Was there really a divine destruction of the first human civilization referred to as “Noah’s flood?” Indeed, there was. Not only is the official and authoritative record of it found in Genesis 6 through 8, but numerous traditions of the great flood have been perpetuated from different areas in the world. Not all their details agree with the Genesis account, but the major aspects of the flood, its survivors and its victims, are all there. Men have always been reluctant to take the Bible at face value – not believing that it really does mean what it says.
Yet, this is the only logical and consistent way to understand any literary work, unless there is a good reason to see it as allegory or some sort of figure, less than literal. It really was a flood – worldwide. It really did destroy all humans and animals outside the ark of safety. Noah and his sons really did build that ark. The animals really did come into it, two by two. And it did really rain for 40 days. The great fountains of the deep did open up. The water did prevail upon the earth for 150 days. We cannot help but be curious as to how the logistics and details of all this flooding and ark business came about. They are not, in reality, the issue at all. The issue is, as it always is, in what is purported to have come from God. Did it? Did it really? Is this Genesis record truly trustworthy?
There is no question that Jesus, the Messiah, believed the record of Noah and the flood to be true for he cited it in Matthew. There is not even a hint that the Savior questioned the validity of the flood and the events that transpired around it. If they were not true, then Jesus did not realize they were not true. That clearly makes him an ignorant kind of savior who was seriously out of touch. Or, if they were not true and Jesus knew that, yet went along with it without exposing the error, He would have been a deceptive savior. Neither an ignorance savior or a deceptive savior could be deemed a worthy savior. The idea is abhorrent. While men seem ever given to place more confidence in the ever-changing opinions of their fellow man, we keep coming back to the impregnable rock of Holy Scripture for the only truly authoritative account. Geologists, and those of other earth disciplines, find a stunning an undeniable connection between the records of the flood found in Genesis and the earth’s topographical presentation throughout the world. The most convincing evidences are… well… convincing!
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