Why Did God Send a Flood?

God sent a flood on the earth to destroy just about everything...why? Genesis 6 tells us it was because of several reasons.

First of all there was wickedness. Unfortunately this is a generic term that does not help us to understand what God hated. The same is true when Genesis says that the world was corrupt. Without context these words mean only what each person reads into the words corrupt and wicked.

The context does, however, shed some light on the sinfulness of humanity. For one, Genesis 6:12 tells us that people corrupted themselves. They did not simply passively fall into corruption, but actively participated in it.

Secondly, the contextual stage is set in the early verses of chapter 6 when the sons of God took wives from the daughters of men. The meaning of this passage was discussed elsewhere, but for the purpose of this section, it seems to say nothing to us today unless we somehow relate this verse to Christians marrying non-Christians (this is a stretch and does not find support from a literal reading of the text).

This brings us to the next sin - every imagination of the human heart was only evil. Once again we find a generic term that leaves us wondering what thoughts were thought. However, it is clear that the passage and the passages following the flood suggest that the thoughts of the human heart are no different today than they were then.

These verses and words that describe the condition of humanity that God hated leave us wondering what exactly did push God into such anger.  However, in verses 11 and 13 gets more specific and tells us that God destroyed the earth because people were violent.

I must emphasize, the flood did not change anything about that violence.  People would still be violent after the flood. In fact, after the flood God simply resigned himself to the fact that we would not change.

Then the LORD said in His heart, "I will never again curse the ground for man's sake, although the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth; nor will I again destroy every living thing as I have done." (Genesis 8:21)

The rest of Genesis shows us what kind of thoughts and the type of violence that humanity is capable of. In other stories in the book of Genesis we find brothers plotting against and killing brothers, rape, incest, taking revenge by killing the men of a city, taking innocent people prisoners, kings fighting against kings, raping of strangers (IE: Sodom wanting to rape the angels), killing in self-defense, forced slavery, mistreatment of slaves, blaming others, and so on, and so on.

Humanity never did change. God just resigned himself to the fact that our thinking is evil and our actions are violent.  We never changed.  We are still violent.  Our thoughts still justify violence.  Whether it is on a national level, a group level, or an individual level... we are and will always be violent.  Furthermore, we usually do not see the evil of our own violence and we will usually justify it.