Run Before the Rain: An Antediluvian Adventure

Vetter, Michael

ISBN 10: 1475951507 / ISBN 13: 9781475951509

Published by iUniverse, 2012

Pages can have notes/highlighting. Spine may show signs of wear. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less. Seller Inventory # G1475951507I3N00

Synopsis:

Sixteen hundred years before the Earth changes forever, a zoologist receives an important message from God that a supernatural event is imminent. God is angry with mankind's evil and will destroy every breathing creature on Earth. Told by God to build a ship that will carry him and his family safely away from a global deluge of water, Noah struggles to warn civilization, to no avail. Unfortunately, he is up against the evil Emperor Anak and his Cainite officials, who are determined to stop the construction of Noah's ark at all cost. Under God's ever-watchful presence, Noah; his grandfather, Methuselah; and his son, Japheth, devote their lives to completing the massive project, even as the water vapor canopy suspended above the atmosphere begins its steady, inevitable plunge downward. The Book of Adam, which contains sacred prophecies of God's work to come and proves that what Noah is preaching is true, appears to be lost forever-unless Japheth can continue the search his grandfather started ages ago and find the book before time runs out. In this fast-paced Christian adventure, a biblical family must put into practice unforgettable lessons of courage, faith, and self-sacrifice as they attempt to escape an evil world with nothing more than an ark and a promise from God.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

RUN BEFORE THE RAIN

AN ANTEDILUVIAN ADVENTUREBy Michael Vetter

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2012 Michael Vetter
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4759-5150-9

Chapter One

Eden's Promise

What was that light ahead?

In the calm, warm dawn, Noah was checking on a new litter of bobcats born a few weeks earlier in the foothills above his remote estate when the sound of a rushing wind around a bend in the path caught his attention. He didn't smell smoke, but he could clearly see what looked like a flame through the brush. Rounding the bend, he observed a small tree not more than four or five feet high. It was not glowing, exactly, but radiating, as if every leaf and branch were infused with fire. The flame ascended ten feet into the air, but there was no smoke or heat. Bright flames, but no smoke or heat? Radiating light, but with its green leaves still lifted to catch the morning moisture?

"That is strange," Noah uttered aloud.

Approaching the tree, he felt a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach and his knees gave out under him. This seemed vaguely familiar to him—the brilliant flames rising into the sky, no heat or smoke, green leaves that should have shriveled and fallen off, the sound of a strong wind, but no movement in the trees around him.

When Noah was a child, his grandfather, Methuselah, told him how he would sit beside Adam late into the night to hear what it was like when God spoke to Adam and Eve in the Garden. Noah's great-grandfather, Enoch, related the same captivating experience of when God spoke to him from a flame, but none of these stories prepared Noah for what happened next.

"Noah!"

God spoke his name!

Noah's instant reactions were terror and reverent subjection. He fell to his knees, spread his arms with palms on the ground and lay prostrate with his forehead pressed into the mountain trail.

Noah heard a voice—better yet, he felt a voice—that entered his body from the burning tree. Oddly, though it somehow resembled the intonation of a deep voice, he couldn't distinguish specific words because the sound of rushing wind overpowered his hearing. He tried to concentrate, but the sounds all seemed to run together. He needed to relax, but he couldn't.

Divine instructions—inaudible, but perfectly clear inside his head—came to him in a single thought that flooded his mind and drowned out the sound of the rushing wind. The pulse of information raced from his mind to his heart and into his soul, where he sensed, at first, a profound dread. A vision—again more felt than seen—of what would soon happen to the world and what he should do filled Noah's being and impressed itself upon his memory. Finally, his initial fear was replaced with a calm feeling that all would be well with him and his family.

It was hard to tell how much time passed; it could have been an hour or a second, but Noah's physical sensations slowly returned: the smell of dirt moistened by the morning dew, the feeling of the pebbles pressing against his face, the warm sun on his back. What was this all about? What have I done? he questioned. Noah rose to his feet and brushed the dirt from his hands and tunic. His mind reeled with thoughts of what all this might mean. His breathing and heart rate were back to normal, but he had so many questions.

Then he heard a bird singing nearby. From the middle of the path he saw a sparrow perched on the branch in front of him, chirping a beautiful melody. It was as if this little creature knew that God had been there and was naturally lifting his song in praise of his Creator.

Noah cautiously approached the tree. The sparrow flew off to sing in the distance as he stretched out his hand to confirm that the tree was real. The heart-shaped leaves were warm in the sunlight, still moist with the last remnants of morning dew. They had the scent of a plant's natural freshness and held no odor of smoke. Had he been seeing things? Was this real? How could a tree look like it was burning with flames reaching into the sky and yet not be consumed?

On his way back home, Noah forgot about the litter of bobcats he had come to check on and stopped several times in mid-trail to think. The experience was so dreamlike and the message from God so fantastic that he doubted anyone would believe him. He sat on a rock by a stream that flowed from the hillside to rehearse what he would tell his wife, Miriam, and his father when he returned home. If what God said to him was real, then this supernatural event would change their lives forever.

