The Ark and the Darkness (43-Minute Version)

Genesis Apologetics

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I think people don't believe in the flood today because they don't have access to the accurate information and evidences that are there.

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We have, of course, the whole embedded presupposition of evolution and the geologic column and all of these things which tell students as they come along that the earth has existed for millions if not billions of years, that man is a product simply of natural succession.

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A flood is a supernatural event. A flood is a divine judgment. A flood destroyed mankind.

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And they're not told that there are evidences of these things. They aren't shown the historicity of Genesis to say that this holds up very well in terms of our scientific age.

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I think it's really that they're afraid of appearing silly in any way. But when you actually go past the surface and look at the feasibility of it and the historicity of it, it's almost inescapably plausible.

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The Holy Bible. A book inspired and architected by God and written by his people, dating back to the beginning of real human history, from the time of man's true origins.

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A book that teaches us that the earth is not millions of years old as we've been brought up to believe.

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A book teaching us that we did not come from monkeys or apes or primordial soup, but a book that instead shows us our creator is a loving, merciful, and just God.

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A God who created a beautiful world in which the entire planet was once a paradise.

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Evidences in Genesis were shown that God had finished all of creation in six literal days.

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And that indeed, everything he had created was very, very good.

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In the span of four days, God was finished with the heavens and the earth.

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And it was on the fifth day that he began making the sea creatures, both great and small.

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And on that very same day, he also made all of the exotic flying creatures.

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On the sixth day, he made all of the majestic land creatures, which included all of the dinosaurs, along with mankind.

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He also planted a garden, and in the midst of it, the tree of life.

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But there was another tree God had also placed in the garden, one that God commanded man not to eat from.

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Sadly, mankind used their free will to sin against their holy and righteous

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God. With free will comes consequences. And in this case, the consequences of sin would plunge mankind into darkness.

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Before the fall, God saw everything that he had made and was very good. It was just the way it should have been.

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It came forth exactly as he intended. And we get some idea of how good it was in the last three verses when

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God says that both man and the animals and birds were vegetarian. They didn't eat each other.

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They ate the plants and the fruit of the plants. Creation was in a state of innocence.

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This affirms a fundamental element of God's character. He is good. God is not the author of evil or death.

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God came into the garden. He had fellowship with man, and they could actually communicate with him and see him.

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They would have lived forever. God warned him beforehand, if you eat from this, you're going to die. Well, Adam did eat.

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God told Adam, you're going to die. God said, from dust you came and to dust you shall return.

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So that's physical death. Through one man, sin entered the world, and death through sin.

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Adam and Eve began to die physically. The fall of man affected the whole creation.

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The ground was cursed. The whole creation is groaning in bondage to corruption.

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And it was not just man who had been corrupted, but all under man's dominion.

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Animals became carnivores and turned on each other and man.

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Where once the earth had been filled with God's goodness, now was filled with the celebration of evil and endless violence.

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Paradise, along with man's innocence, was now gone.

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The Lord Jesus would tell us later that just as in the days of Noah, so too would the world become again just before his return.

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In Genesis 6, it speaks of every thought of man's heart was only evil continually, and that the whole world was filled with violence because of man.

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And God said, I'm going to destroy the earth. The remnant, Noah and his family, they found grace in God's sight.

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Apparently they were not of those that were corrupted, and God took that remnant of mankind and was able to preserve it.

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But one of the things people find interesting is the lifespans of humans before the flood.

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Noah was 600 years old, and after he got off the ark, he lived 350 more years. He was 950 years old when he died.

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In the Bible, we are told that before the flood, men lived to be nearly a thousand years old.

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The average age of men at the time was so staggeringly high compared to today that some have a difficult time comprehending how such longevity was even possible.

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Yet, a major clue lies within the ages given to us in the book of Genesis. In almost computer -like fashion, the book of Genesis reveals that the post -flood lifespans of the genealogical line of Adam, following mathematical concepts known as exponential decay, meaning that if you were to graph the lifespans of all of the men after the flood, you don't see a linear line gradually sloping down, as you would likely see if the ages were made up.

