The Flood and Modern Geology — John Whitcomb

The Flood as a Miracle of God

This is lecture number 8 in a series of lectures on the general theme of the Bible and science, entitled The Flood and Modern Geology. In our previous lecture on the flood and the final judgment, we discovered that the basic reason why leading scientists today reject the historicity of a global flood at the dawn of human history is not because of scientific reasons, but because of a basic rejection of the concept of a living, personal God who can perform genuine miracles in this world.

Because whatever else the flood was, it was basically a miracle of God. It was a miracle because one week before the flood started, God gathered two each of the basic kinds of air-breathing creatures to the ark.

It was a miracle because the very day that the flood began, all the fountains of the great deep were broken up and the windows of heaven were opened, releasing the upper waters upon this planet. It was a miracle because during the many months that the ark moved on the face of the waters, God supernaturally controlled and protected Noah's family and the animals that were with him in the ark, according to Genesis 8 .1.

But that was not the end of the miracles, because one of the greatest miracles, and yet one that has been often overlooked, is the miracle of the end of the flood. This is briefly stated in the book of Genesis chapter 8, where we are told that after 150 days of the prevailing of the waters upon the earth, the fountains of the great deep and the windows of heaven were stopped, and the rain from heaven was restrained, and the waters returned from off the earth continually.

What does it mean when it says that the fountains of the great deep were stopped? If breaking up the fountains of the great deep in Genesis 7 .11 meant the global upheavals of oceanic basins through volcanic and seismic movements, causing the ocean basins to be lifted up and to pour their waters over the continents, then stopping the fountains of the great deep must have been the complete reverse of this, namely, God's supernatural depressing of ocean basins again, so that newly uplifted continental areas would pour their waters into these ocean basins.

Psalm 104 and the Redistribution of the Floodwaters

So important is that aspect of the flood, that God has given to us an additional passage in the Old Testament to describe what happened and how rapidly it happened and with what effect, in order that we might understand something of the dynamic forces involved in the shaping of the present geographical and topographical features of our planet.

Psalm 104, verses 6 to 9, is an account of how the flood ended in terms of God's preparation of this planet for its present pattern of events and its processes of nature. Psalm 104 is one of the greatest of the historical nature psalms, recording God's dealings with this planet through history in terms of its basic features.

After describing the creation of the earth, we read in Psalm 104, verse 6, Thou coverest it, that is, God covered the earth, with the deep, to home the oceans, as with a vesture. The water stood above the mountains.

In the light of verse 9, we will discover that this was the mountain-covering flood of Noah's day. Now the question comes, how long did it take for the floodwaters to disperse after they covered the entire planet?

What was the cause of their dispersal to their present location in the ocean basins? And the answer comes, frankly, with a great surprise. It was not by gradual processes through God's providence and his use of those processes, those forces available naturally in the crust of the earth that caused mountain ranges to rise to their present altitudes and ocean basins to sink to their present depths.

Note carefully, in verse 7, the tremendous power of God's word and the rapidity with which the oceans were redistributed across this planet. At thy rebuke they fled, at the voice of thy thunder they hasted away.

And a more accurate translation of verse 8 shows us the cause of this dispersal. The mountains rose, the valleys sank down. A translation that has been obscured by a mistranslation in the King James Version, with which most of us are familiar.

So the cause of the fleeing and hasting away of the waters was the fact that God caused the mountains to rise rapidly and ocean basins to sink down rapidly, just as Genesis 8, 3 states. And where did the waters go?

Unto the place which thou hast founded for them. Thou hast set a boundary that they may not pass over, that they turn not again to cover the earth. This is an obvious reference to the rainbow covenant of Genesis 9, whereby God promised to this world that never again would that kind of a flood ever occur.

A proof, by the way, that the deluge was global in extent, supernatural in origin, because if it was a local flood accomplished through providential means, then God has broken his rainbow covenant every time there's been a local flood since then, and there have been thousands of them.

This was a unique deluge, once and for all, never to be repeated in earth history. And as we ponder, therefore, the redistribution of waters and the uplift of continents, we ask ourselves these basic questions.

