Why Did God Flood the World?
How do we deal with another of the most difficult passages in the Bible?
What Do We Do with Violence in the Bible?
For many today, the idea that the God of the Bible is good, beautiful, and loving collides with and is defeated by all moments in the Bible of violence, judgment, and bloodshed.
How could a good God send a flood to destroy the earth? Why would he command Abraham to sacrifice his son? Would he really tell the Israelites to wipe out the native people in Canaan?
If they do not find satisfying answers, these questions can keep us awake at night, rattle our confidence, and make belief in Christianity seem less believable. So I’m writing about a couple of prominent instances of violence in the Bible and trying to find some of those answers.
So let’s think about the Flood.
Why did God flood the world?
The story of the flood is found in Genesis 6-9, but it really begins a bit earlier—the story is part of a larger literary unit from Genesis 1 to 11. After Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, things began a downward spiral. Humanity multiplied and violence reigned. Cain killed his brother Abel. One of Cain’s descendants, Lamech, became a man renowned for violence, boasting of his exploits. Sin and evil were only intensifying. How would God react to this state of humanity?
Just before the story of the flood begins, we learn that “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” and it grieved God “to his heart.” So God sent the floodwaters as a judgment, a block in the way of humanity’s wickedness that rose out of the grief of his heart.
Genesis describes the flood as the de-creation of the world—the earth sinks back into the chaotic waters that God cleared away on page one of the Bible. In the ark, God carries Noah’s family through the flood unharmed to start afresh in a world returned to innocence. It is a new beginning and a chance to have a different end.
If you’re like me, you might be saying, “But no matter how you tell the story, God still wipes out all of humanity except one family!” How does the flood reflect the goodness of God when he sent such disaster on the earth?
Let me make three observations from the context of the story.
Just Mercy
The story of the flood is one of God taking merciful action to restrain humanity’s ever-increasing evil. Genesis tells us that God saw that “every intention of the thoughts of man’s heart was only evil continually.”
In the Bible, context means everything. Genesis firmly anchors the meaning of the flood in the context of God’s intervention to stop humanity’s headlong slide into evil. We are to conclude that, had God not acted, things would have become much worse.
Grief, Not Vengeance
God doesn’t take pleasure in the flood. Rather, Genesis highlights how the wickedness unleashed by the Fall caused him sorrow and grief. God made the earth to be a place where humanity could flourish, but instead, humans turned it into a theater of violence and disaster.
He didn’t gleefully send the floodwaters on the earth. The story says that his heart was broken.
The Curious Climax: Covenant
Later on, when Isaiah the prophet remembers Noah (Isaiah 54:9), he doesn’t think of the flood itself but the covenant God made with Noah afterward.
In that covenant, God promises that nothing like this will ever happen again. This points to the key meaning of the story: the flood is about God’s mercy and commitment to the goodness of what he has made—about restoration, not destruction.
A New Beginning?
So the flood wasn’t an act of wanton destruction by a capricious God. God was acting to restore the goodness of his creation. God preserves one family through the flood and elevates Noah as a new Adam, placed once again in a garden on a high mountain paradise with the commission to be fruitful and multiply.
Of course, just as in Eden, instead of spreading God’s goodness, Noah and his family begin again to spread the disaster of human evil. All of this begs the question: how does Noah’s story fit into God’s plan of redemption? If the “first” second Adam didn’t solve the situation, who will?
Jesus and the Flood
All of the Bible is a unified story that points to Jesus, and the story of the flood is no exception.
Noah becomes a paradigm for the kind of leader humanity is awaiting—the righteous one in a wicked age who enters the waters of death and comes out the other side into a new creation, bringing about a new covenant of peace and life. The gospel authors use allusions to the flood story to confirm Jesus is this longed-for leader.
Take, for instance, the curious moment in the Gospel of Luke where Jesus talks about a future baptism he must accomplish. James and John come to him and ask to have a special place of honor for themselves. Jesus tells them they don’t know what they are asking for and says, “Can you be baptized with the baptized I’m about to undergo?”
What was Jesus talking about? Hadn’t he already been baptized earlier in the story?
As the story unfolds, it becomes clear—Jesus’ death on the cross was his submersion under the dark waters of chaos. But this flood story has a different ending.
In the flood account in Genesis, the wicked died and the righteous one was spared. With Jesus, the wicked were spared and the righteous one sank beneath the waters of death.
Unlike Noah, Jesus did not escape the flood alive; the waters of death rose and drowned him. Noah survived the flood by taking shelter in the ark. But in his life, death, and resurrection, Jesus became a shelter, not just for his own family but for all of creation.
The ultimate consequence for sin wasn’t expressed by the flood; instead, it fell on Jesus on the cross. The flood was violent, but it wasn’t the work of a violent God. Rather, this God took on flesh and died a violent death at the hands of violent men, a death that became the very means he would use to save his enemies and usher in an eternal kingdom of peace.
Making Sense of the Flood
You may have questions about difficult passages in the Bible, but they don’t have to be the enemies of your faith. Rather, your questions can become its allies.
As we engage them with diligence and humility, troubling questions can lead us to deeper faith. Though we may be tempted to skip over difficult passages like the flood in Genesis, those are exactly the places we should give extra attention, pray about, and explore.
When we read the story of the flood as part of the ongoing narrative of redemption, it points beyond itself to the goodness of God. This violent event in history turns out to be one step along the way of God restoring broken creation.