In this sermon, the speaker discusses various topics related to the design and complexity of the world. They mention the Aswan Dam and its ecological disaster, comparing it to Isaiah 19. The speaker also talks about the human eye as evidence of design and complexity. They mention articles from the Wall Street Journal about the pro-creationist movement gaining momentum. Additionally, the speaker briefly touches on the water cycle and the dangers of hydrogen and oxygen gases.

This is the fourth study in the book of Genesis conducted by Chuck Missler. The subject of this tape is Genesis chapter 1, verse 19, through chapter 2, verse 3. I brought in a few articles. First of all, there have been a couple of articles, and I had two, and I'm frustrated because I couldn't find the one that I wanted, but I did find one from the Wall Street Journal. This happens to be from June 15th of 79, so it's like a year ago. But it has an article on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. It says, Modern Creationists Seeking Equal Time. And it's just a summary of the fact that the pro-creationist movement has gained a lot of momentum and respectability. There's another article. Actually, I remember two articles, and I went through my own archives. I happen to have an archive of these things. I found this one. I just didn't find the other one because I seemed to have misplaced it. But it just points out that there is an organized, effective movement by several, but the one that it particularly gives credit to is the Creation Research Institute right down here in San Diego. They do a very, very effective job at enlisting the involvement of first-class scientists, not Christian guys like maybe myself who mean well, but guys who really know what they're doing, and publishing sophisticated articles in sophisticated journals and gaining a momentum for the validity of the creationist point of view. In fact, the article I couldn't find, but I remember it very well. It was fun because it happened to be in the journal. I remembered it. It was over on the left side. I couldn't lay my hands on it. The gist of the article was that the debates that are organized are generally won by the creationists. And the reason they are is really funny. In fact, the journal had a lot of fun. They really poked fun at the evolutionists in the article. I wish I could get my hands on it to share with you because the creationists in the debating teams that they field are better informed with facts, and they keep the discussion on a scientific basis. And the trap that the evolutionists fall into is the religious argument. And they lose the debates because they get devastated because the creationists insist upon keeping it on a scientific basis, on a non-religious basis, and win the debates. And it's really funny. It's that the evolutionists retreat to emotion and religion and other things, and it's very funny. But it just mentions that, you know, in here, you know, dogs are always a dog, and a frog didn't turn into a prince, and so we'll flavor this thing. And it points out the creationists tend to win, and some fairly substantially competent textbooks are finally making, are available to the educators that are willing to do this. And it's interesting, some of the concessions, the fact that there was a sudden burial of the fossils is now acknowledged by the evolutionists and so forth. The scientific evidence for creation is overwhelming, says David Minton and so forth, and more and more reasonable scientists are speaking out against the silly theory of evolution and so forth. And it's interesting, the fossil records, you can use the very retreat of the evolutionists is used by the creationists effectively. So I really meant to get this other article, I couldn't find it to share with you, which is humorous, because the Wall Street Journal editors really tore up the conduct of the evolutionists in the debate. Just while we're sort of in the, you know, pre-prayer moment, I see this isn't really sanctified, this is just nonsense, we'll pray in a minute and have the Holy Spirit guide the rest of the study. But those of you that have a flippant nature and thus have a certain rapport with my flippant nature, I thought I would share with you some other things. But I saw an article, Alex, you'll love this if you haven't seen it, in the November 79 Scientific American. Now less than 1% of you will know what I'm talking about as I go through this, and the reason I won't share the whole article with you is I don't understand it either. But the article in November 79 Scientific American has an article which has to do with quantum theory and reality. Quantum theory is a very advanced form of mathematics and modern physics that deals with the physical behavior of subatomic particles, and it underlies a lot of what we do in modern physics. But the doctrine that the world is made up of objects whose existence is independent of human consciousness. Now let me go over that again. The doctrine that the world is made up of objects whose existence is independent of human consciousness turns out to be in conflict with quantum mechanics and with facts established by experiment. Now that's wild! The doctrine that the world is made up of objects whose existence is independent of human consciousness turns out to be in conflict with quantum mechanics and with facts established by experiment. And what's embodied in this is a relatively famous equation known as the Bell inequality, named after not the Bell system but a mathematician. And it turns out, and it's a very, very heavy article, and I frankly, I wasn't just being cute or self-effacing. I don't really fully understand the article. But the impact of the article is that experiments are contradictory in terms of their support or rejection of the Bell inequality. And that turns out to attack three basic suppositions that underlie our concept of reality. And apparently there's empirical verification, or I should put it this way, there's empirical devastation of the fundamental principles upon which the rest of it's based. But the whole idea that there's existence independent of consciousness of that existence turns out to be empirically disprovable. And so if you're really trying to, you know, I think it's exciting how science and mathematics is helping us understand the scripture. I don't think, I think you all in this audience are sophisticated enough to understand that science does not disprove the Bible, quite the contrary. Where science is true science, it is supported. And we're going to touch on some of that stuff in our obviously Genesis study. But on the other hand, what science does do for you, we tend as Christians, biblically based Christians, to make light of man's knowledge, the foolishness of men and all that. And in a certain sense that's important to get man's knowledge in perspective. On the other hand, we also have a tendency to react too far to that. And we tend to disparage the quest for knowledge in the secular sense. And I think it's unfortunate. I think we need to have our quest for knowledge in a more reverent manner perhaps. And we need to understand that when we get a discovery that's consistent with the scripture, that doesn't support the scripture. It simply says our discovery is valid. But what science is doing for us through modern physics, mathematics, the information sciences particularly, is broadening our understanding and our horizons to maybe more fully understand the message God has for us. And when we got into this firmament and all that last time, I'm sorry I didn't have the presence of mind to grab this last time because it affects more the material last time than tonight. But yes, I have a question. But the article in Reader's Digest about can it have the astronomers found God is the reference. And apparently several people have suggested I read it. I have not had occasion to. And it does sound good. And I'm always intrigued with these guys that almost, almost make it to heaven. I think of, I'm thinking of, who was the governor that Paul went up before where he said, you almost convinced me? Felix, yeah, thank you, Felix. Right, in the book of Acts. You almost convinced me. And I really wonder if he's going to regret that he didn't go all the way. I mean, I don't know, I obviously have no way of knowing his spiritual state. Maybe later he was converted. I sure hope so. But that almost is a heavy almost. And I always tend to see Pilate the same way. I have great sympathy with Pilate because as an executive I can relate to where he's at. And he did his best to somehow unravel this mess that he inherited. Came very short of, came just short of seeming to get his real grasp of what was going on. But, okay. Let's go before the Lord in a word of prayer. Oh, Father, we just do praise you this evening for the joy of gathering in the name of Jesus Christ. And we thank you, Father, that not only have you created us, but that you have redeemed us from ourselves. And, Father, we thank you for the, these books of Moses, the book of Genesis. We thank you, Father, that you have given us this record. And, Father, as we approach it, we do just, we know it, we need your enlightenment, your Holy Spirit to open it to our understanding. We just beseech thee to pour that out upon all of us tonight that we might behold your truth. And in that truth, behold Jesus Christ, in whose name we pray. Amen. One of the things that I meant to point out some time ago and took for granted, but I probably shouldn't. I'd like you to, let's start tonight with just taking a quick peek at Acts 7. Acts 7 is one of my favorite commentaries. People ask, you know, what commentaries do you use on the Old Testament? You know, and I mentioned Matthew, Luke, Paul, but that really isn't what they mean. One of my favorite commentators on the Old Testament is Stephen. I'm sorry. Yeah, it's in the New, but it's commentary on the Old Testament. Commentary on the Old Testament. If you really want a good commentary on the Old Testament, Stephen is pretty neat. Does a good job. But one of the, and we could spend a lot of time here. You find, you know, in the book of Acts chapter 7, just to digress slightly, there's all