Let's just start with this: I believe that the flood caused Noah to build his ark really happened. Noah was told to build his ark years before the rains came. Years. And people mocked him, ridiculed him, and derided him. They still do now. At my work is a photograph of a meme of two cats under an umbrella in pouring rain, and it says: "Noah called. He picks us up in ten minutes." First, Noah didn't wait until the rain began before rounding up the animals. He did that while the skies were still clear. Second, it was the majority that disbelieved Noah, and many who mocked him. It was the majority that had fallen away from the God of the Bible, and the majority that mocked the minority who obeyed the LORD their God even when by all appearances they looked the part of the fool.
Let's go straight to the Scriptures for more detail. The account covers Genesis 6, 7, and 8.
When human beings began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of humans were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose. Then the Lord said, “My Spirit will not contend with humans forever, for they are mortal; their days will be a hundred and twenty years.” The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went to the daughters of humans and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown.
Genesis 6:1-4 - https://www.biblegateway.com/passage?search=Genesis%206:1-4&version=NIV
I'll stop here for a second. There are many folks who say they are Christians, in addition to those who are non-Christians, who discredit the Noah/flood story because "it's too far back." Therefore, remember that scripture also says this:
All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.
2 Timothy 3:16-17 - https://www.biblegateway.com/passage?search=2%20Timothy%203:16-17&version=NIV
A few things to remember: 1.) this is the New Testament, also saying that the entirety of the Old Testament, is historically accurate and inspired by the LORD God Himself. 2.) If all Scripture is God-breathed, then it also indeed confirms that Jesus was and is who the scriptures say He is: the Son of God, and therefore the one true God of the universe. Also, to buffer the first point, even Jesus indicates that the early parts of Genesis are accurate, by this passage:
“Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”
Matthew 19:4-6 - https://www.biblegateway.com/passage?search=Matthew%2019:4-6&version=NIV
Jesus got it from this passage which comes from, yes, Genesis 2. This took place before the account of the flood and of Noah's ark-building project.
The man said, “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called ‘woman,’ for she was taken out of man. ” That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh.
Genesis 2:23-24 - https://www.biblegateway.com/passage?search=Genesis%202:23-24&version=NIV
If even Jesus, the Son of God, and God in the second person, says that the creation story is real, then that means the creation story is real.
As for Noah, who for years and decades was being ridiculed for building such a large vessel (with no other human help besides his family), and made to look the fool, everything he did was in direct obedience to the God of the Bible, and nothing else:
The Lord then said to Noah, “Go into the ark, you and your whole family, because I have found you righteous in this generation. Take with you seven pairs of every kind of clean animal, a male and its mate, and one pair of every kind of unclean animal, a male and its mate, and also seven pairs of every kind of bird, male and female, to keep their various kinds alive throughout the earth. Seven days from now I will send rain on the earth for forty days and forty nights, and I will wipe from the face of the earth every living creature I have made.” And Noah did all that the Lord commanded him.
The Bible reveals that in fact, God will not be made a fool:
Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows.
Moreover, back to the Noah story, God was not to be made a fool then, either:
Noah was six hundred years old when the floodwaters came on the earth.
God will not be made a fool. The floodwaters did come, and it did kill everyone else besides Noah, his family, and all the animals they squared away on the ark. Now, there are those who love to take this story and use it to point out how "bad" God is. Kind of a flip-flop from previously denying God's existence, like saying "well, if He did exist, He must be some sort of terrible god." Here's what Genesis 8 has to say about God's character:
But God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and the livestock that were with him in the ark, and he sent a wind over the earth, and the waters receded. Now the springs of the deep and the floodgates of the heavens had been closed, and the rain had stopped falling from the sky.
I'm going to add a technical note, something I didn't realize until a few weeks ago when it was pointed out to me that not all the waters that swallowed up the earth came from the sky. When this flood occurred in Noah's day, it wasn't just the rain that fell that made it flood. In the second verse of the last passage, the springs of the deep and the floodgates of the heavens contributed to the floodwaters. And I think that alone can account for a lot of the archaeological and topographical mysteries that scientists have been trying to solve (and sometimes do "solve" on their own). But more on that later.
