05.2 - Lesson 05, Part 2: The Global Flood: Lessons we Learn from the Global Flood

Interlocked Series - Lesson #05, Part 2
The Global Flood: Lessons we Learn from the Global Flood
September 12, 2023
Robert L. Dean, Jr.
www.deanbibleministries.org

Opening Prayer

“Father, we’re so thankful that we have You to come to, that You are our rock, You are our strong tower, and You are our fortress in the worst times of our lives. You’re always our defender at all times. You are our mighty fortress.

“Father, we’re thankful for that. And we look at what goes on in the world today, what is happening domestically in this nation and in many of the states, and we see governors who are just trampling on the constitutional rights of citizens in this country left and right.

“Father, we just pray that we see the handwriting on the wall that we are headed for a tremendous collapse and chaos. Father, we pray that You would sustain us and that we might be faithful as witnesses to you and to your Word that no matter what happens, we can remain calm and stable.

“Father, we’re thankful for all that You provide for us and all that You’ve given us and the opportunities to prepare people for whatever may come. We know that living in the devil’s world things are not necessarily good.

“We’re thankful that we can be a source of teaching for so many. Father, we pray that tonight as we study Your Word that we would get greater confirmation of its accuracy and truthfulness and that we can understand it better to explain it to others. We pray this in Christ’s name, Amen.”

Slide 2

Tonight we’re going to have a quiz. There are different ways to review things and as I have been showing you there’s the curriculum for Interlocked which is the main curriculum, and then there is the curriculum that’s based for taking it down a couple of notches to children 10 years of age to about 14.

I was looking at that today, and it’s got a 15-question quiz. You all should know this. I mean, I’m looking around here and there’s not a person in here that shouldn’t get at least 14 of the 15 correct. We’re not going to have you stand up and give the answers, but you should write down your answers so that you can keep your own score.

Slide 3

These are all multiple choice. Tonight what we’re looking at are the lessons where we learned about the Global Flood. This is basically designed to see how much you know about the great Flood of Noah. First question. Whose idea was it to build the ark? Whose idea was it? Was it Noah’s idea? Was it God’s idea? Was it Mrs. Noah’s idea? Or was it Ham, one of his three sons? Which one of those had the idea to build the Ark?

Just write down your answer. We’ll just go through the questions, and you just write down your answers, which one it is, and then I’ll go back and review these.

Slide 4

The second question. What was the Ark for? What was its purpose? First, was it designed for some competition? Second, was it a test to show how strong the wood was? Third, was it a new cruise liner for tourists? And four, was it built to save lives?

Slide 5

Third question. How many doors were there on the ark? None. Everyone climbed in through the roof. Second option, one. Third option, four. Two doors on each side. Fourth, eight. Four doors on each side. So those are your options.

Slide 6

Fourth question. How many people got on the ark? One, everyone in the world at that time. Number two, two did, Noah and his wife. Third option, eight, Noah and the three sons and all their wives. And fourth, none, the ark was only for animals.

Slide 7

Question number five. What kind of animals got into the ark? One, the animals that breathed air. Two, only the animals that were good for food. Third, all the land animals and fish. Fourth, none.

Slide 8

Sixth question. Why did God allow Noah to get into the ark? Number one, God liked how Noah looked. Number two, Noah paid God for the ticket to get into the ark. Third, Noah promised to look after the animals. And fourth, God said Noah was a righteous man.

Slide 9

Seventh question. Who closed the door on the ark? Number one, Noah and his sons, of course. Number two, God alone did. Number three, Noah hired some people to close it from the outside. And fourth, they left the door open for some fresh air. Obviously, with all those animals, you’d probably need fresh air.

Slide 10

Number eight. Where did all the floodwaters come from? Number one, from the sky and also the ground. Number two, only from the sky in the form of rain and snow. Number three, only from underground springs that overflowed. Number four, from melting snow around the world. That would be the global warming answer.

Slide 11

Number nine. Where did Noah keep all the fishes in the ark? Number one, he had special tanks built in the ark. Number two, the bottom of the ark was a gigantic aquarium. Number three, there were no fishes in the ark. Number four, they were in nets attached to the outside of the ark.

