“Thou coverest it with the deep as with a garment: the waters stood above the mountains” (Psalm 104:6).
Many Christian intellectuals have argued that the flood of Noah’s day was only local, being unwilling to reject the current system of evolutionary geology. Modern geologists usually assume the earth’s fossil-bearing sedimentary rocks represent a billion years of evolution rather than the deposits of the worldwide flood, as the founding fathers of geology had all believed.
However, this idea is clearly refuted, not only in the actual record of the flood (Genesis 7,8), but also in later Biblical passages. Our text verse, for example, says that the waters of the “deep” once covered the earth like a garment covers the body. Furthermore, these waters stood above all the antediluvian mountains. This was no local flood!
These standing waters of the deep were finally caused to “haste away” (v.7) by means of great movements of the earth’s crust. “Mountains rose up and great basins opened up” (literal rendering of v.8), and the vast flood waters rushed down off the newly elevated continents into the newly opened ocean basins, carving out great canyons and transporting great quantities of sediment into the ocean depths. In the process, as God had promised Noah (Genesis 9:11), He had “set a bound that they may not pass over; that they turn not again to cover the earth” (Psalm 104:9).
There have been many devastating local floods in all parts of the world ever since Noah, but God has kept His promise never again to send a flood which will cover the earth. The mountains of the present world were all uplifted towards the end of the flood period, but they still bear witness, in the form of marine sediments and marine fossils near their summits, of the time when the waters stood above the mountains. HMM
