History unfolds before our eyes

Is the Earth billions of years old, as many people believe, or is it just a few thousand years old, as some creationists claim?

We received a good clue to this question 39 years ago, when on May 18, 1980, a relatively small volcano, Mount St. Helens in Washington state, erupted – causing more damage than any volcano in U.S. history, before or since.

Lessons learned

Because of the Mount St. Helens eruption, scientists know that sedimentary rock layers can form in only hours, rather than requiring millions of years.

Rapid outflow from the volcano caused massive amounts of sediment to fill in the entire valley adjacent to the mountain. And a 1982 dam breach of the snow-melt lake that had formed in the mountain’s crater caused a catastrophic flood that gashed those fresh deposits from two years earlier. To this day, the resulting steep-sided canyon walls can be seen, showing that horizontal sediment layers hundreds of feet thick were formed within hours during the eruption.

The eruption also showed that radiometric dating is not necessarily accurate and that God gave animals and plants the ability to rapidly re-colonize barren land, according to the Institute for Creation Research. A new rock cap atop the mountain that formed after the 1980 eruption should have shown it to be on the order of tens of years. But standard analysis gave the totally incorrect date of 350,000 years.

https://www.icr.org/article/a-30-years-later-lessons-mount-st-helens

25-foot layers formed in hours

Ken Ham, founder and CEO of Answers in Genesis – and the visionary behind the Creation Museum and nearby Ark Encounter in northern Kentucky, near Cincinnati – offered this commentary on Mount St. Helens in May 2000 to commemorate the 20^th anniversary of the eruption:

… The events associated with the volcano’s explosion accomplished in seconds, hours or just a few days geologic work that normally would be interpreted as having taken hundreds or even millions of years. One particular canyon was formed, which has since been named the “Little Grand Canyon.” About 100 feet deep and somewhat wider, it is about 1/40^th the scale of the mighty Grand Canyon. This canyon was formed in one day from a mudflow. A newly formed river then flowed through the Canyon formed by the mudflow.

I remember being taught in school that when you saw a canyon with a river running through it, you assumed that the river took a long time to erode the canyon. My teachers — not having known what happened at Mount St. Helens — would have concluded the same thing about the small river cutting through the Little Grand.

The erosion of this canyon enables scientists to see some of the layers that were laid down. What astonished them were features such as the 25-feet-thick deposit that consisted of thousands of thin layers. In school, I was taught that you assume layers like this were laid down at the rate of perhaps one or two a year. Then you could estimate how long it took for such a deposit to form, perhaps even millions of years.

However, this 25-feet-thick series of layers was formed in less than one day — perhaps even just three hours.

People around the world are indoctrinated by evolutionists who believe that layers like those we see at the Grand Canyon took millions of years to be laid down. That belief of “billions of years” is foundational to evolutionary thinking. What happened at Mount St. Helens is a powerful challenge to this belief.

The evidence here shows that one can logically accept that the Flood of Noah’s day — and its after-effects — could have accomplished extraordinary geologic work, carving out canyons and the laying down of sediments in massive quantities all across the globe — just as we see today.

Increasingly, most geologists — evolutionist or creationist — who have been to the Grand Canyon will now acknowledge that the Canyon was carved by a lot of water over a little period of time, not over millions of years.

https://answersingenesis.org/geology/mount-st-helens/mount-st-helens-evidence-for-genesis/

The canyon caused the creek

Ham isn’t the only one to reach those conclusions. Tas Walker of Creation Ministries International offers this commentary from July 2017:

The eruption demonstrated that geologic catastrophe can produce in hours and days geologic features previously believed to have taken millions of years. When we see what the volcano did in such a short time, we can better appreciate how the catastrophe of Noah’s Flood formed the much larger geological features on planet Earth.

For many years, geologist Steven Austin researched the geological effects of the Mount St. Helens’ eruption and its aftermath. He published extensively on how that catastrophe sheds light on the global catastrophe of Noah’s Flood, which is a key to confirming the Bible’s truth.

One of the many surprising results was a 25-foot-thick sedimentary deposit exposed in a cliff alongside the North Fork Toutle River. It is composed of finely-layered sediment. From eyewitness reports, photographs and monitoring equipment, it is known that this whole deposit formed in just three hours, from 9 p.m. to midnight on June 12, 1980.

