Discovering The Flood

We continue today with Ancient Discoveries by taking a look at the flood.

Let us read together chair Bible pg. 4 Genesis 6:1-8

Genesis 6:1–8 NASB 2020

1 Now it came about, when mankind began to multiply on the face of the land, and daughters were born to them, 2 that the sons of God saw that the daughters of mankind were beautiful; and they took wives for themselves, whomever they chose. 3 Then the Lord said, “My Spirit will not remain with man forever, because he is also flesh; nevertheless his days shall be 120 years.” 4 The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of mankind, and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown. 5 Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of mankind was great on the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. 6 So the Lord was sorry that He had made mankind on the earth, and He was grieved in His heart. 7 Then the Lord said, “I will wipe out mankind whom I have created from the face of the land; mankind, and animals as well, and crawling things, and the birds of the sky. For I am sorry that I have made them.” 8 But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord.

Are you ready for the message God has for us today?

Cool, let’s dig in!

The flood is so often referred to as the flood myth.

It wasn’t a real global event

If it happened it was a localized flood

Moses was simply borrowing from other ancient sources he had access to growing up in Egypt.

But is it a myth?

Why would every ancient civilization have a flood story if it was just a myth?

Why would the Chinese add the story to some of the their character language?

I wonder is there any historical or scientific validity to the Biblical account?

We will see that historically there are many accounts found in civilizations Moses did not have access to

They tell of one family surviving a global flood that destroyed the world

Let us explore together the ancient accounts and the scientific findings to see if we can accept the Biblical account as actual history

Ancient Flood Accounts

Over the centuries as we began to uncover ancient libraries and civilizations from the sands of time we began to see that accounts in the bible are found in other ancients sources

We begin looking as we find that God has given a general revelation of his existence in these ancient accounts

We should note also that while there are evident similarities, there are also striking and vast differences

Here is the biblical account Genesis 7:4-10

One of oldest and most famous accounts is The Epic of Gilgamesh found in Assyria:

For six days and seven nights the wind blew, flood and tempest overwhelmed the land;

When the seventh day arrived the tempest, flood and onslaught which had struggled like a woman in labor, blew themselves out.

The sea became calm, the imhullu-wind grew quiet, the flood held back.

I looked at the weather; silence reigned, For all mankind had returned to clay...

I opened a porthole and light fell upon my cheeks..Areas of land were emerging everywhere

The boat had come to rest on Mount Nimush

Here is a flood account from Sumeria, the civilization of Abraham; Tablet at Nippur:

...a flood will sweep over the cult centers; To destroy the seed of mankind...

All the windstorms, exceedingly powerful, attacked as one,

At the same time, the flood sweeps over the cult centers.

After, for seven days and seven nights, The flood had swept over the land, and the huge boat had been tossed about by the windstorms on the great waters, Utu came forth, who sheds light on heaven and earth,

Ziusudra opened a window on the huge boat,

The hero Utu brought his rays into the giant boat.

There is also an Akkadian account in the story of Atrahasis

The Hero builds a boat with upper an lower decks

The flood caused darkness and rain for seven days and seven nights

The Aztecs have an account:

At the end of the year the God Titlacahuan warned Nota, familiar to Noah, and his wife Nena and told them:

Stop making wine out of agave but go and hallow out the big cypress tree and then move into it

During the month Torontli the water moves up to the sky

After this, they moved in to the tree, and God closed the door.

I found this interesting from Ancient China:

Bet you thought we were done with China

Read Genesis in Ancient China pg. 143-144

Let me take just one the Epic of Gilgamesh and show the similarities:

Like the Epic of Gilgamesh they all contain similarities

The differences lay in the account being changed for the paganism of those ancient civilizations.

Is is possible that all these and many other accounts come from a common historical source?

The Flood and Physical Science

One statement we often hear by those who oppose the Biblical Flood, “There is no scientific evidence to support it.”

