Clough Genesis Lesson 27

Geological data; The Flood Narrative Continued – Genesis 8:15-21

In our series in Genesis we have noted again and again that the faith that a Biblical Christian has can be no stronger than he has in this foundation document and in our own generation, even our own Christian circles are filled with stuffers. I remember the case of a woman that used to come here on Wednesday nights and she took home some of our material; he husband was an officer in a certain Bible teaching church, supposedly Bible teaching church, and when she brought home one of the workbooks, the kindergarten-first grade one on the second framework pamphlet, he saw this and he discovered that we really did believe the Bible, then there was hell to pay, all of a sudden an explosion with a decree that you shall not return again, the idea being that we were serious enough to take the Bible out into the areas of origins.

Now this is very characteristic of this part of the country and you have to be aware of this; that there will be many people who say they believe the Bible but you have to add, we believe the Bible to be true; it’s not just enough to say we believe the Bible, that’s a vacuous expression, and you’ll quickly see the difference when you begin to seriously take the Scripture in every area of life. There are those in the city who are interested in forming a society for creationism in the arts and sciences; not Lubbock Bible Church but just generally in our city and we hope that this will get off the ground and that we will have in our city a testimony to biblical truth in all areas.

But let’s test ourselves. We’ve, so far spent many weeks in Genesis 1-8, and here is some reflective questions to test to see whether we believe the Bible or whether we believe the Bible to be true. Here’s a question that one ought to consider. After all this and after we’ve talked and talked and talked and talked about all this, do you really believe that this portion of the Bible wholly conflicts with the establishment view; are you really convinced that the Bible wholly conflicts with the establishment view, that there isn’t an image in between, that we’ve got onto a tremendous dilemma, where the Bible is telling us one completely different story than what we are getting in our culture at large around us. Another question: do you believe that the human viewpoint around us is really false, that it’s really one massive delusion, that it’s a completely wrong way of interpreting the available data.

The third reflective question: if you believe in the first two things, that the Bible wholly conflicts with the world around us and that the world around us in delusion, then what are you doing to bring up your children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord in this manner. Sub question: Have you checked to see what it is they really are being taught in the schools. Do you know? Have you ever visited their classroom to see the conditions for yourself? Have you ever borrowed from the church library some of the creationist materials that are now being written, written at all age levels, here, for example, being one by the Bible Science newsletter for grades 1-3 that’s available for people who would like to see it? Have you ever purchased any of the great creationists work for your own home library to fortify discussions in the home?

If the answer to all these questions is no, then basically you believe the Bible like most people but you don’t believe it to be true. Those of us who believe it to be true also believe that faith without works is dead and that true faith cannot exist unless it bursts forth into some fruitful activity. You see, we’re all going to be judged. When we have the materials and we have the opportunity what did we do with the materials and with the opportunity.

So we want to summarize, looking upon ourselves as beleaguered minority, faced with the pressure of the culture around us, we want to be sure where we stand. So before exegeting any further in the Genesis text we want to summarize some of the big conflicts we’ve studied so far and summarize some of the evidences to substantiate the Word of God in these areas.

We’ve seen that from the very beginning we believe in creation and the moment we say that we believe in creation that puts us at odds with 99 out of 100 people who say they believe in evolution. There’s no way of tying these two together. People try through semantic tricks but there is no way, there is a definite rupture between these two positions. We believe not only in creation, we believe in a recent creation. We believe in addition to creation in a real fall, so that the universe was not always cruel, the universe did not always have death in it. We believe this because the Bible tells us this in a straightforward day; undeniable, confirmed by New Testament texts. We believe in a universal global flood that transformed the surface of the earth and that puts us at odds with the world around us.

Now in talking about these kinds of things in the Bible we often, if we are Bible-believing Christians that believe the Bible to be true, then we ought to ask the question, well if God has said this and it’s true, then if we look out into the fields of data there ought to be evidence that, in fact, the Bible is what it says it is. That is, if God has spoken then it ought to be reflected out here in the various areas of data.

Let’s look on three areas of data or evidences that we want to look at as Christians because we want to hold our heads high; we don’t want to be shamefaced Christians, people who walk around like the hunchback of Notre Dame, apologizing for the faith of the Word. We want something that is zero, something that we can hold our heads high and look our opponent in the eye and say you are wrong and here’s why. That is the faith of an ambassador, who is “ready to give an answer to every man that asks a reason of the hope that is in him.”