kinds of discoveries. Sometime we may take six months and go through the seventh chapter of Acts. For example, verse 18. It says, Till another king arose who knew not Joseph, referring, of course, to Moses, I mean, to the Israelites in Egypt. And the word another there in the Greek is different as opposed to the same as, meaning a totally different kind of king. And we find out from Isaiah that the king was Assyrian, not Egyptian. Did you know that? A little side thing. If you're interested in that, get the tape on Isaiah, and it goes into that. But you get the clue from the Greek here. And that absolutely devastates most people's understanding of the Egyptian history, but it also explains why the pharaoh in Egypt was perhaps a little nervous about the growing Hebrew populations because while he was in charge, he ethnically may have had some different, or just as Herod was not Jewish, he was a Yemaiah, and so on. But that's another story. Again, what I'm really after is verse 22. And Moses was learned in, or schooled or educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians and was mighty in words and in deeds. Now, as diligent students of the scripture, you all know how carefully, was it Nina Foch who took Charlton Heston out of the bulrushes and brought him up under Sir Cedric Hardwick as Moses? In other words, adopted and raised in court and educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians. Now, that's a very interesting thing. I want you to recognize for something that the author of the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament, was educated from a baby through his manhood. Where? In Egypt, at the best schools they had. So he learned all the, quote, wisdom, close quote, of the Egyptians. Now, you can go through, any of you who have an encyclopedia or some cultural resources at your fingertips, go through and understand how the Egyptians viewed the world, the cosmos. You know, they had some wild ideas. You know, you go back and you read some of the ancient, not just Egyptian, but Babylon, you name it. They had some crazy ideas, concepts of the world. You know, there was flat and all those kinds of things, but also this whole idea of, you know, we revere Aristotle culturally, right? Well, he divided the universe into four elements, right? Fire, water, earth, and air. Well, we may revere Aristotle for lots of things, but his physics wasn't one of them, right? And you can go through and poke fun at the conceptual understanding, scientifically, of the ancient cultures, all of them. And Egypt is no different. They had some strange ideas. Now, what's fascinating is not just what the five books of Moses say. One of the things I would like to get in our consciousness is the things it doesn't say. It doesn't have the earth on the shoulders of Atlas standing on a turtle, or whatever, okay? Now, in contrast to some of the things that we could poke fun at, what is interesting, that in the books, in the Torah, you find suggested or underlying the rules and ordinances, the whole concept of bacteriology, which was 3,500 years later introduced by Louis Pasteur, and we are products of that culture. And so what we read there, we're quite comfortable with. We fail to appreciate that that was radical prior to the discoveries of Louis Pasteur. We talk about blood. We're very conscious of blood circulation, as anticipated by Moses and Leviticus and elsewhere, because we're the beneficiaries of William Harvey, is that right, Dr. Miller? In the 1600s. So not only is that discovery, many of the discoveries we take for granted roughly in the 1600s, 17th century, and thus part of our cultural background, we take that for granted. What's amazing is that Moses also took it for granted, and his taking it for granted, as his evidence is writing, is remarkable, recognizing Acts 7.22, that he was schooled from ground up in all the learning and the wisdom of the Egyptians. Sterilization, quarantine, these are ideas that we attribute to Joseph Lister, also in the 17th century, as radical innovations, not endemic to Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, you name it. In fact, you can go in Iraq and Syria today and wonder if they have read anything about Joseph. I shouldn't say that. Some of these cultures, though, frankly, are pretty primitive. And one of the problems in what we sometimes consider an underdeveloped country situation is an awareness of basic hygiene. The Torah has in it, endemic in it, is basic hygiene. Evaporation, condensation, I'd like to get into that more specifically. We talked about the flat world, Isaiah chapter 40, saying, is it on the sphere of the earth? And Job tells us he hangs it, Job 26 says he hangs it in nothing, which is a very, very radically modern cosmology as we know as products of our culture. I can't resist digressing a little bit because it isn't really a digression from what we're going to get into tonight, but one of the things that I think is kind of fun in contrasting the ancient cultures is the thing that we call the water cycle. Now, we take for granted the water cycle because every night at 10 o'clock we watch the news and at the end we see the satellite view of the earth and we have the temperatures and all this stuff. So we're very sophisticated meteorologically. Very interesting, the largest computers that have ever been built are still most challenged by trying to build models of the meteorological system. So it's not trivial. Solomon poses a question in Ecclesiastes chapter 1. We might turn to that if for no other reason than to get you into Ecclesiastes. Some of your Bibles may creak a little there. I'm sure Daniel Revelation will be well-worn, but Ecclesiastes may still... Be careful you don't rip it. You know, it may still have the gold. I shouldn't be... In Ecclesiastes, Solomon poses a question and it's a very interesting question. In verse 7 he says, all the rivers run into the sea and yet the sea is not full. Have you ever wondered about that? Can you imagine a small boy sitting at the Mississippi Delta or whatever watching this river go downstream continually day and night? It keeps rolling into the ocean, but the ocean doesn't get any higher. It tries every six hours to get a little higher, but you discover those are tides. That doesn't bother you too much. But you watch all over the world, rivers run into the sea, yet the sea doesn't fill up. That puzzles Solomon. Verse 6 and 7, the wind goeth toward the south and turneth about again to the north. It whirleth about continually and the wind returneth again according to its circuits. That's a remarkable insight. We call that the cyclonic system. You can blow a lot of your college time messing around in that area if you're not careful. All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full. Unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again. Well, that's a pretty interesting thing. You mean the cycle is closed. Terrific. How can it be closed? Understand the fact that the air is in circuits is interesting. The fact there are paths that the air follows around the earth itself is an interesting insight for Solomon who was not the beneficiary of aerial photographs, let alone satellite pictures like you and I are. Water weighs about 800 times what air does. Furthermore, salt water, which is what we're dealing with, has contaminants that will kill plant life. You don't believe that. We live on the water over Newport Beach. Let me tell you, a man would kill me if I took a bucket of salt water off the dock and watered her geraniums with it. It would be a bad scene. It could spoil my whole day. So how does it happen? Well, Job tells us. Let's turn to Job 36. Job 36, and we'll look for about verse 27. In fact, we should start at verse 26. It's a neat verse. We'll pick it up on our way. Behold, God is great, and we know him not, neither can the number of his years be searched out. To me, that sounds like he's not in our time domain, just as an aside. He maketh small the drops of water. They pour down rain according to their vapor, which clouds do drop and distill upon man abundantly. Now, the way you get the salt out of the water is you distill it. If you've taken a first-year chemistry course or whatever, you know what distillation is. It's not a trivial process, but that's how the salt gets out of the water. And when you take it, you can go to Psalm 135, verses 6 and 7. Whatsoever the Lord pleased, that did he in heaven and in earth, and in the seas and all deep places. He causeth the vapors to ascend from the ends of the earth. He maketh the lightnings for the rain. He bringeth out the wind out of his treasuries, and so forth. And so you can put these three passages together, Ecclesiastes chapter 1, Job 36, and Psalm 135, and get a description that's a pretty passable description for a high school physics book about the water cycle, in terms of the fact that closure takes place by evaporation from the seas. Now, what you probably won't know from, well, there's a few other things. Let me just amplify this a little bit. What's really interesting about, we could spend the evening on water. You take hydrogen, which is a dangerous gas. That's the Hindenburg disaster, right? Hydrogen is an explosive, a very dangerous gas. You take oxygen. Oxygen also is a dangerous gas. If I was conducting an experiment up here with oxygen, I'd make sure there's no one smoking nearby. Oxygen is dangerous. Ask the Apollo astronauts. Okay? Now, God takes two of the most explosive gases, hydrogen and oxygen, mixes them together, and creates water, which is what you use to put out fires with. Isn't that interesting? Water is interesting for lots of other reasons. Of course, it's the most plentiful thing on the planet Earth, I guess. But also, it violates some of the laws of nature. You all know that when things get hot, they expand, and things get cold, they contract. The reason highways have bumps in them, you've got what they call expansion joints. In Dallas, they weren't quite good enough, and they exploded, as you may know, because the expansion joints, you know, it was exceeded. So you have things, things in general expand when they're hot, contract when they're cold. And as