Yet what we so often don’t hear is there has been many fascinating discoveries that seem to support a global flood catastrophe

Let’s consider just a few of these many wonders

There has been speculation over the years of the accumulation of deep sea sediments

The idea is that these sediments are unconsolidated and immensely thick given the understanding that the earth is millions of years old

As they accumulate at very slow rates, their thickness then would represent an enormous span of time

Would it surprise you to know that is not what they have discovered?

Here was what AmericanMarine Geologist Edwin Hamilton had to say based upon the evidence: “The thickness of unconsolidated sediments on the ocean floor is much less than was anticipated in view of the probable great age and permanence of the great ocean basins.” - E. Hamilton

It is also interesting that fresh water organisms have been found in deep-sea deposits of the Atlantic ocean

So one of two things is possible:

The deep-sea deposits were originally fresh water deposits which have been moved to the deep by strong currents

The present sea bottom was once a continental area that has sunk thousands of feet deep to its present position

Hamilton also noted: “The surprising result has been the discovery there are many areas, only a superficial carpet of the expected deep-sea sediment and that under this thin carpet there is an alternation of thin layers of sediments which could have come only from shallower water.”

There are also problems around the world with the earth’s strata in mountainous regions

John Whitcomb and Henry Morris in their book The Genesis Flood write: “In every mountainous region on every continent, there seem to be numerous examples of supposedly old strata on top of young strata.”

Unless they are ready to accept a global catastrophe like the flood, they are left with no real way to explain how this can be.

Especially when say a volcanic catastrophe like Mt. Saint Helens produced millions of years of sedimentary layers in a matter of minutes.

Whitcomb and Morris write: “Nothing we know of present earth movements, of rock compressive and shearing strengths, of plastic flow of rock material, or of other modern physical processes, gives any observational basis for believing that such things are happening now or ever could have happened, except under extremely unusual conditions .”

what would be an extremely unusual condition?

Geologists M. King Hubbert and William Rubey admit: “Since their earliest recognition, the existence of large overthrusts has presented a mechanical paradox that has never been satisfactorily resolved.”

This is only a couple of the wonderful discoveries that have been found around the world.

What isn’t admitted by many scientists is a flood on a global scale wonderfully explains many of these things - Genesis 7:10-12; 18-20

The Biblical Account

Genesis is not the only place in scripture where the flood is mentioned.

God so often does not leave us hanging without unanswered questions!

Sometimes God wants us to dive deeper!

Let us consider other testimonies found in scripture

Chair Bible pg. 701 Luke 17:26-30

Luke 17:26–30 NASB 2020

26 And just as it happened in the days of Noah, so will it also be in the days of the Son of Man: 27 people were eating, they were drinking, they were marrying, and they were being given in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark, and the flood came and destroyed them all. 28 It was the same as happened in the days of Lot: they were eating, they were drinking, they were buying, they were selling, they were planting, and they were building; 29 but on the day that Lot left Sodom, it rained fire and brimstone from heaven and destroyed them all. 30 It will be just the same on the day that the Son of Man is revealed.

Notice that Jesus put the doom and destruction of the flood alongside that of Sodom and Gomorrah and the ungodly at His second coning!

One is hard pressed to say that only part of the world was destroyed!

The testimony of the Apostle Peter Chair bible pg. 819 2 Peter 3:3-7

2 Peter 3:3–7 NASB 2020

3 Know this first of all, that in the last days mockers will come with their mocking, following after their own lusts, 4 and saying, “Where is the promise of His coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue just as they were from the beginning of creation.” 5 For when they maintain this, it escapes their notice that by the word of God the heavens existed long ago and the earth was formed out of water and by water, 6 through which the world at that time was destroyed by being flooded with water. 7 But by His word the present heavens and earth are being reserved for fire, kept for the day of judgment and destruction of ungodly people.

of this passage British scholar Derek Kinder wrote: “...we should be careful to read the (flood) account wholeheartedly in its own terms, which depict a total judgment on the ungodly already set before us in Genesis not an event of debatable dimensions in a world we may try to reconstruct. The whole living scene is blotted out, the New Testament makes us learn from it the greater judgment that awaits not only our entire globe but the universe itself.”

