September 6, 2021 – Click here to listen
I watched a television show on archeologists who were digging up dinosaur bones and selling them to various museums. It was amazing to see the size of these beasts. The Bible does not spell out much about that time period prior to what we might refer to as modern times.
In secular thinking, the Ice Age does not refer to the first formation of ice on the planet. Indeed, forests grew on Antarctica and the Arctic before ice began to form. Drilling down through Antarctica’s ice sheet, scientists have found in sediment layers beneath the ice sheet fossils of a subtropical rainforest, complete with palm trees and macadamia trees. For these to grow, the land would have to be frost-free for a brief time after the Flood. It is not clear either whether ice covered the entire earth or just some continents. I don’t think it covered the middle-east.
My wife and I took a flight on a bush plane that landed on a glacier. When we landed the pilot told us that it was 6-7 thousand feet deep in ice where we were standing, which continues to build in ice and slide its way along carving out a huge gorge that is many miles long. On the flight back he told us that the entire flatland area we flew overused to be covered with ice thousands of feet deep that extended from Denali all the way to Anchorage.
Why isn’t the ice age mentioned in the Bible? I cannot tell you, but the creation story indicates there was chaos on the earth for a while. Genesis 1:2 backs up to the earliest stage in God’s creation of the earth: “The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.” These expressions indicate chaos. God’s nature is one of order. He put things in order during the creation and ended chaos.
Jesus also removes the chaos of sin instigated by Satan and the free will of Eve and then Adam and restores spiritual order to people who accept Him as Lord and Savior: The sinner steals, kills, and destroys — they bring chaos — and Jesus gives life to the full — He brings order and peace and reconstruction.
I have always looked at the creation story as an explanation written in terms that uneducated people as well as the most educated and knowledgeable professors could understand. To write a smidgeon of how God created the cosmos would take more books than the earth could contain. And even if we had such a library no one could understand it. We were created lower than God and not everything will ever be understood while we walk this planet.
God gave us an account that indicates His awesome power and knowledge in simplistic terms that anyone could understand from ancient times right through today. Like many things we cannot understand, we must accept Genesis as it is written — by faith. Bottom line: God created everything short and simple.
Standing on that glacier and then taking off and soaring through those mountains I was in awe of one thing: the majesty of God. My advice is to look at your surroundings and enjoy God’s handiwork. We are leaving this morning to spend two days in the Arctic Circle and hopefully view the Northern Lights from the top of the world. You can be assured I will be marveling at them and the frozen tundra the entire time.
Hebrews 11:3
By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible.