okay well we'll go on without it it is uh we're in genesis chapter 8 and we'll begin with verse 13 if you would turn with me to genesis chapter 8 and we'll begin reading in verse 13 to the end of the chapter Genesis 8, verse 13, And it came to pass in the six hundredth and first year, in the first month, the first day of the month, the waters were dried up from off the earth, and Noah removed the covering of the ark. and looked, and behold, the face of the ground was dry. And in the second month, on the seventh and twentieth day of the month, was the earth dried. And God spake unto Noah, saying, Go forth of the ark, thou and thy wife and thy sons and thy sons' wives with thee. Bring forth with thee every living thing that is with thee, of all flesh, both of fowl and of cattle, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, that they may breed abundantly in the earth and be fruitful and multiply upon the earth. And Noah went forth and his sons and his wife and his son's wives with him. Every beast, every creeping thing, and every fowl, and whatsoever creepeth upon the earth, after their kind, went forth out of the ark. And Noah built an altar unto the Lord, and took of every clean beast, of every clean fowl, and offered burnt offerings on the altar. And the Lord smelled a sweet savor, and the Lord said in his heart, I will not again purse the ground any more for man's sake. For the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth. Neither will I again smite any more every living as I have done. while the earth remaineth seed time and harvest and cold and heat and summer and winter and day and night shall not cease. Let's pray. Father, we do thank you for your blessings. And we thank you that even though you, man was so evil, you had to bring a great curse upon the earth. but that you still had a way and a plan, and that you raised up Noah and his family to preserve life upon the earth, that you might again reestablish your plan for the earth. And we just thank you for that blessing and how you've revealed it to us here. Let's pray that you would give us understanding through your Holy Spirit and your word that we might understand you better and serve you better. In Jesus' name we pray, amen. So in chapter eight, we've seen the flood. God first instructed Noah to build an ark. And this is a scale model, obviously not full-size ark. If you want to see the full-size ark, you'll have to go to Kentucky. Answers in Genesis, the adventured ark, you can see it built completely to scale. But this is a model that is basically, best I can figure it, it's basically one inch to 10 cubits. Okay. Remember that the arc was 50 cubits wide. This is about five inches wide, 30 cubits high, about three inches high and 300 cubits long. Okay. This is about 30 inches. And then it had three floors. and that it had a window above. We don't know exactly what the window was like, but this shows open slots all through here, and then a cover to get the rain out. So something like that. But this would give us an idea of the shape, if not the full size. So to get an idea of the size, this actually, the lid comes off, and I found a few models that would be on the same scale. So a school bus, about 40 feet long. To give you an idea how big this arc is, that's a school bus with 40 kids in it, and there's a school bus, so there's a school bus, this arc, so it'll hold quite a bit. If that would hold 40 kids, this arc would hold a lot more. And then I picked a few dinosaurs. This would be the largest size of dinosaur which like i said he could take much younger much smaller dinosaurs but still he would fit just fine in that a few other dinosaurs and then i also have a few fossils in here since during the flood is when most of the fossils were formed so what is a fossil a fossil once was something alive. It doesn't necessarily have to have been something alive. I've seen a fossilized hat before, but this was a clam. It's no longer a clam because it got covered and buried in dirt and water, and it eventually turned to actual stone and rock by its molecules being replaced with the sedimentary rock. So that's a small clam, way too big for this scale. And this is a crinoid, little sea creature. There's billions of these things all over the place. You can find these things everywhere. The kids were saying they've dug fossils in our yard. Our house is well over 100 years old and you can still find fossils here and there just that work their way up to the surface and so forth. The dogs dig them up or whatever. So that was the ark that God had Noah build. And it was there to preserve the life of Noah and his family and all the animals through that year-long flood. It rocked along. And now we're getting to the point where it has landed on the earth. So it has, the waters have receded far enough. that it has come to rest on a high, the mountains of Ararat, so a high area. But when it came to rest, you still couldn't see any land showing. Remember he sent out the dove and the second time the dove came back with an olive leaf, so there's a few trees here and there, so the tops of the mountains are just starting to poke up and the plants are starting to grow back. So in verse 13, and it came to pass in the 601st year, okay, where Noah was 600 years old when the flood started. it was about a year long this is now his 601st year in the first month and the first day it's new year's day first month first day of the month the waters were dried up from off the earth okay