Clough Genesis Lesson 29

More Evidences of Catastrophic Geophysical Disturbance

Turn to the Gospel of John; we’ll begin this morning by discussing one of the primary apologetic principles behind our strategy in the morning service. As you know, in going through the chapters of Genesis we’ve been careful at each point in this series to show you that a literal interpretation of Genesis does fit the geophysical data. Some are wondering why, from the pulpit, we bother and deal with scientific and historical evidences, and the answer is found here in Jesus’ words to Nicodemus. Jesus says to Nicodemus in John 3:12, “If I have told you earthly things, and you believe not, how shall you believe, if I tell you heavenly things?”

Jesus makes a contrast between the earthly and the heavenly and Jesus insists that if He tells Nicodemus, for example, of some event of history, if He tells Nicodemus of some act of God in history, if He tells Nicodemus something else, whatever, within the empirical horizon of man, something that man can see, taste, touch and feel, if Jesus says something to us in the realm of the empirical senses and we don’t believe Him and we don’t trust Him in that area, then Jesus asks rhetorically to Nicodemus, well, if you don’t bother to believe me and trust me in the empirical realm then why on earth bother to trust Me in the realm where you can’t check me out. Jesus would ask Nicodemus, what about the claim of the cross, that it cancels sin? What about that claim? How are you going to check that one out? Is there any way a human being can do this before the great judgment? Can he go and check the books of heaven to see whether, in fact, his moral guilt before the Trinity has been eliminated, and there is no way you can do this. Of course we all know this who have become Christians; we know this because we trust Him at His Word. His Word tells us that in fact He has given us this redemption, therefore we accept it. Jesus says how incongruous; here you say that you’re going to believe Me as the One who redeems and then you turn around and say that you can’t trust Me in these other areas.

In our series in the book of Genesis this has been the simple plan of attack. All we have done is simply read Genesis in a straightforward way; we haven’t tried to fudge, we haven’t tried to pretend the Genesis text says something that it doesn’t say, we haven’t tried to bend before the current pressure of our own day, pressure borne of the last 100-200 years of higher criticism of the Scripture, inspired by autonomous thought. Instead of yielding to that pressure we have insisted on a straightforward interpretation. If a word means something in the New Testament and we take it in a common sense position then that same word has got to mean the same thing in the Old Testament.

Now obviously this has put many of you in a state of tension because if you’re hearing me right you’re saying to yourselves that if he really means what he says about this Genesis thing, then intellectually this puts me in a tremendous antagonism with everything I’ve ever learned, particularly it puts me in a position of tremendous pressure against everything I’ve learned about ancient history; it puts me in pressure against everything I’ve learned about biology and historical geologically, and obviously I’ve resurrected the Bible/science controversy. And going through the series further if you’ll examine, if you are having problems this way and think of why it is that you have this tremendous faith and trust in evolutionary history; ask yourself if you really believe honestly at this point in time, whether in the future because of new data there will ever be wholesale revolutionary changes in the way men think. Take for example the Copernican revolution; the idea that the sun once rotated around the earth, according to Ptolemy, replaced the heliocentric idea that the earth rotates around the sun rather than the sun rotating around the earth. This was a tremendous upheaval in the way men thought and it deeply affected all of their thinking.

Now do you think that all of the data is so neatly in place in our generation that in the future the only new things will be a little thing here and there added to the large scale picture, the large scale picture being basically stable and all we’ve got is to learn a few things here and there? If that’s your picture then you have bought hook line and sinker, a faith; a faith born in this generation. And that faith says, and theologians have two terms for this, one is called general revelation and the other is called special revelation, that God has spoken two places, Psalm 19, from which Haydn partly used to develop the piece that you just heard sung, in that one psalm there are two parts, Psalm 19 was structured in two parts; the first part deals with general revelation and the second part of Psalm 19 deals with special revelation. In the general part, the one that was sung this morning, dealt with the part of general revelation, and Haydn being a Christian knew very well what he was doing in this series, because he knew that the general revelation, the angels sing to the glory of God and so on, the firmament showeth His handiwork, the general revelation means God’s work in nature; when you look at nature you see evidence of design, you see evidence of His handiwork and so on, and therefore we say we read God in nature. That’s general revelation.

But theologians have also distinguished that revelation from the revelation given in the last part of Psalm 19 which is when, as you saw in the responsive reading, it talks about the ordinances of God; it talks about the law of God making pure the soul and so on. There you have special revelation and we call that verbal revelation.

Now let’s take again, making sure we’re clear on these two points, let’s pretend we’re in the Garden of Eden and we survey the terrain of the Garden, we see there’s shrubs, trees, meadows and so on, and we look across all the trees in particular and we say all of those trees are telling us something about the character of our God. He created them. And therefore we say all these trees represent general revelation, but if we are left just with general revelation or the data of science and history, and we are in the position of Adam and Eve, the next question comes, which tree do we eat of and which tree don’t we eat of. How do we tell that? Do we tell that by scientific and historical investigation? The answer is no. God gave that by special revelation; He said, “Of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,” don’t eat! Now that is a command, and that is the special revelation of God. And so as Adam and Eve would stroll through the garden, tree after tree, would be interpreted in light of the special revelation, and therefore this has always been the orthodox position in Christianity.

