Our Grand Scenic View
As you walk from the Grand Canyon Visitor Center to the Canyon’s rim, your view transforms from the dry path of trees and rocks to a vast, almost incomprehensible landscape. In what seems like only a few steps, the world gives way and the breath-taking grandeur that is the Grand Canyon comes into view, suddenly making you much more aware of the greatness and glory of God. Here, literally carved into miles of rock, evidence of His Creation and Judgment surrounds you.
Arriving and taking in my first view, it was like waking up on Mars. Mountains surround you for hundreds of miles while vast cliffs of red rocks reach for the sky. For those of us who live almost anywhere else in America, it really is like exploring another planet. I am a person who is generally afraid of heights. Yet, the landscape was SO foreign, SO big and SO far away, even from the edge of the canyon, that I almost couldn’t be afraid because I couldn’t really understand it. It was TOO BIG!
But I made a point of staying away from the edge, just to be safe.
If you haven’t seen it for yourself, I encourage you to add it to your bucket-list and be part of a creation-based tour. Photographs and video can’t do it justice. It is an experience which no camera can capture. As we learned from our guides, it is a vast monument to the trustworthiness of Scripture and the holiness of God.
Our Grand Educational Guides
At the beginning of June, Creation Today helped lead its sixth group around and down into the Grand Canyon showing them not only the beauty of God’s creation, but the unmistakable evidence of the Flood. What a phenomenal experience!
Russ Miller, Helmut Welke, and Eric Hovind led this year’s tour where each person learned to see God’s Word revealed in towering cliffs of rock enveloping us. We walked the rim, seeing the vast expanse of rock, laid down by water in layer after layer all down the mile-deep canyon. We took a raft down the Colorado River, looking up at towering cliffs and seeing evidence that the layers of rock could not have been laid down slowly over millions of years, but rather, had to have been laid down quickly in water. The geologic features clearly demonstrated that the canyon itself was carved quickly and powerfully—not slowly by the gentle river we floated down.
We even stopped to see dinosaur fossil footprint, big and small. We observed a partial skeleton lying encased in rock which was once mud. Evidence of watery catastrophe was literally everywhere.
Our Grand Spiritual Understanding
Our group asked great questions and we witnessed “the light come on in their eyes” as they began to understand what we were seeing. As we discussed our time together, one woman expressed her gratitude for the guided tour. She told us that she understood that the group’s geology lessons were not merely about rocks, or even just the Flood. Rather, the truth she now understood about the Canyon proved, yet again, the validity of the Bible and how it all points to the Gospel!
This is the entire mission of Biblical creation ministries—to open people’s eyes to the trustworthiness of the Bible. Our understanding of science and the world around us is much more than mere academic knowledge. Its God teaching us through His creation that He is our Creator, Judge, and Savior!
Our Grand Challenge
Many in our tour group came to understand the difference between the Old Earth Creation Model, which says God used evolutionary processes over millions of years; and the Biblical Creation Model which accepts the Biblical account of a literal six-day creation and the Flood as historical. It is common for church people to say, “Who cares HOW God did it? The important thing is that God is our creator.” However, your creation model does affect the rest of your understanding of the Bible.
If the Old Earth position is accepted, then your model says God created a world full of death, decay, and diseases which he proclaimed to be “very good.” Some believers in the Old Earth model reject that God made ANYTHING good, even the human race. They believe that God created us as we are now, as prone to sin as we are to sickness. But if God placed sinful, wicked animals (our ancestors in this model) in a world full of sickness and death, then for what did Jesus die? What is Jesus saving us from if sin and death are part of the original creation?
Our Grand Gospel
The Gospel is simple, and it begins in Genesis: A good and perfect God created a perfect paradise with no sin or death. Our perfect first parents enjoyed paradise, but then chose to rebel. Sin brought disease and death. Eventually the world became so wicked and vile that God judged the whole earth with the worldwide Flood. God provided a way of escape in the ark. The ark had one door that mankind could enter and be saved from the judgment they deserved.
Echoing this fact, Jesus says of Himself in John chapter 10, “I am the door. If anyone enters by Me, he will be saved…” Jesus came and lived a perfect life, died in our place for our sins, and rose again DEFEATING DEATH! He is the way to forgiveness and eternal life. That is the Gospel.
In the sky, God places the rainbow—a reminder of his mercy as well as his judgment. On the earth, God places the Grand Canyon, a vast monument to His power, a geological reminder that His Word in the Genesis accounts can be trusted.
A creation guided trip to the Grand Canyon is a breath-taking and educational look into amazing geological features reflecting the fingerprints of God. Having just experienced it myself, I encourage you to take the adventure. See what God has to show you in a journey from the Scarred Earth to the Scarred Hands.