KEEPING COOL by Dr. Shah, Clearview Church, Henderson, NC
Introduction: Where I grew up, I never saw any snow or ice. So, imagine my reaction when I saw it for the first time, especially when it came to driving! In fact, I was travelling with a couple of friends from the college in Georgia to upstate New York in the blizzard of 1993. This was somewhere about 8-9 in the evening. I’m not sure where exactly we were on the highway, but it was probably closer to DC or even in Pennsylvania. Suddenly, the car we were in started sliding and then began to spin slowly. I distinctly remember seeing the traffic we were in but backwards now and the headlights of the cars and even tractor trailers directly behind us coming towards us. Thank God they slowed down, and the car made a 360° turn instead of just a 180°, and we kept going forward as if nothing had happened. In fact, no one spoke for the next minute or so. Even now, when there is ice on the road, I think about that night on the highway. Last weekend, I introduced the matter of Ice Age and Climate Change in the message through Job. Today we will go further in this message titled “KEEPING COOL.” For those of you who may not know, we are returning to our series titled CONTEND, which we began in 2021 and picked up again in 2022. The goal of this series is to teach Apologetics, which is learning to give a reason for the hope that is within us with meekness and fear. We covered a lot of ground regarding the Creation, the Fall, and the Flood in Contend 1 in 2021 and Contend 2 in 2022. Now, in Contend 3, we again return to Genesis to address some of the post-Flood issues. Main point: Secular scientists warn about a coming catastrophe in the form of a climate change, global warming, or an ice age. The Bible tells us that a once, never to be repeated, catastrophic event (the Flood) caused the Ice Age. We don’t need to panic over non-catastrophic relatively slow increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide to bring about another similar catastrophe. In fact, a catastrophe is coming, but it is going to be in the Great Tribulation, Second Coming, and the Judgement.
2 Peter 3 3 “knowing this first: that scoffers will come in the last days, walking according to their own lusts, 4 and saying, “Where is the promise of His coming? For since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation.” 5 For this they willfully forget: that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of water and in the water, 6 by which the world that then existed perished, being flooded with water.”
Context: The apostle Peter warned his readers in his second letter that along with the false prophets (pseudo-prophetai) and false teachers (pseudo-didaskaloi) that he described in chapter 2, there will also arise some scoffers (empaiktes) in the last days. They will be driven by their own selfish desires, sinful motives, and evil urges, and they will make people doubt what the Bible has said about the future and what the Bible has said about the past. Listen again to 2 Peter 3 3 “knowing this first: that scoffers will come in the last days, walking according to their own lusts, 4 and saying, “Where is the promise of His coming? (Future) For since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation” (Past). About our future hope, they will say things like, “So, where is Jesus?” “Didn’t he promise that he was coming back soon?” “Today would be a good day for him to show up.” Conclusion: Jesus was not God. He was just a man who tried to do something good, or so he thought, and they killed him. The Christians or the church and the establishment made him the Son of God and divine and savior. He was none of those things. He is not coming back. There is no “blessed hope” (Titus 2:13) of his coming. The real reason for them to mock and disbelieve the second coming is that they want to deny that there will be a judgment.
Application: Do you believe that a day of judgment is coming? Are you ready for it?
Furthermore, they will also deny what the Bible has said about the past: For since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation.” In other words, since the time of the Old Testament patriarchs, the world has been just ticking along. There is nothing new or different. Here is the important point: 2 Peter 3:5 “For this they willfully forget…” (lanthanei…thelontes), which means deliberately and knowingly. 5 “…that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of water and in the water, 6 by which the world that then existed perished, being flooded with water.” They will deliberately forget how God created the world and then judged the world through the Flood.
Let me pause here and talk about some present-day scoffers: Dr. Jake Hebert, in his book The Ice Age and Climate Change, gives examples of some of them. In 2014, Matthew Liao, a professor of philosophy from New York University, suggested that we should do something to save humanity from the catastrophe that is looming through carbon dioxide emissions. He thinks that we can save the future if we give human beings certain drugs so they would stop eating meat. This would keep the cattle industry from growing, because cows have a lot of gas which contains methane and other greenhouse gases that are causing global warming. Who knew that our cows were causing a catastrophe! He also suggested making people shorter so less body would require less energy. Also, he suggested that if we can create humans with cat-like eyes that would make us see better in the dark and again reduce energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions. We laugh at this, but here is a report on CNN from January 24, 2023: “Bill Gates backs start-up tackling cow burps and farts.” Here is what it says: A spokesperson for Gates’ fund, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, which led the $12 million investment round, told CNN: “Although cows are a significant [greenhouse gas] source, livestock agriculture remains one of the cheapest protein sources globally, which means technologies that can reduce emissions from the existing cattle supply chain today and in the future are critical.” The article concludes with this: “Some countries are exploring legislation to reduce methane emissions from livestock. In October, the New Zealand government announced plans to tax farmers for their animals’ burps, to incentivize them to reduce emissions.”
So, to prevent this catastrophe that is looming over us, these scoffers want to use genetic engineering, population control (how many children you can have), tax climate change skeptics (deniers), and even kill much of the human population (In 2006, Eric Pianka, herpetologist from University of Texas, suggested killing 90% of the human population). Sadly, in 2006, some evangelicals even signed a document under The Evangelical Climate Initiative titled “Climate Change: An Evangelical Call to Action.” You’d be surprised who all signed it!
To understand the present, we must first look to the past. The most accurate record to understand the past is the Word of God, the Bible. Here we find the answer to what went wrong with our world and what did God do about it. Secular scientists jettison the Bible and try to understand the past by looking to the present and then decide what they will do about everyone’s future! What a mess!