Some of you saw Frances Schaeffer’s film on the Galileo controversy in the medieval period of the Church and often that is presented, like Frances Schaeffer presented, namely as only a discussion of the fact that Galileo was objecting to the Aristotelian ideas that had come into the Church. Well, I thought when I watched that film something didn’t set right with me, there’s something missing in Dr. Schaeffer’s presentation. And several of you who have been schooled in science and theology, you mentioned afterwards that you were troubled too. And I think what we are all troubled with is there was another part of the Galileo controversy that Dr. Schaeffer didn’t point out to and that was the Church was right at one point. People always fault the Church; they’re always saying that everything Galileo did was right, everything the Church did was wrong. That’s wrong; the Church was right in this: Galileo not only insisted that the sun moved and rotated around the earth and this kind of thing but Galileo, his main problem was that he held that science could attain truth independently of any reference to the Scriptures, that science could attain truth without any reference to special revelation and therein Galileo was wrong and the Church may not have articulated it right but the Church was rightly troubled by this attitude that you can study any subject, any subject independently of the special revelation of God and that’s just simply false. Everywhere man does this he gets in a bind.

Take, for example, how we’ve looked at ancient history so far. By all models of history the way we are taught we look at history this way: we look back in time and we say see, the curve of technology has grown slow; you have this exponential increase in the last part of the 19^th and 20^th centuries and before that men were stupid, and back here, back at this part of the curve we have man crawling out of the trees as a caveman. And so you have this slow line of evolutionary progress up to this place where the curve really takes off in the last 150 years. But we have said if we take the Scriptures at face value, that’s not so because we have two eras, we have the era before the flood and we have the era after the flood. Before the flood we have Adam and Eve and the antediluvian human race living 900 years, developing a high technology; that technology was lost immediately after the flood and now we’ve recovered. Well, those two views of history totally collide. No way… no way can you believe both of them; we either have to accept the fact that the Bible is telling us something that we haven’t paid attention to and in faith that the Bible is true go out and test some of the data and see if, in fact, the Bible might really be right.

So this is where we’ve come. We’ve come so far in the Sunday morning series to study creation; we’ve studied the flood and now we’re in the area after the flood, and therefore last Sunday morning we started to study the book of Job because we said the book of Job, while dealing with the problem of suffering, was written sometime between the flood and Abraham. So here’s the timeline, the Bible gives at least a thousand plus years between that time; somewhere close to the time of Abraham Job lived and we gave three reasons why. The province of the literature of Job is not Israelite, it does not refer to the Mosaic corpus, and therefore the book is written in a Gentile environment. Well where could a book, written in a Gentile environment get into the Israelite canon if it wasn’t written before Israel came into existence. So that’s one evidence.

Then a second evidence we use is that when you look at the book of Job, as we did last week carefully, you discover Job observes mountain building. Since when, in recent history, have we had mountain building. I gave you some evidence, one of the cities in the Andes that was built and then the Andes mountains raised up, with the city, some three to four thousand feet. That was obvious evidence from the field that Job was seeing orogeny or mountain building.

The third reason was that Job’s age puts him back here just prior to Abraham.

Now this morning we’re going to continue our observation of some scattered passages in the book of Job, once again looking for data about the world of Job’s time. So let’s turn back to Job 6. Keep in mind when you read the book of Job, geographically this is supposed to be central Arabia. Now granted, some people have problems with geography, but I think that most people here know basically where the Arabian peninsula is. And you are at least aware that the Arabian peninsula is at a low latitude, that is, it’s in an area where there’s heat. The Arabia today is a sandy desert, like the Sahara. Now if we come to the book of Job and we’re talking about a man who’s living in the Arabian peninsula and he sees things happening in the Arabian peninsula that strike us as totally out of line with the known climate of Arabia, there’s only one conclusion: either Job is putting us on, either this is poetic language not meant to be taken seriously or in fact these are accurate observations and they are telling us the climate has changed.

Job 6:15-17, here Job is talking about instability of people, instability of people under pressure. It says: “My brethren have dealt deceitfully like a brook, as the stream of brooks they pass away.” Nothing so far strikes us unusual, you can go to the Arabian peninsula, Palestine today and they are full of wadis, just like people out here on the cap rock, you can go out here after the April/May rains and they’re full, and then they’re dry, bone dry for the rest of the year. Well, so it was here.

But then we come to Job 6:16 and now we’ve got a problem because it says, “Which are blackish by reason of the ice, wherein the snow is hidden.” Now I ask you, where is ice and snow in the middle of the Arabian desert today? Obviously there isn’t ice and snow in the middle of the Arabian desert today and we’ve got a climatic problem here. The next verse, verse 17 is telling us that the seasons were going on in Job’s day, “At what time they waxed warm, they vanish; when it is hot, they are consumed out of their place.” So we have a seasonal sequence, but the season of winter is a lot colder in Job’s day than it is in our day.

