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Chapter 2

The Fall, the Curse, and the Flood

Four great events changed the primeval world from the “very good” world, as it was described by God himself at the end of the six days of creation (note Gen. 1:31–2:4) to “this present evil world,” as the apostle Paul called it (Gal. 1:4) in the first century of the present era. These were, in order: (1) the sin and fall of the first man and woman; (2) the curse pronounced by God on the whole creation as a result of that sin; (3) the Flood that physically destroyed the antediluvian world in the days of Noah; and (4) the confusion of tongues and dispersion of the nations at Babel.

These world-changing events are described in Genesis 3–11, but are, in general, completely ignored in the evolutionary world view. Nevertheless, they are vitally important to a true understanding of the present world, with all its terrible problems. They necessarily constitute important components of the creationist world view, so the biblical accounts thereof are summarized in this chapter.

God’s Principle of Conservation

The world that God created is not a dead, static, unchanging thing. Rather, it teems with activity, with things happening, with life. Not only does the creation exhibit an infinite variety of marvelously designed structures and relationships, but also there is an unlimited complexity of interactions between these systems.

These interactions are called processes, and the study of these processes is the function of scientists. Because of the great number of different systems and processes, it has been necessary for science to divide and subdivide itself over and over again. Not only are there physicists and chemists, biologists and geologists, and other such basic scientists, but also physical chemists, organic chemists, nuclear physicists, classical physicists, and numerous other specialists within these basic disciplines. Many fields of science that once were special emphases in physics or one of the broad sciences have developed into independent branches of their own — sciences such as meteorology, hydrology, ecology, metallurgy, paleontology, and many others.

All of which points up both the extreme breadth and complexity of science and also the impossibility of any one scientist ever becoming a real firsthand authority in more than a very restricted scientific specialty. Furthermore, scientists as individuals are real people and therefore subject to the same conceits, prejudices, and other weaknesses as non-scientists. Scientists should accordingly be very cautious about making broad pronouncements on sociological or religious matters in the name of “science,” and laymen should be carefully skeptical about such pronouncements when scientists do make them.

In spite of the great number and variety of scientific processes, there are two statements that can be made about all of them without exception. These are the following:

1 All processes involve interchanges and conversions of an entity called energy, with the total energy remaining constant. Scientifically this is called the law of conservation of energy, or the first law of thermodynamics.

2 All processes manifest a tendency toward decay and disintegration, with a net increase in what is called the entropy, or state of randomness or disorder, of the system. This is called the second law of thermodynamics.

Thus, all the processes of nature are fundamentally processes of quantitative conservation and qualitative disintegration. These two laws, accepted by all scientists as the most universally applicable principles that science has been able to discover, were recognized only about a hundred years ago. However, these basic principles have been in the pages of the Bible for thousands of years, though not expressed in modern scientific terminology. The conservation principle is clearly set forth by the fact of a completed creation which is now being sustained by its Creator.

Colossians 1:16–17, for example, indicates both aspects of this truth. “By him were all things created . . . and by him all things consist.” Note that “created” is in the past tense. The Scripture does not say: “By him are all things being created.” Therefore, creation is not going on at present. The word “consist” is a translation of the Greek word from which we get our English word “sustain.” Thus, the verse says in effect that “by him all things are sustained.” By the Lord Jesus Christ, all things — all systems and structures, all kinds of organisms and relationships — were created once for all in the past and are now being conserved.

This same principle — that nothing is now being created or destroyed — is also implied in many other passages. Examples include Hebrews 1:2–3: “He made the worlds . . . upholding all things by the word of his power”; 2 Peter 3:5–7: “By the word of God the heavens were of old, and . . . the heavens and the earth, which are now, by the same word are kept in store”; Psalm 148:5–6: “He commanded, and they were created. He hath also established them for ever and ever”; Isaiah 40:26: “Who hath created these things . . . for that he is strong in power; not one faileth”; and Nehemiah 9:6: “Thou hast made heaven, the heaven of heavens, with all their host, the earth, and all things that are therein, the seas, and all that is therein, and thou preservest them all.”