Noah's training as an objective scientist led him to carefully outline God's message and reason through each part, but he was having difficulty fully understanding it. God was angry with mankind—that much was clear. Yes, they had obeyed God's early command to multiply and fill the earth with millions of inhabitants. But over the centuries, mankind had grown profoundly evil. Some of this was due to the influence of the appearance of Anakim giants, but it was sin within the heart of each person that caused him or her to act upon every wicked impulse with unrestrained violence. God was grieved in His heart by this rampant, worldwide sin. He was determined to destroy every creature on the face of the earth and start over. Noah had no trouble understanding that part because the trend in the past few centuries was undeniable.

But the fact that Noah and his family had been singled out as the sole recipients of God's saving grace was too astonishing to handle in his mind. This unmerited favor was not due to their "goodness," but it was because God's future plan for the world's redemption involved repopulating the planet from one family. Noah didn't understand it, but his faith compelled him to accept it.

The final part of what Noah "heard" was what caused his inner turmoil. He and his family were told to build a ship—a giant boat that God had called an "ark"—that would be their home while God destroyed the rest of the planet in a global flood of water. God's specifications for the ark were brief, but they described a vessel of immense proportions to protect them during the global deluge. Male and female of every kind of animal on Earth were to be his passengers during the flood. In Noah's mind, this made for an impossible journey, but he knew that it would happen in the next one hundred and twenty years. God had made a covenant promise with Noah to bring it about exactly as He said.

Noah felt a little better after he reasoned this through, but he was no less settled about what lay ahead for him and his family. He had no idea where to start, so he began his walk back home to talk it over with his wife and father.

* * *

By the early Earth's timetable, Noah was a middle-aged man of almost five hundred years, showing evidence of slowly advancing age: thinning hair and streaks of gray in what was once a red beard, wrinkles around the eyes, and the usual aches and pains on damp mornings. But Noah spent most of his days outdoors, and his tall, muscular frame was otherwise in good shape. He was a typical specimen of vitality for this era. His wife, Miriam, was also from the line of Adam's son Seth, whose descendants were called Sethians. Rather than fair-skinned and blue-eyed like Noah, she had almond skin, brown eyes, and glistening, black hair. The significant difference in appearance was not unusual; the Sethian family line had always exhibited a diversity of colors, shapes, and sizes. In the beginning, their race was commanded by God to multiply and spread over the earth, and that they did. At one time their numbers reached into the millions. In contrast, the distinct Cainite civilization, descended from Adam's son Cain, remained in urban areas and the Cainite's facial features and body types were less diverse due to intermarriage. Some say you can tell a Cainite just by observing him, but do not be mislead. If you didn't notice the "mark of Cain" on the back of their necks, some Cainites could be mistaken for Sethians from their facial features alone. It was their aberrant lifestyle that usually gave them away. From early times, Cainites were raised to deny the existence of God; this belief in "no God" was reflected in a lifestyle lacking absolutes. Without acknowledging the definitive truths revealed by their Creator, they lived for their own satisfaction according to a code of relativism determined arbitrarily by their feelings and circumstances. This lifestyle led to the steady decay of Cainite civilization and, ultimately, to God's unfavorable judgment.

Cainite population also numbered in the millions, but they were concentrated in a handful of densely populated, high-rise industrial cities. In more recent years, as Sethians became attracted to modern city life, many adopted the atheistic Cainite lifestyle. Civilization as a whole had been in moral decline ever since, and now Cainite and most Sethian life was faced with annihilation at God's hand.

Noah's family estate had existed for a millennium and occupied a half-million acres of wilderness in the valley watered by the Euphrates River, whose origin was half a continent away in unfathomed, deep, underground springs. Noah's ancestors had named their estate "Eden's Promise" because they said it was located near the original Garden of Eden and, although they had tried to replicate the original Garden, they knew Eden would never return to its original form in their lifetimes. A return to the ideal Garden of Eden was just that, a promise for the future. Over the years, they expanded their home into a walled compound that measured almost a half-mile square, with many small laboratories, animal pens, and their home, surrounded by a high stockade fence to keep out the larger, wild, predatory animals, and flesh-eating dinos. What the family called Eden's Promise was technically the Center for Creation Zoology Research—part of the larger Adam Institute—which was the main center of knowledge and learning in their part of the world. Miriam and Noah made zoology their life's work as they continued their family tradition of nature research. They decided to live in the hills, rather than closer to town where the Institute was located, to be near the wildlife, and to have enough room to breed and study animals in their natural habitats. They had been married for more than four hundred years with no children. Animal research had always been their only passion. All that was about to change.

Miriam would be understanding, as she always was, when Noah told her what happened on the mountain. She would weigh the message from God with her usual godly judgment and common sense. Despite the fact that this would change their lives completely, Noah knew she would stand beside him. However, he had no idea how his father might react. His father was in poor health, so he might not handle this dramatic change very well.

