The Only Way Out Series

Floyd Collins was a professional cave hunter. He found the famous Crystal Cave in Kentucky in

1917. It is a popular tourist cave now, but back them it was too far off the road to get people to

come to it. Floyd's dream was to find a bigger and better cave, even more beautiful than the world

famous Mammoth Cave. So he began exploring, and one day as he went deep into a cave, he

squeezed into a narrow opening, and found the cavern of his dreams. It was like a domed cathedral

studded with glittering stalactites and stalagmites. He was so excited he became careless, and his

foot pushed a small rock that held up a huge boulder, and the boulder came down on his left ankle

pinning him there deep in the cave.

He almost pulled his leg off trying to get free, but it was hopeless. For 24 hours he laid there in

pain and fear. Finally, he heard someone coming. He yelled, and his two partners found him. They

could not budge the boulder, however. He begged them to go get help. In a matter of hours that cave

sight became pandemonium. Crowds gathered as the news spread of a trapped man. His brother

offered five hundred dollars to anyone who could rescue Floyd. Many tried but failed. For two days

these attempts went on, and Floyd was getting weak. Finally, they offered five hundred dollars to

any doctor who would amputate his leg, but there were no takers.

By this time reporters and photographers had made this cave sight the focus of world attention.

Fifteen hundred people who camped in the area, and the governor had to call in the state militia to

keep law and order. In desperation to get Floyd out they tried to dig a shaft from the top. This led to

a cave in that blocked the passage to him, and so they could no longer get food and water to him.

Eleven days later they broke through, but Floyd Collins was dead. The body could not be removed,

so they held a service right there, and the cave became his tomb.

It was not a very happy ending, for it reveals that with all of man's resources there are some

things he just can't get out of. There are traps he just can't escape from. Floyd could not get out

himself, nor could anyone else help him out. He had gotten himself into a truly hopeless situation.

Now this experience, we must admit, is very rare, but it illustrates a fact of life that is not rare, but it

so common, it is true of all of us, and everybody else. Everyone of us has explored the cave of sin

and gotten trapped by the boulder of guilt. The Bible says, "All have sinned and come short of the

glory of God." Once you are in this cave there are no ways of escape that man can devise.

We have a record of all the ways men have tried to get free from the bondage to sin. Men have

offered millions of sacrifices to God in order to get Him to forgive and release them from sin. But

there is no record that anyone was ever set free by this method, even when they offered their own

babies, or young virgins in sacrifice. All of this folly just added to the darkness of the cave in which

they were trapped. Two thousand years ago men use to dig a pit, and get down in it, and kill a bull

above it. They would then let all the blood come down upon them in the pit to atone for their sin.

All they did was make a major mess. They never washed one sin away with all of that blood.

Men have tried other ways to escape their bondage. They have tried to atone for sin and escape it

by doing hard things, like crawling on their hands and knees for hundreds of miles; by standing in

cold water in a cave up their neck until nearly frozen; by kissing thousands of steps as they climb to

a shrine on a mountain top. On and on goes the list of the many things men have done to try and get

free from the cave of sin. The tragedy is none of them work, just like nothing worked to rescue

Floyd Collins. Man, with all of his progress, and all of his marvelous inventions, is no closer than

the caveman to a way of escaping the cave of sin.

Does this mean that man is in a hopeless situation? Yes it does, as far as man is concerned there

is nothing he can do to escape the chains of sin. Once you have sinned there is no way to un sin. It is