Your God talks are at 2 AM in the morning when I am a sleep so I can not attend your God talks but luckily you record them so I surely listen to your God talks when you go into these issues. I know these are some tough issues but I am not the only one who has trouble with things written in the Bible. Only the fact that God killed millions of people in the big flood people who he created and are all his sons and daughters as he is the father. God is all powerful but he cannot have a normal conversation with his own children about this like a father on Earth would with his children ! A father on Earth would not kill his own children when they misbehave but God does which makes it even worse as he is an all powerful being with unconditional love. That means God loves people and all of his creation with unconditional love and umconditional means with no judgment which is what most Christians get wrong God does not judge that is impossible with unconditional love. A man on Earth who kills a lot of people is a mass murderer and goes to jail for the rest of their lives so what does that make God ?
To answer him, I first turned to Genesis 1 to show how the world God created was originally covered with water. So it makes sense, if God wanted to “have a doever” that he would use water.
Then we read Gensis chapters 6 and 7, and I pointed out that Noah was 500 when his sons were born and 600 when the flood happened. So, while he was building the ark, people must have been curious and asked him what he was doing – building a boat nowhere near water. God called Noah blameless and rightwous, so he must have told the questioners why he was doing it. But they were so evil they laughed at him and mocked him. When means they laughed at God and mocked God. He gave them a lengthy period of time to repent, but they never did.
So, when the flood came, they found out God was real, but it was too late for them.
I also played a video:
Cliff talked about how disobedience has consequences, and the higher the authority, the higher the consequences. The consequences were severe, yes, but they were the consquences of their disobeidnce.
We also looked at 1 Peter 3;18-20 18
For Christ also suffered for sins once for all time, the just for the unjust, so that He might bring us to God, having been put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the [n]spirit; in which He also went and made proclamation to the spirits in prison, who once were disobedient when the patience of God kept waiting in the days of Noah, during the construction of the ark, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were brought safely through the water.
We talked about how I approach the Bible. If I don’t understand something, I set it aside. I don’t know who the sons of God and the Nephilim were, so I set it aside and don’t worry about it. If I find something later that explains it, fine.
These are some more notes about the flood.
Unconditional does not mean unjudging. It means the love is not earned. A father who loves a child regardless of the child’s behavior still stops him from beating his sister. The love did not wait for the child to deserve it. The intervention did not wait either. What no earthly father has is what the text claims God has: the making of the child, the knowledge of every intent of the heart, and the right to end a life he gave. An earthly father who kills is a murderer because the life was not his to take. That charge assumes a law above the killer.
In Genesis there is no law above God. Calling him a murderer borrows the category and leaves behind the only thing that made it a crime. What Genesis says he saw is not misbehavior. It is a world filled with violence, all flesh corrupt, every intent of the heart only evil all the day (Genesis 6:5, 11–13). The story does say he spoke before he struck. First Peter 3:20 says his patience waited while the ark was built. Second Peter 2:5 calls Noah a herald of righteousness. A conversation is what those verses are. The world did not take it. Eight did.
The ark is not a lifeboat for the righteous only. Genesis 6:19–20 and 7:2–3 put every kind of breathing creature on it, clean and unclean, male and female, not because the animals were righteous but because the order being ended was also the order being kept. Genesis 7:21–23 then kills every creature off the ark, beast and bird and swarming thing, in the same sentence as man. The animals who drown are not murderers. The animals who board are not converts. They are there because he intended a world after the water, not a monument to eight survivors.
If the charge is that God killed his children and is therefore a murderer, the text will not let the killing be only of the guilty, and it will not let the saving be only of the good. Breath is the category, not guilt. Everything with the breath of life outside the ark dies. A sample of everything with the breath of life inside it lives. The children and the cattle are in both columns. The story is the end of a creation and the keeping of a remnant of it, and the remnant has hooves.
