Clough Genesis Lesson 28

Evidences from the book of Job

This morning is Easter and we are on the area of the flood and I think it’s a good place at least to relate it halfway to Easter by pointing to the fact that the God who is speaking to us in the flood and through all the evidences of the flood is the God behind the resurrection, and He’s a real God, He’s not an unreal type of God. I mention this because of an article in this week’s paper about the debate is growing on the resurrection. Now of course the article was probably some 23 year old reporter that has a historical perspective of three years, probably put that title on the story. The problem with that is that there has been a debate about the resurrection growing since the morning it was pulled off and that’s slightly more than the last decade. So the problem with a lot of these stories you read about, about we’re having changing ideas about whether we really believe that Jesus was God and man, or whether we really believe that He rose physically from the dead, it’s all new… it’s NOT new thought, it’s been around since Satan. The question is the form that that thought takes today. Now unfortunately, since Vatican II Roman Catholic theology also has degenerated tremendously, far faster than the Protestant generated before the onslaught of liberalism at the end of the 19^th century.

For example this article quotes Professor Hans Coon, who is a Roman Catholic theologian from Germany saying: The resurrection does not mean either a return to life and space or in time but the assumption into that incomprehensible and comprehensive last and first reality which we call God. In other words, translated, what Coon is saying is that the resurrection was purely spiritual, it wasn’t physical, it wasn’t literal; it wasn’t such that after Jesus Christ walked out there Mary could grab Him, that picture about where Jesus says “Touch Me not” to Mary isn’t touch, he uses the word embrace, He’s walked out of the tomb and she just grabs Him, and He’s saying hold it here, you know, I’ve got things to do and that’s His point to Mary. But the whole point is that Mary’s grabbing something and she’s not grabbing a phantom; she’s grabbing something that has material corporeality in her arms.

And then the article goes on: Among Protestant theologians the resurrection has been increasingly viewed as a myth or legend since the time of the enlightenment. Those of you who were here in the Frances Schaeffer series ought to know exactly what it’s talking about, where the enlightenment referred to rationalism and so on. Then the article concluded with this final sentence with the most pathetic statement in the whole thing. To me this is a lot worse than what Hans Coon and what some of the Protestant liberals are saying; this is the one that applies to our own area. (Quote) “For the vast majority of churchgoers, however, the scholarly debate means little to their own Easter experience.” (End quote)

Tragically what that’s saying is as long as people have their own spiritual experience it doesn’t matter whether the resurrection was factual or not, whether it was literally true that Jesus rose from the dead. Baloney! In 1 Corinthians 15 Paul says if Christ didn’t literally rise from the dead you’re playing games, throw the Bible out, kiss it off if it doesn’t have historical roots. And this is why we find today, for example in one of the leading churches in Lubbock, a clergyman who denies the inerrancy of the Scripture, who denies the physical nature of the resurrection of Christ and people go to the church thinking that all is well and good, obviously declaring their allegiance to the organization over the Word of God. So we have this and it’s right here in our own backyard and the problem is that we don’t believe that when God speaks He really speaks, and when He speaks He really speaks truly.

So in our series on Genesis we’ve come to this place of the Noahic Covenant and one of the real things stated in this covenant is the stability of nature. Let’s look at the text for a moment. Notice in Genesis 8:22 where it says the seasons will be regular henceforth from the flood on in history. [“While the earth remains, seed-time and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.”] Now that’s not talking about spiritual seasons; the Word of God is not just giving us a sweet little Sunday School story, it’s making statements about what is happening geologically, meteorologically, geophysically in the universe. Verse 22 is a scientifically valid statement. And if it isn’t then you and I have no reason under the sun to accept what the Bible says about anything else. If we can’t trust the Bible in that area where we can see, where we can check it out, what business do we have trusting it in the area where it says He forgives our sins; can you take a rocket ship up to heaven to check to see if your ledger is clear? How can you check those statements? You can’t. So isn’t it foolish to say we believe the Bible spiritually when we can’t believe the Bible physically and historically.

And then in Genesis 9:13 in the Noahic Covenant, it says, “I set my bow in the cloud,” it’s very clear what that’s saying if you’re honest to the text; it’s saying that the rainbow first occurred after the flood and there ought be some scientific evidences, some historical evidences this is so, because we don’t believe God just speaks spiritually; He speaks in all ways. If this is the case, and we’ve got to the point now and I’ve showed you some evidences of some of the problems our liberal friends are having with the evidences, and some of the evidences that confirm our position, if that’s the case, then when we take a timeline and say that the flood occurred, and remember, we are locked down to a very prima facie view of the text, 1656 years between creation and the flood, that’s the only way you can read the genealogies, you can’t put a gap every 50 million years past the name and have 1656 years accounted for and 10 million not; that doesn’t quite give you confidence the genealogy is there for any rhyme or reason that way. So taking the genealogies at their face value we are locked down to that time interval.

And then, taking again the genealogies from the time of the flood on down to the time of Abraham who, based on various dates, maybe from 2000 to 1800 BC, then we have to say that the flood is somewhere between 2500 and 2800 BC, somewhere in there, not exactly but that’s the ballpark. Well, if anybody knows ancient history you know what a radical statement I just made. That statement is totally in conflict with the existing chronological scheme. Even people who accept a late ice age put that back at 10,000 so 2500, 2800 is an extremely recent… extremely recent date and nobody in the establishment is going to buy this. And therefore they’re going to look upon this kind of a thing as just a totally mythological statement.

