SPEAKER_00: Well, good morning.
SPEAKER_00: I'd like to ask you to turn, if you would, please, to Genesis chapter 1.
SPEAKER_00: We're going to be continuing this week and for a number of weeks to come in a series of studies, Bible expositions, trying to open up the early chapters of Genesis for ourselves.
SPEAKER_00: And today we've come to Genesis chapter 1, verses 3 through 23.
SPEAKER_00: That's a typo on my PowerPoint.
SPEAKER_00: It's actually to 1.23.
SPEAKER_00: And in this, as we will see, I'm going to read it for us in a moment, but I want to kind of set the stage.
SPEAKER_00: In this, what we are hearing, what we are reading, that which Moses presents to us, comes under the inspiration of God.
SPEAKER_00: God is speaking to us in this throughout the whole scriptures, but also in the early chapters of Genesis.
SPEAKER_00: And when God speaks to us, he does not stutter, and he does not mislead us.
SPEAKER_00: So as we read these opening chapters and opening thoughts, we approach it with an assumption, with a worldview that God is there, God is involved with us, God is communicating in ways we don't completely understand, that are not necessarily objective, as it were, but that God speaks and what he says is true, reliable, trustworthy, factual, accurate.
SPEAKER_00: And it's with that framework that I approach the scriptures.
SPEAKER_00: These verses and these passages that we are looking at are very easily approached with a very different mentality.
SPEAKER_00: We live in a day, we live in a world, we live in a society, we've been raised in the post-Enlightenment rationalistic, objective, cognitive, propositional, logical approach to understanding reality.
SPEAKER_00: And certainly most of those around us, but also we ourselves, if we're not careful, we don't quite know what to do with the supernatural, with the non-rational, with the non-cognitive, with the fact that God speaks.
SPEAKER_00: He really addresses us.
SPEAKER_00: And if we're not careful, we approach the scriptures, and certainly Genesis 1 and 2 and 3, kind of with the questions, well, how does this correlate with the reality that we see around us?
SPEAKER_00: It's talking about an understanding of how the world came into being that is fundamentally different from that with which we are typically raised, or at least trained and educated and those around us.
SPEAKER_00: So God is not left out of the equation here.
SPEAKER_00: The supernatural permeates all of this.
SPEAKER_00: And if we only approach this with a questioning of the supernatural or a feeling compelled to correlate the so-called facts of things that we know about creation and how it all came into being, and correlate that which with this, we will find ourselves kind of struggling and kind of in trouble.
SPEAKER_00: I'll be talking a little bit more about that, but what I want to say is that what we have here is a pretty simple story, a pretty simple account that even a child can understand.
SPEAKER_00: And, and it's it's really pretty simple, folks, because this is not just Moses talking, this is not just human, this is not just man's words, but God used the writers of Scripture in ways that they may not even have perceived of exactly, so that the end result is what God is wanting to say to us.
SPEAKER_00: And that is a pretty radical thought.
SPEAKER_00: And yet, quite frankly, that's the way here we here at this church approach us.
SPEAKER_00: We believe that this is accurate and true and reliable and does not mislead.
SPEAKER_00: No, we have to wrestle, and we're gonna spend a good bit of the limited period of time I have this morning, to kind of wrestle with how we can correlate some of this stuff, but where we're coming from is a worldview in which God exists.
SPEAKER_00: He transcends the visible, the material, the physical, that which we can weigh and touch and analyze and put under a microscope or look at through a telescope and make complete sense out of on the basis of human thinking and human reasoning.
SPEAKER_00: That's not what this is all about, because that is not all that reality is.
SPEAKER_00: There are realities which go way beyond that kind of that approach.
SPEAKER_00: We'll we'll talk more about that.
SPEAKER_00: Um let's just read.
SPEAKER_00: Let me read for you uh Genesis 1.
SPEAKER_00: I'll begin at verse 1.
SPEAKER_00: We only touched on two verses last week.
SPEAKER_00: We're gonna try to do a little bit more than that this week, otherwise, it'll be four or five years from now before we get through the first four chapters.
SPEAKER_00: Um however, based on the first service, we're not gonna cover this morning everything that I wanted to cover, so we'll probably take this and uh split it into two.
SPEAKER_00: But um follow along in your Bible.
SPEAKER_00: Open it up, please.
