Traffic.  Driving in Oklahoma City you can see a never-ending hoard of vehicles going in every direction and at all hours……. and OKC’s traffic is small potatoes compared to that of many other cities all over the world.

Does it make you wonder how much gasoline and oil is being consumed as you read this?  The logistics stagger the mind.

The world’s present oil use is estimated at 34,000,000,000 (that’s 34 “billion”) barrels a year.  There are about 42 gallons in a barrel.  I will pause, while you do the math.

It is estimated that there are 1.5 trillion barrels of oil left in the ground, but that is based on our ability to retrieve it with present technology.  Estimates of the actual oil still below our feet are much higher.

How far below us?  The deepest oil well yet drilled is about 35,000 feet off shore from Houston, Texas.  That’s over 6.5 miles deep!  How did all that oil get down there?

But it’s not just oil.  Also buried deeply in the earth are reservoirs of natural gas and coal.  Remaining coal reserves are estimated at over a trillion tons.  Remaining coal!

Natural gas?  In the Bakken shale alone (North Dakota, Montana & Canada) there is an estimated 6.7 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, plus over 5 million barrels of gas liquids using only our present technology.

Just what is crude oil, coal & gas?  Each of these “resources” is the remains of dead stuff, decomposed under heat and pressure.  “Fossil fuels”, we call them.

But what is all of this dead stuff doing buried miles under the ground and all over the crust of our planet?  Remember Noah?  Remember the flood that Genesis says covered the entire world and lasted a year?  What we find in the fossil record’s reserves of oil, gas, coal and the remains of plants and animals buried in water-laid sediments, testifies to this flood.

Every time you and I pull up to the gas pumps, we are filling our vehicles with the liquid evidence of God’s judgment, and of the accuracy of the historical record he provided in the Bible.  Since we drive around on his testimony about that judgment every day, doesn’t it seem to you that we should really be taking seriously his promise of another, coming judgment?

Don’t be caught with an empty tank when the Lord returns.