“The world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished.”
“All in whose nostrils was the breath of life . . . died.”

-2 Peter 3:6; Genesis 7:22

God has left a worldwide record in the earth of an event that is not being reproduced today. Life forms of flora and fauna (plant and animal) life are buried en masse in sedimentary layers around the earth. There are small examples of fossilization occurring at places today, but not the widespread burial of countless numbers of large and small creatures. Extensive deposits are found in bone beds and of seashells, fish, and multitudes of unique organisms such as jellyfish and insects. The facts show catastrophe on a biblical proportion. These are evidences that connect true religion to the real world.

Basic Fossil Forms

Consider the four main types of fossilization:

1. Petrification – This is when minerals fill in and partially replace the cells of a substance such as in petrified wood. It then becomes hard and heavy like a rock. Yet under a microscope and by chemical analysis the original organic detail is maintained so that the tree species can be determined.
2. Carbonization – In these fossils most of the original material is lost and a concentration of carbon is left behind. However in coal it is still possible to see tree trunks, leaves, roots, and ferns. Some cell structure can still be seen in thin slices under a microscope. In various kinds of rock, small fish, leaves, trilobites, and the like appear as fine brown or black films of carbon. I have samples of fossil fish like this imprinted on soft tan laminations of rock from Wyoming.
3. Fossils Unchanged – Some clamshells still have the white chalky shell and pearly sheen of live clams. I have wood that was brought up from 700 feet down in well drillings in Georgia. There was wood also with the hadrasaur bones we found along the Bow River south of Calgary in Alberta, Canada. Soft parts are preserved along with hard bones in frozen creatures such as mammoths in Siberia. Animals and humans have been preserved in acid peat bogs, which prevent oxidation. A 2000-year-old man was found in a peat bog in Denmark with natural facial features and a hat on his head.
4. Molds and Casts – A mold is the outer form and the cast is the shape of the original item such as pouring molten iron into a sand form to make a cannon. The sand is the mold and the cannon is the casting. Many brachiopod clam shells left only inner and outer molds and a space is left where the bivalve mollusk dissolved away. A sandstone cast of a dinosaur foot was left in the roof of a coal mine in Utah. It evidently walked across the mat of vegetation that formed the coal before waters washed in a deposit of sand to fill it.

A very unusual mold of a young rhinoceros was found in the basalt lava deposits below the Grand Coulee in the state of Washington. Some rock hunters crawled through a small hole in the basalt cliff and found themselves in a cavity shaped like an animal. Geologists from the University of California made a plaster cast of the inside, cut it in pieces, and reassembled it outside. The folds of skin on the hide could even be seen.

Stringent Conditions for Fossilization

Cattle, deer, rabbits, fish, snails, insects and plants are not dying and fossilizing today. It takes special conditions for fossilization. Most of academia deceives themselves into believing that the fossilization en masse that we see around the world today accumulated in small local floods over millions of years.

Most creatures die and are eaten by scavengers or rot and insects and bacteria finish off the carcasses. Wind, water, and frost on land and waves and currents in the ocean work until disintegration is complete. If something would be buried quickly it may become a fossil if oxidation does not occur, if impregnating substances are available, and if further erosion of the sediments does not obliterate it.

The fact that the earth yields up such a multitude of well-preserved fossils is evidence of colossal catastrophe such as would be expected from the Genesis Flood (Genesis 7).

The Vast Extent of Fossilization

In the last 150 years since Darwin’s Origin of the Species there has been extensive exploration of the sedimentary deposits for fossils. It was often with the purpose of proving Darwin’s thesis of ameba to man evolution and finding “missing links.” The fossil record has been well searched out today and “the missing links” are still missing. There have been numerous fabrications, hoaxes, and postulations but they have all fallen by the wayside. This is proof that creation was according to kind, but with great variation.

In this fossil search, an almost unbelievable expanse of entombed life forms have been unveiled:

Cumberland bone cave, Maryland – Rock encased bones of many mammals from bats to mastodons were found here. It was a mix of living and extinct animals from diverse climates and habitats. Wolverine, tapirs, antelope, grizzly bears, peccaries, groundhogs, rabbits, beaver, muskrat, along with a saber tooth tiger, which according to evolutionists should not have been there. This location was not protected and is pretty well destroyed today by highway excavations.

Lincoln County, Wyoming – Some of the most perfect specimens of fish and plants were taken from here for museums. Fish are very perishable and float or fall to the bottom to be scavenged in a few hours or days. Palm leaves up to 4 feet by 8 feet long with an alligator 4 to 6 feet long, and gar-pike fish reveal a tropic pre-flood climate. This was very unlike the cold mountains of Wyoming today. These deposits are evidence of catastrophe on a worldwide scale.

Florissant, Colorado – A wide variety of insect fossils are preserved in rocks of volcanic shale with remarkable detail, along with tiny mollusks, fish, and birds. A few hundred species of plants have also been identified here.

Karoo Rock formation, South Africa – This is an extensive mixed mammal bone graveyard in rock. Paleontologists estimate that millions of skeletons of vertebrate animals are in this formation. The bones are all mixed together, showing they had time for the soft parts to decompose.

The Red Deer River Valley, Drumheller, Alberta – Over three hundred museum quality dinosaurs have been recovered from this eroded river valley. You can drive on a path through these hills of volcanic ash origin and view cleaned off dinosaur skeletons where they were found. They are roofed over in glass sided shelters.

The La Brea Tar Pits, California – Since 1906, about a million well preserved skeletons of saber tooth tigers, giant wolves, llamas, camels, horses, giant sloth, and other animals have been found. (This was likely an accumulation of entrapped living and extinct creatures after the flood.)

The Sicilian hippopotamus beds – These were so extensive they were commercially mined for the charcoal.

Many others – Amazing fish beds are found in the Scottish Devonian Strata, mammal beds in the Gobi desert, the American Rockies, and the Black Hills. Trilobites are found in such widely diverse places as Morocco, Africa and Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. The half has not been told!

God has brought out this record of the first world that perished in these last days as a reminder that our ungodly society also has a promised appointment with God.

“For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water: Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished: But the heavens and the earth, which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men.” (2 Peter 3:5-7)

“And as it was in the days of Noah, so shall it be also in the days of the Son of man. They did eat, they drank, they married wives, they were given in marriage, until the day that Noah entered into the ark, and the flood came, and destroyed them all” (Luke 17:26, 27)

What to Do?

John the Baptist came to the world preaching repentance from sin. He pointed forward to the coming of Jesus who would be a perfect sacrifice for sin.

The people in anxiety asked, “What shall we do then?” John told them that true repentance will change their lives to good works (Luke 3:10-14). Later, Peter answered the question “What shall we do?” This was in a sermon after Jesus had given his own body, a perfect sacrifice for sin and ascended back to God:

“Repent ye therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out, when the times of refreshing shall come from the presence of the Lord; And he shall send Jesus Christ . . . whom the heaven must receive until the times of restitution of all things, which God hath spoken by the mouth of all his holy prophets since the world began (Acts 3:19-21).

* * * * *

Resources:

The Bible – God’s inspired Word
Origin by Design – Harold Coffin
The Genesis Flood – John Whitcomb & Henry Morris
World Book Encyclopedia – La Brea

语言

English

页数

2

作者

Elvin Stauffer

出版社

Reaching Out

主题

科学和圣经