To finish off what Genesis 8 has to say in defense of God's character (not that it ever needed defending, anyway):
The Lord smelled the pleasing aroma and said in his heart: “Never again will I curse the ground because of humans, even though every inclination of the human heart is evil from childhood. And never again will I destroy all living creatures, as I have done. As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.”
Bottom line: God is good. Even though we humans are not.
We are in a day and age where the non-believers and deniers of Christ as LORD are increasing in number. And as I have also seen, those who say they have received Christ as Savior and as LORD, are increasingly also denying certain Biblical truths. I know of at least one person who explicitly has denied the truth of Genesis prior to the beginning of Abram's story in Genesis 11. What takes the place of Genesis 1-10? The theory of evolution, which I must first remind you that it is only a "theory" and not even a story. There's no story because there's no account of someone who was alive 15 billion years ago to tell it. There's not even an account of someone alive even one million years ago to tell us what was happening.
But the majority appears to have long fallen for it. And for a while, I fell into that crowd as well. Heck, I was raised in it! But over time, I experienced the God of the Bible reaching out to me. First, it was getting me back to church after I had left it years earlier and wandered into spiritual exile for a number of years, and really plugged into a church community in such a way that I couldn't leave. Second, it was plugging me into a men's Bible study group, something a year earlier I was directly resistant to, after it had become clear that a certain pattern of obsession was blocking me from growing further into my faith (I had grown some, but then I hit a roadblock). Third, it was Him gently dealing with a stronghold that directly blocked me from believing the Bible as a whole, which was my vehemently staunch pro-gay marriage stance. My staunch perspective included stances against other things the Bible declared sins, like divorce, and really any sex outside of marriage. (After all, I was around gay people and people who had gone through divorces! I heard their stories; what else was there to believe?)
Then I was invited to a Bible reading challenge by one of my best friends, to read it all the way through in one year, from beginning to end. It was during this time I got saved. The Bible became more alive and real to me. Among many other things, I saw how seamlessly the Old Testament continued into the New, and actually felt sympathetic and empathetic toward the Lord's grief and anger as Israel (and eventually, Judah) slipped further and further away from Him, and continued in their evil, from evil king to evil king to somehow even more evil king.
In the years since, the battle has been over whether I would listen to God over other people or not. I still struggle a lot to just "sit down and read my Bible," even though I have abundant personal experiential evidence that says I get a lot out of it when I do. I even had exercised the rationale that, "if I could just get the Bible in comic form", or "if I could watch God's Word on YouTube", "it would make it easier for me to get into the Word." However, I have a graphic comic Bible and a bevy of Biblically Christian YouTube channels that I subscribe to, and for a few months now I haven't watched any of them. But with my other arguments exposed for being false things I've been feeling myself, what simply stands for an argument now is: "I just don't want to."
It's still a work in progress, a selfish stubborn stance that is rooted in nothing more than laziness and pride. But God has won me over in other areas before, even in areas I never thought I would change. I never thought I would become a conservative, Bible-thumping Christian. But here I am. And it's because I have found that there's really nothing else in this world worth thumping. Science cannot answer whether there is a God or not, and it cannot answer whether the Bible is true or not. And actually, I'm finding both of my statements are false. In fact, true science, without any manipulation whatsoever, points to a supernatural creator of the universe. True science, without any manipulation, backs up the Bible and reveals the Holy Scriptures to be true, factual, historical, and inerrant. These so-called theories about "evolutionism", about "being born that way," about "being meant to be the gender opposite of how you were born," about "life not counting before birth," about (this is a riot) "the value of one's life being based in whether one is able to survive or not"... none of these are actually rooted in science or scientific discovery. They are rooted in the twisting of scientific discovery, or in the "filling of the gaps" --gaps that the actual science has left. More often than not, things have been added to true science that "feels" science-y and maybe possess just "enough" of the appearance of science to be considered "scientific."
