By Adam Habluetzel
“First of all, you must understand that in the last days scoffers will come, scoffing and following their own evil desires. They will say, ‘Where is this ‘coming’ he promised? Ever since our fathers died, everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation.’ But they deliberately forget that long ago by God’s word the heavens existed and the earth was formed out of water and by water. By these waters also the world of that time was deluged and destroyed. By the same word the present heavens and earth are reserved for fire, being kept for the day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men.” ~ 2 Peter 3:3-7
In his second letter, Peter describes the scoffing attitude toward God’s Word that would arise in the last days. Peter warned that such scoffers would mock at the return of Jesus, dismiss God’s active creation and judgment, and choose intentionally to ignore three core teachings of the Bible – God’s original creation, the Global Flood, and the coming judgment of ungodly men.
I implore all of us to take seriously the Bible for what it is – the Word of the living God – and to choose to believe what God says through it. May your faith grow and grow in the Lord Jesus Christ, and may He bless all who seek Him with all of their hearts.
In this article, we will focus on the fact that the Flood was Global and catastrophic not local or tranquil. Specifically we will look at 1) the Bible Evidence, 2) the Geological Observations/Evidence, and 3) what the Doctrine of the Global Flood means for us.
1) What does the Bible tell us?
The scoffers of God’s word in these last days attempt to attack or dismiss the Genesis Flood in many ways…and for good reason. If the Flood of Noah really happened how the Bible describes it, the implications are stark! Many do not want to face them, so they attempt to dismiss the Flood or explain it away (following their own evil desires rather than the truth). Two common ways men try to undermine the Flood is by claiming it was a “local” flood – only occurring in Mesopotamia, or a “tranquil” flood – gently rising and receding without changing the earth’s landscape.
The Flood of Noah was worldwide, not “local”
- “All the high mountains under the entire heavens were covered.” (Genesis 7:19)
- “The waters rose and covered the mountains to a depth of more than twenty feet.” (Genesis 7:20)
- “Every living thing that moved on the earth perished.” (Genesis 7:21)
- “Everything on dry land that had the breath of life in its nostrils died.” (Genesis 7:22)
- “Every living thing on the face of the earth was wiped out.” (Genesis 7:23)
- “You covered it (the earth) with the deep as with a garment; the waters stood above the mountains.” (Psalm 104:6)
- “Then the flood came and destroyed them all.” – Jesus (Luke 17:27)
- “In it (the flood) only a few people, eight in all, were saved through water…” (1 Peter 3:20)
- Something to consider: If God intended to send only a local Mesopotamian flood, then why would he tell Noah to spend several decades building a humongous boat, and then spend over a year on board? Why not send Noah and his family somewhere else on earth that was safe, if it was only a local flood? Surely God is wise enough to figure that out.
- Something else to consider: Why gather animals to take aboard the ark? There were plenty of animals elsewhere on earth, so why would any need to be saved, if it was indeed a local flood?
- Something else to consider: God gave His rainbow as a sign of His promise never to flood the entire earth again. If the Flood of Noah was only a local flood, then God has broken His promise thousands of times, because there have been thousands of local floods since the time of Noah. There has never been another global flood, however. God’s faithful character is at stake in our interpretation of the Genesis Flood!
It sure appears that the authors of scripture were attempting to make it abundantly clear: the flood was global.
The Flood of Noah was catastrophic, not tranquil
- “In the six-hundredth year of Noah’s life, on the seventeenth day of the second month – on that day all the springs of the deep burst forth…” (Genesis 7:11) Though it rained for forty days and nights (possibly from the collapse of the Hydrosphere canopy), much, if not most, of the water of the Flood came from underneath the earth. The earth’s crust burst like seams on a baseball, shooting boiling hot water and volcanic matter high into the sky. This was no gentle rain shower, but a violent catastrophic event like the world had never seen. The Mid-Atlantic Ridge is a good example of where the earth burst forth with water from underneath the surface. This cracking up of the earth’s crust is why we observe plate tectonics to this day.
