What Happened After the Flood?
The Ice Age and the Adirondacks
above pic is from godisreal.today “Evidence for the flood of Noah”
Flood aftermath – the ice age
repopulation, the Tower of Babel, sacrificial system, life is in the blood, capital punishment, languages, dispersion, race, and adaptation to different environments - Genesis ch.11
first - about Substacks – hooray for freedom of speech!
What is substack.com?
Substack helps anyone set up a blog and email newsletter. No tech knowledge is required. Without ads and algorithms to get in the way, you can sustain a direct relationship with your readers and retain full control over your creative work.
News reporting is almost dead. The traditional sources monolithicly parrot whatever is fed to them by their totally biased sources, rather than trying to dig out the truth.
What to do? People are beginning to wise up to the fact that the old news sources are extremely biased and unreliable. Some reporters have even been caught in outright lies just to push forward their ideological agenda.
What we need is alternate, independent, uncompromised sources. Say hello to substack.com.
Elon Musk, bless him, is apparently trying to allow both sides of each argument on Twitter to be expressed without cancelling them. However, Twitter might go bankrupt – they’re still losing money. Or they might come under new ownership in the future and return to the previous horrendous biases in choosing what to allow and what to lock down, just like Facebook and Google and Youtube. Another problem with Twitter is obvious - a “tweet” is hardly enough to give a thorough understanding of any position. So it only works for famous people for whom we already know their thinking on many topics. It doesn’t work for ordinary folks.
What we need is the power of the internet unleashed as an open and independent platform for uncensored information; a platform for otherwise unknown people to express their opinions freely without fear of being “cancelled”.
The only policing that is needed is to keep it civil. There is no harm in censoring obscene language or images, for example. And there’s no harm in censoring vicious personal attacks or threats or bullying. With those few guidelines, it looks to me like the substack.com platform is the answer. It’s a place where different opinions can be expressed without being blocked, removed, or cancelled. If we have access to both sides of an issue, and none of the factual information is withheld, then we can use our heads to determine which opinion is the best choice.
Hooray for substack!
on to Genesis…
Why sacrifice?
“Then Noah built an altar to the Lord and, taking some of all the clean animals and clean birds, he sacrificed burnt offerings on it.” Gen.8:20
I have a framed copy of this wonderful painting that I purchased from Answers in Genesis. The ark and the rainbow are in the clouds at the top, if you look closely, while Noah’s family is pictured at the altar of sacrifice.
The idea of sacrifice seems strange to us today. It is basically a matter of substitution, and it’s an important part of the Gospel, because Jesus died as a sacrifice, or substitute, for the death that we deserve for all the times we’ve disobeyed God’s commands. (Once would be enough!) James 2:10 – “For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles in one point, he has become guilty of all.”
The first sacrifice was when God clothed Adam and Eve with skins after they hid because they realized they had disobeyed. God must have given the first people instructions about sacrifice, because we see Cain and Abel offering sacrifice. The first thing Noah did when he got off the ark was to build an altar and offer a sacrifice. That’s why he needed 7 pairs (Gen.7:2) of animals that were acceptable for sacrifice, and only one pair of all the others. Why 7 pairs? I’m not sure, but during the first year or two after leaving the ark, he would have made more than just one sacrifice. Another thought is that during the flood, he could have killed some of the ‘extra’ animals for meat for food. (pure speculation on my part)
life is in the blood
The ultimate sacrifice is the shedding of blood; the offering of life. “The life of the flesh is in the blood…” Lev.17:11 Jesus gave his life for us; he took our place because of his great love for you and for me.
Capital punishment
The reason for capital punishment is that we were made in the image of God.
“Whoever sheds man’s blood,
By man his blood shall be shed,
For in the image of God
He made man.” Gen.9:6-7
repopulation
After the flood, the world was repopulated by Noah’s 3 sons and their wives. When you do the math, you can see a population can grow very quickly, especially if not interrupted by war or disease.
“To work out how quickly a population can grow, it’s very important to understand exponential growth. Starting from eight people after the Flood, the population would have to double only 30 times to reach 8.6 billion.” Jonathan Sarfati
If Noah’s descendants had large families, and intermarriage was still not a problem because not many mutations had accumulated, (and remember, intermarriage was not against the law yet) then the population could have grown large in just a few hundred years.
The genealogy of Shem’s descendants down to Abraham is given in Gen.11:10-32. It follows the same pattern as we saw in Gen.ch.5, following the line that led to Christ, down to Abraham, confirmed several more times, in Chronicles, Matthew, and Luke. We have the age of each father when the son was born, so we can simply add those ages to get a timeline. If you missed it, see “Methuselah’s Record Breaking Age” here.
Notice also that in each case, they had “other sons and daughters”.
Does mitochondrial DNA trace back to Eve? It’s complicated. If you really want a thorough answer, go here.
the ice age
‘Establishment’ science generally maintains there were several ice ages over long periods. But they have a problem – they have no reasonable explanation for how or why ice ages formed or why they would formed more than once.
