Genesis 6:13

JUDGMENT OF THE FLOOD ANNOUNCED

"And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before men; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth."

The universality of the destruction is apparent in the words "end of all flesh." The labors of skeptics to make some local event out of the destruction announced here are frustrated by the appearance of a great and universal flood in the mythologies of all nations, even those of American Indians. If there was no universal flood, how could such a fact be accounted for? Besides that, the appearance of marine fossils upon all continents at elevations of very great height cannot be explained apart from what is written here. Perhaps it may be granted that a flood inundating the total area of the inhabited earth would adequately fulfill what is in view here, but even such a limitation as that cannot be proved and is not justified as an interpretation.

"With the earth ..." Not only life, but the physical environment of the earth itself would be involved according to this. What is meant is that a catastrophic disturbance of the whole planet would precipitate detrimental changes in the earth itself. We have already observed that the fundamental premise underlying much of man's speculation about the past is founded upon the dictum that, "All things continue as they were from the creation of the world." We know that this is untrue, as attested by the apostle Peter (2 Peter 3:4); but the scientific community themselves are also beginning to understand the falsity of the dictum. Francis Schaeffer mentions in detail the example of prehistoric mammals of great size having been uncovered in the frozen wastes of Siberia, an area supposed to have been uniformly cold for thousands of years; and yet, whenever those tropical creatures froze, it took place so quickly that the plants found in their mouths, neither spit out nor swallowed, were still in the process of being eaten! As Schaeffer said, "Nobody can explain this ... nobody!"[13] Thus, the fact of catastrophe is certainly an element to be reckoned with. It is attested both by the Word of God and evidence from the natural world in which we live. We believe that the event in view here is simply that, an elemental catastrophe of epic dimensions, and that the Genesis record is an accurate history of it.

As repeatedly observed, the changes that followed this catastrophe served as extensions of the primeval curse placed upon the ground for Adam's sake, also that changes of a deteriorative nature are still taking place in the form of recurring natural disasters such as earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, storms, weather changes, etc., and, moreover, that all such things are judgmental in nature, however indiscriminate they may appear to be.