The Karoo asks nothing of you — it simply shows you God’s greatness

By Andre Eksteen

It is December. The heat hangs heavy against the Swartberg, and my days now pass with a jackhammer, a pick, a spade and a rake in hand. I carve walking paths out of the rock — along the contours of the mountain slopes and into the ravines, a new trail to the Bushman paintings against the high cliffs. It is hard work, but it is good work. You feel every strike through your arms, your feet and your back.

I work alone. Not because I have to, but because I want to. For me it is relaxation. It is where my mind becomes quiet. It is where I think. It is where I look. When you work with the mountain like this, you learn to know it. You see how the layers lie. You see how water must once have moved here. You realise this rock has a story — an ancient story that began long before me.

And when the heat burns you, when your body says you cannot go on, when your soul shouts: stop — what are you doing to me now!? It is exactly there where something begins to shift. The noise of your soul — your thoughts — falls quiet. The rush disappears. You are left only with your breath and what God has placed before you. The mountain asks nothing of you. It simply stands there, as it has always stood since God

masterfully formed it.

Every blow breaks not only rock; it reveals layers that water once laid down flat, layers that were later lifted and folded. No human designed this. I merely work with it. I follow it. And the longer you work, the clearer it becomes: this world is not an accident. It is ordered. It is shaped. It is fixed.

Yesterday, Saturday 11 December, we had to drive quickly to town to buy food, diesel and petrol for the month ahead. Just as we turned onto the tar road, we landed among the December streams of holidaymakers — caravan after caravan, vehicles full of people racing through the Karoo on their way to the sea. Within the first ten kilometres two vehicles overtook us on solid lines, on bends we know well as deadly. But on they race.

All in a hurry. All focused on the destination. Few who truly look. Few who realise that the destination is not guaranteed. Many never reach the place they are rushing towards

— only their eternal destination.

And there, between the Swartberg and the open plains, it struck me: how many of these people drive past here year after year without seeing what lies right before their eyes?

While other people build sandcastles on the beach that wash away with the tide, I carve walking paths from rock — paths on which others will one day walk, look, and be able to realise for themselves how great God truly is.

And that is where this article began in my heart.

It always fascinates me how easily people accept certain Biblical truths, yet how little they actually see them. They hear them from childhood. They hear them in church.

They learn them as words. They repeat them effortlessly because it is “in the Bible”. It is part of a story everyone knows.

But what strikes me is how few of those words ever take root in the real world around them. They hear Psalm 104 inside four walls, but never see it outside. They read of mountains rising and valleys sinking, but walk, drive and live every day among those mountains and valleys without noticing, feeling or experiencing them as God’s creation.

And then you ask just one simple question — not a theological one, just an honest question — and suddenly it becomes quiet. Not because the answer is secret, but because people are no longer taught to connect the Word with reality. And worse still: when that connection is gone, a shallow faith collapses quickly.

“The waters of the flood retreated.”

Fine. Everyone knows the waters retreated and that the ark eventually made contact again with soil, rock and mud. Everyone says it. It is commonly accepted. It is one of those statements no one ever questions.

But now ask: how did the waters retreat?

Not why God did it. Not when it happened.

Just: how did it physically happen?

And then it becomes quiet.

That silence is not innocent. It does not show that people are humble; it shows that they have not been taught to think. It shows that they do not truly believe in God’s Word, but in a story they do not understand and yet repeat like parrots. Over time we have created a faith culture where it is enough to say that you believe something, but almost unwelcome to ask how it worked in the real world. As if belief in God and physical reality are two separate things. As if God works only spiritually, but is powerless physically. As if His Word is true as long as we benefit from it, but His creation is a fairy tale. We are more willing to believe Darwin and other scientists’ theories than God’s own testimony.

Preachers speak of the waters that disappeared. But the Bible itself does not say so.

The Bible does not say the water simply “disappeared”. It says the waters fled.

It says the waters went away. It says the waters retreated.

These are words of movement, not evaporation. Words of direction, not disappearance.

Water does not disappear. Water moves.

Water flows.

Water always reacts to height, pressure and shape.

And that is exactly what the Bible says happened.

