Ark’s Reality

` If anybody doubts that a worldwide chastisement is possible, such as Our Lady of Akita warned us of, let them remember it happened once 5,000 years ago, so it can happen again. And if they doubt that the worldwide Flood of Noah’s time actually happened, let them watch on YouTube the fascinating 53-minute film entitled “L’Arche de Noé et le Déluge: Preuves Historiques et Scientifiques.” Alas. in English YouTube seems to have no equivalent film on Noah’s Ark, but rather a good deal of disinformation. God’s enemies work hard to keep away from us such a sensational proof of the truth of the Bible as is the real existence of the Ark of Noah.

It nestles some 4,600 meters high up in a canyon on the snowline of Mount Ararat on the Turko-Armenian border. It is difficult of access because for most of the year it is covered in ice, and from above avalanches threaten at all times of year, while below there is danger from robbers and local civil wars. But after referring to the identical account of the Flood in multiple ancient languages, always with the same name of Noah, the French film continues with a long list of known visitors to the Ark down the ages, 34 of whose descriptions of what they saw are remarkably similar, according to the film.

The list begins with a Chaldean priest about half a millennium before Christ. It includes a Christian bishop in 360 AD and the famous Italian explorer, Marco Polo, in 1269. In 1840 a huge earthquake carved the canyon out of the side of the mountain where the Ark now rests and broke it into two pieces, now 30 yards apart. In the 19^th and 20^th centuries there followed numerous visitors to the Ark, and during and after World War II several American pilots flying over the mountain clearly recognized a huge man-made boat, dark in colour, shaped like a barge. They had no doubt they were seeing Noah’s Ark. Finally in our own time, in 2007, a team of Turkish explorers penetrated inside the Ark and took film footage which can also be found on YouTube, independently of the French film.

The film concludes with fascinating speculation of modern scientists and geologists on the mass of water which Scripture says drowned the highest (then) mountains to a depth of 7 meters (Gen. VII, 20). Especially worthy of note in Scripture is how it says that the water not only rained from on high but also burst up from below (Gen. VII, 11: VIII, 2). A persuasive explanation is offered on the film by an American engineer, Dr Walter Brown, who posits that before the Flood there were huge subterranean caverns of water, interconnected, some 800 meters deep, fiercely compressed beneath the earth’s surface crust of rock, 10 miles thick. It was enough for a split in that crust to run around the earth in two hours, and a mass of that water would explode upwards from below, changing the face of the earth, and explaining many features, Dr Brown argues, of the earth’s geology as we know it today. Altogether fascinating.

But how many people today want to know that God exists, that sin matters, and that the wrecking of environments is one way in which sin is punished? The film says that in the late 19^th century, despite the number of visitors to the Ark, people were more interested in Evolution getting rid of God than in the Ark clearly pointing to him. True, God promised Noah that he would never again punish by a flood of water (Gen. IX, 15), but that does not exclude a worldwide rain of fire. Our Lady of Akita spoke in 1973 of the latter hanging over our heads. Certainly sin is today careering out of control, worldwide.

Kyrie eleison.