In this sermon, Chuck Mitzvah discusses Genesis chapter 1, verses 2 and 3. He mentions that in the previous study, they covered various topics including biblical background and Einstein's theory of relativity. He shares a humorous poem about a lady named Bright who could travel faster than light, connecting it to Psalm 94 which talks about the concept of time in relation to God. Mitzvah hints at discussing the six days of creation in the next session and mentions that there is a host yet to be judged. He suggests studying Daniel chapter 10 for further background reading.

This is the second study in the book of Genesis conducted by Chuck Mitzel. The subject of this tape is Genesis chapter 1, verses 2 and 3. Last time, we ended up in quite a... As I look through my notes and try to reconstruct what we'd covered as to what to cover tonight, I began to be sympathetic to those of you that are trying to organize some notes, because we sort of touched upon a lot of different things, from some biblical background to Einstein's theory of relativity. I'm fumbling here because someone passed on to me a poem that I should have worked into last time. Apparently, there once was a lady named Bright who could travel faster than light. She went in one day in a relative way and came back the previous night. And that's kind of funny, especially if you read Psalm 94, where he points out to the Lord that a day is a thousand years and is but yesterday, or as a watch in the night. So the limerick fashion is perhaps more humorous, but the same idea of time being relative underlined our discussion last time and will underline... underlie our discussion tonight. As you may realize, this little gathering tonight is a... as you may not realize, it's a very expensive gathering. There's no charge. You're just here to gather to explore the book of Genesis. But I wanted to warn you, as I think I warned you in the book of Revelation study, is that while there's no charge, it may prove to be the most expensive program you've ever subscribed to. Because we're dealing in some supernatural things, and if the Lord has his way, and I pray that he has a... will have indeed a way of having his way with us tonight, is that this will touch all of you. Not necessarily tonight, maybe next Monday night, or what have you, but we're in an experience. We're not just going to try to grapple with the current theory of cosmology and the evolution of the dark sun and all those things which populate the technical journals recently, but rather we're really here on a supernatural experience to experience what God has for us. And whether, as you may know, there are no accidents in God's kingdom, so you're here tonight by divine appointment. I didn't know you were coming, and you may not have realized you were... some of you that you were coming, but it's my prayer and belief that this is a divine appointment, that hopefully God has some very specific purpose for you personally to join us tonight. And since we're in that kind of a... we're going to get into a lot of technical things from time to time, and it can easily become a head trip. Let's start out on the right foot and try to put those kinds of things very secondary, and let's petition our real teacher tonight. Heavenly Father, we just claim the promise in Jesus Christ that where two or three are gathered together in his name, that he would be in the midst of us. And Father, we ask that the Holy Spirit just might attend us tonight to open our eyes and our hearts and our understanding to your word, and that you might bring forth to us those very specific things that you'd have us apply to our lives, those very specific things that you've hidden away for our learning, and that in all these things, Father, we would see Jesus Christ, in whose authority and to whose glory we commit these things. Amen. As I tried to indicate as we opened, it is my hope that we don't just spend a lot of time trading technical theories, because if we do a tape on Genesis this week, you can be sure that if you stick it on your shelf and keep it a year, that a year from now it'll be obsolete. Some new scientific discovery will give us a whole different light on what we're doing. Now, one of the things that... it's also a trap I hope we don't fall into. It's often popular to pick a discovery or two out of the archaeological journals or some technical magazine that tends to confirm the Bible. That's backwards. The Bible will confirm sound science. And the interesting thing is that science is preparing a surprise for us. It's very interesting to go back through the commentators of the last several centuries on the book of Genesis. I'm still boiling down a bibliography, so probably next time or so I'll have one to pass out. So those of you that don't want to, you know, darken the thresholds of the bookstores can chase down those particular things that might interest you. But I'm trying to also save you a lot of... I'm trying to make an annotated bibliography and spare you a lot of time in the documentary hypothesis and that foolishness. But the point is, as you go through these older commentators, excuse me, commentaries, you find that they spend a lot of time dealing with scientific theories, trying to either fit them in or refute them or what have you, that are long obsolete. And it's awesome to realize the pace at which technology is moving. One fond example that I've used in some other context is to compare, say, three people. Let's compare King David and his technology and George Washington and, say, our current technology. King David traveled or could travel at the speed of horseback. He could communicate at the speed of a hand messenger. And he lived in a technology that was basically agrarian. His shelter, his clothes, his whatever he did was emerged out of the soil in terms of a agricultural economy. Two thousand years later, George Washington in his day traveled at the speed of horseback, communicated by hand-carried message, and lived in essentially an agrarian economy. In just a short span of time, we routinely travel at the speed of sound. We communicate at the speed of light and by technologies which makes the cost independent of distance. And we live in a society in which we literally in the laboratory can create the materials that we make our things out of, in which our decisions create the resources rather than be limited by them. But all of that's in just a recent period of time. It's been estimated that 80 to 90 percent of all the scientists that have ever lived on the face of the earth are alive today, which is a backhanded way of just pointing out the exponential growth in technological employment. Now, in all of this, as you go through and sense the evolution of scientific understanding as we have it, we discover it's a constantly moving thing, changing thing. We had some centuries ago the kinetic theory of gases, which explained a lot about energy, but was inadequate to understand some of the things the Bible talks about until the atomic age. And now with the insight we have from atomic energy, we can begin to understand, speculatively, many of the things that Paul talks about and others. Sir Isaac Newton invented the basic laws of physics as we think of them, and yet they're clearly inadequate to describe some of the issues we're dealing with in the book of Genesis. Einstein came along and gave us the theory of relativity, which has profound implications at understanding the time domain and many of the fundamental troublesome issues in the book of Genesis are easier for us than it would be for a group, say, 20 or 30 years ago or longer. Even Einstein's theory was published in 1905, not understood until 1920, and not applied to practice until 1942. And the philosophical implications of what he opened to us are still just being probed, and we touched about some of that last time. I guess the point I'm trying to get at is that science has broadened our understanding of the dimensionality in which we live. It has totally altered our concepts of the universe with the advent of plasmas and subatomic particles, and yet all of these things are anticipated in the scripture, and one of the things to be sensitive to is our science advances. It affects our horizon, our perspective, and as it does, it allows us, perhaps, to grasp more of what God has here for us. It's not a question of one being at variance with the other. One's a moving target, one's fixed. The scripture is fixed, and Jesus Christ says that not one jot or one tittle shall pass until all is fulfilled. On the other hand, our insight as to what he's really saying here is incomplete because of our lack of understanding, and one of the things we're able to do as we go through the book of Genesis is perhaps to see some of these things in a different light. No pun intended. And we're going to not, I'll try to avoid, being an engineer by background, I'll try to avoid the temptation of spending too much time on cosmology and some of those things. I'll throw them out for those of you that are interested, and in the bibliography there'll be places you can look further. I don't want you to leave the study with the impression that there's a complete harmony between what we know as science and the book of Genesis. Many attempts to have fit one to the other really lead