How does the mighty word of God display intimate physics knowledge of water, a scriptural symbol of the Holy Spirit and a substance so fundamental and crucial to all of life?
Water is so fundamental to life that even those of us who are poorly versed or little interested in scientific knowledge understand something of its necessity and advantages to our existence and our world. The concept and feeling of 'thirst' seems designed into all creatures at the most visceral of levels. We somehow know we need water...know that we need to drink. Even our young, our babies, our infants are subject to a distinct feeling of need when they become thirsty, when their bodies crave water and let their minds know it.
The truly mighty Word of God, the Bible, of course mentions water a great many times. The first molecular compound mentioned in the Bible is water. Here is Genesis 1:2 where it first mentions 'the waters' :
1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
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It may or may not be a Biblical physics and chemistry hint of water's composition ("1" Oxygen bonded with "2" Hydrogen) that its first mention is in Chapter "1", verse "2" of Genesis, the very first book of the Bible. God alone knows that, I think.
it was Early Christians baptized by submergence in water, which in being submerged symbolized the 'former person' dying and being buried along with their old sinful life and ways, and by being raised back up out of the water if symbolized the now cleansed person wooden type of being reborn into a life of following Jesus through the Holy Spirit's leadings, in a life acknowledging Jesus as your new Lord, Savior, and Master, and His teachings as your guide in a new, better life on Earth leading to an eternal life in Heaven. The old was buried, the new was pulled up out of the water, saved by Jesus' atonement and grace and cleansing.
Two Hydrogen atoms attach to one Oxygen atom when water is formed. They attach at about the same angle. About 104 degrees. Psalm 104 is notable with respect to how many times it mentions water. It speaks of it in 12 out of its 35 verses. At one point it mentions that the Lord has now set boundaries for the water so that they can never again cover the face of the Earth.
It so happens that water's atomic weight is 18, as we have determined through many decades of research in these more modern times using the units and measures that the Creator guided our minds and hands to arrive upon using. Water's atomic weight is 18. A "1" and an "8". (and a small fraction more, it is true: specifically 18.01528 g/mole) So when God destroyed the men of old about 4,300 years ago with the Great Flood, it is in Genesis (book "1") chapter "8" - see the "1" and the "8"? - that the chapter opens up with and involves Noah and his family and the animals on the ark floating on the waters of the world-destroying flood (all those living creatures that were saved by God's grace!) as the rain stops and the water slowly recedes and the ark come to rest then on some mountain in the mountains of Ararat. Those who chose to count on the Ark are saved! (the Ark being not just a real ship but also a symbol of the coming Jesus who was, in His human form, a fleshly human vessel specially and peculiarly designed by God but manufactured inside of the body of a human woman as God so intended, just as the Ark was a vessel built per God's design instructions by men...Noah and his sons.) A hole pierced into the side of Jesus' lifeless seeming crucified body released such large amounts of water and blood that it startled the Roman soldier who pieced Him.
Water and blood are elements of Christian baptism. The dunking in water symbolizes dying to your old life and accepting Jesus as your savior and Lord. We ask to be cleansed and atoned for by the blood shed by Jesus when we are baptized. The blood atones for our sins like the shed blood of innocent animals once did for the Israelites back in the day when Moses' Law was their way of worshiping God. Noah and company's salvation through the Ark is like a pre-enactment of what happens during baptism in many respects, like a prefiguring of the work of the Holy Father through His son Jesus and the Holy Spirit. The Ark itself represents Jesus. The doorway in the side of Noah's Ark can be likened to the hole stabbed into Jesus' side by the Roman spear. All life that was to be saved, all lives that were to receive salvation, came to be saved through the existence of those openings...the door in the Ark and the spear wound in Jesus' side which allowed the water and blood to flow. So it is a more superficial question, but is this book one chapter eight of the Bible the holy scripture's way of hinting that the author of those scriptures, Our Maker, was well aware of the atomic weight of water? Only God knows, I suppose. But it is a little bit interesting, right? It happens to correspond in some ways. Can't really argue that, right?
Interesting side note: God gave Noah the symbol of the rainbow (apparently the first rainbow seen in the sky, as in to say that there had not previously been rainbows? Perhaps the pre-flood atmospheric conditions had been quite different.) saying that He gave it as a sign that He would never again use water to destroy the world. (There might have been a lot of earthquakes, volcanoes, wild weather patterns, etc., when the Ark first came to rest. Maybe Noah's family was afraid to stray far from the Ark, even though they were being directed to spread out and repopulate the Earth. Maybe they needed such a reassurance!) Rainbows are beautiful and contain all of our colors. There is an old school days mnemonic for remembering the order of the colors in the rainbow: Roy G Biv, as if it is a man's name. But it represents Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, and Violet. That's the colors of the rainbow in their respective order when looking at the left hand side of the rainbow and moving your eyes from left to right. So, it's also true that most of our TV screens have used Red, Green, and Blue pixels working in coordination with each other (called additive color synthesis) to display the various colors that we need to see on the color TV screen. They are referred to as RGB displays, standing for Red Green and Blue. Oddly, if Roy G. Biv was a real person his initials would also be RGB. I don't know if that's humor by a human inventor, an accidental correlation, or God winking about foreseeing our human technologies developing through the centuries. Kind of odd, though.