Let’s see if perhaps this might be linked with some other data. Turn to Job 22:11 and here we have an observation of the possible mechanism for this coldness. The problem is, and it has always been a problem that has plagued students of history, is what caused the ice age. I was a meteorologist before I went in the ministry and I can tell you that every theory of climate known does not have an adequate mechanism to explain the ice age. How we have this tremendous thermal imbalance in the planet earth we don’t know but what we’re seeing here is that after the flood, before Abraham, Job is looking at what we will call ice age conditions. The reason we call it ice age conditions is because if you’re getting cold that far south then you’re having a distortion of the hemispheric climate. Well, what mechanism do you suppose God might have used to bring this forth. There have been theories propounded by scientists, like the idea of volcanic blowouts and so on, smearing the sky, filling it with soot, cutting the sun’s insulation down to the {?} surface and thereby chilling the atmosphere.

Job 22:11 looks like that’s exactly what happens because what he’s observing, he says, “Or darkness, that thou can not see, and abundance of waters cover thee. [12] Is not God in the height of heaven? And behold the height of the stars, how high they are! [13] And thou sayest, How does God know? Can He judge through the dark cloud? [14] Thick clouds are covering to him, that he sees not…,” remember, this is written in the middle of the Arabian desert and he’s talking about thick clouds, dark clouds, [15] Hast thou marked the old way which wicked men have trod, [16] Which were cut down of old time, whose foundation was overflown with a flood,” there’s a reference to the face that he believed in the flood. All right, we have in here that he’s observing dark clouds; that in conjunction with previous observations in this book about volcanic activity suggests what we have is a massive volcanism going on on the earth’s surface.

I showed you on a slide last Sunday morning an area of basaltic extrusions in the state of Oregon, northern California, northwestern Nevada and southern Washington, a whole vast area, immense, hundreds and hundreds of miles, you can drive your car over this area and the only place you’re ever going to see anything growing up through this basaltic stuff in eastern Oregon is where it’s cracked and soil has got into the cracks and trees are rooting in that soil. But generally speaking… in southern Idaho it’s the same thing, you drive and drive and drive all day long and you just don’t see anything, it’s almost as bad as the cap rocks. And so you find this very desolate area. Now that must have been blown out with tremendous force.

In recent history we have an example of what just one volcano would do; we’re not talking now about a large area like eastern Oregon, but in the early 1800s a volcano called Krakatau exploded in Indonesia, blew the whole top and it thrust cinders and soot and gasses all the way up into the hemispheric circulation. And this was taken by the winds of the northern hemisphere around the globe north of the equator, and the result was that for two years the average temperature on the North American continent was two degrees below normal. And you say well two degrees isn’t much. Well if you want to do a little experiment to just show you how much two degrees mean you go home someday when it’s a real hot day and you have your air conditioning set at a certain figure and you turn down your air conditioning thermostat just two degrees and them time how long it takes your air conditioning unit to cool chill your house down two degrees, because you’re asking your air conditioner not just to cool the air of your house, you’re asking that machine to also cool the frame of your house; everything has to be brought down to this new thermal equilibrium that you just directed by a simple twist of your finger.

Now if it takes that much energy and time for a modern air conditioning machine just to take the few cubic yards of air in your house and chill it two degrees can you imagine how much energy was required to lower the entire temperature of the northern hemisphere two degrees. That means we’re chilling not just the atmosphere of the North American continent, we’re chilling the surface soil an average of two degrees, we’re chilling the surface water of both the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean two degrees, a tremendous expenditure of energy all from one volcano. Can you imagine if we multiplied Krakatau by a thousand and had vast areas of these volcanoes blowing off in Job’s day as the continents were shifting, then can you see a mechanism that would well account for the chill and the lowered temperatures.

Just to show you that Job wasn’t the only one who observed these geologically catastrophic conditions I want to show you from some passage in the Bible that the conditions of the earth just shaking, that the flood was such a trauma to the geophysical system that the earth took centuries and centuries and centuries to get over this. Let’s look at several points of Old Testament history, famous stories but I wonder if you’ve ever noticed these details of the stories. Turn back to the early part of the Old Testament, to Judges 5:20, this is one of the battles that was fought during the conquest of the land; it was fought in northern Israel, in the valley of Jezreel; it was fought against the northern confederacy of the Canaanites, at that time located just north of the Sea of Galilee. It’s the story of Deborah; she was the leader of the nation. You say how was a woman the leader when most of the biblical era had men leaders? It was because all the men were fairies in her day and so somebody had to bring order out of chaos, it had to be a woman and she was going to do it and she went to the strongest military leader of her day and he wouldn’t conduct a campaign against the enemy unless she went along so she told him okay Hon, you hold my hand and we’ll go up and defeat the enemy; only one problem, since you are not a man and since you don’t take it upon yourself the responsibility of defending your country then when we go up there your enemy is going to die by a woman. And that’s the famous story of the woman who took her tent peg, Jael, and rammed it through the head of Sisera, one of the great accomplishments in the ancient world. She rid civilization of a horrible person.

In Judges 5:20, however, during the critical battle where the Israelites won over Sisera and his forces it is stated the one reason they won was because of the interference geophysically of something. It says, “They fought from heaven;” the stars did, “in their courses they fought against Sisera.” So obviously there was some physical interruption into normal physical law of some sort here that God used to break into the battle and favor the Israelites.