Slide 12

Number ten. How long did the floodwaters cover the earth? Number 1, 150 days. Number 2, 40 days and 40 nights. Number 3, who knows? The Bible doesn’t say. Number 4, 600 years. Okay, number 1, 150 days. Number 2, 40 days and 40 nights. Number 3, who knows? The Bible doesn’t say. Number four, 600 years.

Slide 13

Number eleven. How many mountains could Noah see during the Flood? Number one, just the tallest mountain at the time. Number two, a few of the very tall ones. Three, none. The whole world was underwater. Number four, he could see all the mountains.

Slide 14

Number twelve. How long did Noah stay in the ark? One, 40 days and 40 nights. Two, about one whole year. Third, two weeks. Four, 150 days. So number one, 40 days and 40 nights. Number two, about one whole year. Number three, two weeks. Number four, 150 days.

Slide 15

Number thirteen. How did the flood waters subside? One, God stopped the rain. Two, God stopped the underground waters from rising. Three, God sent a wind to blow the earth dry. That was the origination of blow dry, by the way. And four, God did all of the above. He stopped the rain. He stopped the underground waters from rising. He sent a wind to blow the earth dry or all of the above.

Now we’ll go back to one and you can grade yourself. Whose idea was it to build the ark? I don’t hear you. God, that’s correct. Number two, what was the ark for? What was its purpose? To save life, number four. Number three, how many doors were there on the ark? One.

Number four, how many people got into the ark? Eight. Noah, three sons and their three wives. So that was eight of them.

Five, what kind of animals got into the ark? The animals that breathed air.

Six, why did God allow Noah to get into the ark? Four, God said Noah was a righteous man.

Seven, who closed the door of the ark? God alone did.

Eight, where did all the floodwaters come from? I can’t hear you. From the sky and also the ground.

Nine, where did Noah keep all the fishes in the ark? What? There were no fishes.

Ten, how long did the floodwaters cover the earth? What? One, 150 days.

Eleven, How many mountains could Noah see during the flood? None. The whole world was underwater.

Twelve, how long did Noah stay in the ark? A year and a week. About one whole year.

Thirteen, how did the floodwaters subside? All of the above. How did you do? I hope you all did good on that. If not, you’ll need to pay extra attention to the lesson tonight as we go forward. My favorite question, which I did not put on the test, is how many people did Moses take on the ark with him? Yeah, that’s a trick question.

Slide 16

Last time we stopped just as we were approaching this, so tonight we’re going to look at five lessons that we learned from the Global Flood. Now what’s interesting about this is these lessons go through a lot of events in the Old Testament. So this establishes a pattern that God follows.

The first lesson is that grace precedes judgment. God is not this horrible, wicked, evil God who just seeks to pour out His wrath on people. He gives them a lot of time. He gives them, as the old saying goes, enough rope to hang themselves. He gives them grace before judgment so that they have time to respond to His message.

Second, it has to be a decision about who to save and who to judge. How are you going to determine, on what basis are you going to determine who is going to be saved and who is going to be judged? The Bible teaches exclusivity, that there’s only one way. and that God does not provide multiple ways to get saved.

It’s very clear, those who are saved are those in the ark, and those who are judged are those outside of the ark. So, if the population is somewhere between two and three billion people, some people say maybe even more, maybe five billion, then a lot of people died and that shows that God was just, He had given them so much time. We’ll look at that as we go through it later on.

There’s only one way of salvation. There’s only one ark. You can only survive the Flood by getting on the ark. There’s only one door. There’s only one way to enter the door. Again, this emphasizes exclusivity.

Fourth, the world changed. The Global Flood changed the entire planet. Everything changed. Nothing after the flood looked like resembled or remained of what was before the flood except how to be saved. That is always by faith, by trusting in God. That is how Noah was saved.

We look at this first principle which is grace before judgment. And what we learn here is that as God prepared to judge the world, he gave them a message of grace. And we see this in Jude verses 14 and 15.

Slide 17

Remember Enoch? He’s the seventh from Adam. Now, how do we know that? We know that because that’s what the genealogy says in Genesis 5. So again, this is New Testament evidence that the writers of the New Testament believed the accuracy of the genealogies in Genesis 5 and later Genesis 11.

