Friends, I greet you once again in that name above all names, the name of Jesus Christ, the Lord, to the glory of God the Father. Our message tonight is part one of two on the Genesis flood. Tomorrow night, God willing, the Genesis flood and modern geology, the visible effects of that global year-long deluge. And tonight... the Genesis flood and the final judgment of the world. Please turn to Genesis chapter seven, verse eleven. I would like to explain that we do have more materials in our book table for those who ask things that were sold out. And we trust that that will be of help and interest to you, especially. I'd like to mention that we have acts and fact bulletins, which are excellent studies of creation and the Genesis record that are available for any of you free of charge every month. They will be glad to send those bulletins to you. Help yourself to those that are left on the table. And we have a new supply of enormous book for children. those mysterious dinosaurs and the workbook that goes with it and other things I trust as well that will be of interest to you. Genesis chapter seven verse eleven is God's record of how the greatest catastrophe the world has ever experienced came upon the earth. In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, In the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on the same day, all the fountains of the great deep burst open, and the floodgates of the sky were opened, and the rain fell upon the earth forty days and forty nights. Isn't it remarkable, friends, that God doesn't begin this account as many would believe it to be? Namely, once upon a time, long, long ago, there was a flood. That's how you introduce a fairy tale. But notice how specific God is in terms of the chronology of this cosmically significant event. It was in the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month. In other words, it really happened to a real person in a real world. And that's, of course, how we know. the gospel to be true. Remember that formula? That Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures and was buried and rose again the third day and was seen of many. Friends, that means it really happened because chronology is the backbone of history and history is the frame of reference of true theology. And so we're reading of something that really, really happened. And what was it that happened on that amazing day in human history? All the fountains of the great deep burst open, and the floodgates of the sky were opened, and the rain fell upon the earth for forty days and forty nights. Stupendous seismic volcanic upheavals in the ocean basins pushed those masses of water over the shorelines that separated the continents from the seas. And as the waters rose higher, they rushed inland and then back, and yet higher and farther inland and back, and then augmented by the collapse of the pre-flood vapor canopy that God had lifted up in the sky sixteen hundred and fifty-six years earlier. The upper waters merged with the lower waters and smashed every air breather on this planet, except those preserved alive. in a gigantic box called Noah's Ark. By the way, no such rain could ever happen again. If all the water and all the sky and all the clouds suddenly precipitated to the Earth today, you would only produce one inch of water on the average. That's all there is left in the sky. But this is obviously a totally different arrangement of upper and lower waters on this planet in the pre-flood climate. and topography of the world. And friends, as we think of this, we realize that this is one of the greatest challenges to the so-called scientific mind of our generation. To think that the whole planet Earth was covered with water for months is impossible to take seriously apart from the authority of the living God who was there when it happened and actually accomplished it. Let's turn now to verse seventeen and see how God insists that we believe these things and take them literally. Genesis chapter seven, verse seventeen. Then the flood came upon the earth for forty days and the water increased and lifted up the ark so that it rose above the earth. Verse eighteen, and the water prevailed. And that Hebrew word means to triumph and battle against stupendous opposition. Yes, the water prevailed and increased greatly upon the earth, and the ark floated on the surface of the water. Verse nineteen, and the water prevailed. There's that special verb again. Prevailed more and more upon the earth so that all the high mountains everywhere under the heavens were covered. Stop there for a moment. God is not telling us here, is he, that it was just a hill that was covered with water for a week. And by the way, if any hill that's worth mentioning in the state of Georgia were covered for a week, Florida would disappear, as well as every coastal city on this planet from London to Shanghai, and it would be a stupendous catastrophe for the human race. But that's not what happened here. It was every high mountain under the whole heavens for months. And would you like to know how deep the water was? Look at verse twenty. Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail, and the mountains were covered. Now you say fifteen cubits upward, you mean the flood was only fifteen cubits deep, twenty-two feet? No, that's a minimal depth measurement of the deluge. And it simply means that Noah's ark, laden with its precious cargo, when it sank into the water, had a draft of fifteen cubits. You see, it was thirty cubits high. It sank half its height into the water. So God saw to it the highest mountain in the world was covered by at least fifteen cubits, so the ark could float right over the top without being destroyed. And thus not one square foot of this planet was covered by less than twenty-two feet of water. The flood covered the world. Now, if you've ever studied God's record of Noah's ark, you'll know that that's the key for the magnitude and the purpose and the effects of the deluge. You see, friends, if this was just a regional deluge in Mesopotamia, which is a very popular view, and has been for many years, there would have been absolutely no need for Noah's ark. with a capacity of one million four hundred thousand cubic feet. Why God could simply have given Noah a two month warning. And it's amazing how far a man can go in two months if he's really motivated. And he could have easily escaped the effects of a regional flood to say nothing of birds and mammals. And the whole Genesis record is reduced to absurdity. Is that all that really happened? It wasn't some terrified survivors exaggerating the magnitude of the flood. It's God's record of how great that deluge really was. Now that's probably one of the reasons why Noah's Ark is an object of continual intense ridicule. People seem to think of me when they see cartoons of Noah's Ark and they're always somewhat ridiculous, aren't they? Ten or twelve stories? out of the windows of the top floor inevitably protrude the necks of two giraffes and then some funny comments. Well, I have news for you, friends. Noah's Ark was no laughing matter to God or man. Apart from that amazing, one hundred thousand square foot bridge, no human could have survived from the pre-flood to the post-flood world and none of us would be here. But what's the problem with Noah's Ark? in the minds of most people today. Well, let me give you two brief reasons why it is ridiculed. Reason number one, people somehow have an idea through evolutionary indoctrination, of course, that the farther back you go in history, the more stupid people were, and at the dawn of human history, nobody ever could have built an arc of such magnitude. Well, dear friends, the Bible gives us the opposite picture as we saw last night. People were vastly more brilliant intrinsically than they are today in their ability to use available tools and technology to do amazing things, as we saw concerning the pyramids of Egypt, for example. Noah was perfectly capable of building a barge of such magnitude with a God-given blueprint and with the help perhaps not only of his family but of hired men. That was no problem at all. The real problem is this. Having built such a gigantic barge over a hundred and twenty years of time, how could he possibly gather two each of every bird and mammal and reptile in the world survive in this barge through a universal flood. Well, let's face it, it would be humanly impossible. Noah didn't have any idea how many animals there were. Even if he did, he couldn't have gathered to each of them, even if he did nothing else during that last phase of the pre-flood world. Perhaps you've heard of the Italian film producer who went to great expense to produce a model of Noah's Ark and and near Rome for the filming and rented animals from zoos all over Europe and hired trainers for months at a given signal to have a parade of animals going into the Ark model for the filming. And he only, of course, picked animals he thought would cooperate in the first place. And when the filming began, disaster struck. I think it was a water buffalo that panicked as the signal was given and headed right through the arc model for Rome and the other animals scattered and all they could do was splice together a few brief shots of a few animals moving in one direction. Let's face it, it would be impossible. You say, well, then how do we believe that this really happened? All right, turn to Genesis chapter six. And notice an amazing statement here, please. Genesis chapter six verse nineteen here's a lesson I believe in in in biblical reality namely when all else fails read the instructions and see what God says actually happened here do you have it Genesis six nineteen God said to Noah and of every living thing of all flesh you shall bring two of every kind into the ark to keep them alive with you and they should be male and female. And now his heart must have really taken a plunge when he heard these words in verse twenty, of the birds after their kind, and of the animals after their kind, and of every creeping thing on the ground after its kind. Two of every kind shall, shall, are you ready, shall come to you. You don't have to go out and capture them and drag them in. No. You do what you can do under my direction, namely build this gigantic barge and be sure there are three stories in it and the top one should have a door and I want the door open and a ramp leading to it. And you stand over here, Noah, and watch what I will do. You do what you can do and I will do what you can't do. Two of every kind shall come to you to keep them alive. This, friends, is one of the greatest miracles in the history of the world. And this, by the way, helps to solve a major problem of paleontology. If, as Henry Morris and others believe, there may have been a billion people on the earth when the flood struck this earth, a major question arises, well, where are the fossils, the remains of all these people? Oh, yes, we found one or two or three here and there in Italy, England, elsewhere, deeply buried. But a billion people? Well, friends, Now we have some new insights on what happened in the light of scientific discovery, which we plan, God willing, to develop more tomorrow evening in our illustrated message. You see, the Bible tells us some amazing things happened during those one hundred and twenty years. Noah was not only building the ark, he was preaching to people. He was a preacher of righteousness, Second Peter, too. And while the ark was being prepared, First Peter three says that the long suffering of God continued