Well, the evidences that we are looking for are first of all evidences of a young universe. There ought to be some around, after all, if what we talked about is valid, certainly somewhere there ought to be evidence of a young universe. We also ought to have evidences of kinds in the animals and the plants; that is that say horses may vary but they’re all horses; dogs may vary but they’re all dogs; cats may vary but they’re all cats. One of my boys recently had a film in school in which they showed the famous horse fossil sequence and they showed this nice neat little sequence from the horses the size of dogs on up to a full size horse and in our discussion we were mentioning the fact that look at this little one, this one was a horse wasn’t it? Yes, a little horse but it was a horse; the medium was a horse too, wasn’t it? It was medium but it was a horse. The large one was a horse; it was large but it was still a horse. Now would you tell me where the evolution is? They’re still horses aren’t they? And it’s the same thing with all the categories. Look at all different kinds of dogs, from basset hounds to great danes; they all are basically the same kind. But look at the diversity.

In other words, there’s a richness of diversity within the animal kingdom that can be deceptive if you don’t pay attention to the Word of God. But there is this variation within kinds and when we were in Genesis 1 and 2 I gave you evidences for this, both in the fossil record and we had various authorities that we quoted or that we listened to that verified this. So we needn’t bother with that second category of evidences. The third category of evidence that we’re looking for is evidences of a catastrophe on the earth; if we are right and if there was a flood, somewhere there ought to be evidence of a catastrophe.

So what kind of evidences do we want? We want evidences of a young earth and we want evidences of catastrophe on the face of the earth. Why do we want these evidences? So we can stand up with straight backbones and say that we believe the Bible to be true; we invite honest intellectual questions and we believe the data when honestly considered will verify the Scriptures. This is not a leap in the dark.

So let’s look at some of the evidences. This slide I will explain; according to the evolutionary way of thinking we can measure time by measuring some process, the rate of which we’ll say is the rate of which salt drains off the continents into the ocean. And let’s say that X represents the number of tons per year, it’s the rate of influx of certain mineral salts into the sea. And it should be obvious that all we have to do, multiplying t times x, time, that we should get the total amount in tons of the salt in the sea. And since this can be measured, then if we know x we can solve for t and thereby date the oceans. And we know a because you can measure this. Now x, that’s the little bugger, because that one has to be guessed and what uniformitarians have always done is assume that rates are uniform, that x has never changed over time, or at least it hasn’t changed wildly over time and using this certain assumption {?} all the dates. In this simple process, though I’ve illustrated this morning with influx of mineral salts into the ocean, the same mathematic basically holds with different degrees of sophistication, whether you’re working with mineral salts infusing the sea or whether you’re working with radioactive dating. It’s the same process; you have to assume something is constant in order to solve the equation.

The question we creationists raise is how do you know that it is constant? And this is shown up very graphically in this chart that we’re going to discuss now. If we take various quantities of different kinds of salts into the ocean floor, we have several listed here. We have the influx of uranium, the influx of sodium, the influx of nickel, the influx magnesium, the influx of silicon, potassium, copper, gold, silver, mercury, lead, tin, aluminum and so on. And we can measure those elements in the sea. And assuming the sea had none in it to start with and assuming rates have remained constant, solving that little equation for t produces various answers. But notice the wildly fluctuating answers. For example, the influx of uranium to the ocean via rivers gives a date for the ocean age to be 10,000 to 100,000 years, slightly different from the billion year figure of evolutionary propaganda.

If we take silicon and the rate at which it has infused the oceans we get a date of 8,000 years. If we take tin we get 100,000 list, and going down the list: 11,000,000; 50,000; 560,000; 2,000,000; 42,000; 2,000; 100,000; 100; 100,000; 1,000,000; 32,000,000; 1,000,000. What was this I heard about dating systems giving coherent ages? Somehow we’re always taught that in the classroom. The science teacher conveniently leaves out all the discordant dates. We only get {?} with the dates that are deliberately selected because they fit together but when you look at the resources, and the average student never bothers to go to the library to look up the sources, when you go to the library and look up the sources a whole different picture now emerges. Why are we getting all these wildly different dates? For example, here’s helium, here we’re measuring the rate of helium intrusion into the atmosphere from the earth’s surface, if it has bubbled up from the earth’s surface at a uniform rate, then the age of the atmosphere is about 1800 years; well there’s something wrong with that one. So we can go from point to point and we discover discordance.