SPEAKER_00: If you don't have a Bible with you, there's a Bible in the back of the pew in front of you.
SPEAKER_00: Um let's begin at the very beginning, a very good place to start.
SPEAKER_00: Genesis chapter 1.
SPEAKER_00: In the beginning, God.
SPEAKER_00: And that's really about all I said last week.
SPEAKER_00: It took me a whole lot more words than that to say it.
SPEAKER_00: But that's really the point.
SPEAKER_00: We begin with the God who is.
SPEAKER_00: In the beginning, God.
SPEAKER_00: God created the heavens and the earth.
SPEAKER_00: That's the way the Bible begins.
SPEAKER_00: That's an understanding of reality that is our starting point.
SPEAKER_00: The earth, verse 2, was without form and void.
SPEAKER_00: Darkness was over the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters, and God said, Verse 3, let there be light, and there was light.
SPEAKER_00: And God saw that the light was good.
SPEAKER_00: And God separated the light from the darkness.
SPEAKER_00: God called the light day, and the darkness he called night.
SPEAKER_00: And there was evening, and there was morning, the first day.
SPEAKER_00: Verse 6.
SPEAKER_00: And God said, Let there be an expanse, a firmament, a canopy in the midst of the waters.
SPEAKER_00: Let it separate the waters from the waters.
SPEAKER_00: And God made the expanse and separated the waters that were under the expanse from the waters that were above the expanse.
SPEAKER_00: And it was so.
SPEAKER_00: That's the way it was.
SPEAKER_00: And God called the expanse heaven, and there was evening, and there was morning.
SPEAKER_00: The second day.
SPEAKER_00: Verse 9, and God said, Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together in one place, let the dry land appear.
SPEAKER_00: And it was so.
SPEAKER_00: God called the dry land earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called seas, and God saw that it was good.
SPEAKER_00: And God said, Let the earth sprout forth vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit, in which is their seed, each according to its kind on the earth.
SPEAKER_00: And it was so.
SPEAKER_00: The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their own kinds, and trees bearing fruit in which their seed each according to its kind, and God saw that it was good, and there was evening and there was morning the third day.
SPEAKER_00: Verse 14.
SPEAKER_00: And God said, Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night, and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and for years, and let them be lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth.
SPEAKER_00: And it was so.
SPEAKER_00: And God made the two great lights, the greater light to rule the day, the lesser light to rule the night, and the stars.
SPEAKER_00: And God set them in the expanse of the heavens to give light to the earth, to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness.
SPEAKER_00: And God saw that it was good.
SPEAKER_00: And there was evening and there was morning the fourth day.
SPEAKER_00: And God said, Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures, and let the birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the heavens.
SPEAKER_00: So God created the great sea creatures, and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind.
SPEAKER_00: And God saw that it was good, and God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let the birds multiply on the earth, and there was evening and there was morning the fifth day.
SPEAKER_00: But we'll be doing really well to get through this.
SPEAKER_00: So what do we do with this?
SPEAKER_00: What do we do with the the the layers, the strata that we see in the Grand Canyon?
SPEAKER_00: Beautiful, phenomenal, awesome.
SPEAKER_00: What do we do with the paleontologistic the the findings of paleontology or fossil records?
SPEAKER_00: I always get screwed up when I try to use a high-falutin word, don't you?
SPEAKER_00: What do we do with that?
SPEAKER_00: What about carbon-14 dating, which, if we understand what we're being told on the basis of, I think it's the half-life of carbon or something like that, carbon-14, uh, then the world is something like 4.5 billion years old.
SPEAKER_00: Um how do we approach those things?
SPEAKER_00: Because when when we read the creation account and we just let it say what it says, we get a very different picture.
SPEAKER_00: Um, how do we put those kinds of things together?
SPEAKER_00: Uh as I mentioned last week, I have to say very honestly, uh, correlating uh science in the Bible is really not my great interest.
SPEAKER_00: It's not as though we're going to convince people of different worldviews simply because we come up with logical arguments.
SPEAKER_00: People do not get argued or do not get embracing a fundamentally different view of reality because of argumentation.
SPEAKER_00: Now there's a place for that.
SPEAKER_00: There's a place for apologetics.
SPEAKER_00: Apologetics, by the way, is not apologizing for what we believe, it's defending what we believe.
