Genesis We have come to a turning point in the road. If we turn to the right mayhap our children and our children's children will go that.

GenesisWe have come to a turning point in the road. If we turn to the right mayhap our children and our children's children will go that way; but if we turn to the left, generations yet unborn will curse our names for having been unfaithful to God and to His Word. 

Charles Spurgeon 

Interpretation

Application

Correlation

Observation

Genesis 1:24-31Gen. 1:1 - The Mass-Space-Time Continuum is Created

Day 1: Light is separated from darkness

Day 2: Waters, atmosphere, and vapor canopy

Day 3: Land and seas separated; grass, shrubs, trees

Day 4: Sun, moon and stars created

Day 5: The waters swarm with fish; the air with Birds

Day 6: Living creatures, and mankind

Summary1 – The Creation of the Heavens and the Earth

2 – The Creation of Man & Woman (Day 6 in detail)

3 – The Fall of Mankind, curse on man, woman, serpent

4 – The Fall of Cain, killing Abel, his curse, & descendants

5 – The Descendants of Adam through Seth…Noah

6 – The Corruption of Mankind (sons of God, daughters of men = corrupted race = judgment after 120 years of warning

7 – The Earth-wide Flood

8 – The Flood Subsides, and God’s Covenant with Noah

Genesis 8“God Remembered Noah…”

Genesis 8:1-28:1 “And God (Elohim) 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 assuaged (subsided).”

2 “The fountains also of the deep and the windows of heaven were stopped, and the rain from heaven (the sky) was restrained.” (KJV/NASB)

Genesis 8:1-2“There is a point, however high it may be, beyond which reason must confess its inability to understand, but it is just at this point that faith comes to the rescue of reason; the mind in matters of faith gives the assent to truth upon the authority of God manifested through revelation and thus man completes the edifice of his knowledge with the structure of supernatural truth. The realm of faith then is not to be conceived in opposition to the realm of natural truth but as the culmination, for in both reign supreme the same divine intelligence”

(Thomas Aquinas, quoted in Marique, History of Christian Education, I, 169)

Genesis 8:1-2Rationalism: Human reason was made the measure of all things; whatever could not be harmonized with reason was rejected.

Even the Bible, and anything miraculous, or in any interference by God in the affairs of mankind or the universe, were rejected.

Rationalism rejected Creation & the Flood

Geology, and scientific theory took their place, even though these sciences have unwittingly contributed confirmation to the Biblical accounts of Creation and the Flood (Rehwinkel, The Flood, p. 179)

Genesis 8:1-2Q: But, if there was a universal, worldwide (EARTH-wide) Flood, wouldn’t there be evidence of mass animal and/or human burial sites, where a multitude of dying animals, fish, reptiles and birds were buried---and fossilized---by the rapid water and sediment---at the TOPS of hills or mountains---where they would have fled for safety?

A: Yes, here are 9 examples:

Genesis 8:1-21. An isolated hill in Burgundy, France, in the

valley of Soane. The hill is 1,030 feet above the surrounding plain, with steep cliffs on all sides. The fissure near the top is crowded with animal skeletons, all weathered, all fractured, and thrown together in a disorderly fashion. Bears, wolves, horses, oxen, all die together, and are buried in a common grave.

2. The island of Cerigo, near Corfu, off Greece. There is a fossiliferous deposit, called the ‘mountain of bones’. It is a mile in circumference at the base, and is covered in bones. They died, were buried rapidly, and were fossilized in large numbers.

Genesis 8:1-23. The Rock of Gibraltar: animal remains

which are practically the same as those found in the hills of France. They exist at different altitudes, with the highest at an elevation of 1100 feet.

4. A cave in Palermo, Sicily. 20 tons of Hippopotamus bones were shipped out for carved ornaments within six months of discovery. Deer, ox, and elephant bones were mixed together, with no signs of having been gnawed or weathered before fossilization.

Genesis 8:1-25. On the steppes near Odessa, Russia, in

1847. In one cavity, were found 4,500 bones of bears, from over 100 individual animals; with hyenas, horses, boars, mammoth, rhinoceros, aurochses (extinct ancestor of modern cattle), deer, and insectivores (insect-eating carnivores like anteaters, etc.) and rodents such as rabbits, otters, martens, wolves and foxes.

Genesis 8:1-26. Brunswick, Germany. A heap of tusks, teeth,

and bones piled together in a heap and embedded in diluvial loam (The term deluvial is applied to a deposit formed as a result of geodynamic processes (physics or chemistry) in hilly and undulating landscapes by natural and technogenic movement (natural disaster) of topsoil or products of weathering down the

slope and its accumulation). 11 tusks of elephants over eleven feet long; another one fourteen feet eleven inches long and 12 ¾ inches in diameter; 30 molar teeth, large bones, mixed with horse, ox, rhinoceros, and stag; a confused mass, but not broken before fossilization.

