In this sermon, the speaker continues to discuss the evidence for the existence of God in biology. He criticizes the Darwinian theory and argues that randomness is the enemy of meaning. The speaker highlights the intricate processes in the human body, such as the conversion of food into energy and the functioning of the nervous system, as evidence of a purposeful design. He emphasizes the importance of Christians understanding the details of these processes in order to defend their faith.

Well, good evening to you all. We'll continue what we started the other two evenings I have tried to take through with you on the evidences for the logos in biology. A lot of people have come to me who are teaching and who are wanting to go into the teaching profession and ask that we develop this a bit further because, you see, behind all the Darwinian theory, which Mr. Bill Honig is trying to make a scientific fact, there's one thing that is a fact about it. That life, biology, and the cell has no meaning. Because it started in randomness, and randomness they say, and randomness is the enemy of all meaning. If anything happens by chance, I didn't do it, did I? It happens by chance, say, a lamp falls on your head, you see, while you're sitting there. Watch out, I've seen that happen while I'm speaking. I saw it going like slow motion right onto his head while I was speaking. If it does that by chance, of course, you're not responsible for it. But if I take the lamp and hit you over the head with it, I can inflict the same damage, but I'm responsible because I've done it, you see. So if it happens by chance, you take meaning out. And the whole business of the fight against Darwinian theory is that it's the fight against allowing meaning to be in biology. And all biology is full of meaning, and when it's full of meaning, I say that's the evidence for the logos, and that's what I'm going to do tonight. Now I'm going to make your mouth water a bit, you don't mind about that, do you? I suppose you've had a good meal, but never mind if you haven't, you'll be doubly happy to have one when I finish with you tonight. So the ladies had better look out. And let's have just a look then at two things about biology where you can find such loads and loads of meaning. And it's meaning of a sort that only the elite of Southern California in Calvary Chapel will be able to stand up to, because it would be rather chemical. And I won't do, I won't put the butter on too thick, but you'll need to have just a little to show that you pass the exam as the elite of Southern California. Now let's just have a look. There are two digestive systems in the body. The first is the digestive system which shares my mouth with itself. My mouth is useful to throwing out things and talking to people. My wife says I'm a talking machine. And it also shares the function of taking things in, namely beefsteaks and strawberries and cream and things like that. Now it does that, the mouth, the taking of the things in, to extract things that I need to keep me alive and to keep life more or less physically bearable. Just think of the various things that I've talked about the last time I was here. The various keys, master keys which are used by the body to open up all the molecules which you put into your mouth so that the molecules can lose the energy that they need and give it to you. You see it doesn't take very long for a couple of men, good strong men, to convert a dead cow into a living human being. They eat a pound of it or two pounds of it, and the next two days that dead cow is part of them. Now that's part of the chemical conversion of the body which will take the cow's molecules to pieces, extract the energy from them for own purposes, and then use the molecules and the bits and pieces to build up a man, you see, or woman as the case may be. These things are just simply full of meaning that is logos. And if you attribute them to randomness as Mr Darwin tried to do, you land today into utter and complete bunkum and nonsense. We can easily show that as the evening wears on. Now let's have a look. We need the, I don't need to go into this part about the opening of the molecules and all that, but I'll just mention the seven of the master keys so that you know, at least as I know them, and that you might be able to use them in choosing the diet which your wife puts in front of you tonight when you get home. Now there's the pectases, which break down the pectins, which you get in a lot of your food. There's the esterases for opening the esters. There's the lipases. Yes, all these are all most necessary things to know. If you know them, you can face people you know. But if you can't, then you better get behind the pulpit and hide down and let nobody see you, because this is where they get Christians. Christians make wide sweeping statements about this, that, and the other, and don't know the detail to teach it home. And that's what you've got to do today, because there's no mercy offered us at all, and we shouldn't have it. We should know the stuff ourselves. Now renin, of course, for caseins, as you know, and esterases for choline, esterase to break down the products of the nervous system, so that when you've thought you can rest a minute, and the nervous system will recuperate during sleep. All those things are necessary so that you can think, and so that you can sleep, and so that you can get the energy. Now let's just see a little bit further about this. Could you tell me, ladies and gentlemen, when you're in dire need of a few calories, you feel a certain feeling called hunger, don't you? Would you like to describe that in words to me, what it feels like to be hungry? Now it's very difficult, you see, because most of you people don't suffer exactly from the lack of food, do you? I mean, not as far as I can see, and just taking a look at you, and the fact that you can laugh and be happy, and all the rest of it, argues against that, because when people get really hungry, you know, they get dumbled. They can't react forward or backwards. They just simply become automata, and there's no contact with them. It's very difficult. Now I'll ask you this out. I'll ask you on that account another question. Do you know what it is? This will be easier to answer, but you mustn't laugh. This is very strictly scientific. What does it feel like after you've had a good meal? Well, when you're satiated, how does that feel? Right, you