Hugh Ross asks,

Social Media Question of the Week: Didn’t Adam’s sin and the sin of Noah’s contemporaries blanket/impact the entire Earth? Therefore, didn’t Adam’s sin alter Earth and all its inhabitants and must not Noah’s flood cover the entire Earth?

My Answer: After Adam sinned, “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it” (Genesis 3:17). What changed was the soil humans worked to grow their food. It became damaged because sinful humans were abusing it. Earth’s physics remained unchanged. The remainder of Earth’s surface was unchanged. Noah’s flood is an example of God surgically removing malignant reprobate sin (uncontrolled evil infecting everything in its vicinity). Note that when God judged Sodom and Gomorrah, he left the wicked Amorites to survive because “the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure” (Genesis 15:16). Therefore, Noah’s flood extended to all the land inhabited by humans and their animals, but no more. It was only the world of the ungodly that was wiped out (2 Peter 2:5).