7. Stuttgart, Germany: elephant, rhinoceros, horse, deer, ox, and small carnivores, fossilized together

Genesis 8:1-28. The island of Malta: birds, fish bones,

frogs, fresh water turtles, along with large blocks of stone, measuring 15 feet in circumference, with deep grooves and hollows scooped out of their surface. (see Rehwinkel, The Flood, p. 183 for discussion)

9. Agate Springs, Nebraska, in 1876: rhinoceroses, camels, giant wild boars, with an estimated 9,000 complete animals buried on one hill.

Genesis 8:1-2Q: Could mankind have killed them, eaten them, and buried them rapidly, so they fossilized---along with small animals, herbivorous and carnivorous, mammals, and birds, in one pile---buried in alluvial deposits, intermingled with remains of plants and trees, sea shells, and fish?

Natures scavengers would have found them, and devoured them before they could have been buried at such a depth so they could be fossilized.

Genesis 8:1-2Q: Could some pestilence or common disease have been responsible for the sudden death of these animals?

What pestilence is known to mankind which would carry away every kind…birds, mammals, elephants, mice, rhinoceroses, frogs, bison, snakes, tigers, and fish, along with snails and insects---all at one time?

Q: If a disease caused this, then who buried the carcasses? Who collected them into great pits and carried them to the tops of hilltops (which all of these examples show)?

Genesis 8:1-2Q: Could drought or other natural causes have terminated the life of so many varieties at one time?

Killing them, perhaps.

Collecting them into one place? No

Burying them in one place? No

Rapidly burying them so they could become fossilized? No

Genesis 8:1-2A great flood of water is the only reasonable explanation for this strange earth-wide phenomenon, driving animals to the hilltops, causing them to perish in large numbers, and then being buried and fossilized rapidly together.

Genesis 8:1-28:1 But God (Elohim) remembered Noah and all the beasts and all the cattle 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

Genesis 8:1-2In Genesis 8:1-2, Elohim had accomplished 3 events:

1. A wind was made to pass over the earth to dry it

2. The fountains of the deep were closed---or exhausted of their bountiful supply of water from under the earth’s crust

3. The ‘windows of heaven’ were also stopped---or exhausted of their supply of water; water which was held as a canopy above the earth

Genesis 8:1-2Q: Wind: ‘ruach’ which can be translated ‘wind’ or ‘spirit’

Genesis 8:1 may be referring to the energizing power of God’s spirit (Genesis 1:2---’hovering’ or ‘fluttering’ and in Genesis 1:9 He is seen using creative power to separate the lands and the waters)

The uniform temperatures of the antediluvian world would have precluded strong winds. With the vapor canopy gone, sharp temperature differentials would have been established between equator and poles, and great air movements begun.

Genesis 8:1-2The present complex system of atmospheric circulations would have been initiated. This new beginning could have been quite violent, with nothing but shoreless ocean, causing tremendous waves and currents and vast quantities of water to be evaporated and moved around the globe.

Genesis 8:1-2Q: Would wind, waves and evaporation account for a steep decline in water levels?

No, although it might have helped some.

Q: Would the winds have swept quantities of water clear off into outer space? No, not likely.

Q: Would a drastic rearrangement of terrestrial topography with continental land masses rising from the waters, and ocean basins deepening and widening, drained off much of the water? Probably.

Genesis 8:1-2Psalm 104:5-9 “He established the earth upon its foundations, so that it will not totter forever and ever. Thou didst cover it with the deep as with a garment; the waters were standing above the mountains. At Thy rebuke they fled; at the sound of Thy thunder they hurried away. The mountains rose; the valleys sank down, to the place which Thou didst establish for them. Thou didst set a boundary that they may not pass over; that they may not return to cover the earth” (NASB)

Genesis 8:1-21. The earth’s crust and reservoirs released heat

energy, and the mixture of water and volcanic magma would leave the earth’s crust in an unstable condition.

2. The erosion of the antediluvian mountains and continents would have resulted in great quantities of sediment in the seas.

3. The subterranean caves that were pressurized by water, collapsed, and surface elevations sank.

4. The strong winds could have helped collapse the underground caverns (Morris, p. 207, with more detail)

Genesis 8:3-4“And the water receded steadily from the earth, and at the end of one hundred and fifty days (5 months) the water decreased.

And in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, the ark rested upon the mountains of Ararat”

Genesis 8:3-4“Once the crust began to move (the previous land surfaces downward to form the new ocean basins, the previous sea bottoms and their new deposits of stratified sediments upward to form the new continents), the waters began to drain off the emerging lands, ‘returning from off the earth continually.’ The expression in the Hebrew indicates a quite rapid subsidence, as would be expected under the circumstances just outlined” (Morris, p. 207)

Genesis 8:3-4“One of the volcanic mountains formed in an earlier period of the Flood is Mount Ararat, along with other similar mountains in the upland regions of what is now Armenia. The Ararat region including Mount Ararat itself (now 17,000 feet in elevation), abounds in what is known as pillow lava, a dense lava rock formed under great depths of water. The mountain also includes certain sedimentary formations containing marine fossils” (Morris, p. 208)