SPEAKER_00: Ravi Zacharias is a great example of a good and godly apologist.
SPEAKER_00: And so he marshals the evidence, and there is evidence, and that's a worthwhile thing to do.
SPEAKER_00: It's just not what I do.
SPEAKER_00: And I deeply appreciate Ravi.
SPEAKER_00: But that's not what the early chapters of Genesis are trying to do.
SPEAKER_00: It can be rightly used for some of that, but that's not what it was given for.
SPEAKER_00: That we could win arguments.
SPEAKER_00: It wasn't given so that we would make ourselves by coming up with how you can overlay science and creation, the creation account, you can put those two together in a way that makes us feel good.
SPEAKER_00: That's not what it was revealed for.
SPEAKER_00: And I really am not gonna spend much time on that.
SPEAKER_00: I've got about ten weeks to cover what I want to cover, and at least my thought was I would do this this week.
SPEAKER_00: It'll probably be this week and two weeks from now.
SPEAKER_00: I'm gone next week back to Indiana for a week.
SPEAKER_00: But but I just we we it's not wrong to deal with these things.
SPEAKER_00: And frankly, when we read Genesis, if we are alive and kicking and we know what the world is saying, and if we've had some education, then there's all kinds of questions that rise.
SPEAKER_00: So, how do we deal with those?
SPEAKER_00: So I'm gonna do something now a little bit different from what I normally do.
SPEAKER_00: We're not gonna get into too much of the details of the text.
SPEAKER_00: We'll do a little bit more of that next time.
SPEAKER_00: But I'd like to just help you understand how, in any case, I uh wrestle with these things.
SPEAKER_00: I've spent 45 years in vocational ministry, 45 years standing in front of people saying, this is what God said.
SPEAKER_00: And yet, how do we correlate that with what science tells us and what the uh the data out there is?
SPEAKER_00: And believe me, I'm not expecting to cover this in a complete, exhaustive, or necessarily even terribly helpful way.
SPEAKER_00: I hope it's helpful, but no guarantees in the little bit of time that I have.
SPEAKER_00: But just take this as your pastor, a shepherd who loves you, loves God, and loves his word.
SPEAKER_00: And we don't have to put our mind on the shelf.
SPEAKER_00: We don't have to say, uh, we don't listen to any of that.
SPEAKER_00: So let's just wrestle with those things a little bit.
SPEAKER_00: So what I want to suggest, um, I'd like to spend some time talking about understanding the creation account, kind of in a global way.
SPEAKER_00: Um talk about creation and science.
SPEAKER_00: Um my plan has been and will be one day to talk about the days of creation.
SPEAKER_00: How do we understand the word day here?
SPEAKER_00: It's fundamental to our understanding of that.
SPEAKER_00: Uh how do we understand the flow of thought in this chapter?
SPEAKER_00: Is there continuity or discontinuity?
SPEAKER_00: Is there a big gap between verses one or one and two and then three and the rest?
SPEAKER_00: Uh is there one, just kind of, those are some of the things I'd like us to think about.
SPEAKER_00: And I trust you will see and perceive that these have very practical outworkings for us.
SPEAKER_00: So let's try to do that.
SPEAKER_00: So what we have here, I believe, as I read this, is a very simple narrative account that everybody can understand.
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes we think that unless we have a PhD in paleontology or geology or science or something, or a PhD in theology, then we really can't do very much with this.
SPEAKER_00: We kind of get scared away from it.
SPEAKER_00: And yet you share this with a child, and in simple ways, we get the picture.
SPEAKER_00: We get the picture there is a God.
SPEAKER_00: There really is a God.
SPEAKER_00: And he really has spoken, and what he has to say explains a great deal.
SPEAKER_00: And as we grow and develop in that, we begin to understand that his perspective and what he shares with us and what we come to know and understand makes fundamentally more sense out of the reality around us than what we would only get by looking through a microscope or a telescope.
SPEAKER_00: Both are true, the data and the facts out there.
SPEAKER_00: But what we desperately need to know is what God is saying in simple, clear ways.
SPEAKER_00: And in this account, God speaks, and with six broad brush strokes, a picture is painted.
SPEAKER_00: The account here is one page long.
SPEAKER_00: Okay?
SPEAKER_00: That's all we have here.
SPEAKER_00: And we must clearly understand what he is saying to us and why he is saying it to us.