Turn to 1 Samuel 7, in the days of Samuel the prophet, he was the one who ordained Saul, he presided over a critical situation against the Philistines in 1 Samuel 7:10, and while the Israelites were going into battle against the Philistines, terribly outnumbered, without modern tools, at a tremendous disadvantage but trusting God to get them through, “As Samuel was offering up the burnt offering, the Philistines drew near to battle against Israel: but Jehovah thundered with a great thunder on that day upon the Philistines, and discomfited them, and they were smitten before Israel.” And the word “thunder” here isn’t the word for thunderstorm, it’s the word some interference, some sort of divine interference into history happened in the form of a geologic disturbance.

Now let’s come to 2 Samuel 22:8. 2 Samuel 22 is nothing else than Psalm 18, it’s a psalm that was enclosed in part of the book of Samuel. David is looking back on his career and he’s trying to cite times and situations where God blessed him mightily and so in his memory he thinks of this even and that event and so on, until verse 8, and in verse 8 he narrates an event; we don’t have any other record of it in the Old Testament, but something obviously is catastrophic. Look at it: “Then the earth shook and trembled; the foundations of heaven moved and shook, because He was angry. [9] There went up smoke out of His nostrils, and fire out of His mouth devoured; coals were kindled by it. [10] He bowed the heavens also, and came down; and darkness was under His feet. [11] And he rode upon a cherub, and did fly; and he was seen upon the wings of the wind. [12] He made darkness pavilions round about him, dark waters, and thick clouds of the skies. [13] Through the brightness before him were coals of fire kindled. [14] The LORD thundered from heaven, and the Most High uttered his voice. [15] And He sent out His arrows, [and scattered them; lightning] and discomfited them;” the word lightening here, again, is not necessarily lightening as you and I know it; this is literally heaven fire and it may have been the same kind of thing that Elijah got on the top of Mount Carmel when he prayed to Jehovah and the Baalites were praying, there’s something catastrophic that’s going on here. Notice verse 16, “And the channels of the sea appeared,” do you know what that’s talking about? The water off the Mediterranean coast was so agitated you could see the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea. “The channels of the sea appeared, the foundations of the world uncovered, at the rebuking of the LORD, [at the blast of His nostrils.]” Now what is going on? Is this poetry, is this meant to be just taken poetically or is this meant real, in a real literal historical sense? I say it’s a real literal historic sense.

Let me take you to another passage in the Old Testament; turn to Psalm 46, this is a praise Psalm, a very famous praise psalm. Over many centuries of the Church Christians have memorized that favorite first verse; Psalm 46:1, “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.” Now you’ve probably memorized it, as I have, thinking in terms of a help in the middle of a social situation, upsets, living with people, that kind of thing. But notice, that’s not what the context of Psalm 46 is. “God is our refuge and our strength” in what? In trouble, and the trouble is defined by the next verse. Notice, [2] “Therefore we will not fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea;” is this just poetry? Or is it poetry reflecting real historical situation? [3] “Though the waters thereof roar and the troubled, though the mountains shake with the swelling thereof. [4] There is a river, the streams whereof shall make glad the city of God…. [5] God is in the midst of her,” it’s talking here about Jerusalem. And then verse 6, “The heathen raged,” that’s the Gentile nations around Israel, “the kingdoms were moved; He utters His voice, and the earth melted.” “…the earth melted!”

Now verse 6 tells you something else that you probably never have been told in any history course. One of the interesting things that’s now being uncovered in ancient history research is that when you have these kingdoms and empires that secede one another, you’ll have for example the Babylonian kingdom be seceded by the Assyrians, be seceded by somebody else, in these transition zones of history where one kingdom replaces another, it turns out that those are times of great geological catastrophes. And apparently the mechanism God has of just re-altering history quickly is to set in motion geological catastrophes that so rupture communications and so break down physically the land that government can no longer function, that under a tremendous stress situation government fails, and when government fails it’s up to the individual and there’s where you have mobs; for example the Huns crossed Europe, invade Rome and so on. What drove the Huns to do this? Well, there are people behind them, and so you have almost like massive mob activity for a while because all of law and order has been destroyed in this catastrophe. And that’s verse 6, “The heathen rage, the kingdoms were moved,” because in the middle of these upheavals of history.

Now notice Psalm 46:8-9, “Come, behold the works of the LORD, what desolations he has made in the earth.” Behold it, in other words, look at these catastrophes David says, and worship God as your refuge and strength. Stop, in other words, he says, putting your trust in human social situations, in human works because David says if you ever live during a time of catastrophe and you see mountains shifting, you see cities flattened, you see whole areas of water intrude on continents, when you live through this you know God alone can be your refuge. Don’t ever put your trust in the works of man. Now verse 9, what is most feared of man? His military weapons, now verse 9, “He makes wars to cease [unto the end of the earth]” how, “He breaks the bow, He cuts the spear in sunder, He burns the chariot in the fire.” In other words, He destroys military weaponry in these same catastrophes.

