Watchman on the Wall

Host (Male): Welcome to Watchman on the Wall, a daily outreach of Southwest Radio Ministries and swrc.com. God is still on the throne and prayer changes things. Today, we continue our look at flood legends from around the world. Then, a little later, Josh Davis connects the flood to the future.

Friends, we are less than one month away from the start of our next Prophecy in the News Live event, Friday and Saturday, May 1st and 2nd at Sunrise Christian Academy in Bel Aire, Kansas. You are invited to this free event featuring top Bible scholars, teachers, and researchers on current events and end-times prophecy, God's plan for Israel, unlocking biblical mysteries, and more scripture-based insight that will bring clarity to the chaos.

Speakers include Dr. Larry Spargimino, Dr. Rob Lindstead, Micah Van Huss, Josh Davis, Mac Dominick, and Larry Stam. Registration is now open for this free two-day event. Visit swrc.com to sign up or simply call 1-800-652-1144. Prophecy in the News Live at Sunrise Christian Academy in Bel Aire, Kansas, Friday and Saturday, May 1st and 2nd. Now, here's today's host, Clayton Van Huss.

Clayton Van Huss: I'm so glad you joined us today for Watchman on the Wall. I am joined today by Nick Liguori, who is the author of Echoes of Ararat, Volumes 1 and 2. Nick, welcome to the program. These are fascinating books that recount legends, collections of legends of the flood from around the world.

We have the biblical account, but here we have accounts from various groups. The first book is about legends from the Americas, North and South America, the different Native American Indian tribes. Then, of course, the second book is East Asia and the Pacific Islands. I think we're going to get a bit into that today. Nick, welcome. For those who weren't here yesterday, tell us a little bit about how you got interested in this topic.

Nick Liguori: I've always been interested in apologetics, the need to defend our faith and to answer questions that people have. People have questions and we have evidence. I think the biblical testimony is that we ought to answer. We see Paul answering objections in Acts 17. We see in 2 Corinthians 10 that we should demolish arguments and expose error for the sake of the gospel.

One day, I encountered this subject of flood legends and I realized the importance of the evidence potentially. I wanted to dig into how strong the evidence really is. When I got into it, I didn't find that there was a book that I could read to learn all about it or share with non-believers. So, I started examining the evidence for myself and going back to early sources, original sources on individual tribes and nations. I was amazed by what I found. Ultimately, that led to me writing a book, which I never planned to do. I believe God had a hand in it. Then, a second book, Volume 2, covering East Asia and the Pacific.

Clayton Van Huss: I don't want to play our hand too soon here, but I understand there's a third coming someday. One thing I appreciate very much with your work is the scholarship you put into it. It's not just sensationalism, it's not just speculation, but you actually have the bibliography here in these books. That's worth it alone, to be able to look up these original sources and go back to where this is coming from. Thank you for providing such a wonderful resource for those who are interested in really digging into the truth and historicity of scripture.

Nick Liguori: I feel like I wrote this book for a younger version of myself that had these questions. We really owe it to people to do good research, to document things well. I wanted to write it and document it in a way that would commend itself to the reader, that would invite inquiry, because God's not afraid of our questions. In that spirit, I just want to encourage people in their faith, in their reading of scripture, that they can trust the Bible from the very first page in Genesis.

Clayton Van Huss: I think that is extremely important. I learned years ago when I began to study the history of the Bible and to dig into the material culture and to see what was out there, that if you have something that you fear or you have something that you have a question about and say, "Wait, something's not adding up here, Lord, what is going on?" You look at that thing. Don't be afraid. Take it to the Lord. He's always got the answer. We have no reason to fear. Let's take just a moment here and talk about the importance of these books. What is your goal in these? What do you want to see happen someday when life is over and you're standing in heaven and there are people who come up to you who've read the books? What do you want to hear? What is this about?

Nick Liguori: I want to be very clear. This is a book full of evidence for the flood, but what it's really about for me is much more than meteorology and rain and boats and even history. What I'm really contending even more than the flood is for Adam, for Genesis chapters 2 and 3 and for Romans 5 and 6, in particular the law of sin and death. We read that through one man, sin entered the world and death through sin.

The law of sin and death is this biblical reality that we just have to accept. We can't argue with it. It's biblical doctrine that there was no death originally, everything was perfect, but then Adam sinned and then sin brought death into the world. The secular world says the opposite. There was death before sin. The Bible says there was sin before death and that is a direct contradiction. We've got to stand on the truth.

So, you say, "What does the flood have to do with that?" First, if we lose the flood or if we say who cares if it was global or local or if it really happened at all, if we surrender Genesis 6 through 9 as myth, then we're going to introduce myth into chapters 1 through 3 of Genesis. It's pretty hard to defend 1 through 3 if we've surrendered chapters 6 through 9.

