Today, while looking for the music to "How great thou art", I ran into another Bible/Science site. Quickly browsing the site I run into an article asking why people continue to believe that the Flood was global when the Bible clearly shows it was only a local flood.
Simple common sense, knowing that the signs of a great flood are all around the globe and a straight reading of the Bible shows a global flood not local, but different groups of people keep trying to inflect these ideas upon the Word of God. Imagine God commanding Noah to build an ark so large and stock it with living creatures to float around a large pool of water for a year. In such a case, why would God have not simply told Noah to leave to a new place until the flood was complete, where he could have taken the other creatures also? Why would the people of that area, just sat there and died without going outside that mountain range? In all the years before the flood, why did not someone explore outside that mountain range and settle there thus voiding the purpose of the flood? And lastly, if there was a local flood, why is it that there was now a rainbow that apparently never existed before which was the promise that God would never destroy "the earth" again by flood? If you bring up eSword bible software and do a compare, you will be hard pressed to find versions that do not sound like a global flood.
This is much like those that believe in the "gap theory", where there was a "gap" of billions of years between "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth" and "the earth was without form and void..". This plainly is not scriptural, they have tried to force billions of years into the Bible because man's science says there was billions of years of our earth (for the large part supposedly justified by the light reaching the earth from distant stars), so instead of believing the Bible, they believe a lie.
Could there have been a gap? Yes, with God anything is possible. Does the Bible even remotely suggest a gap? Not at all! The Gap people say that God would not create the world without form and void, so it must have existed and then was "made" void as a destruction after which, He "restored" the earth. Grab a Bible and follow the Scriptures that people use to describe a past world where Satan ruled and you will find there is not even a real suggestion of a prior world, but for those that want to see it, they do for some reason.
Some believe this because a few translations misinterpret the word "replenish" the earth and have the passage read "And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful and multiple and replenish the earth". It does not mean to refill the earth, as at the time of the writing of the King James Bible the word "officially" was defined as to "fill" without any possible meaning of "refill" until later centuries when it was redefined to mean "refill" instead of "fill". More on that can be found at:
http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v18/i2/replenish.asp
In their attempt to comply with man's science and his view of the age of everything, they overlook passages which invalidate that claim, since the view of man's science says the stars, moon and sun are billions of years old. What the gap theory believers overlook is the fact that Bible says God created the Sun, Moon and Stars on the fourth day of creation, "after" He created the earth. So, however you look at it the universe as we know it was created 6,000 years ago, biblically.
Some other forms of Gap theology suggest that billions of years happened between the seventh day of creation and when Adam and Eve fell. First, can you imagine any human lasting billions of years without eating of that tree? God told them to multiply, but when they fell, there appears to still only be two of them without children, did they not obey God for billions of years and then decided to obey after the fall and actually have children? How many people would be on the face of the earth if there was no death over a period of billions of years? Of course, you also have to say the Bible lied when it says "and all the days that Adam lived where nine hundred and thirty years"!
Both the local flood and gap theories portray people who try to fit "outside" information into the Bible, to bend the Bible to conform to man's wisdom. We should all take the Bible for what it says and if we have doubts, simply get a group of people together and ask God the truth. You know He is alive and has given us the Holy Spirit to reveal all truth to us. Maybe we should quit trying to depend on our own earthly reasoning and let God tell us the truth. Well, I guess that would mean we have to seek God's face to find the truth and many are simply not up to it....