Genesis 9:8-17

God spoke to Noah and to his sons with him, saying, “As for me, behold, I establish my covenant with you, and with your offspring after you, and with every living creature that is with you: the birds, the livestock, and every animal of the earth with you, of all that go out of the ship, even every animal of the earth. I will establish my covenant with you: all flesh will not be cut off any more by the waters of the flood, neither will there ever again be a flood to destroy the earth.” God said, “This is the token of the covenant which I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for perpetual generations: I set my rainbow in the cloud, and it will be for a sign of a covenant between me and the earth. It will happen, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the rainbow will be seen in the cloud, and I will remember my covenant, which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh, and the waters will no more become a flood to destroy all flesh. The rainbow will be in the cloud. I will look at it, that I may 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 token of the covenant which I have established between me and all flesh that is on the earth.”

Here again we have proof that the flood was a global one. God says in His promise that He will never “destroy the earth” with a flood again. If the flood was only local, what would God be promising here? We have obviously had enormous floods that have destroyed animals and people since Noah’s time. If the flood was local, then God’s promise would have been broken and the Bible would be inconsistent.

Some have thought that rainbows first appeared after the flood. I tend to believe that they existed before the flood, but that God was simply attaching his commitment to that particular sign. We know that, someday, God’s wrath will come by fire and there will be many who die at that time too. We should never forget the flood, because it’s a warning about what’s yet to come in the future.

2 Peter 3:5-6 :

For this they willfully forget, that there were heavens from of old, and an earth formed out of water and amid water, by the word of God; by which means the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished. But the heavens that now are, and the earth, by the same word have been stored up for fire, being reserved against the day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men.