This verse by verse Bible study on Genesis is an inductive verse by verse study with extensive reflections, verse by verse commentary, cross-references, and applications. They are the personal study of notes of a very good doctor friend of mine. His native tongue is Mandarin, but his English is amazing as you will see below. It is refreshing to take a look at this important book of Genesis through the eyes of a believer from another culture. Without further adieu: The Scribblings According to David.

Genesis 6-7 Inductive Bible Study

Outline

Prologue – The Ever-increasing Corruption of Man (VI 1 – 8)
The Flood Foretold – Noah’s Righteousness (VI 9 – 22)
The Flood Arrived – Noah’s Redemption (VII 1 – 24)
The Flood Subsided – Noah’s Restoration (VIII 1 – 19)
Epilogue – The Everlasting Covenant of God (VIII 20 – IX 17)

Apologetic Thesis

“If God is love, why did He kill all the people in the world but eight?”

— The Case for an “Ecocidal” God

Quite understandably, the Flood is one of the stories in the Bible that receives the most attacks from militant atheists. The criticism is simple, straightforward and, at first sight, reasonable: “how can you say God so loved the world when He literally wiped out the whole earth with waters?”

Before I proceed to make the case, I must lay down as foundation one of my deepest convictions regarding divine truth, as written by Paul in 1 Cor. 2:14, “The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.” Scripture teaches (and our own conversion testifies) that the unregenerate will never be able to comprehend the Bible in the spiritual sense. Apart from the Illumination of the Holy Spirit, the natural man may read the texts, study the texts, even understand the literal meaning of the texts, but never truly come to the spiritual knowledge of the passage as God had intended. The bottom line is, those dead in trespasses and sins, including us before we were saved, can never understand (and perhaps never want to). “They are spiritually discerned”, it says. Just a few verses earlier, the apostle wrote, “For who knows a person’s thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God.” In other words, it is not because we have more exposure to the truth, better faculties of our mind, greater efforts in our learning, or even some mysterious “enlightenment” from above that we somehow “get it” (as the Gnostics have claimed); it is only because we have received through faith the Spirit who is from God. In light of that, the primary objective of this apologetic thesis, then, is not that the unbelieving might be intellectually convinced that God is still good even though He carried out this wholesale ecocide, but that the elect in Christ might be educated and edified in the faith concerning God’s own doing in redemptive history, and in this case, the Flood in particular.

With that said, let me begin the case.

“If God is love, why did He kill all the people but eight?”

When people raise questions of a similar kind about the Flood, what they are accusing, indeed, is that a loving God would not destroy people. If we carefully dissect this statement, we shall see that there are two basic premises, one moral and one anthropologic, without which the conclusion cannot be reached. Their moral premise (their understanding of right and wrong) is that love does no harm; their anthropologic premise (their understanding of humanity) is that people are basically good. Hence, their reasoning process can be broken down as the following:

Premise #1: Love does no harm.

Premise #2: People are basically good.

Observation: God harmed all people (but eight) on the earth by killing them with the Flood.

Conclusion: Hence, God is not loving.

The deduction is valid only when both premises are true. The question, then, becomes: are they?

Let us first examine premise #1, “Love does no harm”. One does not even have to see through Biblical lens to know that primum non nocere is a universal principle of morality regardless of time, place, culture and ethnicity. Scripture is also filled with teachings admonishing us that we should love our neighbor as ourselves, with Rom. 13:11 specifically pointing out “love does no wrong to a neighbor”.

Before we move on to examining premise #2, let us pause for a second, take a step back, and ask the inquirer back another question, “would it be a problem for you if God killed Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Kim Jung-Il, Osama Bin Laden, among other jihadist terrorists, mass murderers, serial rapists and corrupt officials?” I bet the answer would be a resounding no. In fact, many would clap their hands when God actually supernaturally steps in and does it at His pleasure. Therefore, when people asked why God killed all the people with the Flood, the real censure behind the question is not so much against the goodness of God as against the justice of God. In other words, when God punishes evil by sending bad guys to hell, no one would pose any objection whatsoever to that verdict. But when God is sending good guys to hell, they are going to have a problem with that.

Back to the question again: are men basically good?

Let us now return to examining the argument. As mentioned above, the inquirer is commendably right in his understanding of right and wrong. However, he is seriously wrong in his understanding of humanity, viz. man are NOT basically good, although all worldly philosophies may have said so. Turning to the Word of God, we find, among other verses, “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23), “… the Scripture imprisoned everything under sin” (Gal. 3:22), and perhaps the most candid and plain-spoken of all, “… none is righteous; no, not one” (Rom. 3:10). The all-inclusive terms make the point unmistakably clear. Examining in depth the doctrine of Total Depravity would be beyond the scope of this thesis, but every Christian may bear in heart that assuming that men are basically good simply does not square with the Scripture. It compromises the core of the Gospel by negating the possibility of repentance and excluding the need of a Savior.

To take a step further, men are evil not only in that, generally speaking, sin is the hallmark of human nature throughout history (see v.5 (2) in Verse-by-verse Exegesis), but also in that, specifically, men in the antediluvian world were, in a sense, unprecedentedly more wicked by way of their pursuit of demonic unions (see Interpretative Challenge). One cannot stay happily ignorant of the Scriptural description “… the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” in Gen. 6:5. Simply put, people living in that age were by no means good, and if anything, perhaps even worse. So, if I may hereby raise another question for the inquirer: if men were truly behaving that way, would it be a problem to you when God chose to wipe out all of them from the ground of the earth, leaving only eight righteous people?

Hence, people are not basically good.

Hence, premise #2 is false.

Hence, the conclusion is erroneous.