The first chapter of Genesis describes this creation, and it should be stressed as strongly as possible that it is only in the Bible that we can possibly obtain any information about the methods of creation, the order of creation, the duration of creation, or any of the other details of creation. Since, according to both Scripture and the first law of science, nothing is now being created, therefore the scientific study of present processes can reveal nothing about creation and God’s creative processes except that it must have taken place and that it was through processes not now operating. Denying this is the most fundamental fallacy in the evolutionary theory. Evolution assumes that these present processes are the same process by which all things have developed from primeval chaos into their present complexity. Both the Word of God and the first law of science say otherwise.

At the end of the account of creation, the record is very explicit and definite: “Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made” (Gen. 2:1–3).

This summary is very clear in its insistence that whatever methods God used in creating and making all things — including man himself — He stopped using. The present work of providence — of providing for the conservation and sustenance of all the basic entities that He had created — is of a different order altogether from His work of creation.

The Fall and the Curse

Superimposed on the conservation principle, however, is the decay principle. The second law of thermodynamics, no less than the first law, is a universal law governing all processes. Although energy is never destroyed, it continually becomes less available for further work. Everything tends to wear out, to run down, to disintegrate, and ultimately to die. All processes, by definition, involve change — but the change is not a change in the upward direction, such as the evolutionists assume.

Somehow it seems contrary to the nature and purposes of God that He would create a universe in which decay and death constitute one of the basic principles. He is a God of grace and power; as a gracious and merciful God, surely He would not build such a principle into His creation if He could avoid it. Since He is also omnipotent, He certainly did not have to do it that way. Why, then, do “we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now” (Rom. 8:22)? Is this what God intended, when He finished His creation and pronounced it all “very good” (Gen. 1:31)? Obviously not; God is not capricious, and we can be absolutely sure that He will accomplish His good purpose in creation.

The answer can only be that the second law is a sort of intruder into the divine economy, not a part of either the original creation or God’s plan for His eternal kingdom at least in its present form. The local entropy produced by friction, or digestion, etc., must have been fully offset by a decrease in entropy elsewhere. God’s description of the entire creation as “very good” must tell us that at the time He said it, there was no disorder, no deterioration, no groaning and travailing, no suffering, and, above all, no death in the whole universe, “The heavens and the earth . . . and all the host of them” (Gen. 2:1).

The entire world was designed for man, and he was appointed by God to exercise dominion over it, as God’s steward. It was a perfect environment, and man was perfectly equipped to manage it. He should, certainly, have been content and supremely happy, responding in loving thanksgiving to His Creator who had thus endowed him.

God, however, did not create man as a mere machine. God’s love was voluntary, and for there to be real fellowship, man’s love also must be voluntary; in fact, an “involuntary love” is a contradiction in terms. Man was endowed with freedom to love or not love, to obey or not obey, as well as with the responsibility to choose. The history of over six thousand years of strife and suffering, crime and war, decay and death, is proof enough that he chose wrongly.

Sin came into the world when man first doubted, then rejected, the word of God, in the garden of Eden. And death came into the world when sin came into the world. God was forced to tell Adam, “Cursed is the ground for thy sake . . . for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return” (Gen. 3:17, 19). The basic physical elements (“dust” of the “ground”) were thus placed under the curse, and all flesh constructed from those elements was also cursed. The classic passage of the New Testament on this subject is Romans 8:20–22:

For the creation was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him who hath subjected the same in hope. Because the creation itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption [or, more literally, “decay”] into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.

This universal “bondage of decay” can be nothing less than the universal principle that scientists have finally formalized as the second law of thermodynamics. By the same token, God’s “rest” at the end of His work of creating and making all things (Gen. 2:1–3), together with the providential sustenance of His creation ever since (Neh. 9:6), must constitute the universal principle now known as the first law of thermodynamics, the law of conservation of mass/energy.

