Where might Earth's salt have originated?

"Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven; and He overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground. But his (Lot's) wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt." (Exo. 19:24-26).

The two great retributions upon Earth have both left salt for perpetual reminders of what Jesus, the Judge of all the earth, thinks of our mischief and rebellion against His holy Father. As it was in the time of the Roman Empire, so it was also in the days of Noah and Lot.

"Rebellion had struck its roots deep into the heart, and the hostility of man was most violent against heaven. It was demonstrated before the universe that, apart from God, humanity could not be uplifted." Desire of Ages, p. 37.

There is a limit to the grace of God. And this is the holy God's message from the ruins left after His desolations:

"Even as Sodom and Gomorrha, and the cities about them in like manner, giving themselves over to fornication, and going after strange flesh, are set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire." (Jude 7).

"For if God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell, and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment; and spared not the old world, but saved Noah the eighth person, a preacher of righteousness, bringing in the flood upon the world of the ungodly; and turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrha into ashes condemned them with an overthrow, making them an ensample unto those that after should live ungodly; and delivered just Lot, vexed with the filthy conversation of the wicked ... that righteous man dwelling among them, in seeing and hearing, vexed his righteous soul from day to day with their unlawful deeds..." (2Pet. 2:4-6).

Salt and the Dead Sea leave a warning to determined sinners in the way that no plant life can exist there and even most animals avoid it. According to one website specialized on the topic, only micro-organisms can live in the Dead Sea, and that only because of freshwater runoffs into the Sea and because of the springs at its bottom. When God says to sinners, "Thou shalt surely die if you go down the way of transgression", you surely will die. 

Another lesson from the lifeless wasteland that God left behind His overthrow of the cities is the emptiness that attends all who choose to leave the grace and truth of God. When the Spirit of grace leaves the hardened soul, anxiety and every aspect of spiritual death ensues.

"Cursed be the man that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh his arm, and whose heart departeth from the Lord. For he shall be like the heath in the desert, and shall not see when good cometh; but shall inhabit the parched places in the wilderness, in a salt land and not inhabited." (Jer. 17:5,6).

"...the same shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is poured out without mixture into the cup of His indignation; and he shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels, and in the presence of the Lamb: and the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever: and they have no rest day nor night, who worship the beast and his image, and whosoever receiveth the mark of his name." (Rev. 14:9-11).

When we cut off God's voice from our soul too many times; when we turn away our mind from the written counsels from God; then His voice shrinks in our conscience by our choice to turn away. God is cut off from His beloved child, and we are cut off from the living God. Finally, the silence in the soul is permanent. 

"Thou art tormented. And beside all this, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed: so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot; neither can they pass to us, that would come from thence." (Luke 16:25,26).

Both the literal destructions, and the

spiritual destruction that is likened to them, are real. And because the God of love wants all who have an ear open to His voice, to enter and to stay in His everlasting kingdom, the literal destructions have been kept before us in infinitely unutterable woes.

Many years have I pondered the presence of salt because of its connection to the only two biblical acts of divine judgment upon men. Salt! Salt! The Salt Sea and the salty oceans! Why the same residue after both omnipotent destructions?

Simultaneously, a separate question needled me. Why only four giant gas planets in our solar system?  Astronomically speaking, all nine planets should be gas giants. It seemed only logical and likely that at one time they were. Why not? 

Might Genesis 1 show a jovian Earth?

(The following comes from a post I wrote on this, dated Thursday, May 26, 2011.)

Bending all my weak mental power to the task, and with much prayer, in an amateur study of Genesis chapter 1, I realized that if I let scripture interpret scripture then the opening statement of the Bible does not take the reader back to the creation of a sudden, immense cosmos, but simply back to the creation of the world around us. I.e., "the heaven" simply meant the sky or atmosphere, and "the earth" meant simply the land and lakes and a (freshwater?) ocean, and all that Jesus made to inhabit them.

Thus, "In the beginning God created the (sky) and the (land). And the (land) was without form, and void." (Gen. 1:1,2). The rest of the chapter filled in the details of this two-verse preface.

But then another puzzle arose. Just what did the last part of verse 2 mean, "Darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters"? What waters? What deep? The waters of an existing planet? Darkness was upon the face of a deep freshwater ocean? The land was void because the waters covered it?

At length the thought dawned on me that the waters upon which God's presence moved was the watery atmosphere of a giant gas planet, a jumb Jovian planet. All giant gas planets look huge because of their liquidy atmospheres. Actually, their mineral-metal cores are comparably small. Neptune's core is surprisingly close in size to Earth, its atmosphere being almost purely H₂O.

So I began to see that Neptune fits the creation week's pre-creation model when the Word began His work of making a special gift for His Father. On day one He appeared to a giant exoplanet that had no sun and He gave to it His glorious presence and His personal attention.