a mechanic, you know this. If you've got a force fit that's tough, you can heat it, and sometimes something that's intractable will yield if it's made larger, and so forth. There's a measurable coefficient of expansion per degree centigrade, and you deal with this as an engineer or a mechanic, what have you. There are a few things that do the opposite. There are a few metals that actually contract when heated and expand when cold, and they're used to make pendulum on clocks and things that should, so their temperature, the pendulum stays the same length in different temperatures. There are some materials that violate this, but uniformly. Water doesn't either. When water, and I'll speak in Fahrenheit, because we're used to that, when it gets to 38 degrees, it stops contracting. It tends to somewhat contract as it gets colder, down to 38 degrees. From 38 degrees to freezing, it starts to expand, and it expands 30% when freezing. And it has a very non-linear, very peculiar curve. If you're in a laboratory, try to plot, it's volume per temperature. It's a very erratic curve. But the curve has been designed so that first of all, in a local region, everything will be the same temperature locally before it freezes, and when it freezes, so it can expand. Now what's interesting about this, I imagine, how many of you knew that before tonight? You knew that by reading Job 26? Yes, it's in Job 26. He ponders the fact that, you know, that water's like a stone that floats, won't sink. If water didn't do that, we'd probably have very great difficulty supporting life on the planet Earth, because rivers would freeze from the bottom up, and many of them would never defrost. And if you make an ecological study of the planet Earth, you discover you probably have to alter the basic properties of water in order to have life on the planet Earth, and guess what? Those properties are altered to the non-linearity we experience in the laboratory. Very interesting. Something else that's kind of interesting, the ratio of Earth to land on the planet Earth observes this square law. If you took half, if you had half the seas, you'd have one-fourth the rainfall. It turns out if you play around with the ratio of Earth to water on the planet Earth, it turns out to be a very sensitive adjustment. You want just the right amount of land versus water to create the properties we enjoy. And we could go through a whole list tonight. Now relax, I'm not going to go through all of them. This whole idea of how close should the Earth be to the sun. If it's a hair closer, it gets too hot. The heat avoids, does not allow you to have an atmosphere, among a lot of other problems it creates. It gets a little further from the sun, it gets too cold. Mercury, by the way, has seven times the heat that the Earth has. Very uncomfortable. You might get a kick out of it, it has an 87-day year. So, you know, time flies. Uranus, in contrast to that, has one-hundredth of the heat that the Earth has. It's high. The weatherman on Uranus says, the high today is minus three-hundred degrees Fahrenheit. A birthday would be rather rare because it has an 84-year year. So, I mean, it would take 84 times as long to have a year as we do. So Uranus isn't really too, real estate there is cheap probably. Very delicate situation. Before I leave this whole idea of water, though, I discovered something relatively late in my... I'm a Naval Academy graduate, and as a Naval Academy graduate, I spent four years marching down Stripling Rock to the academic group of buildings, one of which was called Maury Hall. And I knew, as most people in the world, not just Americans know, Matthew Fontaine Maury, M-A-U-R-Y, happened to be an American naval officer, but he's known as the father of oceanography in all countries. He was one of these guys way, way back that got interested in oceanography and he did the beginning of that whole science by gathering data and publishing some things. And he, not just in America, but all over the world, is acknowledged as the father of oceanography. What I didn't know was how he got interested in oceanography. He heard, in church one day, a sermon preached on Psalm 8. And in Psalm 8, there's a phrase. It speaks of water... paths in the sea. And he was freaked out by that. He says, there are paths in the sea. And he decided to try and find out where they were. And he started, he organized ways of taking data among all the ships that sailed certain courses. And he gathered that data and laid out maps and discovered what we know today as the basic currents in the world. Worldwide, around the world. We speak of the Gulf Stream and all these things. And he mapped most of them by very rudimentary data back in the, when was it, 1800s I guess. And, but what fascinated me, he got onto that by, Psalm 8. Psalm 8. If I recall correctly. Now, so one of the things I challenge you to do is as you read Job or Psalms or whatever, you can probably make a career for yourself. Job mentions something that to the best of my knowledge, no one's quite sure what he's hinting at. He's talking about warfare and he speaks of the treasuries of the snow. And, to the best of my horizon and my availability of things I've read, I don't think anyone has, well we obviously know a lot about snow. Most of it's just interesting. Not necessarily useful from a point of warfare. And that's apparently the context of the remark that's made in Job. And I'm sure there's dozens of those. So somebody here tonight will read sometime this summer while you're sitting on the beach getting sunburned. You'll come across in your devotions or digging in something that may just grab you and maybe the Lord will put you on a whole new career path. And so, I just throw that out. I always, I'm also intrigued with the idea of salt. We mentioned salt earlier about salt killing plant life. We have, all this nonsense cannot be devoid of any spiritual, you know, there has to be some spiritual content from time to time to keep you coming Monday night. So I have to turn from all this interesting but useless, trivial technology to make an interesting remark. We're all challenged to be the salt of the earth by Jesus Christ. And I've heard all kinds of sermons as to what that means. You know, salt preserves and salt does this and salt does that. Okay? And one of the things that I think of whenever I think of salt is, in fact, what do you think? If I gave you some salt, what would that do to you tonight? Make you thirsty. If you're the salt of the earth, have you made anyone thirsty? I suddenly decided that's really what I'm trying to do. Remember we had that little thing last time. I'm not trying to teach. I'm trying to make you thirsty to dig into his word. And so that's my excuse for this flippant, trivial style. But it's also an interesting thing in terms of the challenge where Jesus Christ says, you are the salt of the earth. What is he referring to? Probably, you probably get a seven or eight point hour lecture on what salt means. But to me, what it means is to make other people thirsty. on that diagram, one other thing I'd like to mention is we, I talk briefly. The whole theme that we've been into is this whole evidence, all the evidence for design, by our Lord, in the universe and in the earth and in the creation. You know, there has been a tendency for many of us that are victims of what I'll call an elementary school concept of science. To speak of, you know, we're prey in our thinking to the evolutionist argument. The evolution, those of you that are gamblers know that if you have a poor bet that's biased in favor of the house, it doesn't matter how many times you play it, you're still going to lose. And the mentality of the evolutionist is that any odds are okay if you play them long enough. And the odds are several billion to one against you, but that's okay. We're going to play it again and again for billions of years. And somehow that mentality justifies these ridiculous scientific conclusions, hypotheses that they attempt to validate. And most of us that know anything about probabilities know that if you've got a bias against you, gee, the more you play it, the more that's going to accumulate against you. And that's exactly the predicament that the evolutionists have. But the other side of this is the presumption that somehow, you know, the whole survival of the fittest idea, that nature somehow will tend to correct itself. That's sort of the presumption that underlies evolution. It happens that that presumption undermines their argument because nature will tend to go to the status quo, not towards an increase in sophistication through mutations. But we've covered that. But the other thought that needs to be mentioned is this whole idea of ecology. That's not a new word. It's been of interest in the scientific community for centuries. But it's gotten a lot of popular interest in the popular press in, say, the last ten years or so. And the one thing we've learned that we've become aware of is that we live, not in a self-correcting ecology, but quite the contrary, one that's in a very delicate balance and where imbalances tend to disrupt. And that's If you think that through, with an understanding, a modern understanding of ecology, the fact that it's delicate and it's not self-correcting, if you think that through, that utterly devastates the evolutionary argument for our present situation. If you want a specific, interesting example of that, sometime do a study of the Aswan Dam. The Aswan Dam was to solve all the flooding of the Nile problems and so forth. And the Soviet Union spent a lot of money helping the Egyptians construct this thing. Big modern marvel, the Aswan Dam. And there have been many articles published that suggest that the best thing that could ever happen for Egypt was to blow it out of the thing. Because, it turns out, all kinds of unforeseen ramifications of that occur. Because the flooding of the Nile doesn't flood anymore, the infusion of the salt water has killed certain kind of life upon which their industries depended. All the flax is gone. Because it depended up on certain things of the salt water because there isn't the flooding anymore. And also, the fishing industry is