Scientists have demonstrated the universality of the two laws, but they are unable to discover why they work. The answer to the question — Why should energy always be conserved and entropy always increase? — can be found only in these biblical records. There are many other biblical allusions to the first law (Col. 1:16–17; Heb. 1:2–3; 2 Pet. 3:5, 7; Ps. 148:5–6; Isa. 40:26; Eccles. 1:9–10; 3:14–15, etc.), and to the second law (Ps. 102:25–27; Isa. 51:6; 1 Pet. 1:24–25; Heb. 12:27; Rom. 7:21–25; Rev. 21:4; 22:3, etc.). It is significant that these two universal (and all-important) principles, discovered and formally recognized little more than a century ago, have been implicit in the biblical revelation for thousands of years.

The imposition of the principle of decay and death on the original creation was the result of man’s sin. God had to bring the curse upon both man and his dominion because of man’s rebellion against his Creator. “Cursed is the ground,” God told Adam (Gen. 3:17). The very ground out of which Adam’s body had been constructed, the dust of the earth, the basic elements of the creation, were thus brought into the “bondage of decay” (Rom. 8:21). “Yea, all of them shall wax old, as a garment” (Ps. 102:26).

The curse is not permanent and irrevocable, however, but only remedial and disciplinary. “The creation itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of decay into the glorious liberty of the children of God” (Rom. 8:21). “There shall be no more curse” (Rev. 22:3). “We, according to his promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness” (2 Pet. 3:13).

At the same time that God pronounced the curse, He also promised the coming Redeemer, the seed of the woman (Gen. 3:15), who would someday provide salvation, both for individual persons and for the whole creation.1

The Genesis Flood

One of the most remarkable phenomena associated with the earth’s crust is the abundance of fossil remains of animals buried and preserved therein. Since these fossilized animals obviously were once living and are now dead, they must have died only after death entered the world when Adam sinned (Rom. 5:12). Although the Bible never mentions fossils as such, it does speak of a time when “all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, and every man: All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died” (Gen. 7:21–22). This, of course, was at the time of the worldwide flood that God sent on the earth in the days of Noah.

Most creationists are convinced that the key to the real understanding of the fossil-bearing sedimentary rocks is nothing less than the great flood of the days of Noah. The fossils speak, not of the gradual evolution of life on earth over vast ages, but rather of the sudden extinction of life, all over the world, in one age.

There was never such an opportunity for production of fossils as in the great Flood. Neither was there ever, before or since, such an opportunity for the formation of vast beds of sediment and for their rapid conversion into sedimentary rock, as in the great Flood. “And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both man, and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven; and they were destroyed from the earth: and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark” (Gen. 7:23).

The curse and the Flood constitute a permanent witness to us concerning God’s hatred of sin and His desire to call men to repentance. Every process that we experience in our daily lives should continually remind us of the judgment of the curse, and every feature that we see as we look at the world around us should remind us of the judgment of the Flood. All that we see and all that we experience are constantly telling us that we are out of fellowship with our Creator and urgently need the Savior.

But all fallen men are perverse, and their imaginations are evil. Instead of responding to the remedial purposes of the curse, early men and women tried to circumvent it and soon became so irretrievably evil that God had to destroy the world with the Flood. Then, instead of gratitude for deliverance from the antediluvian morass of wickedness by the Flood, the descendants of the survivors soon manifested their own perversity by a new rebellion at Babel.

Man has now somehow, in his warped thinking, converted the universal decay principle into an imagined universal evolutionary process, and the worldwide testimony in stone concerning the Flood into a contrived record of the history of evolution. The Flood itself is explained away altogether, either as a local flood or a tranquil flood or an allegorical flood (these theories will all be evaluated in chapter 4, and eliminated as possible options).

