Why would a good God flood the world and kill all those people? That’s a question the skeptics and mockers love to ask.

The reason he did it is twofold. First, it was because of worldwide corruption, but in particular the violence of man. It was really, really bad. Probably even worse than today’s violence, which is enough to make me want to throw up.

I just read a news story reporting that 49 bodies had been callously dumped like trash, alongside a major highway in Mexico. The bodies were that of men and women, decapitated and hands cut off. Apparently this is common, having something to do with rival drug gangs attempting to intimidate each other.

This is what our sin nature is capable of. Killing someone is bad enough, but to then chop up a human being is simply taking delight in doing evil.

This world’s culture is one in which darkness is glorified and pursued, starting early in a lot of kids and young adults. They intentionally desire and display thuggish and beast-like behavior. Dark meanness is showcased in their speech, music, dress, and demeanor; and they’re proud of it.

The level of nonchalance toward precious life is virtually off the chart. As a result, Satan must be having a ball. However, I get the impression that in the days of Noah, things were worse—though maybe not by much.

In those days, the point had been reached that if there hadn’t been godly intervention, mankind would have become extinct. God told Noah that every intent of man’s thought was continually evil (Gen 6: 5). He later in the same chapter told Noah that the violence had brought the end of mankind before His eyes (vs. 13).

And that brings me to the second of the twofold reason for the flood. Actually, it’s the ultimate reason. If man exterminated himself from the earth, the plan of salvation would have become null and void. Satan would have successfully destroyed the seed from which Jesus would come.

So God protected the seed by preserving Noah, a descendant of Adam and Eve’s son named Seth. Seth is biblically noted as a son of god and at the top of Jesus’ ancestry. Noah and his family, the only righteous people on the earth at that time, became God’s remnant people.

The flood, then, was a means to stop Satan from stopping the incarnation of Jesus, the savior of the world.