It was deposited from black clouds of fine, hot ash mixed with gas, blasting at high speed from the volcano. Ash-laden and heavier than air, the flow surged down the side of the volcano and along the river valley at more than 100 mph, hugging the ground and depositing ash.

The big surprise was that the sediment deposited in fine layers called laminae. You would expect a catastrophic, high-speed ash flow to churn the fine particles and form a uniform, well-mixed deposit. Thus, it had been conventionally thought that fine layers had to accumulate very slowly one upon the other over hundreds of years. But Mount St Helens showed that the coarse and fine material automatically separated into thin, distinct bands, demonstrating that such deposits can form very quickly from fast-flowing fluids (liquids and gases).

Since then, laboratory experiments have shown that fine laminae also form quickly from flowing water. This shows how finely-layered sandstone deposits in other situations, such as some of the lower layers in the Grand Canyon, likely formed rapidly, which could have happened within the time-scale of Noah’s Flood.

The Mount St Helens eruption also demonstrated how canyons can be formed much faster and in a different manner than conventionally thought. Ongoing eruptions eroded the thick sediment dumped at the base of the volcano, producing multiple channels and canyons. One such channel was dubbed ‘Little Grand Canyon’, being about 1/40^th the size of Grand Canyon … Someone coming across that canyon could easily conclude that it was eroded slowly and gradually by the small creek now running through it, over many hundreds or thousands of years.

However, this canyon was carved by a mudflow caused after a small eruption of Mount St. Helens melted snow within the crater on March 19, 1982. The mud built up behind debris, burst through it, and cut the canyon in a single day.

So, the creek did not cause the canyon. The canyon caused the creek.

Yet, by volcanic standards, even in historic times, the Mount St. Helens blast was relatively small, ejecting some 0.2 cubic miles of ash. The eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD was three times larger, Krakatoa in 1883 was 18 times bigger, and Tambora in 1815 was 80 times larger. The volume of lava in the Deccan Traps in India is some 5 million times more. These indicate that volcanic eruptions during Noah’s Flood were millions of times larger.

When we consider the true immensity of the biblical cataclysm, and how it impacted the whole Earth, Mount St. Helens helps us envisage how Noah’s Flood explains the geology of the world, and how it happened so quickly.

https://creation.com/lessons-from-mount-st-helens

Fast destruction

Lifescience.com, a science news website (and not a creationist organization), corroborates details about the eruption:

Mount St. Helens was once a beautiful, symmetrical example of a stratovolcano in the Cascades mountain range in southwestern Washington, rising to 9,600 feet above sea level. Then, on May 18, 1980, the once-quiet volcano erupted and blasted off the upper 1,000 feet of the summit. A horseshoe-shaped crater and a barren wasteland were all that remained.

Since then, the land has healed and recovered much of its natural beauty, but it’s likely Mount St. Helens won’t stay quiet forever …

On the morning of May 18, Keith and Dorothy Stoffel were making an aerial survey of the volcano when they noticed a landslide on the lip of the summit’s crater. Within seconds, the whole north face of the mountain was on the move. Just as they passed around to the east side of the mountain, the north face collapsed, releasing superheated gases and trapped magma in a massive lateral explosion. Keith put the plane into a steep dive to gain the speed to outrun the cloud of incandescent gas; Dorothy continued to photograph the eruption through the rear windows of the plane as they made their escape.

The abrupt release of pressure over the magma chamber created a “nuée ardente,” a glowing cloud of superheated gas and rock debris blown out of the mountain face moving at nearly supersonic speeds. Everything within eight miles of the blast was wiped out almost instantly, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The shockwave rolled over the forest for another 19 miles, leveling century-old trees; all the trunks neatly aligned to the north. Beyond this “tree down zone” the forest remained standing but was seared lifeless. The area devastated by the direct blast force covered an area of nearly 230 square miles.

Shortly after the lateral blast, a second, vertical explosion occurred at the summit of the volcano, sending a mushroom cloud of ash and gases more than 12 miles into the air. Over the next few days, an estimated 540 million tons of ash drifted up to 2,200 square miles, settling over seven states.

The heat of the initial eruption melted and eroded glacial ice and snow around the remaining part of the volcano. The water mixed with dirt and debris to create lahars, or volcanic mudflows. According to U.S.G.S., the lahars reached speeds of 90 mph and demolished everything in their path.

