A brief overview for Sunday School teachers and Bible study leaders of Lifeway’s “Explore the Bible” lesson on Genesis 6:13-22, 7:20-24 for Sunday, January 7, 2023, with the title of “Judgment.”

A video version of this overview is available on YouTube at:

INTRO:  ??? What are some of the worst effects of sin that you personally have seen/heard about in our world today?

(Some might = all kinds of problems in families; or all the atrocities of the Hamas attack on Israel. Or human trafficking; or the explosion of pornography; or abortion/the murder of babies; or violence uncontrolled in many streets — sadly there are too many examples to name, on the news every day!)

After several have shared, then I’d say:  This is how the world has become as a result of man’s sin. This is nothing new; it is how the world was in our passage for today, Genesis 6, where God sees Mankind’s sin and judges it.

CONTEXT

Ever since the first sin (which we saw in Genesis 3, mankind continued to deteriorate in sin and rebellion against God. In Genesis 4, we see the first murder (many of us did not meet and do that lesson on Dec. 31) but the sinful climate on Earth continued to worsen. 

In the first part of this chapter, Genesis 6:5 says “Then the LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.”

I might spend just a little time on this verse, though it’s not in our “focus passage,” because it shows just how bad the human heart has gotten in our fall from God: notice the cascading use of words to describe how bad we’d become:

— every intent

— of thoughts of our heart

— was ONLY evil

— CONTINUALLY! 

How could mankind’s sin nature be described as any worse? 

So in :7 “The LORD said, ‘I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, from man to animals to creeping things and to birds of the sky; for I am sorry that I have made them.”

So God is going to judge Man’s sin. That brings us to our lesson for today, “Judgment.”

OUTLINE

I. Sin and Judgment  (:13)

II. The Act of Judgment  (6:17, 7:20-22)

III. The Ark of Salvation  (6:14-16, 18-22, 7:23)

I. Sin and Judgment (:13)

:13 “Then God said to Noah, ‘The end of all flesh has come before Me; for the earth is filled with violence because of them; and behold, I am about to destroy them with the earth.”

??? What does it say God is going to do???

“Destroy them (mankind) with the earth”

??? WHY does it say He is going to do it???

“The earth is filled with violence because of them”

In other words, Man’s sin is bringing God’s judgment upon the earth

We see here the Biblical doctrines of the holiness and righteousness of God, and the judgment that He MUST bring.

The Bible teaches us that God is a holy, righteous God, who must judge sin. 

In Exodus 34:6-7 God proclaims His innate nature to Moses. He says He is:   “The LORD, the LORD God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in lovingkindness and truth; 7 who keeps lovingkindness for thousands, who forgives iniquity, transgression and sin; yet He will by no means leave the guilty unpunished …”

To drive this point home (and I think it’s a very important and needed one today, I might do the following EXERCISE: Have my group call out all the qualities of God they see in this passage:

(“Compassionate, gracious, slow to anger, abounding in lovingkindness and truth; keeps lovingkindness, forgives iniquity, transgression & sin”

??? Then I might ask??? “How many of these are what we might call “positive” qualities???

(The answer is: almost ALL of them! There’s at least SIX “positive” descriptions here, that talk of God’s compassion, grace, forgiveness, etc.  ONLY ONE we might consider “negative”.

??? Then you might ask: ??? “What does this tell us about God???”

(That His love, mercy, and grace are predominant;

??? But what does this ONE show us???

(That with all of His compassion and grace, He cannot just let the guilty go unpunished; GOD MUST PUNISH SIN. He is a holy, righteous God.  

This is so important because it is something that so many people just don’t “get” today: YES, God IS a God of love and grace. But they don’t understand that He is also a God of holiness and justice, and He cannot just “skip over” sin. 

When our son David was little, he would often just “smile” and his teachers and others would just “skip over” whatever he did wrong. One teacher just said “Oh Dave …” and just let him off, because she was so compassionate and he was so charming.

