Why did God destroy the Earth with a flood?
Many people wince at the thought of the questions, ‘Is the flood a judgment from God?’ and ‘Why did God destroy the earth with a flood?’
Today, people would rather see God as being benevolent – kind, gentle, never raising His voice, never issuing threats and never carrying out any judgments.
Why did God destroy the Earth with a flood, if He did really do so?
Why was the flood so destructive and final, could God have just warned the people from heaven?
Both the Old and the New Testaments have examples of God stepping into our world and carrying out His judgments.
If we try to make God a big softie, then we are guilty of the second commandment (from the Ten Commandments):
Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image**…”
Exodus 20:4 KJV
The Hebrew word for ‘graven image**’ is literally ‘image’. We must not make God into an image of our making – one that is not real.
We need to read the Bible, accept its revelations, and not sieve through to find the verses we like.
Table of Contents:
1. The flood was a warning from God that He will judge the world.
The horror of the Biblical flood and the massive destruction it caused is often not understood.
Everything was exterminated, apart from Noah, his family and the animals and birds that were upon the Ark.
Why did God destroy the earth with a flood? The Bible tells us:
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.
Genesis 6:5-7 NIV
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.”
God knew that this judgment would not get rid of all the bad people and leave all the good ones.
Humanity cannot be cleansed like this, because the root problem of our sin remains.
So what does the flood, as a judgment from God, achieve?
It serves as a warning to all of us throughout history that God will not allow our sins to go unpunished:
God didn’t spare the ancient world either. He brought the flood on the world of ungodly people, but he protected Noah and seven other people.
2 Peter 2:5-6 God’s Word to the Nations
Noah was his messenger who told people about the kind of life that has God’s approval.
God condemned the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah and destroyed them by burning them to ashes.
He made those cities an example to ungodly people of what is going to happen to them.”
When God moves in judgment it serves as a reminder that God will judge everyone at the end of the world.
The Flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, etc, serve as examples of what will happen to ungodly people.
2. The flood was a judgment from God a worldwide extermination.
In the Bible, it tells us that:
Every living thing on the face of the earth was wiped out;
Genesis 7:23 NIV
men and animals and the creatures that move along the ground and the birds of the air were wiped from the earth.”
‘Wiped out’ and ‘wiped’ in the original Hebrew are interesting, they are from the same Hebrew word which is ‘machah’ and literally means “to be wiped out, to be blotted out, to be exterminated”.
That is what has happened to the early fossil record – they have been exterminated! That is the horror of the Biblical flood.
The waters and rocks crashing around would have physically dismembered the corpses, there would have been constant abrasion from the sediments, chemical decomposition would have reduced them even further and surviving marine predators would have torn at the bodies.
This left no trace of the land-dwelling, air-breathing creatures and animals in the fossil record at that time.
Every living thing that moved on the earth perished –
Genesis 7:21-22 NIV
birds, livestock, wild animals, all the creatures that swarm over the earth, and all mankind.
Everything on dry land that had the breath of life in its nostrils died.”
Noah needed to build a boat that could withstand the flood waters.
How large was the Ark and could he have built it?
3. Timeline – this is how Noah’s Flood started
all the springs of the great deep* burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens** were opened.
Genesis 7:11-12 NIV
And rain fell on the earth for forty days and forty nights.”
The word ‘deep*’ is from the Hebrew ‘תְּהוֹם’ (te.hom) and means ‘abyss’.
So the text is saying that water was breaking out from deep down in the Earth
There are freshwater springs now that flow out from beneath the oceans, but obviously, at the start of the flood in Noah’s time, there would have been a huge upsurge of subterranean waters.
The word ‘heavens**’ is from the Hebrew ‘שָׁמַיִם’ (sha.ma.yim) meaning ‘heaven, heavens, sky, atmosphere’ and in this context would mean that a massive amount of water fell from the sky.
In other words, torrential rain poured down as the floodgates of the sky opened.
Also, the waters bursting out from the earth were possibly super-heated, and there were probably massive earthquakes, volcanoes, and rapid continental movements which caused unimaginable destruction.
The land surfaces were totally destroyed and levelled.
The heat that was produced would have formed the metamorphic rocks.
4. The Bible describes the Great Flood as a sudden event.
The most incredible destruction occurred in the first 40 days:
For forty days the flood kept coming on the earth, and as the waters increased they lifted the Ark* high above the earth.
Genesis 7:17-20 NIV [* The ark was the huge wooden boat that Noah built for himself and the animals.]
The waters rose and increased greatly on the earth, and the Ark floated on the surface of the water.
They rose greatly on the earth, and all the high mountains under the entire heavens were covered.
The waters rose and covered the mountains to a depth of more than twenty feet.”
‘The high mountains’ would probably have been lower than the ones today.
Some scientists believe that the Mountain ranges were pushed up shortly after this event – if we date it in the early Cambrian.
See the discussion on where Noah’s Ark actually grounded and why Mt Ararat.
See how long the flood went on from God’s warning to when the land had dried completely.
See more thoughts on Noah’s flood.
5. After the flood’s initial destruction, the waters started to recede.
Five months after the flood hit.
The water receded steadily from the earth.
Genesis 8:3-5 NIV
At the end of the hundred and fifty days the water had gone down, and on the seventeenth day of the seventh month the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat.