SPEAKER_00: Every aspect of what I read here I believe to be literally and actually true.
SPEAKER_00: I believe we have here an accurate and completely reliable recounting of what actually, literally happened, that does not mislead us in any way.
SPEAKER_00: This is not myth.
SPEAKER_00: This is not like Greek mythology, this is not fantasy, this is not the Lord of the Rings.
SPEAKER_00: This is God speaking to us.
SPEAKER_00: Now, when we read mythology, and actually, mythology is incredibly interesting, but we recognize it's mythology when we read fantasy.
SPEAKER_00: And actually, I love the genre of fantasy.
SPEAKER_00: But we understand fantasy when we read it, we understand mythology when we read it, when you read this with just a simple, clear, childlike way of saying, Lord, what are you saying?
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't come across as mythology or fantasy.
SPEAKER_00: It comes across as though God is explaining something we would know in no other way.
SPEAKER_00: This is through revelation.
SPEAKER_00: That means if he hadn't revealed this, we wouldn't know it.
SPEAKER_00: God is giving us a perspective on reality.
SPEAKER_00: And just so that you understand, I don't think you'd be able to miss it, I really believe that what is here is literally and actually true, recounting true events that literally happened.
SPEAKER_00: And what we have is a, as I talked about it last time, a compass and a map to help us orient ourselves to reality.
SPEAKER_00: Okay?
SPEAKER_00: So in the beginning, God.
SPEAKER_00: That we will not understand reality without beginning with God.
SPEAKER_00: And that God speaks, and that he who is not created has created everything we see around us.
SPEAKER_00: So if we study and try to relate to the world around us without understanding that that is not all that there is, then we find ourselves in deep trouble.
SPEAKER_00: Up until, let's say, maybe two, three hundred years ago, as the enlightenment, so-called enlightenment, uh, came, and as the scientific understanding of the world, which is based on what's measurable, uh, analyzable, touchable, viewable, correlatable, um, the the a scientific approach to reality, and I'm going to touch on there is true science, but there's a lot of stuff that passes for science that is scientism, not science.
SPEAKER_00: Anyway.
SPEAKER_00: But up until two or three hundred years ago, virtually everyone, believers, from the time of Moses up until a couple hundred years ago, we said this is the way it happened.
SPEAKER_00: But now we are sophisticated and we have other ways of looking at things.
SPEAKER_00: And so most people, unless you believe that God really exists and he really speaks to us and what he reveals is true, then the thought is this is obviously impossible.
SPEAKER_00: This could not be the way it is.
SPEAKER_00: We know better than that.
SPEAKER_00: Well, I don't know better than that.
SPEAKER_00: I don't know anything better than what God says to us.
SPEAKER_00: Um, so it's a revelation, it's an accurate description that doesn't mislead us.
SPEAKER_00: And it's like having a compass when you're lost in a uh in a in a strange place with hills and valleys and trees and streams and no roads.
SPEAKER_00: How do you get along?
SPEAKER_00: Well, if you have a map, a topographical map, especially, talked about this last week, and if you've got a compass, if you know where north is and you have a sense of the lay of the land, well, then you can.
SPEAKER_00: Actually, find yourself.
SPEAKER_00: You can find your way home.
SPEAKER_00: And you know, if we could get rid of our pseudo-sophistication, we're just stumbling around, folks.
SPEAKER_00: We're trying to make sense out of life.
SPEAKER_00: Aren't you?
SPEAKER_00: I'm trying to make sense out of life.
SPEAKER_00: What we have here is not a scientific treatise.
SPEAKER_00: It is not an historical study.
SPEAKER_00: It's not the kind of thing you would submit.
SPEAKER_00: It wasn't intended to be submitted in the academic world with footnotes, cross-references, nice charts, and everything nice and neatly tied up.
SPEAKER_00: If that's what we expect from God, then we're expecting a God is not the God of the Bible.
SPEAKER_00: Nice and neatly tied up that we can fit in boxes and come to put our mind around.
SPEAKER_00: That is not our God.
SPEAKER_00: But that's also not what Genesis is doing.
SPEAKER_00: Now we don't have to deny the facts and the realities of what we observe and of science.
SPEAKER_00: That's not at all where I'm coming from.
SPEAKER_00: But I'm saying, how do we view it?
SPEAKER_00: And for what purpose has this been revealed?
