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Psalms
104:5-8 (NIV)
5 He set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved.
6 You covered it with the deep as with a garment; the waters stood
above the mountains.
7 But at your rebuke the waters fled, at the sound of your thunder
they took to flight;
8 they flowed over the mountains, they went down into the valleys,
to the place you assigned for them.
For over one hundred and fifty years we
have been told that the Grand Canyon was formed by millions of years of water
slowly eroding the canyon to its present depth. Almost no one questions the
findings of modern science. It is almost as if modern science has become the
God that no one doubts.
We are commanded to take all thoughts
captive and make them obey the gospel of Christ in II Cor 10:3-6. Let us
assume that Modern Science just may be wrong on some things like, the age of
the universe, the way canyons were made, etc. Let us test our hypothesis by
some observations.
When you place sharp edged rocks into a
fast flowing streams for just a few months what do you observe happening to
the sharp edges of the rocks? They slowly become smooth, the rough edges
disappear do to the pressure of the water running over them. If you doubt my
observations you can go down Wal-Mart and purchase a rock tumbler and put a
sharp rock in the tumbler and turn on the machine and wait for several hours
and you will discover after just a few hours in the tumbler, what was once a
very sharp edged rock is now a beautiful, smooth polished rock.
Let's now consider the Grand Canyon and ask
some questions. Take a good look at the following picture and make some notes
about your observations.
This picture is the top rim of the Grand
Canyon. Do you notice any smoothed rounded edges at the top? If this canyon
was formed over millions of years by the slow process of gradual erosion you
would not expect to find such sharp edges, but rather very smooth rounded
edges. Notice how deep the very clean cut is in the rim of the Canyon.
If slow erosion over millions of years is
what happened this is not the picture we would have before us. Rather we
would find a picture that would point to gentle sloping hills that eventually
ended up at the bottom of the canyon. There would be no sharp edges, since
what we observe in erosion that is ongoing is that we seldom if ever find any
sharp edges produced by slow erosion over time.
What
might be a better picture of how the Grand Canyon was formed? I believe that
Genesis and Psalms give us a much better picture of what happened. Psalms
104:6-8 says, "You covered it with the deep as with a garment; the
waters stood above the mountains.7 But at your rebuke the waters
fled, at the sound of your thunder they took to flight; 8 they
flowed over the mountains, they went down into the valleys, to the place you
assigned for them."
If the
water of Noah's flood covered the whole earth by the possible depth of 1.7
miles, the sheer weight of the water on the crust of the earth could have
produced canyons almost instantly when the waters were commanded to recede
and the earth opened up and the mountains burst forth from the level ground.
We have
on record canyons much like the Grand Canyon, but on a smaller scale, being
formed in less than a day by the explosions of volcanoes and the subsequent
lava flow that literally cut out large canyons in less than one day.
Now when
all the evidence is weighed I think the Biblical record of the flood actually
answers what happened to create the Grand Canyon. When you look at any
picture of the Grand Canyon or when you walk through any other park where the
are large outcroppings of rocks you are not looking back millions of years,
you are actually viewing the remains of the flood of Noah's day.
We have
right before us evidence that God really did destroy the world by a global
flood and if this is true then we also must accept the coming judgment is
just as certain. What a great reminder that points us once again to the
trustworthiness of the Word of God.
Grateful
for the volumes of evidence our God has left for us,
Pastor Phil
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