Psalm 104 is often dismissed today as a lovely song. A poem. Something to read spiritually, but not literally. Again that pestilent idea that you cannot or may not read and understand the Word literally. But that is a grave mistake. Psalm 104 is not vague. It is not symbolic to hide meaning. It is poetic because the event is so great — it describes real, physical processes that took place.

“At Your rebuke the waters fled;

at the sound of Your thunder they hurried away. The mountains rose,

the valleys sank down

to the place You appointed for them.”

It is not imagery. It is sequence.

First something happens to the earth. Then the water moves.

The mountains rise.

The valleys sink.

And then the water flows to where it must now be — the sea.

If you read it correctly, you see something important: the water is not addressed first. The earth is described. That is the key. The earth moves, and the water reacts.

This is not theology. This is physical mechanics.

If you raise ground, water must flow down. There is no other option. That is how the world works. That is how God made it. It is like when you lift a shell out of the sea — the water does not “fall away” because it disappears, but because water always flows downwards. The water simply seeks the lowest place. That is all.

And that is why the flood was not merely a water problem. It was an earth problem. A structural rearrangement. The earth itself moved.

Now it becomes important to correct something people very often misunderstand. The flood was not simply rain that fell and later dried up again. It was not a giant dam that overflowed and then drained. The Bible itself says the “fountains of the great deep” burst open. In other words: things under the earth happened — pressure, fractures, movement.

That is why the Bible speaks of the earth that changed, not just the weather.

And when you understand this, you begin to look differently at the world beneath your feet.

Let us bring it home. Literally.

The Karoo — our home

Once you understand that the flood was not just a water event, but a physical alteration of the earth itself, many other questions also start to make sense. One of them is something that has bothered people for a long time: why are so many fossils suddenly

“missing”?

With the movement of the earth — mountains rising, valleys sinking, fractures opening

— enormous volumes of sediment shifted. Layers that were once on top were buried. Layers that were exposed were covered again. Many fossils were not destroyed; they are simply no longer visible. They lie today deep under new layers, trapped in rock that further hardened after the flood. That is why fossils do not occur evenly everywhere.

That is why you sometimes find rich fossil layers, and then for kilometres nothing. It is not proof of absence, but of covering — not of time slowly passing, but of an earth that changed drastically.

And if you want to see what such a world looks like, you do not need to search far. The Karoo is not just an open, dry place. The Karoo is one of the largest open geological archives on earth. Kilometre after kilometre of layers lie exposed. You do not need to read about it in books. You can see it. You can touch it. You can drive through it.

Those layers lie flat. They are even. They stretch across enormous distances. They lie on top of one another like pages of a book. No modern river, no slow process over millions of years can lay down so much material so evenly, so widely and so thickly. It requires enormous volumes of water. It requires rapid deposition. It requires an event that affects everything at once.

And this brings us back to the heart of the matter: what you see here is not the product of random, slow change, but the remains of a world that was covered, rearranged and exposed again in one great movement. The Karoo does not lie still. It testifies.

This is exactly what a global flood does.

But here is the point people always miss: those layers are now dry. You stand on them. You farm on them. You drive for kilometres across them. So the question remains: how did the water escape?

Here things become interesting, because the answer does not lie in the Karoo itself, but in the mountains that surround it.

The Swartberg on which I now sit and write. The mountains on which I built my home.

Drive through Meiringspoort. Drive through Seweweekspoort. Look closely at the rock. Do not just say it is beautiful. Look at how the layers lie. You see layers standing upright. You see layers tightly folded. You see layers lifted like waves. And what you do not see is just as important: you do not see heaps of broken rock. You do not see chaotic fragmentation. You do not see everything simply torn apart.

When rock is hard and dry, and you place it under stress, it breaks. It cracks. It crumbles. It breaks into shards. That is how old, dry rock reacts. That is how I break it today with my jackhammer to build walking paths.

But when sediment is still wet and soft, it bends. Then it can be folded. Then it can be pushed upright without breaking. It is like wet clay. Shape it now, and it keeps that form when it hardens later.

And this is exactly what the Swartberg shows. The layers were laid flat first. Then they were lifted and folded while still wet. Only afterwards did they harden.

