The Ark and the Darkness

I think people don't believe in the flood today

because they don't have access to the accurate information

and evidences that are there.

They are simply captive

to entertainment, social media.

There you have movies like "Noah"

that in a very fictional and nonsensical way

distorts the Bible totally,

and for many people, that's the only source they have

for something they think is a biblical account.

And we have, of course,

the whole embedded presupposition of evolution

and the geologic column and all of these things

which tell students as they come along

that the Earth has existed for millions,

if not billions of years,

that man is a product simply of natural succession.

A flood is a supernatural event.

A flood is a divine judgment.

A flood destroyed mankind.

And they're not told

that there are evidences of these things.

They aren't shown the historicity of Genesis

to say that this holds up very well

in terms of our scientific age.

So it's simply, you know, on the one hand,

a lack of information,

- and then on the other hand... - The fear of man.

For the same reason that they don't believe in a lot of the things

that the Bible says are literally true,

literally history, and literally science.

The fear of looking silly

and the intimidation by people

who host science television shows and wear white lab coats.

I think it's really

that they're afraid of appearing silly in any way.

But when you actually go past the surface

and look at the feasibility of it and the historicity of it,

it's almost inescapably plausible.

Conventional scientists, the secular scientists

think that the present is the key to the past.

The Bible, in fact, tells us

that the past is the key to the present,

and the flood is key to understanding

why the world is the way it is today.

Not just the geology, but even the humanity.

Understanding the ark and the flood is very relevant

to understanding why the world is the way it is today

and how we got to be here.

Everyone is interested in their history,

and the flood is key to understanding our roots.

In the early 19th century,

when the idea of millions of years was developed,

it developed as a result of a conscious rejection

of the flood and the biblical chronology.

Most of the church came to the conclusion

that the flood wasn't global,

it wasn't really geologically significant,

the age of the Earth doesn't matter,

and so over the next 100-150 years,

the flood was just kind of forgotten.

And it still, in large measure today,

is ignored by most Christians.

They just never think of it and its relationship

to the question of the age of the Earth,

but it's critically important.

We can go back and we can see

in the fossil record, for example, what happened.

When we look at the world around us,

we look at all of those hundreds of rock layers,

they're sedimentary layers.

That means they were laid down by water.

The flood was a reminder that God judges sin,

and God said He's gonna judge the world again.

He sent the flood to punish evil at that time,

and that's why God sent the flood.

It's important to punish evil.

- That's justice. - Justice.

What is just?

The reason the ark is so amazingly relevant to the flood

is because man's sin

- deserves judgment. - Judgment.

The Bible clearly reveals that we are now approaching the time

when the second global judgment will come.

If we don't understand or believe

in the first global judgment,

then we will not be ready for the final global judgment.

So the consequences of the next judgment

could not possibly be more relevant.

What is at stake is heaven or hell.

The Holy Bible.

A book inspired and architected by God

and written by His people,

dating back to the beginning of real human history

from the time of man's true origins.

A book that teaches us

that the Earth is not millions of years old,

as we've been brought up to believe.

A book teaching us that we did not come from monkeys or apes

or primordial soup.

But a book that instead shows us our creator

is a loving, merciful, and just God.

A God who created a beautiful world

in which the entire planet was once a paradise,

a paradise that He gave to us

to fill up and multiply across.

In Genesis, we're shown that God had finished

all of creation in six literal days,

and that, indeed, everything he had created

was very, very good.

In the span of four days,

God was finished with the heavens and the Earth.

And it was on the fifth day

that He began making the sea creatures,

both great and small.

And on that very same day,

He also made all of the exotic flying creatures,

which flew through the open firmament

of the beautiful heaven.

On the sixth day,

He made all of the majestic land creatures,

which included all of the dinosaurs,

along with mankind.

He also planted a garden,

and in the midst of it,

the Tree of Life.

But there was another tree

God had also placed in the garden,

one that God commanded man

not to eat from.

Sadly, mankind used their free will

to sin against their holy and righteous God.

With free will comes consequences,

and in this case, the consequences of sin

would plunge mankind into darkness.

Before the Fall, God saw everything that He had made,

and it was very good, tov meod.

It was just the way it should have been.

It came forth exactly as he intended.

At the end of Genesis 1, it says it was very good.

"God looked at everything He had made,

and it was very good."

And we get some idea of how good it was

in the last three verses when God says

that both man and the animals and birds were vegetarian.

They didn't eat each other.

They ate the plants and the fruit of the plants.

That's telling us a lot about how very good the world was.

Creation was in a state of innocence.

This affirms a fundamental element of God's character.

He is good.

God is not the author of evil or death.

God came into the garden, He had fellowship with man,

and they could actually communicate with Him and see Him,

according to the way we understand the pre-Fall condition.

They would have lived forever.

God warned him beforehand,

"If you eat from this, you're going to die."

Well, Adam did eat.

God told Adam, "You're gonna die."

God said, "From dust you came,

and to dust you shall return,"

so that's physical death.

Through one man, sin entered the world,

and death through sin.

Adam and Eve began to die physically.

The fall of man affected the whole creation.

The ground was cursed.

The whole creation is groaning

in bondage to corruption.

Sadly, the reality of the Fall

is now easily seen wherever we look.

In this broken world, we see pervasive death,

violence, corruption, lies, hate, and sin.

Man is exiled from the place of God's own presence,

and that fellowship is not restored as it was.

Man is going to have to labor by the sweat of his brow,

and then he will return to the dust from which he was made.

That is what has happened to the world.

So it describes entropy,

the whole idea that things are subject to decay,

dissolution, finally death.

The whole world is like this.

It has a limited shelf life, so to speak.

It changed the world profoundly.

Pretty much everything was corrupted, the human soul.

Even the creatures were suddenly carnivorous or poisonous.

Diseases and viruses emerged that were otherwise benign.

It just radically changed everything.

It even changed plants.

Plants suddenly became weeds

and choked out the crops.

The ground was cursed.

Thorns and thistles began to grow.

We don't live in the original very good creation.

We live in a fallen creation, a cursed creation.

The Fall was a massive, catastrophic,