Second, if we don't have a global flood, then we don't have a geological mechanism or interpretive lens that can account for the fossils that we see in the sedimentary layers that show a record of death, disease, corruption, carnivory, and curse. The flood can account for that and very well, but if we surrender the flood, then we are left with a secular view that ultimately undermines the law of sin and death.

So, this Volume 2 is a 340-page, very big book about the flood, but it's really 340 pages devoted to defending the law of sin and death on which the gospel is built. We see that in Romans 5 and 6. We see that in 1 Corinthians 15, that Jesus as the savior of the world, Paul predicates his argument on Adam. Jesus is the answer for Adam. So, I am indirectly, ultimately, defending Adam and the law of sin and death. This is a gospel-centered book for me.

Clayton Van Huss: If we're going to deny the historicity of scripture, then what do we do with the spiritual things taught? If God says something and if we see it and we realize that this is truth, this really happened, this is a thing that we can hang our hat on, we can say this is real, the Bible is telling us about real people, real places, real events, and then we can trust the things that are being taught. We can trust what He's saying about our lives, our souls, His purpose for us.

Nick Liguori: Right. Jesus said, "If I have spoken about earthly things and you have not believed, how will you believe if I speak of heavenly things?" We have a culture that cannot believe Jesus on spiritual things because they do not believe Him on physical things. Paul addressed the Athenians in Acts 17, he addressed their worldview, and so we've got to address things at the worldview level, which is so often the root of unbelief when people go numb to the gospel. I want to help people understand and appreciate the gospel and I believe this evidence leads right to the gospel.

Clayton Van Huss: I think absolutely. I'm totally with you there. That's my passion too, is to pull things that happened that are true that the Bible records and is good with, and to be able to share that and say, "Look, look, God is true. What He says is right. He can be trusted." I think as far as apologetics go, this is just one of the great ones because people often think there's some sort of a division, a rift, a war between science and faith. What you're showing here is no, there's not.

Nick Liguori: There's not. All truth is God's truth. In my personal study of geology, there is powerful evidence for the flood. These rocks beneath our feet bear evidence to that global event, that flood sent by God. We have these nice-edged, perfectly flat boundaries with evidence of being laid down by rapidly moving water on a large scale, on a continental huge scale, which cannot be explained by modern local forces, uniformitarian means. We're seeing something different. We're seeing something that points to the flood. I go into that in the introduction of this book, but we have geological evidence, we also have a great deal of historical evidence and that's the burden that I focus on in this book.

Clayton Van Huss: And this book, by the way, is Echoes of Ararat, Volumes 1 and 2. We're talking with the author Nick Liguori here on the program today. If you're interested in these books, give us a call at 1-800-652-1144 or visit us online at swrc.com. Nick, we talked a bit in yesterday's program especially about the first volume talking about the Americas and over 300 flood legends from North and South America. Let's talk a little more today about the second volume, which is a collection of 300 flood legends from East Asia and the Pacific islands. So again, we're moving into territory we don't really think about when we think about the flood and flood stories, legends, and myths.

Nick Liguori: We are. The book opens with China. When I got into this research for Volume 2, I didn't know what I was going to find. I was told that China doesn't know of Noah's flood. So, I really didn't know what to expect. But it turns out they do, universally. We have not only the majority Han Chinese people that have their account of the flood, not only in the classics of the Shu King and the Shi King, and I argue that it is actually referring to a global flood, but also we have the classic called the Huainanzi with its flood account involving two characters, Nüwa and Fuxi.

Fuxi can be seen as Noah and Nüwa seems to be his wife, talking about how the sky fell and that caused the flood. It talks about the flood in beyond even global terms, celestial terms. The atmosphere, the heavens were ruined by the flood and this global flood. Then, the need to take these five different colored stones. Now, picture this, five different colored stones that Nüwa or Noah had to raise into the sky and smelt them together to patch up the sky.

Clayton Van Huss: Yeah, that sounds like the image of the promise of God, His rainbow in the sky.

Nick Liguori: Exactly. It's right there. And then we can look at the minority peoples of China, the Miao, the Nosu, the Zhuang. For example, the Nosu people say that a pair of people survived the flood inside a floating wooden chest and that this chest landed on a mountain called Mutu. The singing of a chicken made them realize that it was safe to come out and the flood was over. Another people group close to them says that the boat landed in the mountains of Tibet.

Another group says that a brother and sister survived the flood inside a wooden ark that was made waterproof by tree sap and they say it landed at Olu Mountain. So, this book will actually be groundbreaking in that this will be the largest collection of flood stories I think ever in English. I'm not aware that there's even a Chinese text that has this many flood texts from the ethnic minorities of China and China in general referring to this flood.

