1. 1 WINDMILLS IN THE NETHERLANDS Introduction to Preserving God’s Word Lesson 27 Introduction to Preserving God’s Word Lesson 27

2. 2 KinderdijkKinderdijk

3. 3 Kinderdijk is a village in the Netherlands. It is situated on a polder.

4. 4 Polders are areas of land that once were under water. The water is drained away so the land can be used for farming and living.

5. 5 A polder 5

6. 6 Polder near Rotterdam

7. 7 To drain the polder of Kinderdijk, a system of 19 windmills was built around 1740. It is the largest concentration of old windmills in the Netherlands.

8. 8 Windmills of Kilderdijk 8

9. 9 Large canals had been dug, at first, to drain the water off the submerged land, but an additional way was needed, and windmills were built to pump the water.

10. 10 Kilderdijk

11. 11 Some of the windmills are still used, but diesel pumping stations are also used today.

12. 12 Kilderdijk

13. 13 The Zuiderzee was a shallow bay of the North Sea in the northwest of the Netherlands, about 30 miles wide and about 13-16 feet deep.

14. 14 Seawalls were built and rebuilt to protect the land and villages around this bay, but disastrous flooding occurred in 1282, in 1287 during a violent storm (killing 50,000 to 80,000 people), and again in 1421 (flooding 72 villages and killing 10,000.

15. 15 Green areas are polders

16. 16 Early in the 20th century a large enclosing dam was built in response to another flood in 1916. Now large areas of submerged land were reclaimed for farming and housing. What are these reclaimed areas called?

17. 17 The building of the dam

18. 18 The finished dam 18

19. 19 The red line at top left is the dam.

20. 20 Can you find the dam and the polders? 20

21. 21

22. 22 During the Dark Ages the Roman Catholic Church taught the people that they could not understand the Bible and that only the priests should have access to it.

23. 23 The people had no Bible to read in their own language to, but God inspired some men to change all that.

24. 24 John Wycliffe translated the Bible from Latin into English. The printing press had not been invented yet, so Wycliffe’s Bible had to be copied by hand.

25. 25 The word of God began to break through the barriers (seawalls) the papacy had erected to keep the Bible from the people. At first it reached the people in trickles seeping through the cracks in the symbolic seawalls, but soon a great flood would reach the people!

26. 26 Our lesson this week is about the beginning of this great surge of truth!

27. 27 Credits: Slide 2: mystic_mabel at flickr Slide 5: E. Dronkert at flickr Slide 6: Wilco Schippers at flickr Slide 8: Jack Versloot at flickr Slide 10: Vijay Duvvuri at flickr Slide 12: stevekc at flickr