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by Steve Risner

What happened 4400 years ago that changed the face of the planet? Of course, I'm talking about the Flood that Noah and his family survived, but what really happened? The Bible gives us some details, but there are a lot of things that must have happened to create, maintain, and dissipate a global flood, the details of which are not described in God's Word. Today I'd like to discuss that a bit if I may.

In Genesis 6, you can read how God told Noah what He was going to do and what He wanted Noah to do. In chapter 7, we read the beginning of the Flood. It's very clear that the entire planet was the source of God's sorrow and recipient of His wrath. In Genesis 6:12 we read, “God saw how corrupt the earth had become, for all the people on earth had corrupted their ways.” This says the “earth” (meaning the inhabitants of it) were corrupt—ALL of mankind. God further says, “I am going to put an end to all people... I am surely going to destroy both them and the earth” (verse 17). Some suggest this event was local—that only some area of the Ancient Near East was annihilated. This is, of course, contrary to the story in chapter 6 of Genesis and the understanding of these passages for the last few thousand years or so. There are numerous details in these chapters concerning what would happen, how old Noah was, how many of what Noah was to have, ark dimensions and materials, and several others. Why would there be all this detail if the main part of the story—God's destruction of the surface of the entire planet for its sin—was not really the case? Were only the people of the Ancient Near East evil and disposed to violence? Did God not consider the rest of the earth as part of the earth?

We see in chapter 7 that it rained for 40 days continuously. As I've stated in previous writings, here in Findlay, we know about flooding. It can rain for an hour or two for 3 or 4 consecutive days and the river may flood. Or it can rain all day for 2 days and there's no problem with the river. It's all about how much rain falls. The most rain recorded in modern times in an hour is 12 inches - a foot of water fell in 60 minutes! That's amazing! In a day, the record to beat is 72 inches! Six feet of rain in a day. What if it rained that hard for 40 days? Or what if it only rained 1 ft per day for 40 days? That's a terrific amount of water, not to mention all the other likely sources of flooding during this time.

Now assume that since the Bible doesn't just say it rained really hard for 40 days but that other things happened to generate flooding. There was more to it than a bunch of rain. The fountains of the great deep burst open. I honestly don't know what that means exactly, but I'm assuming it wasn't good if you wanted to live through the Flood. The “deep” is generally the ocean, so it's believed the “great deep” may be something else—like water reserves within the earth. There is evidence for such reservoirs today. That link talks about a reservoir larger than the earth's oceans—all of them! Where did all the water come from/go? We may have the culprit. These subterranean reservoirs, if that is what this passage is talking about, could have all burst open at the same time, spewing unimaginable amounts of water all over the earth's surface. I have no idea what the surface of the earth was like then; it was certainly not like the earth today. In fact, I'd wager that it's possible that there was more land (or less, but I lean towards more) with fewer mountains, and mountains that were not as high as today's highest ranges. This would mean not nearly as much water as skeptics believe would be necessary was, in fact, necessary. The waters wouldn't need to be miles deep to cover the highest mountains of TODAY, but only the highest mountains of the world that then was.

It's believed that, because of the word usage in this passage, a great deal of tectonic activity was going on during this time. The Word says the fountains of the great deep were broken up. This is the same word used to describe what happened when Korah and his followers were swallowed by the earth for their mutiny against Moses. God “broke up” the earth and they fell into it. This leads me (and others) to believe that the land masses literally moved about the face of the earth during this time. I'm not talking like a puck on the ice at a hockey game, but these land masses broke apart (as secular science believes as well), slammed into each other, then rested (nearly completely although they do still move a little) in their current positions.

The effects of this relatively rapid continental movement would be rapid periods of uplift. This uplift and tectonic movement would contribute considerable tsunamis during the Flood, further adding to its destruction. If some mountains were formed earlier during the Flood, the water could easily have eroded some of them to their current lower heights, while those mountains that were formed later during the Flood wouldn't have had such erosion. To be sure everyone is on the same page here, I'm not saying I know this happened a particular way, but it makes sense and works with what we observe. Mountains do grow during periods of rapid uplift and then generally settle down with long periods of little to no growth at all. This is, again, a finger in the eye of the uniformitarian who thinks that some slow, unchanging process we may observe right now is the same process that has acted uniformly over the past however many eons. Few actually believe this is reality, but it's still taught and presented this way.

These ideas—what the fountains of the great deep were, the continental movements, the mountain uplift and erosion—are not directly from Scripture, but they are logical conclusions based on the reading of the text. This is different than twisting the Word to make it fit my preconceived ideas, like the old earth creationist and theistic evolutionist do. We need not vitiate the Word of God to force it to fit into some other religious explanation for the origins of the world or the current condition of our planet. The evidence for a world wide Flood that annihilated everything is fairly easy to see if we're willing to view it from that perspective. There are many details of the humanistic view on origins that fit with the Biblical worldview; the trouble comes with their time line. The only reason—ONLY reason—they believe in the idea of deep time is because they have to in order to uphold their nonsensical belief in universal common descent (the idea that non-living matter became alive and mutated into human beings over billions of years).

The evidence from Scripture is fairly straight forward for a global Flood. It states it quite convincingly numerous times—all the earth, all flesh, all life, etc. God wiped out the planet, which quite possibly meant He wiped out one large land mass that broke apart during the Flood, killing all land dwelling animal life and humans except those on the ark. The idea of a local flood makes no sense at all, either Biblically or even logically. Atheists despise the idea of the Flood and attack it continually. The assault on the global Flood, unfortunately, is one of the first things old earth creationists and theistic evolutionists go to in order to rationalize their marriage of Christianity and humanism. If the Flood wasn't global, they can make up all sorts of scenarios for the landscape we see today, adapting the humanistic myth for origins into their beliefs. Humanism mingled with Christianity is still really humanism, and humanism is where the idea of deep time (billions of years) comes from.

God stated repeatedly that He would and did wipe out all mankind and all land dwelling animals with a Flood. He stated that the entire earth was destroyed, and there are several references throughout Scripture to His promise to never do this again. There are also references to comparing it to what is to come—destruction by fire. Some may act like you need some deep spiritual knowledge and intimate studies of each individual word, learning Hebrew and some other things in order to understand these very simple and straightforward texts. I don't buy that at all. I think it says what it says. I asked Katie Erickson, our Hebrew egghead, about it as well and she agreed. We can make it similar to gnosticism if we really want to make something only an elect few can comprehend, but then it's not the clear teaching of Scripture. It's something else and something that doesn't work with the rest of Scripture. It's not Christianity.

God destroyed all life on land, and we have evidence for that with a lot of dead stuff all over the place. He covered the earth with water. There's evidence for that with sediment layers all over the planet and with fossilized sea creatures on mountain tops. He hates sin and His wrath demonstrated it. He's also merciful and made a way for the righteous few to continue on. Think about these truths and consider what it would mean if just one of them isn't true.

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