Why I’m showing you this is, I’m trying to point out to you your dishonest school teachers and your dishonest college professors who basically are very intellectually dishonest in selecting only a preferred sample of information and thereby attaining great stature but never presenting to the students the other side of the coin. This is all done, of course, in the name of the first amendment.

We could go on and discuss some other items, similar type equation, similar type assumptions and similar type results. For example, the origins of human civilizations and we could go on with the various population curves. Assuming, for example, that the human population has grown at the rate of the Jewish population and since we know that the Jewish population began with two people, Abraham and Sarah, around 2000 BC, and we know the population of the Jews in 2000 AD, then we can get an average population increase over 4000 years. And this is conservative because after all, the Jews have been almost wiped out three or four times in history, so whatever rate we get from the Jews ought to be a conservative rate and thereby overestimate age, not underestimate it, and yet when we do this we still come out with an age for the human race of 5,000 years. In other words, what these population statistics are saying is that if the human race were around for millions and millions of years, like all the propaganda says, then why is it that we don’t have five people on top of each other? The earth would be packed with people there’d be so many people. Oh, say the critics, no way, no way, because of famine and wars, that would surely destroy that and account for the low number of people today. Not at all; show me one war that has decreased the rate of population growth; World War II didn’t; the Civil War didn’t; the many wars in Europe haven’t even touched the population growth curve. That being the case then what other strange process are you going to invent to account for the small number of people on the face of the earth? So here is the data that is not often presented in the classroom.

Now here’s another case of intellectual dishonesty in our school educators. Here is a quotation I discovered in a teacher’s edition of a biology textbook… notice, “teacher’s” edition. The parent never sees this and the student never sees this. This is a special book given only for the teacher and this quote is on the right side, notice what it says. “Point out that there is no conflict between these theories and religious beliefs. Since religious beliefs cannot be tested by scientific methods, only scientific theories can. The theories explain how life originated and they make no reference to the presence or absence of God as a controlling force.” False; that statement is pure neo-orthodoxy. It is saying that although the Bible speaks of a real flood, the Bible speaks of a real creation, the Bible speaks of a real short history, the Bible speaks of catastrophes, nevertheless those are scientifically irrelevant observations, they no way ought to be brought into the process. Now that itself is a religious position; it’s a position of theistic evolution and neo-orthodox theology. And yet here we have a high school textbook, paid for by the citizens of the state of Texas, and this is put in the teacher’s margin, obscure from both student and parent so that we can indoctrinate and undercut the biblical faith. Here is a statement by an evolutionist who shows not that we creationists are the one calling evolution a faith, but they themselves call evolution a faith. “The theory of evolution forms a satisfactory faith on which to base our interpretations of nature,” introduction to the 1971 of Darwin’s Origin of Species.

Now when we use the word “faith,” when we say that evolution in the classroom is a religion, they say oh no, evolution is all science, it’s you bigoted fundies that are always trying to intrude with your religious creationism into this sterile neutral public school classroom. Yet who was it that said evolution is a faith? Again, as an illustration of the extreme modesty and humility of the evolutionary thinkers: “Evolution is a general postulate to which all theories must henceforth bow, and which they must satisfy,” … must “satisfy in order to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light which illuminates all fact, a trajectory which all lines of thought must follow,” one of the great leading biologists of our time. Who is a bigot? Who is articulating a religious position? The much maligned fundamentalist or the arrogant intellectuals? Either way, when one dates and establishes evidences for a young earth he has to encounter simple problems and basically a fourth or fifth grader can get a hold of these. The idea is that when we have any clock, whether it’s decaying series of lead, whether it’s a decaying series of something else, we have to know the kind of origin that was involved, we have to know the original reading, how much, how fast was it going, and we have to know how accurate the clock has kept time since the origin point. Those are all questions which cannot be answered scientifically; they are questions that must be assumed from certain other data.