I’m going to try to give you some evidence this morning, however, in the text, showing you that again our establishment in our generation is reading history very wrongly; they’re making an error factor of some ten to the fourth or ten thousand times wrong, they are just that far off. And one of the things that we’re going to major on this morning is if the Noahic Covenant, and we will study that covenant in detail in subsequent Sundays, but looking at it broadly speaking it’s saying there’s going to be stability on planet earth. Now if the stability came in at the flood it would follow that there would be some era, some delay of bringing the Noahic Covenant into full force; that is, that the earth would have earthquakes and tremors and volcanic activity for some years afterwards. And I’m going to show you some evidence from the Bible that for a thousand or more years after the flood the earth was wracked with the dying echoes of the flood catastrophe, and that men were there to observe these dying echoes and they have been recorded for us in history.

So what we really need to study this morning is since we know Abraham in Genesis, and we know the flood from Genesis, Genesis doesn’t give us too much between the flood and Abraham, it just quickly passes over history, so what we really need to have some fun is to go and see if we can find one book of the Bible that was written between Abraham and Noah. Now could we find one book of the Bible written during that period and I say we can and the book is the book of Job. The reason we say this, several reasons but one of these is that the book of Job deals with the basic doctrinal problem of suffering. But the strange thing about it is, though it uses the Jewish name for God, Yahweh, it doesn’t at all recognize the existence of Moses’ Law, which tends to suggest that Job didn’t know of the Mosaic Law. Well, if Job didn’t know the Mosaic Law the only reason he didn’t know it is either he wasn’t close to Israel or he lived before Israel. We know where Job lived geographically; he lived just south of Israel, southeast of her, in the Arabian Peninsula. Well if Job lived in the Arabian Peninsula he certainly lived close enough to hear the Mosaic Law. Didn’t the Queen of Sheba hear of Solomon? Of course. So it’s hard to explain the absence of the Mosaic Law in Job and say that Job lived later in history.

So there’s only one solution to the problem; Job must have lived before Moses. He must have lived before the nation came into existence. I’ll show you supporting evidence of that. Turn to Genesis 10:29; Job may be mentioned here; there’s a name that looks like his name, it’s a little different but some scholars have suggested here the historical Job existed. This is a genealogy, a study which we’ll get into in subsequent Sundays, these names all mean something, your ancestors are listed here in this list somewhere; all of us, if you could follow your family tree back you’d plug into one of these names. In Genesis 10:29 it says: Ophir, and Havilah, and Jobab,” now though there’s an “ab” on the end of the name that may be another synonym of this man. Job may be his short name, Joseph and Joe, Jobab and Job, so here is some preliminary evidence that Job lived before Abraham.

But there’s more evidence to this; one of the evidences is that when we turn to the book of Job things are going on on earth in Job that are strange. Job is a very strange book; lots of peculiar events are happening and while we recognize that the book of Job was written primarily for a spiritual reason, not a historical or scientific reason, nevertheless, if you’ve got a group of men discussing a problem and they keep referring to things happening in their day that are unusual in our day, then we have to say that the book of Job must reflect something happening on the face of this planet that’s no longer happening.

So we’re going to begin this Sunday a series, it’ll probably a Sunday or two to do this, surveying the material that Job gives us and answering and tying together some of the questions that you’ve handed in on these feedback cards, what about cavemen, what about dinosaurs and so on. The book of Job gives a marvelous amount of information.

We’re going to start by turning to Job 1:16. This is a case where Satan assaulted him economically and physically. Now one thing to remember about Satan and his work, and the book of Job shoes us very clearly our primary reason for existing is loyalty to God, occupation with Christ, and that would have been the goal had there not even been a fall. The Lord Jesus Christ did not have a sin nature but it says He had to learn loyalty to God; in the book of Hebrews it mentions this. So therefore loyalty to God is the purpose, the aim, the goal of all sanctification. Whether there are evil forces or no evil forces, it doesn’t make any difference, that’s still the goal of sanctification, all Christian growth; it’s not to have an experience, it is to develop a mental attitude of authoritative response to the Word of God. Now evil comes in and acts like a weight or an obstacle to that goal, but it doesn’t replace the goal. The goal still is not the elimination of evil; the goal is loyalty to God and we’ll let God take care of the evil process. We fight them, we oppose them, but our job still is not their extermination; that is Christ’s job.

Now this can be illustrated in secular history by a very famous event that happened during World War II. During World War II Hitler and the Luftwaffe almost destroyed Britain, the battle of Britain in the 1940s, and then the Germans made a very foolish decision. Actually they didn’t make it and their military commanders didn’t make it, it was Hitler reacting emotionally to what happened. The original scheme called for the German bombers to bomb the RAF air fields and once they strangled the ability of the RAF intercessors to come up and strike the bombers, then they would have had Britain; Britain would have been naked and prostrate before the German army crossing the channel. And for a while this worked and worked very effectively, in spite of the RAF radars and so on. And then one day a German plane bombed a section of London, one of the English cities, and whether it was for personal vengeance for the crew’s sake, I’ve forgot the details, but Churchill responded by sending British bombers over to start bombing the cities of Germany and then it was off to the races. And each side was going to break the spirit of the other side and the Germans were going to break the spirit of the English on that island if that was the last thing they ever did, and they would bomb the cities and bomb the cities. Only one very small problem; they weren’t bombing the RAF air fields from whence came all the RAF fighters that were shooting down all their bombers.

