Noah’s Flood and Judgment

With our announcement in December of the construction of a full-size Noah’s Ark as a prominent part of the Ark Encounter attraction, and with 2011 being the 50th anniversary of the publication of the monumental book The Genesis Flood by Drs. Henry Morris and John Whitcomb,1 our attention is once again drawn to that great year-long event described in Genesis chapters 6–8.

Understanding the biblical account of the Flood is crucial to our understanding of the age of the earth. Most of the evidence that secularists use for an old earth (i.e., the fossil record) is in reality evidence of a global Flood that occurred around 4,300 years ago. The Flood would have produced the kind of complex geological record of sedimentary rock layers and fossils that we see all over the earth. They cannot be the evidence of millions of years.2

In their attempt to compromise millions of years with the Bible, some church leaders claim that the Flood was just a local event and did not lay down most of the fossil record. However, that view will not stand up biblically. In the famous The Genesis Flood book, the authors dealt with this issue five decades ago, giving many biblical reasons that Noah’s Flood was a global event. For instance, consider the covenant of the rainbow. God told Noah that the rainbow was to be a sign there would never again be such a Flood. We’ve seen many local floods since, but never a global one!

We should also consider what the New Testament says about the Flood. Jesus and the New Testament writers provided abundant evidence that they took Genesis 1–11 (including the account of a global Flood) as literal history.3

The New Testament also tells us something else that is important about the Flood: it is a forerunner of a coming judgment. 2 Peter 3 predicts that, just as there were scoffers during Noah’s time, “scoffers will come in the last days, walking according to their own lusts, and saying, ‘Where is the promise of His coming?’ … For this they willfully forget that … the world that then existed perished, being flooded with water. But the heavens and the earth which are now preserved by the same word, are reserved for fire until the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men.”

As the Flood took people by surprise, so will Christ’s future judgment. And just as no one outside the Ark escaped that judgment, no one outside of Christ will escape the coming judgment. Only those who have repented of their sins and trusted in the sacrificial death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ will stand on Judgment Day and live with God forever in heaven.

This coming judgment is to be a global one—a judgment by fire. This will not be just a local event. Jesus also spoke of scoffers who reject Christ’s second coming because they rejected (“willingly forgot”) God’s original acts of creation (Genesis 1) and Noah’s Flood. And they do this on the basis of assuming that “all things continue just as they were from the beginning of creation.”

Peter’s statement almost 2,000 years ago accurately predicted the uniformitarian naturalistic worldview which now controls virtually all of modern science, which is why most scientists believe in evolution and millions of years. But one day, just as surely as God judged Noah’s world with a Flood (and the evidence for that is all over the earth), all of humanity will face the Judge of all the earth at the final judgment.

As the apostle Paul said, “Truly, these times of ignorance God overlooked, but now commands all men everywhere to repent, because He has appointed a day on which He will judge the world in righteousness by the Man whom He has ordained. He has given assurance of this to all by raising Him from the dead” (Acts 17:30–31).

At the AiG website of AnswersIn Genesis.org, the Creation Museum, and the future Ark Encounter (see next page), you, your family, and friends can learn more about the truth concerning Noah’s Flood and the reliability of the Word of God, which explains the gospel of Jesus Christ.