How did Fish Survive the Tsunamis of Noah's Global Flood?

A question many people have about the Flood is how did both freshwater and saltwater fish survive? The Flood certainly involved tectonically induced tsunamis that traveled at great speeds and pummeled the land with towering walls of water, and fish are very sensitive to shock.



Fish Fossil, left over from the Flood.

 Obviously, fish weren’t taken on board the Ark. So how did they survive? As a matter of fact, most of them didn’t. Over 95 percent of all fossils are marine creatures. They died and are fossilized by the trillions. Many are buried in great fossil graveyards, tightly packed together, choked with sediments, buried before they had time to decay. Obviously, they didn’t live in the environment in which they died. They were transported by rapidly moving water and then buried in sedimentary deposits. But how could any at all have survived?

In the complex of events and conditions that made up the Flood, certainly there were pockets of fresh water at any one time. Remember, it was raining in torrents, and we can expect that the rain water was fairly fresh. Many studies have shown that waters of various temperatures, chemistries, and sediment loads do not tend to mix; they tend to remain segregated in zones. It would be unlikely for any one area to retain such zones for very long during the tumult of the Flood, but on a worldwide scale, some such segregated zones would have existed at any given time.

There is also the possibility that great amounts of vegetation were dislodged from the pre-Flood continents and remained intertwined as floating mats during the Flood. Many creationists feel that the decay and abrasion of these mats are responsible for our major coal seams, but underneath these mats the turbulence of the surface waters would have been lessened. Perhaps many fish found shelter and nutrition under them, as insects may have on the mats themselves.

We can see that there is at least a plausible answer that can be proposed to such questions. There is no reason for Christians to doubt the truth of the great Flood.

(excerpted from John D. Morris, Fish in the Flood, Acts & Facts May 2011, Institute for Creation Research)

(To receive new uMarko posts via a daily email, please click Subscribe)
(On Twitter: FOLLOW uMarko or http://www.twitter.com/uMarko)

Muslims turning to Jesus in the Algerian Sahara

Muslims in Algeria first started turning to Christ 25 years ago in the region of Tizi Ouzou. Today there are more than 100,000 Protestant Christians who live in this area, which is also home to the indigenous ethnic group known as the Kabyle (ka-bee-li). 

More than 900 miles away from Tizi Ouzou, the Sahara Desert looms large in southern Algeria. Yet "Hamid" and his wife "Imane" left the comfort of their Kabylie village to take over an abandoned church in a southern Algerian city in the Sahara.

The couple began to hold prayer meetings. At first it was just the two of them. Then three members of the nearby Catholic church, which is open only to foreigners, began to come. After the new church's third meeting, the police showed up.

"They ordered me to leave the city and said no more meetings should be had." Days later, Hamid and Imane were startled from their sleep by crashing noises. Muslims were throwing coffee cups, glasses and stones at the church door. Later, Imane and another Christian woman were assaulted by a group of teenagers in the city. About 20 teenagers appeared and began shouting at them, calling them "kafir" (unbeliever) and throwing trash at them.

"One of them took an iron rod and began beating the woman who was with me," Imane says. "I tried to defend her and they hit me too. They hit me in my arm, and as I began to run away they began throwing stones at us. I went into a shop, and the owner defended us and got a taxi for us."

Imane arrived home without serious injury, but the incident terrified her. She and her husband were in the lion's den, sharing Christ in the heart of Muslim territory. "I started thinking this was impossible," she says. "Then God told me in Acts 18:9, 'Do not be afraid, keep on speaking, do not be silent.'"

After nearly three years of restoring the church, being harassed by police, fighting off attacks by Muslim mobs and repairing vandalism, Hamid and Image were becoming very discouraged. They asked God to show them the fruit of their labor. The couple climbed up on the church's roof and kneeled to pray. "We said we need five souls for Christ," Hamid says. "We needed five Arab souls by the end of the year, ,and that would let us know that God was with us.

Just months after that prayer, a young Arab walked to the gates of the church. "I'm a Muslim," he said. "I just want to know about Christ." Within three months, five Arabs had come to Christ.

Now Hamid and Imane have a vibrant church congregation of about 40, with Bible studies, baptisms, outreach activities and discipleship training for new believers. The police no longer harass them, and the couple says the persecution they suffered helped them to bear their fruit.

"We are hoping that a strong wave of persecution comes to the Kabylie area so Christians will be pushed out from that area and come after the Arab souls," Hamid says. "We have a big vision about southern Algeria; we pray that God extends our territory more. Please pray for our protection and that the Arab believers who are with us now will be encouraged and share their faith with others."