Pre-Flood Oceans and the Vapor Canopy

What are the differences between the present oceans and the oceans before the flood? And the answer is, first of all, the present oceans are much deeper than those before the flood because now they serve as reservoirs for both oceans, which before the flood were divided from one another by the empty expanse of the atmosphere.

That event recorded in the second day of creation week, which divided the waters, was reversed when God brought back to the earth the upper waters that had served as a vast invisible vapor canopy, trapping the earth's heat, evenly distributing it around this planet, thus providing for the tropical conditions that prevail even in polar regions.

All that ended and ended permanently, because in the second place we must recognize that the present oceans have come to their final resting place, and there they will remain, according to the rainbow covenant, while the earth remains.

The book of Revelation tells us that after the present heavens and earth are destroyed or renovated by God, the new earth that He will create will have no more sea at all. What about the mountain ranges of our present world?

Post-Flood Mountain Ranges and Fossils

In what ways are they different from the mountains before the flood? In the first place, they are vastly higher in altitude, because they serve as a compensating balance factor for the deeper ocean basins on the principle of geologic isostasy, or weight balances.

Much higher in altitude, in fact, many mountain ranges have mountains well over 20 ,000 feet above sea level. In the Rockies, the Andes, the Alps, the Himalayas. Whereas before the flood, we may be sure that no mountains were more than six or seven thousand feet above sea level.

Why? Because the oceanic depths were far shallower, and therefore the weight balance compensation was much less. Furthermore, if mountains were 20 ,000 feet high before the flood, they could never have been covered by the flood waters.

If the earth were completely flat, the oceans would cover it to a depth of only 10 ,000 feet, and therefore we may assume that mountains before the flood were lower in elevation in order to be covered by a global deluge.

It's only since the flood then that the truly huge mountain ranges have arisen, and that not by natural processes over millions of years, but suddenly. And there is much significant geologic evidence for the sudden and recent rising of the great mountain ranges of our world.

In the second place, modern mountains differ from those before the flood because they are filled in many cases with the fossilized remains of billions of plants and animals. Even some of the highest mountains have within their rocks beautifully preserved marine creatures.

How did these get there? All scientists agree, and Bible scholars agree, that they got there by being laid down under the ocean. The only difference of opinion then is to how long it took for them to rise to their present altitudes.

And uniformitarian geologists have no alternative but to assume many millions of years and to grope for explanations for the mechanism, the cause of this great orogeny or diastrophism or mountain building process.

But God was sufficient for the tremendous reshaping of this planet by His omnipotent intervention. And thus we see in verse 8 of Psalm 104 that the mountains rose, not by chance, but by God's power in terminating the great flood.

Furthermore, we may assume that these fossils were laid down not over long periods of time, but by the swirling masses of sediment-saturated waters during the deluge year that destroyed and buried all living things except those preserved in the ark.

Fossilization is an effect of catastrophism, not of uniformitarian gradual processes as we shall see a little later in this lecture. In the third place, modern mountain ranges differ from those before the flood because in many cases they are covered with ice and snow.

But before the flood, we may presume there was no ice or snow on any mountains because of the vast vapor canopy and the even distribution of heat and the lack of convection currents and a totally different water cycle so that there was no rain at all, no rainbows.

Genesis chapter 2 tells us that there was no rain in those days, but simply the escape of trapped subterranean waters in the form of geysers and streams and springs and some type of a mist that settled upon the surface of the earth heavily in the morning hours.

A very different type of climate. So today, we live in a world greatly different in its geologic features than that before the flood. Indeed, as the apostle Peter expressed it, the world that then was being overflowed with water perished.

A lost world, gone forever. All changed by God's supernatural intervention in the days of Noah. Having emphasized the supernatural aspects of the deluge, we must also recognize that not everything pertaining to that flood was supernatural.

Miracles and Providence in Biblical History

Rarely in God's dealings with this earth and with mankind does he totally dispense with his providential means and methods of accomplishing his work. Miracles are exceedingly rare in Bible history, and even in the times when they do appear clustered in a concentrated form, as in the days of Moses and of Elijah, and especially in the ministry of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, we find a certain reticence, an economy of miracle employed by God in his dealings with men.