Accordingly, God ceased to concern himself directly with mankind as a whole, after routing the conspirators at Babel, choosing rather to work through an elect nation, Israel, and then through an elect assemblage, the Church, to accomplish His redemptive work in the world. Not again would He impose another remedial curse of some kind on the ground, nor would He again send another world-purging cataclysm as long as He continued to offer salvation and redemption to man.

“While the earth remaineth,” He said, “seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease” (Gen. 8:22). That is, the earth’s axial rotation and orbital revolution, which processes largely control all other terrestrial processes in the present economy, would remain unchanged, and so would all other processes until man’s temporal probation and God’s reconciliation were accomplished.

Origin of the Nations

Another great event in the ancient world has also had worldwide repercussions to this very day. That was the post-Flood rebellion led by Nimrod at the Tower of Babel, resulting in God’s miraculous confusion of languages of the various families gathered there. This, in turn, led to their dispersion from Babel and their eventual development into the many tribes and nations around the world.

Man is a unique creation of God, entirely without evolutionary relation to the animals, and Adam was the first man, created on the sixth day of creation. However, the present-day nations, tribes, cultures, and languages of men have all been derived from the three sons of Noah, after the great Flood. “And the sons of Noah, that went forth of the ark, were Shem, and Ham, and Japheth. . . . These are the three sons of Noah: and of them was the whole earth overspread” (Gen. 9:18–19).

For a time after the Flood, most of Noah’s descendants lived together in the Mesopotamian plain south of the mountains of Ararat, where the ark had landed. This settlement, in itself, was contrary to the will of God, who had commanded them to “Be fruitful, and multiply and replenish the earth” (Gen. 9:1). He had also entrusted to men the responsibility of governing themselves, in stable social units, even with the prerogative of capital punishment if the crime should so warrant (Gen. 9:6).

However, rather than obeying God’s command to scatter and fill the earth, their rebellious leader Nimrod persuaded most of the people (no doubt Noah and Shem, who apparently were still living, did not participate in Nimrod’s scheme, and this may have been true of others, too) to remain in one place, at Babel, and there to build a great tower dedicated to the heavens, to pagan gods of the sky.

The events are described in Genesis 11:1–9, and the leadership of Nimrod in Genesis 10:8–12. It is probable that there were approximately 70 family clans at Babel, as indicated by the 70 original tribes listed in Genesis 10:1–32. These included Semites and Japhethites, as well as Hamites.

Rather than moving out to “fill the earth,” as God had commanded, they all prepared to unite together in the form of a great city, in which they could “make us a name” (Gen. 11:4). This decision involved a direct rebellion against God’s command, and thus indicated that at least their leaders, especially Nimrod, no longer feared God.

They seemingly had been convinced, perhaps by some form of occult communication with demonic spirits, that they could successfully follow Satan in his continuing rebellion and thus be free from God’s restraint. They built the first great temple “tower, whose top [was to be] unto heaven” (Gen. 11:4), as the central headquarters of this rebellion. They probably emblazoned the various astrological emblems in the shrine at the top, thus dedicating the tower “unto heaven” — that is, to the worship of the host of heaven. The stars were identified with the host of satanic angels. This primeval astrological system is the fountainhead of all occultism, polytheism, and false religion in general. Babylon was the “mother of harlots and abominations” (Rev. 17:5). That is, Babel was the primeval source of all spiritual adultery and idolatry in the world’s false religions.

In any case, it was from Babel that God forcibly dispersed the rebels, by a mighty miracle. “The Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth” (Gen. 11:9).

The skeptic may question this record, but let him devise a better explanation for the origin of human languages! The languages of even the most “primitive” tribes are extremely complex and are removed by a great gulf from the chatterings of the most “advanced” apes, as well as other animals. There is neither any evidence nor any explanation for any assumed naturalistic evolution of human language.