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But instead, what you see is an exponentially decaying curve with minor variations since no two people are alike.

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Would the men who recorded these ages through history really have conspired together to create data that follows an exponential decay curve?

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Instead, what we see resembles exactly the type of data we would expect in the aftermath of a worldwide flood, revealing a steep initial drop -off of lifespans just after the flood due to the catastrophic environmental changes.

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No more access to nutrient -dense foods from the world that was lost, and genetic mutations that were not before present.

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The truth is that no one at the time of recording these metrics would even think to plot them in an exponential decay curve if they were making up fiction.

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This sophisticated decay curve is actually the result of a real and easily provable flood event.

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Most biology didn't need to be on the Ark. Most plants didn't need to be on the

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Ark. Most insects didn't need to be on the Ark. Only the creatures that have breath in their lungs. Most of the species live in the ocean, which do just fine in a flood.

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So the Bible doesn't say that Noah was to take two of every species onto the Ark. It was to take two of every kind.

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The same word that's used in Genesis 1 that talks about God creating different kinds of plants and animals to reproduce after their kind.

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You see, God instructed Noah to only bring the vertebrae land animals.

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And when you simplify those animals to their genealogical class structure found in Genesis, which is known as a kind, you can further significantly reduce the number of animal kinds needed down to around roughly 1 ,400 kinds, or approximately 6 ,750 animals in total.

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Of those animals, you also don't need to bring fully mature adults, when smaller juveniles would fit better, eat less, waste less, and live longer while reproducing in the post -flood world.

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With roughly 6 ,750 animals on board the Ark, we can now also estimate that approximately 1 ,400 cages were needed.

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And when considering that only 20 % of the Ark's volume was needed for food storage, you can see that we have plenty of room left over for cages and infrastructure, with the remaining area able to fit the equivalent of 483 semi -trailers within its volume.

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It's also no surprise that the dimensions God gave for the Ark turned out to be optimal for stability.

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In fact, if we were to scale the Ark up, it appears that modern cruise ships have taken notes from the

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Ark's dimensions, as you can see striking similarities in shapes and proportions that they share.

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But as compelling as the science behind the Ark is, we must not forget that it is God who orchestrated the events.

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It was God who decided the time to judge the world had come. And it was

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God who was ultimately responsible for the deliverance of all who were aboard the

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Ark. In the second book of Peter, we are told that in the last days, before Jesus Christ returns, people would deliberately ignore the evidence of the flood.

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Or as the Bible puts it, they would be willingly ignorant of the flood.

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Peter tells us that in the last days, men would mock the Bible and the second coming of Jesus Christ, and instead they would walk after their own lusts, just like they did in Noah's day.

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You see, just as Noah had faith to carry out God's command to build the

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Ark, and just as Noah had faith that God would bring them through the flood, so we too must have faith that God was perfectly capable of preserving

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Noah, his family, and all of the creatures aboard the

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Ark. Is it too difficult a thing for the

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God who created the universe and everything in it to preserve the life that he chooses?

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Of course not. So, let us not be counted among those who

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Peter prophesied would ignore the evidence of the flood, since we are indeed living near the end.

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The purpose of the Ark was not to save a few animals so Noah could start a farm after the flood.

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It was, as Genesis 7 -3 says, to keep offspring alive on the face of all the earth.

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And then we have the repetition of universal terms. Everything that is under the whole heaven, under the whole earth.

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Everything in which is the breath of life. Those words appear 60 times in Genesis 6.

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All, every, under heaven. And when you have a repetition of those words, that is emphatic.

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Secondly, we have the duration of the flood. 370 days.

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Why such an extensive flood if it was only local? I mean, why that duration of the flood? Why would it take so long for it to recede and dry up?

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There's no way a local flood could last that long. We have the depth of the flood. It covered all the high mountains everywhere under the heavens.