to embarrassment because the fit turns out to be obsoleted a month later by some new discovery. Science is a moving target, but there's nothing in the book of Genesis that, in my opinion, is at variance with what we know technologically, and that's a different kind of a statement and represents a view. Now, last time we succeeded in covering seven words, and incompletely. We discussed the first sentence, and incidentally, if you understand the first sentence and have no problem with that, you have no problem with the rest of the book. And it's very difficult to assail the sentence number one, in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. That's impossible to disprove. Those of you that understand Shannon's verifiability theory of meaning will understand that that is no way assailable. And yet, if you accept that statement, the rest follows. The rest are details. And it reminds me of that Kissinger dinner, I think it was Kissinger, where I heard the idea of, yes, I think he used the example in terms of anti-submarine warfare. One proposal was to essentially boil the ocean and let all the submarines come to the surface. And somebody said, yes, but how do you do that? He says, I've given you the concept, the rest is an engineering detail. And so if you understand sentence one, in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth, the rest is just engineering details. And I won't repeat all of it, but we did get into this whole business of in beginning, in the sense of the beginning of time, that this is not as early a statement as John 1, which really addresses the pre-existence of Christ. This really is the calling into being of the heavens and the earth. Much went on before, and the Bible talks about things that went on before. For example, the first three verses of John's Gospel, the pre-existence of Jesus Christ. But in any case, in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. Did that include the host of heaven? Silence. We didn't recover that. We speak of the host of heaven in Job and Deuteronomy and all through the Old Testament, which refer to really whom? Angels. Were they created? Are they expressly mentioned? No. Job 38 tells us they were there. They shouted for joy when the foundations of the earth were laid. So did the creation of the angels precede the creation of the earth? Sure. Where are the angels? Chronologically. Pulling my tricks on me. Yes, in heaven. But the question is, where are they in the chronological scheme of things? Probably included in Genesis 1.1, but preceding to Genesis 1.2. So that leads us to something that we touched upon last time, but probably deserves a little more discussion. And I touched upon last time, and I'll review slightly and expand a little bit today, tonight, the so-called gap theory. And you'll quickly discover by my presentation of it that I lean in that direction. However, the good news is, in my opinion, that you can get a lot of evidence of the existence of a gap between Genesis 1.1 and 1.2. However, it's totally useless for the to which most people apply it. It won't help you at all trying to get through Geology 1A. Won't help you at all trying to deal with fossils and trying to reconcile some of the notions that are merchandised in today's institutions of learning. It will have no use there. We'll take up that issue when we get to Genesis 6. So don't try to use the gap theory if it appeals to you. Don't hide behind it in terms of the geological ages and dinosaurs and fossils and all of that. Because that, for a lot of reasons, won't work. Does that mean there wasn't a gap? I don't think so. I think there's good, suggestive indication that there was a gap between Genesis 1.1 and 1.2. Genesis 1.1, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, is a final, complete statement. Incidentally, you'll discover in the famous six days, seven days if you will, there's no mention of the creation of the planet earth. That interesting? Because Genesis verse 2 says, and the earth, it just assumes. The second verse of Genesis 1 takes for granted that the earth's in existence. It obviously was brought into existence in Genesis 1.1, but from that point on, it's assumed to be there. All the days with the sun and the moon and the light and the stars and vegetation and animals and fish and whatever, we're going to get into that later, comes later. The earth is not expressly mentioned, except as it's included in the first verse, which is provocative itself. Now, we've mentioned last time that the earth, the word and, and the earth was without form and void, as it shows in your King James, is actually handled, they're just volumes of Hebrew grammarians arguing about subtleties of that structure. Those that view the gap theories being plausible will attempt to sell you the idea, and they can do it with a lot of scholarship behind them, that the while consecutive, which is the translated and here, should be translated, but, and the earth became Tohu Fubohu or ruined and uninhabited. I've described the extreme position. Let me back into this again. Let's take the last part of the sentence. The earth was without form and void, without form and void in the Hebrew is Tohu Fubohu, which is two words that are used elsewhere in the old Testament. Tohu implies being waste or desolate. And here it says without form, the word Fubohu means uninhabited. It's, it's, it's desolate. One is waste and one is desolate, excuse me. Now, the point is, is that you can go through, and I'll spare you a lot of that, of going through item by item by item to show you places where each of these are used. But the net of it is, is there are no passages where these words don't suggest ruin caused by the outpouring of God's wrath. If I took you through the other occurrences of these words in the Old Testament, you'll find that in general, the suggestion in the context is that there is, it's not just that they're empty or vacuous, but they were made empty. They were made uninhabited. Those of you that want to look these up, I'll give you a couple examples, and we won't take the time tonight, but you can jot them down and dig into them at your leisure. Isaiah 34, 11 deals with the fall of Idumea, and it speaks of confusion, and it speaks of the stone of emptiness. It means a plummet, like a, you know, to make complete, in a sense, of emptiness. But the concept of emptiness is as judgment of Idumea. In Jeremiah 4, verses 23 through 27, we might look at that one because it has, it'll give you the style of some of the things you see in the Old Testament. Jeremiah chapter 4, this deals with the desolation of Judah and Jerusalem. Jeremiah, go to Isaiah, turn right. Verse 23, in fact, we should, yeah, 23, and I beheld the earth. Bear in mind, Jeremiah is speaking prophetically in a vision, in a poetical sense, prophesying destruction, but notice what he says. I beheld the earth, and lo, it was without form and void, and the heavens, and they had no light. And I beheld the mountains, and lo, they trembled, and all the hills moved lightly. And I beheld, and lo, there was no man, and all the birds of the heavens were fled. And I beheld, and lo, the fruitful place was a wilderness, and all its cities were broken down, the presence of the Lord, by his fierce anger. For thus hath the Lord said, The whole land shall be desolate, yet will I not make a full land. And for this shall all the earth mourn, and the heavens above be black, because I have spoken it, I have purposed it, I will not repent, neither will I turn back from it. And on goes Jeremiah in this prophecy. But notice those terms. The terms are used in the context of judgment. And this has caused scholars some intrigue as to just what the sense of Tohu Vobohu really means in a communication sense. Now, one other thing, and the pivotal passage for your notes is Isaiah 45, 18, which we looked at last time, but let's look while we're on our way back to Genesis. Let's stop off at chapter 45 of Isaiah and just refresh ourselves on verse 18. Chapter 45 is a letter written to Cyrus 150 years before he was born, by which the Lord calls him by name and in effect causes the Israel nation to be released from bondage. And the Lord opens the letter. It actually starts a few verses earlier in chapter 44. And it says to Cyrus, even though you don't know me, and I've surnamed you, you will know that I am the Lord and so forth, describes how he was able to conquer Babylon. And this, in fact, was presented to Cyrus right after the Babylonian fall. And by a old man that was a Hebrew scholar at the court of Babylon by the name of Daniel, dusted off a scroll of the book of Isaiah and read him the letter. It freaked him out. He let them loose, let them go. They were slaves. And this letter is a very interesting letter where the Lord addresses Cyrus, but the Lord goes on to describe himself and his passage. We get down to verse 18. It's an interesting letter. It's too bad it would be distracting to read the whole letter at this point, but I commend it to you. It's a fascinating episode and it's covered in the Isaiah tapes or the Daniel tapes. I think we explore the whole episode, but in any case, there is a tape on the whole issue if you're interested. Isaiah 45, 18, for thus saith the Lord who created the heavens, God himself who formed the earth