devastated. And we could go through a whole summary, not only of the economic devastation of the Aswan Dam in Egypt, but what's most interesting, you can read all this prophesied by Isaiah in chapter 19. Isaiah in chapter 19 describes all of this. And if you want an interesting study, dig out some summary of the Aswan Dam and its ecological disaster and compare it with Isaiah 19. We won't take the time tonight because I've already digressed for quite, probably substantially more than I really should with you. And if you're interested in the detail, there is a tape. The firefighters have a tape on Isaiah 19 that you can take out. In terms of evidence of design, we could, it's tempting just to list all kinds of things. So I'd like to just leave you with a few. Now we can look at the human eye. I used my little watch analogy the other evening in terms of the absurdity that complexity can occur without a designer is of course so absurd to be humorous. And we've talked about the hand and other things. The human eye is an interesting study in its own right in terms of being just an incredible self-focusing camera. But what most of you probably would not have occasion to realize is that the eye is sensitive to a very, very narrow spectrum in the different frequencies that it could have been a receptor of. We speak of its particular band as the visible light range. Well, because that's the eye sensitive to it. But it's bounded, just to give you a feeling for this, on the one side by the infrared and on the other side by the ultraviolet. There are all kinds of frequencies, emissions, and so forth the eye cannot see. I mean, there's nothing wrong with infrared. We design missiles to track infrared. If you go to a doctor, he can give you a thermograph to see if there's an occlusion in your arteries, veins, what have you. It's a useful medical instrument to look at the thermograph or the infrared. Ultraviolet is a very, very valuable form of emission. What's interesting, though, is that if you were a very, very, engineer, and knew all there is to know about communications theory, and you wanted to design a sensor with an optimum signal-to-noise ratio, maximum of information and a minimum of noise or error, you would optimize the eye the way we have one. You would not have it receptive to those frequencies which would cause confusion or cause noise as opposed to signal. And that's exactly what we have in our eye. And studies of the eye lead to the remarkable discovery that it's optimized as a sensor, as a general-purpose sensor, which I think is remarkable for that to happen by chance without the evidence of a designer. Let's, at this point, to make sure we don't get totally off, let's go through Genesis, Chapter 1, and then comment on the other things. And since we have made so little progress in the last few evenings, we'll start from Genesis, Chapter 1, Verse 1, and read to the end of the chapter. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth, and the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved, brooded, upon the face of the waters. And God said, first direct quote, Let there be light, and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good, and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light day, and the darkness he called night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. And God said, Let there be a firmament, or rock, or whatever that is, in the midst of the fluids or waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament, and it was so. And God called the firmament heaven, and the evening and the morning were the second day. And God said, Let the waters under heaven be gathered together in one place, and let the dry land appear. And it was so. And God called the dry land earth, and the gathering together of the waters called he seas. And God saw that it was good. And God said, Let the earth bring forth vegetation and herb yielding seed and fruit tree yielding fruit after its kind whose seed is in itself upon the earth. And it was so. And the earth brought forth vegetation and herb yielding seed after its kind and tree yielding fruit whose seed was in itself after its kind. And God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the third day. And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and for years and let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth. And it was so. And God made two great lights, the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night and he made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth and to rule over the day and over the night and to divide the light from the darkness and God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the fourth day. And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, the fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. And God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly after their kind and every winged fowl after its kind. 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 fowl multiply in the earth. And the evening and the morning were the fifth day. And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after its kind, cattle and creeping thing and beast of the earth after its kind. And it was so. And God made the beast of the earth after its kind and cattle after their kind and everything that creepeth upon the earth after its kind. And God saw that it was good. Let's try to recap where we are. We've covered some of this already and I've tried to move us through into the sixth day and we could spend obviously a lot of time going over the various theories. It's very easy to reconcile them with the genesis record. There are some similarities but candidly if you do that honestly there's more differences than similarities and I'm not sure that's a fruitful exercise. I don't think it's a fruitful exercise because I have a low regard for that information and I think most of you and we'll get into this in the study of man particularly but it has a very, very poor basis not only of being flaky scientifically but also the subject of much fraud. The main ten times in this passage in Genesis we have the emphasis that each thing is after its kind as if the Holy Spirit is anticipating this fallacy of evolution and this fallacy of evolution Peter himself comments on as being incidentally a symptom of the end time. Remember? We looked at that before. I can't resist though commenting on a few things as we go through here. Everywhere we look in the creation we find evidence of a designer and I've tried to select a few things that you might find interesting. One of the things that you're all aware of I'm sure if you've done any biological biology study is the structure of flowers, incredible structure of flowers, a sexual structure that requires the participation of an animal pollination for them to propagate. I have a tough time arranging some kind of evolutionary scenario to make that plausible. The fact that it requires participation of other animals is just the beginning of the story. Do you know that there are flowers that if a bee, not a design flower, a bee goes in that the pollen will suffocate them? Do you know that he won't live? And what keeps him from suffocating are brushes on his knees. Now, I really, I really would love to see an evolutionist deal with that because if that occurred by natural selection, the first guy that doesn't have them dies. So I wonder how by trial and error you eventually have a worker bee with brushes on his knees which causes the thing to allow him to get in there without suffocating. But that's argumentative probably. What about color? Have you ever noticed how pretty flowers are? Why are flowers beautiful? To attract bees. You know, that's what everybody thought until recently they discovered they were colorblind. You know, it's a very interesting to me, it's one of those trivial things you'll read in textbooks. I think that's profound. I think that's profound. In fact, it falls in the same category. I was, I haven't been interested in diving. And as you may know, if you go into real deep depths, you know, you go 30 feet or so, you lose everything but blue light. You know, the light quickly loses its color and as you go very deep it all gets dark. And essentially in the deep, deep dark of the oceans, they find all kinds of, you know, they go down with various equipment, they find the most fantastically colorful forms of life and coral and creatures. Most incredible things. Why are they there and why are they colorful? Does color serve a function? Can't. It's dark. There's no light down there. Why are they colorful? I have to just believe to please God. We have a salt water aquarium at home and I have to believe, I don't know if you've ever watched Termite Crabs, he has to have a sense of humor. These are the most fascinating creatures. But anyway, to move on. I think the fact that bees are colorblind, now you can make a big argument about color, you know, color has to do with the heat balance of the flower and there's some studies on that, but I don't believe that they have to be functional without being beautiful. I mean, they could be functional without being beautiful, but they're beautiful. Why are they beautiful? Interesting thing. Birds. I have to talk about birds. Have you ever tried to design a bird? There is, I had a brochure and it's again one of those things I remember having, but I couldn't, I have to be honest with you, I'm very frustrated with this study because I found my notes for Genesis, but I lost a chunk that I have not been able in the confusion of my state to lay my hands on. But I remember I had a little, and it was a cartoon that was very cleverly put together, which shows a bird with all the equipment he needs to live the way he lives. He had maps to navigate with, he had oxygen to fly at the altitude he flies on, and he had all this equipment. And when you really enumerate those things, which you and I would, if we sat down to design a bird, would list as a statement of requirements, we'd be overcome with all the things that we need. These birds circumnavigate, they go from practically pole to pole, and back again. They navigate. How do they do it? We're not sure. We have