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And since water seeks a level plain, it would have to be a global flood. When the scripture says that the waters rose to about 24 feet above the mountains, even if you give the idea that the mountains were not as high as they are now, they were upthrust after the flood, you still have water only rising to its own level.

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If we had a local flood, then obviously there's no need to build an ark. If the flood was local in the

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Middle East, the ark was totally unnecessary. The animals didn't need to go in there.

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And he could have told Noah and his family to go on a vacation to Europe or Egypt. You also have the very theological concept that if you had men elsewhere who were not part of the judgment of the flood, then the whole idea of a judgment on mankind for corruption of the earth would make no sense whatsoever.

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When we come to the New Testament, you have a passage like 2 Peter 3, 5 -7.

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It compares a flood that destroyed the world that was with a future judgment on a coming world, on the world that now is.

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If you had a local judgment in the past, you would have to have a local judgment in the future.

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But of course, this is the second coming of Jesus Christ to judge his world. God said, and behold,

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I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth to destroy all flesh, wherein is the breath of life from under heaven, and everything that is on the earth shall die.

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The most asked questions are where did the water come from for the flood and where did it go? And the answer is easily explained in the model of catastrophic plate tectonics.

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Today, the plates are moving about a few inches per year.

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However, during the flood, a billion times faster. When the flood began, it began with these fountains on the bottom of the deep ocean.

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The mid -ocean ridge is 44 ,000 miles long. Most of it is underwater.

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That's why they call it the mid -ocean ridge. And if it all erupted at the same time, it would have made the ocean floor do this.

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And then the mid -ocean ridge would have erupted all around the world at the same time, roughly.

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But that first phase would have caused sea level to rise a mile. Then this tidal wave coming out from that sudden rise of the ocean floor in the middle headed towards the continents.

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Now, that would have been the phase one of the flood. The second phase of the flood, it says, was when the windows of heaven were open.

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The fountains of the deep break open, that is the crust breaking open, the water shooting up the supersonic steam jets and carrying that ocean water up.

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Then it fell as global torrential rainfall. People all know the flood was 40 days and 40 nights of rain.

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But the waters prevailed upon the earth for 150 days. When the fountains of the great deep broke open, as the

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Bible describes, that's the description of the fracturing of the pre -flood crust.

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You've got molten material that's expanding as it solidifies. The new ocean floor expanded.

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That pushed up sea level. That means that the ocean floor is actually going to rise.

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The ocean waters rose up to cover the continents. The new ocean floor cooled and it shrank and therefore sea level fell and the ocean waters drained off.

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The flood waters are still present on the earth's surface today. They went into the new ocean basins that were produced as a consequence of the flood.

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These giant subterranean rifts broke open, piercing the earth's crust, spewing magma that created steam jets that shot up into the sky.

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Then the book of Genesis says that the waters poured down as torrential rain through the windows of heaven that were opened up and that the rain lasted 40 days and 40 nights.

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The supercontinent that the book of Genesis described is now beginning to break apart.

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At first, the newly partitioned continents oscillate, slamming into each other before starting their ultimate journey of separation.

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This closes seaways and forms volcanoes and mountains in the Americas and Europe, such as the

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Appalachian and Chaldonian ranges. The sea floor spreads, forming from molten magma, widening the separation between the new continents.

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Scientists will later discover that the sea floor at the Mid -Atlantic Ridge is much younger than the sea floor in other parts of the world.

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As this newly emerging volcanic floor spreads, it subducts under the west coast of North America, binding and releasing, causing massive tsunamis, carrying mud mixed with sea creatures, totally overwhelming the land.

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As we near the end of the flood, activity begins to cease as the sea floor stops spreading and begins to cool.

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As the new massive ocean floors cool and retract, the waters reverse back down into the new ocean basins and recede as much as a mile.

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At the beginning of the flood, there was movements of the crust. Crustal movements actually caused earthquakes.

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Earthquakes in water cause tsunamis. The tsunamis, then originating from the ocean areas, would then race across the continents.

