2 Peter 3 – Poetry, Short Prose and Walking

Six Sentence Story: God Wills That All Be Saved

After listening to the song, Saint Augustine in Hell, Gregory asked John, his father confessor, how anyone could imagine that Saint Augustine might be in hell.

Well, Father John explained, Saint Augustine was a saint and God wills all to be saved, so there’s a very good chance that he’s in heaven. But he did teach that only some, not all, of us were predestined to go to heaven – predestined before we were even born so we could not boast that we had anything to do with it, so – if he’s right – he might be one of those unfortunate ones the Lord never knew.

Unable to lace his doubts into a secure knot of preservation with these vague words, Gregory cried, Please, Father John, I’ve got to know!

You, my son, I trust will be in heaven, Father John assured him, because you love God with your whole heart, because you follow where He leads and because God wills that all be saved just as you do, so when you get there ask for Saint Augustine and rejoice when he greets you. If it turns out that you can’t remember his name, then rejoice nonetheless in the Lord.

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Denise offers the prompt word “lace” to be used in this week’s Six Sentence Stories.

1 Timothy 2:1-4 KJV – 1 I exhort therefore, that, first of all, supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks, be made for all men;
2 For kings, and for all that are in authority; that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty.
3 For this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Saviour;
4 Who will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth.

2 Peter 3:9 KJV – 9 The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.

Romans 10:9-13 KJV – 9 That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.
10 For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.
11 For the scripture saith, Whosoever believeth on him shall not be ashamed.
12 For there is no difference between the Jew and the Greek: for the same Lord over all is rich unto all that call upon him.
13 For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.

Saint Augustine, On the Predestination of the Saints, Chapter 16: Faith, then, as well in its beginning as in its completion, is God’s gift; and let no one have any doubt whatever, unless he desires to resist the plainest sacred writings, that this gift is given to some, while to some it is not given. But why it is not given to all ought not to disturb the believer, who believes that from one all have gone into a condemnation, which undoubtedly is most righteous; so that even if none were delivered therefrom, there would be no just cause for finding fault with God. Whence it is plain that it is a great grace for many to be delivered, and to acknowledge in those that are not delivered what would be due to themselves; so that he that glories may glory not in his own merits, which he sees to be equalled in those that are condemned, but in the Lord. But why He delivers one rather than another —His judgments are unsearchable, and His ways past finding out. Romans 11:33 For it is better in this case for us to hear or to say, O man, who are you that repliest against God? Romans 9:20 than to dare to speak as if we could know what He has chosen to be kept secret. Since, moreover, He could not will anything unrighteous.

Fossils

We are back in South Carolina. As I was putting mulch around some bushes I noticed the fossils in a bit of mudrock we brought back from a property we once owned on Green Bay in Wisconsin. That rock (along with the mulch) are shown in the photo above.

Ten years ago when I found the stone I tried to identify the fossils¹ in it using a field guide. The field guide said that they were between 300 to 400 million years old (assuming I remember what it said correctly and matched what was in the book with what was in my hand).

I was impressed, but I was also disappointed that they weren’t 600 million years old, or older. I kept looking for more of those stones.

Over the past ten years I smartened up. I realized that given erosion rates all of the stuff I had in my hand would have eroded away² long before it reached anywhere near 300 million years.

Today, I can tell you how old that stone is to within about 10 years, but you need to understand something about fossils first.

Fossils don’t form from dead stuff falling to the ground and being slowly buried over millennia. Dead stuff falling to the ground quickly decays. They have to die rapidly with a heavy weight pressing them down so they do not decompose. That occurs when heavy sediment carried by flooding waters provides the weight to press the plants and animals to the ground.

You would apply the same process to a leaf you wanted to preserve. You would pick it fresh and place it between paper with many books piled on top of it. When it dried out, you would have a nice, flat leaf, not a curled up piece of decaying leaf mold.

So, when in the history of humanity did such a flooding occur so that you could expect to find fossils all over the world? Think. The only time such flooding occurred on a global scale was the flood recorded in Genesis 6-9 and echoed through many legends.

That allows me to date the stone that I now have in my garden.

Given the biblical chronology that Henry B. Smith, Jr from Associates for Biblical Research provided³, the flood could be dated to 3298 BC. Now there is some wiggle-room here due to when in the year births occurred in the Genesis 5 and 11 chronologies, but I suspect that wiggle-room could be reduced to plus or minus 10 years.

You might object that what we read in Genesis are just stories. They are stories, but the important question is this: Are they TRUE stories? If you do not want to believe they are true, to the extent that archeologists can align those stories with historical events to that extent you might want to seriously reconsider any disbelief. This is why Christian archeologists try to align those dates with historical evidence so that the only ignorance that remains is willful ignorance.

So, how old is that stone?

It is, given today’s year of 2025 and subtracting one year since there is no 0 year in the Gregorian calendar, 3298 + 2025 – 1 = 5322 years old plus or minus those 10 years.

That is far less than the 300,000,000 years which the field guide wanted me to believe, but a far more reasonable number given erosion rates. That stone had already suffered much erosion damage when I found it.

And it is continuing to be eroded away every year I leave it unprotected in my garden, but it is not rare. Fossils like the one I have are all over the world because sedimentation layers are all over the world as one would expect given a catastrophic, global flooding less than 5,400 years ago.

The “ungodly men” are those who “willingly are ignorant”. They are not **blindly ignorant**, a class I would put myself in on many issues. They are **liars**.

I think some of those fossils are crinoids. Wikipedia says: “In 2012, three geologists reported they had isolated complex organic molecules from 340-million-year-old (Mississippian) fossils of multiple species of crinoids.” That there are complex organic molecules at all in there should raise a red flag that the millions of years are wrong. ↩︎
I’ve heard that a uniformitarian erosion rate would push all of the continents into the ocean in 50 million years. The problem with erosion is that it doesn’t all happen uniformly. If you have a house on a cliff near the water, you are likely very aware of the effects of erosion. ↩︎
One can find videos and other information about the controversy over the Genesis 5 and 11 chronologies at the Associates for Biblical Research site. There’s a controversy because the Septuagint and the Masoretic manuscripts have different, but not randomly different, dates. They are not unintentional scribal errors, but deliberate distortions of the original. I get the 3298 BC date for the flood (and 5554 BC date for creation) from Henry B. Smith, Jr’s article at the 2018 International Conference on Creationism. The 5554 BC date puts the ministry of Jesus in the 6th millennium when the Messiah was expected to come. ↩︎