Some think that God is that way too, that He will just “smile at us” and say, “Oh, you …” and just let us off. BUT HE WILL NOT. HE CANNOT. He is a “holy, holy, holy” God, Isaiah 6 says. He is a God of justice and righteousness. Exodus 34:7 says “He will by no means leave the guilty unpunished.” GOD MUST PUNISH SIN!  This is a cardinal doctrine:

— We saw it in the Garden of Eden

— We see it again here in Genesis 6

— We see it reinforced in the New Testament as well. This is important: “Judgment” is not just an “Old Testament” doctrine. It’s NOT that the Old Testament is judgment and the New Testament is grace. Both judgment and grace are found in both Testaments. And God’s judgment is definitely found in the New Testament as well:

— One great example is in II Peter 2, which talks in :3 about how the heretics “judgment from long ago is not idle, and their destruction is not asleep.” THEN he gives a list of others whose sins God did not pass over:

— :4 “For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to pits of darkness, reserved for judgment”

— :5 “and did not spare the ancient world but preserved Noah …”

— :6 “And if He condemned the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to destruction …”

:9 “THEN the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from temptation, and the keep the unrighteous under punishment for the day of judgment.”

EXERCISE: You might have a different person read each one of these verses in II Peter, as an example of how God will not just let sin go by; He must punish it.

Then emphasize :9, how Peter says here: God did not leave these sins unpunished: He didn’t skip over the angels’ sins; He didn’t skip over the sins of Noah’s day; He did not skip over Sodom & Gomorrah’s sin — and He will not leave our sin unpunished TODAY either!  

Both Genesis 6 and the testimony of the whole Bible is that God is a righteous Judge who must punish sin. 

?? Some question God’s judgment in Scripture as too harsh.

WE do not have all the facts; God does! He sees all; knows all; even the heart. We don’t.

+x Genesis 18:25, one of my favorite verses in the Old Testament, where Abraham is dealing with God and he says “Shall not the Judge of the whole earth deal justly?” And of course, the answer to that question is YES! God is a righteous Judge; He WILL deal justly! 

NO ONE WILL EVER SAY IN ETERNITY; I DID NOT GET JUSTICE WITH GOD. Whatever is right; God will do. We can trust that. 

And I think that can be a good way for us to respond to some questions people have about what God is going to do for this person or that group. Say,  I don’t know the answer to that; but I trust that God will do what is right. “The Judge of all the earth will deal justly.”

II. The Act of Judgment  (6:17, 7:20-22)

So what does God DO to judge the world here in Genesis?

— He says in :17, “Behold, I, even I am bringing the flood of water upon the earth, to destroy all flesh in which is the breath of life, from under heaven; everything that is on the earth will perish.”

Then in the first part of Chapter 7 we see the flood that God brought, :12 says “the rain fell upon the earth for 40 days and 40 nights.”  :18 says “the water prevailed.”

As a result, :20 says “the water prevailed fifteen cubits higher, and the mountains were covered.” So the whole earth was covered with water — 15 cubits (or about 22 feet) above the highest mountains.

:21-22 says that everyone and everything that moved on the earth, died.

Now, as in a lot of places in scripture, there are some who doubt, or scoff at the Bible’s story of the flood, acting as if it must be a myth; that it could never have really happened. But there are several good reasons for us to believe that it did:

1) God says it did! Hebrews says it is impossible for God to lie. If His word says He flooded the world, then we can and should believe He did! “Let God be found true though every man be found a liar.” (Romans 3:4)

2) There is archeological evidence for a flood. Let me give you  examples:

ABC News reported on their website on Dec. 12, 2010 that Robert Ballard, one the world’s most acclaimed underwater archeologists, found proof of the Biblical flood.

“According to a controversial theory proposed by two Columbia University scientists, there really was one in the Black Sea region. They believe that the now-salty Black Sea was once an isolated freshwater lake surrounded by farmland, until it was flooded by an enormous wall of water from the rising Mediterranean Sea. The force of the water was two hundred times that of Niagara Falls, sweeping away everything in its path. Fascinated by the idea, Ballard and his team decided to investigate.

“We went in there to look for the flood,” he said. “Not just a slow moving, advancing rise of sea level, but a really big flood that then stayed …”

Four hundred feet below the surface, they unearthed an ancient shoreline, proof to Ballard that a catastrophic event did happen in the Black Sea. By carbon dating shells found along the shoreline, Ballard said he believes they have established a timeline for that catastrophic event, which he estimates happened around 5,000 BC. Some experts believe this was around the time when Noah’s flood could have occurred. … The theory goes on to suggest that the story of this traumatic event, seared into the collective memory of the survivors, was passed down from generation to generation and eventually inspired the biblical account of Noah.”

On the Answers in Genesis website, they give this example:

“In another fossil graveyard in Montceau-les-Mines, France, hundreds of thousands of marine creatures were buried with amphibians, spiders, scorpions, millipedes, insects, and reptiles.