SPEAKER_00: I mean, science is great.
SPEAKER_00: I was a biology major in college.
SPEAKER_00: I'll touch on that again later.
SPEAKER_00: But, you know, so you can study the physical dynamics of a tsunami where the water wells up and overpowers a whole country if it's a small island or something, creating thousands of people, killing thousands of people.
SPEAKER_00: You can analyze it, but why does that happen?
SPEAKER_00: I mean, really?
SPEAKER_00: And just knowing the physical dynamics doesn't really answer why is the world this way.
SPEAKER_00: An active shooter that stands up in the middle of church and turns around and starts killing people.
SPEAKER_00: How do you explain that?
SPEAKER_00: Science does not explain that.
SPEAKER_00: The things that, the the conflicts in our own hearts, why we do what we do and why we do what we do to one another.
SPEAKER_00: How come the people we love most we hurt the most?
SPEAKER_00: And you see, it's things like that.
SPEAKER_00: That's reality.
SPEAKER_00: Those aren't measured, those aren't put under the microscope, but boy, those are real.
SPEAKER_00: And it's this broader understanding of why what is is.
SPEAKER_00: How did this come about?
SPEAKER_00: And that's what the early chapters of Genesis are doing.
SPEAKER_00: The consistent testimony of Scripture is that what we have here is actual, literal, historic data, revelation that is relevant for our daily lives.
SPEAKER_00: And I've just got four of hundreds of passages that you could think about.
SPEAKER_00: And let me touch on a couple of these.
SPEAKER_00: Relevant.
SPEAKER_00: Well, it's very interesting.
SPEAKER_00: In the middle of the Ten Commandments, in Exodus chapter 20, you know, we spent a number of weeks a year ago talking about the tender commandments.
SPEAKER_00: God is telling us how life works.
SPEAKER_00: He's telling us, go this way, don't go that way.
SPEAKER_00: Go this way and you'll harm yourself.
SPEAKER_00: Go this way and you will experience life the way it was intended.
SPEAKER_00: Very interesting.
SPEAKER_00: In the middle of the tender commandments, the Ten Commandments, we read as though it's just suddenly inserted here, Exodus 20, 11, in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and his all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day.
SPEAKER_00: Your first reading of the Ten Commandments, you'd scratch your head and say, why bring in the creation account in the midst of God telling us how to live?
SPEAKER_00: Well, if you pose the question the right way, it begins to make sense.
SPEAKER_00: We have a God who tells us how to live.
SPEAKER_00: There is a contour to reality.
SPEAKER_00: If we live, the reality is if we live this way, we will harm ourselves, it will destroy us and create great trauma.
SPEAKER_00: There's other ways to live the way God wants us to that work, because that's the way life is.
SPEAKER_00: That's the way reality is.
SPEAKER_00: We need this understanding of creation, apparently, to be able to rightly understand the Ten Commandments.
SPEAKER_00: Or let's broaden it out.
SPEAKER_00: So God's telling me what I'm supposed to do?
SPEAKER_00: Well, if we understand who our God is, the answer is, duh! He made it! Why ignore the instruction manual?
SPEAKER_00: As though we have to figure it all out ourselves.
SPEAKER_00: No, we have a God who made it all, is involved with it, and communicates to us.
SPEAKER_00: So the understanding of God and how he works and the created realm has direct impact on how we respond and how we understand God saying, do this and don't do that.
SPEAKER_00: Very interesting.
SPEAKER_00: Hebrews chapter 11, verse 3 says, the universe was created at God's command.
SPEAKER_00: It's very interesting, all of these passages and many more point right back to a real event back in Genesis.
SPEAKER_00: The universe was created at God's command, and then he draws a conclusion so that what is seen is not made of things that are visible.
SPEAKER_00: Now, we talked last week about creatio ex nihiloa, the Latin term, creation out of nothing.
SPEAKER_00: The things that are came from not just other things that are, but they came from the creative power and work of God.
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
SPEAKER_00: Now, why does he say that in Hebrews chapter 11?
SPEAKER_00: Well, Hebrews chapter 11 is the quintessential chapter on faith.
SPEAKER_00: It is the high point where there's example after example after example after example after example of people who took God at his word and they lived their lives accordingly.
SPEAKER_00: And faith is the substance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen.
