The Book of Job ON FINDING AN ICE AGE BOOK by Dr. Bernard E. Northrup ([email protected]) ABSTRACT This chapter is a revision of that which originally was published after one of my creation conferences by Colonial Hills Baptist Church in East Point, Georgia sometime in the early 1970's. It also has been part of well over a hundred conferences in many states and several countries. For years it was part of my class notes for Genesis 1-11 entitled "In the Beginning," for Central Baptist Seminary in Minneapolis where I was Director of Graduate Studies. It describes my abrupt awakening to the requirement by the catastrophic contents of the Book of Job that I recognize a post-Noahic flood, thoroughly Biblical, ice "age" catastrophe. For years believers have wrestled with the problem of science and have wondered how we could ever reconcile the many things which are found in the crust of the earth with that which we read in the Scriptures concerning earth's early events. Many creationists have puzzled over the major areas of disagreement and tentatively have provided approaches to harmonization which they thought might help to explain the apparent contradiction between the Word of God and the work of the Creator. These harmonization models have been helpful in that they provided an avenue of escape from uniformitarian dogmas which have proven to be destructive to the uninstructed faith of many students of the natural sciences. But in every case these models have proven inadequate in that they have ignored major pieces of the puzzle. For example, the gap theory completely ignored the physical evidence of a period of earth's history when an icy catastrophe troubled the entire earth with massive, continuous cloud cover, with torrential rains in the regions nearer the equator and with vast snow falls in regions nearer the northern and southern poles. The Noahic flood model likewise has ignored this evidence of the "ice age" and the massive signs of continental volcanism in Cenozoic deposits which preceded it. These things were impossible to fit into the classical form of the flood model and largely were ignored. In recent years it has become popular to tack these physical evidences onto the conclusion of the Noahic flood in a vague, undefined way which leaves multitudes of unanswered questions. The model which I propose in this paper is extremely helpful in understanding the genesis of geology and the confirmatory testimony which the careful study of the physical sciences actually gives to the statement of the Scriptures about earth's earlier events. Through this model I have concluded that Genesis and geology both have exactly the same message. Now this does not require adapting Genesis to geology at all, but rather casts the light of the facts of geology upon the text of Genesis so that we can recognize the wider catastrophic nature of the Biblical testimony. Once the researcher eliminates the fallacious assumptions of geological time, assumptions and miscalculations which are so critical to evolutionary historical geology, the two accounts remarkably carry the same message. The fact that the two records which always have played the same tune only becomes recognizable when one plays the geological record at the same speed as the Biblical record! Suddenly every glissando, every crescendo and every andante passage produce sufficient harmony that one can recognize that the two scores came from the same Master. Many years ago I was speaking at Maranatha Baptist Bible College in Wisconsin concerning creation. During the week I had completed the consideration of earth's earlier events in Genesis, the outpouring of the pre-Adamic flood, the uplift of the great single continent in the third solar day, the Noahic flood and the division of the continents as presented in Genesis 10. I was preparing to speak on the ice age in geology the next day. I was thoroughly convinced that there had been a very Biblical ice age after the Noahic flood for I had followed the courses of several of the glaciers on our own continent and had viewed their great rivers of ice in British Columbia and in Alaska. Since then I have been able to observe these vast rivers of ice in the Andes, in the Alps and in the Himalayas. While meditating about the problem of an ice age within Biblical times, a thought struck me. Surely, if this were true, there should have been a great amount of testimony concerning the ice age available in the Bible, given by those who actually lived during that catastrophic time. Suddenly a flood of secondary revelation began coming to me as the Holy Spirit, the Divine Author, began to point out to me in His Holy Word many places where the ice age actually is mentioned. I had read these many dozens of times, teaching from a theological viewpoint, and utterly had missed the import of these passages concerning the geological disturbances and the climate disturbances which are recorded in His Word! The Lord led me to the Book o...