The Destruction of Man in the Flood
Published by Stanley Pouw in 2019 · 24 March 2019
Now we are coming to the reasons for the worldwide judgment of God, the Flood which drowned the entire population of the earth. Our society works hard to preserve its future, to preserve the environment, to preserve the human race, and to preserve animals. People are trying to conquer sickness, trying to figure out genetics to prolong human life. But it's not going to work.
There is nothing within the power of man to stop the inevitable destruction of the human race and the earth and the universe as we know it. The Bible tells us how history is going to end. It's going to end when the Lord Jesus returns, destroys all the ungodly, and establishes His Kingdom. At the end of that Kingdom the entire heaven and earth as we know it will cease to exist and be replaced by the eternal state.
At that time all of the human race will be destroyed. Only those who belong to God will escape that destruction. The world as we know it is not billions of years old, and it's not going to go on for billions more. It is not a universe that is uniformly sustaining itself perpetually without cataclysm and interruption. The universe as we know it is only about 4500 years old after the Flood.
This event changed the character of the skies and the earth dramatically. It also destroyed all of the human race, with the exception of eight people so that all humanity was begun again from those eight. And that destruction occurred about 1650 years after the original creation, so the whole thing is something around 6500 years old. Here we are 4500 years later on the edge of another holocaust that will kill ungodly humanity.
The big lie of evolution is that everything is always continuing the same way. That is the pervasive lie in human philosophy. Look at 2 Peter 3:1-2, “This is now the second letter that I am writing to you, beloved. In both of them I am stirring up your sincere mind by way of reminder, 2 that you should remember the predictions of the holy prophets and the commandment of the Lord and Savior through your apostles.”
Peter says, I want to take you back to divine revelation, and there you will find how history is going to end. In verse 3 he says, “Knowing this first of all, that scoffers will come in the last days with scoffing, following their own sinful desires.” They will mock the Bible. Verse 4, “Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation.”
Verse 5 says, “For they deliberately overlook this fact, that the heavens existed long ago, and the earth was formed out of water and through water by the word of God.” They purposely ignore the Word of God. They forget that there was a massive worldwide flood that drowned the earth. They willfully ignore that, it's in the Bible, but it's also in science, as we shall see as we get into the study of the Flood.
The Lord created the planet earth between two watery masses. One was above the earth, and one was under the earth in a subterranean location. And with that water that was surrounding the earth in the atmosphere, and that water that was in the subterranean part of the earth, it says in verse 6, “And by means of these the world that then existed was deluged with water and perished.”
All things have not continued from the beginning as they were. The pre-Flood world, the world from Adam to Noah, that world perished, that world was judged and destroyed through that flood. There is also evidence for the worldwide flood in the geology of the earth, in the stratification of the earth and in the fossils that are found. Grand Canyon is one evidence of the universal flood that covered the earth.
But sinful man conveniently ignore what the Bible says and what the evidence indicates to deceive themselves into thinking that there never will be judgment. Verse 7 says, “But by the same word the heavens and earth that now exist are stored up for fire, being kept until the Day of Judgment and destruction of the ungodly.” In the future, the judgment will be fire that destroys all.
What God did in the past is essentially what He's going to do in the future. The only difference is He won't be using water, it will be fire. So let's go back to Genesis 6. Why did God destroy the world then? Doesn't that give us some insight into why He will destroy it now? The answer is that it does. In fact, this is why God destroyed the world and why He will do so again.
Genesis 6: 5-7, “The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. 6 And the Lord regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. 7 So the Lord said, “I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens, for I am sorry that I have made them.”
Verse 8-12, “But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord. 9 These are the generations of Noah. Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation. Noah walked with God. 10 And Noah had three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. 11 Now the earth was corrupt in God's sight, and the earth was filled with violence. 12 And God saw the earth, and behold, it was corrupt, for all flesh had corrupted their way on the earth.”
The point in this passage is very clear. The judgment of God falls on sinful humanity due to the horrible degeneration of mankind. God planned to wipe out the human race, because it was so pervasively and irretrievably wicked. The people at that time were so wicked as to have engaged themselves in perverse unions with demons. Demons dwelling in men were welcomed by women who embraced these demons.
The demons came into their marriages, into their families, and brought evil into their lives. Both the parents and the children were under demonic influence and demon control. They may have thought that they had escaped the judgment of God, but they hadn't. All that happened to them was there were mighty men, men with a reputation. Satan was able to make fierce warriors out of them, but in the end they were just men.
And in spite of the testimony of Adam, who could have told them what paradise was like before they met the fallen angel Satan, who told them what a horrible sacrifice they had to pay because of their sin. Even the testimony of Adam was not enough to keep them from the demons. The same old satanic lies were told again, "You won't die, and you will be like God," and they brought on their own destruction.
Eternal life and a higher being, that's what all the false religions of the world have always promised. Greek mythology, people cohabitating with the deities to produce super heroes like Hercules, all of these super heroes in our society from Spiderman to Darth Vader. Satan is always trying to get us to live in some fantasy world so that we can transcend our humanness.