and made it. He hath established it. Notice what it says. He created it not in vain. Same word as Genesis 1, 2. He formed it to be inhabited. And scholars point out that the grammar here contradicts Genesis 1, 2 or appears to. They say the opposite thing. Genesis 1, 2 says, but the earth became without form and void. Isaiah 45, 18 records the Lord saying, I didn't originally create it in vain or void. I created it to be inhabited. The words in Genesis 1, 2 say that it is, you know, without form and uninhabited, uninhabitable. Now, to give you some feeling for how some of the translations treat this, the Septuagint version evolved by now, those of you serious scholars know that 270 years before Christ was born, 70 scholars gathered in Alexandria and translated the Hebrew scriptures into Greek because most Hebrews spoke Greek under Alexander the Great in the world empire. The only people that spoke Hebrew were rabbinical scholars. The relationship of Hebrew to the populace that it was intended to serve was analogous to Latin in the Roman church, Catholic church, where, you know, you, unless you spoke Latin for many years, you couldn't relate to what was happening. They finally changed that. But what I'm saying is it was a scholar's, Hebrew was a scholar's language, even in three centuries before Christ, when he left the Babylonian captivity, he spoke Aramaic, Chaldean. But the point is to remedy that and all the Hebrew citizens around the world spoke Greek. They wanted a translation of the Old Testament into Greek. They did it. It's called the Septuagint version, started 285 BC, completed about 270 BC. And so, and we have, we have essentially that draft and it translates Genesis 1 to, but the earth became. Now, the Aramaic, oh, and also the Vulgate, the Latin Vulgate treats it the same way. The Aramaic Bible treats Genesis 1 to, it says, but the earth was ruined and uninhabitable. And the structure implies a desolation succeeding a previous life. Now, this leads to another word, and then we'll get out of the grammar thing and look at it, try to back off and look at it broadly. The earth became, it says was without form and void. The word was frequently that same construction is an active verb, like to be, to become. Example of that is in Genesis 19.26, speaking of Lot's wife, she became a pillar of salt. The word became is the same construction as here in the Hebrew. And so, there are many good scholars, it's not free of controversy, but there are many major authorities that believe that that is translatable properly, but the earth became without form and void or ruined and desolate, if you will. Now, that leads us to a whole nother scene, because if indeed God did not create it originally that way, and yet the narrative in Genesis picks it up in that condition, that suggests a judgment. That suggests a judgment. And it says, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. Let me just pick that up. You can make a big case that darkness represents sin and judgment. And I could give you a lot of verses in which darkness and that, it's used spiritually. Darkness is upon the face of the deep. The word deep there is the same word that's translated in the Septuagint, the Abuso. So, there may be something far more sinister in view here than we normally feel as we go through this passage. Now, if there was a judgment of some kind, judgment in our concept, from what we understand from the rest of Scripture, follows on the heels of what? Sin. Adam hadn't been created yet. Whose sin are we talking about? Lucifer or Satan's. Now, we have much in the Scripture dealing with the origin and career of Satan as we know him. And there are many scholars, Nonal Gray Barnhouse and others, if you're interested in this thing, he's written a book called The Invisible War. Relatively sophisticated book, but interesting for a biblically fundamental reader, called The Invisible War, which he deals with the whole supernatural conflict that we're part of, and he does a marvelous job at dealing with the so-called gap theory idea. And it's my personal view that if it fits, it seems to fit that all right, just don't fall into the fossil trap, if you will. I'll come back to that issue. At this point, this is about what we covered last time, I think, in broad terms. The whole idea that this interval that is implied here, or suggested here, is the cause for a ruin of a previous construction. And what we really have recorded here is, at least in some sense, a reconstruction. Now, let's go ahead and take a look at a few things. I think it would be interesting to do. Those of us that were in the Isaiah study together, may recall Isaiah 14. There's two chapters in the scripture that are fundamental to your understanding of Satan or Lucifer, what have you. Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28. They're easy to remember because they're multiples of each other. Isaiah 14 describes Satan's sin, starting at verse 12. From 12 to 17, a very famous passage, Isaiah records how, starting at verse 12, how art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of mourning? How art thou cut down to the ground, who didst weaken the nations? Actually, prostrate the nations, is what the term really means. For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God, I will also sit upon the mount of the congregation in the size of the north, I will ascend above the heights of the clouds, I will be like the most high, the five I wills of Satan. How did Satan fall? How did Lucifer fall? Through pride. Why does the Lord hate pride? All the way through the scripture, that's a big deal. Because that's the way the trouble started. And Timothy's admonished not to let a novice rise too quickly, lest he fall through pride, through Satan's snare. Okay, verse 15. Yet thou shalt be brought down to Sheol, to the sides of the pit, and they that see thee shall narrowly look upon thee and consider thee, saying, Is this the man who made the earth to tremble, who did shake the kingdoms? Who made the world like a wilderness, and destroyed its cities, and opened not the house of his prisoners? That's a very cryptic passage, and it's not my intent to go into this, you can get that on the Isaiah tape, but the interesting thing here is that Isaiah is actually addressing the prince and the king of Babylon. And yet at this point in his passage, he goes far beyond the local earthly reference, and that's how we get an insight that he's addressing the power behind the king of Babylon, in this case Lucifer. Ezekiel does the same thing. Let's turn to Ezekiel 28, and this passage will serve our purposes more specifically in our interest tonight. Ezekiel 28. Now Ezekiel is actually addressing a prophecy to the prince of Tyrus, or Tyre, and it's not my intent to go through that whole history, except to point out there was a literal king of Tyre. He lived on sort of an island that Alexander subsequently made a peninsula, and captured it. And the whole story, if you want a fascinating story, is to read the story of Tyre. Nebuchadnezzar, I think 15 years later, laid siege and gave up, and Alexander the Great, in a matter of months, conquered the place, and made his name doing it. And the whole invulnerability of Tyre, the prophecies against it, and how it was to be, it was all laid out in advance, and a whole story in its own right. Ezekiel deals with that. He deals with the prince of Tyre. Josephus identifies him as Idiobolis, and you can get into that whole scene historically, it's not my intent here. In the passage, prince of Tyrus is mentioned that he will be slain, in fact literally thrust through, and he was. But also in the passage, Ezekiel does a strange thing linguistically. It's as if he shifts gears. He talks about the prince of Tyre, and then he talks suddenly about the king of Tyre. And the king of Tyre isn't going to be thrust through, he's going to be devoured by fire. And as you read the passage, you get very puzzled, because you begin to realize that there's two different people that Ezekiel's talking about. One's the prince of Tyre, one's the king of Tyre. The prince of Tyre is a literal, at that time, live, active guy that historically was in power, and conquered, and fulfilled the prophecy literally. But Ezekiel's burden goes, sees behind him, the power that's behind the prince of Tyre, and he decalls him the king of Tyre. But as we read the passage, we get a very spooky feeling, because far more is in view than just some prominent leader, in the earthly sense. And let's pick this up about, say, verse 11. Moreover, the word of the Lord came unto me saying, Ezekiel speaking. In other words, he's already sort of put a subhead or a paragraph note, moreover, he's going to go on now. Son of man, now that's an expression Ezekiel uses of himself. Son of man, take up, or I should say the Lord uses of Ezekiel, but you'll see all through Ezekiel, Ezekiel refers to himself that way, and the Lord speaks of him as son of man. Take up a lamentation upon the king of Tyre, and say unto him, now if you're reading this superficially, it sounds like a repeat of some earlier stuff, except you've got to be prepared for that switch. Thus saith the Lord God, notice what he says, thou sealest up the sum, full of wisdom and perfect in beauty. That's a very strong statement. Thou