Noah’s flood is a great explanation for a mechanism for the ice age. The ice age was a logical aftermath of the flood, because of warmer oceans from volcanic activity, and cooler atmosphere due to volcanic ash blocking sunlight. For this reason, there is a strong case to be made that there was only one ice age. Michael Oards estimates the ice age after the flood would have lasted about 600 years, in the polar regions and parts of the northern hemisphere.
I’ve spent quite a bit of time in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York, where my grandfather David C. Davies was a guide as well as a preacher. The Adirondack State Park is the largest state park in the lower 48 states.
A few years ago I backpacked up Black Bear Mountain near Inlet N.Y., and camped out on top. I pitched my tent right on the bare rock at the top.
sunrise from top of Black Bear Mt, looking toward mist over 7th and 8th Lake in the Fulton Chain of lakes - you have to look really close to see the tent - I was up pretty early, to make it down the mountain to church where grandfather preached
I could see the striations in the rock, marks left by receding glaciers. This is typical of the higher mountains in the area, because there were glaciers here during the ice age. Returning to 7th Lake was pretty nostalgic for me, because I had gone on a 3 week canoe trip from 7th Lake to Saranac Lake and back when I was only 16.
If we go by the biblical timeline, (see “Methuselah’s Record Breaking Age”) the global flood was in the 1656th year after the creation. That would be 2348 B.C. using Ussher’s date of 4004 B.C. for the creation. In other words, Noah’s flood was only a little over 4300 years ago, and the ice age in the northern latitudes may have lasted until about 1700 B.C.; almost to the time of the Exodus.
I realize this timeline, if correct, (and I happen to believe it is) blows establishment science, the media, and everything we’ve been taught in school and college, completely out of the water.
Sorry to digress, but Black Bear Mt is between Inlet and Big Moose Lake, right in the heart of the Adirondacks. In the early 1900s, my grandfather preached in Inlet in the morning and then hiked 5 miles to Big Moose Lake and preached there for his lunch each Sunday. At first they met in a big boathouse; later they built a beautiful chapel, which I visited after I came down off Black Bear Mountain on Sunday morn just in time for the service.
Big Moose chapel where my grandfather preached
back to the ice age…
I also saw many glacier striations in Mt.Rainier National Park when backpacking on the Wonderland Trail. They’re caused by movement of the tons of ice which has picked up rocks and gravel which digs scratches in the bedrock.
As far as dating the ice age, there is a lot of speculation based on assumptions that of course can’t be proven. Core samples from the remnant Greenland glaciers are in dispute. The dark and light layers do not represent years; they represent snowfalls, so many layers could be laid down in one year.
A WWII P-38 squadron went down during a storm in Greenland in 1942. In only 50 years, they were buried in over 260’ of ice.
“One of those P-38s, now known as Glacier Girl, was extracted from the ice in 1992 by the Greenland Expedition Society, 50 years after it had been reclaimed by the Earth. Pat Epps and Richard Taylor of Atlanta had been searching for the lost planes for years, finally discovering them in 1988 thanks to new radar tech of the time. The planes had been carried two miles from their original location, and by the time they were found, they were under 264 feet of solid ice.”
the Tower of Babel
After about several hundred years, Noah’s family offspring population grew rapidly, very possibly to tens of thousands. They all spoke the same language- Gen.11:1. They disobeyed God’s command to go out and fill the earth. Instead, they concentrated in a city and attempted to build a tower to “heaven”, as if they were thumbing their noses at God. God dealt with this by confusing their language. Today there are some 5000 different languages. This accomplished two things – they couldn’t understand each other, so they could no longer work together to finish the tower, and it caused them to separate in language groups and spread out. Ch.11 tells how the family groups spread out to different areas.
adapting to different environments
Different skin colors and other differences can be explained by understanding the vast capability of variety hidden in our DNA.
There’s only one race - the human race, because we all descended from Noah and his wife – or, to go back further, from Adam and Eve. We’re all related!
When people and animals spread out from the ark, they no doubt encountered a very changed world. We have plenty of evidence of huge differences between past environments and today’s. Satellite imagery tells us the Sahara Desert was wetland in the past, with rivers where there’s sand now. Mastodons have been found in the arctic with tropical vegetation in their stomachs.
Biologists now know that there are genes in our DNA that aren’t expressed until triggered by environmental change. For example, the dog kind had the genes for both short hair and long hair. The ones with long hair survived in the arctic (wolves) and the ones with short hair survived in hot climates (hyenas). We also have records of the artificial breeding of dogs.
illustration from https://i.pinimg.com/originals/de/20/aa/de20aa1f035317c491edf38fd24f82a8.jpg
Next week – why does it matter – a summing up of Gen.1-11, a short bio of Archbishop Ussher, a tribute to Henry M. Morris, founder of the Institute for Creation Research, and a video tour of the ICR Discovery Institute in Dallas, TX