Wow! A Fossilised Pocket Watch.

As the plane soared above the stunning Scottish mountains, I sat there by the window with a sense of astonishment of the view as the airline soared some 35,000 feet 10,670 metres into the clear sky, with the sunshine contrasting the land with the almost black sea and lochs. But with the stunning beauty way below, I also felt a sense of apprehension on what would lie ahead, for this particular 1977 journey from London to Toronto was my first long-haul flight I had ever taken. 

Not that I hadn't flown before. The last trip I took was only a year earlier in 1976, a flight to Tel Aviv. But was that particular flight the longest short-haul flight classified, or the shortest long-haul? After all, a flight from London to Amman, only a small fraction longer, was - and I guess still is - categorised as long-haul. The two preceding flights out of London, one to the Spanish airport of Girona in 1972, and the other to Milan in 1974, were indeed short-haul. Even though I was already nineteen years of age when I first ever boarded a plane, due to my late father's averse to flying combined with his love for the steering wheel, I had never flown with any of my family members.

Therefore sitting alone inside a sealed capsule among complete strangers, I felt a need for divine assurance. And so, during the in-flight meal, I took the bread roll, broke it, and quietly proclaimed,

This is the body of Christ broken for me. And I ate whilst meditating. Then I took the glass of red wine and said,

This is the blood of Jesus Christ that was shed for me. I'll shall drink it in memory of Him, which I proceeded to do.

I did ponder whether I had bestowed a blessing on myself, or whether I had committed a deadly sin, for according to the Catholic Church, I have violated a sacred sacrament by taking it without priestly authority.

And if all that was not enough, a year later in 1978, once again I found myself on board a transatlantic flight, this time from London to New York. And during a mid-flight meal I repeated the sacrament of eating a piece of bread and drinking red wine symbolising the body and blood of Jesus Christ broken and shed whilst hanging on that cross.

Dripping with sweat, inside head of Statue of Liberty, 1978.

I'm glad to say that no harm had ever came to me as a result of these mid-flight self-administered Holy Communion meals, despite what the Church of Rome might think. So far I didn't die and then finding myself tumbling into the eternal fires of Hell. Rather, on both these backpacking trips I felt as if I was blessed. Being close to God, feeling his protective presence where ever I went, never coming across any difficulty in finding a room at every hotel reception I called at.

However, as I sat in the aeroplane full of strangers, there was another important reason on why I self-administered a Communion meal other than for seeking assurance. As a son of Adam and Eve, I was unfortunate enough to inherit original sin from them, which has caused spiritual death and separation from God, with physical death to follow, and a lost eternity spent separated from God's personal presence. But because of the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ, through faith in him I was acquitted from the penalty with all my sins forgiven - past, present and future - and the Righteousness of Christ was credited to my account, and I was adopted into his family as a son of God.

The righteousness credited to my account was Christ's righteousness, not my own! As the Scripture says, 

Now when a man works, his wages are not credited to him as a gift, but as an obligation. However, to the man who does not work but trusts God who justifies the wicked, his faith is credited as righteousness.

Romans 4:4-5.

Therefore the truth of Eternal Security of the Believer, or Once Saved Always Saved, must stand with this truth of justification by faith because such emanates from this truth of the Gospel. Therefore the eating of the Body of Christ and the drinking of his Blood by means of bread and wine attest of eternal salvation gotten through Jesus Christ - a glorious truth in the face of the uncertainty facing me after landing.

But to take Holy Communion mid-flight with such conviction on both trips - surely such a sacrament must be based on factual history. Did Jesus Christ really exist some two millennia previously? Did the Last Supper, on which my in-flight Communion was based upon, itself actually took place? Furthermore, was it him who was crucified and died while still fastened to the cross? After all, Islam insists that it was Judas Iscariot who hung there. And after burial, did he actually rise from the dead? According to one national newspaper, it was thought that Jesus Christ did not actually die, but instead fell unconscious, and was buried in that state, as if he was suffering from catalepsy. Then after waking up, somehow with unimaginable strength, he managed to move the stone covering the mouth of the tomb, and then walked away, probably to a remote desert, never to be seen again.

If any of these things occurred, all which differed to what is recorded in the four Gospels, then really, our faith is in vain, remaining futile, there is no salvation, and all that time spent in church - even if I enjoy singing, praising, praying to God, and listening to sermons, as well as trying hard to love one another despite our different opinions - it would have turned out to be a total waste of time and effort. If I attend church for up to two hours every Sunday for fifty weeks of the year, that would be as much as an annual top up of a hundred hours, or four full 24-hour days where I would be better off spending at a luxury hotel by the seaside. Furthermore, those sacraments taken whilst mid-flight would serve no other purpose but to make a fool of myself in view of anyone watching.

All these things came to mind while we were watching a television documentary about the Jurassic Coast, presented by Dan Snow, Lucy Cooke, and wheelchair-bound Niall Strawson. This three-part series occupied an hour-long slot on BBC Four, therefore down from peak evening viewing of BBC One. As we were watching the third programme, I felt my spirit sink into sadness and hopelessness as the words evolve, evolution, and evolutionary were constantly repeated. Throughout the entire three hours of broadcast, not one word about God, Supernatural Creation or Noah's Flood was mentioned. However, it was Lucy Cooke who, with a moment of hesitation, used the word designed in her description of a fossil with intricate detail.