So here is a classical mistake made in military strategy where we focus on the obstacle instead of the goal and lost the war. And that’s the same thing in Christian sanctification, the objective is loyalty to God and to His Word and the obstacles are there, we have to face them but they are not to be our consuming passion.

In Job 1 Satan drops his obstacle on Job and here it’s destruction. Job 1:16, the report comes in, this is the second bad news report of the day, this is one of those days when it was better if Job hadn’t even got up, but in verse 16, “While he was yet speaking,” that is the first reporter, “While he was yet speaking, there came also another, and said, The fire of God is fallen from heaven, and has burned up the sheep, and the servants, and consumed them, and I only am escaped to tell thee.” Now that’s some sort of a fire fall, it may have been supernatural or it may have been through secondary means but whatever it is we know that that kind of fire fall on a large scale is not going on today, and yet on the face of the earth’s surface we have examples contemporary with this age of Job when these fire falls did occur.

In fact, we’ve got one very interesting illustration from our own country. Here is a map of the northwest United States and here is a map of Oregon; northern California, Nevada and the state of Washington. And this is shaded portions of the state of Oregon, northern California, northern Nevada and southern Washington. That area, the entire area, is one massive basalt extrusion over the surface of the earth. Nothing like that is going on today; Pompeii and Mount Vesuvius don’t produce that widespread a phenomenon, that is a massive thing that happened. If that happened today you would ruin an entire state all at once. Now when did this kind of thing happen? Our liberal friends tell us the present is the key to the past in historical geology. When did this kind of thing happen? That’s not happening in the present; this is a catastrophe, one of thousands of catastrophes that happened in the past in the earth’s history.

Well, that might have been like this fire fall recorded in Job 1:16. We have cataclysms like this that have been experienced. We, just because we don’t have them in our day get used to it. But let me read to you some disturbing reports of catastrophes that have happened, say in the last 200-300 years just to get the wheels going so we can appreciate some of the observations we’re going to see this morning in the book of Job. Normally you don’t get these in school because these kinds of things haven’t happened in the 20^th century. The worst things that happened in the 20^th century are man’s atomic bombs and World War II, World War I. But because we think in those terms we don’t remember, at least in our generation or the generations of our immediate fathers and parents, no large scale national disaster has really happened of this kind of magnitude. But in the 19^th century that wasn’t so and in the 18^th century that wasn’t so.

Listen to this report; these reports, incidentally, were available to Darwin and Lyell, men who are trying to undercut this section of Genesis. Raffles, in his History of Java, it’s the story of Indonesia, the southwestern Pacific area. In his History of Java he writes that: In April, 1815 one of the most frightful eruptions recorded in history occurred in the province of Tambora in the island of Sumbawa, about 200 miles from the eastern extremity of Java. It lasted, this is a time limit, it lasted from April 5^th to July of that year, but the most violent explosions occurred on the 12^th and 12^th of July; the sound of the explosions was heard for a thousand miles away. Out of the population of 12,000 people in the province of Tambora only 26 survived. Violent whirlwinds carried up men, horses and cattle into the air, tore up the largest trees by the roots, and covered the whole sea with floating timber. The ashes darkened the air; the floating cinders to the westward of Sumatra formed on the 12^th of April a mass two feet thick and several miles in extent, through which ships, with difficulty, forced their way. The darkness in daytime was more profound than the blackest night. The town called Tambora on the west side of Sumbawa was overflowed by the sea which encroached upon the shore so that the water remained permanently 18 feet deep in places where there used to be land. You see, the ocean changed the form of the island. “The area covered by the convulsion was a thousand English miles in circumference. In the island of [sounds like: Am broi nah] in the same month and year the ground opened and threw out water and threw out water and then closed again.”

But it is at that point of the European coast nearest to the site of the lost continent of Atlantis at Lisbon that the most tremendous earthquake of modern times has occurred. On the 1^st of November, 1775 a sound of thunder was heard underground and immediately afterwards a violent shock threw down the greater part of the city; in six minutes 60,000 people died. The great concourse of people had collected for safety on a quay, built entirely of marble,” this is on a rock structure, “and suddenly it sank down with all the people on it and not one of the dead bodies ever floated to the surface. A great number of small boats and vessels anchored near it and full of people were swallowed up in a whirlpool. No fragment of these wrecks ever rose again to the surface. The water where the quay went down is now 600 feet under the sea. The area covered by this earthquake was very great. [Sounds like: Humboldt] says that a portion of the earth’s surface, four times as great as the size of Europe was simultaneously shaken. The shakes extended from the Baltic to the West Indies, from Canada to Algiers. At Eight Leagues of Morocco the ground opened and swallowed a village 10,000 inhabitants, closed over them and never left a trace.

Now that’s talking about convulsion that has happened in the past in history and that’s what’s wrong with the movie rendition of The Late Great Planet Earth. At the battle of Armageddon and the end times the world is not going to come to an end by man’s missiles and man’s bombs. The world will come to an end by these kinds of cataclysmic forces, the forces being addressed in the Noahic Covenant. The Noahic Covenant promised stability but the stability was slow in coming.