- “Now the springs of the deep and the floodgates of the heavens had been closed, and the rain had stopped falling from the sky. The water receded steadily from the earth.” (Genesis 8:2-3) The Hebrew term for the NIV phrase “receded steadily” is “Halak va shub”, which literally means “going/traveling in connection to returning and returning.” Or, more simply, the water was going and returning continually, or sloshing back and forth. Kind of like my rowdy kids in a bathtub. The idea is that the huge volume of water was not still, but moving rapidly and violently across the face of the earth. This was due to the rising and falling of the various giant plates moving from the cracking up of the earth’s crust like an eggshell. The powerful movement of the rushing waters also explains so much of the topography of our present-day earth, including sediment layers, sheared off unconformity features, and major water erosion evidence in places that get little to no rain today.
- “But at your rebuke the waters fled, at the sound of your thunder they took to flight; they flowed over the mountains, they went down into the valleys, to the place you assigned for them.” (Psalm 104:7-8) The waters – whoosh! – ran off quickly! The phrase about the mountains and valleys literally means “The mountains rose up and the valleys sank down.” During the Flood, the earth’s surface was transformed into what we see today. The original creation did not have the Himalayas or the great oceanic trenches. The extreme mountains and valleys we observe today were formed during the Flood by tectonic forces. The earth is now wrinkled up like a raisin. The oceans are very deep, in order to hold all the extra water. The mountains are very high and uninhabitable. It makes much more sense to understand the earth’s topography from a catastrophic Flood point of view.
2) What does the evidence show us?
World-wide Sedimentary Rock Layers
- Multiple rock layers, such as seen in the walls of Grand Canyon, are found around the world, indicating water sedimentation on a global scale. These rock layers are used all the time to promote evolutionary and old-age worldviews, but they actually prove a Biblical Global Flood.
- The layers are stacked on top of each other like pancakes, with little to no erosion between them, suggesting rapid sedimentation, not millions of years between each layer.
- “Hydrologic sorting” is the process by which water naturally layers its sediments, and our post-Flood topography accurately reflects that process. You can take a jar of dirt today and perform your own scientific experiment. Fill it with water, put a lid on it, shake it up, and let it sit for a few minutes. The water automatically sorts debris into layers.
- The sloshing back and forth of the waters the Bible describes would drop TONS of sediment with each pass, with alternating layers of sand/debris and organic matter just like we see in the record. See the segment on Mt. St. Helens below for more.
- Petrified trees, vertically positioned, running through multiple layers of sediment, are found all over the world. There is a huge hillside filled with them in Yellowstone National Park, for example. This proves the layers are not millions of years apart, but that the trees were buried quickly in a huge flood. Again, see the section on Mt. St. Helens for a modern-day example of how this happened.
Fossils Graveyards
- There have been trillions of fossils discovered of living things. These are found in the sedimentary layers deposited during the Flood. Interestingly, there are no transitional fossils between one living kind of animal and another. Charles Darwin himself predicted there would be billions of such fossils, and said in his book that a lack of them would disprove his evolutionary theory!
- If you’ve ever observed the action of moving water, even in a very small-scale flood, you notice that solid objects often end up together in swirling eddies and get deposited together when the water recedes. The same thing is often found with fossils, consisting of the bones of animals. They are found not spread out randomly and uniformly, but in giant fossil graveyards, with millions of fossils, discombobulated and tangled together like logs in a log jam. This would be expected from the powerful movement of waters in a world-wide Flood.
- Some very interesting fossils have been found that prove rapid burial during a chaotic flood. For example, one famous fossil is of a fish eating another fish with his meal half-way down his throat. Another is of an Ichthyosaurus giving birth! If fossilization take millions of years, then these creatures have issues with eating and birthing. Obviously they were buried in an instant, covered by churned up mud before they knew what was happening.
Grand Canyon and Mt. Saint Helens
- Grand Canyon is almost always described as being formed over millions of years. The conventional view suggests the Colorado River slowly cut into the rock as the Kaibab Plateau was uplifting, also super slowly. There is another way to look at Grand Canyon, in line with the science of the Global Flood described in Genesis. There are so many evidences we could look at here, but I will focus in on just one for now: what Mt. Saint Helens revealed.