The waters continued to recede until the tenth month, and on the first day of the tenth month the tops of the mountains became visible.”
Although the mountains were lower than they are now, there was still a huge amount of water covering the fields and filling the valleys.
6. Just over nine months after Noah’s flood hit the world.
The Bible tells us that the vegetation started to regrow after nine months which is a reasonable period for it to dry out enough and for seeds to shoot:
He (Noah) waited seven more days and again sent out the dove from the ark.
Genesis 8:10-12 NIV
When the dove returned to him in the evening, there in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf!
Then Noah knew that the water had receded from the earth.
He waited seven more days and sent the dove out again, but this time it did not return to him.”
See an article on Noah releasing a raven and a dove – the dove returns but the raven doesn’t, surprisingly there is a message in that for us.
7. The ground looked dry ten and a half months after Noah’s flood had started.
By the first day of the first month of Noah′s six hundred and first year, the water had dried up from the earth.
Genesis 8:13 NIV
Noah then removed the covering from the ark and saw that the surface of the ground was dry.”
From Noah’s standpoint, the ground looked dry enough, but the Lord knew that the ground at lower levels would still be very boggy and there had not been enough time for the plants to have regrown back.
8. One year and ten days from the start of Noah’s flood.
The earth was dry enough to walk on and plants had regrown to support the animals moving away from the Ark:
By the twenty-seventh day of the second month the earth was completely dry.
Genesis 8:14-17 NIV
Then God said to Noah,
‘Come out of the ark, you and your wife and your sons and their wives.
Bring out every kind of living creature that is with you – the birds, the animals, and all the creatures that move along the ground, so they can multiply on the earth and be fruitful and increase in number upon it.’ “
The Bible has described a worldwide, catastrophic flood of judgment of unimaginable proportions.
9. The ‘Great Unconformity’ and Geochemical Evidence for a Worldwide Flood.
Some experts think that there is evidence of a worldwide flood – the geological confirmation of the flood being a judgment from God.
In different parts of the world there is a vast erosion layer that mainstream geologists cannot explain:
Of the many unconformities (gaps) observed in geological strata, the term Great Unconformity is frequently applied to either the unconformity observed by James Hutton in 1787 at Siccar Point in Scotland, or that observed by John Wesley Powell in the Grand Canyon in 1869.
‘Great Unconformity’ Wikipedia 1
Both instances are exceptional examples of where the contacts between sedimentary strata and either sedimentary or crystalline strata of greatly different ages, origins, and structure represent periods of geologic time sufficiently long to raise great mountains and then erode them away.”
On the Lunar and Planetary Institute website, it describes the Great Unconformity as:
the gap in the rock record between Cambrian times (~550 million years ago) and the pre-Cambrian (anything earlier).
‘Grand Canyon – The Great Unconformity’ by the Lunar and Planetary Institute 2
An unconformity is a surface in the rock record, in the stratigraphic column, representing a time from which no rocks are preserved.
It could represent a time when no rocks were formed, or a time when rocks were formed but then eroded away.
Small unconformities are ubiquitous in the rock record — for instance, in the Coconino sandstone, every cross-bed surface represents a small unconformity.
The Great Unconformity is important for three reasons:
it represents a long span of time — 250 to 1200 million years in the Grand Canyon;
it is found nearly everywhere across the globe; and
it divides rocks with familiar fossils from those with no fossils or only fossil bacteria.”
Many geologists are restricted in their thinking because they base everything on having to be millions of years old to allow enough for things to evolve.
Why can’t this unexplainable erosion layer be caused by Noah’s Flood?
See this video: “Was the Great Unconformity in the Grand Canyon the Start of the Global Flood?” by Dr Steve Austin.
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It seems amazing that Noah and his family had to live on the Ark for over a year with all the noise, smell and lack of space but there is no record of them complaining!
Learn from Noah on how to please God.
10. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
What was the first thing Noah did after the Flood?
He let all the creatures go, then he built an altar from stones, sacrificed some of the additional ‘clean’ animals and thanked God for saving him and his family.
God then made a covenant with him saying he wouldn’t flood the whole Earth again and he created a sign in the sky to be a reminder – a rainbow, (basically a bow facing away from the Earth meaning that judgment was turned away).
Noah then planted some vines and when they had produced grapes he made some wine and became drunk.
He was so drunk that he lay naked in his tent and his son, Ham, laughed about it, but his other two sons, Shem and Japheth, wanted to protect their father’s dignity, so they walked backwards into Noah’s tent holding up a blanket to drape over him.
Noah then lived to a ripe old age.
How many years were between Adam and Noah?
Because the ages of the people living prior to the flood were so big, Adam died only 126 years before Noah was born.
There were 8 generations between Adam and Noah.
Therefore many of those generations knew each other and were in close proximity.
Here is the male line of Adam and their ages when they had their firstborn sons:
Adam was 130 years old, Seth 105 yrs, Enosh 90 yrs, Kenan 70 yrs, Mahalalel 65 yrs, Javed 162 yrs, Enoch 65 yrs, Methuselah 187 yrs, Lamech 182 yrs and he fathered Noah.
References and credits – open in new tabs:
‘Grand Canyon – The Great Unconformity’ by the Lunar and Planetary Institute ↩