sealest up the sum, you're the ultimate, you're the peak of wisdom and beauty. That's a strange thing to say to the prince of Tyre, some guy you're going to grind to dust, okay. Then the next sentence throws you completely, thou hast been in Eden, the garden of God. Now isn't that interesting? I don't know a lot about Idio Ballas there, the guy that ran Tyre, but I have a strong suspicion that he didn't know where Eden was, let alone having been there. But the guy that's being addressed here was in Eden, the garden of God. Every precious stone was thy covering, the sardius, the topaz, the diamond, the barrel, the onyx, the jasper, the sapphire, the emerald, the carbuncle, the gold, the workmanship of thy timbrels and of thy flutes was prepared in thee in the day that thou wast created. So this is not a God, this is not some eternal being, this is someone who is created, but not mortal. And he was in Eden. Now I don't know about you, but as I recall there's about three people in Eden, and only two of them survived, I mean two of them clearly didn't survive for a long time chronologically speaking, to show up when the Tyre fell. There's a third though that we see a glimpse of, but when we see that third person, Lucifer, Satan, call him what you will, is he clothed in light? That's what he's saying, that's the analogy of these precious stones. No, he is already in the form of a serpent, a deceiver and what have you, and his whole role is to mess up things a bit. So we have a glimpse here in the text of Satan in Eden, but it isn't the Eden you and I know. You and I know the Eden, it's trees and fig leaves and what have you. That's not what's described here. We all are victims of our own mental models, but I'm very intrigued with the artistic creativity that was in the prelude part of the Superman entertainment piece, where they have Superman's parents in this crystalline, peculiar kind of existence. And it was a different approach to try to structure that piece of fiction. But it was interesting because how narrow we tend to model things. And I would suggest to you, if I was doing a movie version of the book of Genesis and trying to deal with Adam before the fall or even this before the trees and stuff in Eden or what have you, this whole business of the precious stones as a semantical way to communicate multi-colored light. And we see this two other places at least. We see this emblazoned Levitically where? On the breastplate of the high priest. The 12 stones. And you're right, some of you mentioned that you also see it in Revelation at the end in the New Jerusalem. And as we look at the book of Acts and we talk about the second coming of Christ as the time of restitution of all things, and as we understand the restitution of all things as they're described in the book of Revelation, it may give us a glimpse of those things which are being restituted. That is, God's creation before it was damaged. And the whole program is one of repairing, if you will, or redeeming it from the effects of sin. Now, interestingly enough, when Adam sinned, we had a curse from which death came. We don't have that theologically, I don't believe, tied to others that sinned. And we know who else sinned besides Satan? Angels. It might be kind of fun to take a look at 2 Peter 2.4. 2 Peter 2.4. Where Peter, in the back of his hand, mentions, for if God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell and delivered them into the chains of darkness to be reserved unto judgment, and then goes on to make some other arguments about Noah and so forth. He mentions angels that sinned. Now, when did the angels sin? When they fell with Lucifer. When did that happen? We're not sure. There are some that feel that happened prior to Genesis 1, verse 2. Okay? And this is full of controversy, so I'm not suggesting you buy this. I'm just showing you where some of these ideas come from. This is going to get more complicated, because there are also many that argue that demons and fallen angels are not the same thing. But before we get into that one, just turn to Jude. The book of Jude. Verse 6. Well, verse 5, Jude says, I will therefore put you in remembrance, though ye once knew this, that the Lord, having saved the people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed them that believed not. He's going on to make a point, and I won't get into that. But notice where he mentions verse 6. And the angels who kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation, he hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of that great day. Now, I happen to believe, personally, that these show up in Revelation chapter 9, and that's a whole other scene. I also happen to believe that if these two verses have relevance to what we're dealing with, they have relevance to Genesis 6, not necessarily what we're dealing with here. That leads to another idea. First of all, let's finish with Ezekiel 28. The king of Tyre has his throne in the midst of the seas. And I might point out that the Antichrist, in Daniel chapter 11, has his palace between the Dead Sea and the Mediterranean Sea. And some people see that as together. We point out that he was in Eden and so forth. Every precious stone was his covering. Oh, wait. In Ezekiel 28, verse 14. I stopped one verse too soon. There's a very, very key verse in verse 14. Ezekiel 28, 14. The Lord continuing about this person that he calls, in this passage, the king of Tyre. Thou art the anointed cherub that covereth, and I have set thee so. Thou wast upon the holy mountain of God. Thou hast walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire. Thou wast perfect in thy ways from the day that thou wast created till, and that's a heavy, painful word, till, iniquity was found in thee. And it goes on. Later on, in verse 16. I will cast thee as profane out of the mountain of God. I will destroy thee, O covering cherub, from the midst of the stones of fire. And thy heart was lifted up because of thy beauty. Thou hast corrupted thy wisdom by reason of thy brightness. I will cast thee to the ground. I will lay thee before kings that they may behold thee. And thou hast defiled thy sanctuaries. Now you can dissect this passage and come to the conclusion that at one time, this king of Tyre was a prophet, priest, and king. But he didn't cut it. Therefore I will bring forth a fire from the midst of thee, that it shall devour thee, and I will bring thee to ashes upon the earth in the sight of them that shall behold thee. All they that know thee among the people shall be appalled at thee. Thou shalt be a terror, and never shalt thou be any more. And on he goes. Now, and if you're interested in the stones of fire thing, you can look at Exodus 24, and the Revelation tapes deal with some of those issues, but we're not sure what all that means. Now he is an anointed cherub that covereth. He was a covering cherub. What do cherubs do? They hover over the throne of God. Yes, they lead the universe in worship. Holy, holy, holy. From the throne of God, they apparently have some role relative to his throne and his deity, and they lead, from our insight, in Ezekiel 10, Isaiah 6, and Revelation 4 and 5, we get the inference that the four cherubim, the four living ones, lead the universe in worship. Apparently at one time, Satan was not just an angel, but the covering cherub. The anointed cherub. What does that mean? Top guy. Top guy. You can build a case that that means he's top guy, and it is believed by many scholars that he at one time was responsible to lead the worship of the universe. He was, you know, in charge, as high as one could go, as a created being, the top of the creation. Not equivalent to Christ, not pre-existent, none of those things, but a created being, but at the top of the heap. Now there's a couple of other things one can build from some of these models. They try to point out that there apparently is a mountain of God. There's a general district called Eden, and a subset of that that's the garden of God. In fact, they usually show that Eden is a general district, the garden of God is a part of that, and the mountain of God within that, and they sometimes try to draw a parallel between that and the tabernacle, the outer court, the holy place, and the holy of holies. But that's just, you know, people like to draw charts and do that sort of thing, and I'm guilty sometimes. Okay, now, Satan, as we know him from the New Testament, is referred to by Jesus Christ as the prince of this world, John 14, 30. Paul in 2nd Corinthians 4, 4 speaks of him as the God of this world. There the word world really means this age, this period. But Satan's claim to own the earth and all that's in them was not disputed by Jesus Christ. And that's awesome, if you really understand the significance of Luke 4, the temptations. Because of one of the three temptations, Satan shows, by some mechanism, Jesus Christ all the nations of the world, all the people's tribes, tongues, and nations, and so forth, and says, all these are mine, and I can give them to whomsoever I will, and they're all yours if you'll just worship me. And Jesus Christ doesn't challenge that claim. Don Winton came up to me and said, gee, I would like to sell you the entire Balboa Peninsula for only a hundred grand. Am I tempted? Don's a neat guy, but I probably