Peter speaks of the judgment of Christ coming on a global and universal scale.

A problem some have with the magnitude of the Genesis account is what happened to all that water?

God tells us: Genesis 8:1-3

Genesis 8:1–3 NASB 2020

1 But God remembered Noah and all the animals and all the livestock that were with him in the ark; and God caused a wind to pass over the earth, and the water subsided. 2 Also the fountains of the deep and the floodgates of the sky were closed, and the rain from the sky was restrained; 3 and the water receded steadily from the earth, and at the end of 150 days the water decreased.

It seems God changed the weather patterns of the world.

Victor Starr who was a professional meteorologist with the United States Weather Bureau wrote: “Control of the weather and climate now looks even more difficult than had been thought. A complex of random, unmanageable processes seems to govern our weather patterns. To effect any general change would require nothing less than altering the Equator-Pole heat differential of the rate of the earth’s rotation.”

Consider Chair Bible pg. 405 Psalm 104:5-10

Psalm 104:5–10 NASB 2020

5 He established the earth upon its foundations, So that it will not totter forever and ever. 6 You covered it with the deep sea as with a garment; The waters were standing above the mountains. 7 They fled from Your rebuke, At the sound of Your thunder they hurried away. 8 The mountains rose; the valleys sank down To the place which You established for them. 9 You set a boundary so that they will not pass over, So that they will not return to cover the earth. 10 He sends forth springs in the valleys; They flow between the mountains;

Whitcomb and Morris write: “It is quite evident that evaporation alone could never return all the water that had fallen during the forty days back to the skies, not to mention the juvenile waters that had poured forth through the fountains of the deep. The only way in which land could now appear again would be for tremendous orogeny to take place Mountains must rise and new basins must form to receive the great overburden of water imposed upon the earth. This process is described in Psalm 104:5-9.”

So the Bible does account for all the water!

The conclusion: The Bible speaks well regarding its testimony of the flood

Would we expect anything less from God?

Conclusion:

You might be thinking well what about the Ark they found it, right?

Unfortunately that is not the case:

Ed Davis account in 1943 has the most details. Institute for Creation Research sent Dr. John Morris on a dozen expeditions to Mt. Arrat during the 70’s and 80’s. All that came back were terrifying tales but no ark.

Decades ago, explorer Ron Wyatt claimed that a boat-shaped feature was Noah’s Ark. ICR scientists reviewed the evidence and concluded it was instead a geological formation.

A group of Chinese Ark researchers called NAMI claimed to have found Noah’s Ark in 2010. Those claims proved false after locals admitted to being hired to haul wood up the mountain to make a fake Ark for money.

The 2015 film Finding Noah chronicled expeditions to the summit of Mt. Ararat leading up to 2014. It showed researchers using radar and drill cores to penetrate the ice cap. Although they found no Ark either, the film somehow buoys hope.

There was a discovery made in 2021 using 3-D modeling but most believe it is rock formation geologists and creation scientists alike.

Dr. Brain Thomas of ICR, wrote: We don’t yet have Noah’s Ark, and it looks unlikely to turn up. But the good news is we don’t need the Ark to believe Genesis. We already have a world full of rock layers and fossils from the Flood. God has given us every reason to trust Him and His Word—even the parts about Noah’s Ark.

I am reminded of Hebrews 11:1

Hebrews 11:1 NASB 2020

1 Now faith is the certainty of things hoped for, a proof of things not seen.

and Hebrews 11:6

Hebrews 11:6 NASB 2020

6 And without faith it is impossible to please Him, for the one who comes to God must believe that He exists, and that He proves to be One who rewards those who seek Him.

All we need is faith!

If the Bible account is a myth, or simply a campfire story, then why does every early civilization in history record their own account of this event?

If the flood was not global but localized, then why does the Bible and science lead us to a global catastrophe like to Biblical flood?

Let the Bible and the evidence speak for themselves!