Somewhere in the mountains of eastern Turkey, almo…
Somewhere in the mountains of eastern Turkey, almost 30 [music] ft below the ground, a research team pulled up pieces of wood.
Some of them were black and charred, and they found them inside a formation that many people believed could be the final resting place of Noah’s Ark.
That was earlier this summer, and for months, the team said nothing.
But now, they’ve gone public, and the wood has been sent to a laboratory for testing.
This is one of the biggest moments [music] in the search of Noah’s Ark in a long time.
And I want to walk you through why.
For years now, people have looked at this strange formation and asked the same question.
If an ancient wooden ship is buried here, where’s the wood?
There have been aerial photographs.
There’s been [music] underground scans.
There have been expedition after expedition.
But until now, nobody had put actual wood on the table from deep inside [music] the site.
According to the team, these pieces came from roughly 8 to 9 m below [music] the surface.
Andrew Jones, who’s part of the investigation, was asked about it, and what he said surprised a lot of people.
The wood was found months ago, but the professor in charge chose to keep it quiet.
And here’s how he explained it.
Yeah.
So, the wood though was found earlier this summer.
The professor kept it quiet just to make sure the site was secure and people wouldn’t dig up more, you know.
So, he made that decision.
[music] Uh but we decided to announce it now because we’re about to send we actually have um some of it’s already been sent off to a lab, but another lab in the US is [music] about to test it.
And so the professor said, “Yeah, go ahead and tell the tell everyone we found wood.”
And so there is uh charred blacken wood and also uncharred wood that has been found inside the site.
So they sat on this for months.
And when you think about it, that makes sense.
This is not a normal dig.
Explorers and scientists and believers from all over the world are drawn to this place.
So if word got out that wood had been pulled from deep inside the formation, people could have flooded the site.
Some might even have tried [music] to dig on their own.
The professor wanted to protect the site and make sure nothing important was damaged or carried off.
So, the team kept working in silence.
Now that the samples are in the lab, they’ve decided to tell the world.
Think about what that must [music] have been like for the people on that team, knowing what they had found and not being able to say a word.
Now, to understand why this matters, you need to know the place.
It’s called the Darupiner Formation.
It sits in the mountains of eastern Turkey, not far from Mount Ararat.
And from the air, it looks like the outline of a huge boat lying against the side of a hill.
It runs [music] about 515 ft long.
It first drew wide attention in 1959, and ever since, people have argued about what it is.
Some researchers say it’s simply a natural rock formation and others have spent years trying to find out whether it holds the remains of an ancient ship.
And there’s a reason so many eyes are on this region.
Genesis 8:4 says that after the flood, the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat.
The Bible describes a great vessel that carried Noah, his family, and the animals through the floodwaters and then came to rest in those mountains as the water went down.
Thousands of years later, researchers are studying a boat-shaped formation in that same wider region.
They’ve been scanning the ground with modern equipment, drilling for samples, and trying to find out what’s inside.
And now there’s wood.
It’s easy to see why people are paying attention.
In Genesis 6:14, God told Noah to build the ark out of gopher wood and to cover it with pitch inside and out.
Now, in the ancient world, pitch was used to seal wooden [music] structures so water could not get through the joints and gaps.
For a vessel built to survive a worldwide flood, that instruction makes complete sense.
But here’s what caught my eye.
The researchers now plan to test the [music] fragments for pitch, tree resin, bitamin, and other substances.
They want to know what turned the wood black and whether it was ever coated with something.
Now, the wood is not the only news.
Earlier this month, researchers met in Turkey for a symposium to go over the latest underground radar scans.
Professor Sanker Adela, who’s overseeing the archaeological work, [music] said the scans showed some very unusual features.
And the team described patterns that looked like corridors, chambers, [music] and separate layers beneath the surface.
And that stood out to me because Genesis chapter 6 tells us [music] the ark was built with three decks.
At the symposium, Professor Itilla spoke about the formation with three layers beneath the ground.
He was careful to say the data is not enough yet to draw a firm conclusion, but it is a striking detail.
The team is no longer just studying the outside of this formation.
They’re trying to understand what’s [music] inside it.
They’ve drilled at a number of spots and collected hundreds of samples.
And they’re comparing what comes out of the boatshaped area with the ground it.
And the goal here is to build a clear picture of what is buried there.
What surprised me most is how much work is still ahead.
At the symposium, Professor Attilla said only about 20% of the radar data has been analyzed.
So, there’s a lot more to go through.
And on top of that, there’s now this wood.
The scientists want to know what kind of tree it came from, how old it is, and what its physical makeup can tell them.
But they also want to compare it with soil samples from the drilling.
Every one of these pieces could explain the history of this formation.
And when you hear how the researchers themselves talk about it, you understand what this work means to people who have given years [music] of their lives to it.
Deep inside, I do, but as part of the university project, we’re doing this uh one step at a time and they’re being very careful.
You know, the people have been excited about the site on and off for many years, decades.
Uh you know we’re trying to go beyond just excitement and actually dig into this site literally and figuratively and get real scientific data.
That takes time.
So, you know, we’re very excited that we started this process, but this is just the first season and we’re not even finished with the first season.
We still have this lab work to do with the soil.
You know, we got almost 400 soil samples to still test.
You heard him.
Deep down, he believes they have found the place where Noah’s Ark came to rest.
But as interesting as all of this is, there’s another part of Noah’s story I keep coming back to.
And it’s the reason Noah built the ark [music] in the first place.
When most of us think of Noah, we picture the animals going in two by two or the ark resting on the mountain after the flood.
But before any of that, Noah had to listen to God.
He had to believe what God told him.
Hebrews 11:7 [music] says that Noah was warned about things not yet seen.
And by faith, he prepared an ark to save his household.
Noah’s greatest achievement was not the size of what he built.
It was that he [music] obeyed God when he could not see what was coming.
I mean, just think about what that was like for him.
Noah was getting ready for something that would change the whole world.
And all around him, life went on as normal.
People made [music] plans, went to work, built houses, and raised families.
And day after day, Noah kept doing what God told him to do.
He did not have the full story in front of him the way we do when we open our Bibles.
But he had a warning from God, and he had to decide whether or not to trust it.
We all face that [music] same choice.
Will we trust what God has said even when we cannot see how things will turn out?
Jesus himself pointed back to Noah [music] in Matthew 24 37 to39 when Jesus talked about his return.
He spoke about the days of Noah.
Before the flood, people were eating [music] and drinking and getting married.
They were busy with everyday life right up until the day Noah went into the ark.
Then the flood came and Jesus said his coming would be just [music] like that.
He wasn’t just giving a history lesson.
He was teaching [music] his followers to be ready to pay attention.
And we need to hear that today.
So much is fighting for our attention.
And every day brings a new headline, a new crisis, and a new reason to worry.
So it’s easy to get caught up in all of it.
And we forget what Jesus [music] told us to take seriously.
And yet, here’s the story of Noah grabbing the world’s attention once again.
Researchers are digging in the mountains of Turkey and studying wood pulled [music] from deep in the earth.
But as Christians, this should also make us look at our own lives.
Are we listening to God?
Are we obeying him?
Are we living like the words of Jesus matter just as much today as when he first said them?
Now, one of the things I love the most about Noah’s story is that even in a time of judgment, God showed mercy.
He gave Noah and his family a way to be saved.