have a doubt that he can deliver to me a good title deed to the whole Balboa or Newport Peninsula or whatever, right? In order for me to be tempted by his deal, I have to believe he can deliver. In order for that temptation of Jesus Christ to be a temptation, Satan's claim has to be valid in the mind of Christ. Or there's no temptation. It's meaningless. It's a fraud. Christ didn't challenge the deal. He declined it. Think about that. Where that puts the God of this age, the God of this world. Though most of you in this room, I think, are sophisticated enough in your theology, that's not new news to you. You can also note with some merit the deference of Michael the archangel to Satan in Jude 9, because there's apparently some kind of dispute between Michael and Satan over the body of Moses. And Michael doesn't hit him head on. He treats him as a dignitary and has the Lord rebuke and step in the way. And the point Jude's making, by the way, is not to speak evil of dignitaries. And the dignitary he's suggesting you don't speak evil of is Satan himself. He uses that as an example. Even Michael didn't, you know, make fun of a dignitary. And I have to, you know, as you can probably guess, I get very uncomfortable with some of the songs I hear sung around some of the campfires and things. Because in a Christian group, we sometimes get a little flippant as to how we deal with some of these issues. But if Jude is on target with his admonition, we should be very cautious with those things. In any case, Paul in Ephesians 2, 2 speaks of him as the prince of the power of the air. And what do we mean by the air? That's probably a bigger idea than you and I think of. And we'll get some insight as we start unfolding into the creation as to what the air may mean. But it's interesting in the book of Revelation that that's the climactic place, the final place that the bowls are poured out. They're poured out on Satan's throne and they climactically wipe him out. But it's poured upon the air and what that really means. This leads to a whole hierarchy. It'd be tempting to do a slide on our structure. We know where there are thrones, dominions, principalities, powers, archangels, and angels. And that's a hierarchy. There are thrones over dominions, which are over principalities, that are over powers, that are over archangels, that are over angels. Now the first four come from Colossians 1, 6 and the last four comes from Ephesians 6, 12. And we know that the destiny of the angels from Matthew 25, 41 was set up before the foundations of the earth were laid. Remember that, well you can track that down. Thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers. Principalities, powers, archangels, and angels. We only, archangels plural is probably a bad term to use because we only know of one, Michael. Whether there's more or not, we don't know. In the interest of time, we won't go through Psalm 82, but as side homework, first eight verses of Psalm 82, you might look at at your leisure, which describe, it's one of those places where we have assembly of the angels. In Job, and in Psalm 82 and other places, we'll find that the Lord's throne seems to be a place where there's an assembly. And among the assemblies of the angels, Satan can show up. He's free to come and go. And he's up there in the book of Job, accusing Job. And it's sort of a strange idea to think that, hey he can come and he has access to God's throne. We sort of, we're victims of Dante and Milton and some of the classical English writers who have given us this idea that he somehow presides over hell. That's an English literature idea. It's not a script idea from the scripture. Satan has access to the throne of God for the purpose of being our malignant accuser. I might highlight Isaiah 24 21 as we find our way back to Genesis. Let's turn to Isaiah 24 21. The second coming of Jesus Christ will include a disposition of two groups of governing bodies. One is new, and one may not be. It may be a surprise to you. 21, Isaiah 24 verse 21. As shall come to pass in that day, speaking of the end times, that's clear from the rest of the passage, you can look at your leisure, that the Lord shall punish the host of the high ones that are on high, and the kings of the earth upon the earth. And the point, all I'm pointing out here is that there is a host yet to be judged that will be judged at that time. Now, if you study, in terms of background reading, those of you that want to cram for the final, you can look at Daniel chapter 10. And we won't take the time tonight, but in that you'll find Daniel prays for a vision, and the messenger that's dispatched to meet Daniel, Daniel fasts for 21 days. At the end of the 21 days, the messenger shows up and says, by the way, 21 days ago I was sent out to meet you, but I was held up by the prince of Persia, and I had to get Michael to help me or I wouldn't even be here. What it doesn't say, but you sort of suggest, is that if Daniel was fasting for 21 days, what would have happened if he decided to cut off his fast on the 20th day? I mean, you sort of wonder, is there a link between Daniel's commitment to the fast, in other words the spiritual warfare, and having this messenger make it through? You know, we often think that, gee, if we pray or fast or do something, the Lord will just somehow have it all happen. And what the scripture shows us is that, gee, there's a level of effort involved, spiritually. Even Jesus Christ admitted to the disciples on what problem they had, that this particular problem admittedly doesn't happen that easy, it only goes out with much prayer and fasting. In other words, there's a level of effort implied in many of the biblical views. Now here's a case where this guy was hindered by a hostile alien force, which he refers to as the prince of Persia. Michael helps him, he gets through, gives Daniel chapters 10, 11, and 12 as a vision, and he says, hey, I've got to go now, because the prince of Persia has got to be dealt with. The Persian empire was, I mean, excuse me, the prince of Greece was yet to come. And that was a long time later, a hundred years, whatever it was, I've forgotten the time. But what Daniel 10 gives us a glimpse into the world empires that we see visibly as being in the background, behind these, seeing spiritual forces that are involved. And if you spend any time in Washington, D.C. with any spiritual insight at all, you can come away with some very uncomfortable feelings. I'm not saying that flippantly or what have you, I'm saying it very, very seriously. And if you are close to any of the congressmen or senators that are born-again, spirit-filled believers, and there are a few, they will tell you what a heavy, oppressive trip that whole scene is. We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, powers, so forth. Right? The other thing is Revelation 12, which describes the career of Satan and his specific concern about Israel. We also know that the whole plan of God involved taking Israel early out of Satan's jurisdiction. That's Michael's burden to enforce. We get glimpses of some of this in 1 Chronicles 21 and 2 Kings 6, with the spiritual warfare going on behind the scenes. But it will derail us, I think, a little too extensively if we get into too much of that tonight. The term devil actually means slanderer or malignant accuser. It never occurs in the Scripture in the plural. It always refers to the specific guy who's the leader. There's an unfortunate translation in some of the English translations of the word demon, as devil, it's plural. And that's confusing, because a demon is quite something else. It's an evil and unclean spirit. Those of you that are interested in chasing this down, Matthew 8, 16, Luke 10, 17, and 20, Matthew 17, 18, in contrast to Mark 9, 25, all these passages show you that demons are evil spirits. Luke 8, verses 2 and 3. For Matthew 8, 31, and other passages, we see them clearly portrayed as being disembodied, seeking embodiment. We don't have a lot of insight. You can make a whole study in demonology, that's not my intent tonight. But there are quite a surprising number of things you can learn from the Scripture about demons. They know their end judgment. They recognize the deity of Jesus Christ before his ministry really was underway. They recognized who he was. What have you to do with us before our time, was one of the remarks they make. They had knowledge that was beyond the audience that was there. So it wasn't just an idiomatic use of things we think are psychological today. They're spiritual, sentient, hostile beings under the rule of a ruler. But there's some strange, bizarre things, because when they were cast out, they pleaded with the Lord to be allowed to enter into a herd of swine. And the Lord allows that. It raises a question, what is a herd of swine doing in kosher country? And that's a whole other scene that is amply treated in Chuck's tapes and what have you. I don't have to get into that. The point is, though, recognize that this is a conscious entity you're dealing with that has some desire for embodiment. Nowhere in the Scripture do you find angels seeking embodiment. When the angels show up with Abraham at the Oaks of Mamre, they look like three men. When the angel comes into Mary, a man shows up. And there's something about