This weekly feature is dedicated to Adventists who are looking for biblical insights into the topics discussed in the Sabbath School lesson quarterly. We post articles which address each lesson as presented in the Sabbath School Bible Study Guide, including biblical commentary on them. We hope you find this material helpful and that you will come to know Jesus and His revelation of Himself in His word in profound biblical ways.
Lesson 4: “The Flood”
COLLEEN TINKER
Problems with this lesson:
- It develops an argument to compare the ark with the ark of the covenant in the tabernacle.
- The lesson ignores the biblical comparison of God’s flood judgment to His final judgment, creating a comparison of the post-flood “new creation” to the new heaven and new earth in the future.
- The author says God allowed meat after the flood but gave clean meat restrictions and compares the covenant to the Sabbath.
This week’s lesson denatures the foundational account of the flood that reveals man’s nature, God’s holiness and wrath, His love, and His faithfulness to provide for and protect His creatures.
The Ark
Interestingly, the author devoted Sunday’s entire lesson to discussing Noah’s obedience and to comparing the ark he built to the ark in the tabernacle. The lesson states:
Also, some have seen in the general structure of the ark parallels to the ark of the tabernacle (Exod. 25:10). Just as the ark of the Flood will permit the survival of humankind, so the ark of the covenant, a sign of God’s presence in the midst of His people (Exod. 25:22), points to God’s work of salvation for His people.…Again, the parallel between the two “arks” reaffirms their common redemptive function. Noah’s obedience is thus described as a part of God’s plan of salvation.
This strained comparison of Noah’s ark and of the ark of the covenant veils the fact that these two objects are not synonymous. In fact, Noah’s ark carrying eight people from the primordial world into the antediluvian world is more similar to the exodus from Egypt or even to the catching up of the saints at the Lord’s return than it is to the box containing the tablets of stone containing the Mosaic covenant!
The lesson’s insistence that the ark of the covenant has a “common redemptive function” with Noah’s ark is inaccurate and reveals Adventism’s core belief that the Ten Commandments are necessary for salvation. This attitude supports Adventism’s teaching that Jesus came to vindicate the law, to show us how to keep the law, and to give us the power to keep it as He did.
In reality, the law, according to Galatians 3, was given for the purpose of exposing the fact that humans are sinful! As Romans 5:12–14 explains, “sin is not imputed when there is no law.” In spite of this fact, death reigned from Adam until Moses! Yet without law, there could be no transgression. There was only depravity, that spiritual death into which every person on earth is born (Eph. 2:1–3)—every person, that is except the Lord Jesus!
God gave the law to reveal to people that they were spiritually dead—depraved, unable to please God in any way. The law revealed that sin is not just misguided behavior; sin and its underlying depravity is rebellion against God. The law was not part of a salvation formula; it was a legal document that identified humanity as enemies of God!
The ark of Noah, on the other hand, stands eternally as a reminder that God redeems His chosen ones from the horror and death that is the consequence of man’s sin. God removes His own from His wrath and judgment on sinful earth.
The Biblical Comparison
I found it striking that the author of this lesson went through yet another set of linguistic contortions to make the flood a prefiguring of the new heavens and the new earth.
Of course I am not saying there is no sense in which God’s provision after the flood bears a likeness to His eternal provision for His people, but the direct prefiguring the author insists on finding seems illegitimate.
The Bible, however, makes more than a minor comparison of the flood to a future event—and that comparison is God’s judgment. Of course, Adventism is loath to spend much time on the fact of God’s wrath toward sin and His judgment on sin and sinners. They prefer to portray God as NOT having wrath! They even try to downplay that God kills the wicked, trying instead to say the wicked bring their fate on themselves.
However, Peter says this:
For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to chains of gloomy darkness to be kept until the judgment; if he did not spare the ancient world, but preserved Noah, a herald of righteousness, with seven others, when he brought a flood upon the world of the ungodly; if by turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to ashes he condemned them to extinction, making them an example of what is going to happen to the ungodly; and if he rescued righteous Lot, greatly distressed by the sensual conduct of the wicked (for as that righteous man lived among them day after day, he was tormenting his righteous soul over their lawless deeds that he saw and heard); then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials, and to keep the unrighteous under punishment until the day of judgment, and especially those who indulge in the lust of defiling passion and despise authority.
Bold and willful, they do not tremble as they blaspheme the glorious ones (2 Peter 2:4–10).
This is now the second letter that I am writing to you, beloved. In both of them I am stirring up your sincere mind by way of reminder, that you should remember the predictions of the holy prophets and the commandment of the Lord and Savior through your apostles, knowing this first of all, that scoffers will come in the last days with scoffing, following their own sinful desires. They will say, “Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation.” For they deliberately overlook this fact, that the heavens existed long ago, and the earth was formed out of water and through water by the word of God, and that by means of these the world that then existed was deluged with water and perished. But by the same word the heavens and earth that now exist are stored up for fire, being kept until the day of judgment and destruction of the ungodly (2 Peter 3:1–7).