(from Voice of the Martyrs, May 2011)

(To receive new uMarko posts via a daily email, please click Subscribe)
(On Twitter: FOLLOW uMarko or http://www.twitter.com/uMarko)

Terrible Violence Towards Tribal Believers In Southern Mexico

Some disturbing events from late 2010, all from Mexico in the southern states of Chiapas and Oaxaca:

* Pastor Armando Lopes is waylaid and killed as he travels back to his village after a doctor’s appointment in Comitan, Chiapas.
* Three pastors are killed in Santa Maria El Tule, Oaxaca.
* Four families of believers are expelled from the village of Chilil, Chiapas.
* The church in Llanos, Chiapas, was destroyed last June, and believers put on notice. This month, six homes are destroyed and the families expelled from the community.
* In Mitziton, Chiapas, the church and many homes are destroyed and fifty families are expelled from the community.
* In Nachug, Chiapas, 86 families are expelled.
* At the end of 2010, 498 Indian believers were living as street people, homeless in the city of San Cristobal, where they had sought protection.

“Almost all of this persecution is the result of the conflict which develops when new believers decide they can no longer go along with the rest of the villagers in their practice of drunken fiestas to saints housed in the untended Catholic church, but which have really come to represent ancient pagan gods,” he said. “The responsibility for funding the fiestas are passed around to families in the community, and the conflict begins when an evangelical family is supposed to buy the liquor but refuses to do so.

“Pray for these ‘suffering saints’, many of them very new believers! Some will eventually establish new villages and gradually build their homes again, usually after first building a new church. But the days ahead will be very hard."

Dr. Dale W. Kietzman, founder of Latin American Indian Ministries (www.laim.org), reported in Terrible Violence Towards Tribal Believers In Southern Mexico, International Press Association


(To receive new uMarko posts via a daily email, please click Subscribe)
(On Twitter: FOLLOW uMarko or http://www.twitter.com/uMarko)

Buckled Mountains point to the Worldwide Flood of Genesis

"Throughout the mountain ranges of the world, there are enormous layers of sediment which have been bent and folded without breaking! This could only happen if these mountains were uplifted while the sedminent was of a soft, pliable, mud-like consistency" (from Censored Science, The Suppressed Evidence, p.54)

Buckled Mountains. Textbooks and museums frequently refer to some uplifting force that formed mountains. Can you see that an uplifting force, by itself, would not produce this pattern? Horizontal compression was needed to buckle these sedimentary layers near the Sullivan River in southern British Columbia, Canada. The layers must have been soft, like wet sand, at the time of compression.  Today, surface rocks are brittle.

Bruce Malone, the director of Search for the Truth Ministries, then goes on to tell the evolution "story" about the hundreds of millions of years needed to accumulate the sediment and how it would be rock hard and would break under the enormous upward pressures.

In contrast, Malone explains that the Biblical record describes a worldwide flood that resulted in a rapid accumulation of sediment that can account for the folded rock now visible!

(selected from Clifford L. Lillo, book review of Bruce A. Malone Censored Science, The Suppressed Evidence, published in Creation Research Society Quarterly Journal, Volume 47, Number 3, Winter 2011, to appear at http://www.creationresearch.org/crsq/abstracts/Abstracts47-3.htm).

Not only have sediments been bent and folded without breaking, but Scripture has not been broken either...

(To receive new uMarko posts via a daily email, please click Subscribe)
(On Twitter: FOLLOW uMarko or http://www.twitter.com/uMarko)

The miracle that started the Turkish Church in Cologne Germany

The Turkish church of Cologne, Germany, got started after a dramatic event involving the daughter of a Turkish family...

Jesus still has power over demons!

Her parents asked a Turkish Christian brother and two others to pray for their daughter's deliverance from demons that plagued her. Not knowing how to do this, they consulted an older pastor who told them that speaking in Jesus' name gave them authority over evil spirits. When they prayed and ordered the demons to come out of the girl, they did!

As a result, many in her extended family repented and were baptized. The brother went on to organize the Turkish church of Cologne, and became its pastor. Most of these people are now very active in the church, which now has about 100 members. Many are former Muslims.

The church has recently planted a house church in another area. Please pray that the church will continue to grow and reach others for Christ.

(from a Christian prayer letter, May 2011)

(To receive new uMarko posts via a daily email, please click Subscribe)
(On Twitter: FOLLOW uMarko or http://www.twitter.com/uMarko)