them, though, that typically causes, like Abraham, to recognize where they were from. He knew who he was dealing with. Two angels and the Lord, apparently. And Mary was sort of frightened, but she was responsive. And you can go through the Scripture where you see the appearance of angels. And there, they apparently have the ability to take form on their own. Quite a different thing than the demons. Now, or at least I should say, that's a view. Where am I heading? Well, the fallen angels we'll deal with in more detail when we get to Genesis 6. Because I think the Scripture gives us some interesting clues as to what the flood of Noah was really all about. And those same clues are embodied in what I'll call Gentile mythology. Some very bizarre behavior that is still recorded in the memory of mankind, apart from the Scripture. But the Scripture itself gives us some insight, and it's very important to us, not just to understand Genesis 6, but to understand the full import of what Jesus said when he says, As the days of Noah were, so shall the coming of the Son of Man be. So we'll get into that in Genesis 6. Now, if indeed there was some creation that was subject to Satan's rule that fell with him, and is judged, but not with death, with some other interim judgment pending the final, then that gives rise to all kinds of bizarre theories of a pre-Adamite civilization. Not necessarily man. And some people see the demons as those residents under the rule of Satan, but judged pending some final judgment. Not death yet. Death is part of the Adamic curse. We'll come to that. And so there are those that see not only Satan and his hosts fallen, but make a differentiation between demons and angels. Now we're on way out, as you realize, we're way out in left field, and all this is quite speculative. And if you get, there are a lot of passages, and I'm not taking the time to go through them all, because that's not our purpose tonight, but there's enough of them that raise some interesting speculations, but part of that issue is, where do they occur chronologically? They occur after Genesis 1.1, because they are created things. And yet they occur prior to, for sure, the third day, but even more than likely, before Genesis 1, verse 2. Now, one other thing, and then we'll go back and look at it, in terms of the deep darkness that was upon the face. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, but the earth became ruined and uninhabitable. And darkness was upon the face of the deep. No common as to why, but implying an active result from some prior circumstances, and then goes on to focus our attention in more constructive directions. But that could involve eons, essentially timeless eternity, in which darkness was upon the face of the deep, and Satan, with all his power and wisdom and might, could do nothing to repair it. It was black, dark, useless, empty, ruined. Nothing happened, hopelessness, until the Spirit of God moved, brooded, fluttered over the face of the waters. And that starts a whole new scene. I can't resist talking about the deep, from which we get the concept of the Abuso. If you're interested in this, I commend you the Revelation studies. As I recall from memory, I think we deal with this in roughly, when we get to Revelation 9. I forget exactly where it comes up, but it's certainly in the studies. You can make a whole interesting study, scripturally, about the sea. You look at the sea metaphorically, and that's fine, but there may be something deeper involved. No pun intended. In Revelation chapter 20, it's the sea that first gives up its dead. Now, that might mean, you know, most of us think, well, okay, there's burials at sea. But in the context of the passage, you get the feeling something else is in view. The sea gave up its dead. What dead is it talking about? The Lord, when he had the storm, and the disciples thought they were going to die. Now, they weren't naive like you and I might be. They were fishermen. They made their living on that very lake. But they recognized the storm was not the kind they were used to. They thought they were going to perish. And they woke him up. He was sleeping. And he calms the storm. What does the scripture say? How did he calm the storm? He rebuked the sea. Literary phrase? Possibly. Or is there something else underneath the surface there? The sea is a type of the Gentiles. Daniel, when he sees his night visions, they rise up out of the sea. Consistently through the scripture by Jeremiah, Isaiah, what have you, the wicked are like the troubled sea which cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt. Poetically, the idiom may be just used metaphorically, but it's consistent through the scripture. But the bizarre thing that gives food to the people who like to make a big thing of this is that in Revelation, one of the glorious things that's described in the New Deal is there is no more sea. No more curse, no more death, no more sea. What secret, what spiritual secret does the sea hide? You can find books if you're really interested in some wild reading. I'm thoroughly unreliable of course, but still fun reading. There are books written by scripturally interested people that try to make a big sinister thing of the Bermuda Triangle and the sea and all this stuff. And I won't get a whole Bermuda Triangle trip, that's an empty trip. But there is a lot, there are books around that will feed your fascination about the idiomatic use of the sea. And you can spring from that, go to the Revelation tape as a starter maybe and take it from there. As you can probably gather from my view, I think the gap theory is a valid idea. It doesn't mean it's real, I just think it's an interesting idea and you can find a lot of scripture and it does sort of fit. The only thing you can't use the gap theory for, if you're going to be intellectually honest, is it has nothing to do with geological ages. And I could take you through a whole scene there, but one simple fact will put it in focus for you. The geological ages are essentially hanging on the question of fossil records. Fossils are animals that were alive once and dead now. So they have to occur after the curse of Adam. Because death came by one man and death by sin. And so the fossils have to occur after the creation of Adam. And whatever problems we might feel we have with fossils, we deal with that between Adam and the Genesis flood. And we will. But it doesn't help, many people, many Christians who have come across this gap theory idea get really excited and they go through all the scripture and they build their case as if that's some kind of an attack or defense or what have you against evolution and that whole scene. Doesn't help you at all. It's romantically interesting because it's got some spooky things there and it's kind of fun to get into. But it won't help you at all apologetically dealing with evolution. Okay. Let's jump into another issue. Well, let's see. I think we got down to verse 2. The Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. The word moved there occurs three times in scripture. Essentially means to flutter or some people in Deuteronomy 32 I believe it is. It's translated like brooded, like a hen over her chicks or I think an eagle over its nest or whatever. Some cosmologists are fascinated that it's the word you would use if you wanted to say to set in vibration. And if you're a molecular cosmologist, it's a very fascinating place to put that. I'm going to leave that aside because we'll come back to cosmology a little later. We'll have a better occasion to come back and describe a little bit about what some of the current views are of how the solar system was brought into existence. The most recent views of cosmology argue for a recent sun and argue that the planets did not necessarily come from the sun. There's a conservation of angular momentum problem and some other things. There is a theory in cosmology, a relatively modern one, a new one, called the theory of the dark sun. It's probably as wrong as some of the others because we're always learning and these views are just opinions that attempt to synthesize those observations such as we know it. So not to be dismissed, but they're not to be embraced either. They're intellectual exercises. And I think there's a danger as Christians to on the one hand to be apologetic and not really understand that the scripture will stand the test of any of man's knowledge for sure. But also there's danger going the other way and just closing your eyes and ears to observations. Don't necessarily buy the conclusions that people may make from those observations. At the same time it's an area that we should keep an open mind to in terms of just perspective. But it's interesting that as these things evolve, as science gets smarter, it's giving us greater and greater insight as to what Genesis really may be saying to us. Anyway, the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. I want to set aside right now what the word waters might mean. We'll come back to that. And God said, let there be light and there was light. And here's the first direct quote of God in the scripture. Let light be. And that's a whole thing. Before we get into this, we have to hit head on another problem. Days. Yom. The Hebrew word is the word Yom. Did God really create the