well it means they're receding the ark has come to rest said, and Noah removed the covering of the ark. So somehow he took that top covering off. So now you've got sunlight coming in. And he looked and behold, the face of the ground was dry. Okay, now we're gonna read the next one. That is the second month on the 27th day of the month that the earth was dry. So what happened for two months there? Well, the earth has emerged, The waters the earth is no longer covered by waters. Okay, you can now see it Thought some else will come out now. It's down where you actually see the land. But what's it like after it's been raining here all spring? It's not really ready to be out. You can't get out and mow the grass yet because it's still soaked and wet and muddy and this and that. So another two months before it had dried enough to let everybody out to be on the land. I mean, it's been underwater for a year. Okay, it's really soaking wet. So now another almost two months till the land is dry enough to walk abroad. And God spake unto Noah saying, think about that, God just spoke to Noah, he heard God's voice, he recognized it and he did what God said, so God spoke to Noah, go forth of the ark thou and thy wife and thy sons and thy sons wives with thee bring forth with thee every living thing that is with thee of all flesh both of fowl and of cattle and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth that they may breed abundantly in the earth and be fruitful and multiply upon the earth." Okay, so the flood has just wiped out all life that was on the earth and not in the ark. So he says, okay, it's time to bring out. This, you had your seeds. Okay, nowadays, what do we do? I forget what they call it, but there's a seed bank way up in Norway or something like that, that we've got all these seeds preserved so that if we I think the idea was basically if we have a nuclear holocaust, any survivors could replant and survive the idea. So they keep all those. Well, that's kind of what the ark was. It was the seed bank. It had the animals, every species. It had food, which would have seeds and this and that. So now this earth is wiped out. So what are you gonna see? Noah comes out, what's he gonna see? Well, it's a devastated earth, much like if we saw the pictures in 1980 after Mount St. Helens. Mass at Helens was covered in ash, so it looked like a moonscape at first, and there wasn't much there, but trees and things quickly started coming back. So it's coming back, but it doesn't look like the forest it was before. So now he's like, it's time to get out and let these animals loose. They need to get busy reproducing and fill the entire earth. Well, how? If Ararat, if this is actually in modern day Turkey, they say it actually could have been all the way to the border of Iran, where this may have been, where the mountains of Ararat were. It's funny, there's some mountains there now, and in Iranian, they call it Noah's mountain. That's what they call it. So, Just like in Saudi Arabia, there's a, well, in Saudi Arabia, there's a mountain they call the mountain of Moses. Okay, so that's what they call it. So we don't know where that ark actually landed. There's been search parties for it, but nobody's ever been able to prove they found it. If we don't find it, does that mean that it never happened? No. Just like one man said, he said, well, what about the Mayflower? Can you find the Mayflower today? Does that mean it never happened? Of course not. They say best we can tell it's a barn somewhere in England now. They repurposed the wood. Why not? Of course you would. That's a lot of wood to cut. reuse it. And that could be what happened to the ark. It's doesn't necessarily have to be there for it to be true. But so that ark was there, it landed. And then now he said, okay, it's time for everybody to get off the boat, get on with your lives. Now, how in the world could all the creatures and people and everything we see now have come from one very large boat somewhere in the Middle East to all the creatures in the world came from that. So how in the world did the kangaroos get to Australia? Well, that would seem unlikely today, wouldn't it? But remember that the earth was probably one landmass to begin with. And then during the flood and the times after it began to break apart and move, we've discovered fairly recently what we call plate tectonics. That whole huge, I forget how many separate plates there are on there, it depends how they counted, five or six plates, and they move. Well, that's why we have mountains that we have, because plates run together. Well, it's gotta go somewhere. Where does it go? Up, and some goes down. We've got, you know, the San Andreas Fault, California, that's a plate, there's a Pacific Rim plate, that's why they had the tsunami in Japan a few years ago, because that slipped and caused things and so forth. So the animals, one, it could have been less distance to travel before things had drifted all the way apart. The other thing, they've proven that animals can transport on various floating mats of logs and debris and things like that. They can go long distances and wind up in different places. They'll usually find it. There's very few places that aren't inhabited somehow. They'll find a way to get there. So does that mean kangaroos used to be in the Middle East? Absolutely. What about all these different varieties of animals? from the ones that were on the ark. Well, we already know that you can get all the dogs