Times Before Time

By David Kiker

The truth of history, when finally recovered, is more fascinating than any tale of fiction could ever be! This treatise of history will enrich and enliven your understanding of your origin and the events that shaped and formed the world in which you live. When the account in the Bible is applied to Jewish tradition, the record preserved by Josephus and other ancient historians, and the ancient Greek traditions called myths, much can be learned about the preflood world, which, heretofore, has been considered lost to human knowledge! Here within it is proven that history of ancient times and history contained in the Bible can be beautifully harmonized! The Bible is not a history textbook. It is a guidebook! Without it, nothing important in ancient history can be rightly understood. But this does not mean all history is recorded in the Bible. Scripture is the starting point of study. It opens up solutions to secular records that could not otherwise be understood. This exposition begins at creation and concludes at the time when Joseph, Job, and the Israelites are all living in Egypt at a fabulous period in biblical history. The intelligence that created is outside the creation and thus is not affected by time, space, and matter. A spirit being is not composed of matter. You have to have space and matter for time to exist. You have to have matter for there to be space and time. Without matter and time, you would not have space. This continuum had to come together simultaneously as a result of intelligent design.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Covenant Books, Inc.
• Release date: Aug 20, 2018
• ISBN: 9781643004044

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Times Before Time

David Kiker

ISBN 978-1-64300-403-7 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64300-404-4 (Digital)

Copyright © 2018 David Kiker

All rights reserved

First Edition

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

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Preface

I have fervently endeavored to assemble and judiciously evaluate all pertinent material in an effort to address an issue presented by the famous historian, Hendrik Van Loon. Here are his candid words: We live under the shadow of a gigantic question mark. What are we? Where did we come from? Whither are we bound?

Although I have not addressed all questions presented by this historian, I have brought to bear much light to the question Where did we come from? Out of necessity, I frequently had to abstract facts by means of hypothesis in my attempt to reconstruct ancient history. I had to be creative because facts do not automatically arrange themselves.

If I allowed myself to bear the limitations of conventional interpretation (historical method), this treatise of history would not be possible.

Introduction

The truth of history, when finally recovered, is more fascinating than any tale of fiction could ever be! This treatise of history will enrich and enliven your understanding of your origin and the events that shaped and formed the world in which you live.

When the account in the Bible is applied to Jewish tradition, the record preserved by Josephus and other ancient historians and the ancient Greek traditions called myths, much can be learned about the preflood world, which, heretofore, has been considered lost to human knowledge! Here within, it is proven that history of ancient times and history contained in the Bible can be beautifully harmonized!

The Bible is not a history textbook. It is a guidebook! Without it, nothing important in ancient history can be rightly understood. But this does not mean all history is recorded in the Bible. Scripture is the starting point of study. It opens up solutions to secular records that could not otherwise be understood.

This exposition begins at creation and concludes at the time when Joseph, Job, and the Israelites are all living in Egypt at a fabulous period in biblical history.

Part 1

Before Adam

Chapter 1

Creation and Chaos

C ertainly, the Bible is the source of my religion, stated a modern-day professing Christian. "However, we all realize that the first eleven chapters are myth !"

This outlook immediately presents a problem. If the first part of the Bible is questionable, so would all the rest be.

Bible: True from the Very First Verse

The Bible’s answer to this modern concept is clearly stated in Psalm 119:160, Jewish translation: The beginning of thy word is truth! God knew the opening portion of the Bible would bring forth the most controversy. Therefore, He has backed up its absolute validity in plain language.

The beginning of all things is extremely important. If man cannot know where and how he began, he cannot know where he is going. But, if he has the correct start, the rest of the way becomes clear.

The Bible, and the Bible alone, gives man the correct start in understanding the origin of all elements of his universe, world, and society. Without that correct start, man can never arrive at the true answers to his questions and problems. He will simply continue to grope aimlessly—ever learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth!

Modern scientific man, having dispersed with God as superstition, is groping around in his intellectual vanity! In his vain search for godless explanations of origins and beginnings while clinging to the idol known as science, he has come up with two basic science fiction ideas: evolution and a phantom called prehistory.