The faulty logic of the statement has been successfully dismantled at this point. But let us take another step further. We, fallen men, are most prone to “find ourselves” by comparison. We feel “tall” when standing besides someone shorter than we are; we feel “rich” when seeing someone struggling in poverty; we feel “healthy” when visiting someone lying in a sickbed. In the moral universe, such behavioral pattern also exists: we feel “better” (more righteous) when we compare ourselves to the “worse” (more evil) people in the world. It doesn’t take a quantum physicist to figure out we do enjoy making such comparisons. And in so doing, we feel comfortable, and are blinded by our own iniquities. We are led into believing that our own “mistakes”, our own “venial sins”, our own “skeletons in the closet”, are really no big deal compared to, say, the Holocaust. The average person, therefore, would tend to think that were there any sin that would bring upon God’s judgment, it would definitely be something really really horrendous. Does it even occur to your mind, O Christians, that, in fact, a single sin, by a single person, at a single time, would be good enough reason for God, Who, according to the prophet Habakkuk, “… are of purer eyes than to see evil and cannot look at wrong”, (Hab. 1:13) to pour out His wrath and destroy everything? Of course, one cannot understand this unless he understands the holiness of God, which is also beyond the scope of this thesis.

Before the case is closed, let me make yet another very important point. Have you ever asked the question: does God enjoy sending people to hell?Eze. 33:11 puts it this way, “… as I live, declares the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live; turn back, turn back from your evil ways, for why will you die, …?” No, God is not happy when sinners suffer eternally for what they deserve. He would rather you turn from your evil ways, repent, and live. In fact, Peter wrote in 2 Pet. 3:9, God “… is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.” He is like the loving Father in Luke 15, running towards us, to embrace us, kiss us, give us the ring and the robe, and kill the fattened calf for us, the moment we return to Him.

Back to the Flood story: on the one hand, sending the Flood as divine judgment upon a depraved world is a perfectly just act on the part of God; His love, on the other, is shown in that He preserved and delivered His own remnant. Peter summarizes both sides of the coin in 2 Pet. 2:9, “… the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials, and to keep the unrighteous under punishment until the Day of Judgment.” With that in mind, do you know that God will one day send another cataclysmic disaster, much like the Flood, to judge the wicked world? Do you also know that He has also prepared another “Ark” of salvation for those who live by faith?

Are you on board?

VI 1-8. Prologue – The Ever-increasing Corruption of Man

Interpretative Challenge

“The Nephilim, … the sons of God, … the mighty men who were of old, … the men of renown.” (v.4)

Brief Summary of the Popular Views of the Gen. VI Nephilim

Fallen angels view
Satan and/or his fallen angels bred with human women and had offspring that were called Nephilim.
Fallen angels overtook men view

Fallen angels and/or Satan possessed men and caused them to breed with women.

Sethite view

The sons of God were the godly line from Adam to Seth down to Noah, and the Nephilim were fallen children who sought after false gods.

Fallen men view
Godly men (sons of God) took ungodly wives, and their descendants (Nephilim) followed after the false gods, rejected God, and fell far from God in wickedness.

The exact meaning of “sons of God” and “Nephilim” in Gen. 6 has long been the subject of intense debate among Christian circles. Although no one view can be held with watertight conviction based on limited Scripture evidence for this matter, among the four popular views listed above (other unbiblical views are discarded, e.g. the Nephilim being space aliens), according to an Answer in Genesis article Who Were the Nephilim by Bodie Hodge, the Modified Sethite View (the Fallen Men View) seems to be the most plausible one.

In brief, the Modified Sethite View believes that the Nephilim were 100% human (and not some demigods bred between angels and man). Being from the godly line of Adam (i.e. from Seth, and thus named Sethite), they were called “the sons of God” (according to the immediate context ofGen. 5), yet, because of their continual wickedness, were in a state of falling away from God (Hebrew root for Nephilim means to fall). They were infamous for their gross sins (“men of renown”), which persisted for a very long time with seemingly no end since they enjoyed an unprecedented longevity (“men of old”).

However, in his expository sermon Demonic Invasion, pastor John MacArthur has built what I believe to be a much stronger case for the Fallen Angels Overtook Men View, which means that the “sons of God” were demons, who possessed human bodies and married “daughters of men”, thereby turning men away from God. The flow of thoughts for such a view, according to MacArthur, goes like this:

Starting from an observation from the text, the “sons of God” in v.2 were juxtaposed alongside with “daughters of men”, indicating a contrast between creatures of God and creatures of men.
In the bigger picture, most, if not all, expressions of “sons of God” in the OT refer to angels (e.g. Job 1:6, 2:1, 38:7, Ps. 29:1, 89:6; with one exception: Hosea 1:10), probably implying the fact that they were directly created by God. And based on the immediate context, it is not hard to infer that they are fallen angels, i.e. demons (Rev. 12:1-4). (P.S. Traditional Jewish view of the also attributes the “sons of God” in this verse to angels.)

The 1 Pet. 3:18-20 passage (“… the spirits in prison, who formerly did not obey, when God’s patience waited in the days of Noah, while the Ark was being prepared…”) points all the way back to Gen. 6:1-8, which clearly demonstrates that behind the worldwide corruption it was demons (the fallen “sons of God”) who disobeyed and were therefore put in this “prison”, awaiting their final judgment. (P.S. What the risen Christ “proclaimed” to these chained spirits was victory, not the gospel.) Following the thought, one may ask, in what ways did these demons disobey?

The “sons of God … taking the daughters of men as wives” in Gen. 6:2 is the only description of what they did. It suggests that the union was sort of a marital transaction and not a forced rape. However, such kind of union between demons and men was a grave aberration of marriage and sex (and thus the major sin in view in Genesis 6) for several reasons:

Jesus Himself taught that angels do not marry nor are given in marriage (Matt.