The Bible, in Genesis, recounts that the 'fountains of the deep' opened up and released water during the time of the Great Flood of Noah's time. And it also rained with extreme heaviness from the sky. Fountains of the deep? How deep were they? In what configuration was the water stored? How 'deep' was deep? One mile? Ten miles? A hundred miles? I've been just now learning, in 2024 A.D. , that it was discovered in about 2014 A.D. that deep down in our Earth's mantle, approximately 400 miles down, there is water trapped in a mineral they're calling 'ringwoodite', a mineral with an unusual ability to attract the hydrogen in water and then trap the water. Some articles called it a sponge like mineral zone. It is reportedly able to store the water in what scientists studying it call a '4th state of matter', i.e.: not a liquid, solid, or vapor. The quantity of water trapped in this manner is being reported as over 400 times the amount of water that is on the surface of the Earth. Could a meteor strike or some other cosmic occurrence have shocked the mantle and released some of this vast reservoir of water to the surface in the time of the Great Flood of Noah?
Water is mentioned in Genesis chapter 1. And so, water is the first mentioned chemical substance in the Word given to us by our Almighty God and Maker. A hat tip to its importance?
Water is used symbolically in scripture as well. Sometimes as a symbol of the Holy Spirit. Sometimes as a symbol of nations and peoples and tongues. And this isn't just a reader's interpretation, but rather the Bible specifically connects and designates water as a symbol of a few certain things. For instance, it is specifically identified to us that water can be used as a symbol of the Holy Spirit at times. One example:
John Chapter 7, verse 37 - 39:
37 On the last and greatest day of the festival, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink. 38 Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.”[c] 39 By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive. Up to that time the Spirit had not been given, since Jesus had not yet been glorified.
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And water is specifically identified as being a symbol of the nations and peoples and language groups of this world at times. For example:
From the Book of Revelations chap 17, verse 15: 15 Then the angel said to me, “The waters you saw, where the prostitute sits, are peoples, multitudes, nations and languages.
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71% of the Earth's surface is calculated to be covered by water or ice, but only 1% of the Earth is covered by fresh water or fresh water ice. Does the Earth also symbolize humanity, Jesus' bride? Some say so. I think so.
Between birth and the age of one, baby humans will pass through the 71% water weight zone (of course we're talking about weight now) as they move to become significantly dryer adults. And so, our human bodies are at one time in our life composed of 71% water just as the Earth is covered with about 71% water. Men are made more of water than women, as muscle holds more water than the fatty tissues so central to a woman's design. Men are around 60% water and women around 55% water on average, per some sources.
Water is so crucial to our human bodies that there is an outdoor survival thumb rule that says you can last without air for 3 minutes, without water for 3 days, and without food for 3 weeks. According to the Biblical scriptures WATER is sometimes a symbol of the Holy Spirit. We also learn from the Bible that on the day John the Baptist baptized Jesus the Holy Spirit was seen descending like a dove down upon Jesus. So the scriptures made certain that we know that Jesus had the Holy Spirit of God dwelling within Him. Then at the proper time Jesus allowed Himself to be crucified and to die for our sins. Then Jesus descended into Hell for 3 days and 3 nights, before ascending back out because Hell apparently could not hold Him, there was no sin to charge Him with. So, here is a question: did the Holy Spirit also have to go or did the Holy Spirit decide to go with Jesus down into the place of punishment for those 3 days? I don't believe so though I am not exactly sure which scripture I would point to as evidence. Jesus did cry out, while on the cross, "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?" So I basically suppose that the Holy Spirit withdrew so that Jesus would do this great task alone...I am not certain, but I suppose that. So did Jesus go 'without WATER' for 3 days but live through it? Is there any spiritual lesson being taught there? A spiritual analogy? I would see it as our bodies being designed prophetically, made in reflection of the work that Jesus would do for us one day, if this analogy is true at all. It should have killed Jesus, but could not. But 3 days without water can kill a man, in general. More proof that Jesus is the Son of God?
Clouds, such as a large white fluffy cumulus cloud of normal size like you might see floating by on any given day, can hold over 500 tons of water. City planners talk about water use rates of 75 to 125 gallons per day per resident, so that could be up to 1,000 pounds of water per household per day, with cooking and bathing and lawn care and clothes washing, etc. for a large family. So that passing cloud might have enough water to last 1,000 large households for 1 day pretty easily, could you harvest it all.
