A couple of weeks after returning from our trip to the Southwest, visiting Zion National Park and more, I came across a YouTube video of a guy hiking a remote trail in Zion. It intrigued me because I hadn’t seen that particular trail before, so I settled in for a few minutes to see what we might have missed.
Turns out, we wouldn’t have been able to hike the trail anyway. Only a limited number of hikers are allowed, and permits are required. They get gobbled up quickly, and we certainly would’ve been too late by the time I was exploring hikes.
The hiker/narrator talked us through, and like us, he marveled at the beauty all around him. One of the features of Zion’s rock formations you can see everywhere you turn are the layers upon layers solidified in stone. Our narrator observed these and offered one of the standard explanations.
Once upon a time, millions of years ago, he suggested, the entire area was under a vast ocean. Over a million years or so, the ocean receded, leaving behind a layer of sediment. Then the ocean grew again, bringing a new layer of sediment that was left behind when it once again receded. This process, he opined, continued repeatedly over hundreds of thousands of years. Then, a river left by the receding waters and fed by nearby higher elevations, gradually etched its way through a few thousand feet of rock, exposing the disparate layers as it cut deeper.
So today, we can visit Zion Canyon with the Virgin River running through it and see the results of this multi-million-year process of river carving through stone, exposing the layers of sediment left behind by a primordial ocean.
Well, that’s one theory. But I don’t buy it.
Another explanation for the dozens of layers in the rock formations is found in the biblical record of a global flood. Yes, I know, the notion is scoffed at and rejected by mainstream “science,” but not for a lack of evidence. More from a lack of willingness to consider that a book written a few thousand years ago was given to explain what actually happened on this planet.
Admittedly, on our trip through Zion, etc., we didn’t do anything resembling a thorough scientific exploration of the region as a whole or of specific rock layers and so forth. But what we observed, even casually, made perfect sense as the aftermath of the flood described in Genesis 7:
In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of the heavens were opened. And rain fell upon the earth forty days and forty nights. On the very same day Noah and his sons, Shem and Ham and Japheth, and Noah’s wife and the three wives of his sons with them entered the ark, they and every beast, according to its kind, and all the livestock according to their kinds, and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth, according to its kind, and every bird, according to its kind, every winged creature…. The flood continued forty days on the earth. The waters increased and bore up the ark, and it rose high above the earth. The waters prevailed and increased greatly on the earth, and the ark floated on the face of the waters. And the waters prevailed so mightily on the earth that all the high mountains under the whole heaven were covered. The waters prevailed above the mountains, covering them fifteen cubits deep [that is, nearly 25 feet]. And all flesh died that moved on the earth, birds, livestock, beasts, all swarming creatures that swarm on the earth, and all mankind. Everything on the dry land in whose nostrils was the breath of life died.
One of the challenges we face in trying to make sense of our observations is the lack of a reference point. In other words, we don’t know what the planet was like prior to the flood, so it’s impossible to know the full extent of a global flood’s impact.
My purpose in this brief post is not to try to answer all the objections to and present all the evidence in favor of the Genesis flood. The secularist who rejects the Bible presupposes that The Flood never happened; therefore, he has to come up with other explanations for what he observes. I, too, begin with a presupposition: what the Bible tells us happened as recorded in Genesis 6-7 is historical fact.
With that presupposition firmly held, I conclude that the marvelous beauty we beheld in Zion National Park, Grand Staircase-Escalante, and the Valley of Fire came about from one of the ugliest events on the planet, the global flood.
An ugly event because of the cause.
The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.… So the Lord said, “I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens, for I am sorry that I have made them.”
Genesis 6:5, 7
Ugly because of the effect.
…the waters prevailed so mightily on the earth that all the high mountains under the whole heaven were covered…
Everything on the dry land in whose nostrils was the breath of life died.
We don’t have to look far to see evidence of the ugly cause of the Flood to this day. Violence, hatred, greed, perversion, destructive addictions, malice, slander—vice of every kind pervades our world, just as it did the pre-flood world. I’m guessing things were worse then, but likely not by much. One of the differences would be the beauty God has brought about after the ugliness. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
On our trip, we heard about evidence of the Flood’s ugly effect of death. Mass graves of ancient dinosaurs pocket the region. Fossil remains of sea creatures locked in stone layers at 5-6,000 feet above sea level. Petrified trees buried in the earth, some standing vertically through multiple rock layers.
But we could see all around us the evidence of the Flood’s effect on the earth. Not simply the multiple layers of different kinds of rock, but the cataclysmic way the layers were sometimes thrown together. Everywhere we went in the region, we came across the after-effects of massive layers of land smashing against one another, of undersea dunes preserved in rock formations thousands of feet above sea level, of earth in upheaval, surviving destructive horror.
It all must have been very, very ugly. Unimaginably ugly.
But not now. It fills us with wonder and awe. Overwhelms us with beauty.
The more I pondered all of this, it dawned on me how like God this is. He is masterful at bringing something beautiful out of chaotic ugliness.
Remember how everything began?
“The earth was without form and void.” A dark, empty chaos. Until He finished His creative work, and then?
Paradise.
Remember what God did right after the flood? I don’t think we can imagine how grotesque the water-soaked, death-filled planet must have been. How awful the stench. How ugly. And God painted the first rainbow in the sky—a beautiful phenomenon that still captures our gaze thousands of years later.
The Bible recounts the lives of countless individuals and circumstances that on some level were quite loathsome to behold. And He made something beautiful.
Consider the lives and legacies of Abraham…Jacob…Joseph…David…Peter…Paul…and, yes, Mary (Magdalene, of course).
Then, consider the Roman cross, the ultimate in ugly cruelty.
Do you know the gospel song?
“On a hill far away stood an old rugged cross, the emblem of suffering and shame…”
“O that old rugged cross, so despised by the world…”
Yet the hymn-writer George Bennard continued, declaring that cross “has a wondrous attraction to me” and “In that old rugged cross…a wondrous beauty I see…”
Wait! What? How could something so ugly be attractive and beautiful? Mr. Bennard explains.
“I love that old cross where the dearest and best for a world of lost sinners was slain….”
And, it has a wondrous attraction…
“for the dear Lamb of God left His glory above to bear it to dark Calvary.”
And there is a spell-bounding beauty in that cross, “for twas on that old cross Jesus suffered and died, to pardon and sanctify me.”
So I’ll cherish the old rugged cross,
Til my trophies at last I lay down.
I will cling to the old rugged cross
And exchange it someday for a crown.
And here’s another marvelous, transforming Divine work. The one who looks on that cross, to the Savior who died there in his place and suffered the penalty for his sins, and who trusts wholly in the “dear Lamb of God” as his Savior—to this one God takes the ugliness of a life of sin and an eternity of woe and makes a new creation.
As the Apostle Paul explains,
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.
2 Corinthians 5:17
And once we see Him on that cross with the eyes of faith, and its ugliness becomes a thing of great beauty, then…
We all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.
2 Corinthians 3:18a
God indeed seems to specialize in bringing forth beauty from ugly!