Leaving evolution for the time being, consider the concept of prehistory. Prehistoric time supposedly refers to man’s earliest experience, which is nowhere recorded in written records. This concept incidentally has become popular only within the last century.

But is prehistoric time an actual fact? Let the Bible answer. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Time is coeval with creation because time is measured by the created heavenly bodies. The Bible then provides a record that reaches back to the very beginning of time! The idea of prehistory or prehistoric time cannot be reconciled with Scripture, for there is no period of time the Bible does not cover!

The Bible begins at the very beginning—the original creation of the physical earth and universe.

Actually, however, to make the second complete, it should be noted that the Bible, in other portions, actually provides a glimpse of events even prior to its opening verse!

Before the Beginning

Robert Shapiro, professor emeritus of chemistry at New York University, clings tenaciously to the idea that life arose by chance in some fashion not yet fully understood rather than creation having a creator. This scientist as do many scientists believe that somehow life began by chemicals spontaneously assembled forming complex molecules and began replicating. These scientists speculate that their major components arrived on earth from outer space and that the organic soup these components arrived into was formed by rain striking rock over eons of time, breaking down the components to form a pool of minerals. In essence, this is saying that life came from a rock.

Scientists have absolutely no proof that life is not the result of creation. For a so-called simple cell to come into being, three types of complex molecules must work together—RNA (ribonucleic acid), DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), and proteins. You would need fifty amino acids to come together in the correct combination and in a favorable environment to make up one of the elements of the first living cell (the proteins). Nucleotides are necessary for DNA and RNA, but no nucleotide of any kind has ever been found in any studies of meteorites. Energy in the atmosphere (an electric spark in some cases) would be required to split the compounds to make one amino acid. Once having been formed, the amino acid would quickly decompose due to destructive ultraviolet radiation in the atmosphere unless somehow protected. If the amino acids reached the organic soup and were protected from the destructive ultraviolet radiation in the atmosphere, what then? Beneath the surface of the water there would not be enough energy to activate further chemical reactions; water in any case inhibits the growth of more complex molecules (The Neck of the Giraffe by Francis Hitching, 1982, page 65).

The idea of life forming in an organic soup is a total impossibility. Many scientists support the evidence that RNA molecule cannot form nor long exist in a liquid environment. This presents itself to be a big problem for evolutionists in that, without RNA, a cell forming in an organic soup could never have happened. Concerning life spontaneously coming into existence, chemist Richard Dickerson explains, It is, therefore, hard to see how polymerization (linking together smaller molecules to form bigger ones) could have proceeded in the aqueous environment of the primitive ocean, since the presence of water favors depolymerization (breaking up big molecules into simpler ones) rather than polymerization (Scientific American, Chemical Evolution and the Origin of Life by Richard E. Dickerson, September 1978, page 79).

Biochemist George Wald agrees with this view, stating that spontaneous dissolution is much more probable and, hence, proceeds much more rapidly than spontaneous synthesis. This means there would be no accumulation of organic soup! Wald believes this to be the most stubborn problem that confronts us [evolutionists] (Scientific American, The Origin of Life by George Wald, August 1954, pages 49 and 50).

Chew on this: RNA is required to make proteins, yet proteins are involved in the production of RNA. Enzymes are needed to produce a special energy molecule called adenosine triphosphate (ATP), but energy from ATP is needed to produce enzymes. DNA is required to make enzymes, but enzymes are required to make DNA. Also, other proteins can be made only by a cell, but a cell can be made only with proteins. The extremely complex molecules that make up a cell—DNA, RNA, and proteins—are designed to work together; hence, a creator that designed.

The Beginning

The material universe is not the creator of life; it is consciousness that creates all that is material. Intelligence existed prior to matter. Our physical vehicle did not generate our consciousness. In Genesis 2:7, it states that when the Creator breathed the breath of life into Adam’s nostrils, the man became a living being. If our body generated our consciousness, then our consciousness dies when we die.

The first verse of Scripture is packed with meaning! An expanded paraphrase helps to make plain its full significance: In an original beginning time, an untold number of years ago, the God family (Elohim is the Hebrew uniplural word translated God) created out of invisible energy (Hebrews 11:3) in perfect order, harmony, and beauty (the Hebrew word for created (barah) carries this meaning) the physical earth and universe.