we've got from a pair of wolves, because that diversity, their genetics have so much diversity in it, where God created animals, that they can be very different. Now, our modern breeds don't have a lot of variety, because we've bred the variety out. But if you just have mutts, they can have all different things. There were litter of cats born across our fence. So then, you know, and here they go, you know, there's summer gray, summer yellow, and summer, you know, they're all different, whatever. It's all from the same parents, but there's all that genetic diversity. You know, so you get all these things, but how do we get like zebras? They're pretty unique. They're from the horse family. But how do you get something like that? Well, when a population gets isolated, they can begin to, they would interbreed in a small population. So if they get isolated, like, Who knows what kangaroos were way back at the time of the Ark. But if they got caught as Australia split off and went away, they're off by themselves. They wouldn't have any other of their kind to breed with. So they would have just that population. So whatever genes are in that population come out. How do you get different breeds of dogs? Well, if you breed collies, you only breed them with collies, right? If you're German shepherds, you just breed them with German shepherds. If you turned them all loose, you'd get mixed months again. Plus animals tend to breed with those that look like themselves. They found that in different species, fish and things like that, that there's variations in the population, but then they tend to kind of go with the ones that look like them. And so they tend to kind of do that. And so it tends to go for these specialized and they can get so specialized that they can't breed back into the regular population. That happens. So the Darwinian idea is of a evolutionary tree, kind of an upside down tree. It starts with one base at the bottom, the first form of life, whatever that was, that supposedly popped out of non-living material. Now all of a sudden, you've got reproducing cells, and those are reproducing, blah, blah, blah. Then it goes on. And then at the top, you've got all the different species we have now. So like they say, humans, they said, well, we're related to apes, but not descended from the common. So they go back to our last common ancestor. So there's supposedly some creature that they've never found proof of that became branched into apes and into humans, and then we diverged from there. So it looks like a inverted tree growing up. That's the evolutionary idea, okay? And so the straw man, the way they portray creationist is they, our morphology, that means the shapes of things, they say ours isn't, evolution is a tree, creationist is grass, okay? So how does a bunch of grass look? They're all just separate stalks, right? It's all straight up like that. Well, that's not true either. That's called fixity of species. that says that everything, the way that we see it right now, is the way God created it. I don't think God created a poodle in that form. It has specialized into that. So really, ours is more instead of, do they call it? Bushes. Basically, instead of grass, it's that you have a bunch of little trees. You have each species is distinct, but then out here on the end, you can have collies and poodles and German shepherds, all from the same common ancestor. But it's all dogs. So there's a whole bunch of different ones. There's not one creature you can trace us all back to. There's a whole bunch of different kinds that God created. Then those kinds have the ability to diversify after that. That's the creation model. So Noah went forth and his sons and his wife and his son's wife with him. So they make it very clear who got on the boat, who got off, and that's it. That is the entire human population of the world. Eight people. That's it. And every beast, every creeping thing, every fowl, and whatsoever creepeth upon the earth after their kinds went forth out of the ark." So all the creatures that we see now had an ancestor on the ark. Now, there are ones that were there that have not survived, like dinosaurs. And personally, I'm grateful. I'm glad we don't have to deal with some of those creatures. They're large and hard to manage, and I'm glad that we don't, but any creature you see today had an ancestor on the arm, but he might look very different than his ancestor. You don't always look like your great, great, great grandpappy, this and that change over time. And so they've changed, so they've had all those. The other thing is, One of the things you hear about in school, right? You always hear about the ice age and the standard evolutionary teaching is there were hundreds of ice ages over millions of years. Okay, look at the 70s, but they never can explain where these ice ages came from. Well, global cooling, global warming, global whatever, but they can't give a good explanation. The best explanation, I think, is that the flood caused the Ice Age, and there was only one Ice Age. Only one. And how could you create an Ice Age? What does it take for an Ice Age? Well, it takes a lot of snow, right? Excuse me. And it takes cooler. cooler summers and things so it doesn't melt off so much. So they think there are a lot of ice ages. Well, you would have, you know, the snow all comes in in the winter and glaciers form and kind of, then melt back every summer and then come back again in the winter. You know, that would be a normal