The attribute of language — the ability to articulate and communicate even abstract concepts — is the most basic aspect of any human culture. Physiological distinctives such as skin color are of minor importance compared to language as the cause of divisions among the nations and tribes of mankind. When God decided to enforce a separation and scattering of the people, He did so by the most effective way possible, confusing their tongues. After they were separated into distinct tribal units, then it was possible for distinctive physiological characteristics, hitherto inhibited by the intermarrying at Babel, to become fixed genetically, by tribal inbreeding. Thus, the different physical characteristics of different national groups were indirectly the result of the confusion of tongues.

The 70 original nations, as listed in Genesis 10, have proliferated into more than 3,000 tribes and languages. Since this primeval dispersion there have been many attempts by strong leaders to unite all nations under their rule, as well as efforts by politicians to establish voluntary unions of all nations, but every one has failed. This is because “the Most High divided to the nations their inheritance, when He separated the sons of Adam” (Deut. 32:8). God has “made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation” (Acts 17:26).

It is well to recognize that, while the Scriptures place high importance on the distinctiveness of nations and tribes as such, they never once mention the concept of race. Biblically there is only one race of men: the human race. There is only one kind of man: that is, mankind. “God hath made of one blood all nations of men.”

The idea of race is strictly a category of evolutionary biology, not of Scripture at all. The threefold division of mankind into Japhethites, Semites, and Hamites is not a racial division, but, rather of three different streams of nations. The biological entity known as “race,” on the other hand, is supposed to be a sub-species in the process of evolving into a new species, with a long evolutionary history of its own. Modern racism has always found its strongest and most vicious expression among doctrinaire evolutionists, men such as Karl Marx, Adolph Hitler, and other such advocates of group struggle and survival of the fittest.

A real understanding of man in relation to his world will never be attained, nor solutions to his problems ever achieved, as long as our educational and political leaders persist in thinking of them in evolutionary categories. Man is not an evolved animal, and his cultures and institutions have not been developed from the herd-instincts of animals. Rather, he is a unique creation, made in the image of God, and his tribes and nations represent divisions established by God for man’s own good and for the ultimate accomplishment of His divine will on the earth, not through man’s own devices but by His power and grace.

Summary of the Biblical Model of Creation

In summary, the biblical model of earth history focuses on three great worldwide events: (1) a period of six days of special creation and formation of all things, the completion and permanence of which are now manifest in the law of conservation of energy; (2) the rebellion of man and the resultant curse of God on all man’s dominion, formalized now in the law of increasing entropy; and (3) the world-destroying flood in the days of Noah, leaving the new world largely under the domain of natural uniformity.

This framework does not, of course, preclude the occurrence of later events of worldwide implications, especially the confusion of tongues at Babel. The Flood itself occupied only a year, but the aftereffects were felt all over the world for many centuries.

The main key, however, to the true interpretation of the physical data relating to earth history, must lie in full recognition of the effects of creation, the curse, and the Flood. The evolutionary system, on the other hand, has tried to correlate all these data in a completely naturalistic framework that either rejects or ignores the significance of these events. It implicitly, if not explicitly, denies God as Creator, Redeemer and Judge.

Tragically, many Christians seek, by one means or another, to compromise Scripture with the assumed evolutionary history of the earth and man. These placating theories must be examined critically. As it is done, there is no intent to criticize or judge individual advocates of such theories. Good Christian men have at one time or another, no doubt with excellent motives, promoted these various ideas. It is not the proponents, but the theories, that will be criticized. The Word of God must take first priority, and secondly, the observed facts of science, rather than the reputations of men. Each of these various compromising theories will be shown in subsequent chapters as unacceptable on biblical, theological, and scientific grounds. The only truly satisfactory model is the simple, literal, historical view of Genesis and science that is supported in this book.

1 See Henry M. Morris’s commentary, The Genesis Record (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1979), p. 105–132, for a more complete discussion of these topics.