Some of you have seen the film, The Late Great Planet Earth, I happen to have as a friend of mine Hal Lindsay, I’ve known Hal for many, many years personally, but I have to disagree with him in both his books and particularly his film in which he argues that the return of the Lord Jesus Christ to earth is going to be accompanied by nuclear war and man ending his own act with his own weapons. I say it is the context of Scriptural history that when God is going to intervene the next time it will be in the classic way He has always intervened in history, it will be through large scale geological disturbances. When Jesus Christ returns and during the tribulation you are going to see catastrophe upon catastrophe and having been in the military and I still am, having been in the service I know what happens to sophisticated military weapons under these conditions. Can you imagine, for example, the pipelines, the petroleum pipelines rupturing under massive earthquakes. You don’t fuel a modern army without petroleum, it’s gone. So that is why the book of Revelation and all the prophecies of the Bible speak of the end times in terms of military strategies that we think are outmoded and primitive. The simple reason is they’re primitive because the military commanders have had to degrade the systems in order to accomplish the military objective because their modern weapons won’t work in such a cataclysmic environment, prophesied here. “He makes wars to cease, He breaks the bow, He cuts the spear, and He burns the chariots.” So these are how awesome God’s catastrophes are.

One further note on this, turn to Isaiah, one of the key prophets of the Old Testament, and there we have added proof that we are not to interpret prophesies of Christ’s return in terms of human works and programs. Isaiah 1:7-9, here Isaiah, who developed under God, the vocabulary of the return of the Lord Jesus Christ, remember that famous passage, “the Wonderful Counselor, the Mighty God, upon His shoulders the government…” etc. etc. etc. These are all Isaianic prophesies. Now since Isaiah was also the one who prophesied the virgin birth of Christ, he was the key man who set the vocabulary up to describe the coming of Christ.

Now wouldn’t it stand to reason that when Isaiah talks about the Second Return of Christ one way we could have of checking on what he’s trying to tell us is go back to his own day, and Isaiah in Isaiah 1:7 says this to his countrymen: “Your country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire; you land, strangers devour it in your presence, and it is desolate, and it’s overthrown by strangers. [8] And the daughter of Zion is left as a cottage [booth] and a vineyard…. [9] Except the LORD of hosts had left unto us a very small remnant, we should have been like Sodom, and we should have been like Gomorrah.” Now it doesn’t require a Bible student to understand how Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed in history. Were they destroyed by human weapons or were they destroyed by natural catastrophe? Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed by a natural catastrophe and we’ll see evidence of it here in a moment, but the point is that God judges by natural catastrophe. Isaiah knew it and that’s why he prophesied of Christ’s return in terms of natural catastrophe. People who do not believe in catastrophism are going to have a very interesting lesson shortly in history.

Let’s turn back to Genesis 13 a moment because since we are on this area I want to show you some other evidence of the shifts that have gone on in the past and then we’ll finally get back to Job. In Genesis 13:10 there’s that passage where Abraham and Lot go to find their piece of real estate and remember a debate occurs and the big controversy between Lot and Abraham. We’re not interested in that but what we are interested in verse 10 of Genesis 13 is how the area looked in the day of Abraham. “Lot lifted up his eyes, and beheld all the plain of Jordan, that it was well watered everywhere,” that is, “before the LORD destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah,” it was well watered “as the garden of the Jehovah, [like the land of Egypt,]” now what’s the garden of Jehovah? The garden of Jehovah is Eden, and what he’s saying is, again thinking of our time line, that as late in history as Abraham which is about 1800 BC, as late in history as Abraham, the Jordan valley was so well watered that it was looked upon as a picture of Eden.

Now here’s what you’re going to see as you go to the Jordan valley today. [shows slides] Here is a map of the southern end of the Dead Sea. You’ll notice that the Dead Sea has an indentation in it in the southwest corner, and scholars have believed for a long time that the original Dead Sea stopped just north of that peninsula and that that southern section of the Dead Sea is the area where Sodom and Gomorrah was, and whatever God did He blasted it out and made a second hole and the water from the north side of the peninsula broke through and spilled south over the area. Confirmation of that is found in the pages of Josephus where Josephus argues that you can take a boat, row across that area in his day, look down and see the ruins of the city of Sodom. So therefore there’s a gigantic catastrophe that happened. Here is a close up of the area today. I dare say that it is somewhat removed from a paradisiacal setting; I don’t think you’d confuse this area with the Garden of Eden today. That’s not water, that’s salt that you see there. If that’s the way it looks today and yet in Genesis 13 we read it is well watered, so well watered that it’s like the Garden of Eden, I suggest to you there’s been somewhat of a climatic shift since the time of Abraham.

Let’s look at Job for some more data to see what we can find about the climate of his time. Job 37:6-11, keeping in mind our objective is to get a feel for what conditions were like on earth during this period of history. Keep in mind again that today this is hot desert in the middle of the Arabian Peninsula. Verse 6, “God says to the snow, be on the earth; likewise to the small rain, and to the great rain…. [7] He seals up the hand of every man,” and so on. Verse 9, “Out of the south comes the whirlwind, and cold, out of the north. [10] By the breath of God frost is given, and the breadth of the waters is straightened [narrowed.] [11] Also by watering He wearies the thick cloud, He scatters His bright cloud.”