Now let’s look at the “certain other data.” This round thing you see on this slide is called a radial halo. And I mentioned back a while that there was a man who came recently to Texas Tech to a physics seminar, and this particular man is a creationist, one of Oak Ridge, Tennessee’s outstanding nuclear physicists, who incidentally believes that the earth was created no earlier than 6,000 years ago, and has introduced to the scientific world these controversial radial halos. For our purposes as Christians, we don’t want to get into all the detail of them but we do want to see the force of what this man is saying. We want to know why those strange marks are important.

First, what are those marks? When a piece of radioactive material is trapped in a rock and it starts to decay, obviously it releases energy, and these energy particles, whether it’s alpha particles or something else come out of here and leave a burn mark on the matrix around this radioactivity. The burn mark is always a certain radius for a certain isotope. And so by measuring this radius, assuming certain conditions about intensity of energy and so on, we can make some guesses about what the element is, or what the isotope is. Now that’s the phenomena, but now here’s the puzzle that Dr. Gentry has pointed out. He takes the uranium lead series, which orthodoxy, that is evolutionary orthodoxy says, is inviolable; why, they tell us, the earth can be easily to shown to be millions and billions of years old, because we know that radioactivity decay rates have remained unchanged, this is one of the most easy assumptions to make, we are told. And this is the series; it starts with uranium 238, goes to thorium, goes to another isotope, radium, radon, polonium; polonium 218, 214, 210. Now this series can only start at one point, according to the existing theory, namely, this series has to begin with uranium 238 breaking down, over millions and billions of years. So, for example, if you come across a piece of rock and it has polonium 218 that had to come from uranium 238 for millions of years.

Now you would expect that if this series has stayed there trapped in a rock matrix you’d have one halo for each one of those steps in the decay chain. In other words, there ought to be evidences of the complete breakdown of the whole sequence. But says Dr. Gentry, when we look at them those halos are missing; where are they? The theory says they ought to be there; fact says they’re not there. In fact, looking again at this series of events all one sees in these particular pieces of rock cited by Dr. Gentry are the polonium. The question Dr. Gentry raises is where did the polonium 218 come from because the polonium breaks down in 3.05 minutes to 214, that’s its half life. So since it breaks down in three minutes where did it come from, and the evolutionists have never been able to answer this. The only choices they’ve got is that the polonium 218 must have suddenly been created out of nothing inside the rock which would stress slightly their philosophic assumption of uniformity. Or, we creationists can simply say well, we told you so, we told you the earth isn’t millions of years anyway, it was just created instantly and it was created cold, it did not condense and crystallize from molten magma because had it done so then even this would have died out. So there’s a puzzle and these three are several of Dr. Gentry’s conclusions: one, the earth’s crust crystallized instantly; two, types of radioactivity not going on today are found in ancient rock so that alone blows out the idea that radioactivity itself has been uniform through time; radioactive clocks were severely disrupted in the past. So these are very troubling conclusions to some of our evolutionary friends with their condescending tut-tut toward the Scripture and us naïve creationists.

Let’s look at some more data. Here is a tree trunk 10 meters long that just suddenly must have sat there for a long time; we’re told, of course, in our biology and geology courses in school that the rock took millions of years to lay down, very slowly millimeter by millimeter and then we come across a piece of data like this; what, did this tree stand there for three million years while the rock slowly laid down millimeter by millimeter? For all the world that piece of data looks like it’s trying to tell us that that strata laid down and it laid down very rapidly while the tree was held in place. Here’s a tree in Nova Scotia, that previous one was found in Germany, just to show that is occurs several places. This tree is at a 45 degree angle; how do you hold a tree at a 45 degree angle for three million years? And to prove something else, one of the creationist scientists did an experiment to show that trees do not float like logs in water, the whole tree floats vertically, the reason being that the root system absorbs water and makes one end heavy and this is what happened to these trees; they were simply floating with the roots down. In fact, some of them in that rock series I showed you are upside down, so that’s another… how to hold the tree upside down for three million years, that’s an even bigger stunt. But this kind of data, of course, is carefully removed from the classroom textbooks; this is carefully kept out of the college classroom for discussion, hoping thereby to crush creationism.

