Inductive Bible Studies
by WordExplain
Equipping you to study the Bible on your own.
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Inductive Bible Studies by WordExplain Equipping you to study the Bible on your own. |
"The water prevailed more and more upon the earth, so that all the high mountains everywhere under the heavens were covered." Genesis 7:19 |
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Saved From Judgment! Genesis 7:1-24 (Study 8) A. Preservation from Judgment. Gen. 7:1-9 1. Instructions to Board. Gen. 7:1-5 a. What command did God give Noah? b. What reasons did God give Noah? 2. Obedience. Gen. 7:6-9 Why do you suppose Noah followed God’s instructions? B. Catastrophic Judgment. Gen. 7:10-24 1. The Start of the Flood. Gen. 7:10-12 a. What events combined in this terrible catastrophe? b. What was the duration of the flooding stage? (For additional help, see A Chronology of the Great Flood.) 2. The Preservation from the Flood. Gen. 7:13-16 How was life preserved? 3. The Severity of the Flood. Gen. 7:17-20. What language is used to describe the severity of the Flood ... a. In Gen. 7:17? b. In Gen. 7:18? c. In Gen. 7:19? d. In Gen. 7:20? 4. The Destruction of the Flood. Gen. 7:21-24. What language is used to describe the destruction caused by the Flood ... a. In Gen. 7:21? b. In Gen. 7:22? c. In Gen. 7:23? d. In Gen. 7:24? 5. Lessons from the Flood a. What does this chapter teach you about the Judgment of God? (See also Gen. 6:5-7, 11-13, 17.) b. What does this chapter teach you about the Power of God? c. What does this chapter teach you about the Grace of God? (See also Gen. 6:8-9, 13-14, 18.) d. What does this chapter teach you about the Salvation of God? e. How is Faith always connected with the Salvation of God? (See also Gen. 6:22.) 6. The How of the Flood. (How Did It Happen? A possible scenario). The best explanation I have encountered is the Hydroplate Theory as explaining the break-up of "the fountains of the great deep" (Gen. 7:11). For a brief video explanation of the Hydroplate theory, see this YouTube video. The same video begins the online explanation of the book, In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood by Dr. Walt Brown, Ph. D. I apologize in advance for the poor quality of the video (by today's standards). It was first produced in 1986, long before High Definition video. The
Hydroplate Theory: An Overview. This overview lists 25
different phenomena Brown discusses that are best explained by the
Hydroplate Theory of the Earth's geology and how it relates to the
Biblical Flood of Noah. A critical question: How does Brown define the
term,
"Hydroplate"?
But first, what is a hydroplate? Before
the global flood, an ocean of
water was under earth’s crust. Pressure increases in this subterranean
water ruptured that crust, breaking it into plates. The
escaping water
flooded the earth. Because hydro means water, those
crustal plates will
be called hydroplates. Where and why they broke, how they
moved, and
hundreds of other details and evidence—all consistent with the laws of
physics—explain so many of earth’s major features and constitute the
hydroplate theory.
For example, the Hydroplate Theory best explains the contours of the world's ocean floor. Moreover it can best explain the unevenness of the ocean floor. Brown makes 1 Major and 2 Minor Assumptions in conjunction with his Hydroplate Theory and a Biblical and scientific explanation of the Great Deluge of Noah's day. Major
Assumption: Subterranean Water: The Bible explicitly terms
these subterranean waters as "the fountains of the great deep" (Gen.
7:11).
According to Brown, About
half the water now in the oceans was once in interconnected
chambers, 60 miles below the entire earth’s surface. At
thousands of locations, the chamber’s sagging ceiling pressed
against the chamber’s floor. These solid contacts will be called
pillars. The average
thickness of the subterranean water was at least 1
mile. Above the
subterranean water was a granite crust; beneath that water was earth’s
mantle. [See the explanatory text below Figure 13]. [Go
directly to Figure 13.]
Minor
Assumption 1: A Global Continent. According to Brown,
The earth’s preflood
crust
encircled the globe. On the crust were deep and shallow seas, and
mountains, generally smaller than those of today, but some perhaps
5,000 feet high.