all kinds of theories and all kinds of studies, and different ones probably do it differently. They fly at altitude. You guys that design carburetors, you know the problem you have when you just go up to Arrowhead, or Denver or something, right? Birds have quite a, they can go pretty good heights. Their bones are hollow, so they're not, so they don't, they're lightweight. Their beaks are specifically designed for the diet they're programmed for. Did you know that? I have a feeling that if you were in the right kind of a college, you could do a PhD thesis on the design of beaks, of birds. Do you know that there are birds, now you've all probably been off the pier out here, watched the birds that will dive and go underwater for a while. I remember being flabbergasted, I was going out on, we have kind of a long pier, it turns out, and we were walking down there, and I remember looking down and seeing the fish, and seeing this duck down there. Now, I've seen duck dive, I never realized how long they stay underwater. They actually are down there for a long time. I watched this guy, and I was getting nervous. What I didn't know until I read it, there are birds that not only will dive and get underwater, they're able to give themselves negative buoyancy. They can contract so they can walk along the bottom and get their food before coming up. Did you know that? True, really. How many of you have read articles or read in a novel about the vulture that smells the scent of the carrion and so forth? Do you know that they don't do that with scent? That they do it by eyesight, and that's exactly what Job tells us in Job 28. Just an aside, you can hunt that down on your own. But here's the wild one. If you're a bird at some altitude, and you're going after something down there, you know, your target, your prey, what's the fastest way to where you are down there? Straight down. Most of us think that's true if you were in a vacuum. There is a scientist, a mathematician by the name of Bernoulli, who raised the question of giving the bird at an altitude, what's the fastest, what trajectory is the fastest way down to an arbitrary point on the surface? And two scientists operating independently came up with the same answer after a great deal of study. Sir Isaac Newton was one of them, and you know who he was. He was the guy that invented calculus. One of the great, great minds in the history of mankind, just as an intellect. The other one is Leibniz, one of the greatest mathematicians that has ever lived. And these two guys independently attacked Bernoulli's problem and came up with the same answer, but working independently. And the answer is a mathematical equation that we call a cycloid. And what that means is that if I was going to draw a cycloid on a blackboard, the way I would probably do it is to take a wheel and put a piece of chalk on the perimeter of the wheel and then roll the wheel on the chalk tray and I'd get a curve. You can visualize that. It looks sort of like a spiral in a sense. Okay? It's called a cycloid. There's a mathematical equation for it. And both Newton and Leibniz found out or discovered that a cycloid is the trajectory you'd have to follow if you were to have a bird altitude in air and we're trying to find the fastest way down to the surface. Okay? Now, let me tell you, by the way, if I asked you to either draw or calculate a cycloid, I don't think you could, if you were flying a plane, I don't think you could do it without an autopilot or some kind of computer to help you because otherwise you'd approximate it. You wouldn't be really a cycloid. You're following me? All birds of prey follow a cycloid. If you ever watch them, you'd think the radius gets so large when you get to water, it looks like they're going straight down, but they're actually following a cycloid. Very interesting thing. I'm just pointing out there's some non-trivial design problems that are either solved by these birds of prey or more likely by the guy that programmed them in the first place. Let's talk about fish and then we'll get to more productive things. I mentioned beaks of birds are tuned or adjusted or engineered for their prey. Did you know that the eyes of a fish are designed to have that magnification that's appropriate for the food that they normally eat? Did you know that they've been fitted with glasses that are optimized for their particular feed? Now, what's really wild in Malaysia, there is a fish that has a problem because he eats relatively small things, but he's afraid of birds because he's a prey to birds. And when we study his eyes we discover, believe it or not, he's got bifocals. The top half of his eye is designed with a focal length that's appropriate for watching defensively for birds. Following a cycloid, I guess. And the bottom part of the eye is a focal length that's adjusted for the kind of thing that he goes after to eat. I think that's wild. I just think that's wild. And, of course, I mentioned the seahorse. That's one of my favorite examples to bring up in a debate or discussion. The seahorse is a marsupial, which means he has a pouch. The male has the pouch. The female deposits the eggs in the male's pouch, and then the male nurses the young. That's the seahorse. And it's an interesting thing to throw into an evolutionary hypothesis somewhere. I don't know how you get the idea. The other thing, while we're talking about fish, I might mention, there's something else we're going to see in the rapid multiplication has been commanded. It's interesting, the mackerel lays what, half a million eggs? And in ten years, if they all hatch, now they obviously don't, a lot of high mortality, but if they all hatch, it would fill all the oceans full of mackerel. The herring in 20 years lays 338 times, and then 15 zeros. Tons. Now that's if they all hatch. Now obviously they don't. But if you play around with the number of eggs and so forth, and assume, it's obviously a false assumption, but if you take that assumption, you get in some pretty hairy thing. The basic thing that I was going to undergird some of this with is this whole hypothesis of the evolutionists that the offspring inherit the traits of the parents. Right? Well, you have a tough time with worker bees. Because neither the worker bees have the apparatus or the ability to collect honey or make beeswax. Interesting, isn't it? And you can go through the field of biology and find animals that alternate life cycles. You saw the movie The Alien. You're familiar with the idea of a double life cycle. One and then the other. That's based on a biological model of which there are many examples in nature. So enough of this stuff. Let's go ahead and pick ourselves up where we were. Something else that I'm resisting the temptation of going into, but I should at least make you aware of it. It speaks here in the fourth day of making these, you know, the lights in the firmament for signs, seasons, days and years. Right? And these lights, sun, moon, stars. There's a whole departure we could take. But I'm resisting that because I realize even as a I'm really taking a long time to get through Genesis 1. But you just might be aware of the fact that there are some people, now their views are not necessarily free of controversy. Anything that's free of controversy I seem to drop out of our program. But there is a view and it's built upon several passages in scripture. Psalm 19 that we read in terms of, you know, the heavens declare the glory of God and so forth. And it speaks of Mazaroth, which is the Hebrew name for the Zodiac. And it goes into not of the signs of the Zodiac as you and I know them because you and I know them by their Babylonian traditions. But the premise of several authors, and if you go to a Christian book store you'll find several of these writers that will deal with this incompletely. I might warn you on the one hand it's interesting, on the other hand if you really spend the time and I have to dig into them you also find it a little frustrating because it raises more questions than the answer. But there is a hypothesis that the constellations, well first of all you've all looked at the constellations and you've tried to learn them by their ancient Greek or Babylonian names, right? And you look at Orion and he is in no way a hunter. You know you can find his belt and his dangling sword maybe but the rest of it's kind of fuzzy. And you look at Cassiopeia and you can see a W maybe. Trying to find a lady chained to a chair is a tough job. And you can go through the constellations as they are classically configured and you have all kinds of strange ideas as to well they used to be maybe something that caused them, you know they used to, you get the impression usually taught that those were names given to the constellations as a mechanism of remembering them by their shape. Well that's nonsense because there is no way their physical arrangement relates at all to the folklore around them. And we know them of course by their classical, I should say the classical Greek or Babylonian names. There has been some study given to the whole scenario of the constellations by their Hebrew names. And interestingly enough you can find in some places, it's a little contrived frankly, but you can find a remarkable chronology of the gospel. Virgo is the virgin and so forth. And you can go through the whole thing. The dragon and he's being slayed by the sword of the hunter and all this. And you can go, what makes it interesting is that you can take the constellations and go through it and try to arrange them and they seem to, in fact, there is a way they seem to describe the gospel. What's interesting if you go at them with their Hebrew names and look at the Hebrew names of the stars in the constellation, they confirm the idea. And I don't want to take the time in this study to get into it unless there is an awful lot of interest I can bring that all in because I think it would take a good hour to do that. And at the same time I think it is way off the subject. On the other hand I might be doing a disservice at least not letting you know that that exists and those of you that are looking for ways, things to read on the beach while your buddy surfs or something can blow a couple of bucks at a Christian bookstore and pick up one of the books by Bullinger or I forget the other authors. I'll put that in the bibliography when we get it out. And you might find it interesting. It's a little frustrating because some of them are a little contrived and the research has come up against some, it isn't as closed as system as you'd like it. It raises a lot of questions. But it's incidentally something I happen to believe in is that I think the original concept of the stars was to declare the glory of God and that would include his redemption of man and so the hypothesis is sound. But it's been so corrupted by the Babylonian astrological traditions. By the way Babylonian astrology in its wildest dreams never dealt with astrology as we think of it where astrology is based on the day and hour events. That was something introduced in the 17th century surprisingly enough. Or is it 15th? Anyway much later. Even the Babylonian astrological systems didn't lean on that interestingly enough. But they've so corrupted what God originally dealt with. It's interesting to the best of my knowledge I'm not aware in the scripture where we're admonished to go study that. Do you follow me? In fact if anything we're admonished to stay away from any form of divination. We've made it all the way to verse 26 and we're going to go to verse 37. 