liberal social philosophy,
predominantly in the West, thing might be considerably worse. However
bad we might think it is when confronted with the evidence from around
the world of wars and violence at national levels and rising crime
rates at the level of the individual and society, this was
obviously a time of unparalleled human abuse that was clearly
getting worse and worse.
In
their attempts to denigrate God, the atheist so often refuses to face
these facts or comes up with the theory of optimistic humanism that
suggest that everything will get better given time and education.
Unfortunately history shows us that time and education without a change
of heart don't bring the changes for the better that we so desire.
So what are we left with?
Let's
ask the question again: what are we left with? Here we have
a description of the world going down in a whirlpool of evil.
If
we were in charge of this world, a world we had made and which
had been beautiful, wonderful in every way, but now getting
ever darker and darker, what are the options that are open to
us as we gaze on this world? |
What
are the only options open to us to remedy this? |
1.
Do Nothing
How
many of us who are parents are happy to sit back and watch an older
brother or sister bully a younger one? How many of us would sit back
and not even ring the police if we saw a man about to rape a defenseless
woman?
| Doing
nothing is not an option in the face of gross injustice |
How
many of us are happy to let world governments sit back and do
nothing when the media report genocide? The only thing that
stops us crying out, “Stop it!” is fear of repercussions against
us. In the absence of such fear, we would always step in to
halt an injustice. |
And
now you would like God to do the same when the world is sliding into
oblivion? This is God who has made this world so that it was very
good and made human beings to have tremendous potential for good.
And you want Him to sit back and let violence escalate and escalate
until human suffering and misery gets to screaming pitch? If you can
answer 'yes' to this, then perhaps too many violent films have desensitized
us to the horror of such a world.
The
truth is that if any of us had been in heaven standing alongside God,
looking down on the earth, if we'd had the courage we'd have been
saying, “Do something Lord!” Do nothing is not an alternative!
2.
Minor Remedial Activity
Again
and again we have seen the claim throughout the Bible that God is
a God of love and of goodness, and a God of forgiveness. We have seen
it through many of the assertions to that effect that are found in
the whole Bible. What can God do that will bring mankind to its senses?
If
we don't like the thought of the ultimate option that we're working
towards, and we don't like the thought of not doing anything, then
we've got to come up with some ‘mid-way' activity. The only problem
is that it has still got to permit free will.
We
can put pressure on this godless humanity that we are looking down
on, in the hope that they will come to their senses. In fact we quickly
scan over the whole Biblical record and we see that this is God's
most common way of dealing with people, so perhaps this will work.
Very
well, if God does this in most other instances in the Bible
(and we'll be looking at some of them in the chapters ahead,
and we'll see how God holds back and gives warnings, and then
holds back and gives more warnings) surely if this was a possible
option He would have taken it???? Give them some earthquakes,
let them go even further down the path of evil so that they
cry out for relief! |
'Tinkering
with the engine' will not restart a burnt out engine. |
Two
of the things that the Bible tells us about God is that He is all-knowing
and all-wise. In other words He knows absolutely everything there
is to know – including how people will react in any given circumstances!
He also knows the wisest and best course to take – this follows on
from being all-knowing!
As
God looked on this state of the earth at that point in human
history wouldn't He have come up with an alternative if there
was one? He looks and He sees and He knows – and He knows
that there is NO in between. there is NO other explanation
that fits the character of God and the state of the earth
as described in the Old Testament.
|
If
there had been an alternative, certainly God would have taken
it - but there wasn't! |
3.
Bringing Death
Again
remember what He said through Ezekiel: “I
take no pleasure in the death of anyone, declares the Sovereign
LORD. Repent and live!” (Ezek 18:32)
So
remember again the first of the forms we saw of God's judgment:
1.
Death, where God sees that nothing He can say or do will
change the heart or mind of the individual in question,
and so He stops their ongoing misdemeanour by removing the person.
We
can get upset about the Flood, but when we do that we say, "God,
I know better than you! I don't believe it was as bad as is being
inferred. There MUST have been an alternative." That just shows
our arrogance. The truth has to be that God, seeing the downward
spiral of humanity, with the knowledge that only He has, saw that
unless it was brought ot an end now, it would result in ever increasing
anguish from which the world would not recover.
In
fact there can be no other reason than this for God's declaration
after the flood:
Gen 8:21,22
“Never
again will I curse the ground because of man, even though every inclination
of his heart is evil from childhood. And never again will I destroy
all living creatures, as I have done. "As long as the earth endures,
seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night
will never cease."
- i.e.
even though I recognise that the effect of sin in human beings is
to have wrong inclinations even from childhood, I'm never going
to do this again – it is too painful to behold!
But
it is not ultimate:
Gen
6:8,9 “But
Noah found favor in the eyes of the LORD. This is the account of Noah.
Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time,
and he walked with God.”
- Why
did Noah find favor in the eyes of the Lord? Because he was a righteous
man, blameless.
- Thus
God can take this man and his family and start again.
- This
man's righteousness actually makes the unrighteousness and evil
of the rest of the world appear even worse. There was no question
that ‘the ways of the world' made everybody bad, for one man stood
out and wasn't! If one man wasn't then many more needn't have been
like that; it was their choice and for that they were held accountable.
(We'll see the whole subject of Justice when we investigate the
question of Israel and Canaan
in later chapters).