Now closer to home here’s Carlsbad Caverns; we are told that stalactites and stalagmites grow very slowly over millions of years. One wonders, then, how this bat managed to stay there and have his entire body buried without being devoured by any predator, without any signs of decay on his body. For all the world that piece of data, doesn’t it look like stalactite…the bat was just standing there one day and plop, he got buried and it hardened fast. There’s no need to postulate thousands of years slow process. And then this fossil raindrop, on the surface everything looks nice except when one raises the question; in a rainstorm, on mud, each individual drop would simply have been eliminated by the following drop. The only way to get and hold this kind of a fossil is that if that soil hardened up very rapidly around the raindrop. It was in a process of rapid hardening, not slow hardening, and again, fossil evidence to remind us of the fact that here we have fossil data that had to be preserved rapidly; you can’t have the rocks slowly harden, wind, water and other animals would have destroyed those prints.

Now here’s another dilemma facing our evolutionary friends, this is their own geologic column which is valid in most places, as far as sequence goes, and here is two levels; one indicated in blue, one indicated in gray. The blue is Permian, the gray is Cretaceous. The Cretaceous rock on the top is “an advanced,” (quote, end quote) from the evolutionary perspective, “an advanced” rock. Notice, because the fossils in it have light forms advanced over the fossils in the Permian, and that’s the sequence those rocks to be in if evolution is correct. However, in some places we find the Permian on top of the Cretaceous. Now to explain this what is usually done in historical geological circles is to explain it in terms of an over thrust, that is, the Permian rock is thrust over and on top of the Cretaceous and that explains how the older rock came to be on top of the younger rock. The problem with this explanation is that when it truly does occur, because of the tons and tons of rock involved and the shear forces, between the two rock levels there’s got to be a considerable amount of fractured rock or breccias and other kinds of rock formations. Anyone with a little engineering can understand the problems of friction and we’re talking about thousands and millions of tons of rock that have to be moved one on top of the other. Now geologists are able to point to some areas on earth where this occurs but in the Empire Mountains of Arizona when one looks where the Permian has gone across the top of the Cretaceous, the interface between them is like a saw tooth. Again, one doesn’t have to be a student of science to realize there’s a slight degree of friction involved in moving millions of tons over an undulating surface and miraculously leaving no fractures, no breccias, no signs of sliding. Why? The obvious answer is because it didn’t slide; in this case the Permian was deposited after the Cretaceous. How’s that possible? Because they come from different ecological zones of the antediluvian world; this rock was floated into place by debris taken out from one area and later on a wave during Noah’s flood brought another area of rock from another location, and so what we’ve got is a sequential deposition of debris from different areas from the antediluvian world.

Now to show you in practice that this is true, here it actually is in real life. This Permian rock, say the geologists, slid over top of that Cretaceous rock. Now I’m not a geologist but I am a student of physics and I wonder what new principle of physics they’ve discovered to allow rock like that to slide over the bottom. It’s a mystery to me. Here again is this older rock, the bluish rock, Permian, overlying Cretaceous. Now with a surface like that would someone kindly suggest how we can get slippage without a sign or a shred of evidence? Another case, here where you see the hammer, there’s no sign of breccias, nothing, not a shred of evidence physically to indicate any sliding. The only way that people say that that rock is older than this rock is because this rock has fossils that by evolution date older than these, but if we gave up our evolutionary… took our evolutionary glasses off we’d surely discover that that rock, looking at the physical data, came after the gray rock, and the heck with the evolutionary sequence, just look at the physical data and stop reading theory into it.

So these are some of the information that we have on our side. I thought some of you would like to see that to raise some more questions about what is going on in our generation; why this tremendous intense ridicule of a literal interpretation of the text of Scripture.

Let’s turn to Genesis 8:15 and continue the flood narrative some more. “God spoke unto Noah, saying, [16] Go forth out of the ark, thou, and thy wife, and thy sons, and thy sons’ wives with thee. [17] Bring forth with thee every living thing that is with thee,” and so on, in other words, disembark. But if you look back up in verse 9, 10, 11 and 12 you find that Noah had been conducting a series of experiments and the experiments were to ascertain on an empirical basis whether or not the earth had dried out; see the olive branch.