This Enoch is in the line of |Adam. There’s one in the line of Cain but we’re not talking about him here. Enoch, the seventh from Adam prophesied, that means he made a prediction about a judgment. See, most people think that prophecy just means to foretell the future, but the focal point of all prophecy is judgment.

God’s just not telling the future to satisfy people’s curiosity. So Enoch prophesied about these men also, saying, “Behold, the Lord comes with ten thousands of His holy ones.” Frequently the angels in the Old Testament are referred to as qodashim, which is holy ones.

Here it’s not restricted to the meaning of saints. It refers to the angels. They are set apart to God’s service. And their purpose is, in verse 15, to execute judgment on all, to convict all who are ungodly, and among them of all their ungodly deeds which they have committed in an ungodly way, and of all the harsh things which ungodly sinners have spoken against them. That is the most ungodly verse in the Bible.

Slide 18

We have just a chart here with just the last part of Noah’s genealogy, and we see that Enoch was the father of the man who lived longest in the Bible, Methuselah. But Methuselah died before his father did, because Enoch was righteous, he walked with God and was not. He did not die physically, just walked right into Heaven. He lived 365 years.

From what we learned from Jude is that Enoch was proclaiming this message over 700 or 800 years before the Flood. He’s proclaiming this message. So that is 600 or 700 years, maybe more, of grace from God.

He wasn’t the only one. I assume that his son Methuselah would have been and Lamech also, I believe. But Noah certainly was. According to the Apostle Peter Noah was a preacher of righteousness. So, you had the message going out that all you have to do is get on the boat. There’s going to be a worldwide flood.

Nobody had ever seen a flood before and the word that they used in the Hebrew was the word mabbul. Now there’s another word for a local flood. Mabbul is only used to describe Noah’s Flood. They’re talking about there’s a great mabbul coming.

That made no sense to the people who heard the message. They had never seen one. They had never seen rain any more than you have ever heard that word before. And so it didn’t mean anything to them. And they’d say, well, what’s that?

Noah would describe what was going to happen, and that this is why he was building an ark. He told them that God had told him. The only way to survive was going to be to get on the ark. So there was a precise message given, and not one person responded.

I guess I can’t say that because there could have been some who responded, but they died before the Flood, like Methuselah. Methuselah was a believer, but Methuselah died before the Flood. And the same with Lamech. He died before the Flood.

There may have been other believers who had responded to the message, but by the time the Flood came, there were only eight people who possessed righteousness, and that was Noah and his family.

They had to have two qualifications. Number one, possess righteousness, and number two, they were from a bloodline that was pure humanity because of the infiltration of the sons of God, the angels, the fallen angels, who had intermarried with human beings.

That doesn’t mean everyone had that problem, but it means that it had reached a critical mass where God had to stop it. You just have to think that through a little bit. With the younger children you have to think how to teach that.

Slide 19

In 2 Peter 2:5, Peter says that “God did not spare the ancient world, but saved Noah, one of eight people, a preacher of righteousness.” This is from the New Living Translation, and I’ve put it up there just to kind of have a foil here. This translation makes it sound like Noah was a preacher of righteousness because he warned the world of God’s righteous judgment. I don’t think that’s so. I think Noah is righteous because he, like Abraham later on, believed God and it was imputed to him as righteousness.

Noah is preaching the gospel. You have to be righteous to be saved by God, and that means you have to trust in His promise of a future Savior. So I would take that as a preacher of righteousness, that righteousness is what he’s preaching about, is how to become righteous.

Slide 20

What we see in this principle of grace before judgment is for some 700, maybe 800 years, you have the proclamation of this coming judgment and the warning, and grace again and again and again and again, and then the judgment comes.

We’ve seen a lot of warnings in this nation over the last century of what will happen because of the departure from the truth of God’s Word which began in the 19^th century with Protestant liberalism, Darwinism, and the rise of almighty science.

Slide 21

God’s judgment is stated in Genesis 6:3, “My spirit shall not remain with man forever, for he is indeed flesh.” As I pointed out last time the Hebrew word translated “remain” here is only used one time. King James translators translated it “strive.”

Just as you have words, we have words in English, like the word amorous. But if you look at the root A-M-O, that comes out of Latin for love. You also have Amor, Amore, Italian, and French, and Spanish, and all of these are just related languages. So we can look at the word that in the Hebrew that’s translated there. It’s only used one time in the Scriptures.

