I was reading the Psalm
s and these verses struck me as important.
6 By the word of the LORD were the heavens made; and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth. 7 He gathereth the waters of the sea together as an heap: he layeth up the depth in storehouses. 8 Let all the earth fear the LORD: let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him. 9 For he spake, and it was done; he commanded, and it stood fast. Psalms 33:6-9 [emphasis added]
The Creator, Jehovah, spoke the Universe into existence. The ‘host’ of heaven are the stars, which He knows all by their individual names.
He telleth the number of the stars; he calleth them all by their names. Psalms 147:4
It was not the big bang that spontaneously created the Universe out of nothing. It was the mind of the Intelligent One who spoke the Universe into existence. He created the solar system and the planet Earth with all that was necessary to support life.
When He created the Earth He placed boundaries (Psalms 33:7) for the oceans that they not pass, except at His command in the great Flood.
He hath compassed the waters with bounds, until the day and night come to an end. Job 26:10 [emphasis added]
And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. Genesis 1:9 [emphasis added]
God initially created only one ocean. But it was by the water in that ocean, the water in the “deep”, that He flooded the world in Noah’s day. God sent a great flood that covered the whole Earth.
11 In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened. 12 And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights. Genesis 7:11,12 [emphasis added]
The ‘fountains of the great deep’ may indicate water in the crust itself, and that some of that contributed to the Flood waters that covered the continents in Noah’s time.
It has been estimated by some that the crustal rocks contain 5 – 10 times the amount of water that we find in the oceans. One discovery has produced evidence for the first time of a large body of water found deep in Earth’s mantle with at least the volume of the Arctic Ocean.1,2 The water is locked in moisture-containing rocks 700 to 1,400 km beneath the surface—a subterranean ocean.
Although water covers 70 percent of the Earth’s surface, water is actually relatively rare representing just 0.05% of the Earth’s total mass. This certainly brings to mind this verse:
He gathereth the waters of the sea together as an heap: he layeth up the depth in storehouses. Psalm 33:7
But some of this water that was stored there in the rocks (in addition to the existing ocean water) He released onto the surface in the great Flood. God explains this to Job when rhetorically questioning whether he could do what God had done.
Or who shut up the sea with doors, when it brake forth, as if it had issued out of the womb? Job 38:8 [emphasis added]
Now Psalms 74 is worthy of note.
12 For God is my King of old, working salvation in the midst of the earth. 13 Thou didst divide the sea by thy strength: thou brakest the heads of the dragons in the waters. 14 Thou brakest the heads of leviathan in pieces, and gavest him to be meat to the people inhabiting the wilderness. 15 Thou didst cleave the fountain and the flood: thou driedst up mighty rivers. 16 The day is thine, the night also is thine: thou hast prepared the light and the sun. 17 Thou hast set all the borders of the earth: thou hast made summer and winter. Psalms 74:12-17 [emphasis added]
This passage does seem to relate to the great Flood though verses 16 and 17 seem to relate to the original Creation in the beginning. Yet verse 12 indicates salvation by the Ark a prophetic symbol of Christ saving us by the Flood waters from sin in the world that came as a result of Adam’s sin. See 1 Peter 3:20,21.
In those flood waters were ‘dragons’, verse 13. The King James Bible was translated in 1611 and the word dinosaur (or Dinosauria, meaning “terrible reptile”) was first coined by Sir Richard Owen in 1842.3 Thus, the translators could never have had access to that word. They used ‘dragon’ here where the Hebrew word תַּנִּין תַּנִּים (tanniyn) has the meaning of some sort of monster or serpent. Certainly from context it is marine dwelling. Some translations render it ‘jackal’. But that is just the influence of the so-called modern science of evolutionism on those fallen humans who attempted to explain what God already had.
With the word ‘leviathan’ in verse 14, the untranslated Hebrew word לִויָתָן (livyathan), it seems to indicate that during the course of the great Flood that God killed dinosaurs. The meaning was probably unclear to the translators, but some lexicons list the meaning as serpent or sea-monster (the latter obviously from context). Some marine dinosaur seems to be as an appropriate choice as any. Maybe a plesiosaur? Hmmm, barbecue dino steaks! Probably tasted like chicken.
Before the Flood humans were essentially vegetarians (Genesis 1:29), but after the Flood God told the survivors in the wilderness that they could eat meat (Genesis 9:3). Possibly these verses speak of God supplying the needs of the 8 survivors aboard that Ark, or at least after they landed, one year after the Flood waters started to cover the Earth.
Psalms 104:26 supports the idea of a marine dinosaur.
There go the ships: there is that leviathan, whom thou hast made to play therein.
In that Psalm we read:
5 Who laid the foundations of the earth, that it should not be removed for ever. 6 Thou coveredst it with the deep as with a garment: the waters stood above the mountains. 7 At thy rebuke they fled; at the voice of thy thunder they hasted away. 8 They go up by the mountains; they go down by the valleys unto the place which thou hast founded for them. 9 Thou hast set a bound that they may not pass over; that they turn not again to cover the earth. Psalms 104:5-9 [emphasis added]
Verses 5 and 6 describe God’s initial creation of the basement rocks of the Earth, the mantle and the crust. He seems to be promising it will not be destroyed. He also created the oceans, covering the planet with water like a garment. At one point the waters, the oceans covered the mountains. This was true in the peak of the great Flood (Genesis 7:20). The waters were above the highest mountains by at least 15 cubits (about 7 metres) which must have been a depth greater than the draft of the Ark4 (the depth it sank in the flood waters), else it would not pass safely over all mountain tops.
Then God caused the flood water to leave the land (verse 7) and as part of that process the deep ocean basins formed and the mountains rose (verse 8, which could also be translated ‘The mountains rose, the valleys sank’).
If you levelled the surface of the Earth today, made it smooth like a billiard ball, the current oceans would cover the whole surface to a depth of 3 km. Where did all the water go? It’s still there in the oceans. The greatest depth of the oceans (11000 m) now is greater than the height of the tallest mountains (8850 m).
Finally God promised, in verse 9, that He would never again flood the world with a global flood.
Why would He need to make such a promise? If the Flood was only local and not global as some, who compromise on the plain reading of Genesis, believe, it make no sense. In fact, the only way it makes sense is if you take God’s Words as He intended.
Update June 17, 2014
New research has shown that 3 times the Earth’s oceans waters are trapped in rocks 700 km underground.5 The water is hidden inside a blue rock called ringwoodite lying in a Earth’s mantle, within the mesosphere (see Earth cut away figure), the layer of hot rock between Earth’s surface and its liquid outer core. This is evidence that more water was once trapped inside the mantle and was released onto the surface during the great Flood. The evidence, when correctly viewed through a biblical worldview, makes much more sense than some long-age evolutionary story.
References
- Massive New Ocean Discovered Deep Inside Earth’s Interior, 10 December 2007, http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2007/12/scientists-scan.html
- Richard A Lovett, Huge Underground “Ocean” Found Beneath Asia, National Geographic, 27 February 2007, news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/02/070227-ocean-asia.html
- Richard Owen (1804-1892), http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/owen.html
- http://www.biblicalcreation.org.uk/biblical_studies/bcs043.html
- Massive ‘ocean’ discovered towards Earth’s core, www.newscientist.com/article/dn25723-massive-ocean-discovered-towards-earths-core.html#.U6AMPvmSxFv
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