while the ark was being prepared. In other words, people were being warned day after day, month after month, year after year. There's a catastrophe coming. There's a flood coming. And the ark is a visual aid of the fact that somebody takes God seriously enough to actually prepare for the catastrophe. Everybody laughed, everybody mocked, everybody ridiculed. He was notorious. He was obviously an object of intense ridicule all over the world. But one week before the flood came, all the laughter ended. Why? People were gripped with total terror as they saw two each of every kind of animal in the world moving toward the ark led by an unseen hand. Convinced now, at last, by what they thought was a premonition of the animal kingdom of a coming catastrophe they fled to the hills thinking they would escape a limited and temporary catastrophe famous last thought the higher they climbed the higher the waters rose day after day week after week until finally friends the flood picked them all off by the hundreds the thousands of millions and they all drowned now we have discovered to our amazement that people who drown in the depths of the sea disappear forever. Billions of scavengers totally annihilate everyone and everything that ever drowns in the depths of the sea. Has anyone here ever heard of the Titanic? What happened when that stupendous ship sank in the North Atlantic eleven thousand feet down? Well, they sent a marvelous machine, you know, with cameras and floodlights down there a few years back and found the wreckage and explored the ocean floor around it. And of the one thousand five hundred people that went down, not one bone, nothing was found of any of them. They were all annihilated. This is God's amazingly effective way to wipe out even the visible reminder, the visible evidence of a generation of people totally demonized who hated God and despised his messenger. But friends, there's another major problem about the ark, you know, and that is this. Even if, we're told, an antediluvian at the dawn of human history could have built such a gigantic barge and somehow got these creatures into the barge with him, how could he possibly, with seven other people, have survived in this floating menagerie of tens of thousands of animals as the ark began to move upon the surface of the waters. Can you imagine calming, controlling, feeding? Can you imagine the cleanup problem in that barge? Don't you think after one week of this pandemonium that Noah would have been sorely tempted to end it all? Except for one thing. God. Look at Genesis eight one. Here's another amazing passage of Scripture. At first glance, you don't see anything here. Watch carefully. After a hundred and fifty days of this deluge, as you see in the last verse of chapter seven, God remembered Noah and all the beasts and all the cattle that were with him in the ark. You say, well, what does that prove? Well, friends, we can guarantee this for sure. It doesn't prove that God was so busy bringing the flood that five months later he woke up and said, oh, there's Noah and the animals, and he remembered them. You know what that Hebrew verb really means? That verb zakar to remember? When God remembers somebody, it means he takes total charge and supplies all the needs of that individual. And the Jews knew that. That's why that Jewish thief next to Jesus on the cross said, Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom. And he certainly didn't mean when you enter your kingdom, please recall I was here. What good would that have done him? He meant, please, totally meet my needs. And Jesus said, this day shalt thou be with me in paradise. I heard your prayer. I have just answered it. I'll take care of you. And that's what it means here, friends. This is an amazing thing. God took care of Noah, and God took care of all the animals that were with him in the ark. How do you think God did this? Well, God is the one who brought the animals to the ark, wasn't he? He led them in two by two into these thousands of what the Hebrew word is, nest. that God told Noah to design into this barge, various state rooms, boxes, cages of all sizes and shapes that only God knew would be needed. And as God led them into the ark by their tens of thousands, He led them into their appropriate places, and there He told Noah, have food waiting for them, and they gorged themselves after their long walk, and God put them all to sleep in a supernaturally imposed hibernation experience. that all animals are capable of under extreme conditions, and there was no need whatever for Noah to take care of any of them. What Noah could not do, God could handle. That's a New Testament principle, friends, illustrated, for example, by the resuscitation of Lazarus from the dead. There are two things that people could do to help him. Number one, they could move the stones. Number two, they could unravel him and let him go. But nobody on this planet could ever raise the dead man to life. So what they could do, Jesus said, you do, and what only he could do, he did. And that was the basic principle of the Genesis flood. Don't you think God could have saved Noah a hundred and twenty years of labor by saying, I will create the ark for you. You don't have to do anything at all. No. God says, you do what you can do, and I'll do what you can't do, and the result is the perfect work of God. Now friends, it's hard to imagine how this could happen. See, I was privileged three years ago to hold a conference in Rochester, Minnesota, and one of the members of the church introduced himself and said, I would like to invite you to come here to Mayo Clinic where I work, and I'm in charge of all animal experiments in Mayo Clinic here. And I couldn't believe what I saw. Two whole gigantic floors in two huge buildings. He had