- Mt. Saint Helens erupted in Washington on May 18, 1980, causing widespread devastation, though it was a relatively small volcanic eruption. Fifty-seven people were killed, and some of the ash circled the entire globe. Countless millions of large trees were blown down by the force of the blast, many of them landing in nearby Spirit Lake. As the wind blew the dead trees back and forth, they coalesced into large tree mats, and their bark and branches started to rub off and fall to the lake bottom. After just a few years, over 15 feet of organic sediment coated the lake floor – with layers of dirt settling in between each pass! What’s more, many of the trees became water-logged and began to sink to the bottom – most vertically upright but some vertically upside down – and became buried in the layers of sediment. If the area ever dries out, the trees will petrify standing up, running through multiple layers of rock and coal, just as we find all over the world today. Catastrophes really transform the landscape!
- Not long after the initial eruption of Saint Helens, giant ash and mudslides were frequent on her eroded slopes. One such debris slide tore down the mountain and covered a section of the little Toutle River, damming it up. The mud and ash began to harden and a lake started forming behind the dam. Eventually, the lake filled to the brim and breached the dam. The rushing waters very quickly and violently washed a huge canyon out of the hardened slide. What resulted, in only a few hours, was a mini-Grand Canyon, about 1/40th the size, but with very similar features. The canyon averaged about 125 feet in height and 400 feet in width, and the steep sides of the canyon contained hundreds of different layers, all from ONE slide. After equilibrium was reached once again, the itty bitty Toutle River flowed through the lowest part of the canyon, just as all rivers do. The river did NOT make that canyon. A catastrophe did!
- Grand Canyon is best interpreted through the lens of the Bible. The Kaibab uplift would have formed at the same time all the wrinkled mountains and valleys formed toward the end of the Flood. As the waters receded, the area north of the uplift, which is like a giant bowl, would have trapped an enormous amount of water, forming a colossal lake. When that lake finally filled to the top of the uplift, the dam would have breached, and – whoosh! – Grand Canyon would have been carved within a few days at most. What a sight that would have been! And at the end, when all the dust had settled, the Colorado River would naturally flow through the crack. The Mt. Saint Helens catastrophe gave us, in our own time, a miniature version of the event, easily observable to this day. Now that is a good use of true science.
3) What does the doctrine of the Global Flood mean for us?
- It reminds us that God is the Owner of His creation and is sovereign over it. He can do with it what He pleases.
- It reminds us of God’s abhorrence toward sin. He is the Lawgiver, and because of the violence done toward God’s laws, and therefore His holy character, He has the authority to do something about it. The earth was destroyed because of man’s sin.
- God is the only and absolute Judge of His creation. The Flood was God’s first judgment on man’s wickedness. Another judgment, by fire, is coming on the inhabitants of the earth. The scoffers try to deny the Flood because they want to follow their own evil desires and want to pretend they won’t be held accountable for their sin. The scars we see on the earth today from Noah’s Flood should remind us that God can and will judge His creation. Man has attempted to usurp God’s position as Judge from the beginning (Genesis 3:5), but God remains the one and only Judge of all things.
- God is long-suffering in His patience and full of mercy. He gave ultra-wicked humanity 120 years to repent and turn back to Him (Genesis 6:3, 1 Peter 3:20), using Noah, a preacher of righteousness (2 Peter 2:5), and the visual testimony of a giant ark being built. He does not desire that any perish, but that all people come to repentance (2 Peter 3:9).
- God will always rescue His own. While the rebellious perished, Noah and his family floated above the judgment, safe in the ark, rescued from destruction. God Himself sealed the door shut so it wouldn’t leak. God always protects and provides for His children. The ark is a picture of our eternal security found in our Savior Jesus Christ.
- It reminds us of the spiritual battle. The plain story of the Genesis Flood, backed up by over 150 worldwide Flood legends as well as the physical evidence left behind for us to see, is so often undermined, doubted and outright denied even by those who profess to be Christians. The spiritual battle for souls is very real, and Satan, the deceiver, is consistently trying to confuse people to keep them from the truth. Let us resist him, stand firm, and believe what God says.
- It implores us to look ahead to Christ’s return. Jesus taught that, as it was in the days of Noah, so will it be when He returns. People were intentionally ignorant back then, just as many are today. We may busy ourselves with eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage (Matthew 24:37-39), and intentionally forget that Jesus is coming back soon. The account of Noah and the Flood is a picture of the coming judgment, and should spur us on to tell others the Good News of the rescue given through Jesus before it’s too late!
