A Volcano that Changes Everything

But he didn't stay in the manger, and he didn't stay on the cross. He died and rose again so that you could have that seat reserved. And he then ascended to the Father.

He's in the seat of glory, and he is coming back again. He will judge all of humanity of all time. Using that judgment, this universe will explode in a fiery ball, and we will watch him with the word of his mouth speak. This time we get to be there, to hear him say, Let there be light!

Today is coming when God will return and usher in a new era with a new heaven and a new earth. In the meantime, we study and learn about God through the things He's created. But many people come to wrong conclusions, often intentionally.

Some people do all they can to avoid the reality that God actually exists. So, they come up with all sorts of explanations for what they observe in the world. Today, Stephen continues looking at the universe God created with a mind to discovering the Creator behind it all.

This lesson is called a volcano that changes everything. From our research as we go back into this series in living color, we've discovered that there are numerous elements necessary for life to be possible on planet earth. And it takes a remarkable amount of precision, whether it's oxygen or nitrogen or phosphorus or carbon, whether it's the size of the sun and the distance from earth, whether it's our personal moon orbiting us at just the right distance and speed, creating just the amount of gravitational pressure and tides, which allow seasons.

All of these are needed to be in existence at just the right time in order to sustain life. And one of the texts that we've looked at, and I've mentioned it a couple of times, I hope you've noted in your Bible somewhere, or maybe even gone to Isaiah 45 and verse 18 and underlined it, this is where Isaiah the prophet is quoting God, who says, informs us that he has created the earth to be inhabited, and he references the universe as uninhabitable. In fact, Isaiah calls it a waste place, definitely as purposes beyond probably what we could even imagine in balancing the universe for one thing. But he uniquely created, Isaiah says, earth to be inhabited.

And I found it interesting after a couple of weeks ago, and we talked about this going home and the very next day, being sort of deluged by the news media that's now quoting this one NASA scientist who said, and I thought it was rather intriguing the way the headline read, without any evidence, one NASA scientist believed we have been, visited by aliens. And this is going to become the growing religious faith statement that seeks to answer what Darwinism has failed to answer, because Darwin knew nothing of a complex cell, he knew nothing of DNA, and there has to be a designer behind all this design. So now, well we don't have to look to God, there's somebody that's probably seeded the earth a long time ago, some alien race somewhere.

So they're pointed, again, not in the direction of a creator God, but they hope in something else. And we ran out of time in our last study on the subject that addresses the question, if God, according to the Bible, if it really happened, that he created by the word of his power, if he created the world and the universe, he spoke, and it was so, according to the Genesis account and the genealogies, which would place earth at right about 8,000 years of age. Well, if that's true, then why does the earth look so much older?

That's a legitimate question to answer. We began by being reminded that earth is considered old only if you hold to the evolutionary worldview of uniformitarianism, and what that may, you may remember, means is that whatever has been happening, observed in nature, in the world, in the universe, it has always been happening that same way. And so, we come up with the evolutionary birth date of planet earth, which evolutionists put at 4.5 billion years, I don't know where the point five came from, but it's 4.5 billion years old. I mean, look, if it takes that drip of water a thousand years to wear out that granite stone, then based on that observation and a uniformitarian worldview, then if it's left alone to do that, in about six million years you'll have the Grand Canyon, because that's how long it would take based on what we can observe. With regional flooding and the erosion of rock and sediment by the Colorado River, it took supposedly six million years to pull out that stunning piece of real estate that you may have visited.

But again, that's assuming the normal rate of erosion, which we can measure under normal circumstances. But what if something happened that doesn't normally happen, that turns that time scale upside down? And then we were able to get into just a little bit the earth experiencing something that had never happened before according to the Bible. In fact, God promised that it would never happen again, and it was the global flood. Now, in Genesis chapter 7, if you want to turn there, we'll drop back in there fairly quickly, sort of get a running start. This is all just sort of a refresher course.

