Two questions on the flood

Faith & Science Conversation
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The various ancient Near Eastern flood stories that retained interest long after the memory of some long-ago event was mostly forgotten—these stories are enough to convince that there was something that occurred in that region which led to these tales, and that it was maybe more violent than most. The region has had a history of flood events (long ago), so it is not impossible for the Genesis story to refer to something particular. Lots of theories on that, including some who link the divine respone to the strange events of Genesis 6 as the cause of the flood event.

Jesus said, in Matthew 24, “as it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man” --and then went on to describe people doing normal things “up till the day Noah entered the ark” --and whether you want to suggest this was a local event or not is your choice.

That this flood was perceived as God’s wrath upon human beings - – seems clear. It does not necessarily make Him look like a petulant child–any more than Jesus talking about judgment and hellfire should make God look childish. I suppose you would say this is a theological stance. But it also appears to come from a partial reading of the biblical text. There’s more to the story.

We all (universally) have a sense of right and wrong and want “justice done.” We do not have that instinct by chance. There would be no audience for “who dun it” movies or Old Westerns — were a desire for resolution and justice not part of our DNA (or psychology).

As Abraham said “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” And that presumes that in the course of doing right or pronouncing judgment, the Creator does not act like a spoiled brat. Such presumes that nothing was meant at all by God Himself coming in His Son to take upon Himself the penalty for all sin —so that those who deserve that judgment can have [instead] forgiveness if they acknowledge their need for forgiveness (some of us think we are perfect) and acknowledge what the Son has done.

In other words, God did not create us with the intention of just destroying us. But we are stubborn.

The “petulant child” aspect of future judgment will not happen so long as we have asked forgiveness for our sins based on Jesus’ actions…
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OK-- gone on too long already!

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You keep saying “refute” – but it does not mean what you think it means. To refute something is to present evidence and apply logic to overturn a proposition, yet you present no evidence and apply no logic, you merely shout “I refute!” like a little child yelling " Na-na-na-na-boo-boo!"

On the other hand I have patiently presented the evidence and explained the implications.

Irrelevant – the only science at issue here is what you stick into the text.

Total failure to understand normal language, due to inserting a MSWV into the text.

The tragedy is that you are intent on stuffing a modern scientific worldview into the text without even knowing you hold that worldview. But unless you grew up in a remote peasant village, that’s the worldview you soaked up with every bit of education; it’s the worldview through which when people see the word “world” they automatically think of a planet, when they see the word “all” they ignore common language use and think “every last bit”, when they se the word “day” they think “twenty-four hours”. In everyday use that is fine because it’s what everyone else does, but when it comes to ancient literature it fails because there’s no stopping to ask what the word meant to the original writer and his audience – an even more egregious error when the literature involved is God’s!

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Inconsistency unmasked!

That’s a great observation. It brings to mind a point made in a Hebrew course I took, that applies to all language: when translating a given word, it is best not to extend the meaning beyond the minimum meaning in the passage at hand.

Circular and inconsistent.

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That they refer to a single event is not unreasonable since all these stories come from people who lived where there was a common source of big floods, or their neighbors.

Though one of the two strands woven into the Noah account that we have comes darned close!

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I have to highlight that your responses above are nothing more than a bogans denial of presented theoligical references.
This tells me that you do not actually have any biblical support for your view there St Roymond and that is deeply worrying in that indivudals who rely on your knowledge and experience are being lead astray due to their ignorance and trust.
When someone presents evidence, you are supposed to provide actual evidence in your own response, evidence from the bible that balances the arugment. You have done none of that here as this phrase of yours i quoted above shows.

Lets add in another evidence of Noahs flood…

People sometimes wonder where all the water from the flood went

NASA states…
“If all glaciers and ice sheets melted, global sea level would rise by more than 195 feet (60 meters).”

Also, if im reading the image below correctly, the average height of landmass above mean sea level is far less than the average depth of the oceans. So if we levelled out all of the landmass, the entire earth surface would be under water.

1000015475

As ive said before, there are evidences in both biblical theooogy and extent to the bible that are consistent about the flood.

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Omg…thats because the bible explains that
“The evening and the morning we a first day…a second day, a third day etc…”

The bible tells us this quite specifically especially when we consider those statements of Genesis in the weekly cycle of the sanctuary service and the keeping of the Sabbath.

It is simply impossible for anyone to believe that the Sabbath day of worship is not also founded directly on the 24 hour period.

Im all ears if you wish to prove that the Jewish Sabbath doctrine of a 24 hour day is not 24 hours???

Individuals here are hesitant to get involvoed in discussing the Sanctuary in scenarios such as this because its an ancient Israelite belief that was presented to them by the very same man who wrote Genesis…Moses!

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It is the same issue with the Adam and Eve not being the first of the homo sapiens species. The biological species is just our bodies. Our real humanity is in the mind which God brought to life in Adam and Eve. Thus the flood DID destroy all of humanity even though it was a local flood because human civilization had not yet spread over the whole globe. That was what the Tower of Babel story was all about. Preventing mankind from uniting in a single culture as it did before the flood but instead forcing us to spread out and divide into many different cultures and nations. That way competition between them would limit how depraved they could become.

Because the real promise is that God would never again destroy everything for the sake of human beings. He didn’t think we were worthy of that, even when it only took a local flood to wipe out the only human civilization on the earth. But I think the whole truth is that God would take steps so this would never be needed again – by preventing mankind from all uniting in a single corrupt culture and civilization.

the Lord said in his heart, “I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth;

No. As my responses show, it is quite clear to me that the flood was not over the whole earth. There was no concept of a planet and that simply could not have been the meaning of the word “earth” in that text.

Oh you mean the worldview that closes eyes, ears, and mind refusing to pay any attention to all the information God sends us from the earth and sky just so you can cling to a magical interpretation of the Bible which selectively ignores anything in the text which disagrees with this? Yeah I think that is motivated by the misuse of religion as a tool of power… because if you can get people to close their eyes, ears, and mind to anything which disagrees with you then you can get them to believe any nonsense which you care to dictate, and thus build a tower of Babel out of endless lies which promises them a doorway into heaven but delivers nothing but destruction.

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There were no “presented theological references”.

Simple logic does not require biblical support.

You didn’t present any evidence, you made a wild accusation and false accusation with absolutely no logic, just childish emoting.

Why is it that you lie about people here and never either apologize or repent?

A trivial intellectual exercise is not justification for bad science fiction.
And connecting your bad science fiction to scripture only serves to make people think that scripture is rubbish.

And says nothing about twenty-four hours.

Really? Jewish and Christian scholars both have held that the day of rest – that’s what a Sabbath is, not a “day of worship” – is not founded on a twenty-four hour period but that it is imposed on the progression of days by transfer from a divine rhythm.

Actually most people here are “hesitant” because the Adventist doctrine concerning the sanctuary service is bad Christology because it puts something other than our Savior at the center of theology.

You can make up other excuses if that makes you happy, but we’ve seen the result of that already: you end up lying repeatedly about people and won’t acknowledge that. Seems to me there’s a recommended remedy in Deuteronomy for that.

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i would suggest that one need not apologise to delusion.

I know what your aim there is St Roymond…im not going to fall for it. You were presented with biblical references showing appropriate theology supported by those references.

As is usual, not a single one of them was addressed with biblical referencing that counters what i stated.

The door is still open there, id suggest it might be worth while regaining some academic credibility by addressing the theological dilemmas.

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explain how you believe that the be the case? Are you complaining that the bible contains and Old Testament Sanctuary Service?

Id suggest this is problematic for you because you do not study the sanctuary or understand its purpose. You are welcome to refute that with some biblically referenced theology…do you have any?

Let me also respond specifically to your last sentence above…“the sanctuary service is bad Christology because it puts something other than our Savior at the center of theology.”

Im starting to wonder what religious denomination you follow…indeed are its doctrines even biblical? It appears to me that you just make it all up as you go along.

Would you mind explaining to everyone here what the purpose of the Sanctuary Day of Atonement was if it wasnt to explain exactly how salvation works

ie that God humbles himself, taking on the form of his own creation and dies for their sins, so that they may recieve the gift of grace and be saved.

Whats really amusing to me in reading your response above is that you do not appear to notice the similarities between the OT Sanctuary lamb and Christ being called the Lamb of God!

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Dear Marshall,

actually no, I didn’t localise it at all for any of the reasons you guessed at.

Tim only mentioned Sodom and it was Tim to whom I was replying.

In Truth, I actually typed ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’, then I deleted ‘and Gomorrah’, because I was being as specific as I could to what Tim had written.

God bless,
jon

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Dear Mitchell,
I’m genuinely sorry, but try as I might, what you have written here makes little to no sense to me in relation to the part of one of my posts that you have quoted; i.e.;

if the Flood of Noah’s day was merely a local flood,
1.) then why did God say the purpose of the Flood was to destroy all flesh, if there were people alive elsewhere that weren’t affected by the Flood?

So from what you have said, it does appear that you accept the clear message that God destroyed everything, i.e., all of the living creation on Earth (earth)?

Now you have stated that the flood was not over all the earth (Earth). Please make your mind up!

Mitchell, what is all this about really?