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Once the tsunami lost its power, the sediment would settle down out of the water and form a flat layer at the bottom.

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That's the first layer. Then another earthquake in a different part of the world sets off a tsunami, maybe a week later, maybe a day later, brings in a different sediment.

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The tsunami runs out of power in this area. The sediments in the water settle to the bottom and form another flat layer.

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There's no erosion. It's fascinating to see the evolution scientists explain their dig sites.

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For example, at Dinosaur Provincial Park, they have 10 ,000 dinosaurs buried in this flat layer.

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And you ask the site paleontologists, well, how did these 10 ,000 dinosaurs get in this flat layer?

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Well, they died in a river in flood. Oh, what was the shape of the river bottom?

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It was a flat river bottom. So you're saying this river that was so strong that could bury 10 ,000 dinosaurs over five miles wide, which would be a raging river, wasn't strong enough to cause an erosion channel?

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Why isn't there a river cut from this river channel? Why isn't there erosion from that river? The answers make no sense.

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What we see at the Grand Canyon is that the layers got bent at the edge of the plateau because the folding was smooth when the sediments were still soft.

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The whole sequence had to be formed rapidly during the flood and then bent at the end of the flood while they were still wet.

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And so these folds are very strategic evidence tying together all the layers and it emphatically demonstrates that the millions of years never happened.

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The fact that we see so many fossils indicates that there was a worldwide event that caused mass fossilization of all life on Earth at one point in time.

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These sedimentary layers span entire continents, meaning they were formed all together in one event.

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Multiple layers are bent and folded together, proving rapid burial events created them.

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We find trees spanning through multiple layers of rock, and all over the globe we find massive areas of erosion such as great canyons carved out.

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Museums have collected one billion fossils, and scientists suggest that in the rocks, and you can find these, there are trillions of fossils.

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If you see an animal die along the side of the road, like a possum or a deer, pretty soon that deer or that possum is gone.

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The bones disintegrate, scavengers come, the mice eat the bones, the pelt falls apart.

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Ten years later, it's just dust. There's nothing. And yet there's these trillion fossils. Here's why we have a trillion fossils.

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There was this enormous flood. It was a worldwide flood. Tsunamis were racing across, bringing in sediment and quickly burying these animals.

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As the flood receded, all this ocean water percolated back through the sand that was covering the animals and provided the minerals to change the bones into fossils.

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For example, fish about to swallow another fish, and it's been buried.

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Another example, we've got ichthyosaurs, which are marine reptiles. Some of these are up to six feet long, and they've been buried in the process of giving birth to a baby.

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Another case of, you know, ten, twelve foot long fish with an undigested fish in its stomach.

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The details of wings of wasps.

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The wings are open, and the legs are in the fly position. The destruction of the flood was rapid, sudden, catastrophic on a global scale, preserving these creatures sometimes in life positions.

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What greater proof would you need that this was from a worldwide flood, that there's saltwater creatures in all the layers?

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Now, this is in the middle of the continents. You're saying, Mr. Evolution Scientist, that there's saltwater creatures in all these layers, and you're saying the oceans rose, covered the middle of the

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United States, and went back down, went back up, went back down, multiple times, at least a dozen times.

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Occam's Razor would say, it's more simple to believe in one flood than more than a dozen worldwide floods.

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Noah's Flood provides a better explanation for the demise of the dinosaurs than the impact in Yucatan, simply because that event is so small, so localized, there's no way it could have a physical effect that would cause the dinosaurs to be buried the way we find them.

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And nobody in the secular world even claims that. They say, well, it produced climate change that caused the dinosaurs to starve to death.

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You are essentially given two choices today. On the one hand, you have a book written thousands of years ago, giving an amazingly detailed account of a worldwide flood that wiped out virtually all life on Earth.

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On the other hand, you have man -made theories, in this case, one that was only first postulated about 40 years ago, due to the inadequacy of their prior non -catastrophic models that they know really didn't work.