Turn to Job 8:6, another passage in Job remarkably strange to our ears. This is the discourse of Bildad; Bildad is trying to answer the age old question of why it is that Job is suffering when Job appears to be righteous. Bildad argues that all suffering is due to direct immediate sin. This is a standard argument, you know, these parents have a deformed child because the parents sinned. Baloney! It’s very cruel to have parents who have to suffer because of a genetic imperfection in their children and then you blame the parents for sinning somehow. Maybe the parents have sinned in the past and they go through the rest of their marriage with this tremendous guilt and so on. All they have to do is turn to John 9:1-8 and Jesus destroys the whole theory; He says that’s not true, genetic defects in children aren’t due to the sins of their parents; they’re due to sin in general but not to the specific sins of their parents. Bildad is wrong, but Bildad apparently was influenced in his argument by what had happened in what we call the antediluvian period.

Now we’ve said again and again in this morning series that civilization began after the creation and fall, and until the flood you had a rise of technology, a rise in technology that would surprise many of us. We would be surprised to know that iron was worked, that gold was worked, that perhaps they had access to electricity from electroplating in this antediluvian period. We would be surprised at the level of technology, and then immediately after the flood you have a decline in technology because the name of the game after the flood is almost a thousand years and there’s one word and it begins with “s,” survival. And so you have a decline of technology and now you have an escalation back again, and so today, because we’re only presented that view in school, we think of technology in evolutionary terms; the only problem is that we have evidences back here of a very high technology, so now the only way the evolutionists can explain this one is to bring Von Danagin [sp?] into the story and have the flying saucers dropping down all these goodies before human technology arose. We don’t believe that at all. We say what happened is that those are goodies that are simply nuances of the high antediluvian technology.

The other thing that happened in all this was that besides this great theological structure, the technological structure of this world, the people existing immediately after the flood remembered this and so in the generation from Noah to the generation of Abraham, somewhere in here you had a gradual decline in ages. And Job, we say, lived somewhere in this period. And this all figures into Bildad’s argument. Notice the text, Job 8:6, he says, “If you,” he’s talking to Job, “If you were pure and upright, surely now He would awake for you,” that is He would answer your prayer, “and make the habitation of thy righteousness prosperous,” so there would be immediate blessing, immediate rewards; this operates on the theory of immediate judgment, which may have been followed in the antediluvian world. [7] “Though thy beginning was small, yet thy latter end should greatly increase,” that’s prosperity.

But now his reason, that’s the strange one, it just stands out from the text and grabs you. Job 8:8-9, look at the reason there, isn’t that a strange reason, “For inquire, I pray thee, of the former age,” now what’s the former age? The former age is the antediluvian age, the age before the flood; inquire “of the former age, and prepare thyself to the search of their fathers,” Adam, Cain, Lamech and those people, those people, “their fathers.” Then notice his comment in verse 9, “(For we” that is those of us this side of the flood, in this age, “(For we are but of yesterday, and we know nothing” that is relative to verse 8 people, our technology has dropped, “we know nothing,” compared to them, why, “because our days upon earth are a shadow).” …our days are as a shadow! That is, we’ve got a shortened lifespan, our lifespan has dropped considerably.

Now we could demonstrate that by looking at a simple piece of graph paper and you can do this for yourself if you doubt it, those of you with a little math do this on semi log paper and you really get an exciting result, but just do it on regular paper and take the data of Genesis 5 and Genesis 10 and 11 and do your thing, and when you plot the data you’ll get a graph like this; it doesn’t depend on what Charlie Clough says or anybody else says, the data is there in the text and you get a straight line on the decline if you use semi log paper, but regular graph paper will give you this kind of a graph; you plot your data as follows; on the ordinate you plot the death of the patriarchs, the age of the patriarch at his death, and on the abscissa you sequence they by father/son. Plot the points on the graph paper and if you really are sophisticated you can use some curve fitting techniques, otherwise just do it freehand, and you will notice that before the flood between the creation and the flood the line of best fit is a straight line at the 930 year mark. That means that the average age before the flood was 930 years. Then after the flood you’ll see this rapid decline and this decline takes a very peculiar form, it’s called an exponential decay curve; it’s the same kind of curve that you get, for example in electricity, when you discharge a capacitor you can get it from a thermal thing, you can put ice in a glass, mix it with a thermometer, get the same kind of curve, this curve shows up in physics, chemistry, biology, it shows up in electricity and so on. It’s a curve that you always get in science when you move from one state to another state. And the peculiar thing about it is that if you’re really careful you’ll get two curves; they split in the generation of Peleg, exactly the generation where it says the earth was divided in the days of Peleg.

Now why does the data split like this? What is this data telling us? It’s telling us in unmistakable language that something real is taking place. Some people say oh, well, that can be explained because they had a different calendar before the flood. If they had a different calendar before the flood you’d have a straight line before the flood and you’d have a straight line after it, you would not have a transition curve. This is a peculiar curve that shows the data are reporting real declining conditions as the earth’s systems, the biosphere, went from one state to another. The only other explanation I can think of if you doubt the text is that somehow T.I. managed to have exponential hand computers and the rabbis in Moses’ day were playing number games one day when they wrote this genealogy and they put it in there just for our later amusement.

So we have real data in the text, longevity. And that’s what Job is talking about here in verse 9, he says I know that is true. If you had lived in that day your grandfather and your great grandfather would probably have appeared younger than your father, strange set of circumstances but that would have been true. Just be thankful you didn’t own stock in a life insurance company while all this was going on. So there was a real type thing that was going on, we don’t know why. Now there have been three guesses as to why the decline in longevity. And you say well, look, come on, I don’t really care about what caused the longevity. Listen, if you’re a curious Bible-believing Christian you ought to because what is obviously is telling us is that man’s aging process can be affected by the environment. That’s a medical deduction based on this data. If we only knew that the factors were in the antediluvian climate you could slow down the aging process that nobody seems to be able to define or tell us about. So there have been three, and these are only preliminary guesses; maybe some of you interested in these fields, I urge you, use your creativity, take your technical fields or your studies or your interests and do something with them. Give something back to the human race and give God the credit for giving you the idea from the Scriptures.

Here are three guesses that have been put forward, one by a Canadian physiologist, Dr. Arthur Custance has argued that the longevity decline is due to interbreeding and the fact that after the flood you had a family that had a genetic structure of accumulated mutations from before the flood and when these went to interbreed closely, which they’d have to if there are only 8, then you had immediate decline of the viability of the whole body.

Another idea is that they had a poorer diet, that diet has something to do, therefore, with aging. And that there was a shift in man’s diet from a total vegetarian diet before the flood to meat afterwards, plus other things. A third guess has come about that the air has changed; that after the flood we have greater CO2 and greater ozone levels in the atmosphere. The ozone, that’s the one that you have to be careful that your can of Right Guard doesn’t destroy. So we have the change in the composition of the gases in the atmosphere and this may be the cause. It may be something else but we throw this data out; it’s sitting there, begging for somebody to come along, you’ve a valuable hint on human aging process that hardly anyone even knows about and even the Christians that know about it don’t seem to take it seriously.

Well Job did, and there’s proof that something was happening in his day. Let’s turn to Job 12:15, here we have another evidence of peculiar things going on in Job’s day; look what it says, “Behold, God withholds the waters,” literally the floods, “and they,” that is the land areas, “dry up; also, He sends them out, and they” the waters “overturn the earth.” Notice the word “overturn,” in the Hebrew it means overturn or change, so there was tremendous changes taking place both through lack of water and over abundance of water.

Now we have evidence of this. Take northern Africa for an example; everybody knows and has heard of the Sahara Desert and so in northern Africa you have this vast sea of sand. Only one thing; when you fly across the Sahara Desert and you look down out of the airplane you notice lake beds, and not only do you notice lake beds but when you go there to investigate the lakes on the surface you find caves with drawings in them depicting animals that can’t live in the desert. Well, what’s this telling us? Well it’s telling us very clearly the Sahara Desert is something very recent in history; it didn’t used to be that way in northern Africa and we have substantiation for this in the Bible. We have, when Abraham goes to Lot and they have this big fight about who’s going to go down and take the area in the Salt Sea there, the Dead Sea, they say oh, go ahead, Lot wants it because it is watered like the Garden of Eden.

Now friends, the Jordan Valley today isn’t watered like the Garden of Eden. If that statement isn’t poetic exaggeration it’s telling us a different climate, more rain, was occurring in Abraham’s day at that latitude. Historians, like Herodotus tell us that when the first Egyptians came to Egypt there was so much water that Mizraim, the guy who was described as the founder of Egypt in the Bible, Mizraim, the first Egyptian, had to build dikes to get the water off the farmland, and that wasn’t dikes to prevent the Nile, that was dikes because all of this water west of the Nile, out here in the so-called desert. So now the question comes, why was the Sahara desert under water recently, in historical times, and men lived to write about it and tell about it and live around these waters. Well, Job is saying that during his day they are drying up; “He withholds the waters, and they dry up,” a drying out process was already beginning after the flood and in northern Africa there’s evidence of this.

But we don’t have to go to northern Africa; we can go to our own southwest. In case you haven’t noticed it’s dry around here. And there was a lake called Lake Bonneville; Lake Bonneville was a thousand feet deep, you can go around Salt Lake City this day, driving your car around, you can see the lake levels up along the edges of what is now the Great Salt Lake; this Salt Lake still is shrinking so fast that in 1925 there was a great amusement center put there on the side of the lake and now it’s a mile from the edge of the Great Salt Lake. So since 1925 the Great Salt Lake has contracted a mile. That is how rapid the western United States is drying out. In other words, we are still experiencing the drying out from the time of the flood; it’s still going on around us. It’s going on in the rainfall. One guy tallied up the 44 year rainfall in northern California from 1879 to 1923 there were 29 out of the 44 years that had over 20 inches of rain; but in the 44 year period from 1923 to 1967 out of 44 years only 18 years had 20 inches of rain or more. In other words, the southwestern United States is gradually turning into a desert; we are drying out from the days of the flood.

The Pueblo Indian civilization in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado, there’s a civilization you can tell from the way the cities were constructed, they built tremendous dwellings, had tremendous population and something happened and it wasn’t because they were defeated in war; it was because their water ran out.

We can go to another part of Texas where this has occurred and that is in east Texas; over near Fort Worth and Dallas, you can drive around, you can see lake bed, beaches, because all of east Texas was covered at one time by the Gulf of Mexico and there was thick sediment that formed because in the model that I’m following for the Genesis text here we visualize the flood as happening, as laying down the early Paleozoic strata, laying part of the Mesozoic strata. And then we have Psalm 104, the continents rising after the waters of the flood but rising gradually; it’s a thousand years or so for the continents to assume their present shape and as they assume their present shape and they backed off and the adjustments occurred, then you have the waters receding from the land.