The related words in Arabic, and Akkadian, and Ugaritic, which is a form of Canaanite, and these other languages all have this root. In those other languages, they all have the idea of remaining or abiding. The word needs to be translated remaining.

I think that God, at this time, still had a temple, tabernacle, a dwelling place in the Garden of Eden. After the Flood, that place no longer existed.

Slide 22

The reason that Noah is saved is that he responded to God’s grace. We have to recognize that some of the English Bibles translate it as “favor”, but the idea is grace. It is unmerited favor. It’s not just favor. God didn’t say “I like Noah so I’m going to let him get in the ark.”

Noah is a preacher of righteousness. Noah had imputed righteousness just as Abraham did. There’s a long time that goes by from Enoch to the Flood, and God is going to be gracious to Noah, not just in saving him eternally, but delivering him and his family physically from the flood.

He and his wife will be the new Adam and Eve. They will reboot the human race. God’s going to hit that restart button, and everybody, everybody in this room, everybody who ever watches this video, all can trace their line back to Noah. Most of us think we can trace it back to Adam. Well, sure you can, but you’ve got to all go through Noah first.

Slide 23

2 Peter 3:9, is a verse that emphasizes the long-suffering, the patience of God. “The Lord is not slack concerning His promise.” In this context, Peter is warning about the future judgment of God, but he relates it back to God’s judgment at the flood saying that just like it was then now people are asking where’s the promise of His coming?

It seems like everything just goes on like it always has, and nothing changes, and it’s been a long time, so He’s really not coming. Peter says, “The Lord is not slack concerning His promise, as some count slackness, but is longsuffering toward us.” There’s always grace before judgment.

“God is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.” God continues to allow things to go on. People often ask why is there so much suffering? Why doesn’t God stop all this? Why doesn’t God intervene?

There are wars and famines and everything else, because God desires to see as many saved as possible, to continue to extend the gospel to any and all. That is the same thing that was happening prior to the Flood. If you go back to when Enoch is proclaiming that message, you’re going back 700 or 800 years that God held off in destroying the human race.

Slide 24

The second thing that we’re looking at is the question of who to save and who to judge. And so all of those who are saved are inside the ark. All of those who are judged are outside of the ark. It is God who decided what the means was but He gave people the opportunity to make a decision about whether they would go into the ark or not. There’s no secret plan. No one is confused. Noah and the others made it very, very clear.

Even though there had never been any rain before, never been a flood before, Noah was given specific instructions by God on how to build the ark. God is omniscient. He knew exactly what was necessary for this ship to weather all storms and waves. Some of those tsunamis are estimated to have moved at over 150 miles an hour.

Can you imagine getting the ark pointed in front of that? It’d be like a massive surfboard. And you’re just riding the wave of all waves at 150, 175 miles an hour. God’s hand was on it, so God was protecting everyone inside of the ship. He had designed it and built it so that it could survive whatever came. God determined who to save, and the message went out. Those who will enter the ark will be saved, those who do not will not be saved. Everybody had their own choice to make.

Slide 25

Third thing we see is that there’s only one way of salvation. That way was in the ark, and only one way to enter the ark, and that was through the one door. And so you have Noah, who is the representative of the human race, as the underlord of God who is bringing the animals there so that all of these animals contain the DNA to rebuild the animals, insects, all the air-breathing creatures on the ark.

A lot of people ask how could they get all of those animals on there? We’ll talk about that a little later on. There’s been a lot of discussion and a lot of study on that over the years. There was more than enough room. There was enough room for all of the kinds, and a kind, a biblical kind, is not a species.

When I was a kid I heard that this is species. No, it’s much broader than that, because you have to have animals that can breed together. There was some sort of dog kind, and we have wolves, and we have coyotes, we have German shepherds and chihuahuas, but they’re all part of the dog kind, which is probably at the family level.

I was reading an interesting article on Answers in Genesis over the weekend, and the question that they were addressing was are cheetahs really part of the cat kind? There’s some interesting distinctions with cheetahs in Africa. It has to do with the way that line was isolated following the Flood. You can go to Answers in Genesis and read the article for yourself.

