Do Creation’s Ocean Boundaries and Rest Exclude a Global Flood?

At a glance

Noah’s Flood Revisited ends its biblical case for a regional Flood with a fence: creation’s ocean boundaries, God’s finished rest, and an established water cycle are read as closing the door on any later global inundation. This response examines each reading in the context it belongs to — poetry, narrative, and argument — and asks what each passage actually fences in.

The book’s biblical case for a regional Flood has a last line of defense. After its argument from the Flood narrative’s own language, it gathers passages that seem to set limits on later history: oceans given permanent boundaries when the world was made, a God who rests from finished works, and rain falling long before Noah. If those readings hold, then reworking the planet’s surface at the Flood is ruled out before the scientific questions even begin. The book presents them together as biblical clues to the Flood’s extent [1].

This response examines the three fences in turn: the boundary passages (Job 38; Psalm 104; Proverbs 8; Jeremiah 5), the rest of Hebrews 4, and the pre-Flood water cycle and rainbow of Genesis 2 and 9.

The book’s case, stated as strongly as it deserves

• The boundaries were decreed, and they hold. The book reads Job 38, Psalm 104, Proverbs 8, and Jeremiah 5 as teaching that once the sea was given its place at creation, it would never again cover all the dry land — a standing order that a global Flood would have to violate [1].
• The rest is a finished work. Hebrews 4 grounds God’s rest in works completed from the world’s foundation. On the book’s reading, nearly all of Earth’s geological features cannot belong to a later reconstruction without making that rest incomplete [1].
• The water cycle predates the Flood. Genesis 2:5–6 is read as describing a stage in the establishment of the water cycle, not a rainless world before Noah; on this reading clouds, rain, and rainbows existed from creation’s early days [2].
• The rainbow was already familiar. Genesis 9, on the book’s reading, assigns covenant meaning to a phenomenon already known rather than producing the first rainbow; the novelty lies in the promise, not the physics [2].

What the book gets right

Three acknowledgments belong here, and they are not small.

The passages really do assert a boundary that holds. Job’s sea has doors and bars; Jeremiah’s waves break on sand by ordinance; Proverbs places the sea’s limit among creation’s decrees; the psalm pledges the waters will not again cover the earth. This site takes that permanence seriously — no response here defends an ocean that overruns continents in ordinary times.

The book is also candid about Psalm 104’s shape, conceding that it is not a chronological narrative parallel to Genesis 1. That candor matters for the discussion below, because it concedes the psalm’s frame is the question — not its sincerity.

And the boundary argument is exegetical in form, which is the right form. It cannot be settled by importing a geological model — in either direction — and this response settles nothing that way.

Test one: what kind of boundary does the psalm set?

The strongest of the boundary passages is also the one the book’s own notes engage most directly. Psalm 104 describes the world with the psalmist’s eye — cattle, cedars, ships, lions — and most of it plainly describes the present order: verbs of ongoing action, a world already populated and worked. Near the beginning, though, four verses tell of waters that once stood over the mountains, then fled at a divine rebuke, going down to the place appointed for them, where a boundary now holds them back from once again covering the earth.

The book reads those verses as creation week’s third day — and admits the psalm is not chronological, which is where the counter-reading has its say. The principal counter-reading, made at length by Terry Mortenson at the site the book’s notes engage, argues that the psalm’s only real touchpoints with Genesis 1 are its opening and its sun-and-moon line; that the rest describes creation as it appears to the psalmist, not creation as it happened; and that the four boundary verses track the Flood itself — waters standing above the mountains, a retreat at God’s rebuke, and a pledge never again to cover the earth [3].

Two of Mortenson’s details carry most of the weight. First, the pledge in the psalm matches the covenant language of Genesis 9 and the oath of Isaiah 54:9 — a promise that was never made at the close of day three. If the boundary had been decreed at creation with no promise attached, then the Flood would have broken a decree; if it was pledged in the aftermath of a covering, then the psalm’s line has a previous covering to look back on. And the line carries the word “again” (Psalm 104:9) — a word that needs an earlier covering behind it. Second, the recessional verse reads most naturally as land and sea being rearranged at the Flood’s end — mountains rising, valleys sinking — a point the article presses against several standard translations [3].

Our response

The point here is not that geology forces the psalm’s reading — the book rightly disowns that move, and so does this site. The point is that the psalm’s own words are at home in the Flood story the book itself affirms: a previous covering, a retreat at a rebuke, a new arrangement of high and low, and a promise of no repetition. On the book’s reading, all of that is pushed back to creation week and scrubbed down to ordinary providence. The text does not read like something straining to say less than it says.