Ice is less dense than water. Water's solid state is less dense than its liquid state. Very few chemicals can say this! Despite objections that might be lodged by the passengers of the Titanic, this is a very good thing. Life on Earth might not exist were it not true. For instance, if cold weather froze the surface of a lake into ice, and ice was denser than water, the ice would sink. This would fill up lake bottoms with ice. And since the surface never froze over the cold weather would just keep producing more ice until all of the water was turned into ice. Where would the fish live? And the plants on the lake bottom would be buried in ice. But as things are, the layer of ice at the top is a sort of insulator for the water and the creatures that live in the lake.
The density difference between water and steam is a suspiciously perfect fraction. What might that mean? Anything from nothing to hard to say! But water is 1,000Kg/cubic foot. Steam is .6 Kg/cubic foot. Divide the water density by the steam density and you get exactly 1,666.666666 repeating endlessly. Which could show up...if you try to put out a fire with water you will get some steam! Which happened in the chief city of the world's greatest sea power (England) when the Great Fire of London broke out in 1,666 A.D. But the Great Plague of London also ended that year, which was the last time that London battled the Bubonic Plague. The number 66 seems to almost always be associated with God saving His people in the nick of time when they are greatly imperiled and call on him. And people wrote that the end of the plague seemed to come from God answering their now chastened pleas and prayers for help from Him there in London where the plague raged. So does any of that relate? No, I'm just thinking about connections that might exist. But you do have the sea and a sea-ruling nation (England, and lots of water), fire fighting water (probably a lot of fresh water), the number 1,666 and the number 66 (repeating infinitely) and you have destruction by fire and you have steam, and it seemed to coincide with a fire and water, so you had steam and water. That probably all has no relation, but it is amazing that God designed steam and water to have such an exactly perfect density fraction. It was prophesied that the first destruction of the Earth would be by water (and Noah's flood accomplished that.) And it is prophesied that the next destruction of the Earth will be by fire. In 1,666 A.D. you have the great fire of London, and that year has the 666 anti-Christ number in it. Will London or England be somehow involved with that Coming World Leader who will start out pretty good, but then be entered by the spirit of Satan and become the world-destroying anti-Christ? Who knows? There's a mess of thoughts there, all of them probably frivolous and false.
Salt water is H2O with NaCl in it. The NaCl laden water covers most of the Earth...our mighty oceans and seas. They are about 3.5% salt by weight, but are not of uniform salinity. The Atlantic is the saltiest of the great oceans. Oddly, the Don Juan Pond nearf McMurdo Sound in Antarctica is said to be Earth's saltiest pond. It has so much salt (around 32% by weight) that it does not freeze until about -53 Fahrenheit/-50 Celsius. So you can float in it if you are brave enough! You won't sink but it is extremely chilling. It is very shallow, about knee deep in many places or so people report.
The atomic numbers of Sodium and Chloride are 11 and 17 respectively. If you go to Genesis chapter 11 it is after the flood of Noah (a large water event by any measure) and the scripture is speaking of the human lineage that bridged from Noah to Abraham, and it mentions a man named Peleg, who is mentioned in the Biblical time line as being alive when the world was divided:
16 When Eber had lived 34 years, he became the father of Peleg. 17 And after he became the father of Peleg, Eber lived 430 years and had other sons and daughters.
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Peleg is an interesting man because it specifically tells us in scripture that it was in the time of Peleg that the land was divided. And if that division was referring to the land masses separating we know that it was the salt water seas that are separating them. It may also be referring to the division of language and the separating of the people to different parts of the Earth though. Genesis 10:25
ESV To Eber were born two sons: the name of the one was Peleg, for in his days the earth was divided, and his brother's name was Joktan.
NIV Two sons were born to Eber: One was named Peleg, because in his time the earth was divided; his brother was named Joktan.
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The name Peleg is said to mean 'divided' or 'a small water stream' in Hebrew. Joktan became an ancestor of some Southern Arab tribes it is said, and his name reportedly means 'small dispute' or 'disgust', in Hebrew.
Could this be the Bible telling us that a super-continent once existed, undivided? Something like the Pangea Continent that scientists speak of as having once existed? Or does it refer to the division of the languages? Or perhaps they happened at about the same time?
Half of a circle is 180 degrees (and circles are so fundamental to the Creation, as is water) and the difference between the freezing point of water and its boiling point is also 180 degrees Fahrenheit at standard temperature and pressure. I have no idea if there is a connection, but the odds are somewhat against this. If you add this 180 more degrees to the 212 degrees boiling point you get 392 degrees Fahrenheit. This is exactly 200 Celsius, or twice the numerical value of the boiling point of water in Celsius (100 Celsius.) Explainable, but kind of interesting.
(I have read about the efforts of famous physicists such as Albert Einstein to discover a Universal Constant...a constant that ties all of the various Physics Constants into one Master Constant. Whenever I have heard that discussion I have had a strong notion that it is literally embedded in the pages of the Bible, and that God might allow people to discover it someday. But I suspect that they won't be smart enough to acknowledge our Maker, the Almighty God of Abraham, as its author with Jesus His Son at His side when He used it in forming the Creation.)