Flooded by Doubt

By Nathan Jones

The trend these days seems to be for Christians to attempt to find some middle ground for the Bible and secular teachings. The initial result is the view that the Earth is millions or even billions of years old. The long-term result is a lot of confused Christians, with many even leaving the faith because of the contradictory teachings.

To learn just who out there is causing so much confusion among the Christian community by teaching that the Earth is not 6,000 years old, I went to Dr. Jobe Martin, former dentist, professor and Evolutionist. Having clearly seen God's eternal power and divine nature from what has been made (Rom. 1:20), Dr. Martin came to faith in Jesus Christ and a trust in the biblical account of the six days of Creation. He and his wife Jenna Dee have since formed Biblical Discipleship Ministries based in Rockwall, Texas to teach on campuses, classrooms and churches that we can trust the Bible's account of the Creation and Jesus as Savior.

A lot of leading evangelical spokesmen have recently endorsed the views of Dr. Hugh Ross, who believes in an ancient Earth of millions or billions of years of age. What do you think of Dr. Ross' viewpoint and why do you think it is picking up so many endorsements in the evangelical community?

As far as his Christianity — his faith in Jesus — I have no way to evaluate that.

I can evaluate what he says about billions of year and a local flood in the days of Noah. That's not Biblical. He says the Flood was contained in the Mesopotamian Valley. Now, he is kind of tricky because he said it was a universal flood. If you just read him kind of casually you would think he believes in the global flood. To him universal was universal to the people that lived in the Mesopotamia Valley.

If a local flood is true, the Bible says the waters covered the mountain tops by so many cubits, then you would have a wall of water going up and over the tops. God can certainly separate water like that as He did with the Red Sea and with the Jordan River, but the evidence in the Bible's account is that all the high hills and all of the mountains were covered. All the dry land animals were killed in the Flood, as were all the people, other than the ones that were on the Ark.

I think Hugh Ross denies the clear teaching of the Bible concerning a global flood because he has joined those people who want to maintain their credibility with the scientific community. They want people to look at them and acknowledge that they are very bright people since they buy into this whole concept of billions of years. Having this belief means there has to be a local flood in the days of Noah and that you can't have a flood that covers the earth. And so, I think they love the approval of men more than the approval of God.

Hugh Ross, as I understand him, is a Progressive Creationist. They believe there was a pre-Adamic race of people, but they didn't have a soul or a spirit, therefore you can't say that there was death before Adam in the same sense that we say with Adam came death. But, the fact is with Adam came the death of everything. Everything that is alive dies — plants and animal — everything dies, because God put the curse upon the creation. Romans 5:12 and 1 Corinthians 15 tells us that by man came death. By Adam came death. You cannot have a pre-Adamic race of things living and dying before death came on the Earth.

As a matter of fact, God says at the end of the first week that everything He had made "was very good." Well, if it is very good, then how in our whole history displayed in the fossil record of dead things do some of the bones show cancer? When did cancer and sickness and disease come? Those came after the Curse. That's part of the Curse and part of the Fall.

Thorns and thistles are found in some of the very oldest sedimentary rocks. Well, wait a minute, the Bible says in Genesis 3:18 by Adam's sin came thorns and thistles. You just can't have all these things pre-dating Adam.

God says He made it all within a six day week that is made up with the same kind of days we work. Heaven, Earth, sea, and everything in them God made during the six days of Creation. If we just go back to what the Bible says, there is no way to get these billions of years nor a local flood in the days of Noah.

There is absolutely no evidence in the Bible of a pre-Adamic race. It is a product of the imagination.

To believe there was only a local flood would be to ignore sea shells found at top of Mt. Everest in a closed position. It would be to ignore human skeletons found on the tops of mountains. During the flood God heaved up the mountains, dropped down the ocean floors, and rearranged the surface of the Earth. When you find a clam that is in sedimentary rock and it is closed, that means it was trapped when it was alive, because if they die the muscle relaxes and it opens. If it was just dead things that got washed in, open clam shells would be no problems. But, when they have millions of these that are closed, that means they were caught. They were caught quickly because they were trapped. That sounds like a rapidly developing flood which I think the Flood of Noah's day was.

In the Flood there was water coming down from the canopy that surrounded the Earth. There was also water coming up as the fountains of the deep broke open and up the water came.

There are things on Earth that are difficult to describe and understand. For instance, all the frozen woolly mammoths that have been found. They were flash frozen! How could that have occurred unless something happening just very rapidly, which it was.

I think after the Flood is when the Ice Age came. It would have created land bridges in-between all of the continents. Warm water would be flowing from the fountains of the deep due possibly to volcanoes. As the oceans become warmer, more water evaporates around the equator and ice accumulates up over the poles. When it begins snowing with the beginning of cold winters so begins the Ice Age. The ice freezes water out of the oceans causing them to be more shallow, resulting in land bridges. Then, as the Ice Age melts and the oceans warm up, the land bridges recede and the water levels come up, trapping animals and people on separate continents.

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