The Bible records that the original vast creation was so overwhelmingly beautiful that the angels shouted for sheer joy when they beheld it for the first time (Job 38:7).

Scientists have analyzed the minerals of both the earth and outer space and have guessed at their age. Hundreds of millions of years is the claim (The Bible as History by Werner Keller, pages 409 to 415).

Earth’s First Catastrophe

Many Bible translators—Goodspeed and Moffatt are two examples—combine the first two verses of the Bible as if they were speaking of the same period of time. This is a common misconception that has caused millions to misunderstand the very beginning of the Bible!

It is vital to understand this. The first two verses of the Bible are speaking of two separate and distinct events. They are widely separated in time—by an untold number of years!

The true meaning of the second verse of the Bible is this: Now (Jewish translation, implying a later period of time) the earth had become (the correct rendering of the verb, not was) chaotic, and an undistinguishable ruin and darkness was upon the face of the muddy ocean depths.

The first verse of the Bible pictures a perfectly beautiful and harmonious creation.

The second verse of the Bible shows an earth that has become a chaotic wreck!

A perfect creation and a complete destruction occur within the first two verses of Genesis! This is what the Bible reveals! What brought about this destruction?

The Bible does not tell the cause of this chaos at its opening because God, at this stage of the story, does not want to divert our minds from the concept of creation—the tremendously important realization that there was a beginning and a beginner! Other parts of the story are reserved till later.

A Picture of the World from Geology

In the world before Adam, there were physical plants and animals at this time. Geologists have discovered fossils in the strata of the earth, which show what one could have seen in the pre-Adamic creation.

It would have been an amazing sight to behold! It was a world characterized by giant dinosaurs that weighed as much as forty tons! Some roamed the land; some were sea creatures, and others actually could fly!

In addition to these gargantuan reptiles, there were giant insects that filled the air. Huge plants covered the ground, comprising vast and dense forests, which far surpassed even our densest jungle of today.

To put it in geologic terms, these were the creatures and plants of the Mesozoic and Paleozoic eras in the geological time scale. The last or upper portion of the Mesozoic Era is termed Early Cretaceous. It contains the last deposits of the pre-Adamic world. (Upper or Late Cretaceous then contains material of Adam’s time and after.)

The geologists assign long periods of time to these so-called eras because they think the animals in them evolved over an immense duration. But actually, these layers show in what order these creatures were buried. The larger creatures were in the higher strata because they tended to get buried later than the smaller creatures!

In other words, the fossil remains in the earth do not show the process of evolution but the relative order of burying in a great catastrophe, which occurred before any men existed.

Man and mammals appear later in the geological picture (in the Cenozoic era), not because it took them a long time to evolve but because they were created later! The geologist Dunbar has provided us with a startling admission: Fossils provide the only historical, documentary evidence that life has evolved from simple to more and more complex forms (Historical Geology, page 47, emphasis added).

Now bear this in mind: Evolution teaches that the strata of the earth were laid down slowly and in perfectly smooth and uniform fashion by the land areas slowly rising above and sinking below the ocean waters. This is theory known as uniformitarianism. And during these long ages covering millions of years, plants and animals were supposedly slowly evolving from the original single living cell, which once had miraculously appeared down by the warm seashores!

But here is the catch! If such a process did go on in the distant undeterminable past, no fossils could have ever been buried! Why? Because fossils, in order to be preserved, must be buried suddenly and packed lightly in sediment where no air can ever reach them! A sudden burying must take place; otherwise, the plant or animal will decay! If the evolutionary concept is true, all fossils would have decayed and none would exist!

So the unanswerable question for the evolutionists is If evolution was an extremely gradual process but fossils can be formed only by sudden burying, how can fossils prove evolution?

A great catastrophe struck this earth, and all the strange creatures of the pre-Adamic age were buried, and geologists themselves call this the first time of great dying! But they cannot explain why all these life forms suddenly became extinct.

If they had analyzed the Bible to see what it really does say, they would have had to understand the full significance of only the very first two verses!