fifty buildings in Mayo Clinic. And he had forty thousand animals for experiments. He said, of all the years we've experimented with all these animals, there's two things we've never solved. We don't know how animals can migrate. Birds, for example, flying across the Pacific thousands of miles, hatching out of their eggs and landing just on the correct island. And the second thing you'll never fathom is how they hibernate. Well, I'm sure you'll agree that God knows how it works, and he can handle this problem perfectly. So as the animals came into the ark, You know, don't you, they came in two by two with rare exceptions. You know also the ark was just big enough for that number, don't you? And a year later they came out two by two, including the rabbits. That suggests control. And so in Genesis eight, seventeen a year later God said to Noah, you bring all these animals out of here and they will be fruitful and multiply on the earth, not in the ark. Thank you, Lord. I can begin to see something here. What you start, you are perfectly able to finish, just like our salvation that has never dropped halfway through, incomplete. That's the kind of a God we know and we worship, dear friends. Now, one thing absolutely overwhelmed me. I never really took the Genesis flood seriously, even as a professor in my first couple years. at great theological seminary in the early fifties. I believed in the gap theory of Genesis one, one, and one, two, and I taught that theory. And I believed that the real flood that transformed the world and smashed all the dinosaurs and all the fossils took place somewhere between Genesis one, one, and one, two, and that Adam and Eve were really walking on a vast cemetery filled with the fossils of that extinct animal they would never see alive. And some of the students challenged me about that and provoked me to search the scriptures daily to see if that was so. And I finally realized I had vastly underestimated the Genesis flood of chapter six, seven, eight, and nine. And so in God's providence, I wrote a five hundred page doctoral dissertation on the magnitude of the deluge. And I studied what Genesis says about it. and Psalm twenty nine and Psalm one hundred and four and Isaiah fifty four and Matthew and Luke and first and second Peter and I discovered that every reference in the rest of the Bible to the flood was to this one not something back there before Adam and Eve appeared I was completely overwhelmed by the biblical testimony to this flood in the days of Noah and what it did to the world and friends It was just about that time that a great hydraulic engineer, a Christian godly engineer, came to our campus and gave a lecture on the flood, and his name was Henry M. Morris. This is nineteen fifty-three. And I was so impressed by his presentations that I asked him to help me, and we agreed to merge our efforts together, and finally in nineteen sixty-one, our book, The Genesis Flood, was published, and we We are amazed at how God has used this to help people to believe that you don't have to abandon true science to believe the Bible or you don't have to abandon the Bible to believe in true science. Our God is the author of scripture, special revelation, and of the world, what we call general revelation. And God doesn't ever contradict himself. And we take that as our fundamental presupposition. in approaching the Word of God. Now friends, if the flood covered the whole planet Earth in the days of Noah, and it did, then we are in stupendous trouble today. Do you know why? Because there is going to be another flood, not of water, but of fire for the same reason. Turn to Second Peter, chapter three. Listen to what's coming next in God's program for a godless world. Second Peter three, verse three, knowing this first of all, primary importance here, listen, that in the last day, scoffers shall come walking after their own lust and saying, where is the promise of his coming? For ever since our fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation. In other words, there can't be Armageddon, second coming, global catastrophe, because there never was. Never was. And you know what God's answer to that? False uniformitarianism is? Look at verse five. For this they willingly are ignorant of. They don't have to be ignorant. They want to be. Ignorant of what? Two things. That by the word of God the heavens were of old and the earth. He created them supernaturally. And secondly, that earth that God created, upon which He placed animals and people on dry land continents. Friends, those continents were lifted up from the waters and were surrounded by waters. By means of which waters the world that then was being overflowed with water perished. That's the deluge. You mean then that all things have not continued as they were from the beginning of the creation. You mean God was fully capable of destroying the world that He had created because of the rebellion of people that had His image and likeness. Yes, and furthermore He is able to do it therefore again. Look at verse seven. But the present heavens and earth by His word are being reserved for fire. Kept for the day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men. You say, what kind of fire? Look at verse ten. The day of the Lord will come like a thief in which the heavens will pass away with a roar. The elements will be destroyed with intense heat. And the earth and the works will be burned up. Since all these things are to be destroyed by in this way, what sort of people ought we to be in all holy conduct and godliness looking for and hastening the coming of the day of God on account of which the heavens? will be destroyed by burning and the elements will melt with intense heat. You know scientists used to laugh at these statements too. They