These marine and land-dwelling creatures are found buried together on the continent. How could this have happened unless the ocean waters rose and rapidly swept over the continents in the global, catastrophic flood?”

Those are just a couple of examples; there are numerous examples of science and archeology giving evidence of a massive flood on the earth. All of which shows that you don’t have to be scientifically ignorant to believe that a catastrophic flood hit the Earth thousands of years ago. There is evidence for it.

3) It is significant that Flood tales all over the world.

Some have criticized the Bible, saying, Well, the Bible is not alone in suggesting that there was a great flood. Almost every culture has a flood story, they say. One of the most famous is The Gilgamesh Epic, the Mesopotamian flood story, which has much in common with the story of Noah. They say, see, other cultures have this story too.

I don’t know why they think that somehow “undermines” the Bible’s story; that virtually every culture all over the world has some kind of flood story really just confirms: THERE REALLY WAS A FLOOD! Do some of these stories vary in details, sure; things get garbled in transmission over the years. But that virtually every culture has a flood story just adds to the weight of evidence that the Flood really did happen, just like the Bible says it did. 

III. The Ark of Salvation (6:14-16, 18-22, 7:23)

After reporting how everything died in the flood, the second part of :23 does say:  “And only Noah was left, together with those that were with him in the ark.”

In 6:14 God had said to Noah, before the flood ever came: 

“Make for yourself an ark of gopher wood” and He gave him the description of how it should be made

??? What all instructions do you see about how the Ark was to be made???

— of gopher wood (:14)

— with rooms (:14)

— covered inside and out with pitch (:14)

— :15 length 300 cubits, breadth 50 cubits, height 30 cubits

— :16 a window, a door, with lower/second/third decks

(NOTE: a “cubit” is the length from your elbow to the end of your fingers, roughly 18”, so when you see a “cubit”, think a foot and a half. So 100 cubits = about 150 feet, etc.)

So 300 cubit Ark = about 450 feet long.

??? You might ask if anyone in your class has been to the Ark Encounter in Kentucky???

(I have and it is amazing; I would recommend it. Maybe your family, or a group from church could go. To me, the most amazing thing about it was just looking at it from a distance: how BIG it is! It just makes this story from Genesis come alive. It is right about the size the Bible describes, 510 feet x 85 x 51.

(YOU MIGHT PRINT OFF A PICTURE OF THE ARK ENCOUNTER to show your group)

The Ark serves two purposes:

1) it shows us how God preserved mankind (and the animals to support him) and eventually bring a Messiah/Savior for us. Through the Ark, God saved this remnant, Noah’s family, and through them, a Messiah would come, Jesus, who would save the world. Without the Ark, there would have been no more mankind, and no Savior, and everyone would have been lost forever.

2) The Ark also foreshadows the salvation of the cross. 

We see a picture of the GOSPEL in it: 

— that man has sinned against God, bringing His just judgment upon us

— but God showed grace and provided an “ark” of safety. 

This was true in Noah’s day — and it is also true in ours. 

Just like in Noah’s day, we have all sinned, and all deserve God’s judgment. But again as in Noah’s day, God has shown us grace. The Ark pictures the salvation He gave us in Christ, who died on the cross and paid for our sins. And now gives an offer for whoever wishes to enter in to that “ark” of Christ, through repentance and faith. 

II Peter 2:5 says that Noah was a “preacher of righteousness.” He evidently preached to his generation about righteousness and judgment — although no one listened but his own family. 

Today we have the same choice: God’s word tells us clearly that we have all sinned against God, and that God will rightly judge sin. Just like in Noah’s day, He has given us ONE way out, an “ark” of safety: through salvation by faith in Jesus. Just as in Noah’s day, there is only ONE ark: Jesus said in John 14:6 “I am THE way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through Me.” The most important question of each of our lives and for each person we know is, will we “climb aboard” that One True “Ark” and escape God’s judgment through Jesus Christ?

There’s so much more here:

— 6:8 how Noah found favor (“grace”) in the eyes of the Lord. It’s always grace that saves, even in the Old Testament. 

— 6:22 how Noah obeyed and DID all that God commanded him to do, as he responded to that grace — a good example for us!

And more! Read the text for yourself and write down the points and applications God shows you that YOUR class specifically needs. But I hope I’ve given you a few things you can use Sunday!

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