And back to the Han Chinese for a minute. It's not just the flood because we also see the Garden of Eden, the tree in the garden. They have this what's called the Bronze Tree of Sanxingdui. This 3,500-year-old statue. You look at it and it depicts the tree of the knowledge of good and evil with a woman's hand reaching for something on the tree. There is this serpent with legs that lives on the tree, that's connected to the tree.

You look at it and you just, if you're looking at the statue, you're thinking, "No, no, no, don't reach for that tree." And you see these knives on the tree, you see these knives on the back of the serpent. And what is it depicting? It's depicting a memory of that fateful event where death was brought into the world. That tree, the creation, these are, it's not just the flood that these tribes know about. It's also the Garden of Eden. It's also the Tower of Babel.

Clayton Van Huss: Right, yeah, and that's something that you cover in these books. Let's leave East Asia for just a moment. And by the way, it doesn't just stop in China. You go through the islands, through the different islands of the Pacific, Okinawa, which that one's special to me. I was born there, so I certainly had to look that up. I like how you have it divided into these sections so it's very easy to go to the location you want to go to and follow. But let's go back now to these early flood stories from Mesopotamia. We have plenty of cuneiform tablets, different recollections from some of the different people there, whether it's in Akkadian or Sumerian, different famous tablets that record a global flood. You address these in the book. Did the Bible steal from the Mesopotamians?

Nick Liguori: It was very important to me to address this. This is a myth. I first heard this argument on my second day of college. I was in a history class and my teacher said, "Students, you know that Moses stole the flood account, you know that, right? Here's the Babylonian, here's the Epic of Gilgamesh. Look at the similarity to the Genesis flood account and the Babylonian version is older so therefore Moses must have stolen it from a Babylonian text."

This argument is predicated on the idea that Moses is passing off something as his that wasn't really his, that he got from somewhere else. But that argument just is blown out of the water. If you take the time to read Genesis and you see in Genesis 5:1 he says, "This is the book of the generations of Adam." And we see 11 times in Genesis this Hebrew word "toledot," which refers to a record, a historical account.

Moses is letting us know actually that he had sources. He had historical accounts that were passed down by Noah, by Abraham, by Jacob. So, that immediately shows that Moses is not passing off something he stole from the Babylonians. But also we can look at a direct comparison. The rule, and Kenneth Kitchen talks about this, in the Middle East, simple historical accounts give rise over time to more elaborate, embellished accounts.

When we do a side-by-side comparison of this historical, serious, sober account in Genesis with the embellished, obvious myth in the Epic of Gilgamesh, it's clear, if you look at that criteria, it's clear which one is older. The Genesis account must be older. It's more historical. It doesn't show the signs of embellishment that was added over time. And then, and there's many evidence I go into showing that the Genesis account is the true original one. Unique to this book is, what about the tribes of the world? Which one do they agree with? Well, when you compare them with Genesis and the Babylonian version, they line up with Genesis because Genesis and the Epic of Gilgamesh differ on three points and when we look at those, they agree with Genesis as the original.

Clayton Van Huss: You can see the similarities where they're obviously talking about the same occurrence. However, to me far more interesting are the differences between the Genesis account and the Sumerian-Akkadian accounts, that the differences show that the Bible is not copying from the Mesopotamian authors. I think it's interesting that you can see in these legends from around the world that they are coming from the true story, just like the Mesopotamian accounts were coming from the true story, while we have that true story preserved in the account in Genesis.

Nick Liguori: Right, because for example, the Babylonian version, it has three birds are sent after by Noah or Utnapishtim, and they don't do anything, there's no dove that returns with something. But we look at the tribal versions, we look at the Native Americans, the Chinese, the Pacific Islanders, the North Asians, they have a bird detail that agrees with Genesis. It has this dove returning with something in its beak. They'll change what it was, maybe it was a piece of sand, maybe it was a different tree leaf, maybe it was a branch lit with fire. It's Genesis they agree with and not the Babylonian version, pointing us to the fact that Genesis is the original one.

Clayton Van Huss: And so what we've got in these books, in Echoes of Ararat, Volumes 1 and 2 by Nick Liguori, we have these compilations of flood legends from around the world and we see how they match up beautifully with scripture. Nick, we appreciate you joining us today and thank you so much for the work you've done here that really is going to help for years to come on research and on finding these stories that tie together and show us the truth of scripture.

Nick Liguori: It's been a privilege to talk with you about this. One of my hopes for this book is that if you're someone from China, from Vietnam, Japan, Southeast Asia, New Guinea, I want you to see that this God is the God of all of us and this history is our human history. I just hope that these accounts, these ancient witnesses, will be a bridge pointing people to the gospel, pointing people to the Bible as their history. I hope that this will be something that's faith-affirming and that encourages people to trust in Jesus.

Clayton Van Huss: Absolutely, Nick. Thank you once again for joining us.