To such an extent that we may suggest a formula that God never performs miracles when he can accomplish his work in other ways. Miracles are rare. Miracles are special. They shock men into contemplating the significance of this unusual way of God's working.

If they were not rare, they would lose their sign value. They would become cheapened and commonplace by overuse, and that was true even in the public ministry of Christ our Lord. Consider the event at Bethany at the tomb of Lazarus.

Lazarus had three basic problems to overcome to get out of the tomb. First, he was bound hand and foot in grave clothes, stuck together like an Egyptian mummy. Even more significant, his tomb was blocked by a gigantic boulder, sealed shut.

But surely his greatest problem was that he was dead. Did you know that Jesus only helped him in one of his three problems? He told the men, you move the stone, and that was no small task. Jesus could by a miracle of God evaporate the stone and save them the work, but God never does for men by miracle what they can do for themselves.

Jesus said to the men, you loose him and let him go. Jesus by miracle could have unraveled him, loosened him, freed him, but what they could do he refused to do. But there's one thing that they could not have done through all eternity, and that was to bring a dead man to life again.

And Jesus Christ by one spoken miraculous creative word brought that dead man to life again. You see, God honors his varied methods and techniques of accomplishing his work, and the flood is no exception.

Consider Noah's ark. God could have saved Noah and his family a hundred years of concern and labor by building the ark for him, creating it. But God refused to do for Noah what he could do for himself given enough direction and time to do the job.

You say, what does this have to do with our understanding of the geologic aspects of the flood? Just this, 99 of what actually happened during that flood year was not miraculous at all from the standpoint of the movements of the waters and their effects upon this planet.

Some people think that since all leading geologists reject the historicity and even the possibility of a global flood, that therefore we must assume extra miracles in order to accommodate the demands of science today in the sense that there is no visible evidence of such a deluge.

But this is a dangerous approach. The Bible doesn't for one moment hint, for example, that there was an invisible wall that held the waters at mountain covering depth in one small region of the Near East in order to avoid the embarrassing problem of finding evidences for the flood in different parts of the world.

Nor does the Bible for one moment allow an additional miracle of God to tranquilize the flood so that it would cover the whole world and yet not disturb the soil or in any way leave effects that would be visible to geologists today.

This tranquil theory, which was popular for a while in the 19th century, and based its position on the idea that the dove found a fresh olive leaf, thus indicating to them that the flood was so tranquil, supernaturally tranquilized, that it didn't even affect or disturb olive orchards.

But just the opposite is true, because it took 10 weeks for that dove to find that olive leaf after the ark had grounded and after that portion of the earth had been exposed to sunlight. Just enough time, interestingly enough, for the broken branch of an olive tree to sprout again when buried shallow in the earth and exposed to sunshine.

In other words, that emphasizes the stupendous catastrophism of the deluge that wrecked and smashed all forests, trees, and all standing objects in the world and in fact completely reshaped the crust of this planet.

No, there was no tranquilizing of that deluge. The book of Genesis emphasizes the fact that the flood was intended to destroy the earth, as God said to Noah when he announced the purpose of this destruction.

Furthermore, the Bible emphasizes that it covered the entire planet, not just the Near East, and the magnitude of the deluge is not determined by what Noah may have thought about it, but specific statements often repeated in the Word of God.

The flood was a miracle from the standpoint of the movement of the waters, only at the initial point when God broke up the fountains of the great deep, pushing the ocean basins upward and their waters outward over the low-lying continental regions, and increasingly upward during the early phases of the flood year, so that it required six weeks for the flood to attain its maximum mountain covering depth.

That would have been an ideal time span for the creation of a vast complex of rivers in the oceans, great masses of water moving back and forth. When scientists say today that there is no real visible evidence of that kind of a flood, what kind of evidence are they looking for?

