Sid: Yeshua is getting ready to visit planet earth with the most awesome outpouring of God’s Spirit in history. And I have a concern and maybe you’ll understand my concern if I tell you this story. My wife was raised Southern Baptist; when she got to college she had atheist professors, she was totally unprepared for that onslaught; the church did not prepare her; her parents did not prepare her and left her at the mercy of her teachers who had a goal of making her an atheist. Well she had enough of a background to say “I won’t become an atheist, I’ll be come an agnostic just in case there’s a God.” And I met my wife, she converted to Orthodox Judaism because I insisted not so much that she wanted to be an Orthodox Jew, I insisted. So you might say she was a Southern Baptist, Agnostic, Orthodox Jew that did not know God. And then I had an encounter with Jesus and we started studying things from a Hebraic viewpoint of “Why is Jesus the Messiah?” She had never had any teaching like this, what are the prophecies proving Jesus is the Messiah; what are the prophecies about Israel? She came to the point where she literally said to herself, “The evidence is so overwhelming, I must believe in God, I must believe that Jesus is my Messiah, I must make Him my Lord.” Well, I wish every high school student and every college student in the world would get a hold of Jim Nienhuis’ book “Old Earth, Why Not?” Because the truth of the matter is I’ve been wrestling with how old is the earth; I read what the Bible says, I read what scientists say, and then I can come up with the only conclusion I can come up with is maybe a day wasn’t 24 hours back then. I don’t understand it I accept what God says, but I really can’t prove it to anyone else. Then my friend James Nienhuis came with this book and it answers questions that I never could answer. I accepted it by faith, but you know what, I believe that the devil is coming with such an onslaught to take away and rob our young people of their faith; especially within the educational system that God has raised up such a man and such a book. And Jim there is so many fabulous themes in your book that many Christians have thought about but truthfully they don’t have the answers. For instance you deal with in your book about Moses wrote a number of the books of Genesis; but these facts occurred before he lived how could he have done this?
James: Yeah, well I think he just received a compilation of cuneiform tablets you know the clay tablets that we learned the Babylonians used to write in you know they’d add to their letters in to the wet clay and it would dry. Well the Hebrew word for to write Sid is you know you read the book, is to cut in. “So, cut into a piece of paper?” “No, cut into a clay cuneiform tablet” and the Middle Eastern custom at 2000 BC was at the bottom the writer or the owner of the table would have his name signed off at the bottom of it. And when these cuneiform tablets were signed off by the Patriarchs mentioned in the Bible before and after the deluge they signed it off these are the generations of; for instance Noah. Now Sid what is generations mean in the Bible? It doesn’t mean progeny after Noah it means origins, it means these are the origins of Noah, so Noah eye witnessed account reported all that he had seen in his life recorded it on a clay cuneiform tablet, signed off on it at the bottom, “These are the generations of” the word Hebrew word for generations is toladah, which means origins not offspring, is a progeny you know his Grandsons and great grandsons. Talking about his ancestors, so apparently all this history was written down by eyewitnesses signed off at the bottom by the eyewitnesses and Moses had those stacks of those cuneiform tablets and simply edited it and redacted them; according to the Holy Spirit.
Sid: Jim, how did you get so interested in verifying the Bible and coming up with this book “Old Earth Why Not?”
James: Well, I became a Christian; age twenty-six, after graduating from Dartmouth College, Degree in Geology. Was born again, famously born-again, lightning bolt shot in my head on a hung-over morning. Started a flit from my upper left temple, went into my head just like the scales came off, hangover gone, you know the preverbal jumping around preaching for the week after like a new born Christian babe, you know that was age twenty-six. But still I had no reason to believe that what I’d learned at my little Ivy League college was not true that the earth were billions of years old. And still at about age thirty I’m fifty-three now, at age thirty I picked up Henry Boris’s book “The Genesis Flood” he founded the Institute for Creation Research.” That was in 1985 it like the scales came off of my eyes, like a secondary born-again experience you know. Finally as a geologist what I’d learned in college all the information made sense; I mean it didn’t make sense without the global flood model. After all how do you explain vast flat layers grading into each other up on the continents stacked like pancakes with billions of creatures in tune there in.
Sid: And let me ask you this question with all the research that you’ve done, with all the study of the Bible that you’ve done, are their areas in the accounts of the history of planet earth in say the book of say Genesis that you really don’t have a reasonable explanation for?
James: Well, the only, it’s kind of a slum dumb deal just a silly notion that well the naysayers will say “Where’s the garden of Eden, where’s the garden of Eden, well you know it’s under 10,000 feet of sediment (laughing) that’s about the only you know…
Sid: Well, that’s nothing so is there any area?
James: No, that’s about it to tell you the truth, and like I’ve told a …
Sid: But what about? Okay here’s the most basic question and that is we have all of these scientific methods plus a lot of understanding from history and geology and archeology that the earth is millions of years old and not 6,000 years old?
James: Well, let me – chew on this one Sid, check this one out. “Okay you know there’s erosion off the continents because of rain going into river you know sweeping the sediments off the continents over time; 27 billion tons of sediment is eroded off the continents every year.
Sid: Right.
James: Okay, okay presuming that rate into the past okay, within 80 million years the oceans should have filled the brim with sediments.
Sid: In other words there would be no oceans.
James: Right within 80 million years and yet they say rocks on the continents are up to several billion years old; some of them are on the surface. So it’s totally totally absorbed as well at that current erosion rate 27 billion tons per year presuming that rate is the past all the continents should have been leveled to sea level within fifteen million years. And yet they say “The rocks of the continents are up to billions of years old, it’s absurd.
Sid: What about something like, is there really evidence of Noah’s flood that’s described in Genesis, did it really occur?
James: Just look around you the next time you’re driving through a road cut in sedimentary rock terrain you know sedimentary meaning sandstones, shales, limestones, you know when you’re driving through a road cut in one of those areas you’ll see those bands?
Sid: Right.
James: Those are sedimentary layers and sedimentary means laid out at the bottom of a body of water. So there is a body of water up on the continents that laid all those vast layers down entombing billions of creatures; those are fossils that we see. Some of the fossils even still having bone-marrow and red corpuscles from the T-Rex’s recently discovered in Montana, as well as, I believe in North Carolina. You know organic live red corpuscles that should have degraded millions of years after they supposedly went extinct, “65 million years ago.” So it all bespeaks of global encompassing flood in entombing, how—fossils aren’t being formed today when an animal dies it might fall in the river go down rot, degrade, float, bloat, scavengers eat it bacteria eat it up within a matter of weeks there’s no sign of it. The delta should be full of animals being covered up with all the sediments eventually to rise above the ocean dry out to become fossils. Now that is what the uniform uniformitarian scheme taught at our schools is all about, and it’s totally absurd.
Sid: What I want to ask Jim is how could all these different types of animals; all these different species fit on Noah’s ark? He has an answer in his book; he has an answer to questions that have been troubling you for so long.
Tags: It's Supernatural, Sid Roth