THE Story

THE Story

The story is really God's story, or as we like to call it, HisStory.

This is a condensed overview and may raise more questions than answers. Rest assured those questions do have answers, and we're happy to talk with you or direct you to another person or ministry that can help you better understand God's story and its implications for our daily journey through life.

While there is a much bigger story, our focus is on God's creation and mankind's original rebellion, followed by God's judgment—the reason behind the scars we see even today.

Creation and the Fall

A little over 6,000 years ago, God created time, energy, space, and matter, along with the laws of nature, the earth, and the universe. He then created every living thing that inhabits the earth, including information systems and interdependent biological systems. As the final capstone of His creation, He created humans, both male and female.

God placed the first couple, Adam and Eve, in a beautiful garden He created out of nothing and gave them just one prohibition: they were not to eat the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Even with plenty of other trees bearing amazing fruit, they still chose to disobey and eat from the forbidden tree. By doing so, they broke their relationship with their Creator.

The Great Flood

Over the next roughly 1,600 years, generations passed, and mankind became more and more disobedient, violent, and evil. God found a righteous man named Noah and instructed him to build a large ship that would be big enough to carry his family of eight plus two (male and female) of every kind of creature, both wild and domestic. Noah and his sons built the ark and welcomed others to join them. Just as amazing as it sounds that Adam and Eve broke the only rule in the garden, it's equally baffling that no one chose the path of salvation by boarding the ship.

God had warned that He was going to wipe out all of mankind, along with the animals and birds, and He did exactly what He said He would do. The ensuing worldwide flood completely changed the surface of the earth from how it was originally created, with everything being completely rearranged. The earth's sediments were carried by currents all over the globe, the continents likely broke apart, and those sediments were laid down in the various layers we see today. Since they were formed in water, they were capable of being bent and folded, and each layer was quickly laid upon the one below, leaving little or no time for erosion or other geological processes. As the waters became less violent and flowed into the newly created seas, many of the visible landscape scars we see today were formed.

After their one-year voyage, the people and animals left the ark, and the first thing God did was set a rainbow in the clouds with a promise to never flood the entire earth again—a promise we can be confident He will keep.

After the Flood

We can see that God displayed His judgment upon mankind through the flood, but He also tells us there's another day coming that will be even worse because mankind's rebellion against God has only increased. The next time, the earth will be destroyed by fire.

A couple hundred years after the flood, mankind again rebelled against God by not obeying His directive to populate the earth. Instead, they stayed together and formed a big city called Babel. So God disrupted their plans and divided their languages so they would disperse with their different language groups. Those separated people groups and their DNA subsets are what some call different races today, but we believe there is only one human race, the visual differences are just genetic variations from that language dispersement that occurred at Babel.

God's Promise of Salvation

Not long after that dispersion, God called a man named Abraham to follow Him. God made several promises to Abraham, and we'll focus on one of the most important: He promised that Abraham would have a descendant who would act as a deliverer of mankind from God's impending judgment—one even more serious than the flood.

That descendant is Jesus Christ, God Himself, who entered His own creation as a baby to live as a human. He committed no crimes and was therefore the only person who could pay for mankind's rebellion against a perfectly holy God. One man's disobedience in the Garden doomed all of mankind to eternal separation from God. One Man's sacrifice provided the way for all of mankind to be reconciled to God for eternity. Our right response is to turn from following our natural disobedient nature, put our faith in Jesus Christ, and learn about Him in the Bible so we can obey Him, follow Him, and become His disciple.

Why Scargazers Matters

The purpose of Scargazers is to share the visible scars all over the world. Even though many are amazingly beautiful, they also serve as a reminder of what happened to the earth, people, and animals because of mankind's rebellion, violence, and evil. God provided the ark as the only means of salvation last time. This time, the only means of salvation is through Jesus Christ.

The scars we see in the landscape aren't just geological curiosities—they're reminders of God's judgment and His faithfulness to His word. But they also point us to the hope we have in Christ, who offers us rescue from the coming judgment, just as Noah's ark offered rescue from the flood.