One of the things I thought that was interesting is that you have a lot of different cat kinds. Everything from your favorite little cat all the way to a lion, leopards, cheetahs, all kinds of ocelots. You’ve got jaguars down in Central and South America. You’ve got just a huge number of cats.

Some cat species can interbreed with other cats. Let’s say group A can interbreed with group B, but they can’t interbreed with group C. But group B can interbreed with group C. So this just spreads out to where you have 30, 40, 50 different species today of cats, felines. At some level, they can all interbreed with certain others in the feline kind, but not all of them. All of those would originally be traced back to the cat kind and those two cats went on the ark.

God is overseeing all of this DNA distribution. He knows how to do that. There may not have been as much of a distinction in the ancient world as there is after they all got off of the ark. You may not have had so many different kinds of species and subspecies.

Slide 26

When Noah built the ark, the instructions were, a male and female of each kind entered. Another good question is how many of each kind did Noah take on the ark? A lot of people say it was two. No, it was seven of every clean and two of every unclean.

Why the odd number of the seven? It was because the clean animals could be used for sacrifice and the seventh one was the sacrifice. When they got off the ark, the seventh one was part of the sacrifices that they made when they exited.

Male and female of each kind entered just as God had commanded Noah. Then the Lord closed the door behind them. He shut them in and closed it, sealed it, So, they’re protected. Nothing could hurt them. God is protecting them.

That is a wonderful picture of our security and our salvation. God knows all of the things that can attack us, but He has sealed us. Just as He sealed the door on the ark, we are sealed by God the Holy Spirit. There can be no loss of salvation. We are totally protected by the Lord

Slide 27

The next question is whether there are many ways to be saved. We live in a world where people would like to have many different ways, many different options, dependent upon their particular choice. People think it ought to be this way. They think there ought to be a lot of diversity so anybody can go to Heaven for any reason they choose.

God isn’t against diversity. Look at everything in God’s creation. There’s going to be all kinds of people in Heaven. It’s just going to be remarkable because salvation is for all without distinction on race or ethnicity or skin color or anything else. God is the One who designs what the basis is for going to Heaven.

People today want a lot of options. They want it to be morality so that if they’re a good person they’ll go to Heaven. How do you define good? Where do you get the word good? You know, you go into some subcultures in this country, criminal subcultures, good and bad are completely reversed. So who defines good? Only God can define good.

Some people think that it’s karma, that it’s fatalism, that it’s any religion as long as you’re sincere. Some believe it depends on your donations, how much money you give to the organization. Most people believe in a do-it-yourself salvation. God says He’s the only One who can do it and provide for it.

Slide 28

The Bible says that there’s only one way to salvation. The pagan worldview says it depends n you doing good whatever your religion. After all, God is love, so everyone goes to heaven, they say. God makes the rules. We don’t. Because of our sin nature, we want permissiveness.

We want God to just be this old man in Heaven who says, “Tut, tut, tut, too bad. Well, you just have a sin nature, but you’re sincere and you’ll go to Heaven.” This is not what God did. He defines what is acceptable to Him and what is not acceptable to Him, and who will be saved and who will not be saved. Do-it-yourself salvation kits are not to be passed around. They don’t work.

Slide 29

When we look at the Flood as a judgment, God’s judgment is a global flood, and since He’s the only One who knows what a global flood looks like, only He can provide the solution of how to survive the flood. All man-made solutions would fail. I wonder how many people were trying to make rafts or make some sort of boat at the last minute and trying to escape and it didn’t work for anyone.

Slide 30

The next point is on page 7 of Lesson 5 in the Interlocked Series. This is how the world changed in incredible ways. We have a very difficult time imagining the power of that much water. Some of you have been to places that have been flooded.

When I was in seminary, I used to go down to a place near Kerrville where the upper waters of the Guadalupe River are. Once, I can’t remember exactly what time of year it was, there was a massive flood.

There was a Keswick camp for kids, a Christian camp for kids, back in this one area. To get there, you had to cross a low-water bridge and this bridge washed out. The water was about 30 feet high. A camp bus was crossing on that bridge when the flash flood hit. And so there were a number of kids killed. I went down there frequently enough where I knew what the topography around that area on that river looked like.

The next time I went after the flood nothing looked familiar. The landscape, just the direction the creek ran, or how it ran, completely changed. That’s just one very small river in Texas. This isn’t the Guadalupe as you see it a little further down. This is just one of the rivers and the tributaries in the upper area.