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14.6
Keeping Perspective
Before
we go into this final part of this chapter, I need to remind you of
what we are saying. I am not arguing for the validity of the Flood
account, for others have done that. I am simply saying that in the
light of the Bible's claim that God did flood the world, how does
this show God?
Now
having come to the point of recognizing that God, according to the
Bible, did drown every inhabitant of the earth for the reasons we've
just considered, I hear a critic say in scathing terms, “But to kill
them! Men, women and children!”
Any
answer that I make throughout this book will never be confined to
the ‘event' under scrutiny. The Bible has to be seen as a whole and
when we see it as a whole, things make more sense. We need to make
some statements about death to catch the full picture:
|
i)
Everyone dies (Heb 9:27
) and that is NOT the
end!
ii)
Human existence, once it is started goes on and on and it
doesn't end when we die on this earth.
iii)
For those who have responded to God during their times on
earth, there is everlasting life in God's presence.
iv)
For those who haven't there is that life but in the awfulness
of being outside of His presence.
v)
None of us knows how long we have on this earth.
vi)
At the beginning of mankind when the effects of sin were small,
it seems, men and women lived to very long ages. As history
progressed that length of life diminished to “ three
score years and ten”
i.e. seventy, and it is only now that with God's grace, we
are starting to live longer again.
vii)
Some people die very young of illness or accident (that is
how it is in a Fallen World where sin works to bring human
carelessness or bodily failure), others in old age, and others
in the intervening time spans. All we know is that in the
face of eternity, our time on this earth is very limited,
and we will die – sometime.
|
Now
let's not be silly and make light of death. When a loved one
dies it is THE greatest heart-breaking thing we can go through.
Death divides. When a child dies we mourn both for their loss
from our lives and for the loss of the life that might have
been. When someone we love dies in a car accident, we mourn
for their loss and for the harshness and awfulness of their
going. There are many facets to dying. |
The
truth is that death means separation and separation is often
painful, however it comes. |
Having
said that, the wise person has a wide perspective on death, takes
on board what the Bible says about it, and responds to it. The more
we ponder on what the Bible says, the more we realise there is potentially
a wonderful afterlife, even more wonderful than we can comprehend
from this viewpoint.
Death
comes:
-
naturally in old age,
-
when we or sin bring it on ourselves, or
-
when God brings it prematurely for the reasons given previously
|
Does
God bring about the death of every person? No, often it is simply
the human being who brought it on themselves, or it is the general
outworking of sin in the earth that brought about a premature
death, and sometimes it is just the life-force in the individual
declining so they die in old age, and sometimes God does terminate
lives prematurely for a variety of reasons, not all of which
are clear to us this side of death. Very good men die prematurely
sometimes for no apparent good reason. We'll have to wait until
the other side of death to find out why. |
I
have often thought that, in line with the teaching of the Bible, if
the Lord allows us on the other side of death to look back on our
lives or, for that matter the lives of others, I am certain we will
never have any grounds to criticise Him. That is my conclusion from
extensive reading of the Bible. I don't ask you to accept that unless
you've also read it widely, because it is a faith position that only
comes, I believe, from seeing the big picture that the Bible gives
us.
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14.7
Finally
So,
in this chapter we have considered the following:
| 14.1
The Complaint Observed
- we
faced the challenge of the Bible claiming God brought the
Flood
14.2
Recap: What we know of God
- we
reminded ourselves what we have observed of God so far in
this book
14.3
The Uncertainties about the Record
- we
pondered the possibilities of the extent of the Flood
14.4
The State of the Earth
- we
reflected on the condemnation of mankind seen in the text.
14.5
The Alternatives for Action
- we
considered what else God could have done
14.6
Keeping Perspective
- we
concluded by putting death in perspective
|
Perhaps
it would be useful to reiterate some of the key statements made through
the chapter:
a)
We declared again that God's judgment comes in three ways:
-
Death, where God sees that nothing He can say or do will
change the heart or mind of the individual in question, and so He
stops their ongoing misdemeanour by removing the person, or
-
Corrective action, in order to bring people to their senses so that
they will return to God, to a place where they are able to live
as He designed them to live, receiving all the goodness He has planned
for them, i.e. it stops a person following the course they are following
so that they follow a new path that is not hurtful, harming or destructive,
or
-
Corrective action designed to bring change as above, but which,
if not heeded, will bring death.
b)
We held that in perspective with Ezekiel's words from the Lord: “
I take no pleasure in the death of anyone, declares the Sovereign
LORD. Repent and live!” (Ezek
18:32)
c)
We sought in a small measure to understand the state of the earth
as it was described in the text, and sought to understand God's actions
in the light of how He moves throughout the rest of the Bible, and
concluded that the state of the earth must have been so bad that this
was the ONLY course of action possible.
d)
We concluded by recognizing the whole Biblical teaching on death,
that death is not the end; there is more to come, and the wise prepare
for it.
As
we go on to consider God's actions in respect of Pharaoh and Moses,
we should see some things there which will reinforce and possibly
clarify some of the statements made in this chapter. For the time
being, as we have considered these bigger issues in this chapter,
I hope your heart has been big enough to face the truths of the situation
and arrive at a bigger understanding. If you have determined
to criticise God regardless, nothing I say can change that, but if
you have a heart that is open to search for truth, you will come to
a more thoughtful conclusion. This was a devastating outcome
but it reflects more on the human race than it does on God. That will
be emphasised even more when we move on to examine the case of Pharaoh
in Egypt.