The other three boundary witnesses behave similarly under inspection. Job’s doors and bars are given to the sea by the God who asks who shut it in — the imagery of a door supposes a keeper who can open it, and the Flood account has him do exactly that with the fountains of the deep and the windows of heaven (Genesis 7:11). Jeremiah’s sand is offered as evidence of a faithfulness that outlasts storms, in a book that announces the storm of judgment on his own generation and beyond — the boundary testifies to God’s constancy, not to the impossibility of divine judgment. Proverbs places the sea’s limit among creation’s decrees; a decree is violated precisely when a higher decree of judgment overrides it, which is the Flood account’s own claim. None of these passages fixes the date of the boundary’s decreeing; all of them are compatible with a boundary that was suspended once and re-fixed afterward.

Test two: the rest that Hebrews calls rest

The book’s second fence is the rest of God. Hebrews 4:3–4 quotes the creation rest to argue that a rest remains to be entered; the book reads that finished rest as excluding the attribution of nearly all Earth’s geological features to Noah’s Flood [1].

The passage has to be allowed to do its own work. Hebrews is a sermon, and its subject is not geology but a warning — drawn from the wilderness generation that fell in the desert and never entered the rest — against the same failure repeating. When it grounds the rest in works finished from the world’s foundation, it is explaining why rest exists to be entered, not declaring history closed to judgment. The sermon’s own logic depends on the opposite: the wilderness generation perished inside history, after the rest began; the argument assumes God remains at work in judgment and deliverance.

The Flood, on anyone’s reading, is not an act of creation. It makes nothing and establishes no new kind. The book’s own theology elsewhere places it in the same sequence as the judgment to come — a world judged by water, then reserved for fire (2 Peter 3:5–7) — and no one suggests the coming fire restarts creation. A rest from creating is not a prohibition on judging, and the Flood account is a judgment from first sentence to last.

Test three: rain, the water cycle, and day four

The third fence concerns the weather. The book reads Genesis 2:5–6 as a stage in the establishment of the water cycle rather than a portrait of a rainless antediluvian world, and takes the fourth day’s lighting of the sky as the luminaries becoming visible rather than first existing [2][4].

Much of this can simply be granted. Genesis 2:5–6 speaks of conditions at the point when the man is about to be formed — a plot stage, not a weather report for the centuries to follow. The Flood narrative is itself a story of rain in abundance: forty days and nights of it, with the windows of heaven opened. Whatever one decides about rain before Noah, the Flood account does not depend on centuries of drought — and if the wider point is that rain fell throughout human history, then it is rain that the Flood narrative absorbs without difficulty. A fence that fences nothing cannot exclude anything.

The day-four question is a side corridor for the same reason. Whether the lights were appointed to their roles or first kindled on that day is a question young-earth readers themselves answer differently; the Flood account is untroubled by either answer, and so is this response. What the fourth day cannot do is serve as evidence for the scale of a judgment that comes many generations later.

Test four: the rainbow before the promise

The last piece is the sign itself. The book argues that Genesis 9 assigns covenant meaning to a familiar rainbow rather than creating a first one [2].

Grant it. The text never says the bow was new; a sign can be appointed over something long seen, and readers ancient and modern have taken the passage both ways. What the passage does not do is decide the Flood’s extent. That question was examined in this series’ first response, where the covenant’s scope — all flesh, every living creature, the earth under the bow — was found to keep step with the judgment’s scope. Whether the rainbow’s colors were newly hung or newly pledged, the covenant’s language works the same way, and it is the language that carries the argument.

What this leaves standing

Take the fences one by one. The psalm’s boundary verses contain the Flood’s own story in miniature — a covering, an at-rebuke retreat, a reordered land, a no-again — and the psalm’s pledge matches a covenant that was never made at creation’s close. The rest of Hebrews is a summons to enter, not a geology clause, and its own logic assumes God at work in history after the rest began. Rain, the water cycle, and the day-four lights are either granted or immaterial; the rainbow need not have been new, and its familiarity changes nothing about the covenant’s reach.

None of this requires reading the boundary passages as geology; the book is right to insist on that. It requires something narrower, which is stating plainly what the passages say: the sea has a keeper and a door, the door has been opened once in judgment and shut with a promise, and the promise itself looks back on a covering. That is not a fence against the Flood the book itself affirms. It is the Flood’s own fence — set, as the psalm suggests, after the waters went down.