1
Then the LORD said to Noah, "Go into
the ark, you and all your household, for I have seen
that you are righteous before me
in this generation.
2 Take with you seven pairs of all clean
animals, the male and his mate; and a pair of the
animals that are not clean, the
male and his mate;
3 and seven pairs of the birds of the air also,
male and female, to keep their kind alive upon the face
of all the earth.
4 For in seven days I will send rain upon the
earth forty days and forty nights; and every living
thing that I have made I will
blot out from the face of the ground."
5 And Noah did all that the LORD had commanded
him.
6 Noah was six hundred years old when the flood
of waters came upon the earth.
7 And Noah and his sons and his wife and his
sons' wives with him went into the ark, to escape the
waters of the flood.
8 Of clean animals, and of animals that are not
clean, and of birds, and of everything that creeps on
the ground,
9 two and two, male and female, went into the
ark with Noah, as God had commanded Noah.
10 And after seven days the waters of the flood
came upon the earth.
11 In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in
the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month,
on that day all the fountains of
the great deep burst forth, and the windows (2) of the
heavens were opened.
12 And rain fell upon the earth forty days and
forty nights.
13 On the very same day Noah and his sons, Shem
and Ham and Japheth, and Noah's wife and the three
wives of his sons with them entered the
ark,
14 they and every beast according to its kind,
and all the cattle according to their kinds, and every
creeping thing that creeps on the earth according to its
kind, and every bird according to its kind, every bird
of every sort.
15 They went into the ark with Noah, two and two
of all flesh in which there was the breath of life.
16 And they that entered, male and female of all
flesh, went in as God had commanded him; and the LORD
shut him in.
17 The flood continued forty days upon the earth;
and the waters increased, and bore up the ark, and it
rose high above the earth.
18 The waters prevailed and increased greatly
upon the earth; and the ark floated on the face of the
waters.
19 And the waters prevailed so mightily upon the
earth that all the high mountains under the whole heaven
were covered;
20 the waters prevailed above the mountains,
covering them fifteen cubits deep.
21 And all flesh died that moved upon the earth,
birds, cattle, beasts, all swarming creatures that swarm
upon the earth, and every man;
22 everything on the dry land in whose nostrils
was the breath of life died.
23 He blotted out every living thing that was
upon the face of the ground, man and animals and
creeping things and birds of the air; they were blotted
out from the earth. Only Noah was left, and those
that were with him in the ark.
24 And the waters prevailed upon the earth a
hundred and fifty days. |
Our own Milky Way
Galaxy is unlike any other in the Universe. A
penetrating infrared census of about 30 million stars
indicates that the Milky Way Galaxy is distinguished by
a very large central bar some 27,000 light-years
long. It is very likely that our unique appearance
is due to us being the epicenter of the opening of the
Windows of Heaven, when all the stars were both 1.)
moved away from Earth & 2.) other galaxies were
moved away from our own galaxy. This photo is from
the 8-25-2005.Astronomy Pic
of the day.
Verse 7:11 is the
key to understanding perhaps the greatest mystery of
modern astronomy. The question is, if our Sun and
Moon are brand new (see the Genesis 1 comments) then how could the
stars be very old. All the stars were made on day
four, along with the Sun and the Moon, however, they are
millions and sometimes billions of light-years away from
us. This says that the light arriving here is from
millions and billions of years ago. The answer is
reached through elimination.
Two things happen
in 7:11; first, the fountains of the great deep burst
forth. A great crack in the firmament called
Heaven was made between what is now the Americas and
Europe / Africa. Then, the foundations supporting
the underground cavern were broken, and forced all of
the subterranean water out to the surface of the Earth,
totally flooding it out.
Secondly, the windows
of
the
heavens were opened. Lots of folks quickly
assume that this was stored rain in the upper
atmosphere, but I don't think so. First, it had
never rained upon the Earth, and secondly, the sky was
bronze in color, not grey (see the Job 37 comment). So, what are the windows
of heaven? If it wasn't rain, then I think
it was the Fifth
force. The first four forces are:
- Gravity
- Electro-magnetic
- weak molecular
- strong atomic
and the fifth force would be the windows
of heaven. It is opposite to gravity, being
a repulsive force (also see the Job 9 comments
and Job 38 comments, which
describe a repulsive force). The "Window" would be
a transparent barrier to a dimension beyond our normal
three. Depending upon the degree that the Window
is opened, the speed of the object caught-up in it could
be varied.