The 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption was the most destructive in U.S. history. Fifty-seven people died and thousands of animals were killed, according to U.S.G.S. More than 200 homes were destroyed, and more than 185 miles of roads and 15 miles of railways were damaged. Ash clogged sewage systems, damaged cars and buildings, and temporarily shut down air traffic over the Northwest. The International Trade Commission estimated damages to timber, civil works and agriculture to be $1.1 billion.

https://www.livescience.com/27553-mount-st-helens-eruption.html

A new view of history

The eruption of Mount St. Helens provides a unique look into the history of Earth. We saw rock formations develop before our eyes – formations that scientists previously thought took thousands or millions of years to grow.

The same science applies to the Grand Canyon, which proves that Noah’s Flood covered the Earth – and quickly.

Is Earth only a few thousand years old? I can’t say, of course. I wasn’t around when Earth was created. But the evidence suggests that it’s not as old as many people think it is.

We have the eruption of Mount St. Helens to thank for a lot of that.

Re-thinking church in an inner city

I’ve never been involved in a church plant before. There’s plenty of hope and excitement, but we don’t even know all the challenges we will face.

Our multi-campus church is planning to open a new campus in Lorain, Ohio, a self-described “international city” of about 63,000 people on the shores of Lake Erie about 30 miles west of Cleveland. As of 2016, whites comprised 51.7 percent of the city’s population, Hispanics 29.1 percent, blacks 14.5 percent and “two or more races” 3.1 percent.

http://www.city-data.com/city/Lorain-Ohio.html

I’m interested in this because my wife and I raised our three sons at an inner-city church in Saginaw, Michigan, with similar demographics to Lorain. Now that they are grown and on their own, I have more time to devote to this.

To learn more about planting a multi-ethnic church, the Lorain campus pastor and I attended a three-day conference on the topic in Chicago. It was eye-opening.

As a former newspaper guy, I took lots of notes. Here is a summary from the plenary speakers and workshop leaders I heard:

Church and society

If we want to be a multi-ethnic church, then the dominant culture cannot be more than 80 percent of the church. Research shows that if visitors see at least 20 percent of people in their ethnic group attending, then they feel like “members” and not “visitors.”  We should be strategic about seeking 20 percent of an ethnic group if we truly want to be multi-ethnic.

For some people, society does not work – economically, medically, socially, religiously, etc. These people do not trust any institutions. Church plants will take a long time for these people to trust. They may reject institutionalism, even if they hunger for God. To reach them, we might need to change the way we do church – why 11 a.m. services? Why does communion happen weekly or monthly? Etc. These are not wrong, but they are not in the Bible. What’s Biblical, and what’s cultural?

The new national divide is achiever vs. non-achiever. Achievers value the individual; non-achievers value the society. Most non-whites (as well as whites) are achievers. Achievers are mainstream; non-achievers live in the sub-culture.

Doing church

One speaker said white pastors are excellent at “three-point sermons with seven sub-points.” That’s fine, but that’s not how black preachers preach. If we want to reach black people, this might become an issue. Another example: Hispanics will show up late, then they will stay late. That’s their culture. We might need to re-think the way we do church.

The traditional church model: Meet Jesus, attend church, connect/serve/give, go into the world. This isn’t working; it’s too shallow.

The new model: Meet Jesus, attend church, deep change, go into the world.

How to accomplish deep change? We need to meet emotional, social, intellectual, physical and spiritual needs – all of them.  Which means all of those needs in my life, as a leader, must be met as well, or I will not be an effective leader. The Mary-Martha struggle: When are we focused on our actions at the expense of spending time with Jesus?

This is not a quick fix. It’s hard. It takes time.

Most people in our cities aren’t thinking about repentance, but about where their next meal is coming from. We must disciple them to conversion. We must offer Bible nuggets that people can relate to. “There’s a guy in the Bible who understands what you are going through …” (This means we have to know the Bible well, of course.)

Value in all cultures

Whites frequently will not get involved in a church (or any other organization) unless they lead it. Several speakers made this point. Whites often don’t leave room for other ethnic groups to lead – or if they do, they must follow the examples of whites. We often do this unconsciously.

There is no assimilating into one true culture in heaven. All cultures are good. Faith brings out the best in all of them. Every culture has stories to tell.

How much of church planting is led by whiteness? Most of it. It’s a strange mix of benevolence and oppression. This has become the only story. How do we liberate from whiteness (or any dominant culture)? According to the Bible, we die to it. We are not to assimilate, but to create a new story.