Perhaps the Lord, with a sense of humour, does allow the presenter to let her guard slip on occasions. And no doubt, as I see it, the Jurassic Coast is a testimony of the Biblical Deluge, which stretches from Old Harry Rocks which are the chalk stacks east of Swanage, all the way west to Exmouth, on the River Exe estuary. The resort of Lyme Regis, where many fossils are displayed and sold, lies on the Dorset side of the border with Devon, itself midway along the Jurassic Coast.

And so the public is fed to the hilt with how these fossils of mainly marine creatures, are out-and-out proof of organic evolution - despite that these lifeforms look to all have died together at one instance. And how my spirit sank in very much the same way those creatures sank to the bottom of the ocean. Because, like the newspaper testimony above, if evolution is a scientific fact, then my faith in Christ is a sham and the Christian faith is a worthless ideology. For Darwinism is a direct denial that Jesus is the Christ who atoned for our sins.

While Dan Snow dealt mainly with human history around that stretch of coast, particularly of wartime tanks and submarines, Lucy Cooke narrated on the fossils so frequently found here. A fossil expert who was with Cooke picked up what looked like a large rounded limestone pebble. He then struck it with a hammer, and the two halves came apart to reveal a beautifully-detailed fossil ammonite. When asked how he knew that this ordinary-looking pebble contained such a intricate fossil, his answer was that by looking at the surface, some detail of the edge can be seen. I guess this can be referred to as a ham-roll effect. Only the edge of the ham at the outer surface can reveal its presence between the two bread roll halves.

The ammonite remains represent the ideal fossil of a creature which lived in the Jurassic Period somewhere between 145,000,000-200,000,000 years ago. That's pretty old, and such remains found embedded in limestone are classed as a true fossil, a thought-view which carries the notion that it takes millions of years for a dead organism to fossilize. And this theory of tremendous longevity is essential for Darwin's evolutionary theories to hold true. And such theories are spoon-fed to the public which in turn accept without any ado. And furthermore, no one in his right mind would dare throw a challenge. If the challenger is a man in the street, he would simply be ignored. If a graduate or a university professor and civil engineering, such as the late Henry M. Morris, then its likely that he will be ostracised by the scientific community, who will write papers debunking his Creationist stance. 

It was within the first fifteen minutes of the second show when something I consider to be very remarkable. Here stood Lucy Cooke talking to an expert about some sealed bottled perfumes, together with a couple of china vessels and statuettes, all of them around a hundred years old, found at a shipwreck off the coast of Dorset. And next to the porcelain was an insignificant-looking lump of rock. And fully embedded in the rock was what looked like a man-made artifact. After thorough cleaning and examination, the artifact turned out to be a pocket watch, almost entirely entombed in solid rock in virtually the same way the ammonite was entombed in a limestone pebble.

The rock featured on the BBC: A watch "fossilized".

A pocket watch embedded in "crud" - solidified mud.

Interestingly enough, Cooke remarks that it will take a further 130,000,000 years before the watch will be a "proper" fossil. But going by the hardness of the rock, isn't it a fossil already? What is the real difference between it and that of the ammonite? Except for its age and of different rock composition? The rock in which the watch is embedded is given a name "crud", which is mud consolidated into rock. What I find so fantastically remarkable about this exhibit is that if a man-made artifact of little more than a hundred years of age can be entombed in solid rock at an amazingly quick time, then why does the ammonite need millions of years to achieve the same result?

It is as if God is desperately trying to tell us something, and just by looking at all the fossils found around the coast and elsewhere, one obvious conclusion can be drawn, and that is all fossilised organisms - whether its marine life, plant and trees, birds, or land animals including Dinosaurs, must have died very quickly, were buried and preserved as fossils over a very short duration. At is as if God is saying, Hey, look guys. What I have written in my Book is historic and true. There was a universal Deluge in the days of Noah, and you are looking at the evidence right now. Oh, so you want more proof that fossilization is quick and recent? Well there you are, a watch preserved in stone. There you have it.

As I stand, this revelation is vital for the Christian faith. Mythologize any part of the Bible, especially the early chapters of Genesis, and the Christian faith will go down like a house of cards. But even the reality of Noah's Flood isn't by means all and end all. Rather it's the historical truth of Adam and Eve. For the reality of Jesus Christ can only stand if Adam and Eve were real too, along with Divine Creation and the Fall, as well as the Deluge, the cause of the formation of fossils. Because through their transgression sin entered the world and death to all men. This concept, which is within the very heart of the Christian faith, can only stand if there was an Adam and Eve, and they were created direct from the ground as the Bible teaches, and were not descended from a human line gradually going back to the primates, as all of these must have died already, before the Fall, therefore nullifying the purpose of Jesus Christ and the Atonement he made on the Cross.