SPEAKER_00: God created that which is seen from that which is unseen.
SPEAKER_00: And the point being that in our walk of faith, the things that matter most are not the things we see around us, but the truths.
SPEAKER_00: He gives the example, uh Abraham.
SPEAKER_00: He wasn't looking for the city from which he came.
SPEAKER_00: He was looking for another city whose maker and founder is God.
SPEAKER_00: And ultimately, that's talking in the revelation of Scripture about our real home.
SPEAKER_00: This is not our real home.
SPEAKER_00: We do not find our real home here in this world.
SPEAKER_00: We are east of Eden and very far from home.
SPEAKER_00: And going to the very heart of faith is learning to live on the basis of things besides what you can see, touch, taste, and make complete sense of.
SPEAKER_00: So this is very, and he points back to creation.
SPEAKER_00: That gives us a context.
SPEAKER_00: That's part of the contours of reality.
SPEAKER_00: Acts chapter 17, Paul's interacting with non-believing seekers.
SPEAKER_00: And he says, God made the world and everything that is in it, so that he made from one man a nation, every nation of mankind.
SPEAKER_00: So he goes back to creation of the physical world and then the creation of Adam and Eve from which everything else flowed.
SPEAKER_00: Why was that important when he was speaking to non-believing, pagan, but very intelligent Greek philosophers?
SPEAKER_00: Well, we're not going to get very far in helping people get a sense of who God is unless we point beyond the physical and beyond the material.
SPEAKER_00: Because we do not rightly understand the world around us without what God is saying to us here.
SPEAKER_00: Or Romans chapter 5, verses 12 and 19.
SPEAKER_00: Sin entered the world through one man, and you get the impression it was really a man, really Adam, a real live human being, and therefore sin came to all of us.
SPEAKER_00: And in Romans 5, verse 19, he says, in the same way, salvation comes through one man, Christ Jesus, and it is through that man that we are saved.
SPEAKER_00: So there's one man through which everything else came, sin, and there's another man through which salvation and restoration and forgiveness and new life comes.
SPEAKER_00: Well, a real man back here and a real man here, those are intimately tied together.
SPEAKER_00: Our understanding of salvation is based upon the view of reality that is found in the first chapters of Genesis.
SPEAKER_00: So there's a lot more I could say about that, but what I'm really trying, I'm trying to be subversive here.
SPEAKER_00: I'm trying to help you think in a different way and approach Genesis, these early chapters, at least the way I approach it is with a very different goal in mind.
SPEAKER_00: And it's not to win arguments and figure out how to how to disagree with Darwin.
SPEAKER_00: It's to figure out who God is and where He has placed us, the compass and the topographical map.
SPEAKER_00: Creation and science.
SPEAKER_00: I'm not trying to enfold, lay the Bible over on top of scientific or factual records to be able to correlate everything.
SPEAKER_00: I spent a very interesting day one time in the Creation Museum in Kentucky.
SPEAKER_00: A friend of mine was a pilot.
SPEAKER_00: He and his wife had an airplane, and they gave Jane and me a wonderful present.
SPEAKER_00: They flew us from the Chicago area down to Kentucky, and we spent a day at the Creation Museum.
SPEAKER_00: And what I sensed is that there was an effort to correlate and overlay these so that they, the one proves the other.
SPEAKER_00: And you can do that if you want.
SPEAKER_00: Let me put it this way.
SPEAKER_00: I believe there is, and listen carefully, no conflict between the Bible on one hand and the actual observable facts of science that can be observed.
SPEAKER_00: What we weigh, touch, feel, measure, magnify, bring close through a microscope or a telescope, the data that's out there is data.
SPEAKER_00: It's real, it's there.
SPEAKER_00: I see zero conflict between what I read in Genesis and what I observe there.
SPEAKER_00: Let me try to explain that.
SPEAKER_00: Because this statement, all truth is God's truth, I believe, but I think it doesn't say quite enough.
SPEAKER_00: Because the real question is, how do we know what is really true?
SPEAKER_00: All truth is God's truth, but not everything we hear is really true.
SPEAKER_00: How do we know what is really true?
SPEAKER_00: And how do we interpret the actual data that we find in the world around us?
SPEAKER_00: Those questions are much more profound.
SPEAKER_00: And actually, they're philosophical in nature.