When you see quartz veins, they tell you something very specific. Quartz is hard and brittle once it has hardened. It does not bend; it cracks. If that quartz had already been hard when the mountains were lifted, you would see straight fractures, shards and chaos. But that is not what you see. You see quartz bent along with the surrounding layers. It means the sand from which it formed was still wet and plastic when the movement occurred.

It fits perfectly with a world where water is slowly retreating while the earth is still in motion.

And now, when you read Psalm 104 again, it begins to sound different:

“The mountains rose. The valleys sank down.”

It is not poetry. It is description.

The earth moved.

And the water reacted.

The waters retreated. Yes.

Not because water is obedient. Not because it “just happened”.

But because the Creator moved the earth itself, and water always does what water does: it flows to the lowest place appointed for it.

And those traces still lie beneath your feet today.

Enjoy your holiday — but not like the people of the world. Enjoy it as a true child of God. Slowly. With eyes that see. With a heart that rests. With His perfect peace that does not depend on a destination, but on Who travels with you.

And that brings us back to the heart: what you are looking at in the Swartberg is not slow, random uplift over millions of years — it is the geological signature of rapid, large-scale movement while the sediment was still wet.

Once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

And the moment you connect it with Psalm 104, the world under your feet suddenly joins the world written in Scripture — and the Bible becomes real in a way that many believers have never experienced.

Because the truth is this:

God’s Word is not a collection of symbolic stories for emotional comfort.

It is a record of real events that took place in a real world, with real physical consequences.

And that world — the world reshaped by the flood — is the same world in which you stand today.

But most people never notice it because they are moving too fast.

They drive through Meiringspoort as if it were a tunnel. They rush through the Karoo as if it were empty.

They see rocks but never read them.

They feel heat but never ask why the land looks the way it does.

They quote the Bible but never connect it to the ground beneath their feet.

This is not because they lack intelligence. It is because they have been taught to separate the “spiritual” from the “physical”, as if God rules the one but has nothing to do with the other.

But creation is the first Bible God ever wrote.

Nature is not an accessory to faith — it is evidence of it.

And the Karoo is one of the clearest open pages of that testimony.

It shows you a world that was once under water. It shows you layers laid down in a single event. It shows you sediment folded while still wet.

It shows you a landscape shaped not by slow erosion, but by sudden movement.

And above all, it shows you this:

The waters did not “disappear.” They went somewhere.

They followed the valleys when they sank. They moved aside when the mountains rose.

They fled when the earth trembled at God’s command.

And the sea basins we know today — the deep trenches, the massive depressions — are the places the water was driven into when the land rose out of it.

This is not fantasy. This is physics.

This is Scripture.

And the two do not contradict each other — they explain each other.

When you walk in the Karoo, you are not walking in emptiness. You are walking in the aftermath of Genesis.

When you sit on the Swartberg and look over the plains, you are not looking at desolation.

You are looking at the reshaping of the earth recorded in Psalm 104.

The world has changed, but the witnesses remain.

The rocks tell the story. The mountains confirm it. The valleys prove it.

And the silence of the Karoo magnifies it.

Because the Karoo asks nothing of you — it does not demand belief, emotion or ritual. It simply shows you.

It shows you a world God touched.

A world God judged.

A world God reshaped. A world God preserved.

And when you slow down — when you walk instead of rush, when you look instead of glance — the truth becomes unavoidable:

God’s greatness is not hidden.

It lies openly on the mountainsides. It is carved into every contour.

It stretches across every plain. It rises in every ridge.

It lies under every stone.

The Karoo is a sermon preached in silence.

It tells you that the earth has moved. It tells you that the waters have fled. It tells you that the past is real.

It tells you that God is not a myth — He is the Maker.

And the more time you spend here, the more the noise of the world dies down. Your soul stops shouting.

Your mind stops racing.

And your heart becomes quiet enough to hear what creation has been saying since the beginning:

“The heavens declare the glory of God.” (Psalm 19:1)

Not metaphorically.

Literally.

So enjoy your holiday — but not like the world enjoys theirs.

Enjoy it slowly. With eyes that see.

With a heart that rests. With a spirit that listens.

Because peace is not found in a destination — it is found in the One who walks with you.

And the Karoo, in its silence, will remind you of Him.

Always.