Now the question that ought to be raised is why, with all the empirical evidence, did he still stay aboard the ark? Why didn’t Noah just simply say well now look, I’ve got all this empirical data, why not act upon it and take off, disembark? Because, Noah had to have data out beyond the range where he could personally investigate, because had he opened the door to the ark and had he disgorged all these animals out, once those animals, can you imagine animals cooped up for a year what they’re going to do when the door opens? Ever watch your dog get out of the yard when the gate blows open? So what’s going to happen? Three thousand animals, zoom, zoom, and you say oh-oh, got to pull them back, the flood’s not through yet. He never could make it so in order to make a judgment of fundamental significance what did Noah need besides empirical data? He needed the Word of God. He needed data from an infinite source and so this is why he waited until God gave the okay. Now it’s true, God’s Word is at one with the empirical evidence but the empirical evidence by itself, without God’s Word is insufficient for this kind of a decision.

So then after waiting he sends out the animals. Well people say when they read this text, and they look up and their eyes have gone across that dove thing and they’ve talked all about this problem of bringing the olive branch back to Noah, and they say well how could that be? And then they get their little smirks on their face and say ha-ha, you know, you poor naïve fundies, don’t you ever know that seeds couldn’t germinate after floating for months in salt water? No, as a matter of fact, we fundies don’t know that because we’ve done an experiment to counter prove it. Professor George Howe of the Creation Research Society who was a botanist took some seeds and he tested them in salt water bath for a given time periods, and then tested their ability to germinate. And so here we have seeds from three out of five weedy species randomly selected, germinated and grew after seven weeks, it doesn’t have to be the seeds on water the whole 300 days of the flood, because the waters started going down after the fortieth day remember. And grew after seven weeks of soaking in sea, tap, or mixed water. So it’s correct, we fundies do not know that the seeds could not grow; neither do the seeds because they went ahead and grew anyway. So the olive branch was a sign empirically that the earth had dried out sufficiently and there was no danger that the seeds would not take, plus the fact probably for domestic seeds Noah took some seeds with him.

Also one further little feature, one of the neat little details, I think, of the Word of God showing the more you study it the more assured you become that this is God’s Word because of the neat way all the details fit together. What would you say if the Bible here read: disgorge all the animals and people out of the ark and the ark had somehow managed to land on the island of Java or Indonesia; now this would present Noah with a slight difficulty, how do I get all the animals from Indonesia onto the main continent? Well, obviously the ark landing site had to be in a perfect zone. What would constitute a perfect zone? If you were to pick the best site for the ark, with a map of the existing earth surface, where would you pick? Well, I’ll tell you where I’d pick? I’d pick the area that was closest to all other areas; in other words, I’d pick the area on the face of the earth that was closest to every area so I could get maximum efficiency in my dispersion pattern.

Now this can be done; all you need to do is take a map of the earth and sector it off into squares and then measure the distance from one given square, take any square, just pick one at random, take any square and draw a line to any other square and measure the distance; and draw a line to another square until you draw a line from this one square to all the other squares on all the face of the earth. Then divide by the number of squares and you have the average distance this square is from every other point on the earth’s surface. Now do that for all possible squares. Of course this involves a computer calculation and then compute where on the face of the earth we have the center of the earth. Well, that’s already been done by the Institute for Creation Research, a man in the oceanographic institute at San Diego, Mr. Wood. And his computer study of the earth’s center found that the center of the earth this way is a point just southeast of Ankara, Turkey; it is on the same latitude as Mount Ararat, and the same longitude as the city of Jerusalem.

Now isn’t it interesting that all of God’s activities occur in this square, which is the center of the earth. Isn’t it interesting that the dispersion of the human race and the dispersion of all animals came from Ararat, very close to the center of the earth, so that the animals and man had the most efficient paths of dispersion that could be done, given the topology of the postdiluvian world? Isn’t it interesting the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ began in Jerusalem so the paths to the ends of the earth would be the shortest length? In fact, the average length from this point to any other point on the surface of the earth is 4600 miles. So it’s no accident that the Middle East is the geographical location, both for the central dispersion from Ararat and for the dispersion of the gospel of Jesus Christ. It all fits together when you take the trouble to test it mathematically and you believe the text at its face value, don’t try to fudge it, just relax and digest it.