believed in the atomic theory of matter, namely that the basic physical units of the universe are solid, indestructible and thus permanent. That's why they call them atoms, which means in Greek no split, no destroy. Like, ah, theist, no God, ah, millennial, no millennium, ah, tom, no split. Guess what will we discover to our horror? There are no atoms, just toms, splitables. These so-called indestructible particles are nothing but what? Negative bits of energy called electrons spinning around a central nucleus of the opposite charge, which under proper conditions can be split to release heat and energy sufficient to destroy the world. And this great planet that looks so solid and permanent, friends, is nothing but some kind of a bomb ready to explode. And the only thing that keeps us together is the fact that God is long-suffering and patient, not willing that any should perish. And you know what he has to do to destroy us by fire? Nothing. All he has to do is stop doing what he is doing, namely holding us together. a little longer until we repent and turn to His Son. Now friends, when we stop to think for a minute what it took for Noah to take God seriously, Hebrews eleven says, by faith Noah being warned of God of things not seen as yet. Things not seen as yet. It had never rained. No water had ever fallen from the sky. Imagine this scenario just as the ark-building project was nearing completion. On a high plateau, a final delegation of scientists, pre-flood scientists, come to the ark to confront Noah. Sir, what are you doing up here? I'm building an ark to save my family. To save your family from what? from gigantic masses of water that are going to rise from the oceans below and falls in the sky above and and only those in this ark can be saved water rising from the ocean and falling from the sky you are out of your mind you don't realize sir do you that all things have continued as they were from the beginning of the creation there never has been any water going up or down gentlemen I understand where you're coming from. I have not lived on this earth six hundred years for nothing. I know a great deal about what never has happened. But I'm telling you something not seen as yet which Almighty God and His mercy is revealed, and that is there's going to be a catastrophe, and He's going to vindicate His holiness and His sovereignty, and in His grace He's provided a way of escape, and you may enter the ark and be saved. How many believed Him? None. Have you ever wondered why? The Lord Jesus tells us why. These are awful descriptions of human beings that came from his lips to describe those people. He said, number one, as it was in the days of Noah, so shall it be when the Son of Man returns. That's real bad, friends, because we know that when he returns, the whole world will be demonized unto the beast. It was a demonic world in the days of Noah. In fact, Genesis six says that God saw that the wickedness of man was great upon the earth and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. You've got to be helped by demons to be that bad. But listen to this one. That in those days men were eating and drinking and marrying and giving and marriage until Noah entered the ark and the flood came and destroyed them all. You say, well, what's wrong with eating and drinking and marrying and giving and marriage? Just this. This was their highest and only goal in life. Just feeding and multiplying, feeding and multiplying. Guess what? Animals can do that, too. And God didn't create people in His image and likeness to do nothing more than beasts. So God can sign them all, hundreds of millions of them, to total destruction through the mechanism of a mountain covering your long flood that wiped clean this planet from such abomination. And friends, the horror of it all is the fact that another flood is coming. Why? Because people now have sinned against even greater light, greater truth. God's own Son has come. The light has come into the world, and men love the darkness rather than the light, and they won't come to the light, lest their deeds should be reproved. But God in His mercy has provided another ark. This time it's not made of wood, because it's going to be a fire flood. This time the ark is a person, the Lord Jesus himself. And Jesus said, I'm the door by me. If any man enter in, he'll be saved. No man comes to the Father but by me. Come unto me, all you that labor and are heavy laden, and I'll give you rest. And if you believe his message, if you believe his claims, you know what will happen to you? God the Father will put you into Christ his Son and close the door of his securing hand on your soul in Christ forever. And when the fire flood comes, you and I in Christ will rise above the highest flames and be landed upon the shores of a new earth in which dwells righteousness forever. And friends, outside of Jesus Christ the Savior, There's no hope. May God help us to reach out to those people who aren't in the ark, who know not the Savior, that they too can be with us in God's mercy, in God's perfect provision, and that we might learn deeply the lesson of Holy Scripture concerning the Genesis flood and the final judgment of the world. Do you know Him? Are you in Him? Let us pray. Now, Father, these indeed are awesome things you've revealed to us of what you did to a God-rejecting world and what you're going to do. And the fact that your long-suffering still continues moment by moment, but we have no guarantee it'll continue another one. Therefore, help us, Lord, to believe, to obey, to serve. the living God. While it is yet day, for the night comes when no man can work and destruction will come. Lord, speak to my heart tonight of my need to be conscious of, alert to, sensitize to the things that count for eternity.