The Lesson of History
What a difference interpretation of history makes! Specifically, what a difference for interpretation related to earth’s history!
I am spending a few days in Moab with friends. We are driving and hiking through some of the most amazing canyon country in the world. Much of it I have never seen before and the sights are truly breathtaking. Shear cliffs dropping hundreds of feet appearing out of nowhere in a perfectly flat plain. Erosional rock features towering hundreds of feet in the air. Canyons so vast that everyone who walks up to them has the same response – “O my” and then they stand for a few minutes in silent awe. It is scenery that draws something big and deep out of everyone that sees it. Such sights demand that something big and deep be attached to those feelings they produce inside.
What could be so awesome as to be worthy of producing such amazing, awe inspiring sights? All of us have been given one powerful possibility. Eons of time. Eons of time, time beyond the imagination, millions and millions of years, is an idea vast enough to match the vastness of what we see. It’s not that eons of time are the obvious explanation, but that “eons of time” somehow can hold the reverence and awe that fits what is due to that before us.
For most people there is no other idea they have been given to consider. And so, the breathtaking expanse of the canyon seems an actual confirmation of the idea of deep time.
But there is another idea. Perhaps even more vast, more powerful, that produces a much more grounded reverence. That idea is a judgment from a Creator God, brought through a year long, worldwide, life-extinguishing flood.
Such an interpretation of geologic features is now my reigning paradigm, and has become one of the fascinations of my life. I actually never drive through a cut in the roadbed without thinking about what made the layers of rock I see beside me. Every rock formation is the result of something. It is a product of a process, and observation can often determine facts about the process by studying the product. Studying the rock formations I see around my home and around the world all lead me to see that the best explanation for the features of our planet’s surface is the flood of Noah.
Canyons such as the one below Mesa Arch are not hard to explain if one has the proper options. And “time” is a very poor choice. The amount of sediment transported out of the erosion area almost defies calculation. It is an amount so vast that the years of erosion required if time is the explanation is also almost beyond calculation. The National Park sign says that small amounts of rain produce the canyon slowly over time. But it doesn’t rain here. And the landscape is not filled with erosional material being slowly moved through the canyon. The rock floors, the canyon sides, the bases of the spires are scoured nearly clean. It is so obvious that what lays below Mesa Arch is left from a massive catastrophic erosional event. This was caused by a cataclysmic flood.
Monument Valley tells the same story. Huge canyons that start out of nowhere in the flat plain. There isn’t even a stream going up to them today (or even a stream bed). Clearly, a huge amount of water came, carved through the rock and then was gone, leaving canyons half carved through the plain, and rock spires towering 900 feet in the air, perhaps only minutes from being eroded away completely by the flooding waters, but suddenly the rushing runoff was gone.
This view of geologic history also has an awe-inspiring story that connects with it. But the implications of the story are very different. The rocks, instead of being a statement of my immeasurable insignificance, now become a deeply sobering reminder of God’s nearness. A reminder of the fact that God is real and God does respond to the acts of men. That God is dealing with us, that He has done so in the past, and that we should believe His promises about doing so in the future.
No one can look at the landscape here and deny that there is a deeply profound story behind what is seen. That deeply profound story is not time, but God, who has made us, who is here with us and who has spoken to each one of us in His Word, in history, and in His Son. He is not far away. And we are standing on one of his messages every day.
Great thoughts. I think when I think of a cataclysmic flood, it makes sense. It seems that millions of years would have pounded everything smooth over time…
Excellent observations! Thank you for your insights.