age. That's not a hundred different ice ages. That's just seasonal progression and so forth. But what's the big problem? Not only do you need, you need colder weather to preserve the, ice and snow right but that doesn't explain where all the moisture came from a large percentage of the moisture from our oceans was trapped in the ice caps but if you have cooler if the earth was cooler you have less evaporation and where's the clouds come from evaporation so you've got to have more evaporation which takes what more heat and you have to have cooler, so the lands have to be cooler to preserve the glaciers. Warmer oceans, colder glaciers, how do you explain that? The flood explains it, okay? What happened when the flood started? Well, we got 40 days of rain from heaven, we got that, but also what did it say that God broke open the fountains of the deep, okay? Well, what happens if you've ever been to Yellowstone? Okay. Old faithful. That's water that comes from the fountains of the deep, right? Is that water hot or cold? It's hot. Cause it's down there where you've got volcanic activity. And so what happens is the water gets hot and steams out. Well, if God broke open the deep fissures in the earth, what kind of water's coming up? Hot water. hot water, and you also have a lot of volcanic activity. What do volcanoes spew into the air? Lava into the sea and ash into the air. What does ash do? Blocks the sun. Mount Pinatubo in Indonesia, I believe 1991, So when that went off, so 10, 11 years after Mount St. Helens, and it was about 10 times the size of Mount St. Helens, much larger. Now I've talked to people that lived in the Northwest during Mount St. Helens, and they said, oh, it was like night. They just stayed in their house. It was dark outside all the time. There was so much ash. It was just, you never did see the sun for, you know, a few weeks and things like that. Pinatubo was 10 times larger. Mount Pinatubo, dropped the average temperature of the entire earth about one and a half degrees for two years. That's significant. So the flood would have been a greater volcanic activity going on and more. So it could have dropped the overall temperature of the earth. So the land would be cooler, but also have warmed the oceans. Now you have the conditions for an ice age. Cool land, less sun exposure, hotter oceans. Those hot oceans would evaporate a lot of moisture. So that moisture is gonna come down as snow. That snow lands and it packs and gets heavier and heavier and turns to ice. Then you have glaciers. Glaciers covered the Arctic region, Canada, down into the United States, Europe. way down into Europe. If you read the book of Job, I think Job probably lived during that time. There's more references to ice and snow in Job than anywhere else in the Bible. It's saying that. I don't think he was in it down in the Middle East, but it wasn't that far away. Ice and snow would come in there. So I think the flood also explains the ice age. we've got that so those conditions came and what about with the one i was always enjoyed i always like the woolly mammoths okay the woolly mammoths um and what's the stories that is they say well they were freeze-dried quick dried because we find them you know with buttercups in their stomachs and things like that so they were frozen suddenly that's kind of hard to freeze an elephant Pretty strong elephant-sized creature. And these were, they were elephants, but they were hairier. They were more adjusted to colder weather, but then suddenly they all froze to death. That doesn't make any sense with that. It looks like the way they were really found the way there, some of them were found standing straight up. We think they were stopped, killed by sandstorms. That's a different idea, but that's the best evidence we have now is it's sandstorms because near the end of the ice age, you've got this barren land, winds blowing, they would kick up a lot of sand. Where do you find them? Siberia, Canada, North America, this and that. And so some of them, they think the only explanation is they were trapped by blowing sand. And believe me, Blowing sand can surround something in a hurry. I wouldn't stand still too long. Grew up in West Texas, and it can just, it piles up like a snowbank up against any vertical surface or anything. That sand will just blow and pile up. And so they think sandstorms is what actually got them during the retreat, the end of the ice age as it went back. So here we have in Genesis, we have the explanation for a lot of things. The diversity of animals, how they got spread around, ice age and all that I think that all came from this and so now that come off the boat you know you got to be happy I mean think about it when you take a long car trip and the kids have been asking are we there yet for the last several hours and this and that you've been on this boat for a year They're ready to get off. They come off and they get out on dry land. And they've been on the ocean. I've never wanted to take a cruise. I thought, I'll get out there and I'll want off. I'll be out in the middle of the oceans and there's no place to get off. I'll be ready to get off. T.C., our former pastor, his brother took a cruise. uh cruise uh european i forget exactly where they left from spain or something like that they took a cruise over there mediterranean or something like that he wanted off he went captain and said get me off this boat they had to send a helicopter out take him back to land he wasn't he wasn't standing for it at all he was ready to get off not many ways to get off a boat you know the ocean so i've never been anxious to go get on one out in the ocean lake's big enough for me um So they're ready to get off. They're down on the earth. So what did Noah do? First thing he did is he built an altar under the Lord. He wants to thank God for preserving their lives. Whatever the world population was then, millions, maybe billions, and there's eight people left. It's good to be grateful. Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord. And he took of every clean beast, okay? And remember, There's lots of animals, but all of them are not appropriate for sacrifice. You know, can't sacrifice skunks or things like that. That wouldn't be a sweet savor unto the Lord. But they remember he took extra. He took sevens of all the clean animals. So he has extras. So he had a huge offering men, all these animals. built a big altar, put a fire on it, and sacrificed all these animals, shed their blood, and then sacrificed these animals. Every clean beast, every clean fowl offered burnt offerings of the altar. So that was his offering to God, his thanks for being preserved through this judgment. And the Lord smelled a sweet savor. And the Lord said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground anymore for man's sake. the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth." He still knows what we're really like. But he said, but I'm not going to wipe everybody out again. I'm not going to do that again. I did it once, started over, but I'm not going to do that again until the end of time. But he knows that were evil in our hearts, neither will I smite any more everything living as I have done." So God makes a promise that he's not going to do that anymore. seed time and harvest okay the seasons you plant in the spring harvest in the fall that's going to keep going cold and heat winter summer summer and winter day night shall not cease so it's going to keep going now Folks like Elon Musk, of course, maybe thinks we'll destroy ourselves first, but you know, they worry about asteroids and things like that. Something's going to hit the earth and wipe us out. I'm not worried about that. God said it's going to keep going until Jesus Christ returns. That's what's going to end this world. So instead of working on Mars, moon, Mars bases or escape plans or anti-asteroid technology, We ought to get right with Jesus Christ, because that is what's going to save us. That's where we need to be. God said, okay, he's done this huge thing. And remember, do you remember when Noel was born, what his name means? Back in chapter five, I believe, Genesis chapter 5. So we had Enoch, and then we had Methuselah, then we had Laman. That was Noah's father. Days of Methuselah were 969. He was the longest. Then Lamech lived 882 years and begat a son, and his name was Noah. Then he tells us why he named him Noah, saying, this same shall comfort us concerning our work and toil of our hands because of the ground which the Lord had cursed. So Noah means comfort, okay. The curse came at Adam's time, right? So they've all lived under the curse ground with thorns and thistles and death and suffering and all those things were already there. But his son Noah, he's like, but Noah will comfort us, this and that. Well, here's Noah, God has used Noah. to be the savior of the world at that time, he's the one that's going to be the father of all living on the earth at that time and so Noah was the comfort and so Noah has now God has said okay I've cursed the earth and the curse is still in effect we find that out quickly And man's heart is still evil continually. We find that out quickly, but God has preserved Noah and his family. Noah is offered a sacrifice. Please God, God has promised never to destroy the whole earth. again day and night shall not cease so you can count on the sun coming up in the morning every day god is going to continue and noah became the one that brought that comfort to man the preserver of mankind for that and then we continue on always noah it's our patriarch our progenitor from then that's our say so we all had adam god made a covenant with adam he's going to make a new covenant again with noah Here he said, okay, I'm not going to destroy the whole earth again, and we'll see next chapter. He'll make the same covenant with Noah that he made with Adam, that they would go and reproduce and be fruitful and fill the entire earth. That's what's coming next there. So Noah has fulfilled his name to be comfort for mankind during this. And of course, as we said, he's the picture of Jesus Christ, our savior in our heart, because the world will be destroyed again. Look at Peter. Peter tells us about that, but this time, not a flood, which is a good thing. Flood still destroyed. We know last week, South Texas, a lot of damage, a lot of lives lost, a lot of tragedy due to flooding. We were, I think we're still under a flood warning around here, you know, so it can happen, but it won't be like Noah's flood. It won't be worldwide where everybody, we can still evacuate. There's places to go. Noah couldn't evacuate because there was no place else to go, but we can still do that. So, but the next judgment is going to be worldwide. It's going to be by fire. And there is an ark of safety, just like there was in Noah's time, and that's Jesus Christ, who came and died on the cross to pay the price for our sins, that we might be safe in him. He is our ark. Let's stand.