earth in six days? Oh no. Each day is for a geological age. And if you take the six days and lay them out to geological ages, they sort of fit. And that's probably what he meant. Or God created it maybe over millions of years, but he revealed how he created it to Adam in six days of Revelation. And there's a list of these. They all try to get around the notion that God did what he said he was going to do. That he created the earth in six days. Well, what's a day? How can you have a day, a revolution of the earth on an axis, before the sun shows up the fourth day or whatever, depending on how you see certain things. Isn't that a problem? Let's hit that head on. The first point is, before we get into that, let's point out something else. How many of you have given your loved one a watch for Christmas? Raise your hands. At some time in your life. Have you given somebody a wrist watch or a pocket watch? How many of you that gave a watch, before you had it wrapped, set it to the correct time? Okay, what? That analogy just blew out the window. What I was really trying to get at is, is that chances are, today especially with electronic watches, that before you package it or present it, you'd set it to the exact time, within two seconds a year and all that sort of stuff, and you give it complete. And if you do that, is God going to do any less? Let me put the same argument another way. If there were trees in the Garden of Eden, did they have annular rings? Was Adam created an infant, having to have a bottle? Or was Adam created as a mature man? We infer from a variety of things that Adam was created mature. Do you have a belly button? The theological treatises on that thing go back centuries. Did Adam have a navel? The issue is, if God created the universe, if we create a simulation in a laboratory, say a mathematical simulation on a computer, there are equations that describe the model as you want it to run. Once you've designed that, you've got a problem. They're known as boundary conditions. How do you start? You might build a simulation of an inventory, and if you want to manipulate that to see the effects of certain things, you can ask the what-if statements to the computer model. But there's a problem of the initial conditions. And if you've designed your model well, you can design it so it almost doesn't matter too much what initial conditions you start with, because it'll stabilize under some set of assumptions to some nominal value, you can run the model from there. But there's a whole question of initial conditions. If God created the universe, is he obviously going to build in the initial conditions? Are there going to be yolks in the eggs? Are there going to be annular rings in the trees? Are there going to be whatever? So the question is, could God have called the universe into existence in 30 seconds? Sure. The real question, if you think about it, is why did he fool around for six days? I'm not trying to be irreverent or disrespectful. My point is that God had a purpose. I don't believe it took him six days because of any limitation on the part of God. If you feel that way, your God is too small. You haven't met him. You haven't found out where he's at. He had a purpose in taking six days. His purpose, there's several of them I'm sure, but one of them was to set an example for man, to institute the Sabbath. He took his action, which took place before the ordination of uniformism, and set it up and then rested to ordain the Sabbath day. Now, let's get at this term Yom. The word Yom in the Hebrew occurs in the Old Testament 1,480 times. And it's translated into 54 different words. So the argument that Yom can mean this or can mean that is true. 1,181 times of the 1,480, it's translated day. No surprise. 67 times it's translated meaning time. Time in general is a concept. 30 times it means today. This time. Today. 18 times it means forever, in some poetical sense. 10 times it means continually, in a similar sense. 6 times it happens to mean age. 4 times it means life, in a broad sense. Twice it means perpetually. However, in the book of Genesis, it's used four ways. As a period of light and dark. It's clearly used as by Moses in his construction, which he intended it to mean a literal day. The word Yom, tied to a definite number, occurs over 100 times and always means a literal day. If you were God or Moses trying to convince you of that, you would say the evening and the morning made the first day. And another evening and morning made the second day. And another evening and morning made the third day. You would think by being that precise in your lab report, that the reader would understand, he would have no problem calibrating his instruments. But 2000 years of cynical scholarship has muddied it up a bit. If you want, now we can go on and on about day, age theories and so forth. And I could spend some time showing you some implied support for the idea that, gee, of the six days, they represent six geological ages. But in fairness, I'd have to tear it apart from you, both from concept and also from the scripture. These things are broadly held views, but are very, very difficult to support, frankly. The concept of the word day as an indefinite duration is always a figurative. In that day, speaking of the day of the Lord, in that day, that clearly is the day of redemption or something. It's a broad concept. So that's an indefinite or figurative use. The use of time itself, in the day that Jehovah made heaven and the earth, we'll discover in Genesis. Even in Genesis it's used that way. But the context is always pretty clear. And you want another example, those of you who want to be scholastic, go turn to Deuteronomy 10.10. And we have, the verse says, And I stayed in the mount according to the first time, forty days and forty nights, and the Lord hearkened unto me at that time also, and the Lord would not destroy thee. The first time, the forty days, and at that time, all are the word Yom. But in the context it's clear that the forty days are forty days. Because there's a number with it. And yet the term day can also be used idiomatically. Alright, enough of this. A couple of other things. The Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. Those of you that are interested in the Trinity should realize that John 1.3 and Colossians 1.16, when put together, imply that all three persons are present at the creation. Not just the Spirit of God, not just the Father. We tend to think it's the Father's action. John 1 points out that it was Jesus Christ. And yet here Moses highlights the fact that the Spirit of God moved upon. So we got the Trinity in view, in effect. The next verse, verse 3, is going to be some fun. I want to share some things about that. It says, Let there be light. This is the first of the Ten Commandments. In the book of Genesis there are ten commandments. In verse 3, verse 6, verse 9, verse 11, 14, 14 again, 20, 24, 26, and 30. God says, Let there be something. Those are God's Ten Commandments. The Decalogue of Genesis. Not the Decalogue of Exodus. That's the Ten Commandments you often think of. These are the Ten Commandments here. In those of you that are numerologists, you might get a kick of it. You can have just as much fun in Genesis as you did in Revelation. There are seven words in Genesis 1.1 in the Hebrew. There are 28 letters. Four times seven. Four is the number of creation, as you know, and seven is the number of completeness. There are seven stages in God's creation. The actualization of the Holy Spirit in verse 2, the calling of light in verse 3, the making of the firmament in verses 6-9, the clothing of the earth with vegetation in verse 11, arranging of the heavenly bodies in verses 14-18, the storing of the waters in verses 20-21, and the stocking of the earth in verse 24. Seven times the word good is used. You saw that it was good. Seven times. Not each day. The mystery, your homework assignment, is to find out why wasn't the second day pronounced good. All the others were. Something wrong with the second day? Seven times the word made is used. Seven times the word heaven is used. If you look at the structure of Genesis chapter 1, and I take chapter 1 to include the first three verses of chapter 2, which conclude the summary of it. Chapter 2 should start verse 4. These are the generations of. I'll come back to that when we get to chapter 2. The point is, if you study this, you discover that the language is mathematically designed. The number of the words that are used. The word God appears. Seven times five. Thirty-five times. Seven, completeness. Five is the number of grace. The structure of the Hebrew itself is mathematically precise. I defy you to write a passage like that and have it computer verifiable so that all your idioms numerically have the same meaning, independent of what words you use. I mean, the idiom you chose to use. It's true in the book of Genesis. It's true in the Bible in general. In the Greek, in the New Testament, or the Hebrew, in the Old. Very interesting discovery. It admits a design down to the nits and the nats. I have to share with you one other thing, and that's where we'll close tonight. God said, let there be light, and there was light. We understand less about light than probably any other thing in our grasp as mankind. It has a very