BIRTH PANG NUMBER 20
May 15, 2010
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Some valleys are formed when the block of land between two normal faults slides downward. Valleys created in this way are called rift valleys. One example of a rift valley is Death Valley in California. It is a long, narrow valley 87 meters
below sea level. Scientists believe that the valley was formed by a series of small movements along two faults at either side of the valley. They estimate that the land along the eastern fault of Death Valley will move another 3 meters during the next 1000 years.
Another example of a rift valley is the Great Rift Valley in the Middle East and Eastern Africa.
This valley contains the Dead Sea, in Israel, the lowest spot on Earth, and Victoria Falls on the Zambizi River, in Zimbabwe.
The Great Rift Valley varies in width from twenty to sixty miles (thirty to one hundred kilometers), and in depth from a few hundred to several thousand meters. The northernmost part of the Rift forms the Beqaa Valley in Lebanon.
To the south, in Israel, it is known as the Hula Valley separating the Galilee mountains and the Golan Heights. Farther south, the valley is the home of the Jordan River, which flows southward through Lake Hula into the Sea of Galilee in Israel and then continues south through the Jordan Valley into the Dead Sea on the Israeli-Jordanian border.
From the Dead Sea southward, the Rift is occupied by the Wadi Arabah and then the Gulf of Aqaba and the Red Sea.
The southern end of the Red Sea marks a fork in the rift. The Afar Triangle or Danakil Depression of Ethiopia and Eritrea is the probable location of a triple junction, which is possibly underlain by a mantle plume(an upwelling of abnormally hot rock within the earth’s mantle that helps the earth to lose heat). The Gulf of Aden is an eastward continuation of the rift—before the rift opened, the Arabian Peninsula was attached to the Horn of Africa—and from this point the rift extends southeastward as part of the mid-oceanic ridge of the Indian Ocean. In a southwest direction the fault continues as the Great Rift Valley, which split the older Ethiopian highlands into two halves.
In eastern Africa the valley divides into the Eastern Rift and the Western Rift. The Western Rift, also called the Albertine Rift, is edged by some of the highest mountains in Africa, including the Virunga Mountains, Mitumba Mountains, and Ruwenzori Range, and contains the Rift Valley lakes, which include some of the deepest lakes in the world (up to 1,470 meters deep at Lake Tanganyika). Many sites in the Albertine Rift are protected as national parks, wildlife reserves, or forest reserves. But there are several other sites important for conservation that require legal protection in the future, mainly in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
In Kenya, the valley is deepest to the north of Nairobi. As the lakes in the Eastern Rift have no outlet to the sea, these lakes tend to be shallow and have a high mineral content as the evaporation of water leaves the salts behind. For example, Lake Magadi is almost solid sodium carbonate, and Lakes Elmenteita, Baringo, Bogoria, and Nakuru are all strongly alkaline, while Lake Naivasha needs to be supplied by freshwater springs to support its biological variety.
Sodium carbonate, however, creates an ideal breeding ground for algae. Several species of fish, tilapia in particular, thrive in this environment. As a result, millions of birds flock to these soda lakes to feast on the abundant food supply of algae and fish. Each of the lakes in the Rift Valley string has a slightly different water composition ranging from freshwater to extremely alkaline, highly saline to brackish.
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Chapter 22 – God suddenly Makes a Great Valley
October 26, 2001
In Chapter 21 we observed how God slowly formed a great valley over a very long period of time.
In this Chapter we shall observe how God forms another great valley in a very short period of time.
Zechariah 14:4,5 – And his feet shall stand in that day upon the mount of Olives, which is before Jerusalem on the east, and the mount of Olives shall cleave in the midst thereof toward the east and toward the west, and there shall be a very great valley; and half of the mountain shall remove toward the north, and half of it
toward the south. [5] And ye shall flee to the valley of the mountains; for the valley of the mountains shall reach unto Azal: yea, ye shall flee, like as ye fled from before the earthquake in the days of Uzziah king of Judah: and the Lord my God shall come, and all the saints with thee.