Water is powerful, and you’re multiplying that probably a million-fold, at least, probably much more, to see the power where all of the land on the planet is covered to at least 22 feet, the Scripture says, to at least 22 feet, 15 cubits. A cubit is about a foot and a half, so at least 22 feet, the text says. It stays that high for 110 days.

You have the initial part where the fountains of the deep have opened, the windows of heaven have opened, and then as the waters rise and they churn, you would have tsunamis moving 150 miles an hour. You have the breakup of the tectonic plates. We saw some of that in that little a short video I showed last time.

I hope some of you take the time to find one of the longer ones to watch because it gives you an idea of the incredible power. One example that they is used in the Interlocked Series is that when Krakatoa blew in the 19^th century, the explosion was so powerful that it actually shifted the axis of the Earth to a minor degree and that’s just one volcano.

Steve Austin, who was a speaker at the Chafer Conference in 2016 has a great animation of what happened at Mount St. Helens which I’ll show you. Just imagine that there were tens of thousands of volcanoes under the water and on dry ground that were exploding with that force at the same time. What impact would that have on the whole planet? It boggles our mind. We can’t imagine anything like that.

Slide 31

In Genesis 7:17 through 24, we read, “Now the flood was on the earth forty days.” So that’s talking about the rain. It rained for 40 days and 40 nights. “The waters increased and lifted up the ark and it rose high above the earth. The waters prevailed and greatly increased on the earth and the ark moved about on the surface of the water.” So, what that’s talking about is all of this churning that’s going on all over the earth.

“And the waters prevailed exceedingly on the earth and all the high hills under the whole heaven were covered.” The waters prevail 15 cubits, that’s about 22 feet at least. And the mountains were covered, and the waters prevailed on the earth 150 days. This tells us how the world changed in ways that could not really be imagined.

Slide 32

In 2 Peter we read, “For this they willfully forget that by the word of God the heavens were of old and the earth standing out of water and in the water.” When you go back to Genesis 1, we read that God separates the waters for the waters above and waters below, and the waters below He calls ocean. So there’s some water way above the earth.

There was the theory for many years that this was some sort of water vapor canopy. Jody Dillow, who was in the doctoral program when I was a student, had an engineering background, and in conjunction with a third reader, I believe, from the science department over at SMU he worked through all of the calculations as to what the Earth’s temperature would be like if there were a water vapor canopy like Venus. The conclusion was that it would have been way too hot on the surface of the planet.

We don’t know how far out the water vapor canopy was. It just says that God took this water and moved it above the Earth. and that’s the water that comes down when the windows of heaven are opened. And Peter talks about this and says that “They willfully forget this, that by the Word of God the heavens were of old and the earth standing out of water and in the water, by which the world that then existed perished.”

The world that then existed (Genesis 1–6) perished. It was totally destroyed being flooded with water. Then Peter says, “But the heavens and the earth which are now preserved by the same word.” People get all upset about all kinds of global warming or climate change.

The climate’s always changing, all of these other things that are going on, and yet we as believers ought to relax about all of this. All this gloom and doom that they say, because we’re told in Scripture here in Colossians that God preserves the earth. He is the one that it’s preserved by His Word, His power, and they’re reserved for fire, which comes at the last judgment.

Slide 33

What Peter tells us is that people deliberately forget. That means that they know the truth, but they suppressed it. That’s what Paul says in Romans 1, that they suppress the truth in unrighteousness. They deny the reality of what God has said and God’s power to maintain the earth.

Their view is that we have to take care of it. There’s nothing we can do to take care of it. Not one thing that any human being can do. And I’ve said this before, that a good assignment for your kids is to research volcanoes as to what is blown into the atmosphere with a volcanic eruption. All of the gases, and all of the chemicals, and all of the things that go into the atmosphere, and what the consequences of that are.

Compare that to what is produced by all human beings since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. More stuff is thrown into the atmosphere from just one volcano than every human being has produced since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. We’ve had hundreds and hundreds of volcanoes over the years. We have to rely on God to preserve the planet.