A number of fundamentalist church denominations believe the Bible account of Noah’s flood. But these groups do not understand the great catastrophe that occurred after Genesis 1:1. Consequently, they try to interpret all the geological evidence of destruction and stratification evident in the layers of the earth’s crust on the basis of only one deluge!

But the unbelieving geologists realize this explanation is entirely illogical and out of harmony with the evidence. Therefore, they reject the Bible account because they believe it says the same thing the fundamentalist interpreters think it says.

If the agnostic geologist would lay aside the assumptions he has inherited from others and read the Bible with an open mind, he would discover that the Scripture is scientifically correct!

Chapter 2

Recreation and Eden

The second verse of the Bible gives us a picture of an earth that had been totally smashed! It was a ball of mud and water out in space. All life on its surface had died—drowned in great flooding and tidal waves—and then buried in mud, silt, and debris!

Water covered the earth (notice the words deep and waters in verse 2), water that was filled with sediment and debris. The atmosphere had been polluted also because darkness hung over the earth and no light could reach its surface.

The Cause of Chaos

What caused this pollution of air and water? The answer: tremendous volcanic activity! The earth seems to have erupted with vast outflows of superheated lava! Volcanic deposits on the continents and ocean bottoms provide the proof of the catastrophe that tore the earth.

This unbelievable volcanic action caused terrible thick gaseous clouds and ash to be thrown into the atmosphere. This is why thick darkness literally covered the entire surface of the earth!

The vast subterranean outflow of hot lava raised the temperature of the oceans! Terrible poisonous gases circulated through the waters as the result of the horrible fumes pouring out from within the earth. All life in the sea was poisoned and boiled by this volcanic eruption!

No deposits below the ocean waters are found beneath this volcanic level. Deep corings into the ocean bottoms have not produced a single deposit below the Upper Cretaceous! The tremendously hot lava melted and fused everything along the ocean floor! What deposits existed at that time rendered unrecognizable.

Now the scientists say this could not have happened all at once because then all ocean life would have died and there could have been no evolution. With all marine life extinguished, the evolutionary process could not have continued. But this is exactly what happened! This destruction resulted in the sudden extinction of all life on earth. Again, scientific findings prove evolution a dead theory and the Bible true in every particular (The Deep and the Past, David Ericson and Goesta Wollin, New York, 1964, pages 256 to 268).

Now notice the last part of the second verse: And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. God was doing something to the waters! This was even before God said, Let there be light." Nowhere later in this first chapter of the Bible do we read of God cleaning up the oceans to prepare them for sea life, so that is what must have been going on at this point. God, through the power of His Spirit, was purifying the muddy waters to prepare them to support life when the fifth day of creation week arrived.

Now it is time for a summary of what God did when recreating the earth and preparing it for human habitation.

The First Day

It is well to bear in mind that the story of creation here is told from the point of view of a person down on the surface of the earth. Moses wrote it from this perspective.

Thus, when God said, Let there be light, He was saying, Let the light shine through to the surface of the earth. The sun had been there from the original creation (verse 1), but its light could not reach the earth because of the dense haze in the atmosphere. Now God purified the air, so the darkness disappeared.

Verses 4 and 5 tell us of the origin of day and night. God divided the light from the darkness by causing the earth to begin spinning on its axis.

The Second Day

On the second day, God made the firmament (verses 6–8), the expanse or space that separates the clouds in its upper regions from the seas below it. This word firmament is an unfortunate translation. These verses are actually speaking of the atmosphere, the deep blanket of air that covers the earth. Scientifically, this is called the troposphere, the portion of the atmosphere below the stratosphere. In other words, on this day, God literally said, Let there be an atmosphere!

The very existence of our atmosphere is itself a miracle! If it did not have proper composition and density, no life could exist on our planet. Our atmosphere is made up largely of nitrogen (78 percent) and oxygen (21 percent), but it also contains essential amounts of argon, carbon dioxide, water vapor, as well as traces of neon, helium, methane, krypton, xenon, hydrogen, ozone, and a few others. The rare gases present in our atmosphere exist in much smaller amounts than anywhere else in the universe while the proportions of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and water vapor are much greater! If the ingredients of our atmosphere followed the proportions prevalent around other planets, life on earth would be impossible. An error such as having too much or too little of even one gas would make the earth uninhabitable!