37. Aha you're paying attention. Very good. Most Bibles stop at 31 but we're going to go to verse 37. And God said in verse 26 if you make a book of Genesis you've got to memorize verse 26. It's a neat one. And God said let us make man in our image and after our likeness. Who's he talking to? This is one of the places where the Elohim construction or this grammatical thing I mentioned to you shows up in the English. But anyway God said let us make man in our image. Now that's an interesting phenomenon to see God's himself. But you know it occurs many other times in the scripture. Does that surprise you? The most dramatic place if I guess if I can have tangents that are in the secular world I should take tangents that are in the scripture because I'm sure they're far more productive than some of the other foolishness I've laid on you. So let's turn for a moment to Psalm 2. Since this is intended to be not much evidence yet but it's intended to be a study in prophecy. Psalm 2 we'll dig into we'll just go through. Psalm 2 you really won't understand unless you recognize that it's a conversation among several people. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. One speaker says why do the nations rage and the peoples imagine a vain thing? The kings of the earth set themselves and the rulers take counsel together against the Lord and against his anointed. That's an interesting thing. You know we glibly talk about the battle of Armageddon but we fail to understand that in the language in the Old and New Testament prophets is what is exactly mentioned here. They're not going against Jerusalem except as a local tactical thing. They're taking arms against whom? Yeah. The Lord and his anointed. And what are they saying? Let us break their bands asunder and cast away their cords from us. That's what the kings of the earth are saying. Can you imagine the audacity of everyone going not only taking arms against God but trying to cast off his constraints on us? Incredible. He who sitteth in the heavens shall laugh and frankly I don't blame him. The Lord shall have them in derision. Then shall he speak unto them in his wrath and vex them in his great displeasure. Yet have I set my king upon my holy hill of Zion. I will declare the decree. The Lord hath said unto me, Thou art my son. This day have I begotten thee. Ask of me and I shall give thee the nations for thine inheritance and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession. That was the proposition that Satan gave Christ except he wanted Christ to take a shortcut. He wanted him to be able to fulfill that verse 8 without going to the cross at Calvary. And if you don't think that was an attractive alternative, remember that Jesus Christ none other prayed three times to be able to dock the cross in Gethsemane. Three times he pleaded with the Father, take this cup from me. Nevertheless, oh is that a precious word. Nevertheless, not my will but thine be done. So you have to recognize that Satan's proposition was attractive because Satan made the boast he could deliver this stuff. And Christ didn't challenge his claim. But here the Father says, ask of me and I shall give thee the nations for thine inheritance and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession. Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron. Thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel. Be wise now therefore, oh ye kings. Be instructed ye judges of the earth. Serve the Lord with fear and rejoice with trembling. Kiss the Son lest he be angry and ye perish from the way when his wrath is kindled but a little. Blessed are they, I'll put trust in him. There's an example where if you study that Psalm 2 carefully. I'll leave it to your own resources to diagram who's talking to who when. But you'll discover it's a conversation in the Trinity. You'll find, and it won't take the time to look at each one, but you'll find the same kind of phenomenon going on in Isaiah 48, 16, Psalm 45, 7, Psalm 110, 1, and there are others. That's just the Old Testament. In the New Testament you'll find a similar kind of reference in Matthew 11, 27, John 8, 42, and John 17, 24. John 17, the whole chapter is the Son talking to the Father. You speak of the Lord's Prayer, that isn't the prayer he taught his disciples. We call that the Lord's Prayer. The Lord's Prayer, perhaps in more proper terminology, is John 17. The one occasion where we have this real intimate prayer between the Son with the Father. Very worth your deep study. Getting back to Genesis 1, God said, Let us make man in our image after our likeness, and let him have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. By the way, notice it says, Let them, them, Mr. and Mrs. Man, were created in this image. We're going to get to that. Chapter 2 of Genesis expands on this issue. This is the summary statement. So we're going to get a good chance to dig into the whole Adam and Eve thing in Chapter 2. But here, this is the summary overview because God is giving us the generations of the heavens and the earth, the seven days. And we're talking about the sixth day here. Have dominion over the fish. Now, he was given to Adam. I mean, the word Adam, Adama, is the Hebrew name for earth. So Adam gets his name from the earth, partly because he was made from the dust of the ground, probably because he was named to have dominion over the earth. And of course, he blew it. He had dominion over the fish of the sea, over the fowl of the air, over the cattle, over all the earth, every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image. In the image of God created he him, male and female, created he them. So we've got Mr. and Mrs. Man in view. Now, we could spend all evening what we mean by created in his own image. That's a whole theological point. He certainly did it in his image in some sense, if for no other reason than he knew when he did this that he would eventually have to become a man. Right? That's what the incarnation is all about. And that view is highlighted in Hebrews 10.5, Luke 1.35, and Philippians 2.7. Now, I'm not going to other side of the coin, Christ is in the image of God. Hebrews 1.3, Colossians 1.15, and 2 Corinthians 4.4. Okay? Now, this whole idea, if you really want to get into this image thing, the path I would tend to take you on is the trinity of man. We speak of the trinity of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It's very interesting, by the way, how many times does he say he's going to make man in his image? He's going to make three times. Three times. Let's make man in our image, and then in verse 27, create man in his own image in the image of God. He goes out of his way to repeat himself. Right? Well, if he repeated it twice, we know that in two witnesses, a thing is established. Right? But he did it three times. Why? Well, there's a trinity involved. And also, as an aside, there's a trinity of man. The body, soul, Holy Spirit. The body, soul, Holy Spirit. And you can take Hebrews 4.12 and 1 Thessalonians 5.23 to establish the fact that the soul and the spirit are not the same thing. That we have a body, a soul, and a spirit. And we see that confirmed in Luke 1.46 and 47. And an unsaved person is spoken by Jude as having a soul, but not a spirit. I often wonder, you always hear that preached, you know, that idea. And I always wonder what the scriptural basis of it was, and at least one place is in Jude. The whole idea of body, soul, and spirit. And that an unsaved man has to be born again of the spirit. And it's missing because of his predicament. If it helps you at all, the body, soul, and spirit is a sense or a world or environmental consciousness, the body, that puts you in touch with reality in the physical sense. Sight, feel, touch, you know, the sensual sense. So it's a world consciousness. It's a world you in a self consciousness. You can have pets and things that are conscious of you. It's hard to establish any evidence that they're conscious of themselves in the sense of the soul. And, of course, the spirit is God consciousness. So you can play with that. It may not be valid. It helps me. It's a way of, it's just a way of viewing things. I throw that out before we move on. Okay, verse 28, And God blessed them, and said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill, and fill the earth, replenish, as in your King James. And many people use that to support the gap theory idea. Wrong. If you're interested in the gap theory, there's a lot of other things you can hang your hat on. Not that. The word replenish is really just fill. Fill the earth. And subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, which is in the fruit of a tree yielding seed. To you it shall be for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to everything that creepeth upon the earth wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for food, and it was so. And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day. Now, many people use this passage as a basis to go on a vegetarian diet. Wrong. You're going to discover before Genesis is over that God institutes other forms of food. Now, there's probably a lot of good reasons to go on an all-vegetarian type of diet, but Chapter 1 of Genesis ain't one of them. Okay? So if you want to be a vegetarian, terrific, but don't hang your hat on Genesis 1. Unless you also want to walk around clothed in light. And stuff, okay? This is a world we have no ability, I personally believe we have zero ability to visualize what Adam and Eve looked like, how they conducted themselves. I frankly think we have very little insight as to what the vegetation looked like. This is vegetation, by the way, that started before the sun and the moon were stars. They were probably illuminated by the plasmas that were still, you know, could be ultraviolet sensitive plasmas that were in motion prior to day four. You can have light without having to come from the sun or the moon, depending on the circumstances of the time. And it may be that vegetation that explains oil rather than coal and those kinds of things, and I think we talked about that before. The point is, though, what we fail to allow for is the convulsions that occur later. Number one, the effects of the curse which introduced the entropy laws, among other things. Number two, the second law of thermodynamics and all that it implies. And we fail to appreciate the upheaval of the flood. So before we get to Genesis 6, we'll have a world we know, not the world we're talking about here. When we talk about the serpent in the Garden of Eden, we have no idea what the serpent was like prior to the curse. Because God humbles him and makes him what we know as a serpent. We don't know what he was before. We also have some strange problems because they carried on a conversation. Is it reasonable that Adam and Eve carried on communication with all the animals? Did they have some kind of ESP where they could commune with the animals? I have no idea. I have no idea. Scripture doesn't give us a lot of illumination. But what we do need to allow for is the creation, the environment they're in is something we have very little insight. If we were going to render this into a movie of some kind, we could justify great freedom of concept of the pre-flood world. Because it was different in ways that we only have hints of. And we'll talk about some of those hints as we go. But I didn't finish chapter 1 in my view. I'm going to suggest to you that chapter 1 probably ends, well let's be conservative and say it ends at verse 3 of chapter 2. Some people take it even further. I'll just, let's make it a 34 verse chapter. Chapter 1 And I say that because of the first, the first 3 verses of chapter 2 relate more meaningfully to chapter 1 than chapter 2. Now the divisions, the chapter divisions are man's divisions. They were introduced I believe in about the 15th century. 14th to 13th century? I've forgotten. But I mean relatively recent times. There's nothing intrinsically historical about this, that, or the other. In fact it's kind of amusing. There was a volume being bandied about many years ago called the Echo Volume, which had letters of Pilate's wife to Pilate and all this stuff. Except it mentioned in a couple of places a, in the old, Isaiah 52 or something. And the problem with that is there wasn't Isaiah 52 at the time of Pilate. That came later. So it's obviously a little embarrassing. But chapter 2 verse 1 see just summarize, the first three verses of chapter 2 summarize chapter 1. So if we were editing this we would be tempted to put chapter 2 starting say at either verse 4 or verse 7 depending on what you want to do with those others. And so we'll just skip ahead a little bit. Thus the heavens and the earth were finished and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made. And he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. And God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it because that in it he rested from all his work which God created and made. Difference created and made. Both. These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created. Verse 4. In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens. Day. Day. The word yom appears there but not with a number as a general period. Now there's one of the uses of the word yom in the other sense that we talked about. And every plant of the field before it was in the earth and every herb of the field before it grew for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth there was not a man to till the ground. Both. There was no rain and there was no man to till the ground. But there went up a mist from the earth that watered the whole face of the ground. Adam didn't have to work. It took care of itself. And they didn't have rain. One thing we'll try to understand when Noah was there with his contraption in his driveway for 120 years. That part of his burden was to explain to his neighbors it was going to rain. And they hadn't seen rain. Apparently. Because they didn't have rain until then. That's the basis at least of that view. Okay. Now there's a couple of ideas that I really can't resist sharing with you. And we've talked about, perhaps tediously to many of you, the creation and what I'll call the scientific apologetic aspect of Genesis 1. And I'd like to sort of put that behind us and look at Genesis 1 from a totally different point of view. Not necessarily a correct point of view. I'm going to throw out some ideas. And if you relate to them, let the Holy Spirit deal with that. If for some reason you think this is wacky or way out, fine. Don't worry about it. This is just one of those, you know, you take it as you like. Do you notice, okay, we've dealt here with the creation. When I speak to you of the creation in the New Testament, what passage comes to mind? John 1. Okay, that's, except that in the beginning was the word. That was even, what he really is saying there, before the creation. Now I'm really thinking, when I was thinking of the 2nd Corinthians 5 17. 2nd Corinthians 5 17. Therefore, if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature. Creature is what your King James may say, but the proper translation is what? Creation. Exactly. Therefore, if any man be in Christ, he is a new creation. All things are passed away, and behold, all things are become new. Okay? So I want us to think a little bit about you and I. I want us to think a little bit about you and I. I want us to think a I want us to think a little bit about you and I. I want us to think a little bit about you and I. I want us to think a little bit about you and I. I want us to think a little bit about you and I. and I. I want us to think a little bit about you I want us to think a little bit about you and I. I want us to think a little bit about you and I. I want us to think a and I. I want us to think a and I. I want us to think a little bit about you and I. I want us to think a little bit about you and I. I want us to think a I want us to think a little bit about you and I. I want us to think a little bit about you and I. I want us to think a little bit about you I want us to think a little bit about you and I. I want us to think a and I. Nicodemus by not knowing this beforehand. As far as Jesus Christ is concerned, he's not announcing something new in John 3. He is tutoring Nicodemus, who is supposed to know these things. How? By the book of Jeremiah, for one. You'll find the whole doctrine of regeneration, the born-again, is in the book of Jeremiah. I won't tell you more than that, because I've got to give you a little bit of work to do. But I'm also going to suggest to you, as sort of a hypothesis you should think about and try on and see if you can relate to, that he's talking about it in Genesis chapter one. I'm going to suggest to you that we might look at Genesis chapter one in the sense of a pattern that God deals with in his creation, on the one hand, and recognize that you and I are going to be a new creation. And it shouldn't surprise us if God operates with us in the same pattern that he did with the cosmos. First of all, where are we when we start? I submit to you we're in ruin. That we are without form and void. If you don't believe me, you can turn to Jeremiah 17.9, where it points out that the man's heart is in, it says, desperately wicked. The word in Hebrew is incurably. Incurably wicked. That's where we are. We're in ruin. Now I'm using, as my little model here, I'm using a point of view that would honor the gap theory, not in the sense of fossils, I think I've covered that, but the idea that we started in Genesis 1, verse 2, in trouble, in ruin, without form and void. And I'm going to suggest from Jeremiah 17.9, as one of hundreds of examples we could call to mind, that we are desperate, our heart is desperately wicked. The word desperately in Hebrew is incurable, and I want to point out to you that nowhere does God cure a heart. Nowhere does he repair it, mend it, heal it. He gives you a new one. Heart, in the conceptual sense. I'm not talking about the transplant thing, obviously. Okay, in Ephesians 4.18, we know that we're alienated. We are alienated from him. Right? That's where we start. Are we abandoned? No. Why? Because the Spirit of God moves and broods and concerns himself with that chaotic condition. So what's the first step? What happened in the first day? Let there be light. Good. What comes into our life? Light. 