It's been two weeks. Remember, if this is a regional flood, then Jesus was sadly misinformed because in one of his sermons recorded in Luke chapter 17, he said that the flood of Noah destroyed all of humanity, the entire human race. Furthermore, not only is Jesus misinformed, but that isn't bad enough, and that would be bad enough. But God the Father lied to Noah, because God the Father told Noah, this isn't going to happen again. But if it was a regional flood or a local flood, he lied, because that happens every year in places around our country. Well, according to Moses' record at Genesis chapter 7, if you drop down in the middle part of verse 11, Moses records, the fountains of the great deep burst open, and the floodgates of the sky were open. The rain fell upon the earth for 40 days and 40 nights. By the way, keep in mind, the water's going to be covering the surface.

It'll take a long time to recede, about five or six months. Noah and his family will remain on that ark for a year. It's often overlooked even among believers. They're on that ark for about a year. We're told the rain fell upon the earth, and verse 18, drop down there, the water prevailed and increased greatly upon the earth, verse 19, little part, so that all the high mountains everywhere under the heavens were covered. Thus God, verse 23, dropped there, thus God blotted out every living thing that was upon the face of the land, from man to animals to creeping things to birds of the sky, they were blotted out from the earth.

Last part of verse 23, only Noah was left together with those that were with him in the ark. The fountains of the great deep burst open. It's interesting that there is the presence of marine fossils on the mountain range of Mount Ararat near the peaks. Even Mount Everest, one study I encounter documented, they have found ocean fossils near its peak. This is 29,000 feet above sea level. This is the tallest point on planet earth, fossils of fish at the highest mountain peak on earth's surface.

How did fish get up there? Well, even the evolutionary world is allowing, in my lifetime, more and more credence to the idea of what they call catastrophism. That is some catastrophe from ancient days, we don't quite know where to put it, where millions of animals were fossilized quickly, sediment laid down on a global scale. This is what I would say is a wonderful evidence of geology catching up with Genesis. There are still many intriguing questions.

I've encountered more of them than we'll ever get into. But one question that I've done a lot of reading on relates to coal, which supposedly again on an evolutionary time scale takes 300 million years to form. So if we have coal, coal mines, it took 300 million years, or it's got to be at least that old. And of course the sedimentary layers that you can see on the sides of canyon walls, it takes so long for those layers to be formed one on top of another. So where is the evidence of something like these things being formed quickly? You know, it's really interesting to me that we happen to be living in a generation where evidence has been provided in a remarkable manner.

It occurred only a few decades ago in a regional manner, and along the way I want to connect some dots. On May 18th, 1980, this beautiful setting of Mount St. Helens and Spirit Lake at its base was dramatically altered. Mount St. Helens erupted and the top and the side of the mountain literally blew off in a massive explosion that equaled the detonation of several nuclear bombs. The blast from Mount St. Helens traveled at 650 miles an hour, and it destroyed the forests, get this, in the surrounding 230 square miles. So it's huge. As some of the side of Mount St. Helens literally cannonballed into Spirit Lake, it displaced the water, creating waves 800 feet high.

That's high. The water from the lake rushed up the surrounding forest regions where all the trees are now knocked down, and then as the water returned back to Spirit Lake, it carried with it an estimated 4 million trees, creating this massive log mat. It's going to be significant because one of the most shocking results was discovered five years later in 1985, where all that timber had intermingled suddenly with volcanic sediment. Now up until then, the prevailing viewpoint was that it took 300 million years to form coal, and yet here in Spirit Lake, they had sections of timber below the mat where timber had sunk, creating a 300-foot-deep mat. So with fire, pressure, lava, rock, and all of that, guess what you had in Spirit Lake? The formation of coal. The standard geological viewpoint, by the way, is that it takes a thousand years to form one inch of coal. In Spirit Lake you have right now three feet of coal being formed.

So let's connect the dots. Just imagine what a global flood did four thousand years ago. Imagine what it did to earth's vegetation and trees. Imagine the massive volcanic eruptions Moses records for us around the globe. Imagine all of the forests of the earth, not a few, not in the northwest, all of them immediately uprooted, blown over, all the forests immediately tumbled together with lava and sediment and heat and water and pressure. The coal beds we have have had ample time to be formed in four thousand years for what we are now mining on the planet. By the way, I want to make another point on something that reaffirms the Genesis flood and the young age of the earth. Let me throw in here something that the news did not report.