And out here at Glen Rose, and I’ve left one of the fossilized footprints up here on the table for you to see, some of you who haven’t seen these, these are found in the parks near the Glen Rose area, and the interesting thing about them is that they are man tracks in a Cretaceous formation. For those untrained in geology, what that is is a Cretaceous is supposedly the age of dinosaurs, who were supposed to become extinct 70 million years before man evolved. Unfortunately this man didn’t know he wasn’t supposed to be there and so he walked there anyway. Here is one of the dinosaur tracks, just to give you an idea of the size; that was one toe, one claw there. In other words, get out of his way. Here is the man track next to a sandal in the rock; some people say oh that’s just a freak erosion pattern. Okay, we have an answer to that one; notice how the erosion pattern miraculously eroded a right foot here, a left foot here, a right foot here, it’s amazing what the powers of erosion can do. So there are man tracks embedded in the park at Glen Rose in the level of the dinosaur strata, clearly testifying that man and the dinosaur were not different ages, as we are always told in school, they were simultaneous. I’ll present more evidence of that as we go on in the book of Job. So if you’re prepared for some radical thoughts then we can proceed in the book of Job.

Let’s go to the next passage, Job 9:5, this is all in the Hebrew participle, meaning a continual process, and look what he just casually says, “God removes the mountains, and they know not,” “He removes the mountains, and they know not; and He overturns them in His anger,” now he’s not talking about moving a little dirt pile around, he’s talking about full-sized mountains, thousands of feet of rock are being moved in Job’s day. That means the major mountain ranges are coming into existence in Job’s time. [6] “He shakes the earth out of its place, and the pillars thereof,” which is a poetic metaphor for the foundations if the earth, “are trembling.” And now look at verse 7, “He commands the sun, and it does not rise;” now what are you going to do with this text? Are you going to kiss it off as poetry or is this real historical observation; oh, that’s Joshua’s day… No! In Joshua’s day what was unique was about Joshua’s day was that the sun stopped at the prayer of a man, that was what was unique about Joshua’s day, not the sun stopping. Here it says the sun did not rise and it’s in the participle meaning that this happened several times in history.

You say come on, do you mean to tell me that this gigantic glob of matter called planet earth spinning on its axis slows down, gets rid of all its momentum, and nothing happens to the earth and then it speeds up again? Yes, and I’ll give you some evidence of it recently. Now that time can be measured more accurately and the solar flares are being studied it’s interesting that when the earth in its motions around the sun passes through a solar flare it intersects the orbit of the earth, the earth’s rotation slows down by several microseconds and when it gets through the flare it speeds up to its original speed. Now, isn’t that testimony that there’s some force not well understood by which somehow the angular momentum of a rotating spinning globe is somehow slowed, somehow removed temporarily and then put back into the system. So these forces do exist, and so it’s foolish to say that it can’t happen. What you’d better say is we don’t know how it can happen but don’t ever say it can’t happen. Job says it did happen in his day; “God commands the sun, and it does not rise.” So something peculiar is happening.

Now it also says that “He removes mountains, and He overturns them in His anger.” Do we have any evidence of mountain building within recent history? You know, we’re always told oh, that was millions of years ago. Well, there are several evidences Velikovsky gives this in his book, Earth and Upheaval, and at one place he points to a strange city in the Andes, latitude 16 degrees south, there is a city at an elevation of 12,500 feet and the problem with this particular city is it is a large city, we’re not talking about a few goat herders up at 12,000 feet, we’re talking about a major city up here with granaries; only one problem grain doesn’t grow at this level in South America any more; it grows at 6,000 and 8,000 feet but it doesn’t grow at 12,000 feet. Question: where did they get all the grain for these humongous size granaries at 12,000 feet?

The only answer appears to be, as hard as this answer may seem, that the mountains have risen since the city was built, and the city was abandoned after the mountain rose and they could no longer grow grain at that altitude, so they came down to a lower altitude. And a geologist mentioned this; he said, “Is such an idea beyond the bounds of possibility? Under the assumption that the Andes were once some 3,000 feet lower than they are, maze would then ripen in the base of Lake Titicaca, and the site of the ruins of this city could support the necessary population. If the megalithic builders were living under these conditions the problem is solved but if this is geologically impossible we have no answer to this mystery.”

So there are evidences of recent orogeny or recent mountain building. When was the last time you saw a mountain pop up? You see, because this isn’t recent to our experience we think therefore it can’t happen; it’s got to happen slowly. Who says? We’ve got eyewitnesses here; this is an eyewitness observation, verse 5, and it says it happened quickly. If one man saw it then it obviously happened within his lifetime, meaning that mountains could rise and rise extremely rapidly. If you want an example of how fast things happen I’ve got a book of a series of remarkable photographs taken of the island of Surtsey, southeast of Iceland, this island was born in 1967; it came up through the sea in some eight months and it’s over two miles wide and you can look at the photographic evidence yourself and see it building. It didn’t take millions of years for this island to kind of, millimeter by millimeter to come up out of the water, and then the plant life slowly evolved; the plant life grows right on the island while it’s still growing. Seals are still on it.