Take what I shared earlier in this blog post about the effects of the flood from Noah's day. Evolution says that a meteorite killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, and that the so-called "ice age" began 18,000 years ago and ended 11,700 years ago. Carbon dating is supposedly one of the key things what has determined the so-called "timing" of both events. As is dating the soil, rocks, and so on. But the Bible (and specifically Jesus, the Son of God) says:
When he came near the place where the road goes down the Mount of Olives, the whole crowd of disciples began joyfully to praise God in loud voices for all the miracles they had seen:“Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!”“Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!”Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to Jesus, “Teacher, rebuke your disciples!”“I tell you,” he replied, “if they keep quiet, the stones will cry out.”
The stones will cry out. The same stones that scientists carbon date to tell us how old they think the universe is, how old they think dinosaurs are, and how long ago a suggested "ice age" must have occurred. And yet, this is the bunk that people are buying into left and right: hook, line, and sinker. The universe didn't create itself. The house you live in, the bank you go to deposit or withdraw money, the grocery store you shop in... the country you live in... someone, or several persons, built the house, built the bank, built the grocery store, and founded the country that you live in. It didn't just "evolve" from the dust of the earth. So why would the universe create itself? Why would the earth create itself?
It's because it didn't. Just as the architectural firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill designed and built the Sears Tower (now Willis Tower), and just as George Washington, John Adams, John Hancock, Alexander Hamilton, and the rest formed the United States of America, so did the God of the Bible create the heavens and the earth:
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
As such, it should follow that there would also be a definitive point in time where it happened:
And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.
Let's not make a mistake about this: there was a definitive point. It's not that everything came together all at once, but unlike the evolution period where things just "gradually happened," there were definitive points when things came into being. Every human being has a definitive birthday, no? You wouldn't say of someone who popped out of the womb on, say, on May 21st, "well, this person was born sometime in the spring of such-and-such a year, with scientific studies saying this birth likely would have happened in the month of May." No! Each person has a definitive date of birth! (Even if in some cases it's listed incorrectly. But that's besides the point.)
I will admit it took me quite a while to believe that universe was created in seven days after a lifetime of believing it self-created over the course of 15 billion years. It was because the latter teaching was repeatedly drilled into my head by multiple sources: my parents, my church, my schools, as well as friends and other adults that were in my life. But as I considered it, I first realized that because none of us were alive at the beginning of time, no one can really say how the universe formed. As such, I felt it pointless and a waste of air to argue over how old the universe is. But then as the God of the Bible worked on my heart especially in relation to His Word, I started realizing that the Holy Scriptures were more trustworthy than anything earth could put out there. Even if I didn't understand some things that the Bible was saying (and this is still true, by the way), it had earned my trust to the point that when I didn't understand why, I could still trust it to be right. I still don't understand fully how the universe came to be, let alone how long it may have "really" taken for things to be developed and arranged, but I can trust that God was in control and making sure things were working the way He intended it to be.
I choose to go with a belief and a people that is seemingly becoming more and more in the minority these days, because it has shown itself to be true, through and through. Regardless of how many, or how few, people agree with it, I believe it, because I am choosing to believe God over people. I am choosing to care more about what God says, about the universe, about me, and about people around me, than what people have to say about the universe, about me, about themselves, and also about God.
I'm a Bible-believing Christian, and what that means is I take every bit of the Bible at face value, chief among it being the fact the Jesus Christ died for my sins, resurrected Himself less than 48 hours later, and said that anyone who believes in Him will not perish but instead have eternal life. Therefore, if I receive this same Jesus as my Savior and as my LORD, I will be saved, live forever (even after I pass away), and get to enjoy Jesus' company, as well as that of so many who also have said yes to receiving Jesus as their LORD and Savior, for years and years and years to come. My message to you is that this same free gift is available to you. I invite, encourage, exhort, and challenge you to humble yourself and receive it. This is the best offer that you will ever see in your lifetime.
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