Genesis 8:18, “Noah went forth,” it says, “and his sons, and his wife, and his sons’ wives with him. [19] Every beast went forth, [every creeping thing, and every fowl, and whatsoever creeps upon the earth, after their kinds, went forth out of the ark].” And then it says in verse 20 that “Noah built an altar unto the LORD; and took of every clean beast and every clean fowl, and offered burnt offerings on the altar.” All right, here is the first time the word “altar” occurs in the Bible; the first time the word “altar” occurs.

Now why is that? We have previously studied there was a place called Eden on the antediluvian earth’s surface and there was a garden in the east part of Eden. To the west of Eden we presume, some doubt here, but we presume there was a mountain, the mountain of God, from which came a water supply that watered the Garden of Eden, went east and divided into four, according to Genesis 4:9-12. And so this water spreads out across the face of the earth from this location. We said, we used the word altar here, that the antediluvian people came to worship God here, but the text didn’t use the word altar, it was from a place where Cain and Abel dropped their offerings, but it’s interesting the text doesn’t use the word altar. Now when Cain and Abel and all the believers of the antediluvian world came east of Eden, who was in Eden to which they gave their offerings? God was. In other words, God in some sort of preincarnate form walked the face of the earth inside Eden. Apparently He left representatives, the fiery cherubs, there at that east gate of Eden, all during the era of the antediluvian world. Now when the flood came Eden was destroyed because the face of the earth was destroyed; all the earth was renewed. Don’t look at a world map today and think that’s the antediluvian world, it’s different, different continents, different oceans, different rivers, different mountains.

But Eden was eliminated, so therefore God had no headquarters on earth. Therefore His headquarters were in heaven, and so then we have the word altar, and in connection with the word altar there’s a word that means burnt offering and it comes from the Hebrew word ‘alah, or to go up, and the picture is the smoke, when the animal was being burned, those of you who were here when we had the movie, when they slaughtered the lamb and they cooked it and you saw the wool burning and the smoke coming up from the offering; well, that’s the simple physical picture we have in the text. “Noah built an altar unto the LORD: and took of every clean beast, and of every clean fowl” and offered burnt offerings. Now in verse 20 there’s a great risk here; you have to be sympathetic to Noah, tremendous risk. Why? Because he only had a few clean animals, they hadn’t multiplied yet, and if God did not accept this sacrifice, Noah in about two or more sacrifices would be in trouble, so God had to accept or show some favor of this sacrifice or all the clean animals that existed at that time would have been burned up and then we’d have no clean animals for future generations. So Noah, at great risk, sacrificed immediately on disembarking from the ark to go.

And now in Genesis 8:21 we have the typical Jewish Old Testament way of viewing things. “And the LORD smelled,” literally, “a soothing smell, and the LORD said in His heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man’s sake; for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth; neither will I gain smite any more every living thing, as I have done.” The “LORD smelled a soothing smell,” now a soothing smell would tend to suggest that the Lord was irritated and He needed soothing, calming down, and yes He was because what had he just got through doing? Judging the world. And so what we have pictured here in graphic terms of the sense of smell is propitiation.

You see, the Bible speaks graphically; the Bible speaks sometimes offensively to 20^th century man. This is why way back in Genesis 2, 3 and 4, when we got on the flood a lot of people got bent out of shape about the metaphors that were being used in the text, and when I went on to point out that our human good in God’s view is a bunch of excrement, and that’s the very word the Bible uses, when it’s pictured as excrement, that which smells, it’s offensive to God, that’s the graphic way God pictures us and therefore we are in a bad case for perfume, and so therefore we have the juxtaposition of these metaphors as smell, they are brought in to deal with propitiation. You might say that this is presenting deodorant to God, “a soothing smell,” for once, is coming into the nostrils of God. That’s the way it wants to be read because God looks down and he sees a sinful humanity. And then He smells a pleasant smell and it comes because that sacrifice is a fore view of the cross of Jesus Christ. God is sovereign, God is righteous, God is just, God is love, God is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, immutable and eternal and so therefore since God is righteous and just, that righteousness and justice has to be propitiated in order for God to show His love; it is propitiated because it is answered at the cross. The cross is the propitiation for God’s righteousness and justice. And therefore the Lord smells a soothing smell.

