Saturday, January 11, 2020

Genesis 8:1-3 comments: the rain restrained, the fountains of the deep stopped


8:1 ¶  And God remembered Noah, and every living thing, and all the cattle that was with him in the ark: and God made a wind to pass over the earth, and the waters asswaged; 2  The fountains also of the deep and the windows of heaven were stopped, and the rain from heaven was restrained; 3  And the waters returned from off the earth continually: and after the end of the hundred and fifty days the waters were abated.
And God remembered Noah does not say, in this context, that God forgot about him but that God revisited him, brought him back into play, turned His attention to him. In pre-1611 dictionaries something remembered was something worthy to be mentioned, thought about, or spoken of, not as it is often today, something I had forgotten but has now come to mind.
Genesis 19:29  And it came to pass, when God destroyed the cities of the plain, that God remembered Abraham, and sent Lot out of the midst of the overthrow, when he overthrew the cities in the which Lot dwelt.
Genesis 30:22  And God remembered Rachel, and God hearkened to her, and opened her womb.
After, or even during, the hundred and fifty days God causes a wind to pass over the earth and the waters asswaged meaning, as this context states, abated. The wind caused the waters to diminish much as wind now causes wet ground to dry out. This would have been a powerful wind as the speed of the wind flowing across the water also affects how fast it will dry. This drying out process did not stop with the emergence of dry land again.
Some modern scientists theorize a time when the earth was nearly covered in water although, as with most of modern theory they put this time in a remote, unapproachable, and I might add, unproveable distant past. They talk about an explosion of life and the appearance of dry land but they put it in a different order and at a different time than God’s testimony in the Bible reveals.[1] Of course, as with all pursuits dependent upon a philosophy, in their case atheistic materialism, the evidence is interpreted in accordance with one’s worldview unless the light of the Holy Spirit shines through one’s clogged thinking. God says one thing, they say another. Believe God.
The earth has been undergoing a drying out period for the last several thousands of years as indicated by the formation of such places as the Sahara Desert which is thought by some to have gone, about 5,000 years ago, from a very wet place to a very dry place, and it is growing yearly.[2]
Nevertheless, volumes of fossils that had once been ocean life have been found in the heights of mountain ranges around the world, showing that those peaks were once under water and while that evidence is interpreted differently by an atheist it clearly shows the veracity of the Bible to anyone with an open mind.[3]


[1] University Of California - Davis. "When The Earth Dried Out." ScienceDaily. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/02/020208075438.htm  (accessed August 2, 2016).

[2] Becky Oskin, “Sahara went from Green to Desert in a Flash,” LiveScience. April 5, 2013.

[3] Carol Marie Tang, “Tethys Sea,” Encyclopaedia Brittanica. https://www.britannica.com/place/Tethys-Sea. (accessed August 2, 2016).

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