Minor
Assumption 2: An Initial Crack. According to Brown,
A small initial
crack occurred in
the earth’s crust. (Several ways this crack could have started will
soon be mentioned.) Once a tension crack formed, the high pressures in
the chamber and the stress concentrations at each end of the crack
would have quickly propagated the crack around the Earth in a
great-circle path.
The
Great Flood of Noah. The
Four Phases of
the Hydroplate Theory: Rupture, Flood,
Drift, and
Recovery
1) Rupture
Phase: According to Brown
The
rupture began with a deep crack at the earth’s surface. Because
stresses in tension cracks are concentrated at each end of the crack,
both ends grew rapidly—at about 3 miles per second. Within
seconds,
this crack penetrated down to the subterranean chamber and then
followed the path of least resistance. The rupture probably completed
its path around the earth in about 2 hours....
As the crack raced around the earth along a great-circle path, the 60-mile-thick crust opened like a rip in a tightly stretched cloth. Pressure in the subterranean chamber directly beneath the rupture suddenly dropped to nearly atmospheric pressure. This caused supercritical water to explode with great violence out of the 60-mile-deep “slit” that wrapped around the earth like the seam of a baseball. Here is a simulated view of what it must have looked like from out in space. 2) Flood
Phase:
According to Brown
Each
side of the rupture was initially a 60-mile-high cliff. In the bottom
90% of the cliff face, compressive, vibrating loads
greatly exceeded the rock’s crushing strength, so the bottom 90%
continually crumbled, collapsed, and spilled out into the jetting
fountains. That removed support for the top 10% of the cliff, so it
also fragmented and fell into the pulverizing hypersonic flow. The
46,000-mile-long rupture rapidly widened, reaching an average width of
about 1,400 miles all around the earth.
The water escaping from the rupture eroded sediment, which began to bury now dead life forms, creating fossils. An increasing body of water began to separate the Americas from Africa-Eurasia. Eventually all land was covered by increasing layers of sediment underneath a watery matrix. According to Brown Eventually, the
width was so great, and so much of the surface weight
had been removed, that the compressed rock beneath the exposed floor of
the subterranean chamber sprung [sic] upward.
As the Mid-Atlantic Ridge began to rise, the granite hydroplates started to slide downhill on the steepening slopes. This removed even more weight from what was to become the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, so the floor rose faster, the slopes increased, and the hydroplates accelerated, removing even more weight, etc. The entire Atlantic floor rapidly rose about 30 miles. When the first segment of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge began to rise, it helped lift adjacent portions of the chamber floor just enough for them to become unstable and spring upward. This process continued all along the rupture path, forming the Mid-Oceanic Ridge. Adjacent land masses, still
lubricated by water, slid
away from the ruptures, Africa-EurAsia drifting eastward; the Americas
drifting west. See a visualization
of how North and South America on the West, and Africa-EurAsia
on the East fit
neatly into
the shape of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the author's proposed site of the
fracture of the original earth God created. (See an explanation
of this visualization in conjunction with Figure 12).
4) Continental Lift, or Recovery Phase: As the submerged land masses
moved westward and eastward toward
the present-day borders of the Pacific, two things happened: (1) The land masses
(continents)
began to go uphill as they approached the Pacific version of the
Mid-Oceanic Ridge. (2)
They ran out of subterranean water. Result? In geological terms, they
quickly ground to a halt, their leading edges driving down deep into
the
earth. This accounts for the volcanic and earthquake tendencies along
the Pacific rim. The huge land masses behind were driven upward and
continents emerged. At the continents’ weakest points, mountain ranges
pushed upwards perpendicular to the direction of the drift – the
Rockies and Appalachians in North America, the Andes in South America,
the Himalayas in Tibet. In some instances, the sideways pressure was
almost equal to the upwards pressure. Folded
strata indicate that the mountains were soft and pliable
during the rapid deceleration of the continents. Finally movement ground
almost entirely
to a halt, leaving the present
oceans
and their basins, but there are still tremors along fault
lines to this
very day.