And the other thing to remember; if our southwest desert areas are recent and the Sahara Desert is recent, doesn’t this tell you about the speed with which plants adapt? Where did all those cactus come from? This shows you tremendous and rapid ability of plants to adapt, not over millions of years but within a couple of thousand years. I have some photographs in my office of an even more amazing feat; in the west the first time they brought a camera into Oregon and Idaho they photographed the woods and then they photographed them in the 20^th century and you know, you can see the woods are expanding; the great northwest lumbering area, as recent as 1850, were not half as populated with trees as they are today. What does this tell you? That even the western woods area that we thought were so old have recently developed; not that there weren’t trees there before but I’m talking about the density of the trees.

So don’t absorb all this evolutionary baloney that goes on saying that this couldn’t happen. Obviously the sun stopped still in Joshua’s day. You say oh well, they just thought it. Well then how do you explain the fact that simultaneously with the idea of a long day in the eastern hemisphere there are myths on the North and South American continent of the Indians experiencing a long night? As Velikovsky has remarked, isn’t it amazing how myths vary longitudinally. So there are eyewitness evidences that strange things have happened in the past and happened very catastrophically.

Let’s look at Job 14:18, another reference in this remarkable of observations on earth history. Surely the mountain falling comes to nothing, and the rock is removed out of its place.” Is this poetry? Is this exaggeration or is he literally trying to say that entire mountain ranges like the old worn out Appalachians were worn out in historical times. Verse 19, “The waters wear the stones; they wash away the things which grow out of the dust of the earth, and thou destroyest the hope of man.”

Turn to Job 28:9, “He putteth forth His hand upon the rock; He overturns the mountains by the roots.” Again, is this poetry; is the guy just putting us on or are these literal observations that occurred, say within the last 4,000 years. Notice verse 10, “He cuts out rivers among the rocks,” … “He cuts out rivers among the rocks,” now one of the prize cases for our evolutionary friends is the Grand Canyon. Oh, they say, I’d like to see how you explain that one; that surely is evidence of millions of years of erosion. Only one problem; the Grand Canyon is a meandering river and meandering rivers don’t cut down, they cut sideways, right? The Mississippi River doesn’t erode down, it erodes sideways; the fact that it’s meandering is proof that it’s eroding sideways, the bed is soft and you can’t have a meandering cut unless the beds are soft beds. So what does this tell us? That the Grand Canyon was cut out when the beds were soft, mud and ooze and therefore they were cut our very rapidly after the flood. The Grand Canyon is a drain off of waters of the floods on the North American continent. And it happened, it was cut within a thousand years, it didn’t take millions of years; it can’t be explained on a slow process because if the Colorado River is cutting through rock it’s going to cut straight, it’s not going to cut meandering, and you can prove that with a simple equation of hydrodynamics. There’s nothing obscurantist about this suggestion, it’s not some fundy just trying to crank something out. The truth of the matter is nobody knows how the Grand Canyon formed; we have a guess and the evolutionists have a guess. But their guess isn’t any better than ours.

All right, all the time this was happening we have the continents forming and going through a radical upheaval because as a sister to the Grand Canyon there’s an area in the Mideast, near the eastern end of the Mediterranean, the Jordan Valley, it goes all the way down into eastern Africa, it’s called the Great African Rift. It’s in that great African rift that Leaky in his recent book finds all the remnants of man, but this African Rift is a crack in the earth’s surface through what is Paleozoic and Mesozoic strata. We believe that those strata were laid down by the flood and that the Great African Rift is a split caused when these continents are readjusting after the flood. If so, then the bones that Leaky has discovered down here in the Great African Rift are bones, not of man before the flood, they are post-flood man, they are sons of Noah who spread out, lived there during the time of the catastrophes described in Genesis and they were located precisely in the area of this Great African Rift, there was great rainfall in this period, they went down there to get warm. Why did they have to go down there to get warm? Because the climate was turning colder; this was the days of the ice age. I will show you evidence next Sunday that the ice age existed during the time of Job and Job describes the glaciers. So therefore Job lived in the ice age, he records it, he tells us what it was like and during that time there was a great need to get warm and so the men went down to get warm as you can experience any time you descend into these kinds of deep cuts and deep valleys.

Now what about man? Let’s turn to Job 30:3 and look at his observation about cave men. During this time it wasn’t that Noah and his sons were primitive; it was that they were trying to survive. Cave men were not going around [he makes funny sounds] like this, their art was as sophisticated as Egyptian art, as any other art, we’ll show you some of their art as we go on in the series, you can’t tell the difference between it. In fact, some of the ark shows symbolic representation of Eden. They were theologically acute people; the only problem is they appear primitive to us because they had no tools. Where did they go to live? They had to eek out an existence under the awful conditions following the flood.

If you want a modern day illustration, if you track a pioneer family from Boston or New York as you moved west to the Mississippi, cross the Mississippi, went across the Great Plains, and you gathered together the tools that they were dropping along the way, you would find a primitivization. For example, the things that were not useful, the elegant silver and the china would be left in the east; there’d be more crude dishes. Was this because the people in the plains at first couldn’t have china, couldn’t have good silverware? No, it was because they were primarily fighting a battle for survival and when you fight for survival you automatically primativize down. So therefore, that’s an argument we’ll point out later, the cave men are not stupid, the cave men were under a beleaguered condition of nature and this is why they had their problems. Some of them, the stooped ones, one of them was declared to have arthritis, a French physician went to study the skeleton of one of these types, and found out that the backbone was just scarred with osteoarthritis, I’ve got the scientific paper where he reports it. Well if you lived in a cave and it was driveling and drooling and everything, you’d have arthritis too, but don’t say he had a tail and ate bananas.

