Stage setting

News brief this past week: "From America, to Europe, to regions throughout the world, violent extremist incidents have been a modern plague in recent years. Researchers from the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB) note many of these perpetrators quote verses from their religion’s holy scriptures during their deadly crimes . . . Specifically, nine percent of the Christians supported violence without reading any scriptures beforehand. That number rose to 12 percent among Christians seeing such a quote before hearing the question. For Jews, three percent supported violence without reading quotes and seven percent supported it after seeing such a passage."

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Here is outtake from Bob Barlow's book "The Origin of the Races":

"The philosophy which attempts to explain the universe, our world, yea, even ourselves, APART FROM A CREATOR, is the SAME PHILOSOPHY which gave ammunition to half a billion unbelievers living before the days of the Flood to laugh off the loving warnings of God. . . .

“There is a prime reason the warnings of the Flood seemed so preposterous to the antediluvians. Before the Flood there had never been a flood. Not only that, according to the biblical record before the Flood, it had never rained on the earth:

‘And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: for the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground.
[6] But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground.’ (Gen. 2:5-6)

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"That is the reason the New Testament says of Noah:

‘By faith Noah, being warned of God of things not seen as yet, moved with fear, prepared an ark to the saving of his house; by the which he condemned the world, and became heir of the righteousness which is by faith.’ (Hebrews 11:7)

“Noah was warned of ‘things not seen as yet.’ The thought of water coming down from the sky was totally foreign to every human up to that time of history. The ecosystem of the earth was SO totally different from what it is now. The earth was watered by a misting system that kept the entire globe in ‘greenhouse’ perfection.

“No rain! Just what kind of myth is this? It is no myth at all, just a factual account of the pre-Flood days. The reason many readers of the Bible have such a difficult time discerning exactly what these Scriptures are telling us is that most of us have failed to grasp the clear declaration by the Scriptures that the PRE-FLOOD earth was vastly different from the POST-FLOOD earth. This is the reason for Peter’s words in the following passage:

‘Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished:
[7] But the heavens and the earth, which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men.’ (2 Peter 3: 6-7)

(another post later today)