You never saw this on TV. It never made it into your children's geology books. But in June of 1992, roughly twelve years later, volcanic rock that had been formed by this eruption was taken from this site at Mount St. Helens and put to the standard radiometric testing to date it. The rocks that were only ten years old, ten to twelve years old, were by using the standard methods of dating determined to be three hundred and fifty thousand years old. And get this, one report admitted that the minerals packed inside the rock during the eruption were dated using the standard radiometric dating processes were dated to be two point eight million years old.

And they're barely more than ten years old. Geologists were stunned. In fact, two of them that wrote a report that I scanned went on to say courageously, I thought, and publicly, uniformitarianism and Darwinism is hindering our studies in geology. Today, the top of Mount St. Helens is gone. It blew sediment and ash, by the way, sixteen miles high.

Closed airports impacted eleven surrounding states. I've had people in earlier services this morning tell me they were in that region. They saw the results. Topography was instantly crafted, entirely changed. If you stumbled across this scenery right here at the base and stretching out from Mount St. Helens, you would date it at taking millions of years to carve out those canyons. But if Mount St. Helens' eruption in 1980 wasn't enough to get our attention, if it wasn't enough to impact the religious faith declarations of Darwinism and uniformitarianism – God, in his patience, designed yet another eruption to take place 24 months later.

And this one received even less of an effort to connect the dots. By now, that crater at the top of Mount St. Helens had formed ice, and yet that eruption immediately turned that ice into a flow mixed with lava and rock. It became the largest debris avalanche in the history of the United States. In fact, one author said it's the largest debris avalanche we have recorded in all of human history.

Of course, if you don't take into account this one, this would be the largest. But in 1982, this ice, lava, and mudflow initially traveled 40 miles an hour, at some points 90 miles an hour. It changed the topography of 23 square miles, it carved out canyons with elevated plateaus, it cut through bedrock at its deepest points, some 600 feet deep, and it created a 1 40th scale model of the Grand Canyon.

And this could be tedious, but I want you to follow this because this point here alone is significant. According to the evolutionary timescale model, it took 6 million years, remember, for the Colorado River to carve out, with the water flowing over the plateaus as well, the Grand Canyon. Six million years. Now, you have the results of a massive avalanche that has created something 1 40th the size of the Grand Canyon, so if you pull out your calculator like I did and you do the math, it should take around 150,000 years to create the canyons outside the region of Mount St. Helens.

But you can drive over there right now and see them. It didn't take 150,000 years after all. Granite canyon walls were supposed to take 6 million years to be carved by water. Geologists watched some of these canyon walls of granite at 1.1 140 feet deep, solid granite, cut away in less than one day.

Less than one day. Coal, again, it should take 300 million years to form. It's forming in Spirit Lake. In fact, in one of the canyons formed by this second eruption, I've got a picture.

There's a guy in a red sweater there. He's standing at the base of one of the canyon walls carved out in a matter of days by the second eruption of Mount St. Helens. In this particular canyon wall, I wanted to show you the picture because you can see the strata of sedimentary layers. According to uniformitarianism and evolutionary thought, you have to have a million years between each layer of strata. So you can just start counting the millions of years that supposedly it took for this to be formed. One article I read said that the canyon wall showed the strata of sedimentary layers perfectly and symmetrically laid down in a matter of hours. Another article, a geologist was staggered that sediment layers could be 600 feet thick, yet separated into distinct strata, even though this avalanche was moving at 40 miles an hour. Evolutionary Darwinism has been printing in textbooks for years that it takes one million years between each layer, so I would assume they're going to rewrite the textbooks.

Was there a great revival, beloved, in Washington State? Has there been a rush to redo the geological standards of radiometric dating? Has there been an acknowledgement in school books and online scientific resources, which you can look up just as much as easily as I could, that the Grand Canyon could have been formed in a couple of years because of what they saw happening in one month?