The flood was not one huge splash of water and then all over with, leaving strewn, mixed, chaotic materials all over the planet. No, Genesis emphasizes the fact that it took six weeks for it to attain maximum depth, and we may be sure that once God pushed up ocean basins, that the waters would have accomplished their fantastically destructive work and their transportation of eroded sediments and deposition of them exactly according to the known laws of hydrodynamics today.

Of moving water under flood conditions. And God miraculously released the upper waters, but once they were released, they came down to this planet according to the known laws of gravity. And as the water poured through the atmosphere to the earth beneath, the waters were shaped by the movement through the air into spherical droplets, and as they struck the surface of the earth, it didn't take a miracle of God to cause them to erode the surface and to form streams and rivulets and rivers as they rushed to the ocean to join the waters from beneath.

In other words, the key to determining the nature and effects of that kind of a flood is not in the hands of speculative geologists who simply observe the present geologic phenomena and try to imagine what causes may or may not have been involved.

The key to unlocking the mystery of the magnitude and the effects of the flood is found in the mind of a man who takes the biblical account for what it says and then applies to that account the known observable processes of moving water under flood conditions today, which is a branch of the science of civil engineering called hydraulics.

I am confident that in these days God and his providence has raised up men who are highly skilled in this particular discipline to analyze the true nature of that deluge. One of these men is Dr. Henry M. Morris, for 13 years head of the Department of Civil Engineering at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, a man internationally known for his great college textbook, now in its second edition, published by Ronald Press in New York City, entitled Applied Hydraulics in Engineering, a 600-page volume packed with formulas that spell out the amazing capacity of water, of moving water, to transport sediments and to destroy the things that stand in its pathway under flood conditions.

It is our purpose to briefly analyze Dr. Morris's contribution to our understanding of the deluge and to come therefore to an appreciation of what God really did through those gigantic masses of water in that amazing year in which God consigned the entire world of living things to permanent destruction because man had rebelled against his God and had lost his privilege of existing in God's world.

The moral causes of the flood are primary. Man rebelled and therefore as the king of the earth he had lost his dominion and lost his right to continually pollute and to pervert God's glorious creation on this planet and therefore was consigned to destruction because a holy and righteous God will not forever tolerate sin.

Thus, as we consider what really happened in the days of Noah from the standpoint of hydraulic engineering, we come to a much greater appreciation of the enormous factors hydrodynamically that God brought to bear upon this completely morally corrupted world in the days of Noah when all the imagination of men's hearts was only evil continually and God had to actually say according to Genesis 6, my spirit will not strive with man forever.

Therefore, let us consider as we turn over to the second part of this tape some of the basic aspects of what was accomplished by the movement of the waters in the days of Noah at the time of the global flood.

Flood Velocity, Sediment Transport, and Destruction

Part two of our study on the flood in modern geology. As we come to understand what Genesis actually says about the flood, namely that it took six weeks to attain mountain covering depth and then covered the entire planet for a year, we can appreciate in the light of modern principles of hydrodynamic engineering what enormous factors for destruction were unleashed upon this planet in that year-long global deluge.

Imagine if you can a river moving down its channel hundreds of miles to the sea, five miles an hour, carrying enormous masses of mud and silt hundreds of miles from their source to their delta in the sea.

Now if you can imagine that river suddenly having its velocity multiplied by a factor of 10 so that instead of five miles an hour, its waters move 50 miles an hour. Its carrying capacity and destructive power is suddenly multiplied tens of thousands of times so that instead of mere pebbles and sand particles and mud particles, it is now capable of carrying huge boulders, ripping up forests like matchsticks and smashing almost anything man can build to resist its impact.

Our nation in recent years has had more than one opportunity to study the enormously destructive potential of a flood on the rampage. The Johnstown flood of 1889, recently described in full detail in a publication that brings to memory again the spectacle of 40 or 50 feet of water rushing down a channel toward the city of Johnstown deep in that pocket between the mountains where 20 million tons of water literally picked up houses, trees, the soil, people, engines, locomotives, houses and swept them across the valley and smashed them across the mountains like mere toys.

Just a couple of years ago in Peru, an earthquake shook the coast of that South American nation and up in the Andes in the dead of night, a mountain glacial lake was loosened and began to rush down the side of the mountain toward that beautiful Indian tourist city of Yungay, which was my privilege to visit in the summer of 1950, of which I still have photographs showing the beautiful cobblestone streets and tiled roof homes.

And in the dead of night, that city was overwhelmed by millions of tons of water that had picked up gravel, mud, boulders, all types of sediments, and by the time it hit that city in the valley below, it was moving 230 miles an hour.

Within 60 seconds, the entire city of 20 ,000 people was buried under 100 feet of mud and boulders. And even yet, the city has not been excavated. It has been buried forever. In other words, the depth of a deposit, the depth of a sedimentary deposit is not a factor of time, but of the magnitude of the hydrodynamic forces involved.

So that moving water under flood conditions has unbelievably great destructive power. What would happen to New York City if suddenly the Atlantic Ocean arose 50 or 70 feet and swept inland over the city, 50 or 80 miles an hour?

What would happen to New York City? It would not be a problem of cleaning up the city afterwards. The problem would be to find the city, as every object above bedrock would be swept hundreds of miles away and the city would never be found again.

One sweep of the oceans would wipe out the best of man's engineering projects, and therefore when God employed the destructive forces of the oceans, He employed the greatest known power for destruction in all this world, short of atomic disintegration.

Again, the Apostle Peter was not exaggerating when he said in 2 Peter 3 .6, the world that then was being overflowed with water perished. Never underestimate what God could have done to this world in that year of the flood.

As some have actually said, oh well, it couldn't have left very significant geologic remains because it only lasted a year. Secondly, let's consider what floodwaters under these conditions would have done in terms of transportation of sediments and deposition of the sediments that they carried.

One of the interesting things about floods that frankly I had not realized a few years ago was the fact that they do not always leave complete chaos and ruin in their wake. Take for example that river we were speaking about a moment ago, moving 50 miles an hour down its channel to the sea, carrying all kinds of sediments, fine silt, gravel, rocks, huge boulders, watch what happens as that river begins to slow down.

45 miles an hour, all the heaviest objects drop out and form a horizontal layer on the riverbed. 40 miles an hour, the next heaviest things drop out automatically, forming another layer on top of the first one without disturbing it.

And as the river slows down 35, 30, 25 miles an hour, the things that are carried automatically are signaled, as it were, for dropout to form additional layers on the bottom of the river, so that finally when the river returns to normal velocity and the flood stage has ended, you could slice through that riverbed with a knife and see everything it had carried, beautifully assorted according to mass and density, like the layers of a birthday cake.

This is the principle of hydrodynamic selectivity, of moving water under flood conditions, so that we can actually say that in a real sense, instead of producing chaos, moving waters like that reorganize and beautify the things that they carry.

Of course, I wouldn't want my personal possessions to be reorganized in the sense of horizontal layers superimposed according to their mass and density, but we can't say that this is total chaos either, in the sense of things mixed together in no order or arrangement at all.

And when we consider this principle, we then are face to face with the challenge of many uniformitarian evolutionary geologists when they say, where are the evidences of a global flood in the days of Noah?

What kind of evidence are you looking for? If you understand what really was accomplished in the earlier phases of the deluge, you will then know what type of evidence to seek for to confirm the historicity, the actuality of that catastrophe.

Therefore, since the flood took six weeks to attain mountain covering depth, we can imagine masses of water moving inland, sweeping back to the sea with their sediment-saturated currents, and then coming back inland again, farther, picking up more sediments and sweeping them to the sea, and back and forth, so that by the time the flood covered all the mountains of the world, there were literally thousands and millions of distinct rivers, each carrying their load of material eroded and transported, each going through the cycle of slowing down, dumping their load, only to have another current from another direction, carrying its distinct load of material, slowing down and dumping its load in horizontal layers on top of the first one, so that each stream not only selects out the things that it carries and deposits them as its velocity decreases, but then has another river deposit its complex of materials, so that through the weeks and months of this global flood, you'd expect to find superimposed layers everywhere around this planet.