The landscape of the earth was created in one day or maybe even 6 days. I explained this in our message titled “LANDSCAPE.” The mountains and the valleys, the oceans and the rivers were formed at an infinitely rapid speed. It was all catastrophic! There was erosion, sedimentation, and deposition starting from creation week. There is no comparison to our time because this was such a unique period in earth’s history. This world then went through another catastrophe, a major one, during the great Flood at the time of Noah.
First was the Eruption Stage: “Fountains of the great deep were broken up” referring to volcanic eruptions all over releasing massive amount of water (oceanic or subterranean water). In fact, about 3/4th of what is released in volcanoes is actually steam, which is water. You can see evidence of this in places like the Agathla Peak in Arizona. We filmed here for our bible study. It looks like something out of a Tolkien novel or even sci-fi! In a previous sermon titled TRACES, I talked about Catastrophic Plate Tectonics. Dr. John Baumgardner explains that there was one super continent before the Flood, and it was broken up into separate continents during Noah’s Flood. He uses a mechanism known as “runaway subduction.” It is proposed that the cold heavy ocean-floor rocks in the regions on the outer edges of the super continents broke and began to sink into the mantle of the earth. When this began to happen, it could have reached a rapid speed, dragging the rest of the ocean floor and triggering massive vertical movements. This would have created a “linear curtain of supersonic steam jets along the entire 43,500 miles of the seafloor rift zones” (Andrew Snelling). The ocean floor could have lifted as much as 3500 feet! Of course, molten lava and subterranean water erupted. In turn, lots of the sea water would have evaporated in the process resulting in a massive rainfall all over the world – “…and the windows of heaven were opened.”
After the eruption stage came the ascending stage. The mountains were not as tall as we see them today. Much of that has been caused by the catastrophic plate tectonics and the up thrusting, which are post flood. Also, the ocean invaded the land with lots of sediments and marine life which has now resulted in thick fossiliferous sedimentary rock. Make sure to stop by the display case in the lobby to see some of the marine life and dinosaur fossils from different parts of the world. The evidence for this stage is huge extent of many layers; rapid formation of the main rock layers (rapidly buried fossils, thick sandstones deposited under water, rapid layering; and very little time between layers.
Now comes the Retreating Phase – Sheet Flow Phase; Transition; and Channelized Flow Phase. Genesis 8 1 Then God remembered Noah, and every living thing, and all the animals that were with him in the ark. And God made a wind to pass over the earth, and the waters subsided. 2 The fountains of the deep and the windows of heaven were also stopped, and the rain from heaven was restrained. 3 And the waters receded continually from the earth. At the end of the hundred and fifty days the waters decreased. 4 Then the ark rested in the seventh month, the seventeenth day of the month, on the mountains of Ararat. 5 And the waters decreased continually until the tenth month. In the tenth month, on the first day of the month, the tops of the mountains were seen. This is the sheet flow phase where giant sheets of water began retreating and the rocks that had just been dumped here and there have not had time to cool down and solidify, but they are in the process. Monument Valley is a clear example of that. 6 So it came to pass, at the end of forty days, that Noah opened the window of the ark which he had made. 7 Then he sent out a raven, which kept going to and fro until the waters had dried up from the earth. 8 He also sent out from himself a dove, to see if the waters had receded from the face of the ground. 9 But the dove found no resting place for the sole of her foot, and she returned into the ark to him, for the waters were on the face of the whole earth. So he put out his hand and took her, and drew her into the ark to himself. 10 And he waited yet another seven days, and again he sent the dove out from the ark. 11 Then the dove came to him in the evening, and behold, a freshly plucked olive leaf was in her mouth; and Noah knew that the waters had receded from the earth. 12 So he waited yet another seven days and sent out the dove, which did not return again to him anymore. 13 And it came to pass in the six hundred and first year, in the first month, the first day of the month, that the waters were dried up from the earth; and Noah removed the covering of the ark and looked, and indeed the surface of the ground was dry. 14 And in the second month, on the twenty-seventh day of the month, the earth was dried.The evidence for this stage is massive erosion, planation surfaces, water gaps, rapidly formed canyons. A great illustration of this is the Grand Canyon.
As many as 500 legends exist in ancient cultures of a worldwide flood.
Let me pause here: We are in the last days. We are 2000 years closer to the end than when Peter first penned those words through the Holy Spirit. The mockers are here. They can see the evidence of the first and the second catastrophes, especially the second one (following taken from Dr. Jake Hebert):
- Sedimentary rocks (water deposited rocks) cover about 75% of the earth’s surface;
- Thin continent-wide sedimentary deposits were catastrophically deposited over vast regions at the same time;
- Fossils of marine and land creatures are found buried together;
- Large number of flood accounts and legends all over the earth, very similar to the Genesis account.
Nonetheless, they chose to willfully reject the truth and promote their agenda. Climate Change, Ice Age, and Global Warming are all part of the new agenda. We will look at these more carefully next week. Here I just want to emphasize again a “once, never to be repeated, catastrophic event (the Flood) caused the Ice Age, and we don’t need to panic over non-catastrophic relatively slow increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide to bring about another similar catastrophe.” There is a catastrophe coming and that is the Tribulation and the Second Coming, which will lead to the Judgment.
Application: One reason why people believe that this is it and there is no other appointment on the world calendar is because they are trying to avoid thinking about a judgment day that is coming. Hebrews 9:27 “And as it is appointed for men to die once, but after this the judgment.” Acts 9:31 “because He has appointed a day on which He will judge the world in righteousness by the Man whom He has ordained.” How about you? Do you believe that a day of judgment is coming? Are you ready for it? Do you know Jesus Christ as your Savior and King? Are you saved?
Leave a Reply