Now turn to Job 38:26, once again is this what you would expect in the middle of the hot dry Saudi Arabia? “To cause it to rain on the earth, where no man is; on the desert area [wilderness,] wherein there is no man. [27] To satisfy the desolate and waste ground,” well that sounds all right but then look what happens in verses 28-30, “Hath the rain a father? Or who has begotten the drops of dew? [29] “Out of whose womb came the ice? And the hoary frost of heaven, who Gendered it? [30] The waters are hidden as with a stone, and the face of the deep is frozen.” Now every other place the expression “face of the deep” occurs in the Bible it refers to the ocean.

Now I ask you, since when could the ocean at the latitude of Saudi Arabia be frozen? Well, quite obviously what we have here in undeniably clear language is a cold climate condition during the time of Job. In other words, we’re saying during this period between the flood and Abraham, Job’s era, we saw what scientists have mistakenly assumed to be something millions and millions of year ago, the ice age.

You say well, that’s kind of flimsy, do you have any extra-biblical data? We’re going to spend the rest of the morning on some rather eye opening data that will show you that not only did man live before the ice age but he lived at a very high technology. People often say well, now look, if your picture of history is right then why is it that we find evidences of stone age; why is it we go from old stone to new stone, bronze, usually bronze I, bronze II, bronze III, and go up to iron and so on; why do we have this sequence of events if history isn’t slowly evolving and if it’s created? The reason is that t his represents a recovery of technology; that is, right after the flood mankind was in a survival mode, where the first thing to do was just survive, then we’ll talk about building cities and culture. And you couldn’t build cities; why? What do we already know from the book of Job that knocked out any idea of building enduring cities? Because of the earthquakes. So that’s why the first dwellings outside… you don’t build a house on rocks in an earthquake prone country unless you want to get {?} on the next earthquake. So they had rocks, they could have built stone edifices but they didn’t. That also explains why the Egyptians, at a very early state, did what in their architecture? They built the pyramids, one of the most stable structures known, because it wouldn’t fall apart any time there was an earthquake.

So you have this influence on early archeology by these shakings and you have the adobe structures; if you’ll turn to Job 6 you have the decline of technology back to stone. Remember they had iron; iron is spoken of in Genesis 4, before the flood, and they had iron aboard the ark but in Job 6:12 you seem to get a hint that they’ve had problems developing iron tools, and they reverted to stone. Notice the language of Job 6:12, “Is my strength the strength of stones? Or my flesh of bronze?” The bronze is a reference to tools; he says is my hands as strong as a bronze tool, or my stone tools? Now why, and we have to ask this seriously, if these cave men that lived down in the stone age really aren’t stupid people, if they really, in fact, had the technology to develop metallurgy, to smelt ore and obtain bronze and iron, what the heck are they doing going around with stone implements? It’s very simple, if you live in a dangerous area and you have to survive, what do you need to smelt your ore? You need fire, you need kilns, you need ovens constructed. Suppose every time you build an oven it falls apart. Suppose the climate is so bad that you haven’t got anything to burn in the oven to get the heat, what are you going to do then? Well, you’re not going to have your iron tools, you’re going to save your wood, whatever wood you can get hold of, to do what? To cook with, and you don’t have any food and you don’t have any wood left over to put into a furnace so you can smelt tools down. So I suggest to you there are sufficient environmental reasons and explanations for the decline of technology and the reversion back to what we call stone. Stone age is not the apes jumping out of the tree giving up bananas and tails; the stone age is a group of men who are fighting for their life after their flood, against this horrible geophysical environment.

But just to show you they weren’t too stupid and just to show you that all during this period as the continents were being formed, and if we take Abraham again, by his day apparently the ice age had left because he talks about a famine in Egypt, no water, so we’ve got to place the ice age before Abraham; Job is in here, now suppose we could find evidence of an ancient group of people who explored the face of the earth during this period of time. In 1929 in the Turkish archives there was a map called the Piri Re’is, Re’is is the Turkish word for admiral, Piri is the man’s name, and his name was on this map and the map was dated in 1513. We know and are sure of that date. The Piri Re’is map is this one, I will show it to you in the slide. Let me show you what it looks like and then we can get an idea of some of the controversy this map has caused.

This is a parchment; keep in mind this map is dated 1513; remember 1492? Very close. On this map, on the right side of the map you see the western coast of Africa. You see the Straits of Gibraltar and you see Spain with France sticking out here just north of Spain. The most amazing thing about the map is that it’s an entire map of the Atlantic Ocean and on the west of the map here you have the northern coast of South America and then here, going up and down you have a strange land with islands oriented north/south, it appears. It turns out that that’s a wrong projection and that land should be horizontal this way and that’s Cuba. So there’s the entire Caribbean, all of its islands mapped out, the entire western hemisphere mapped out on that map. Unfortunately when I took the slide it doesn’t go down and show you that the South American continent extends all the way on the bottom, it even has Antarctica mapped out. Only one slight problem—Antarctica wasn’t discovered until 1818, yet somehow the map maker in 1513 knew that Antarctica was there and he drew it anyway. He must have had the gift of prophecy!