And the amazing thing is, of course, that that's exactly what we find. Take the Grand Canyon, for example. One of the most amazing things in all this world, from a geologic standpoint, a huge crack in the crust of the earth 5 ,000 feet deep, five miles across from edge to edge, and a hundred miles in either direction, as you stand at the edge of that canyon, look down and look across, what do you see?

Perfectly horizontal, superimposed layers like the layers of a birthday cake. And that's only one short, small segment of similar features covering 500 ,000 square miles of Utah, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico.

The Grand Canyon and Catastrophic Layering

What caused these layers to be formed like that? Uniformitarian geologists for many years have been puzzled by this, and of course, in the nature of the case, have had to assume that it was all formed gradually, over hundreds of millions of years.

And we are told that, as the story began, in that particular region, there was one great flat area called a geosyncline, 500 ,000 square miles. Of course, there is no such perfectly flat area anywhere in the world today, nor could there be, but we are asked to believe that this did exist.

And also, unbelievably, there must have been hundreds of rivers all around that flat basin that were pouring sediments into it, and this is unbelievable, in such a way that the sediments were distributed all over the basin evenly, and it sank at the same rate the sediments accumulated, so that hundreds of feet of sediments over 500 ,000 square miles could be laid down by these rivers.

Instead of forming conical deltas, they did this type of thing for the sake of the evolutionary scheme. Then we are told the whole system was lifted above sea level, thousands of years went by, perhaps millions, it sank down below sea level again, and more rivers were there waiting to deposit another layer on top of the first one, perfectly horizontal and conformable to it, and that this process of up and down river deposition, layer upon layer, went on for hundreds of millions of years until finally we have 5 ,000 feet of layers, which were then carved into by the Colorado River producing the canyon we see today.

Now from the standpoint of hydraulic engineering, this is a totally impossible interpretation. Dr. Henry Morris and Dr. Clifford Burdick, who was a geologist in the Grand Canyon area, having studied these features for years, along with other geologists who have studied the effects of moving water under flood conditions, have come to the conclusion that nothing could be farther from the true explanation of what we see in the Grand Canyon series.

Why not? Because a geosyncline, absolutely flat area of such an extent, is impossible under the conditions geologically known in this planet. Those kinds of rivers could not have existed, and even if they did, and the region was uplifted, it could not have been pushed back down again, perfectly horizontal, totally unaffected by buckling, twisting, erosion, so that it was completely conformable to the next layer above it.

You see, once a water deposited horizontal layer has been disturbed, twisted, uplifted, it can never be flattened out and pushed back down again. It's a one-way process. It's irreversible. One of the aspects of the second law of thermodynamics, irreversibility of such processes to regain the original order and form that has been destroyed.

And therefore, the only possible explanation for the Grand Canyon series is that each of these thick, widespread layers was caused by huge masses of sediment-saturated water sweeping over that part of the planet in terms of a global catastrophe.

And before the layer that is deposited can be twisted, uplifted, tilted, eroded, another layer is deposited on top of it by another massive movement of water from another direction, and then yet another, and another, and another.

In the complexities of that deluge in that particular part of this planet, this huge series was built up. And then finally, the whole continental uplift took place, and in that region, the crack occurred in that geologically weak fault line, leaving the Grand Canyon, which so far from being carved by the Colorado River itself, was thus split open.

And the river that we see today is simply, as it were, the final remnant of the outwash of trapped inland waters hurrying back to the sea in terms of Psalm 104, the waters hasted away to the places which thou hast founded for them.

You see, there are many incised meander features in that part of our continent, which could not have been caused under present conditions of rivers simply moving across terrain. Canyon cutting like that cannot occur by a mere river movement, which would have to knock down the sidewalls and spread out its wide valley, as in the Mississippi, instead of cutting down.

Thus, that region must have been formed when the materials were comparatively unconsolidated and soft as a result of a sudden uplift. And thus, as Dr. Morris has elaborated, not only in his great textbook on applied hydraulics and engineering, but also in the book The Genesis Flood, which it was my privilege to co-author with him a number of years ago, these factors alone totally destroy the uniformitarian evolutionary interpretation.