All Satan can do is make our sin worse, our alienation from God more severe, our judgment greater. Genesis doesn't say anything about the judgment on the fallen angels who communed with these people because Genesis is the story of man. The record of what happened to the fallen angels, we studied last time in 2 Peter 2 and in Jude 1: 6 -7, as well as in 1 Peter 3.
But here we have the story of man. Here man is so bad that he is pursuing demons. We get a further description of his sinfulness in verse 5. Here we come to the first major description of the depravity of man. Keep in mind, that while the passage indicts humanity, it also exalts God. It becomes clear that God cannot tolerate sin because He is absolutely holy and just.
He will act in consistently with His holy nature. In verses 5 to 12 the earth is mentioned eight times. The earth is going to be purged by God of this wretched humanity. Corruption has gone beyond the point of recovery, or tolerance. And God is going to drown the earth. First we see what the Lord saw. Then we see what the Lord felt. Then we see what the Lord said. And then we see what the Lord gave.
God is omniscient. Everything that exists He knows fully and completely. Hebrews 4:13 says, “And there is no creature hidden from His sight, but all things are open and laid bare to the eyes of Him.” There is nothing that escapes His gaze, or His knowledge. This is not the seeing of sudden perception. This is the seeing of constant awareness. So the Lord was aware and knew.
The people may have thought that these demon spirits could help them produce men of renown. But they weren't super beings, they were just more evil flesh. Before they came along there were other great men called Nephilim, other powerful men, and they were just more of them. And what God saw when He looked at these evil people was not just their behavior, but also their heart.
The biblical definition of what's wrong with man is not really just his behavior, that's only a symptom. What's wrong with him is his nature. And the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth. And here He goes right to the core of the issue, verse 5, "That every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually." It's down in the depths of the nature of man.
That's why when God drowned the world, He only spared eight people. The rest had no capacity to alter on their own their wicked nature and they refused to hear the Word of God, the message of God. They were left then in their depraved condition. It's chronic. And the Flood didn't change it. Genesis 8:21, after the Flood, God says, “The intent of his heart is still evil.”
Why did God drown the whole human race? Because they were wretched and wicked to the very core. In verse 11 - 12 it says, "The earth was corrupt in the sight of God and the earth was filled with violence." What happens when all the planning in the heart is only evil continually? That behavior becomes corrupt and violence breaks out everywhere. General lawlessness makes people hate each other.
But the language here is really remarkable: All flesh had corrupted their way, every intent of the thought of his heart was only evil continually. All the adjectives, all the adverbs speak of an absolutely inclusive depravity. And it extends to every human being and it is in the heart of every human being all the time. And then you can add that it's aggravated by unions with demons.
That's what God still sees, it isn't any different today. The only people who aren't like that are the people who have been transformed by God. And we should be thankful to God that by His grace there are more than eight today. Verse 6, "And the Lord was sorry that He had made man on the earth and He was grieved in His heart." God is not apathetic to the sin of man. He is never indifferent.
Ezekiel said that God finds no pleasure in the death of the wicked. Jeremiah wept the tears of God over the judgment to come. Jesus wept over the judgment to come on Jerusalem and Israel. The Lord was sorry, it says. There's a reality to the sadness of God. In 1 Samuel 15:11 God said, "I regret that I made Saul king for he's turned back from following Me and has not carried out My commandments."
Why did God regret it? Because He was going to have to act in holy justice against Saul and that made God sad. He was sorry about what Saul had done, it made Him sad to have to judge that man. And part of that sorrow is not just over the condition of man, but it is over the fact that God must do what He must do. God is not a man that He should change His mind. Judgment falls and that is a grief to God.
You see, it is precisely because God does not change His mind that He is sad. God was truly grieved by sin and truly grieved by the immutable and necessary consequences that sinners bring upon themselves. This is anthropomorphic in the sense that God is speaking in human terms and that would be the ultimate note of human sorrow to say, "I wish that the person never existed."
Yes, God is sovereign and yes, man is responsible. God didn't make him sin. God didn't want him to sin. But God doesn't accept excuses for his sin, nor does He blame his environment. And if he rejects God, then hell is God's only solution. And that's why it says at the end of verse 6, "And He was grieved in His heart." The heart of man was devising only evil. The heart of God was grieved.
Imagine a world of billions of people and no one would acknowledge Him, no one would turn from sin and embrace the righteous God. We learned in verse 3, God graciously gave them 120 years before the Flood came. And during that time Noah preached, and he preached how a sinner could become righteous by the same way any sinner in any age becomes righteous, through the confession of sin, repentance and forgiveness from God.
And for 120 years, nobody heard, only his wife, three sons, their three wives, eight people believed. Noah said there was coming a flood, and they said what is a flood? Noah said it will rain and water is going to come out from the ground, and they said what water. Nobody had seen much water. Noah built a very large ark, and they had never seen a boat. But God always tells the truth and He does not change.
The world as we know it is the post-Flood world. And if God was patient then, what would He do now? It was 1650 years then, it is now 4,500 years. Man is still this way and as the centuries have gone on, he's just smarter in shaping the intent of his heart into evil. The only escape today is to come to God through the Lord Jesus Christ, whom He appointed to be the Savior of all who repent. I hope many will. Let us pray!