DAILY DEVOTIONAL – August 15, 2019
“The Cry of Creation”
Prayer: Our God and Creator, we praise You for Your incredible Creation and for the daily testimony it gives of Your amazing love and salvation. Keep us always firm and steadfast in the assurance of Your Word revealed to us, especially as we see it in the Word of God made flesh, Jesus Christ. Amen.
Scripture: Genesis 7:11-12 & 17-20
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 of the heavens were opened. 12 And rain fell upon the earth forty days and forty nights.
17 The flood continued forty days on the earth. The waters increased and bore up the ark, and it rose high above the earth. 18 The waters prevailed and increased greatly on the earth, and the ark floated on the face of the waters. 19 And the waters prevailed so mightily on 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.
Devotion – “The Cry of Creation”
As I am sure goes without saying, but I will say it anyway, the world and culture we live in has become and continues to increase in its hostility towards Christianity and in its biased skepticism of the Bible. While our society and government love to portray a genuine desire for religious liberty and speak a lot of tolerance, the truth is that there are concentrated efforts from every element of secular society that work very hard to try and silence the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Of course, this shouldn’t surprise us. Jesus told us this would happen in John 15:18-20, “18 If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you.19 If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.”
One of the most obvious examples of this hatred of the world is, unfortunately, in the classrooms and halls of our universities. I can’t tell you how many Christian college students have told me about professors who not only teach with a self-professed agenda against anything that hints of God, but there are plenty of stories of both staff and students being unjustly graded and even fired from their jobs because they won’t blindly teach and manipulate information to promote the secular agenda. A great movie documentary that shows the terrifying realities of this tyranny of education happening in our universities, is the movie “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” featuring Ben Stein. If you have not seen it, do so.
One of the biggest issues that science professors and secular scientists love to take issue with in the Bible is the story of Noah and flood. They have long argued that it is scientifically impossible for the whole world to have been covered up to the tops of the mountains. However, that is explicitly what God said happened in the passage from Genesis we read in chapter 6, and God was quite specific saying, “The waters increased and bore up the ark, and it rose high above the earth. 18 The waters prevailed and increased greatly on the earth, and the ark floated on the face of the waters. 19 And the waters prevailed so mightily on 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.”
Interestingly enough, I came across an article the other day that articulated a fascinating discovery. The article was written by Motherboard; the tech and science news arm of the popular news website www.vice.com. I have linked to the article in the PDF of this devotional if you are interested in reading it for yourself. The article was entitled, “There’s An Ocean Deep Inside the Earth.” The article was written in 2014, and here is some of what the article said:
“The gemstone in question is called ringwoodite, which is created when olivine, a material that is extremely common in the mantle, is highly pressurized; when it’s exposed to less pressurized environments, it reverts into olivine. It has previously been seen in meteorites and created in a laboratory, but until now had never been found in a sample of the Earth’s mantle…Diamond expert Graham Pearson of the University of Alberta came across a seemingly worthless, 3 millimeter piece of brown diamond that had been found in Mato Grosso, Brazil while he was researching another type of mineral. Within that diamond, he and his team found ringwoodite—and they found that roughly 1.5 percent of the ringwoodite’s weight was made up of trapped water. The findings are published in Nature. That water had to get in there somehow, and, using analyses of its depth and its water makeup, Pearson suggests that there’s water deep beneath the Earth’s surface—a lot of it. The finding “confirms predictions from high-pressure laboratory experiments that a water reservoir comparable in size to all the oceans combined is hidden deep in Earth’s mantle,” according to an analysis of Pearson’s findings by Hans Keppler of the University of Bayreuth in Germany.”
I think it is so telling that, as this article reveals, it was not until this discovery of the ringwoodite that we had any idea of the incredible magnitude of water that lay hidden deep inside the earth. Yet, they should have known. You don’t have to have PhD in geology or any of the sciences to know full well that there are huge reserves of water inside the earth that could have very easily been released along with 40 days of rain to bring a global flood that covered the mountain tops. God already told us that’s what happened in verse 11 of our text for today, “on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of the heavens were opened.”
How much water exactly is hidden in the depths of the earth? Well, according to this peer reviewed scientific article from vice.com, there is a “water reservoir comparable in size to all the oceans combined.” You hear all the time of the epic flooding that would happen across the world if just the glaciers were to melt, how big indeed was the flood that God brought upon the earth as He released not only all the waters of the heavens, but also poured out the oceans from deep within the earth!
The truth is friends, God’s Word is perfectly True and absolutely reliable. It was in 2014 that science thinks it was able to confirm just how much water is in the earth. And for the next 2,014 years, Creation will continue to bring forth its praises of the Creator and bear the evidence of His hands and the truth of His revealed word in Scripture. Whether it is out of hatred for God and His truth or out of ignorance because of what we have yet to discover, there will always be those who try to use the knowledge God has revealed to us through His Creation to make the attempt to disprove the truth of Scripture…but rest assured, God’s Word will prevail and endure as it always has. Long before telescopes and proton accelerators, God’s Word declared in Romans 1:18-20, “18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. 19 For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. 20 For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.”
Praise the Lord for His faithfulness and for the eternal confidence we can have in His revealed Word. God bless you all, and remember that God has forgiven yesterday, is with you today and has already taken care of tomorrow. Amen.
The article referenced above was found with this web link, which was functional and accurate portrayed herein as of 6-26-18.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ypwvmy/theres-an-ocean-deep-inside-the-earth