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Both views require a catastrophic event with global implications, but only one has the power to actually explain the stratification of the

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Earth's surface and the trillions of fossils. Think about it.

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The Bible already said long ago that the entire world's surface was destroyed catastrophically.

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They have no choice but to make that same claim. The Bible said that the continents were once together in the beginning.

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It looks like they have to share that too. Nearly all animal life on Earth was wiped out during the destruction, a fact that they also couldn't ignore.

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Marine life was scattered across the world. The Bible says the waters went above the highest mountains.

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Secular scientists formulated their own theories as to how to explain the marine fossils away.

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The Earth's original environment was permanently destroyed. The pre -flood paradise was gone.

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In the secular model, they refer to this as the prehistoric world going extinct.

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And let's not forget that the flood set the processes into motion for much of the world to be frozen over.

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Hot oceans produce evaporations and greater snowfall. Volcanoes send volumes of aerosols into the atmosphere, blocking the sun.

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Greater snowfall with cooler summers results in global ice sheets.

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Evolutionists have called these results of the flood the Ice Age. One of these is constantly being proven true as more and more evidence is discovered over time.

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While the other was only invented after the evidence was unearthed.

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Sadly, the religion of evolution is one in which its priests are constantly updating their outdated theories.

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While in the Bible, we are given the final true and unchanging account.

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And as the evidence is unearthed over time, the biblical account is always proven to be true.

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If you go to a museum today and look at the dinosaur displays, have you ever seen a boa constrictor at a museum display wrapped around a

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T -Rex's leg? No, but they have found boa constrictors with dinosaurs. Have you ever seen a box turtle at the feet of a stegosaurus?

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No, but they found box turtles with dinosaurs. Have you ever seen a

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T -Rex with a duck flying over him? No, but ducks have been found with dinosaurs and they look the same.

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Museum displays don't show that. So if they actually put the animals they found with the dinosaurs, people would look at those displays and say, well, evolution hasn't occurred.

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It's just the dinosaurs went extinct. But scientists have withheld the modern animals from their dinosaur displays to promote the idea that evolution occurred.

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You know, the soft tissue analysis in dinosaurs that's been recent has been a little bit of an enigma to those who believe that the

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Earth and universe is really old. Mary Schweitzer in the 1990s and early 2000s first found this like elastic material in arteries.

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Elastic material means you pull it and it and it and it reloads back to its original place. In fact, scientists have run into major challenges when attempting to publish these findings because of the wholesale rejection that dinosaur soft tissue could even still exist.

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The consensus at the time agreed that it was completely impossible because everyone held to the widespread belief that the bones were millions of years old, which would require that all of their biomaterial had long since fossilized.

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There was simply no way that these dinosaur bones contained biomaterial like blood vessels and proteins such as collagen.

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In fact, of the 16 types of bioorganic materials that have since been discovered inside dinosaur bones, collagen by itself ends the debate on these bones being millions of years old, as the maximum age of collagen is as low as 10 ,000 years by some estimates and as high as 900 ,000 years by others, with 100 ,000 years being the generally agreed upon maximum age.

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The relatively short shelf life of collagen proves what the Bible has been saying about these bones all along, that they're roughly 4 ,400 years old and were buried all over the world around the time of Noah's flood.

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As the floodwaters began to recede, the earth was in a state of chaos.

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Dinosaur graveyards like these would later be found all over the earth, and secular paleontologists agree that these worldwide sites share one thing in common.

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The state the bones are found in all show evidence of flood burial.

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And now you understand exactly where the water came from. Water that would eventually dry up because it didn't belong there in the first place.

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The whole earth would undergo a massive reset as vegetation would slowly grow back and water would find its final resting places.

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Sadly, the earth that was once a perfect habitat for dinosaurs was now irrevocably ruined, and those dinosaurs that were able to survive would be hunted to extinction over time.

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We know them as dinosaurs, but legend would remember them as dragons.

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And so it was that on the 17th day of the seventh month, the ark rested upon the mountains of Ararat.