controversial nature. If you know the history of light, you know that it has certain properties that behave like waves. It'll bend through a prism. So it has a wave phenomena associated with it. But light also consists of a number of particles. And so it has a particle, the corpuscular theory of light. And both these theories are woven together in today's quantum mechanics, in effect. But we also know that light has mass. A star will be moved in its location in the heavens due to the gravitation of the sun during a solar eclipse. You can tell this because that's one of the reasons solar eclipses are so exciting to the astronomers, because while the sun's blacked out, its mass can dislodge slightly the position of stars. The beam of light coming from a star has mass. It can be deflected by gravity. Do you know that? And yet light travels at the speed of light, which implies its mass less. Now it turns out that if you decide to render, and I didn't want to make this too technical, but you can actually take the basic attributes of God. There's sort of four conceptualized. You take the basic equations of light. They speak to the same, for example, God is infinite. Perfectly collimated light mathematically is at infinity. God is omnipotent. Light may slow down in some media, but when it leaves the media it speeds up again. That would imply you add energy, but you don't. Is it being pushed by the light from back? You get some real dilemmas as to what that's all about. Now there's also the question of being full spectrum and some other things. How many of you here have ever seen a hologram? That's terrific, because I often used to have to do this by setting up a hologram, letting people see it, and that can be dangerous because you don't want to let it enter your retina. But if I had a hologram here tonight and held it up, it would look like a piece of gray, it looks like a darkroom mistake, it's a piece of gray film. And as you look at it, it's got no, you know, under natural light. It looks like a piece of screwed up film. It's gray and you can't see anything on it, just fuzzy, you know. But if I illuminate that with a laser light, now a laser is simply well-organized light. Light that comes from the sources you're familiar with tends to be disorganized. It's not temporally coherent, that is, it doesn't stay in step with itself, and it also doesn't collimate with a lot of things. But if you take a laser, you can organize it so it's the way you want it, very well-organized. And if I had a hologram and I illuminated it with a laser and you looked at it, you would see an image. What this little gray piece of, let's say a gray window I'm holding up here, would look like a window in a three-dimensional world. If I had, say, a ruby, you know, a neon ion laser, or helium, I mean a helium neon laser, it would look reddish. If I had an argon ion, it would look greenish, but whatever color the laser happened to be. But the point is, you would see an image. The image would be three-dimensional. Let me explain what I mean by that, because believe it or not, this is coming to a spiritual thing. I have a tie on, and no comments about my choice in ties. Don says that was a gift, I presume. And if I held my Bible up so it covers the tie, and you stood there and took a photograph. Now a photograph is an image in the spatial dimension. The pieces on the photograph comply geometrically with what was there when you saw me. If you were looking through this little window at a hologram, you could move your eye over here and see around my Bible and see the tie. You follow me what I mean by a three-dimensional image? As you move your eye, you can see around things just as if they're there. If I took a group of objects and put four holograms, you could walk around this little box and you would not be able to tell that those little figurines or whatever weren't actually inside the box. You reach to the top and you find there's nothing there. It's all just an image. It's a three-dimensional image. How does this happen? Well, the way you make a hologram is you illuminate some object with a laser and you illuminate a piece of film at the same time. And the light rays that hit the piece of film directly and the light rays that are reflected off the object interfere with one another and create what you're really recording in the film is the interference of the difference between them. So if you look at the hologram very closely, you see a strange little pattern on there. But every piece of information in the image is diffused over the whole surface of the hologram. The hologram is a Fourier transform of the space domain. It's the image in the frequency domain. And I mentioned we have transfer functions in engineering. We have Fourier transforms, Laplace transforms, Lorentz transforms. There are ways of translating something from one domain to the other. We live in the space-time domain. You can translate that in the frequency domain and a hologram is an example of that. Why am I going through all this? Because God has given us an absolutely fantastic analogy that I have to share with you. If I had this picture, this little gray window, and it's illuminated with a laser and you look through it, there's an object there. Let's assume I drilled a hole or I cut away one square inch of, say, a ten by ten inch window. I cut out a little one inch square. Would you lose anything of the image? You'd have a defect right in the middle of your hologram, right? But you can look around it, right? It's just like having a window with a little spot on it. It doesn't bother your ability to look inside the room, does it? So the hologram has a very strange property. I can cut it into pieces and not lose the image. I can cut half of it away and I have not lost half the image. I've got all the image. I've just got a smaller window to look through. I lose resolution. The details are not quite as sharp as before. But if I give you a one inch square hologram or a foot square hologram, one just gives you a more sharply defined image. You follow me? Now why am I going through? The hologram is a Fourier transform of a thing. Good. I take a laser, I illuminate it and I get a hologram. And if I illuminate the hologram with a laser, I can reconstruct this three dimensional image in the first place. If I held up the hologram in natural light, it would look gray. It has no form. It has no form nor comeliness that you should desire it. But if I take the hologram and I illuminate it with the light that created it in the first place, I get a three dimensional image. And I have here a hologram. And in natural light, the natural man does not discern the things of God. He had no form nor comeliness that we should desire. But if we allow this to be illuminated by the light that created it in the first place, we have an image of whom? Jesus Christ. And Jesus Christ, that image is created on every page and every verse from Genesis 1-1 to Revelation 22 and so on. Now, if I take a hologram and I illuminate it by a laser of a different frequency, I get a false image. I get a distorted image. So if I have a false light, I get a false image. If I have the light that created it in the first place, I have a true image. And we could go on for a whole hour on the subtleties of that model. But it's absolutely fascinating. If I drill a hole in the hologram, I don't lose any of the message. Tear a page of your Bible and throw it away and have you lost any key doctrine? No. Because God has engineered his message system so that you can lose part of it and not lose the message of salvation of Jesus Christ. You'll lose some subtlety, some bit of resolution. Some things may not be as crisply in focus. But you can suffer substantial degradation and still have the essence of the gospel of Jesus Christ. How God became man and gave himself that you might live. And that he did the whole job requiring only acceptance from you. Just to accept it. You can't add anything to what he's done. The whole gospel is from cover to cover. It's a hologram, if you will, of Jesus Christ. It's also interesting that in the gospel of John, as we open the gospel of John, in the beginning was the word and so forth, nothing was made but that which he made and so forth. He immediately is introduced as the light of the world. But men love darkness rather than light because their deeds are evil. Right up front, John and his gospel equates the role of Jesus Christ with the light that is introduced early in the book of Genesis. We're going to explore, as we get a little deeper into Genesis, we're going to show that the creation in the six days models the plight of the believer. We're going to see that there's a spiritual message there quite beyond just this issue of when did the fossils show up and did the mammals come before the birds which came before the trees and all that. Let me be candid with you. You see charts in some well-meaning Bible handbooks of the various geological ages in the six days. They try to make them fit. Candidly, they don't. There are some similarities that are interesting, but there are some differences that are catastrophic. We'll get into that next time as we start to roll into the six days. Praise the Lord. Look forward to seeing you next Monday night. This concludes this study in the book of Genesis.