Friday, January 17, 2020

Genesis 9:8-17 comments: a covenant made by God with every living creature


9:8 ¶  And God spake unto Noah, and to his sons with him, saying, 9  And I, behold, I establish my covenant with you, and with your seed after you; 10  And with every living creature that is with you, of the fowl, of the cattle, and of every beast of the earth with you; from all that go out of the ark, to every beast of the earth. 11  And I will establish my covenant with you; neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of a flood; neither shall there any more be a flood to destroy the earth.

9:12 ¶  And God said, This is the token of the covenant which I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for perpetual generations: 13  I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth. 14  And it shall come to pass, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud: 15  And I will remember my covenant, which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh. 16  And the bow shall be in the cloud; and I will look upon it, that I may remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth. 17  And God said unto Noah, This is the token of the covenant, which I have established between me and all flesh that is upon the earth.
God made a covenant with Noah, his sons, and all of the creatures with Noah, that He would never destroy the earth with a great flood again. All of those waters under the surface of the earth that I referenced earlier will stay under the earth and although devastating floods are possible none like this one that reduced life on earth to a precious few will be permitted again.
The rainbow we see in the sky is an ever-present reminder of God’s covenant that the world will never be destroyed by a great flood. A rainbow is an optical phenomenon that happens when the sun shines through water droplets in the atmosphere. Its existence is verification that the atmosphere of the pre-Flood earth was very different from that of the post-Flood earth. The fact that it was possible after and not before the Flood might be evidence of the vast difference between the conditions. Just as Mount Saint Helens’ eruption showed us that geological events that were thought took hundreds of millions of years to occur took place in the span of hours and that formations like the Grand Canyon and The Scablands also could have been formed quickly are evidences of the Great Flood of Noah, so the rainbow, God’s sign of a covenant not to cause the Flood again, is evidence of the great change between old and new earth.
We see evidence of the Great Flood all around us. We run our civilization on petroleum products that resulted from a tremendous biomass being crushed under great pressure. Fossil fuels are just that. We find fossils of creatures that have modern representatives and creatures that are extinct as fossils. A fossil doesn’t occur when something just falls out on the ground, is eaten, rots, decays, and disappears. A fossil occurs when a creature dies in a sudden cataclysm and is preserved in rock by great pressure. Scientists will use terminology like a fossil is formed when a plant or animal dies in a watery environment and is covered with mud or silt or they will just say they were buried quickly. But, this is explained very readily by the Flood of Noah given to us in the Bible, a primary source with God relaying what happened to Moses, who wrote it down.
Evidence of the flood includes fossils of trees that extend through many geological strata or levels so that they are called polystrate fossils as in Yellowstone Park with fossil trees formed by rapid sedimentation and violent volcanic action. What modern scientists say are geological strata laid down over long ages were laid down rather quickly during the Flood, an example of which we saw in Mount Saint Helens’ eruption. Another evidence is that fossils often are found in strata that is reversed or lacking in continuity. In other words, the supposedly older strata are over the younger.
But, if you trusted the Bible you wouldn’t need this proof. Still, it is out there as the most reasonable explanation of the conditions of the earth in which we live, if you believe God. The evidence, the facts, don’t change but the interpretation of the evidence does as the conclusions of modern theoretical science are based on ideology and the way they view the world, not incontrovertible truth.
Think of the logic of it for a moment. Modern scientific theories fall under the uncertainty that, “To be accepted as a paradigm, a theory must seem better than its competitors, but it need not, and in fact never does, explain all the facts with which it can be confronted.”[1]  For example, “Copernicus’ more elaborate proposal [a sun centered solar system] was neither simpler nor more accurate than Ptolemy’s [a fixed earth as the center].”[2]  The truth is simply that, “We now know that the difference between a heliocentric theory and a geocentric theory is one of relative motion only, and that such a difference has no physical significance.”[3]
And yet, Christians have, for the most part, bought into modern scientific theory and denied the Bible’s literal statements where it is convenient to do so. When a scientist makes a declaration that appears to attack some point of the Bible, like the great catastrophe of the Flood, consider what they are saying, why, and how. The theoretical scientist of today is not a prophet getting a revelation from God. He is a modern priest only receiving a revelation from his own reasoning ability which God points out in His word is damaged and unresponsive to the truth of God.


[1] Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1962), 18.
[2] Ibid., 76.
[3] Fred Hoyle, Astronomy and Cosmology: A Modern Course (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman & Co., 1975), 87.


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