I believe the
mechanism that this works under is through the movement
of space itself. When a traveler goes through
space at increasing speeds, the traveler's time
progresses slower and slower, relative to Earth-based
observations. This has been proven out as a
verifiable phenomenon during our country's space
flights. Conversely, I think that objects
caught-up in an opening window of heaven are not
moving through space, but rather, the space in which
they reside is being moved in a trans-dimensional
fashion. Here, Einstein's
theory
of relativity can be though of in a reverse case
situation, and would support that stars caught-up in a
moving reference frame of space would experience time
speeding-up, relative to our observations. So, the
faster the space containing a star is moved, the faster
the star would progress forward through time.
Einstein himself originally proposed this force, calling
it the Cosmological Constant, but was later talked out
of it by other physicists. I think he should have
stuck to his own ideas on that one.
What all of this
means is that the Sun, the Moon, and the stars could
have all been made on the same day (day four), but now,
they are very different in age. Our Sun and Moon
having only aged to approximately
6,438
years old, while the stars are now varying in age
up to billions of years old, with the further away they
are from us, the older they are. This brings us
back to the old church view that we (the Earth) are at
the center of the universe.
What other
evidence supports the Bible here? First, is the Red Shift of
most all stars. It indicates a "trail" of
interstellar recession. Some theorize that the Red
Shift is caused by remnants of the
big bang, but a U.S.
News & World Report article from July 20th,
1998 indicates that the chance of the Omega Value
being "just right" to coalesce the stellar matter into
solar systems is just one-quadrillionth of 1% (that is,
one chance in 1x1017)!
Otherwise, it would have blown off into infinity and
dust, or just would have globbed-back into a ball of
mass trash. So, it looks like the Red Shift is
really an echo of the windows of heaven being
opened at the time of Noah's flood.
Further evidence
that the big bang is not a result of an explosion, but
rather a placement of the stars is from the work of
Clyde Tombaugh. Most famous for his discovery of
Pluto in 1930, he also went head-to-head against
Hubble. Hubble not only theorized that 95% of the
galaxies in the universe were randomly distributed as
the result of an explosion, but also claimed to have
measured this from Mount Wilson Observatory.
Conversely, Tombaugh measured
nearly 30,000 galaxies (about 20 times the
number known up to that time) and found just the
opposite! Ninety-five percent of the galaxies
belonged to clusters, indicated placement, rather than
explosion.
Secondly, we have
about 140
Globular
Clusters around our own Milky Way Galaxy.
These are a perfect example of the windows of heaven
running on idle. With no apparent rotation, groups
of stars just hang together in a ball. It seems
that gravity as a whole keeps the ball together, and the
windows of heaven provide an inter-spatial force
to keep each star separated within the ball. The windows
of heaven also eliminates another bit of bad
astronomical theory; dark matter. This theory
suggests that, since the big galaxies seem to have only
1/10 the required mass to be in an orbital velocity,
there must be 10 times more mass out there that we just
can't see (things like black holes, etc.). The
good thing about the windows of heaven mechanism
is that now galaxies can just happen to be rotating;
they don't need to be in an orbital profile, lacking all
of this "invisible" mass.
So why push the
stars away at the time of the flood? According to
Job
38:33, God asks Job if he does "...know the
ordinances of the heavens? Can you establish
their rule on the earth?". Somehow, the
stars have an effect on Earth. Perhaps the
radiation from so many stars so close to earth might
have killed every living thing, once the magnetic shield
wound down. (places in
the Bible where interstellar movement is mentioned)
And finally, a
note about carbon
dating. Fossils
have been dated at ages much greater than approximately 6,438 years old,
and yet the Sun, made on day four of creation, is still
brand-new! How could this be? Carbon 14 is
also called known as Radio Carbon (which is short for
Radioactive Carbon) and the way it becomes radioactive
is by high energy cosmic rays hitting Carbon 12 (the
normal variant of carbon). Since the pre-flood
Earth had a very powerful magnetic shield which would
have stopped cosmic rays, it would be very easy to see
that virtually no Carbon 14 was formed before the
flood. Also, since the magnetic shield gradually
decreased in field strength after the flood, Carbon 14
production would have scaled-up only slowly to today's
present levels. The only time things absorb Carbon
14 is while they are still alive, and then the age of
the dead animal or plant is calculated based upon the
half life of the decaying Carbon 14 still
remaining. It is easy to see that the current
"accepted" system of dating grossly over-estimates the
age of fossils, when one ignores the pre-flood Earth's
powerful magnetic shield.
One interesting
thought from this section of Genesis that affects us
today is the knowledge of where we are from. Where
you come from does indeed influence how you think about
life, and also affects how you treat others. Very
specifically, please notice that in verses 21-23, only
Noah and his family survived this flood. This
means that in the year 2,757 BC, we all came from the
same Great Grandfather, and hence we are all related to
each other. |