The word used for “cleave” is “baqa,” which means to break, rend, rip up, make a breach, separate, split, cut out, break through or into, or to divide. A valley itself is often referred to as a cleft (baqa), such as the Beqa Valley in Lebanon. The context of these verses leaves little doubt that the Lord intends to form a great cleavage valley in the “midst” of the Mount of Olives. It is also quite clear, from the linguistics of verse four, that it will not merely be a narrow ravine, but rather “a very great valley.” It will be sufficiently wide for multitudes of Jews to flee through it. The Hebrew word used for “midst” in verse four, in this particular context, means “to divide, to reach to the midst.” This word does not have to mean dead center or exactly half way, as the following Scriptures, where it is used, attest:
Psalm 102:24 – I said, O my God, take me not away in the MIDST of my days: thy years are throughout all generations.
Jeremiah 17:11 – As the partridge sitteth on eggs, and hatcheth them not; so he that getteth riches, and not by right, shall leave them in the MIDST of his days, and at his end shall be a fool.
The Bible indicates a normal lifespan of seventy years for a human. You can see, from the preceding Scriptures, that if a man were to die between thirty and forty, he would have left the land of the living in the MIDST of his days. The word used for “midst” does not require that the Mount of Olives cleave precisely in the center. The Scripture merely indicates that a division will be effected in the middle section of the mountain.
May I now direct your attention to Figure 31.
The two dashed black lines (oriented west to east and labeled “X” and “Y”) indicate normal faults in the upper crust of the earth. As you can see, they pass north and south of Jerusalem on a converging track toward the Mount of Olives. These normal faults are not there by accident. I am persuaded they have been created there by God and, at His command, will collapse to fulfill Zechariah’s prophecy. Please note that fault X intersects the northern flank of the Mount of Olives, while fault Y passes through its southern end. That section of the Mount of Olives between X and Y is the MIDST of the mountain, and is the section that will collapse and sink downward when God issues His command. These two normal faults pass through the Mount of Olives, and then make contact with a series of north to south faults that exist along the eastern lee of the mountain. In this zone, where the intersection of east-west & north-south faults occurs, a structural weakness like the Afar Depression will be generated in the earth’s crust when violent earthquakes are occurring in the Jordan River Valley (See Birth Pang 19, Chapter 21 and associated Figures). The center of this geological weakness zone is on the eastern side of the mountain, approximately four thousand cubits (six thousand feet) directly east of the Jerusalem Eastern Gate.
The old city of Jerusalem sets atop Cenomanian and Turonian limestone, a rock strata that will safely support the largest structures.
One might naturally suppose, that just across the narrow Kidron Valley, you would find
the Mount of Olives composed of a duplicate rock strata.
However, its slope betrays its actual geological composition, for it is made of Cenomanian chalk – the same type of chalk that crumbles into a thousand pieces when it falls from a blackboard railing.
I believe God deliberately formed it of chalk. When its northern and southern ends divide from its middle section, the entire middle section will sink downward and crumble into billions of pieces of chalk. This geological transformational process is shown in Parts A and B of Figure 32. Such a downward slippage process has been used many times in the past by God to form large fault block valleys around the globe.
When the critical force, holding the Arabah Fault together, is finally exceeded by the force spreading apart the Red Sea, (See Figure 25), then the Arabah fault will suddenly rip open from the Gulf of Aqaba northward for about 185 miles. The resultant fantastic earthquakes produced in Israel will cause: (1) A new triple point depression to be formed with a center about four thousand cubits east of the Eastern Gate of the old city of Jerusalem, (2) Everything between points X and Y on Figure 32 to sink downward and crumble, (3) The remaining northern half of the Mount of Olives (the section north of point X) to move northward on a newly created Gaza Plate, (4) The remaining southern half of the Mount of Olives (the section south of point Y) to move southward on the newly created Sinai Plate, and (5) the Jericho Valley to rip open southwestward from the Jordan River to the new triple point depression I call Zechariah’s Triangle. Figure 32 (looking eastward from the old city of Jerusalem) illustrates the horizontal sequence of events as they affect the Mount of Olives before and after the cleavage.
Figure 33 portrays the overall local area action as if you were viewing it from a point about three miles above the ground thirty miles west of Jerusalem. The spring and river system shown in Figure 33 will be discussed in future chapters. Figure 34 shows the effect.