As startling and profound as his morning had been, Noah walked confidently and briskly toward his house in the distance. Had he known how much their lives would change from that day forward, he would probably have been more worried.

Miriam greeted him cheerily when he walked into the large kitchen of their home.

"Where have you been? I thought you would be back hours ago," she asked as she took the coffee pot off the stove and poured a steaming cup for Noah who took it gratefully and stood staring out the window at the distant hills. Miriam had turned the kitchen into a large laboratory space so that she could experiment with animal feed. Something was always cooking on the stove, but most of it was not particularly appetizing to humans. Noah almost didn't hear her as he tried to form in his mind what to say.

He told her about the burning tree and tried to explain how he knew it was God that had spoken to him.

"It was a supernatural miracle, without question," he began with conviction. "I am a scientist and have been studying plants and animals all my life, and this was definitely supernatural. I cannot explain how I know that it was God, except that the appearance of the flaming tree resembled what Adam described to our ancestor Enoch many centuries ago. The phenomenon was definitely miraculous." What God actually told Noah would be harder to explain to her. So, he blurted it out all at once.

"I must build a giant wooden ship called an `ark' that will be large enough to carry our family and two of every kind of animal. God will drown every living thing that is not in the ark in a global deluge of water." Noah paused to form his next words. "Miriam, God said that you and I will be in the ark with our three sons and their wives. We don't have any children!

"Building an ark is one thing," Noah continued, "but for God to wipe out every human being and animal on the face of the earth is a terrifying prospect. God is very angry. He is angry every day with the wickedness He sees in the world and how civilization has been polluted with the selfish desires, intentions, and actions that spew from mankind's evil heart. The Cainites first corrupted world government and commerce many centuries ago; and then a powerful world leader took over with such violence that everyone—Cainite and Sethian alike—were gathered under his brutal domination. The corrupt influence of the empire spread to the extent that there is not a town or city where the original, godly Sethian order survives. We, and the few other Sethians like us, are fortunate to live on isolated farms in the country where we can work and worship as we wish, but it is only a matter of time before the controlling arm of the empire reaches us too.

"What is more amazing is that God has been merciful this long. He has held back His wrath and tolerated the world's wickedness long enough. Now, He has given us one hundred and twenty years in which to repent or face global destruction. It is a task that seems like trying to empty a lake with a teaspoon, but I am supposed to warn about the coming judgment and the world's need to get right with God while our family builds the ark that will save us from the flood. I honestly do not know how we are going to do it. I am a zoologist and a professor—I can barely build a decent tool shed, let alone a five hundred foot boat!" Noah finished, taking a deep breath.

Miriam took all this in stride and nodded knowingly. "You know more than you realize, and God would not have chosen you for this task unless He also gave you the ability to complete it."

Noah appreciated her effort to encourage him, but he remained skeptical. "I am a zoologist and you are an animal nutritionist. Like Adam and all our forefathers, we have spent our lives studying the creatures that God created and placed on Earth for our benefit. I suppose that will come in handy when we have a boatload of them to care for, will it not?"

"Now you are thinking more positively about the circumstances," Miriam chimed in her usual upbeat tone. "We can prepare for their care and build the right habitations inside the ark. With our understanding of animal genetics, breeding methods, hibernation cycles, and eating habits, we can be ready to care for and preserve God's creatures while we are inside."

"But that does not change the fact that I lack the construction skills necessary to build such a large ship that will have to stay afloat for who knows how long when the flood finally comes." Noah stood and began to pace. "I will need help to build it, that is for sure."

Noah's father, Lamech, entered the room as they were finishing their talk, and Miriam wisely excused herself to check on some tests she had underway in the breeding pens. She turned and gave her husband as knowing smile as she went out the kitchen door and closed it quietly behind her. Noah watched her walk across the courtyard and thought how blessed he was to have her as his wife and companion.

"What was that discussion about? You sounded very excited, Noah," his father commented as he walked slowly to the stove and poured coffee into his oversized mug. In the past few years, Lamech tired easily, but he still tried to go outdoors every day to tend the animals as he had for most of his life. His once-healthy body was paying the price of almost eight hundred years of hard, outdoor labor. He eased himself into his favorite chair next to the window where he could watch the animals in the yard. Joining him by the window, Noah thought he should start from the beginning and tell his father what happened that morning. As he emotionally described how God planned to obliterate the earth, Lamech listened impassively. Finishing his story, he anticipated his father's skepticism by asking, "Pretty unbelievable, isn't it?"

"Not really," Lamech replied absentmindedly while he continued to gaze out the window.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from RUN BEFORE THE RAINby Michael Vetter Copyright © 2012 by Michael Vetter. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Bibliographic Details

Title: Run Before the Rain: An Antediluvian ...
Publisher: iUniverse
Publication Date: 2012
Binding: Paperback
Condition: Good
Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket