Monday’s lesson states:
Peter reminds us that many will be unprepared for Christ’s return because they “willfully forget” (2 Pet. 3:5, NKJV) what happened at the Flood. Today, even though the world has a collective memory of a great deluge (an astonishing number of global cultures tell the story of a devastating flood, from the ancient Greeks to the Mayans), the story of Noah is today perhaps one of the most ridiculed of the Bible’s accounts. As predicted, the world is willfully setting the story aside as a myth, no matter how clearly and explicitly it is depicted in the Old Testament and referred to numerous times in the New Testament.
Almost every culture has a legend of the Flood; I’ve collected many in Chapter Ten of my book, “Dinosaurs - An Adventist View (on sale at Amazon for only $14.95).” A discussion of the Babylonian Flood legends can be found here. At creation-wiki, there is this longer article compiling and discussing Flood legends.
Monday’s lesson also mentions the the moral conditions of the antediluvian world as narrated in Genesis 6:1-8. The statement in Gen. 6:4: “There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown” always raises questions about the “Nephilim.”
I’ve written an in-depth treatment on the topic of the Nephilim in part one and part two of a longer series on giants. Unfortunately, the wording of Genesis 6:4 has led to much misguided speculation about interbreeding between humans and angels (or demons). The reality, however, is that people who lived before the Flood were of much greater stature than modern people, and relatively gigantic people (such as those reported by the Israelite spies after their reconnaissance into Canaan) persisted in some areas for several centuries. This is all that is communicated by the term “Nephilim.”