So now how do we account for this strange set of affairs; what is this Piri Re’is map? What are some things that have been found out about it. In research, by Dr. Hapgood, who was a professor of the history of science at Keene State University in New Hampshire, has written a book about ten years back, a very excellent work, of his students and their work of the Piri Re’is map; it’s called Map of the Ancient Sea Kings, put out by Chilton Books, and in this book he narrates how he and his students of geography studied and they studied and they studied this map. Now on the map you will notice if you look carefully that in the middle of the ocean there is stuff that looks like this, and you wonder why instead of latitude and longitude they have these circles; these circles themselves are part of a great circle. And one of the first discoveries, says Hapgood and his students, was that if you take an arc and swing it through all these points the center of the arc is Egypt; the center of that map projection is Egypt. Someone in Egypt or in that area made that map and projected it from Egypt.

But here are some other things that are just mind blowing. This map is part of a group of maps that were made as early as the early 1400s and they’re called portolans, and that means they are maps that give distances between ports on the sea. Now the land maps of that time were awful, atrocious medieval renaissance maps, but the portolans that were maps of the sea, appear to have been copied from earlier maps and they maintain their accuracy. In fact, one of the first things the students discovered was taking Ptolemy, dated 200 AD, the second century, who supposedly, we’re all assured of this in school, that Ptolemy was one of the first great cartographers, one of the first map makers, here’s Ptolemy’s map of the Mediterranean; here’s Spain, here’s Africa, the Italian boot, it looks like someone kicked it in the shin and you have Greece here with an exaggerated strait of Bosporus, it’s frankly a very lousy map and we expect that, you know, first try, not too bad. But the mind blowing thing is that the portolans look like this. Now what’s going on here; notice this. This is almost like a modern map, Ireland is a little too big, Britain sticks out very close to Ireland but generally speaking that map is very accurate; much more accurate than Ptolemy’s. But the strange thing, all the history books never talk about the portolans; there’s not one word of it, except we know they existed because all the practical map makers that were negotiating for voyages were using portolan maps.

Now the question comes, where did the portolan maps come from. As more work went on this and they began to study projections and it’s a very complicated spherical trig do this, but they discovered something. Back in 200 BC, this is well known, a man by the name of Eratosthenes measured the circumference of the earth. You remember that, I always had fun with this one because when I was in solid geometry in high school I happened to be browsing the school library one time and I dug this out about Eratosthenes has measured the circumference of the earth in 200 BC and then I’d go into history course and everybody would tell me they believed in a flat earth and I raised my hand, how come it’s a flat earth, I don’t see how you can measure the circumference of a flat earth. Eratosthenes measured the darn thing within four and a half percent accuracy in 200 BC; don’t tell me that people believed in a flat earth; this jazz, you know, if Columbus sailed too far west he’d go off the edge. Now maybe some kooks in the Middle Ages believed that but the science of the time had already measured the earth. Very simple; all he did was set up two poles, one in the southern part of Egypt and one in the northern part, waited until noon and measured the angle of the sun; from that he got his angle and determined the radius of the circumference of the earth; very simple. And he did so within four and a half percent of the present figure.

So since the circumference of the earth was measured in 200 BC it stands to reason that if we look at the portolans and we look at these maps, you would expect that if they go back in ancient time they would have the error in it. In other words, if we measure the circumference of the earth on the map, by measuring the degree levels and so on, we ought to be able to find the error of Eratosthenes. But the mind blower is that these maps are better than Eratosthenes. They don’t have the four and a half percent error, they only have half a percent error in the measurement of the circumference of the earth. And we found… one of the research projects here and Dr. Hapgood’s team was that when they began to research the map this particular Piri Re’is map is a joint map, it’s made up of a lot of little local maps, and the guy that made this one thought that the circumference was what Eratosthenes said and so he mapped it as though that were true, but when they discovered the maps, the original map from which the big one was made, it didn’t have that. In other words, they go back further.

And the findings of the team, Dr. Hapgood points out in his book, page 33, he says: “This was a startling development, it could only mean that the Greek geographers of Alexandria, when they prepared their world map using the circumference of Eratosthenes had in front of them source maps that had been drawn without this error, that is, apparently without any discernable error at all. We shall see further evidence of this, evidence suggesting that the people who originated the maps possessed a more advanced science than that of the Greeks.” His other conclusion to the map is: “To sum up, this part of the Piri Re’is map research suggests that Piri Re’is had a source map of Africa, Europe and the Atlantic islands based on maps probably drawn originally on some sort of trigonometric projection adjusted to the curvature of the earth. By default of any alternative we seem forced to ascribe the origin of this part of the map to a pre Hellenic people, not to Renaissances or Medieval cartographers, not to the Arabs who were just as badly off as everyone else with respect to longitude, and not to the Greeks either.” His point there is that you could measure latitude by the sun’s shadow but you can’t measure longitude without modern navigation. And to the best of knowledge we don’t know how they measured longitude. But whoever drew that map, if you notice, located Africa and South America perfectly. How did they measure longitude? We don’t know. “The trigonometry of the projection suggests the work of Alexandrian geographers, but the evident knowledge of longitude implies a people unknown to us, a nation of seafarers, with instruments for finding longitude undreamed of by the Greeks, and so far as we know, not possessed by the Phoenicians either.”