SPEAKER_00: It goes back to the part of the study of philosophy of epistemology, another fancy word, that basically means how do we know what we know?
SPEAKER_00: Epistemology begins to think about how do we know what we know.
SPEAKER_00: And it deals with a worldview.
SPEAKER_00: And so I come to the scriptures with a worldview that is very different from the way I did when I was a pre-med student.
SPEAKER_00: I just do.
SPEAKER_00: I come to it with a set of glasses that has been formed and shaped by what God has said.
SPEAKER_00: That's why I'm trying to paint a larger picture.
SPEAKER_00: Maybe this would be helpful for you.
SPEAKER_00: Just to tell you a story, and I'll basically wrap it up with this, and we'll pick it up two weeks from now.
SPEAKER_00: I came to Christ in college back shortly after the Earth's crust hardened, I think.
SPEAKER_00: And I was in a pre-med program at a very good school.
SPEAKER_00: It wasn't a large school, but a school that had an excellent pre-med program.
SPEAKER_00: If you made it through their pre-med program, you could almost certainly get into medical school unless you tried hard not to.
SPEAKER_00: And it's so interesting.
SPEAKER_00: The very semester that I encountered Christ, some staff workers with crew came to my fraternity house and they shared the gospel with me.
SPEAKER_00: And something inexplicable happened.
SPEAKER_00: I was deeply and truly and fundamentally transformed from within.
SPEAKER_00: That very semester, I was taking an advanced biology course of in comparative anatomy.
SPEAKER_00: So what we did in that course is we took three different animals from the different stages along the developmental cycle or curve or whatever.
SPEAKER_00: So a very simple animal.
SPEAKER_00: I think it was a starfish, if I remember right.
SPEAKER_00: There's really not much to a starfish.
SPEAKER_00: And then there was a frog, a more advanced animal, and then there was a mammal, there was a cat.
SPEAKER_00: I remember the cat for sure because for probably two months I had this heavy plastic bag filled with the odor stench of formaldehyde.
SPEAKER_00: I can still bring it back up.
SPEAKER_00: And in that bag was the increasingly unrecognizable carcass of the cat as we began to dissect it.
SPEAKER_00: So we would dissect the starfish and we'd look at the uh the circulatory system of a starfish.
SPEAKER_00: It's really pretty simple.
SPEAKER_00: Um and then we'd look at the circulatory system of a reptile, and it's it's more complex.
SPEAKER_00: And then we'd look at the circulatory system of a cat, very complex.
SPEAKER_00: Nervous system, um, all the way through.
SPEAKER_00: Um the starfish has hardly has what you would call a brain, maybe a nexus of neurons, but but really nothing more than that.
SPEAKER_00: Uh a frog doesn't have much sense, it often gets run over by cars as it crosses a road.
SPEAKER_00: But a mammal, that is much more sophisticated.
SPEAKER_00: And the school I went to, it was not a Christian school, but we were taught that we try to understand the observable things before us, and so we developed theories.
SPEAKER_00: A scientific theory is a best effort that we can come up with to give a reasonable explanation of what we observe.
SPEAKER_00: So I had learned the theory of evolution, and I knew it was a way of trying to make sense out of observable things.
SPEAKER_00: And boom, in the middle of that, I encountered in an existential, profound way the reality of God.
SPEAKER_00: Now, I did a lot of thinking about that.
SPEAKER_00: It wasn't all that profound, and I'm not a real complicated guy, honestly.
SPEAKER_00: In a very simple way, I said, how do you correlate this?
SPEAKER_00: But I knew that evolution was a good scientific theory.
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't make it true.
SPEAKER_00: It makes it the best efforts that good minds that I highly respect, far more intelligent than me.
SPEAKER_00: But there are other realities out there.
SPEAKER_00: Once I came to know that God is real, and I came to know the God of the scriptures, then it changed the way I viewed the facts and the data that is out there, because there's another way to correlate it.
SPEAKER_00: Let me just give one simple uh example of this, um, and then I will really will wrap this up.
SPEAKER_00: Um I kept thinking about, okay, you look at um, so we're in the Genesis, and and there's a tree.
SPEAKER_00: God created all of it, and suddenly a tree appears.
SPEAKER_00: A tree of the knowledge of good and evil, let's say.
SPEAKER_00: I think it was a real tree.
SPEAKER_00: There were real trees.
