Broken Open

Take water past 705 degrees Fahrenheit while holding it above 3,200 pounds per square inch, and something happens that most people never learn about in school.

It stops being liquid. It also stops being steam. The line between them does not blur, it vanishes. There is no boiling, because boiling requires a surface between two phases, and there is no longer a surface. Put it in a window and you can watch the meniscus disappear. What you have left is one substance, called supercritical water, and it behaves like nothing you have ever poured out of a tap.

It is water turned inside out. Ordinary water dissolves salt beautifully and refuses to mix with oil. Supercritical water does the reverse: it dissolves organic compounds and gases with ease, and it drops salt like a stone. Industry uses it to annihilate hazardous waste, because it will take apart chemical bonds that survive almost everything else. It eats through steel alloys. It will dissolve quartz. And it exists in the real world right now, down at the deep-sea vents where superheated water comes up through the crust under crushing pressure.

Hold that thought, because Walt Brown built a Flood on it.

Centuries of Tide

In Brown's model, the pre-flood earth had a shell of water roughly ten miles beneath a granite crust. Not a lake, not an aquifer. A globe-encircling chamber of it.

Then he asks a question that I think is the cleverest thing in his whole book: what would the moon do to that water?

Tides do not only pull on oceans. They pull on everything, including a crust with water underneath it. So twice a day, for century after century, the moon lifted and dropped that entire granite shell, stretching and compressing the supporting pillars. Flex a paperclip and it warms. Flex a continent twice daily for a few hundred years and you are pumping a staggering amount of energy into the water below.

Brown called it tidal pumping, and the result was that the subterranean water climbed past its critical point and became supercritical. Which means the chamber was not holding water. It was holding a pressurized solvent, and that solvent had been quietly dissolving the rock around it the entire time. Quartz. Calcium. Carbon dioxide. Salt. Everything needed to make limestone and rock salt and silica, held in solution, under pressure, for centuries.

He is describing a loaded gun the size of the planet.

The Same Day

In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened (Genesis 7:11).

Now put the physics next to the sentence.

The Hebrew behind broken up is baqa', and it is not a gentle word. It means to split, to cleave, to rip open. Not a leak. A rupture. And Moses says it happened to all the fountains, on the same day, which is a strange thing to emphasize unless the simultaneity is the point.

Here is what supercritical water does when a chamber holding it suddenly opens. The pressure drops toward atmospheric, and the water flashes. Violently. It does not pour; it explodes outward as its dissolved load comes out of solution. Brown described the dissolved solids precipitating like snow as the pressure fell.

So the Flood was never only a matter of water arriving. It was a chemistry set emptied across the earth. Limestone precipitating out of solution in vast sheets. Salt dropping out because supercritical water cannot hold salt once it depressurizes, which is why the salt beds of the world are stacked in quantities no evaporating lagoon can honestly account for. Silica flooding through sediment as cement. The layers were not merely laid down wet, they were laid down saturated with everything that had been dissolved for centuries, and then that dissolved cargo fell out of the water and became rock.

Whatever you conclude about the mechanism, notice what a plain reading of Genesis already told you. The water did not come from the sky alone. The text puts the deep first and heaven second. The ground opened before the rain fell.

Moses wrote broken up about the deep four thousand years before anyone knew water could be broken open in this way.

Where Else That Word Appears

Now the part that stopped me.

Baqa' shows up early in Genesis in one other place you will recognize immediately. Genesis 22:3: and Abraham rose up early in the morning, and saddled his ass, and took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son, and clave the wood for the burnt offering.

Same verb. The deep is split open for judgment, and a father splits wood for a sacrifice. One breaking that drowns a world, one breaking that carries a substitute up a mountain. Genesis puts both words in your hand within fifteen chapters, and then spends the rest of the Bible showing you which breaking answers the other.

Pitch Within and Without

Which brings us to the ark, and to a detail that has undone me since I first saw it.

God tells Noah, Make thee an ark of gopher wood; rooms shalt thou make in the ark, and shalt pitch it within and without with pitch (Genesis 6:14). The Hebrew for that pitch is kopher, and kopher comes from kaphar.

Kaphar is the atonement word. It is the root under the Day of Atonement. Everywhere else in the Old Testament, kopher means a ransom, the price that covers a life. Genesis 6:14 is the one place it means the tar you smear on a hull.

So the only thing standing between Noah and the wrath of God was a covering, and the word for that covering is the word for a ransom. Inside and outside, sealed. Noah did not survive the flood by being buoyant. He survived it by being inside something that had been covered.

That is the whole doctrine of being hidden in Christ, drawn in tar on a boat, two thousand years before Paul wrote a word of it. The judgment came. It fell on the ark. Every wave that should have hit Noah hit the covered wood instead.

One Door

And there was one door.

Not several. One (Genesis 6:16). It stood open the entire time Noah built, and he built for a very long time, in front of an audience, while preaching righteousness to people who watched him work and did not come. Anyone could have walked up that ramp. The invitation was as wide as the whole world's population and the terms were absurdly simple: come inside.

Then Genesis 7:16 says something that should make you sit very still. And they that went in, went in male and female of all flesh, as God had commanded him: and the LORD shut him in.

The door had been open for decades. God closed it Himself. Not Noah. And on the far side of that door, the world went on with its business for seven more days before the deep broke open.

The invitation was real. The deadline was also real. Both of those are true at once, and the entire New Testament stands on that pairing.

The One Who Was Broken Open

Here is where it lands.

Genesis shows you a God who breaks open the deep in judgment and a father who cleaves wood to carry a substitute up a hill. It shows you a shelter sealed with the ransom-word and one door that God Himself shut.

And then, at the far end of the Book, judgment comes again, and it does not fall on you. It falls on Him. The soldiers came to break the legs of the men on the crosses and found Jesus already dead, and one of them opened His side with a spear, and there came out blood and water. The deep was broken open and a world drowned. His side was broken open and a world was offered life. The direction reversed at the cross, and it has been running the other way ever since.

The ark had one door. So does He. I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved (John 10:9). One door, standing open, on a boat that is still being built in front of a watching world.

So Come In

Here is my exhortation, and I will not dress it up.

The physics is thrilling and I have enjoyed every hour I have spent on it. But nobody was ever saved by understanding supercritical water. Noah was not saved because he grasped the mechanism. He was saved because he believed God and walked through a door.

If you love this kind of study, love it. Chase the science, read Brown, get your hands dirty in the Hebrew, and never apologize for believing that the God who wrote the book also built the planet. But do not mistake the study for the shelter. You can know exactly how the deep was broken open and still be standing outside when the door shuts.

And if you are outside, hear this: it is still open. That is the whole reason this platform exists. The door of the ark stood open for years while a man hammered and preached and the world laughed, and it is standing open right now, and the One who is the door was Himself broken open so that you could walk through it.

And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely (Revelation 22:17). Water again, at the very end, and this time it is not judgment. It is a drink, held out, free, to anyone who will come.

Come inside. Let Him shut the door behind you.

Darren ReinhardtAuthor of Whosoever Will · whosoeverwill.bible