Scripture itself compares God’s destruction of the evil world with the flood to His eventual destruction of it one more time—this time with fire. The emphasis is not on God’s restoration or reconstruction of a state of paradise but on the fact that God judges evil, and He destroys the intractable unrepentant and destroys the polluted world.
Our holy God has wrath against sin, and the Lord Jesus is the one who said that as it was in the days of Noah, so it shall be in the days of the coming of the Son of Man (Luke 17:26). This is the comparison the Bible makes of the flood with the works of God. It was an act of cleansing destruction, and the Lord God destroyed the evil that was defacing both the earth and the people He had made.
Meat, Sabbath, and the Unconditional Covenant
Finally, the lesson misses the powerful reality of the Noahic covenant in spite of the fact that the quarterly spent two-days’ lessons on “the covenant”.
Before we discuss this covenant, let’s read what Scripture says:
Then Noah built an altar to the LORD and took some of every clean animal and some of every clean bird and offered burnt offerings on the altar. And when the LORD smelled the pleasing aroma, the LORD said in his heart, “I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the intention of man’s heart is evil from his youth. Neither will I ever again strike down every living creature as I have done. While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.”
And God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth and upon every bird of the heavens, upon everything that creeps on the ground and all the fish of the sea. Into your hand they are delivered. Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you. And as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything. But you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood. And for your lifeblood I will require a reckoning: from every beast I will require it and from man. From his fellow man I will require a reckoning for the life of man.
“Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image.
And you, be fruitful and multiply, increase greatly on the earth and multiply in it.”
Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him, “Behold, I establish my covenant with you and your offspring after you, and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the livestock, and every beast of the earth with you, as many as came out of the ark; it is for every beast of the earth. I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of the flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.” And God said, “This is the sign of the covenant that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations: I have set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh. And the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh. When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.” God said to Noah, “This is the sign of the covenant that I have established between me and all flesh that is on the earth” (Genesis 8:20–22; 9:1–7).
The lesson acknowledges that God gave Noah meat to eat, but they make the point that the meat was a provision because the plant life had been destroyed. This is speculation and goes far beyond what Scripture says. Furthermore, the fact that the dove came back with a “freshly plucked olive leaf” indicates that there certainly was some plant life—even edible plants—on the earth when Noah and family exited the ark.
For whatever reason—and those reasons likely went far beyond a temporary lack of plant life but may have included a completely different environment than pre-flood before the fountains of the deep were opened—God gave man “every moving thing that lives” to be “food for you”.
The lesson says that the provision of meat came with clean and unclean restrictions, but the text never says that. While it does discuss clean and unclean animals that went into the ark and came out again—seven of every clean variety and two of every unclean—this designation was never applied to what Noah could eat.
This designation may have applied to sacrifices; the text states that “Noah built an altar to the Lord and took some of every clean animal and some of every clean bird and offered burnt offerings on the altar,” but God did not specify that Noah could only eat clean animals. On the contrary, He gave him everything that moved!
Adventism will twist Scripture to avoid acknowledging this clear provision.
Perhaps even more egregious than the deliberate misquoting of the text to say God demanded clean meat only is the forced comparison of the rainbow to the Sabbath!
To be sure, the rainbow was the sign of the Noahic covenant that God made with the earth that He would never destroy it or all the life on it with a flood again. Also true is the fact that the Sabbath was the sign of the Mosaic covenant God made with Israel. But NOT true is the lesson’s claim that “Also, like the Sabbath, the rainbow has a universal scope; it applies to the whole world. Just as the Sabbath, as a sign of Creation, is for everyone, everywhere, the promise that no other worldwide flood will come is for everyone, everywhere, as well.”
The Sabbath was not a “sign of creation”. This statement is a misuse of the fourth commandment’s statement,
For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy (Exodus 20:11).
God reminded Israel of His ceasing work on the seventh day and calling that finished work holy by asking them to keep the seventh day of every week holy. The Sabbath was not a sign of creation; rather, the Sabbath was a reminder that God’s work was perfect and complete, and He was asking them to trust Him by ceasing from work one day in seven. He was reminding them that He had made the heaven and the earth; He was sovereign and bigger than they were. They could trust Him.
Furthermore, the Sabbath was a shadow of Christ, as we learn in Colossians 2:16, 17. Jesus’ finished work on the cross would be perfect and complete, and all who trust and believe would enter His rest! Their own work would be finished!
No, Sabbath was never a sign of creation. It was, rather, the sign of the temporary Mosaic covenant (Ex. 31:13), and it was never “for everyone”! It was for Israel and was inseparable from the Mosaic covenant, a temporary, conditional covenant that defined the life and worship of Israel and revealed Israel’s sin!
The rainbow, on the other hand, is a perpetual sign of God’s unconditional covenant that He would never destroy the world with a flood again. His covenant was with all mankind and with the earth, and the rainbow reminds us always that God is faithful. He keeps His promises, and His word cannot fail.
This lesson seriously twists Scripture and makes statements that, out of context, seem reasonable, but when we look contextually at Scripture, we see that the points the lesson makes are false. †
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