On day two He divided the planet's watery atmosphere, lifting the lesser dense upper water, condensing it into a thick liquid barrier to shield the soon-to-appear creations that would live on the surface of its core. And further condensing the semi-liquid water under the resulting air gap. 

Now it having two oceans, one above and the other below the newly devised sky, on day three He lifted the core's tectonic plates to bring up a landmass that would be home to the innumerable flora and fauna species with which He would populate this new wonder of the galaxy.

On day four Jesus accomplished a most prodigious engineering feat. He brought to His precious rogue planet a run-of-the-mill yet very stable sun, and an unusually large satellite moon to more abundantly stabilize the natural systems of this amazing new planetary home. He placed these two new additions to earth's sky at just the right distances, so that to the inhabitants the two orbs would each appear the same size. He did this to teach His highest creatures to examine all their dominion and learn of its two Makers. 

Then He brought eight other exoplanet rogues into our little galactic sub-system. This act defines the simple statement of Genesis 1:16, "He made the stars also," the stars being gaseous jumbos, which all rogues are, but these now roving, revolving around the newly captured sun.

Not the immense cosmos came into existence that day, but the wandering stars of our solar system--and they already very old, from the beginning of their galactic home.

But over time, the planet closest to the Sun lost its watery jacket, and the next found its atmosphere in a runaway greenhouse condition. Earth, the third, as predetermined by its Creator, had its jumbo water jacket split in two to create a vast terrarium, providing a kind of the Creator's breath of life, and giving the planet an exquisitely opaque, azure hue from a cosmic distance. But what about the old Jovian atmosphere of the fourth terrestrial planet, Mars? What happened to its water-balloon-like atmosphere? It was situated too far from its sun to be burned away like Mercury's.

What happened to Mars' old Jovian atmosphere? has been my conundrum for years. Where did Mars' jumbo gaseous atmosphere go? Unlike Jupiter's and beyond, which have retained their oceanic atmospheres, what caused Mars' jumbo atmosphere to disappear?

But maybe the Lord is showing me the answer to this perplexing problem in my theory of a biblical-scientific explanation for the creation of our planet and its solar system. And it has helped confirm my reality of the wrath of God toward our humanistic forgetfulness of Him and His grace.

Yesterday I was explaining my ideas of creation week to my brother who has been trying to believe the Bible, but has been unable to get past its first chapter, for all its seeming mythology and ancient, unscientific tradition.

I could only get to day two's Neptune concept, but ran out of time to explain day four's rogue planet concept. So, this morning as I came out of deep sleep a new query crossed my mind. Look into the salt content in Mars' ice compared to the Dead Sea's contents. So I googled both sources of salt and found a possible answer to both mysteries that concern the source of the divine judgments and the cause of Mars' loss its jumbo, water atmosphere.

One article from Forbes Magazine notes, "The presence of sulfur dioxide led to Martian oceans that were rich in sulfuric acid."

Space.com says, "The soil of Mars also holds nutrients such as sodium, potassium, chloride and magnesium."

The ice on Mars contains a mixture of table salt with magnesium and sulfuric acid. Over the past several weeks scientific research has been conducted to ascertain human sustainability on our inhospitable neighbor. Those recent studies have generated internet articles that now present better data than a few years ago when rogue planets were still a supposition. Now I have facts to buttress my biblically scientific theory of the providential judgments on the ante-deluvian world and on the wicked cities of Canaan.

Magnesium, for example, finds at ground zero of the firey destruction of Sodom it's most abundant source than anywhere else in the world. But divine retribution punished the entire globe during the great deluge. That would explain the presence of magnesium spread over our whole planet, its highest concentration at the Dead Sea (Sodom and Gomorrah). Magnesium mixed into the sulfur that was chemically bound in Mars' liquid atmosphere may have been released by the friction upon entry into earth's atmosphere, igniting the explosive magnesium and sulfur, thus magnifying the heat to an unearthly intensity.

This also explains the loss of Mars' poisonous water atmosphere, and its underground salt ice lakes. The Lord God brought it to Earth and poured it upon the willingly ignorant transgressors of His Law.

Another arsenal from our solar system's cosmic resources is the incomprehensible mine of asteroids and proto-planets, meteors and meteorites, between Mars' and Jupiter's orbits.

Will those asteroids comprise the last plague's blazing hailstorm, when 80 pound bags of hardened concrete come screaming down from above, pushed into action from the Main Asteroid Belt by Jesus and His angelic retinue, the apocalyptic "kings of the east"? Will they be the cause of blazing temperatures when "the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up." (2Pet. 2:10).

As I have looked at the woeful warnings and their implications for us today, I have asked, How can we trust deeply enough in the gospel of God's power and love for His recreation unless we first see and trust in the omnipotence and love that He showed in our first creation? And thankfully, the new understanding of Genesis 1 has built up that faith in me.