And now God responds to that, just like we were talking in family training about prayer; see how God responds. Nowhere in verse 20 do you read God told Noah to make the sacrifice, it was a spontaneous plea of Noah: oh Lord, preserve this world and God says I will. The whole period in which you and I live is an answer to one man’s prayer; Noah, the first time he got out, prayed, by this burnt offering, oh Lord, protect our world against this awful thing, let it not happen to us ever again. And then you have God responding and notice, “He says in His heart” in verse 21, He doesn’t say it to Noah right away, eventually He probably had to because we wouldn’t know it, but originally God said to Himself He says, as He smelled in this sweet smell, “I will not again curse the ground any more for man’s sake,” or because of man, but then, if you read the text carefully it looks like we’ve got a problem because for all the world it looks like we’ve got a non sequitur, something doesn’t follow here. God says I won’t curse the ground, and then He adds “because man is evil.”

Now you’d expect to read in verse 21, I will curse the ground because man is evil, or, I won’t curse the ground because man is good. But you wouldn’t expect to find I won’t curse the ground because man is evil. What’s happening here? What’s going on? Let’s first look at the word “the imagination” of his heart. The word “imagination” comes from a Hebrew word, yatsar, which is a word that is used to mold clay; it’s the one used in Genesis 2, the gooey mass of sticky clay on the potter’s wheel and as the potters wheel goes around his fingers work with it and the various tools until he gets a bowl shape out of this mass of clay. That area of working the clay is called yatsar. It’s “yatsar-ing” the clay, forming the clay. What the word for “thought” here is, is an idea of thought forms. What God is saying, He’s not looking at each immoral lust that we have; what He’s looking at is the whole form of thinking of man is evil; in other words, the whole depravity of man extends from one side to the other of his intellectual and heart life, everything is screwed up about this man. And so what God does, He smells the propitiation, and He looks down at man and He sees that it’s all fouled up, even with Noah. Noah is totally depraved, his three sons are totally depraved, their wives are totally depraved. So if He looked just at Noah and just at Noah’s sons and just at their wives, God would damn the earth again.

Well then, what is it that makes God not damn the earth? The sweet smell from the sacrifice. And so what you’ve got in a graphic picturesque way in verse 20 is a picture of God’s grace; God’s grace, because God is gracious He is not going to curse the world. Man, the only way he can get along is not to be cursed. Because man is so evil the only way God could ever get along with man on the face of the earth would be to judge him again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again, and God says I can’t do that because if I do that then I eliminate man from history, and so I’m going to back off and I’m going to give the human race an era of grace, the postdiluvian civilization.

Let’s conclude by turning to 2 Peter 3; we’ve been to this text a number of times, this is the one that all the critics of the global flood fail to have in their Bibles for some strange reason, Bernard Ramm and Davis Young have funny Bibles, they don’t include 1 Peter 3:5-7 for some strange reason. But after commenting on a global flood verse 9, “The Lord is not slack concerning His promise, as some men count slackness,” and why, because He “is long-suffering toward us, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. The picture is that we live in a period of temporary, underline the word temporary, we live in a period of temporary grace.

Has it ever dawned upon you that grace is not an eternal attribute of God? Grace is not an eternal attribute of God. Now yes, God is eternally gracious but He doesn’t show this attribute but for a limited time in history because there’s coming a time when grace will be withdrawn and when it is withdrawn then comes damnation or eternal salvation, one of the other. History will fork, it’s been going along with the wheat and tares mixed together and then it forks and when it forks there’ll be not a second opportunity for us; we’ve had our opportunity in space/time history, to respond or reject but once that fork in the road comes it’s all over. Then there’ll be no other chance to choose; then there’ll be no more ethics of grace and “love thy neighbor as thyself.” All that will be done away with because God will no longer be gracious. Here God is gracious in response to Noah’s prayer the entire postdiluvian… remember, Noah is the father of this world, remembered so in the myths, which remember the god Janus, the two-faced God, the god that looks to the past, the god that looks to the future. Noah, the father of this world, or as he’s known in India, Vishnu, Noah is our intercessor and our father of this era.

So we conclude with God being gracious to Noah and establishing uniformity in nature from this time until the time of the day of the Lord. Next week we’ll study further some of the details of the day of the Lord.