Michael Pearl: All right, here we are. Mike Pearl and Jared once again to answer your Bible questions. I have not heard these questions yet. Jared's going to play one for me now and we're going to see what kind of answer we come up with.
Stella Gearhart: Hi. My name is Stella Gearheart. We were reading in Genesis nine and we were talking about how Noah was 950 years, and then he died. I was wondering why don't we live that long anymore? Thank you. Bye.
Michael: Genesis Chapter 9, reading about Noah's age. There's no point in turning to that. We had a Bible study there and we had each student to examine the Book of Genesis, and all the way through the historical book and create a graph of the ages. It's very interesting. In other words, you put down Noah. Noah lived so many years. Excuse me, Adam lived so many years and you put down your 100 year marks. Then, you come down like diagramming a sentence and you put Shem and you put down how long he lived. He lived a little longer. You work right on down.
You've got Noah and, then after the flood, you've got Shem, Ham and Japheth. So, we listed all of those ages to find out how long how they lived, and we noticed something. If you convert that into a graph, for instance, you'll find that starting with Adam who lived to be almost 1,000 years. It continued like that. But, there started to be a decline slightly up 'till the flood.
Then, after the flood, those four who were born before the flood lived well past 600, 700 years. But, those who were born after the flood, their ages dropped down to 120, 130 years. Then, it declined up until the time of David to about 75 or 80 years old.
So, it's obvious that there was some kind of affect that sin had upon the human race. Man was originally created to live forever and sin brought a curse upon us. And so, probably the genetic pool degenerated. I can't really tell you what it was in a medical sense. But, something happened to the human race as a result of sin.
Maybe it was a failure to access the tree of life. But, slowly, man's life span dropped off for 2,000 years. And after about 2,500 years from creation, God told David. He said, "Your life span will be 72 years. If by reason of strength, it will be more."
So, that remains about the lifespan of man ‑ about 72 years. So, it's obviously something that had to do with the fall, and with the result that sin brought to the human body that brought degeneration. We're not told otherwise.
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One possibility is that the earth had some things different about it before the flood. Because the decreases in life all started after the flood. Whether it was the double atmospheric pressure or oxygen different? I have no idea. But I do know we only live as long as our surrounding environment...and genes will let us.
I've actually heard from Creation Today (Eric Hovind), that it is scientific - has to do with the water canopy before and after the flood. EVERYTHING was not only older, but bigger also, before the flood. It was kind of like a greenhouse. I obviously don't remember all the details, but know that science proves it. If you check out their site, I'm sure you can get the details.
Thank you so much for your ministry!
That was a good question which I think most of us have wondered, regarding why we
don't live as long, as in the beginning.
Well, we have to also think of how the flood affected the world. It was a MAJOR event that destroyed our original habitat. In order to adapt to the new surroundings and the new diet, our bodies probably had to employ A LOT of their resources. I am originally from a tropical country and moved to Canada 2 years ago. As the seasons change, I still lose weight and get sick as my body tries to adapt to new sunlight schedules, change in diet, humidity, pressure, temperature. I was raised in constant weather, now I have to adapt to ever-changing weather and it's definitely not easy. Can you imagine if you had your original habitat destroyed, how hard would it be to adapt?
I listened to Kent Hovind on this topic and he says all the animals were larger as well as humans because of the rich oxygen as well as the firmament of waters blocking the radiation. O and we lived with dinosaurs. Interesting to say the least.