SPEAKER_00: I think Eden was a real place.
SPEAKER_00: But if that's true, and if God created that, how old was that tree?
SPEAKER_00: Well, it from its inception was really not very old by the time we read the Genesis account in chapter 2 and 3.
SPEAKER_00: But it sure looked like it was old.
SPEAKER_00: It had the appearance of age, I'm assuming.
SPEAKER_00: Maybe that's stretching things.
SPEAKER_00: How about Adam and Eve?
SPEAKER_00: They were created by God, and that is recorded how that happened, and it wasn't through a period of gestation and development.
SPEAKER_00: Adam was created full-blown, and then Eve was created full-blown with the full appearance of age.
SPEAKER_00: Could it not be?
SPEAKER_00: Is it silly to think that when you study the marvels of the geological layers in the Grand Canyon, that God created those that way?
SPEAKER_00: Not the result of millions of years of matter and uh mud and different kinds of rocks and volcanic activity.
SPEAKER_00: Maybe some of that is since then.
SPEAKER_00: But why could not the world have been created with all that we see, which if we leave God out of the picture, the only conclusion we could come is that it takes millions and billions of years to, but I again I'm just really simple-minded.
SPEAKER_00: I think the world was created with the full appearance of age.
SPEAKER_00: And now with science, we look at that, and if we if we only look at it with a rationalistic, non-supernatural basis, then the best we can come up with is all the theories of science.
SPEAKER_00: The facts of science, that those things exist, absolutely undeniable.
SPEAKER_00: No need to deny them, because they're not fundamentally in conflict with this.
SPEAKER_00: It's just how do we explain them?
SPEAKER_00: And I personally believe that we can explain far more of reality on the basis of the revelation of God's word, not only here but elsewhere, than we can just with geology and paleontology and psychology and sociology.
SPEAKER_00: And there's a place for all of that.
SPEAKER_00: I'm not against that.
SPEAKER_00: The reason I didn't go into medicine was not because that was incompatible with being a Christian.
SPEAKER_00: Okay?
SPEAKER_00: God just revealed a different plan for my life.
SPEAKER_00: So all I'm trying to do is expand your thinking here.
SPEAKER_00: Um we've seen some verses that say this has everything to do with our life.
SPEAKER_00: And I'd like to just say this God brings light in dark places, and he fashions and forms and shapes and fulfilled that which appears to be chaotic and empty.
SPEAKER_00: That's what he does in creation.
SPEAKER_00: And my friends, that's what he does in our lives.
SPEAKER_00: He takes the darkness and he brings light.
SPEAKER_00: Oh.
SPEAKER_00: How we want that once we taste it.
SPEAKER_00: And that which doesn't make any sense makes more sense when we someday when we get to heaven, it'll make a whole lot more sense, no doubt.
SPEAKER_00: But that which is chaotic and and and that which is uh misshapen, God begins to fill and bring order and give shaping to.
SPEAKER_00: Just as he does that in creation, he does that with you and me.
SPEAKER_00: That's the gospel.
SPEAKER_00: The gospel.
SPEAKER_00: So this is far from an abstract theoretical thing so we can win arguments.
SPEAKER_00: It's just so that we can understand the world around us.
SPEAKER_00: Would you pray with me?
SPEAKER_00: Heavenly Father, our understanding is admittedly very limited.
SPEAKER_00: Mine is.
SPEAKER_00: And I pray you would give us a humility when we look at the world around us.
SPEAKER_00: It is full of wonder.
SPEAKER_00: The heavens declare the glory of God.
SPEAKER_00: The firmament, that expanse, that canopy shows your handiwork.
SPEAKER_00: Everywhere around us, there are signs of who you are.
SPEAKER_00: And so, Father, I pray that you would give us eyes to see.
SPEAKER_00: And that you'd give us a heart that is willing to submit to the God of the universe, joyously, willingly, that we would worship and exalt you.
SPEAKER_00: You are high and lifted up.
SPEAKER_00: We are small and wandering.
SPEAKER_00: You give us a compass and you give us a map.
SPEAKER_00: And oh, Father, we desperately need that.
SPEAKER_00: And we thank you for that.
SPEAKER_00: Help us to understand this in Christ's name.
SPEAKER_00: I pray.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
SPEAKER_00: All right, you're dismissed.
SPEAKER_00: Thank you.