Host (Male): In Echoes of Ararat, author Nick Liguori contends that oral traditions of the flood and the survival of the few inside the floating ark are even more prevalent than previously thought, and they powerfully confirm the truth of the Genesis account. This unprecedented work carefully documents hundreds of native traditions of the flood as well as the Tower of Babel and the Garden of Eden from the tribes of North and South America.

Order your copy of Echoes of Ararat, Volumes 1 and 2, when you call 1-800-652-1144. You can also order Echoes of Ararat online. Simply visit swrc.com. Learn what the Cherokee, Lakota, Iroquois, Cheyenne, Inuit, Inca, Aztec, and countless other tribes claimed about the early history of the world. Nick Liguori also shares many evidences for the historical reliability of Genesis and shows that the Genesis flood account is not dependent on the Epic of Gilgamesh or other Near Eastern texts, as skeptics claim.

Rather, its author Moses had access to ancient records passed down by the early patriarchs, including Joseph, Jacob, Abraham, and even Noah himself. Echoes of Ararat, Volumes 1 and 2. 1-800-652-1144. Some scoffers ask, if Jesus is coming back, what is he waiting for? 2 Peter 3 teaches that those who say such things are making the same mistake that Noah's generation made. Josh Davis connects the flood to the future in today's Moment of Prophecy and reveals the biblical answer to the scoffer's question.

Josh Davis: Where is the promise of God's coming? When will Jesus come again? When will the Rapture take place? These are the kinds of questions that the Bible actually predicted that people would be asking in the latter days. And in fact, the discussion that we've been having the last couple of days about Echoes of Ararat and Noah's ark really come into play in Bible prophecy, not just in Bible history, but also in Bible prophecy.

I'm considering 2 Peter chapter 3, starting in verse 3, going down to verse number 9 today. In this powerful passage of scripture, Peter links what God will do in the future with what God has done in the past, specifically with the flood judgment that came upon this world. In verse 3, Peter writes that knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers walking after their own lusts, pursuing their own selfish desires and whatever they want, and saying, "Where is the promise of his coming? For since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation."

In other words, the world is just in a cycle and it just keeps going around and around and around. There's nothing new under the sun, there's nothing new happening. If God's bringing this judgment, if the Rapture's coming, if the tribulation's coming, what's God waiting on? He said that's going to be the attitude in the last days and we see that before our very eyes at this time. He goes on to point out in verse 5, for this they willingly are ignorant of.

Notice that word, they are willingly ignorant of this truth. They have chosen not to understand what God says, that by the word of God the heavens were of old and the earth standing out of the water and in the water, whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished. But now, the heavens and the earth, which are now by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of un-godly men.

He is long-suffering to usward, the Bible tells us, not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance. You see, God is giving our generation a window, an opportunity to repent of our sins and to get right with God. This is that day of grace. This is that moment when we have the gracious gift of God, when the gospel message is going forth just as we are giving it even this very moment, and you are hearing this, and God has appointed this moment to you as a gift of His grace extended to you at this very second so that you could repent of your sins and turn to Jesus for salvation before His flood of judgment coming by fire will sweep this world.

You see, the Lord is not slack. He will not delay when the judgment begins. It'll begin precisely when He has ordained that to be. He is long-suffering. He is being patient with people in this day of grace, being long-suffering to usward, not willing that any should perish. That speaks about His heart. He's not wanting anyone to be swept away in that flood.

But those who will be swept away will be swept away of their own free will choice because they have chosen to reject God, to reject His authority, to reject His word, to reject His message. Then, they will be washed away in the flood of judgment that will come upon this world. But God isn't willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. In a word, we can summarize it this way: what has God waiting on? Friends, He's waiting on you. He's waiting on people to repent of their sins and to put their faith and trust in the Lord Jesus Christ.

Host (Male): Today, we are featuring the outstanding resource, Echoes of Ararat, Volumes 1 and 2. In Echoes of Ararat, author Nick Liguori contends that oral traditions of the flood and the survival of the few inside the floating ark are even more prevalent than previously thought, and they powerfully confirm the truth of the Genesis account.

This unprecedented work carefully documents hundreds of native traditions of the flood as well as the Tower of Babel and the Garden of Eden from the tribes of North and South America. Order your copy of Echoes of Ararat today when you call 1-800-652-1144. Echoes of Ararat, Volumes 1 and 2. You can also order at our website, swrc.com.

Tomorrow, we have a special group joining Watchman on the Wall, ready to discuss the linchpin of Christianity, the death and resurrection of Jesus. Be sure to tune in by downloading our free mobile app or by subscribing to our daily Watchman on the Wall podcast. Watchman on the Wall is a production of Southwest Radio Ministries and is supported by faithful listeners like you. Visit swrc.com. That's swrc.com.