Now if that isn’t mystery enough, since I’ve raised this issue of cold weather in Job and the primitive climate, what would you suppose if Dr. Hapgood in discovering and plowing through all these maps, had discovered another one; this one even more amazing than the other. Let’s look at this second map he discovered. This is called the Oronteus Finaeus map of 1531. I don’t think it requires any student of geography to see that that’s a map, an entire map of the continent of Antarctica; 1560 or whatever the date the was on the Oronteus Finaeus map, but yet it wasn’t discovered until 1818. Now it turns out that that map is telling us something else very interesting. If you look at it closely, if you’re real sharp and you look at that map real closely you see there’s something wrong with it, and I don’t mean the projection; there’s South America almost touching, you can say that’s a mistake; there’s Africa. But if you look around the circumference of Antarctica what do you see? Rivers. But Antarctica is all covered in solid ice, there are no rivers on it.

Now herein is the amazing thing. In 1949 there was an expedition to Antarctica that took seismic readings of the land underneath the ice caps and the profile of those seismic readings show that that map is accurate. That map is a map of the land underneath the ice cap. Now, we ask the question: who mapped that? When was man there? To obviously take a boat, measure all this, measure this before the ice age. Here the Antarctic continent is today, with the ice cap way over the land; the land area is the black; it’s all under ice, nobody can map that without seismic instruments. And where these areas are, where these decline areas are, the river beds and so on, that’s the area that shows up exactly on this map; all those little things, like around the Ross Sea, look at the deep wadis that come into the Ross Sea. This map is also telling us that the ice age has already begun because interior there are no rivers and apparently it’s covered with ice in the center but the ice hasn’t yet expanded to include all of the continent of Antarctica.

Now to show you that that’s not just a figment of some fundy’s imagination, Professor Hapgood, who isn’t a fundamentalist, took this to the map making section of Strategic Air Command. SAC has a real good map section; after all, you’ve got to drop your bombs accurately and you need good maps. So here we have the technical squadron at Westover Air Force Base, 6 July, 1960, and here’s a letter of the commander of the cartographer unit after he had examined the Piri Re’is map with his team:

“Dear Professor Hapgood, Your request for evaluation of certain unusual features of the Piri Re’is world map of 1513 by this organization has been reviewed. The claim that the lower part of the map portrays Princess Martha coast of Queen Maud Land, Antarctica, and the Palmer Peninsula is reasonable. We find this is the most logical, and in all probability the correct interpretation of the map. The geographical details shows in the lower part of the map this map agrees very remarkably with the results of the seismic profile made across the top of the ice cap by the Swedish/British/Norwegian Antarctic expedition of 1949. This indicates that the coastline had been mapped before it was covered with the ice cap.”

Now this is data that, granted, you don’t find in 7^th grade history course but nevertheless it’s real data. And as Christians who believe that the Bible is true, we take this data seriously. We are not going to allow this data to be put in the wastepaper basket like it usually is, to be ignored by our evolutionary friends in all their vaunted activity thinking that they have the final word on the matter. And so Professor Hapgood argues in the conclusion of his book, he says: “Thus we have strong support for the conclusion that Piri Re’is source map was of ancient vintage; it appeared to reflect an unexpected level of scientific achievement in Alexandrian science. Also indicated on the margin of the map is that Piri Re’is got some of his source maps from the library of Alexander the Great.”

Now that dates these maps very, very early, far, far before the time of Christ. What do we do? I say this is just another piece of data that has been long overlooked that the Bible is literally true, that history is going to be radically revised when all this data finally comes to light and everything you have learned to date about historical geology in history will be overthrown within hours when this finally dawns on people what has happened. The Bible is going this way, modern thought is going this way and the tension is going to snap sooner or later.

We’re going to conclude by going to two more passages in Job to answer one further question, one last question: what about the spiritual knowledge of these people. Job 31:26-28; were these people primitive? Were they, as we are always told in school, early polytheistic, superstitious people, people whose religion hadn’t evolved upward to monotheism? Look at Job 31:26-28, “If I beheld the sun when it shined, or the moon walking in brightness; [27] And my heart has been secretly enticed, or my mouth has kissed my hand, [28] This also was an iniquity to be punished by the judge; for I should have denied the God that is above.” Not only is Job a monotheist but he’s testifying that in this era of history monotheism was enforced by the state. Think of Melchizedek, the priest, for example. So you have a state enforced monotheism, not a polytheism, not gross superstition, simple monotheism. I’ll prove that to you with some more extra Biblical data as we go on in the series.

That shows you they were monotheists. Let’s turn to Job 19:23-27 to show you even more amazing how much they knew. Job says, “Oh, that my words were not written! Oh, that they were printed in a book; [24] That they were engraved with an iron rod and lead, in the rock forever!.” Now the thing from Handel’s Messiah that many of you have sung but never realized where it came from, here is a prophecy of Christ, way back in Job’s day. [25] “For I know that my redeemer lives, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth; [26] And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God.” He believed in a coming resurrection; he believed in the return of the Lord. Isn’t that high theology for somebody that just hopped out of a tree with his banana? Obviously something’s gone on, something’s radically wrong between what we’re saying and what you’re getting; now one or the other of us has to be screwed up and screwed up badly but you can’t put these two views together; no way!

We’ll conclude by singing….