Jesus’ blood is the new story, for all cultures. His death and resurrection is the great equalizer for all of us. Jesus didn’t ask us to become Him. Instead, He became one of us.

Those of us in the dominant culture often forget that we have a culture. Everybody speaks with an accent except me, for example.

Marginalization happens when people are minimized in different ways. Marginalization often leads to oppression, which is defined as sin plus power.

Jesus went to the margins. He was surrounded by sinners and tax collectors and prostitutes and women and children. All of us need to go there, too.

Jesus gave us a table, and all the chairs around it are on the same level. No high chairs and low chairs. Everybody drinks from the same cup, and we share germs. All ethnic groups are equal before God.

History is not over

Blacks’ history is slavery. No other immigrant group can say that. We heard first-person testimonies from several ethnic minorities who have experienced racism in their lifetimes. My wife has a co-worker whose boyfriend is black. He recently was talking with several friends in the parking lot of the apartment complex in Lorain where he lives. Another resident of the apartment complex called the cops on him. His crime? Being black and talking with his friends. It happens still today, even in Lorain.

As white people, we cannot deny that these things happened, and are still happening. If we want to reach this population for Christ, we need to meet them where they are.

Perceptions

Another cultural difference: Whites often see themselves as a collection of individuals. Blacks see themselves as a community. This is crucial to understanding how we communicate differently.

For example, a white police officer in Houston recently killed a black man in his own apartment. Blacks wanted the world to feel his suffering and pain. They wanted pastors to talk about that the following Sunday. Our reaction as whites? We want more facts. Give us the details of what happened before we react.

This is huge. We must understand this difference.

Critique the culture

Cities – with density and proximity – amplify the opposition to the gospel.

There is little social pressure anymore to attend church. There are four basic religious beliefs, but some Americans don’t even have these:

1. There is a god.
2. There is moral truth.
3. There is sin.
4. There is an afterlife.

How do we evangelize in this setting?

We must critique the culture. The standards our culture offers don’t work. If your career is your primary motivator in life, what happens when – not if, but when – you lose it? If it’s to be a good person, you’ll never be good enough (maybe you haven’t committed adultery, but have you lusted? This is Jesus’ standard.) If it’s freedom, you aren’t, and you know it. If you live for money, you’ll never have enough. If you seek beauty, you’ll never feel beautiful. And on and on.

But if you serve Jesus, you’ll get forgiveness when you fail.

There are no merit-based scholarships in heaven. Only grace.

Also, there is no defense against:

1. Prayers of the saints.
2. Love of the saints.
3. Wise application of the word of God to your concerns.

Shorten the game, permanently

Cleveland Indians reliever Josh Tomlin, left, waits to be pulled during the eighth inning of a baseball game against the Oakland Athletics on June 30, 2018, in Oakland, Calif. (Marcio Jose Sanchez/The Associated Press)

 

When was the last time someone pitched long relief in Major League Baseball?

That happened when a starting pitcher got knocked out of the game in the first, second or third inning, and the relief pitcher who replaced him stayed in the game for three or four innings, sometimes even longer.

Long relief.

These days, if a starter leaves the game early, a parade of relievers comes in for one or two innings at a time, draining the bullpen of just about everyone available. But since each of them pitches only one inning (20 pitches or less, most likely), he’s available for tomorrow’s game as well. Flexibility, not performance, is the goal.

If a relief pitcher does his job well, he still gets taken out after an inning or two.

That’s why bullpens are such a crap shoot. If a reliever is having a good day, why not ride him? Save the rest of the bullpen for another day.

Instead, when teams put six or seven relievers on the pitcher’s mound in the same game, at least one of them is likely to have a bad day at the office. Oh well.

No purpose anymore

I did a Google search of middle relief or long relief pitchers. The current definition of “middle reliever” is anyone who isn’t a starter or closer. There’s no such thing as a long reliever anymore, unless it’s Andrew Miller – and, when healthy (which he isn’t at the moment), he pitches at most two innings at a time.

That’s why Josh Tomlin has no role on the Cleveland Indians, and hasn’t most of the season. He flunked as a starter earlier this year, so he became a mop-up guy who pitches only when the outcome of the game has already been decided. As a former starter he’s physically capable of pitching five or six innings at a time. But since that role doesn’t exist in today’s game, he gets an inning here, a batter there, just like any other reliever.

If he gives up a hit or two, he doesn’t get the chance to straighten himself out.

