The Flood

We find three periods, at which it was given by God to the human race, the first of which was immediately after the creation of man, the second upon the restoration of mankind after the flood, and the third upon that more glorious restoration through Jesus Christ.

The first objection usually made against the lawfulness of war is taken from the law given to Noah and his posterity, Gen.

upon the renewal of the human race, after the deluge, that the same evil custom might not be established, God thought proper to restrain it by severer means.

And do not these things make plain that the Lord preached the good news both to those who perished in the flood — or rather were fettered — and to those held in prison and ward?

If, then, in the flood all sinful flesh perished, the chastisement having come to them for their instruction, first we must believe that the will of God, being instructive and active, saves those who turn;

So that, wishing thence to cut off the great course of sin, God brought a flood upon the earth, destroying every living soul;

The lives of men with billows;

And whilom water too began to win-

As goes the story- when it overwhelmed

They tell, indeed, how the strength of the waters overwhelmed the dark earth;

that there was a deluge of old too, on account of the unbeliefs and iniquities of men;

Noah too God delivered from the flood uncircumcised, and not keeping the Sabbath.

In short, let them show, as we have already said before, that Adam kept the Sabbath, or that Abel, offering to God a holy victim, pleased him by the religion of the Sabbath, or that Enoch, translated, was a keeper of the Sabbath, or that Noah, the builder of the ark, observed the Sabbath on account of the immense flood, or that Abraham offered his son Isaac in observance of the Sabbath, or that Me …

unjustly that the malice of that age was smitten by rains and then by fires;

For the first prophet, Moses, who set forth, beginning from the past, the founding of the world and the sprouting of the human race, and presently the avenging force of the flood upon the iniquity of that age, by his prophesying down to his own time, and thereafter through his own affairs, gave forth images of things to come;

and measured out anew to the second generation after the flood:

For just as, after the waters of the flood, by which the ancient iniquity was purged, after the baptism, so to speak, of the world, a dove, the herald of the heavenly anger laid aside, announced peace to the earth, being sent forth from the ark and returning with the olive — a sign which even among the nations is held forth for peace — by the same disposition, by a spiritual effect, the dove of th …

I suppose they did not think that, published before the cataclysm, it could have survived safe after that disaster of the world which abolished all things.

For already the Lord had shown His judgment through the flood, and had moreover threatened it through the requiring of blood "from the hand of a brother and from the hand of every beast.

Other iniquities provoked the flood, once for all rebuked, such as they were, yet not seventy times seven, as the two marriages deserved.