Needed: Pangea picture,
plate tectonics picture, Ring of Fire picture (included)
Scripture: Genesis
1:6-10; 1:29-30; 2:4-6; 7:1-20; 8:22; 9:1-3
Read Genesis
7:1-4
What are
“clean” animals and “unclean” animals? Why are they called that?
Unclean
animals were the animals God told the Jewish people not to eat. They might have
carried too many diseases. They might also have been certain animals that God
told the people not to eat as another way to show that they were different from
other people.
Why did God
want Noah to keep alive seven pairs of every kind of clean animals, but only one
pair of every kind of unclean animal?
After the
Flood, the people would need the clean
animals to repopulate quickly, so that they could eat them. They didn’t need
the unclean animals to regrow their population as rapidly.
Read Genesis
1:29-30
But before the
Flood, people were not allowed to eat animals, right?
Read Genesis
9:1-3
After the
Flood, God gave Noah permission to eat animals.
But the
question now is, Could Noah have fit that many animals on the ark? Could he
have taken 14 of every kind of clean animal and 2 of every unclean animal? Was
there room on the ark?
Could Noah
have fit every “kind” of animal he needed on the ark? (Yes.)
Remember
that a kind of animal is cat, dog, bird.
It’s not panther, lion, cheetah, tiger. Cocker Spaniel, Great Dane, Yorkie,
German Shepherd. A kind is animals that can reproduce together.
Read Genesis
7:5-12
Why do you
think the Bible tells us the exact day that the Flood started? (To let us know
that this is actual history and not just a made up story.)
Read Genesis
7:13-20
The Bible
tells us in verses 19 and 20 that there was so much water in the Flood that all
the mountains on earth were covered by at least 20 feet. If all that water was
on the earth before, why was the earth never flooded before? If all that water
wasn’t on the earth before the Flood, where did it come from?
Let’s start
with the “springs of the great deep.” What is that?
When the Bible
talks about the “great deep,” it’s talking about the ocean. Remember that in
the beginning, there was only one continent and one ocean.
Read Genesis
1:9-10
When God created the world,
He created it as one continent and one ocean.
We call that first continent
Pangea. (Show your picture of Pangea.)
At the time of the Flood, the springs of
the great deep burst open. Those bursting points we now call mid-ocean ridges.
Mid-ocean ridges exploded with hot groundwater
and lava. The bursting open of the mid-ocean ridges set off the process known
as plate tectonics. The mid-ocean ridges pushed out from either side, causing
Pangea to break apart and forcing the separate continents to move away from
each other. (Show your plate tectonics picture.)
As the
mid-ocean ridges push continents apart, it also pushed them into plates in the
earth’s crust. When two plates collide, the crust of the earth buckles,
crumpling up and forming mountain ranges or volcanoes. The Ring of Fire (show
your plate Ring of Fire picture), surrounding the Pacific Ocean, shows the
world’s largest concentration of volcanoes. It is caused by the mid-ocean ridge
in the Atlantic Ocean pushing continents from either side toward the Pacific
Ocean.
So that’s the waters of
the great deep and the effect they have: hot groundwater
exploding from the earth’s crust and setting off the process known as plate
tectonics.
Now let’s
look at the floodgates of heaven. What does it mean by that?
Read Genesis
1:6-8
The expanse, or the sky, was a hydrosphere, a bubble, a layer of water,
that completely surrounded the earth. What would a hydrosphere like that do for
the earth? What effect would it have?
This hydrosphere kept the earth at a constant, ideal temperature. It
protected it the earth from UV rays and had other beneficial effects on the
atmosphere of the earth.
Read Genesis
2:4-6
How was the earth being watered in the beginning? (By dew or streams
from the earth.)
The Lord had not sent rain on the earth because all of that water was
still up in the hydrosphere.
Read Genesis
7:11-12
When God sent the Great Flood, all the springs of the great deep, the
ocean trenches that we talked about, and the floodgates of the heavens were
opened. In other words, the expanse or the hydrosphere broke down and all that water that was surrounding the
earth came falling down.
Let’s look at one of the effects that the breaking down of hydrosphere
had on the lives of the people. Turn to Genesis 5. Call out some of the numbers
that you see for people’s total lifespan in years. This is how long people
lived before the Flood, or before the hydrosphere broke down.
Before breaking down of the hydrosphere: 930, 912,
905, 910, 895, 800, 962, 969, 777.
Now turn to Genesis 11:10-26. What are the numbers, in order, that you
see there?
After breaking down of the hydrosphere: 500, 403,
430, 209, 207, 200, 119
This is how long people were living after the hydrosphere broke down.
You can see that the numbers go down after the breaking down of the
hydrosphere. Something about this hydrosphere made the earth’s atmosphere
better for us. Since the hydrosphere broke down, the earth’s atmosphere changed,
and we started not living as long after
that.
The hydrosphere affected our atmosphere. It is guessed that the
breaking down of this extra layer of the earth’s atmosphere is what caused
people to start living a shorter amount of time after the Flood.
I also said before that the hydrosphere kept the earth at a constant temperature. This means that there
would have been no seasons before this hydrosphere broke down. But now, after
the hydrosphere has been broken down, we do have seasons.
Read Genesis
8:22
Now there’s only one question
left. We saw where all the water came from. It came up from underground
exploding out of the ocean trenches, and
it came down from the hydrosphere. But after the Flood, where did all that
water go?
Some of the extra water from the Flood went back into the earth as
groundwater. Some of it remains in the clouds. And some of it became the ice
glaciers and then the ice caps at the north and south poles.
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