Fossilization and Evidence of Catastrophic Burial

But in addition to the destructive power of moving water under flood conditions, and its remarkable effects in terms of transportation and sedimentation, we also recognize a third important thing about vast floods.

Namely, they are the only known factors that can bring massive fossilization of plants and animals. Looking into the Grand Canyon, you see literally billions of fossils beautifully preserved. Fishes twisted in their dying agony, almost innumerable in the Devonian strata of the Mesozoic zone.

Delicate plants with their flower patterns perfectly preserved. In some cases, tree trunks crisscrossing several layers, polystrate strata that could not possibly have been formed by trees sitting in a semi-erect position for thousands of years waiting for sediments to build up around them to fossilize them.

And then huge reptiles, 50 or 60 feet long from tooth to tail, perfectly preserved in the rock as we see in the Dinosaur National Park in Utah, ready to be chipped out and reassembled in museums. These creatures were not buried gradually over years of time by normal processes.

In the oceans today, fishes aren't sinking to the bottom and becoming fossils. They're picked to pieces by scavengers. They decompose and vanish forever. In the dry land regions, fossils aren't being formed.

Millions of buffalo roam the western prairies of our country for centuries, but not one fossil of a buffalo has ever yet been found. Why? Because when the beast dies, its body is exposed to weathering processes and even the bones then crumble and return to dust and vanish forever.

But when you dig into the crust of the earth, you're confronted with literally millions of beautifully preserved creatures of all sizes and shapes, indicating very clearly that there was an overwhelming catastrophe of global proportions that came upon this planet.

In the tundras of Siberia, literally millions of mammoths and other animals trapped suddenly, not only buried but frozen solid instantly under conditions that could not possibly be imagined in our present world.

Many such features could be described in detail, which we have attempted to do in our book on the Genesis Flood, such as the presence of pollen grains in the lowest strata of the Grand Canyon, showing that the evolutionary sequence is in complete error.

Reversed strata, the upside down layers that we find, for example, in the Lewis Overthrust area of Montana in the Glacier National Park, reversing the order that evolutionists would expect on the basis of the index fossils within them, and many, many other features that are important for the understanding of what really happened to this world.

Divine Sovereignty and the Meaning of the Flood

God wants men to understand that all things have not continued as they were from the beginning of the creation, and that the flood of Noah's day was the greatest single blow ever delivered by an omnipotent God to this planet, to shake man out of his complacency to recognize that not he but God is sovereign in this world.

In fact, Psalm 29 was composed, I believe, to emphasize this aspect of the sovereignty of God in terms of the deluge. Listen to this passage, Psalm 29, 1 and 2. Ascribe unto Jehovah, O ye sons of the mighty.

Ascribe unto Jehovah glory and strength. Ascribe unto Jehovah the glory due unto his name. Worship Jehovah in holy array. Why should we do that? Doesn't man have all the answers, the key to ultimate interpretation of the mysteries of the universe?

And the answer is no. God is sovereign. Man is here by God's grace alone. And as the passage goes on, it tells us of the enormous impact of God's voice upon the waters, upon the many waters. The voice of the Lord is full of majesty until we come to verse 10, where we read these astounding words.

Jehovah sat as king at the flood. God brought that flood upon this earth, not a quirk of natural processes through chance. And the amazing thing about this statement is this. It goes on to say that God sits as king forever.

He is the sovereign who rules this world, not man. And God would have men remember that flood, I think, in at least three ways. First, through the living memory of oral tradition, as peoples all over the world have had handed down from them from their ancestors the memory of that flood.

An example of that is the Gilgamesh epic of the Babylonians, written 2 ,000 years before Christ, 500 years before Genesis, which tells in remarkable detail how that flood came, and how that favored family was spared, and how the dove and the raven were released at stated intervals to determine the assuaging of the waters, and how that ark landed on a mountain, and how the Noah of that experience, called Utnapishtim, offered his sacrifice of thanksgiving.