Job 30:3, look what it says here, describing the awful conditions these people had to live through; this is our human race and what it went through in those awful years after the flood. “For want and famine they were solitary, fleeing into the wilderness in former times desolate and waste. [4] Who cut up mallows by the bushes, and juniper roots for their meat. [5] They were driven forth from among men (they cried after them as a thief,” these are particular types of men. [6] “To dwell in the cliffs of the valleys, in caves of the earth, and in the rocks.” There is your reference to cave men. So the Bible acknowledges yes, there were cave men and they lived there for very good reason; there was a problem with survival, both from nature and from man.

Now one further point of observation we’ll look at in Job 4:19. Archeologists often tell us that when they dig down in the early parts of a city or a tel, for example at Jericho this happened, you cut down into the tel and you get various level, city A, city B, city C, city D or sometimes it’s reversed in the sequence of letters. And then down on the bottom there are all of these clay layers. And these clay layers are said to be (quote) “pre-dynastic” period of history when there were about a thousand years or so in this period, and that’s how they get a 7000 BC date for Jericho. And so all these things, they say well, that took a hundred, two hundred years for each one of these adobe layers of homes to be built and destroyed and wear away. No, if right after the flood there’s lots of rain what happens when you try to build an adobe house? The first rain it washes out. So you’re getting these rapid build up of these layers not because they’re a long time but because of the rain.

Job 4:19-21, “How much less,” he’s commenting on unstable people and he uses the metaphor of these people that lived in adobe houses, “How much less in them that dwell in houses of adobe [clay], whose foundation is in the dust, that are crushed before the moth?” The word “moth” here is an odd word; we don’t know what it is. [20] They are destroyed from morning to evening; they perish forever without any regarding it.” So obviously it’s reporting tremendous catastrophes that are happening to these people. Now why? Why was this time when three was such an upheaval on the face of the earth and all this suffering and sorrow and just primitive living in order to survive and build the great civilizations that we know. Noah’s sons had it tough.

Well as always, there’s a spiritual reason for it and I think the book of Job and Job 21:9-15 gives us why. Had God allowed these people, with all their antediluvian finesse, with all their high technology, to have an easy time of it, it would have been a prosperity test for them that they would have failed. Job 21:9, Job talking about some who in spite of it all apparently lived in safe parts of the earth and he comments on how they think and he said: “Their houses are safe from fear, neither is the rod of God upon them. [10] Their bull genders, and fails not; their cow calves, and casts not her calf. [11] They send forth their little ones like a flock, and their children dance. [12] They take the timbrel and harp and rejoice at the sound of the organ [flute].” See, there’s your technology carried over from the antediluvian world. [13] They spend their days in wealth, and in a moment go down to the grave. [14] Therefore, they say unto God, Get out of here [Depart from us]; for we desire not the knowledge of Thy ways.” That’s why, with prosperity came a forsaking of the God of the antediluvian world, the God of Noah. And so to teach the human race, as all the great world’s foundations and civilizations are founded, the theological reason for the cave men era, and for the ice age, and for all the suffering, was to root out from man his idolatry and get him back to basics. When you’re trying to survive you automatically go to basics.

I would also suggest in closing that what we have here is, in this separating of the continents and all this readjusting that’s occurring is that here’s the answer to a strange passage that scholars have pondered for over 2000 years in the writings of Plato, the strange passage on the lost continent of Atlantis. Plato talks about the Egyptians who said this, they’re talking about a group of strange people that conquered the Mediterranean. “This power landed on the Atlantic coast, for in those days the Atlantic Ocean was navigable from an island situated to the west of the straits that you call Gibraltar. The island was larger than Libya and Assyria put together and from it could be reached other islands, and from the islands you might pass through the opposite continent,” our continent, North and South America. You see it being mentioned here in Plato, people say oh no, it wasn’t discovered until Columbus. Listen to this passage. “In those days the Atlantic,” I’m reading from Plato’s works before the time of Christ, “In those days the Atlantic was navigable all the way west of Gibraltar, there was an island there bigger than Libya and from it could be reached other islands, and from the islands you might pass through to the opposite continent.” Now I ask you, what is the “opposite continent?” These people aren’t stupid, they didn’t believe in a flat earth like we’ve been told; they didn’t believe that you’d fall off on the edge; that’s medieval stuff; they knew there was another continent on the other side of the strange island of Atlantis.

“…surrounded by the true ocean, for this sea which is inside Gibraltar is only a harbor,” he’s talking about the Mediterranean, “having a narrow entrance, but the other one, the Atlantic, is the real sea and the land surrounding the Atlantic may be called a continent.” 400 BC! Now scholars have wondered what ever happened to the island of Atlantis. We don’t know, except if the continents are splitting and readjusting what that might have been was one last piece in the great drama that was being unfolded in the days of Job and the days of the Old Testament, as our present, what we know of the North and South America continents, assumed their final forms.

So we have this and many other evidences which we will be discussing. I’m going to conclude the service, since we’ve discussed the omnipotence of God in nature, we’ve tried to open your eyes a little bit, perhaps, to the forces that have gone on in history, that we think of God in a trivial way. A little article the paper said our Easter faith untouched by historical fact, we’re going to conclude by singing How Great Thou Art.