all know that, I mean, don't you? I mean, the other one is more difficult. In certain parts of Eastern Europe, you could very often find people who hadn't had a square meal for quite a long time, but here that would be rather more difficult. But the feeling that you have when you're satiated, and you've had enough, when you can say no to another half a pound of strawberries and deventer cream, I mean, when you can get to that stage, now that's the feeling of satisfaction. You are satiated. You don't want any more. Your hunger is gone, but it's been replaced by a feeling of, how shall I say, a feeling of goodwill to all men, isn't it? If you want to soft-soap somebody to a good sharp business deal, well-recognized way of doing it is to invite him to dinner and take care that he has a real good square meal and ample wine, if you believe in that. I don't myself, but they do, in general, think so. And the result is that people have goodwill to all men, then, don't they? They feel really very well, and they're at enmity with nobody, and they're not irritated, and you can't get their goat very easily. So, that is the reaction you get to a person who's satisfied. Now, keep that well in mind, because social peace is sometimes dependent upon it, especially if the person who rules over the kitchen doesn't understand these things very well. It's a very important point. The woman who rules over the kitchen is one of the most important people in the world. She's like the pastor, because she has to take care that the body gets, in about the proportion it needs, the right ingredients for peace, and quiet, and happiness, and health, and ours. In fact, now, these things being so, apply that this first digestive system which I put up there, which has one mouth, and one stomach, and an intestine, a large intestine, and a small intestine, and all the means to extract that which you put into food. Now, I've omitted one thing there, and I must put it in, because I wouldn't like to omit it for words. You can get your calories, you know. You can buy these, what do they call them, diets, don't they? Which will give you just under the minimum of what you need to keep body and soul together, and, you know, they taste sickly, and am I right? I haven't been dieting lately, don't suspect me of these things, but there's one thing about eating, which I do like to think of. Quite gratuitously, the Lord has put in, over and above the calories, which are there for metabolic, economic reasons, he has put in spices and saltiness, pepper and salt, and things like that. Now, I think that's very important, because it's entirely gratuitous, you know, to make eating pleasurable. I mean, otherwise it would be a chore, just chucking in ground rice, you see, or ground straw, which would give you a certain amount of carbohydrates and things like that, that you might be in dire need of. But to eat it, well, leave it alone. But if it tasted nice, say it tasted like strawberries from Devonshire Cream, then you might get on with it, mightn't you? Now, you think how good the Lord was to throw in spices at the right amount, not too much, not too much pepper and not too much salt, but just enough, just to make it interesting. I think that is good of him, you know, to give us the things that are necessary, the calories, but to combine them with pleasure. And I think so often that verse, that he giveth us life and enjoyment forevermore. I think it's a wonderful verse that he does that. He takes care that we have joy. And I mean, in little things like that. I know when meal has been prepared with love, you know, so do you. It tastes quite different. And the God has done that for us. Now, remember this, that when you are spouting to people, when you're talking to people, to use, I'll leave the vernacular just for now. When you are talking to people, it's very easy to be tedious. I remember we had one old gentleman in one of the Plymouth Brethren meeting in East England during the war, and it was, they were ever such nice people, but you know, they believed in healing the sick, and so do I. And they had a particular case of a man who had a particular disease, and you know this dear old brother, he stood up and he told the Lord all the medical details about this man that wanted healing, just what to do, what was his infection, you see, and what the antibiotics were that were active against that stuff, and how he could do to get his kidneys to start working again, because he was in anuria, he hadn't, wasn't producing urine. And he told the Lord in about an hour, all that the Lord would have to do just to say, do it, you see, and the man would be healed. Well, I don't know. I thought, dear, oh dear, oh dear. He was right. I mean, dear old fellow, he loved the Lord. But the great mistake was that the poor old fellow was tedious. Now, I think it's a very bad thing to be tedious. You wouldn't dare go to a monarch, you know. You see, Mrs. Thatcher, for example, Mrs. Thatcher is rather short-tempered. And if you were to stand in front of her and steal her time for half an hour by bringing out all the unnecessary details and being tedious in front of her, she's a barrister. She'd get pitted, before you could say Jack Robinson, because you don't do that, and the reason is you don't waste other people's time. The only thing that we've really got in life is time, you know. The Lord's given us 70 years to get us trained to be kings and priests with Jesus after we've got converted. 