Passages Dealing With Judgments of the Earth

In last week’s post I included a quote by Pastor Barnhouse which stated that because of Satan’s rebellion that the world “was blasted to chaos with a single breath from God.” This week I would like to continue on with that theme to provide a bit more detail regarding Bible passages which support such a judgment.

I am not going to provide a couple of quotes from Pastor Barnhouse (if you want that then please buy his book here):

Let us now consider some of the evidence substantiating the fact of God’s intervention in creation to wreck it by a great catastrophe at the time Lucifer made his bold bid for power. Many details are to be found in various passages of the Old Testament which cannot be applied to any moment in time other than that described in the second verse in the Bible. In the book of Jeremiah, we read: “I beheld the earth, and, lo, it was without form and void; and the heavens, and they had no light. I beheld the mountains, and, lo, they trembled, and all the hills moved lightly. I beheld, and lo, there was no man, and all the birds of the heavens were fled. I beheld, and, lo, the fruitful place was a wilderness, and all the cities thereof were broken down at the presence of the Lord, and his fierce anger” (Jeremiah 4:23-26). By quoting in Jeremiah the second verse of Genesis, God has placed this passage in time for us. Jeremiah’s vision is of the earth made waste and desolate; of the earth in the catastrophe that came in judgment and not in creation, since God states so exactly that He did not create the earth in chaos (Isaiah 45:18, R.S.V.).

The Invisible War
p 36

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At the end of Job’s great testing the Lord appeared to him, vindicating him in the matter of charges brought against him by his “comforters.” And in the divine revelation of the person and power of God to His suffering servant, whose body and soul had become a battlefield in the invisible war, God makes reference to the original creation, the catastrophe of judgment, and the re-formation that followed. “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding. Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it? Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or who laid the corner stone thereof; When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” (Job 38:4-7). Then, in the next verse, after this description of the creation, we move on immediately to the scene of great judgment. “Or who shut up the sea with doors, when it brake forth, as if it had issued out of the womb? When I made the cloud the garment thereof, and thick darkness a swaddling band for it, and brake up for it my decreed place, and set bars and doors, and said, Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further: and here shalt thy proud waves be stayed?” (Job 38: 8-11). After these two sections on the original creation and judgment, the Lord then proceeds to speak of the re-formation, reminding Job of the time when He had spoken on the first of the six days, commanding the morning and causing “the dayspring to know his place; that it might take hold of the ends of the earth, that the wicked might be shaken out of it?” (Job 38:12, 13).

The Invisible War
p 37

I am sure that many Christian theologians have interpreted these passages as being allegorical. The problem I have with many theologians is that when they get into difficult passages they tend to allegorize them. Not that the Bible doesn’t have some allegory but this way of interpreting seems way too a way to move past passages that should require a lot of thought.

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