Beyond its perfect chemical composition, which makes human, animal, and plant life possible, the atmosphere performs other vital functions. It shields us from the constant barrage of meteors that reach the earth. It provides a perfect blanket of insulation against both heat and cold. Were it not for our atmosphere preventing the rapid rise of heat, we would be frozen hard as a board in one night! The atmosphere holds and distributes heat, maintaining temperatures at mild levels.

But even more startling is the fact that the atmospheric layers protect us from dangerous ultraviolet rays from the sun. One major example is this: a thin layer of ozone forty miles up miraculously protects life on earth from eight killer rays. If this little belt of ozone would suddenly drift into space, all life on earth would perish! Ozone itself is poisonous to human beings, but thousands of feet above us, it acts as a protective shield!

The point is clear. Such an atmosphere as ours, with its perfect balance of layers and gases, could not be the result of sheer chance! The existence of the atmosphere proves the existence of the Creator! And because its composition and functions remain essentially unchanged, this is proof that He maintains and sustains it. With every breath of air we take, we prove God exists!

Notice then that God created the atmosphere early in the orderly progression of creation week as a necessary prerequisite for the living things that were soon to be brought into existence.

The Third Day

When the third day of creation week arrived, the earth still lay prostrate under a covering of water! But now God began reshaping the surface of the home of man. He caused the dry land to appear by raising the continents from their covering of water (verses 9 and 10).

Following this great demonstration of power, God brought into existence the fruits, vegetables, grasses, and grains necessary to sustain human and animal life. These types of vegetation were not extant in the previous world because that world was not designed to support human life.

In this connection, it is significant to note that evolution is never discussed in terms of plant fossils, the remains of vegetation in the strata of the earth. Grains, grasses, fruit-bearing trees, and so on are never found before the Cenozoic Era, the time when man came to inhabit the earth. Grass, for example, was made for mammals, and mammals were made for man. But giant tropical trees, as geologic evidence shows, did exist before grass.

However, no evolutionist would admit trees evolving into grass! That would be evolution in reverse! Thus, the remains of plants from past ages prove the Bible true and evolution a disproven theory!

The Fourth Day

This is the day that God, in a figurative sense, created his calendar, a calendar that man can never change because it is based on the solar system and the entire universe! In other words of verse 14, God set the astral bodies for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years (Luke 21:25).

The sacred calendar, which God commissioned the Jewish people to preserve along with the Old Testament, is simply a record on paper of what goes on in God’s calendar, stretching over the vastness of space!

On this fourth day then, God positioned the sun, moon, and stars in correct and harmonious relationship. He made the sun and moon to visibly govern day and night and months and years. And He assigned the solar system its precise orbital pattern.

At this point, we should compare verse 3 with verses 14 and 16, the description of days one and six of creation week. Confusion often arises over the translation of the verbs in these verses.

In verse 3 when God said, Let there be light, the word let from Hebrew doesn’t mean to create or make; it means to manifest what was previously in existence. God was simply saying, Let the light shine through to the surface of the earth.

Now look at verse 14. Here the Hebrew word for let is an entirely different word from that used in verse 3. By this time, the atmosphere had been completely purified, and the heavenly bodies were now unveiled in all their glory. Whereas only light had been manifested before, now the sun, moon, and stars become visible for the first time as they were placed in correct relative position to the earth.

Verse 16 makes this even more precise. Here we read, And God made two great lights. Once again, a clearer translation of the verb makes this plain. The verb made is the Hebrew "asah. The meaning of this Hebrew word is constituted, appointed, or ordained." God appointed the sun and the moon to rule the day and the night.

By way of review, notice how God’s re-creation progressed: on the first day, from an already existing heaven (sun, moon, and stars) and earth, God manifested light through the darkness of the clouded atmosphere. The atmosphere was prepared on the second day. Dry land and vegetation appeared on the third day. Then on the fourth day, the sun, moon, and stars became clearly visible for the first time. This is when they were appointed or ordained for special purposes: for signs, seasons, days, and years and to give light upon the earth. Notice how orderly and logically God’s work was carried out!

The Fifth Day

In the next twenty-four-hour period, God brought into existence all the types of sea life and