“Stored up for fire”

The Day of the Lord Will Come

3:1 This is now the second letter that I am writing to you, beloved. In both of them I am stirring up your sincere mind by way of reminder, 2 that you should remember the predictions of the holy prophets and the commandment of the Lord and Savior through your apostles, 3 knowing this first of all, that scoffers will come in the last days with scoffing, following their own sinful desires. 4 They will say, “Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation.” 5 For they deliberately overlook this fact, that the heavens existed long ago, and the earth was formed out of water and through water by the word of God, 6 and that by means of these the world that then existed was deluged with water and perished. 7 But by the same word the heavens and earth that now exist are stored up for fire, being kept until the day of judgment and destruction of the ungodly. (2 Peter 3:1-7 ESV)

Whether or not the artifact found on Mt. Ararat, by the team from Noah’s Ark Ministries International (NAMI) in Hong Kong, turns out to be the real wreckage of Noah’s Ark or not, the Scripture holds a clear warning that the historical event of the global flood in Noah’s lifetime is the one and only event comparable with the day of judgment still to come. I’ve commented on NAMI’s discovery and the work being done by Creation Ministries International (CMI) to verify NAMI’s “Ark” claim in a blog post at Keruxai.com here. I lay awake for a while last night thinking about the implications of such a discovery if it proves legitimate. However, this passage in 2 Peter 3 came to mind and I was reminded that even without actual physical evidence of Noah’s Ark, there is ample physical evidence all over the world of “Noah’s Flood”.

That’s what Peter was saying in verses 5-6: “…they deliberately overlook this fact… [that] the world that then existed was deluged with water and perished.” In many, many conversations with unbelievers committed to the popular dogma of a billions-of-years-old-Earth, I’ve pointed out evidence that many fossils show a sudden, catastrophic event happened long ago. Like a reptile buried and fossilized while giving birth, 346 whales being buried together in mud, hundreds of jellyfish buried and fossilized without a chance to decay, or a T-rex bone found with intact blood vessels complete with red blood cells, these and many other examples testify to anyone with an open mind that whatever catastrophic event killed the dinosaurs and formed much of the fossil record happened quickly and relatively recently (a few thousand years ago and not millions of years ago). The reaction I’ve usually gotten from skeptics reminds me of that scene in The Princess Bride when Miracle Max sticks his fingers in his ears, refusing to listen to his wife. Dr. Tas Walker’s “Biblical Geology” website has a lot of additional information helpful for believers to understand the geology of the world we live in without having to appeal to billions of years of earth formation. In most cases, in my experience, people who deny the accuracy of the Bible’s account regarding the Flood and Creation events do so not for scientific reasons involving actual recorded facts or physical evidence but for doctrinal reasons (e.g., the Bible can’t be true because God can’t exist). Peter calls this, “deliberately overlook[ing] this fact, that the heavens existed long ago, and the earth was formed out of water and through water by the word of God, and that by means of these the world that then existed was deluged with water and perished.”

If NAMI’s claims of discovering the actual Ark Noah built and took refuge in during the global flood turn out to be true I would think this will be very troubling for people who deny the Bible for doctrinal reasons (people like Richard Dawkins). If you click the photo above and to the right, you can see the wooden timbers of the alleged Ark encased in ice and buried under tonnes of rock (full size photos here). I hope experts are able to confirm this discovery. And I hope that if and when they do so, skeptics, like Dawkins and like so many other  people who so far refuse to acknowledge God, will realize that underneath tonnes of flimsy “evidence” and encased in Darwinian propoganda lies buried not the fact of a godless, random, billions-of-years-old Universe, but a desperate, fearful hope that they are not accountable to any Creator and Judge. The day is coming when God will expose the lies of men for what they are and judge the world on the basis of whether or not each and every person has trusted in Jesus Christ through the Gospel. Just because the world seems to go on like it always has in our experience does not mean it will do so forever. God judged humanity once before and He will do so once again.