I find it sad that although I am a fellow brother in Jesus, a fellow Christian, you appear to have such a terribly jaded view of me, just because I believe the Holy Bible to be trustworthy and True.

I believe that our omniscient Creator made certain that the message He wanted to convey is as absolutely clear as it could possibly be. And it is ever so clear in Genesis.

Even though in His absolute omniscience, God went to the effort of stating on each day, “and there was evening and there was morning…”, to put any questions about the length of each day beyond any doubt about what He wants us to understand, it appears that on this website, the message is still contorted to mean something other than what it so evidently is.

I’m sorry, but the venomous diatribes and contorted misuse of exegesis, hermeneutics and Hebrew translations to justify what is so obviously false teaching makes my eyes water.

God bless,
jon

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The text is “earth” which has absolutely nothing to do with the planet Earth. And extending this to all flesh on the whole planet makes no sense because most of the living things on the planet are in the ocean which obviously were not destroyed by a flood.

You might as well interpret this as destroying all living things throughout the entire universe, this is no less nonsensical that what you are pushing.

No. Your extending the word “earth” to the modern idea of Earth as a planet makes no sense whatsoever.

God didn’t think saving us from ourselves was even worth the damage to His creation even when it was just a local flood.

Indeed. It is clear when you don’t edit things out or add things in. If you don’t edit out the fact that Cain was very worried about wandering the earth because it was filled with people, then you know that Adam and Eve were not the only homo sapiens even though they were the first human beings. If you don’t insert sisters into the text for Cain and Seth to marry in an incestuous relationship, then you know that Genesis 6 is speaking of the children of God like Cain and Seth finding wives among all those other homo sapiens out there.

And if you don’t insert all the space and time needed for all animals on the planet to get on the ark then you know the flood wasn’t about planet Earth but only the known world which is described as flat because when it is only a small portion of the planet then it is close enough to being flat for that description to work.

So your effort to get me to close my eyes, ears, and mind to all the information God sends us from the earth and sky and only believe what you say has certainly failed. I want nothing to do with this tower of lies which you are a part of.

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You wrote:

Essentially your evidence says that because “pigs can’t fly” and “dead rotted corpses cannot be brought back to life” or “ascend into heaven against gravity”… it must also be concluded that the second coming of Christ is impossible and therefore a false doctrine? (thats what must be extrapolated from your reasons for the denial of the creation and flood accounts)

There is no evidence in there, there is a wild and false accusation with no logic.

My aim is to get you to stop lying about people here and what they have said. You have been called on lies so frequently it is appalling, and it is worse that you never admit you have done so, you just blithely keep going.

You presented not a single biblical reference nor any theology, which is obvious from the quote above – it’s just “na-na-na-na-boo-boo”.

I can’t address something that isn’t there.

I am noting that your theology regularly sets your sanctuary service theology above Christ.

I don’t particularly care about your sanctuary service doctrines because they invert the relationship between the Savior and Mosaic law.

I’m getting really tired of responding to someone who makes responses that don’t relate to what others have said. In the past your statements have put the Passover lamb above Christ by saying that Christ was the Lamb of God because of the Passover lamb when the reverse is true. You have used the sanctuary doctrines to say that they determined what Christ had to do when the reverse is true. You make the sanctuary service the center of you theology instead of Christ. Everything in the Old Testament is a reflection of Christ, not the other way around.

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In context and in accord with Hebrew grammar and ordinary use of language “all flesh” refers to the world known to Noah.

He did. But you distort it.
Why do you insist on modern definitions of some of the words in Genesis instead of reading them with their actual meanings? Why is it that the meanings you give them are derived from modern science? Why do you ignore the ordinary use of the Hebrew language even as translated into English?

That’s not a description of a day, it’s a description of a night.

Why do you make the text about answering your modern questions instead of asking what the original writer and his audience understood by it? Giving the definition of a night says nothing about the length of a day, it makes a theological point against the common mytho-theology of the ANE! It isn’t about providing a scientific definition of a day, it’s about Who YHWH-Elohim is!

You have no idea what the message because you throw almost all of it in the trash by failing to read the Creation account as what it is! Instead of embracing the treasures Moses set down you surrender to rationalism and materialism by making the Creation account about material events! The worldview of Genesis 1 is not about material events, it’s about YHWH-Elohim being the conquering King and the Master of the Temple and the Creator of what the Egyptians called gods!

You’re looking in the mirror.

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There is much I need to do, and have little enough time to get it done.

I can see that continuing this is pointless and may be harmful to those in the valley of decision.

Thus I bid you all farewell.

God bless,
jon

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Worldviews… a topic which you introduced.