In Biblical terms, God had covered the earth with the deep, and the waters were standing above the mountains (Psa. 104:6). This occurred during the Flood Phase. During the Continental Lift, or Recovery Phase, the following description applies: "At Your rebuke they (the flood waters) fled, at the sound of Your thunder they (the flood waters) hurried away" (Psa. 104:7). What was the mechanical (geological) process? "The mountains rose; the valleys sank down to the place which You established for them" (Psa. 104:8). In Genesis 9:8-17 God established an eternal covenant with Noah and all the animals that had been rescued aboard the ark. God would never again destroy the earth with water. The newly-appearing rainbow in the altered post-flood atmosphere was the sign of that covenant. We call this covenant the Flood Covenant or Noahic Covenant. A reference to that covenant appears in Psalm 104:9, "You set a boundary that they may not pass over, so that they will not return to cover the earth." It may be argued that the context of Psalm 104:1-9 is one of creation, not the Flood (Psa. 104:5). I believe there is a simple explanation. When God created the earth on Day One of the Creation week, it was initially a watery matrix (Gen. 1:1-2). God used the process described in Psa. 104:7-9 on the third day of creation (Gen. 1:9-10). God miraculously achieved that process in one day, the third day. During the Continental Lift, Recovery stage of the Flood, He used the same process to sink down ocean canyons and lift up continental and island land masses over a period of roughly 150 days in order to drain the water off the earth gently and slowly. It had to be slowly so as not to cause tidal waves that would swamp the gigantic barge and drown all aboard. So the process God used in creation was the same process He used in reclaiming the earth from the global flood. The only difference was the rate or speed of operation. The declining flood waters left Hopi Lake and Grand Lake at the corners of the four states of Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico at the head of what is now the Grand Canyon. (See Graham Hancock explanation of Walter Brown.) Perhaps centuries after the formation of Grand and Hope Lakes,a natural earthen dam was breached, and the massive flow of water carved the Grand Canyon in a short period of time. It first carved out the Funnel and Barbed Canyons. (See the area circled in red.) The linked
image illustrates graphically the four phases of the Great
Flood of Noah in terms of the HydroPlate Theory. 7. The "How Long" of the Flood. See A Biblical Chronology of the Great Flood.
C. Conclusion
1.
There is massive geological evidence for a catastrophic, global flood.
This is the Flood of Noah, recorded in the Bible in Genesis 7:1-8:22. 2. The HydroPlate theory explains the process and the effects of Noah's Flood better than any other scientific or quasi-scientific explanation of which I know. For example, it fits the geological facts infinitely better than does the Evolutionary Model. 3. The theological conclusions and lessons to be drawn from the Flood of Noah graphically bear witness to the awfulness of human sin and degradation, and the lengths to which God will go to judge human sin. (See, for example, Revelation 20:7-15.) 4. Above all, Noah's Flood indicates that, to those who will heed God's warnings and seek to be in a relationship with Him through His Son, Jesus, there is salvation. a.
Just as the ark saved Noah and his family, who believed God's warning,
so Jesus Christ is the ark of salvation to save all who will put their
trust in Him and believe God's warning (John 14:6; Acts 4:8-12). b. It took faith in God for Noah and his family to build and enter the ark. So also it takes faith in God and in His provision for salvation, Jesus Christ, to enter the safety of Jesus' Kingdom (John 3:1-3, 16-21, 36). 5.
To all who read this article, I ask this question: "Have you admitted
you are a sinner who warrants eternal punishment? Have you turned to
Jesus and embraced Him and His sacrifice on the cross and His
resurrection for your own personal salvation from eternal punishment
for your sin?
Saved From Coming Judgment (Study 8) Prepared by James T. Bartsch Published in its present form November, 2018
Published Online by WordExplain.com Email Contact: jbartsch@wordexplain.com Bible Study questions are based upon the NEW AMERICAN STANDARD BIBLE ®, Copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by the Lockman Foundation.
This Page Updated September 18, 2020 |