1 Peter 1.23. You might just pop into that and take a quick look. 1 Peter 1.23. Being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible by the word of God, which liveth and abideth forever. I'm sorry, I'm off one notch with my notes. Also, I want to take Psalm 119.130. The entrance of thy words giveth light, it giveth understanding to the simple. I'm going to argue that the light is divided from the darkness. Oh, by the way, incidentally, in John chapter 1, we have, in the beginning was the word, the word is with God, and so forth. And he was the light of men. The darkness comprehendeth it not. You can follow John chapter 1 and see the parallel I'm making, where the light is who? Jesus Christ. And he divides the light from the darkness. Okay. And we thus have a separation of light and darkness, and for that you can track into Colossians 3, verses 1 and 2, and Romans 12, verses 1 and 2. You can go that on your own. Now, we then get to the third day. The second step is to divide. The third day, we have life appear, right? And the life reproduces after its kind, and I suggest you might take a look at Galatians 5, 22 and 23, Proverbs 11.30. Okay. And then we have the whole idea of the light bearers for testimony in day 4. So that's the order. Light first, separation of the light and darkness. The resurrection, if you will, of life in verse 3, in day 3. We have light bearers for testimony in day 4. And Daniel speaks in chapter 12, verse 3, that they shall shine as the stars, who win many for righteousness, and so forth. And you can go to Ephesians 2, verses 4 through 6. And we're running out of time to go through each one of them, but those of you who want to track this can do this on your own. Ephesians 2, verses 4 through 6. John, chapter 9, verse 5, speaks of light bearers for testimony, and you can go on, those of you who want to, Matthew 14, 16. Then, you know, you get into service, 2 Peter 3, 18, and Romans 8, 28 and 29. And finally, at the climax of the whole scene, you enter what? Into his rest. And the book of Hebrews and, what, Ephesians and scads of others refer to that. So that's a viewpoint. The notion that the creation in Genesis 1 patterns, is the same pattern that God shows us in the growth of the believer. Now, if you think that's way out, go one more. I'm going to suggest to you that if we're looking for Jesus Christ in the book of Genesis, day one can be related by some to the incarnation, by five things. It's the work of day one, it was the work of the Holy Spirit, and obviously the incarnation was in Luke 1, 35. It issues forth as light, and Luke 2, verse 9, highlights that. Remember Simeon, when he saw the Christ child, said he is a light to lighten the Gentiles? Very interesting insight for Simeon, before Christ's ministry started. He was approved by God, the light was approved by God in Genesis 1, verse 4, and of course in Luke 2, 52 and elsewhere, baptism and so forth, we find that the Son, the incarnation, was approved. But this is my Son in whom I'm well pleased. We notice that there's a separation from darkness, and you can go to Hebrews 7, 26 and other places to tie that together. Also, it's interesting, he was named by God. The light in the first day was named by God, and of course Christ is not called the day star and some other things. But in Isaiah 49, verse 1, it mentions that the Messiah would be named in his womb, when he was in the womb, and Jesus was, if you recall. So there is a parallel you can see. If the first day of the light from darkness represents the advent of Jesus Christ, then what's day 2? It's division, it's separation. When was Christ divided or separated? Psalm 22, 1. My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? He was cut off out of the land of the living, the scripture says. So the suggestion is day 2 could speak of the crucifixion, spiritually. It was purposed by God before all of this. We see that in Revelation 13, 8. Also in Acts 2, 23, Peter says, God in his predetermined counsel and so forth. God designed the crucifixion. The Romans didn't. I mean the Romans were the instruments. But God had designed the crucifixion before the foundation of the world was laid. Acts 2, 23 is one reference and there's lots of others. And described it all hundreds of years before the Romans invented the idea of crucifixion. It was purposed by God before. It was in the midst of waters and you can take the word waters as peoples in Revelation 17, 15. You can go to John 19, 18 in the local sense or you can look at Jerusalem as the midst of the world and the center of the landmass of the world as another thing certainly in the midst. The waters were divided. You can look at 1 Corinthians 1, 18 and Matthew 10, 34 in terms of dividing the peoples. Matthew 10, 34 is where Jesus says, I think not that I come to send peace on earth. I come not to send peace but a sword. And you can chase that one down if that intrigues you. Then from this point on the third day, speaking of the giving forth of life, dry land appears. Same thing we see with Noah and the new life starting there is viewed by some to be suggestive of the resurrection. This is kind of interesting because 1 Corinthians 15 defining the gospel says how Jesus was to be dead, buried and rose again the third day according to the scriptures. What scriptures? Well there are several possibilities. We'll get to a more interesting one in Genesis 22. One possibility is that the third day of creation speaks metaphorically in a rabbinical, mystical sense of the resurrection. Then you can get into the light bearers in the heavens, you can get to the ascension and all of that, the son of righteousness, Malachi 4.2, Colossians 3.1 and 2 and run with this. Now there are two ideas here. They are really sort of mixed up but they are separate. One idea is that the mission of Jesus Christ parallels the creation. The other thing is that the life of the believer parallels the creation. In either case what is interesting is as you sequence those steps in an outline, they are all positive things except the second one. The second one in the life of Christ was the cross. In the life of the believer model that I suggested to you earlier was the whole concept of separation of light and darkness. It is interesting when you go back, you say well gee you are going out in the left field a little bit. Yeah probably but the Holy Spirit comments on each day and saw that what was done was good except on one day, the second day. The Holy Spirit doesn't mention that what happened on the second day that God saw it and it was good. God doesn't look at the cross and say it was good. It certainly was good in a theological sense. God accomplished his desire for our redemption, yes, but you don't really look at that and taking a holy perfect Christ and having him made sin for us and say that was good. We are grateful but that isn't quite, the word good by the way in all these things means beautiful. Same word that is used in Ecclesiastes, something rather, Ecclesiastes, I know I noted it down because I was chasing a word study. Anyway it means beautiful, same word as beautiful, good in the beautiful sense. In any case it is interesting that the Holy Spirit fails to say that. It doesn't mean that what was done on the second day in Genesis 1 was not good because later on before we finished in chapter 1 verse 31, God saw everything that he had made and behold it was very good. So he is not displeased. But the Holy Spirit took it upon himself not to mention that with relative to day 2 particularly. And as I am going to demonstrate to you later in the book of Genesis, I personally believe the Holy Spirit does that with some freedom. He will nudge the record around a little bit to not distort the history too much but so that it follows a spiritual model. He does that in one place where he goes so far as to make the thing inaccurate. And we will deal with that as a thing when we get there. So I look at the absence of mention, the fact that he doesn't say it was good in day 2 as a clue for something. Now whether these particular perspectives of Genesis 1 are spiritually rewarding to you or not is something between you and the Holy Spirit. If it is useful to you and you find it a productive form of study, praise the Lord. If not, don't worry about it because I think any biblical scholarship would argue that this viewpoint of Genesis 1 is sort out in that field. It is the kind of thing that would appeal to Arthur W. Pink or M.R.D. Hahn, that kind of a writer who tends to reach for spiritual analogies in the scripture. And I have to admit that I have a fondness in leaning that way but that doesn't mean they are wrong. We made it, believe it or not, through what I would consider Genesis 1 without too much damage. I think you certainly do want to take the whole idea of Christ as our Sabbath rest home with you as we get into that. But it is certainly clear, independent of all the arguments of Yom and the rest, that the intent of Moses as exemplified in Exodus and in Deuteronomy is that there were seven literal days. Because they become the basis for God instituting the Sabbath as we see here and it gets amplified later. What we are going to do next time, now this brings us in some respects down to the real nitty gritty. Each chapter in Genesis focuses our attention more usefully in a sense. In chapter 2 we are going to take up man and we will start getting into the prophecy aspects of the book. My intention in exploring the book of Genesis is to focus on it as a book of prophecy and in that light read chapters 2 and 3 of the book of Genesis and focus on Adam as a type of Christ. That sounds wild because we think of Adam as the bad guy, he blew it, he sinned. Well, Christ is the last Adam. So if I can invert that a little bit and say okay great, to the extent that Christ did what Adam didn't, he fulfilled Adam in a sense. How did Adam foreshadow Jesus Christ? I'm going to argue to you girls, especially, the story of Adam and Eve is in Ephesians 5, not Genesis 3. We are going to jump into that full bore shortly, next time probably. Praise the Lord, let's close with a word of prayer. Father we just praise you and thank you for this evening together. We thank you for your word. We thank you for reaching so far to redeem us. We thank you Father for your new creation that's available to each and every one of us. We ask you Father just to increase in us a hunger for your word. We ask you a very special blessing as we go forward in this coming week. Give us an appetite for those particular things that would be fruitful for our own lives. It's probably different for each and every one of us Father, but we just pray that the Holy Spirit might guide us and strengthen us and encourage us and help us to grow in grace and knowledge of thee, in whose name we pray. Amen.