No. In fact, I went online last night, and I was supposed to preach this two weeks ago, so maybe the data changed, and I Googled, how long did it take to form the Grand Canyon? And up pops at the very top of that screen a beautiful box, picture of the Grand Canyon next to it, in big, bold numerics and letters it reads, the answer, six million years. No question mark.

It's a statement of faith. And then I went ahead and I Googled, how long does it take for coal to form? And the answer popped up again, large letters, 300 million years. Always learning. Never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.

Why? Because it would point you back to a creator who designed the planet, who has promised judgment, it came and it's coming again. I uncovered one article by the way, about a man, this is very sad to me to read this, he operated a lodge for more than 50 years in that region. He was located a mile away from Mount St. Helens, and he became a folk hero among the people of this region because he refused to evacuate. Mount St. Helens had been giving off for months and months warnings, rumblings, vapor. They knew it was going to erupt. There had been plenty of time and warning given just about everybody else, in fact everyone else in his area and beyond had evacuated before 8.32 a.m. on May 18th, 1980. But this old man became a brave hero. His statement to a reporter that said, quote, that mountain is a mile away. That mountain ain't going to hurt me.

Within 10 minutes of the eruption, he and his lodge were buried 150 feet deep. God issued a warning through Noah, it would take 120 years to build the ark and nobody reserved a seat besides his family. God has issued a warning through Peter that another judgment of fire is coming, that warning's lasted now about 2,000 years. 2 Peter chapter 3 and verse 3, and I'm going to work my way very quickly through this, but Peter says this, know this first of all that in the last days, mockers will come with their mockings saying all continues just as it was from the beginning of ancient past, creation time.

What are they saying? They're declaring their faith in the doctrine of uniformitarianism. We believe that everything is continuing in the same way as it's always continued since the beginning of time. Everything that's happened is what always happens and nothing that usually doesn't happen isn't going to happen. And Peter takes that statement of faith and connects the dots.

He says for when they maintain this, it escapes their notice. Haven't they noticed that by the Word of God, the world at that time was destroyed, being flooded with water. But by His Word, the present heavens and earth are being reserved for fire, kept for the day of judgment.

The heavens, that is the universe, will be destroyed by burning and the elements will melt with intense heat. You know how ridiculous that sounds to our world? As ridiculous as it sounded when Noah said, it's going to rain and flood everything and if you don't get on this boat, you're going to drown. The next global judgment will not be water, but fire. Listen, let's just take God at His Word.

Reserve a seat. This time on the living ark, who is the Lord Jesus? That's the only way you're going to emerge safely, following the great judgment of God upon the human race. In fact, the entire creation which has fallen and is going to recreate.

How? Through billions of years of time? No, by the word of His mouth. He's going to speak again and a new earth will be created and a new universe. The scriptures tell us. And listen, if you have trouble with that first creation and that first judgment, can you imagine the next judgment and the power of Christ to recreate the universe all over again?

Only this time it will be eternal, immortal, perfect, in living color like we have never seen color before. Have you reserved a seat on the living ark who is Christ? You know our world is very happy, especially at this season, to think of Jesus as a baby. He's much safer as a little baby boy in a manger.

Isn't that cute? And if you get much beyond that, we really want to put Him on a cross and leave Him there. But He didn't stay in the manger and He didn't stay on the cross. He died and rose again so that you could have that seat reserved. And He then ascended to the Father. He's in the seat of glory and He is coming back again. He will judge all of humanity of all time. Following that judgment, this universe will explode in a fiery ball and we will watch Him with the word of His mouth speak. This time we get to be there, to hear Him say, let there be light.

There was light. We're going to get to see that one if you've reserved a place in the living ark who is Christ. It's true that the reconciliation of Christ restores all things. I hope you were encouraged by this lesson today here on Wisdom for the Heart. Stephen is working his way through a series on God's creation, a series called In Living Color.

He's calling today's lesson a volcano that changes everything. Our resources are designed to make disciples of the nations and edify followers of Jesus Christ. Learn more at wisdomonline.org. Then join us next time on Wisdom for the Heart.