It doesn’t take many years of living in this broken world for someone to ask why God allows suffering. And usually this isn’t an academic question—they’re asking because they’re suffering, sometimes intensely. So why does God allow death and suffering?

Well, the Bible’s history gives us the answer. God originally created a perfect world—there was no death or suffering. But this world was ruined by the rebellion of the first man, Adam. His sin brought an intruder into the world: death, the penalty for sin.

You see, we all sinned in Adam, who represented us. In other words—it’s really our fault the world’s the way it is!

This week we’ve seen that the idea of millions of years doesn’t come from the rocks. It came from a belief about the past!

So we shouldn’t be surprised that the evidence confirms the Bible’s history of just thousands of years. For example, helium quickly escapes rocks, leaking away in less than one hundred thousand years. And yet rock crystals are filled with helium! Or consider rock layers that are bent, meaning they had to be deposited quickly and bent while still wet. Oh, and soft tissue has been found in fossils supposedly tens of millions of years old.

You know what? The evidence confirms a young earth!

This week we’re looking at where the idea of millions of years came from. Now you might wonder, “isn’t millions of years just science?”

Well, there’s two different kinds of science. Observational science is directly testable, repeatable, and observable. Think technology and medicine. Then there’s historical science, which is an interpretation of the past. Think rock layers and fossils. Because we weren’t there to observe the past, we’re interpreting the evidence in the present. And your interpretation depends on your worldview.

Millions of years is an interpretation of the evidence that ignores the history in God’s Word.

As geology began to shift away from God’s Word and to the interpretation of millions of years of slow and gradual processes, many Christians accepted the old ages and added them into Genesis. But this compromise had consequences.

Once the door was opened to reject the historicity of God’s Word, the Scriptures were no longer viewed as the ultimate authority. Instead man’s ideas became the authority and God’s Word was reinterpreted in light of those ideas.

And that’s still happening! So many Christians are reinterpreting God’s Word on today’s moral issues because they’ve never really viewed God as the authority—but he is!

Yesterday we learned the idea of millions of years came from a new way of looking at rock layers that rejected the eyewitness account of history in God’s Word. Now how did the church react to this shift?

Well, many scientists rejected it! They argued the Bible’s history could be trusted and the catastrophe of Noah’s flood made more sense of the evidence than the idea of slow and gradual processes.

But, sadly many other Christians simply accepted the millions of years. They said it didn’t matter what someone believed about the age of the earth. But their compromise had disastrous consequences. More on that tomorrow.

Have you ever wondered where the idea of millions of years came from? You see, for most of Western history people believed in a young earth because they respected the Bible as the history book of the universe. But about two hundred years ago there was a shift. People stopped viewing the rock layers through the lens of a global flood, and they started arguing that the present is the key to the past.

In other words, take the processes happening today and stretch them backwards. When geologists did this, they came to believe earth was very old.

But as we’ll see this week, it’s the Bible that gives us the true history of the world.

This whole week we’ve seen that the Genesis text is clear: Noah’s flood was global. But it’s not just Genesis!

Jesus compared his second coming to Noah’s flood. Now Jesus’ return isn’t going to be a localized event—it will be global, just as the flood was!

And the apostle Peter wrote that only eight people survived. If the flood was a local event, people outside the area would’ve escaped so the Bible would be, well, wrong!

You know, the only reason some Christians say Noah’s flood was local is because of millions of years of history. Instead of compromising with man’s ideas, let’s start with God’s Word and believe it!

Was Noah’s flood local or global? This week we’ve seen that Genesis makes it clear that Noah’s flood was global. And the size of the Ark itself makes it clear that God was sending a global flood.

Then, after the flood, God said the rainbow would be a sign of his promise that he would never again send another global flood. But if Noah’s flood was just a local event, well, God lied. There’ve been many devastating local floods since the flood of Noah’s day. So what did God mean by saying he’d never again send another flood? It makes no sense!

God’s Word is very clear—the flood was global! And God will never send another flood like it again!

This week we’re looking at the question “was Noah’s flood local or global?” Well, consider this: Noah’s ark was huge. At five hundred and ten feet long, fifty-one feet high, and eighty-five feet wide, the ark was a massive ship designed to hold two of every kind of animal, supplies for a whole year, and Noah and his family.

Now why would Noah need such a huge ark if the flood was just local? He and his family could’ve just packed up and left the area. And animals outside the flood zone would’ve survived so why did two of every kind need to come to the ark anyway?

No! The text of Genesis is clear: the flood was a global event!

Some Christians, including many pastors and Bible colleges, teach that Noah’s flood was just a local event, not a flood that actually covered the entire earth.

Now this doesn’t come from the text of Genesis. It comes from bringing evolutionary ideas from outside the Bible into the text. Here’s what the Genesis text actually says:

Over and over Genesis uses words like “all” and “every,” such as “all the high hills under the whole heaven were covered” and “all flesh died.” Now that doesn’t sound like a small, localized event!

The Bible is clear—Noah’s flood was a global judgment on sin, but God offered mercy.