You are absolutely correct that mine is completely different, and always has been, for I was not raised Christian but by a couple of psychology majors with the most liberal worldview you can imagine. Like most people today they have judged the Christian establishment by its fruits and found no value in it. So I started with a completely scientific worldview and it is from there which I took a look at philosophy and religion and came to different conclusions from my parents. The good news, I suppose, is I found more of value in Christianity than in other religions.

Nevertheless the background of criticism for Christianity remains and the value I found in Christianity had to be in spite of all the flaws. A good portion of doing this was to identify a great deal of popular theology which simply doesn’t work because it is mired in irrationality and magical notions contrary to all the evidence of science and our experience of life. But another substantial portion was to identify the ways in which Christianity had been distorted to make it into a tool of power – something which is irrefutable to those who look at Christianity with any kind of critical eye.

So the questions I faced looking to see if there was anything of value in Christianity was whether there was a way of understanding its teachings and the Bible which was compatible with the evidence and which could be separated from the long misuse of Christianity as a way of manipulating people into doing evil. I found there was and therefore I naturally set about separating that value from the nonsense and abuses. In this there is a rule of thumb I adopted: if something (practice, doctrine, or interpretation of the Bible) serves a purpose particularly well then that is the most likely origin.

The big surprise to me is just how orthodox I managed to become with this approach. Another was how much of the Bible itself is aimed at the abuses of religion for the purpose of power and manipulation even in the teachings of Jesus. But naturally there is some significant shift of emphasis from the Christianity which you are familiar with. There is definitely an increased focus on the God of love rather than the ones of wrath, glory-seeking, jealousy, megalomania, purity, unforgiveness, control, manipulation, and sadism (so yes I will refute the use of every passage for supporting these). There is a shift from thinking God is our enemy to ourselves as our own worst enemy – a shift from forgiveness (indulgence really) as the essence of salvation to overcoming the habits of sin and changing to become better people. There is a shift from it being about rewarding believers (and punishing unbelievers) to what makes for better choices and a higher quality of life. And all of this goes well with the evangelical shift from ritual to seeking a personal relationship with God.

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That’s a common mistake – any second-Temple Jew would fall over laughing at such an idea, as would any Christian up until the very late third century. “בְנֵי־הָֽאֱלֹהִים֙” never means humans, it means divine beings. Genesis 6 is referring to the Enochian account of the Watchers who were appointed to guide the nations in righteousness but who abused their posts by making themselves out as gods and corrupting mankind. They’re what Peter is referring to when he speaks of the angels in Tartarus. Nothing in the text even suggests that these are humans.

This is worth a watch:

That’s a deal-breaker for literalists, but it is the logical conclusion the moment it is recognized that the two Creation accounts are separate stories – despite the tradition that they aren’t.

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This brought to mind the movement that calls itself A New Apostolic Reformation, which after some reading I found to be not new, not apostolic, and not a reformation; it is all about power and self-exaltation. But it also brought to mind a lot of church politics such as all the congregations who decide they cannot remain in their large church body for reasons of conscience, and the large church body fights to eject the congregation from the property, the church building, that they have worshipped and learned in for generations; I see the Christian response to such a matter of conscience as, “Keep your home, brothers, and go in peace”.

Have you read Bradley Jersak’s book A More Christlike God? It tackles a fair amount of this and reminded me of something Philip Yancey said: ““There is nothing we can do to make God love us more. There is nothing we can do to make God love us less.””

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Not to me.

This projecting your understanding on things on people of ancient world even if you find some justification in some person who thought that way is a common mistake. Just because the book of Enoch survived showing some people thought this way does mean this was the view held by the majority of people at that time or before.

Nonsense. Not only does Jesus say the scriptures refer to humans as divine beings in John 10:34, but many versions of Deuteronomy 32:8 has “sons of God” rather than “sons of Israel.” And there is Exodus 4:22, Hosea 11:1, and Jeremiah 31:20. For this reason I am not buying into the idea that this phrase has the exclusive meaning you dictate. They are just words which typically by themselves can have many meanings.

LOL So you believe Genesis was written after the book of Enoch?

I certainly do not, and I would equate any imagined reference to this work of fantasy literature as similar to references in modern literature to events in works of fiction.

Disagree. The last part refers to the so called “Nephilim” as men of renown and not fairytale giants or angelic half-breeds.

Interpret the Bible with the book of Enoch as your template if you like but the result is something worthy of being shelved in the fantasy section of the library next to Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter.

P.S. The more I look into this, the more diversity of opinion I find (among both Jews and Christians). Above you have my understanding of the text (which I will stand on against all the others) – that which is most in accord with reality and the scientific evidence.

I don’t know what you are talking about nor how you see this connecting with what I said.

No, haven’t. But I am aware that this shift to a God of love is widespread… in many different groups. (The quote of Yancey is well said.)

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