Slide 34

There are some people who think there’s no connection between spiritual things and the physical world. I’ve heard people in doctrinal churches say this. that there’s no connection. Yet we have passages in Scripture, which I’ve usually pointed out, such as in Leviticus 26, with the five cycles of discipline, God says that if you violate My covenant, if you worship other gods, it’ll stop raining. And the ground will be like bronze and the earth and the sky like bronze.

The ground becomes hard, the sky doesn’t give any rain, and there’s a cause and effect there. God is saying your spiritual condition has an impact on meteorology and on other factors. It can cause famines and droughts, many, many other things. There is a connection. The connection is because God is the sustainer and controller of meteorology and the Earth.

Slide 35

God’s original design was for the human race to responsibly care for and utilize the various resources of the planet. He created those resources. We think of the resources from petroleum products to lumber, to water, to all of the various things that can be domesticated and grown by farmers. God created all of that with a purpose. Man was to responsibly care for that as the underlord.

Slide 36

What happened was sin. All of creation was damaged by sin. And there you see a spiritual decision leads to physical consequences. The serpent has to crawl on his belly.

You had the development of gastrointestinal systems so that they could handle eating meat. You had the development of carnivores. There were no carnivores before Genesis 3. All of that changed.

No matter how you stack up all the damage that man has done to creation, all of the pollution, all of the emissions of various gases, the strip mining, the logging, all of these things, they don’t add up to anything close to what happened to the planet when Eve ate the fruit and Adam ate the fruit. That changed everything.

Slide 37

The last couple of lessons we’ve gone through, Romans 8, starting in verse 19 down to 22, but I’m just quoting Romans 8:21 and 22 here where it says that the creation itself also will be delivered from the bondage of corruption. God didn’t create it in bondage of corruption. That’s the result of Adam’s original sin.

In Romans 8:22, “For we know that the whole creation.” That includes the furthest galaxies, everything God created has been impacted by sin. Sin isn’t just that we make a mistake, or we just let our lust get a handle on ourselves.

The sin of that little tiny sin of eating a piece of fruit in disobedience to God changed the physical nature of all of the universe, not just Adam and Eve. That’s something to really ponder and think about. Everything is impacted by sin. Spiritual decisions affect physical reality.

Slide 38

The fifth thing is how to be saved. How are we saved? We’re saved by faith. Hebrews 11:7 says, “By faith Noah being divinely warned of things not yet seen, moved with godly fear, prepared an ark for the saving of his household, by which he condemned the world.” You condemn the world by the very act of your coming to Bible class to study God’s Word as a statement of judgment and condemnation on the rest of the world.

The fact that Noah did what God wanted him to do was a condemnation of the rest of the world. He condemned the world and became heir of the righteousness which is according to faith. So those are the five things we learned. We learn these five things every time we go through these different episodes. Everything shows that we are always saved by faith.

Slide 39

Here are the five lessons that we learn from the Flood. We have a choice. We can either look at things that are happening in our world around us and doubt God’s control and panic. There’s a lot that you could panic about. There’s a lot of uncertainty. There’s a lot of chaos. There are people like this governor in New Mexico who just autocratically passed an executive order to take away Second Amendment rights.

Her executive order says no one can carry a concealed or open weapon. Anybody carrying a firearm in Albuquerque, in the county that Albuquerque’s in, over the next 30 days is liable to punishment. The problem is everybody, even some of the most radical anti-gun people in the country, say that she stepped over the line and there’s no basis for this in the Constitution. But she’s pushing it.

If Gavin Newsom in California thought he could get away with it, he would do it. And there are other governors that would do it because they want to control people. This could change tomorrow but we’re not quite there yet. God’s in control. We have to learn to trust Him. We can’t put our focus on the waves and the circumstances and the tyrants who want to control us. We have to put it on God and focus upon Him.

Slide 40

The first of the five lessons we learned is there’s always grace before judgment, 120-year grace period, Enoch warned, Noah warned. The second lesson is there’s always a decision. Who is saved? Who is judged? And those who are saved are those who obey God, and those who are judged are those who aren’t.

Third, there’s only one way of salvation, and that’s what God says, not what man says. Fourth, the world changed. The Global Flood changed the whole world. The Tribulation is going to change the world again. Maybe not to the same degree, but it will change it again.