He wasn’t trained for one inning of relief. No wonder he’s struggling.

Baseball experts say he’s washed up.

Perhaps he is.

Or, perhaps he needs a new opportunity with another team, since the Indians no longer have a place for him.

Starters don’t finish

Which brings me to my second point about pitching.

News flash: Baseball games are nine innings long. No one, and I mean no one, associated with Major League Baseball remembers this anymore.

Starters are groomed to pitch six or seven innings, no more. Even all-stars.

In the past week, Corey Kluber and Trevor Bauer – both All-Stars this year – pitched shutout ball for seven and eight innings, respectively. Since they reached their pitch count maximum, they were taken out of the game.

The relievers cost both starters a win – and lost the games themselves. Badly.

 

Last Saturday, Kluber left after seven innings with a 3-0 lead. Reliever Neil Ramirez, who has had a good year so far, actually, gave up three runs to tie the game in only one-third of an inning. The game went extra innings, when Tomlin gave up three more runs as the Indians lost. (Five relievers pitched the four innings after Kluber left.)

On Tuesday, Bauer cruised through eight innings and exited with a 4-0 lead over the Cincinnati Reds. The Indians brought on their closer, Cody Allen, to pitch the ninth. He promptly gave up three runs and left the game with the bases loaded. The next reliever gave up a bases-clearing double and another run-scoring hit. After doing nothing for eight innings against Bauer, the Reds scored seven runs in the ninth inning – seven runs! – and the Indians lost probably their worst game of the season.

Protection, not performance

But no one cares, because it’s only July. Got to save those precious All-Star arms for September and October.

That’s the mind-set in baseball. Protection, not performance. No one is allowed to finish what they start. Games are decided by the crap shoot in the bullpen.

That’s why there will never be another 300-game winner. Ever.

The last to do it was Randy Johnson in 2009. I was blessed to see him pitch for the Yankees in Detroit in a playoff game in 2006. He is one of only 24 pitchers to reach that milestone.

Meanwhile, no pitcher reached 20 wins in a non-strike-shortened year for the first time in 2006; this was repeated in 2009 and 2017.

Kluber and Bauer pitched shutouts, and the team lost both games. That’s great for their personal stats, but not for the team.

The Indians have an outstanding starting pitching staff, and one of the best hitting teams in all of baseball. But their bullpen is awful. They should win the American League’s Central Division easily, because every other team in the division is rebuilding its roster and not seriously competing for the post-season.

Not a winning formula

Do the Indians have a recipe that could lead to a World Series victory?

History says no.

The 2013 Detroit Tigers were built in a similar fashion to this year’s Indians. They had an outstanding starting staff led by Justin Verlander, Max Scherzer and Doug Fister, and a top-notch batting order with Miguel Cabrera at the peak of his career.

But, in the words of Rob Neyer of SB Nation:

 

Now, about the relief pitching. Once the Tigers finally settled on a closer in June, their bullpen was no longer a running joke. Still, Detroit’s relievers did finish the season with a 4.01 ERA, fourth worst in the league and the worst among the league’s postseason teams. By the end, (manager) Jim Leyland didn’t seem to have much confidence in any of his relief pitchers, which left him making changes just about as quickly as the rules would allow …

Ultimately, this was a team that could really pitch (for seven innings) and really hit, but couldn’t do much else at all. Which can work. Which did work. It worked for six months, and given a little luck it might have worked for one more month. But the baserunning and the fielding and the relief pitching wasn’t likely to improve all of a sudden. Meanwhile, Miguel Cabrera got hurt and stopped hitting fastballs, and Prince Fielder drove in exactly zero runs in 40 postseason at-bats.

When you’re built solely on starting pitching and hitting and you take away the hitting … well, there’s just not enough left.

 

https://www.sbnation.com/2013/10/20/4857258/alcs-2013-detroit-tigers-red-sox-season-review

The Tigers beat the Oakland Athletics in the Division Series, then lost to the Boston Red Sox in the Championship Series.

The Indians of 2018 better keep hitting – all the way through October. Otherwise, the team has no chance to win the World Series.

The starting pitchers aren’t able to finish. The bullpen, as it stands, can’t finish.

And the Indians are one of the better teams in baseball.

That’s the way Major League Baseball is played today.

Many people complain that baseball games take too long. The latest proposal is to institute a time limit.

Here’s another option: Cut the game to seven innings.

Make starting pitching relevant again. And take away the need for long relievers.