Just say Noah
You’ll have to get in line behind me to see Ark Encounter if it opens as planned next year in Kentucky. I’m really looking forward to seeing how Noah managed to build a three-level, 500-foot-long wooden boat at least 5,900 years before the first Home Depot opened. At the age of 600. Without Craftsman power tools. (Haha!) But it’s in the Bible, so I believe he did.
Ark Encounter is being planned by the good folks who erected Creation World not too long ago – also in Kentucky. So, John Denver, you were wrong when you sang that West Virginia is “almost heaven.”
I was one of the 400,000 folks who visited the Creation Museum in 2007, when it opened. It does a real spiffy job of explaining that Earth is only 6,000 years old and that God created it in just six, 24-hour days. They get a lot of flack from nonbelievers saying that these numbers are way off. But I’m here to tell you that God – being God – could do anything he wanted to do, in whatever period of time he wanted to do it. And since calendars and watches hadn’t been invented yet, how can anyone be sure? Besides, God knew he had to be done in six days so people could make it to church on Sunday.
While I’m on the subject, I want to say that the folks who blessed us with the Creation Museum are also spot on when they depict dinosaurs and humans living together. “Scientists” tell us this isn’t so, but here is a little tidbit I’ll bet you didn’t know: No way would the God-fearing executives at network TV have let Hanna-Barbera get away with “The Flintstones” if there wasn’t some grain of truth to it. (I admit that foot-powered cars doesn’t make too much sense to me, but then, neither does the Internet. It will all be revealed on the One Great Day).
But back to Ark Encounter. No one at Tim’s Discount Lumber Yard could tell me how long a cubit is, but somehow the master builders at the Creation Museum figured it out for themselves and are planning to construct an exact replica of Noah’s mighty ship. Well, not quite exact because Tim doesn’t know what kind of tree produces “gopher wood.” But I’m willing to bet that Wolmanized lumber will be just as good, because God has a way of taking care of things like this. The new ark will have three decks – just like the original – and I hear there are plans to show how cagey old Noah, using the technology of the times, could have squeezed in two of every animal and invent a system to remove all that animal waste and ventilate the ship. (Princess Cruises could use that! Haha!)
I also can’t wait to see the First-Century Village, the Tower of Babel and 10 Plagues of Egypt ride that will accompany Ark Encounter. I wrote to Mike Zovath, co-founder and vice president of Ark Encounter, and suggested a “Hebrews of the Mediterranean” ride, but he hasn’t responded.
I read the other day that although Ark Encounter has $12.3 million in donations with another $12.7 million in pledges, it will take $23 million more to actually get the ark started. That’s a lot of “shekels,” to use the biblical term! So I voided my $50 check for Oklahoma tornado relief and rewrote one to Ark Encounter. It was an easy decision.
Do your part, that’s what the Golden Rule says.