Z: Answers for the Final Generation

The fountains of the deep

The one aspect of the Flood that the authors of The Genesis Flood don’t seem to have addressed is this matter of the ‘fountains of the great deep’. The phrase suggests that vast quantities of water were previously trapped under pressure beneath the surface of the earth and burst out. In 2016 scientists working with the Hubble Space Telescope excitedly reported observations which strongly supported the possibility of water being trapped under pressure below the surface of a planet. They identified fountains of water or ice spewing 100 miles into space from the surface of Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons. A report on USA Today stated, ‘Water from this salty sea presumably shoots up through cracks in the outer coating of ice, which measures tens of miles thick or more.’ NASA’s Curtis Niebur admitted they didn’t have a full explanation for the process. “We’re seeing [the plumes] using a completely different technique. That gives you a lot more evidence that it’s not just a fluke, that it’s actually something physical.” (Scientists find incredible fountains shooting from Jupiter's moon.T.Watson, USA TODAY, September 26, 2016)

Even on the earth today geysers of water such as ‘Old Faithful’ in the Yellowstone National Park continue to spout water into the air; oil spurts out of the ground when it is released; and volcanoes can eject ash 20 miles upwards into the sky. If water was once trapped beneath the earth’s crust and was superheated by volcanic magma the generated pressure could well have been explosive.

The power of multiplication

Back in the garden of Eden the Lord told Adam and Eve to ‘be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth…’ If they thought that to be an impossible task it was because they had not reckoned on the power of multiplication. Because they were fruitful and made a good number of children (Genesis 5.3,4), and because each of their children gave birth to a good number of children too (Genesis 5.6,7), two people eventually filled the earth with people.

In the same way Jesus told his remaining eleven apostles to “…make disciples of all nations… teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.” (Matthew 28.19,20) They too must have thought it an impossible task to make disciples of all nations. But it wasn’t impossible, because Jesus also told them to teach their disciples to do the same thing that he had commanded them to do. It’s exactly what Paul told his disciple Timothy to do. ‘…what you have heard from me before many witnesses entrust to faithful men who will be able to teach others also.’ (2 Timothy 2.2) Once again it’s the principle of multiplication at work.

If each wave of converts had taught the next wave to do the same, and if they had taught their converts in turn to do the same, then the whole world could have been reached in one generation through the process of multiplication. And that’s what began to happen in the very beginning. When only Peter and the other apostles were preaching in Jerusalem ‘…the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved’. (Acts 2.47) But when the church spread throughout Judea and Galilee and Samaria and everybody began to share the good news with their neighbours the number of believers multiplied. (Acts 9.31)

Some six months after the day of Pentecost, Stephen was stoned to death. The new believers in Jerusalem fled to other parts of the country where they preached the word. (Acts 8.1-4) But suppose that they and every subsequent believer had been willing to keep moving on in order to continue to share the good news of Jesus where it had never been heard before. And suppose that each believer led just one other person to believe in Jesus each year and that every new believer did the same. That’s feasible, wouldn’t you say? The astonishing fact is that if that had happened then within just sixteen years the first group of 3000 Christians who were baptized on the day of Pentecost would have multiplied to almost 200 million, the estimated population of the entire world at that time! Just sixteen years!

Let’s say that at Pentecost in the year AD 30 there were 3000 Christians altogether. In the year AD 31 the number would have doubled to 6000, in AD 32 it would have doubled again to 12,000, and so on. If you keep doubling the number you’ll find that by AD 46 it will have reached 196.6 million! (Enter 3000x2^16 in your calculator if you don’t believe me.) And that’s not all. Not everyone who heard the gospel would have accepted it: perhaps only one in ten would have done so. In that case the task of converting 20 million people to Christ rather than 200 million could have been accomplished in less than thirteen years!

To be fair, the calculations assume that no one would have died during that period. And in order for the multiplication process to continue as calculated, many or perhaps most believers would have had to move to new places and even new countries as the evangelization of their current locations was completed. But this is exactly what Jesus expected many Christians to do. In Luke 18.29,30, he said, “…there is no man who has left house or wife or brothers or parents or children, for the sake of the kingdom of God, who will not receive manifold more in this time, and in the age to come eternal life.” And in Luke 14.33 he said, “…whoever of you does not renounce (give up) all that he has cannot by my disciple.” In particular he told the apostles themselves to “go into all the world”. (Mark 16.15)

In practice some Christians with family responsibilities, health problems or a lack of zeal would have stayed put or fizzled out as evangelists. Nevertheless others on fire with the Holy Spirit could easily have made up for that by leading far more than one person to Christ every year. Multitudes of Samaritans responded to Philip’s preaching, for example, and he wasn’t even an apostle. (Acts 8.5,6)

It seems certain to me that the task of preaching the gospel to everyone on earth could have been accomplished well within one generation if the majority of believers and their converts had obeyed Christ’s instructions to multiply! One reason that he kept telling people he might return at any time was surely to instill a sense of urgency into their evangelism.

The principle of multiplication was evidently in the mind of Jesus in his parable of the yeast or leaven. “To what shall I compare the kingdom of God? It is like leaven which a woman took and hid in three measures of flour, till it was all leavened.” (Luke 13.20,21) Yeast cells divide, reproduce and multiply. And while my calculations are based on everyone leading one person a year to Christ for a maximum of sixteen years, I believe that Jesus envisaged his followers leading significantly more than sixteen other people to faith during their lifetime. In his parable of the sower he said that the good soil represented people “…who hear the word and accept it and bear fruit, thirtyfold and sixtyfold and a hundredfold.” (Mark 4.20)

So it really isn’t surprising that Jesus expected the task of world evangelization to be completed within a generation. It could have been!