Then there’s the issue of salvation. Salvation is always by faith alone in the promise of God. The promise of God shifts. Before the Cross, the promise is that God will provide a Savior. And by trusting in that promise, you will be given God’s righteousness. After the Cross, we look back. We now know who the Messiah is and we trust in Him.

Slide 41

The ark is a picture of salvation. How does God judge and save? It’s the ark. It’s one way, God’s way. And that’s a picture of how Jesus judges and saves. So this takes us down to page 10 in Lesson 5, and I want to cover one more area before we wrap it up.

Slide 42

At the bottom of page 10 there is a question asking if there was such a thing as a worldwide flood that destroyed the earth? Remember that there are those who compromise biblical truth with science. They either merge it in or they come up with some ways to not interpret the Bible literally. They do various things like adding ages and years.

A basic question to ask is what reason they have for adding long periods of time? Why do they feel the necessity to add 50,000, 100,000, 100 million, 100 billion years to the history of the planet? Science comes up with it, they say.

What are their presuppositions? We touched on it in 2 Peter 3, that the scoffers will come, say, where’s the promise of His coming? Everything continues as it always has. That articulates the principle of uniformitarianism, which is believing that because we see certain decay rates in various chemicals today, then we can extrapolate back and we can assume that it’s always decayed at that same rate and that there were no catastrophes. Nothing changed anything. They believe that we should be able to go back and extrapolate.

What we’ll see is that there’s a lot of things that don’t quite hold up because you can look at different chemical compounds that are breaking down and they end up with conflicting ages for the Earth.

Slide 43

One thing that we know, that we have as evidence, is the existence of pagan accounts of a big flood. Nearly every culture, every civilization, every tribe in the most remote parts of the jungle have some story about a worldwide flood in antiquity, and that there were various ways that people were saved. It’s all sort of been muddied over. They call this different things in different parts of the country. I grew up hearing it called gossip. Some people call it telephone.

Whatever it’s called it’s where about 20 people get in a circle and you have something that you’re saying, just a short phrase, and you whisper it to the person next to you. Then they whisper it to the person next to them. It goes all the way around the circle and when it gets to the end and they say what it is, but it bears no resemblance to what was said at the beginning.

After the Flood, Noah and his children and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren begin to spread out. About 200 years later, there’s the Tower of Babel incident where the languages are confused, and then people are split up into different groups. As they get further away from anyone with the truth of God’s revelation, then what happens is they start to change the stories.

I have the English translation of a six-volume French work that was written by a Jesuit priest who was an anthropologist, and he published this six-volume work back in the early 20^th century. He investigated every known tribe, every known culture, every known civilization in the history of mankind, and traced back their original religious belief systems.

What he discovered is everyone, without exception, started with a single god, and then it deteriorated from there. Monotheism is the earliest religion. That’s not what evolution says. That’s not what your sociology professor in school will say, because they’re willingly ignorant of works like this. These works are out there but they’re just ignored. They are willfully ignorant of these things.

Slide 44

You have all of these descendants of Noah, and as they scattered, they just embellished on the truth, things change from generation to generation. We have evidence of a worldwide flood.

Slide 45

Second, is we get into the issue of the depth of the flood water and the duration of the flood.

I’m going to stop here because that’s going to take us some time to go through the material that I have for that. We’ll come back and look at that next time. The key is to think your way through those five things that we talked about in terms of understanding the dynamics of the Flood, especially as it relates to judgment and salvation.

Closing Prayer

“Father, we thank You for this opportunity to be together, to study Your Word, to be reminded of its truthfulness, its veracity. We know that the world around us again and again is suppressing truth. We see it now in ways we never saw it before. There’s no desire for objectivity.

“There’s no sense of absolute truth. Everybody’s just making up their own stories to get money, to get success, to get prestige, and to control people. It doesn’t matter. We don’t even know who or what to trust anymore.

“The one thing we can trust is your Word, that it is absolutely true. And that we need to judge everything in our lives by Your Word, and not by science, not by how many degrees somebody has, or how many laboratories did X, Y, or Z. It is Your Word that is the basis for absolute truth, and everything needs to be evaluated by Your Word, and not the other way around.

“Father, strengthen our understanding of Your Word, of the truth of Your Word, and our ability to articulate this to those that we get the opportunity to. In Christ’s name we pray, Amen.”