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It was a little over a year after the flood began that Noah, his family, and all on board the ark would finally step onto dry land again.

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This group of eight people would repopulate the earth, just as legends around the world cite in their historical literature.

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There are hundreds of flood legends from around the world, but in many of these cases you have huge similarities to the biblical account.

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You have one righteous family that is saved, and the reason for the flood is because God was angry. The gods were angry at something that humanity had done.

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There are lots of similarities, but the true account is in Genesis. Some of the evidence of that is just in the description of the ark.

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The Babylonian Gilgamesh epic has a cube for the ark.

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Well, that would just roll in the water and everything would die. The biblical account has a flood that's duration is 371 days, but when we come to the

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Gilgamesh epic, it's merely six days. The biblical account is the true account, and the farther they moved away from the

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Middle East and any contact with the true account, the more the story got corrupted over time.

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And so that explains the differences as well as the similarities. There was an ancient world, and that ancient world, because of corruption, was destroyed by a flood.

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And that was the judgment that was on mankind. They didn't believe that judgment was coming. The flood did come, and people were not ready.

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And Jesus says, just before he returns, people will be in rebellion, ignoring

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God, just going on, living their life as if God doesn't exist. They will be surprised when

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Jesus comes and brings judgment. Of course, we have the plague of abortion, the sins of Molech, the burning of children, the plague of sex trafficking, and the exploitation of the vulnerable.

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These things are the evils and the darknesses of our age. Just as the flood came suddenly, so the second coming of Christ will be sudden.

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But here's the good news. God's masterful plan, as unveiled in Corinthians, reveals that while humanity collectively inherited condemnation through one man's disobedience,

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Adam, they can now find forgiveness and salvation through the obedience of one man,

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Jesus Christ. If one man can bring death to all through his sin, then it follows that a sinless man can bring life to all through his obedience.

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Thankfully, God in his wisdom and mercy has given us a simple and easy way to be justified in his sight.

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And that is through his son, Jesus Christ. The Bible tells us that God created a perfect world.

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Adam sinned. And because of Adam's sin, we are all born sinners.

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But we also choose to sin. We choose to rebel against God. Every one of us has broken the

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Ten Commandments in thought or word or deed. And the

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Bible says in Romans that the wages of sin or the penalty of sin is death. And so God sent his son, the

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Lord Jesus Christ, to die on the cross, to take the wrath of God for us, pay the penalty for sin.

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And then he rose from the dead, proving that he had paid that penalty, that he had conquered death and that he could give us eternal life.

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We need to respond to what Jesus has done. Every one of us. No one can respond for us.

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We must each personally acknowledge to God that we have sinned against him, that we deserve his judgment.

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And then put our trust in Jesus Christ as our Savior and our Lord. And when we do that, we're forgiven.

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We're restored to a right relationship with God, to a personal relationship with God. And we're given the gift of eternal life.

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We've heard that the Ark of Noah was an ark constructed for the salvation of mankind.

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It had one door in it, and that was a single entrance. That was done by design. God also only has one way of salvation.

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That way of salvation in the ark was to preserve them through God's judgment, which was the flood. And someone had to trust in God and accept him and come his way, which is that one way into the ark, in order to be saved.

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Jesus himself said, John 14, 6, he said, So if we come to the one who is

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God in the flesh, the one who came to provide redemption for us, and we trust him and take him at his word.

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He says, I will save you. That's the way to God, and I'm the way. Come to me, and you have all that was promised in the

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Bible. Eternal life, a relationship with God, and everything beyond what we can even imagine in this life.

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There's a whole life yet to come that God has promised to those who love him. 2 ,000 years ago,

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God the Father sent his son to the world to usher in a new era of righteousness and peace.

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But they rejected the true Messiah. They hated the very one whom the

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Bible says created love, joy, beauty, and life itself.

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They took and crucified him in the very place he was to establish his glorious kingdom.

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But God the Father raised him from the dead and made his sacrifice the salvation for many.

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For Jesus Christ is the light of the world, and in him is no darkness.