70 years to pass our regal examinations to be fit to rule and reign with Jesus forever in his kingdom. But we need training for that, and one of the things we've got to do to be trained for that is know how to use our time. And one of the things that is killing our present civilization here in the West is that we've got lazy and we don't use our time as we ought to. Now, that doesn't mean to say you've got to have fixed ideas on this, but it means that you've got to do things such that people will listen to you and you'll have an effect on them. And one of the things is this. The holy scripture says, let your conversation, which means walk, be always seasoned with thought. When you're talking to people, see that you don't make it sickly and so ineffably sweet that you spew it out of your mouth. It should be seasoned with the right sort of spice. Even the Lord takes care for ornery things in the kitchen, that that is the case, and that we have a joyful meal where we read the scriptures round the table together and eat a nicely cooked meal. One of the things that our present generation is fast forgetting, you know, fast losing. And the parable of better things. And we should get the word of God over to our kids and to those that come in and have hospitality with us by the same means, but on the higher plane, that is on the plane of being prepared for the kingdom of God. Because the meal is to prepare us for the day, to give us the calories and the nice taste, so that we're really happy that it's been prepared with so much love. And the same thing is when we give over the word of God to other people, that it's not too salty, but that it has a bit of pepper in it, if you understand me, that people know what we're talking about and that we've got our feet, both of them, on the ground. Now that's the first part of the digestive system that I wanted to mention to you. But there's one thing more. The mouth, you see, coupled to the stomach, and then the intestine, and then the duodenum, and that's the system by which we get so much pleasure. I do anyway, and it gives me the strength for the day's work. But over and above that, there's one thing there that is really very necessary for our present generation. You put the bread into your mouth, you'll notice this, pardon me, a pastor thinking about the Lord's Supper, but one does when one puts bread into one's mouth. You know, if you put the bread in your mouth and you wait until everybody else has got the bread in their mouth, if you notice very carefully, pardon my doing experiments on such things as this, but I do occasionally, it's a genetical illness with me, I'm genetically deformed. You see, if you have the bread in the side of your mouth, just waiting for the others so that you all eat it together, which I think is a nice little habit, you'll notice that it goes sweet. Try it. You put white bread on your tongue, it is told in there, the saliva, which is almost pH 7, it's just a little bit above 7, just a wee bit on the alkanine side, there's the key there, the enzyme there, to convert the starch, which is insoluble, into soluble sugar, which you then have in your taste buds and it's sweet. Now that's the first thing in the process of digestion. Keep it ever so mild, ever so mild, practically neutral in the mouth, but just enough to convert that which is insoluble into a soluble substance which you can digest. Now that's the first step that you have to take to solve all problems. Solve them, make them soluble, so that you can assimilate them yourself. Now the second thing is, you swallow the piece of bread or the meat or whatever in your mouth, and it goes down to your stomach, and there's an entirely different kettle of fish in the stomach. That isn't neutral, that's highly acid, so acid that burn a hole in your carpet, if it gets onto your carpet, really is strong stuff. And then it's churned around with strong muscles for quite a long time, until you get a chyme there, which is a sort of a, well, perhaps we'd better not go into this too much, it might have tender souls in front of us that suddenly go white, you know, and you have to go and get the ammonia bottle and help them out. Now you get it down into your stomach, now I've got something far more to say there than you can guess, just wait one minute. Don't go to sleep though, put your thoughts somewhere else. You get it into this strongest medium, and it's a whitish sort of greenish, bluish, all according to what you've eaten, soup. And it's churned and churned and churned, until there's a signal goes up to the brain, there's no more to extract. Open the valve, and the duodenum is opened, and the whole lot is shot through from a highly acid medium. Hey, shot through, you can hear it sometimes. Oh, you've got to know these things, ladies and gentlemen. It says in the holy scriptures, man know thyself, and that applies to woman as well, doesn't it? So there we are. Yeah, now wait a minute. Don't miss the point here. The body made by Jesus Christ, because I hold him to be the creator, leaves no stone unturned to avoid any waste whatsoever in what you eat. First of all, it starts with the ever so mild conditions in the mouth, and extracts the sugar it can, and that under the tongue is absorbed. And you can use that in your liver, and you can use that to develop thoughts, you see. You're converting bread into thoughts in that case. Now then it goes down to this highly acid medium with these strong enzymes there, and there it does really wring the calories out. And they're wrung out with a firmness and a thoroughness which, chemically speaking, is breathtaking. They really do get submitted to all that acid hydrolysis can do. Okay, now when that process has been finished, and the last few calories have been wrung out by chemical means to avoid waste, it's then shot through into a highly alkaline medium down beyond the duodenum into the intestine. Small intestine and the large intestine. And then you get it really alkaline, really is, you know, ph8, that sort of thing, ph9, right down. And there, other enzymes that can only work under those alkaline conditions get going, and they wring out the last few quanta of calories that are necessary to extract the food which you put into your mouth. And then what is absolutely of no further use to the body is of course excreted, and that's the end of that. Now think of this. You see there the utmost economy in the nourishing of the body with the environment and the calories which come from the environment. There's every mortal thing that you can do, and chemical thing that you can do, to wring the last bit out, to make the efficiency of the digestive system reflect the creator. Now you see, Jesus did exactly the same. When the 4,000 were fed, and the 5,000 were fed, when Jesus was on earth, he made the food for them on the spot by miracle, didn't he? And he divided the bread, and the loaves, the fish, and all the rest of it, and gave it to them. But then he said to his disciples, now go around because human beings are wasteful with my good things. And they took, what was it, 12 baskets full of bits of bread and fish which had come from this miracle of the Lord Jesus. There you see the same creator, the Lord Jesus, ordering on earth that which he's already done in the human body. But in the human body it's a super technical matter. Whereas when he was on earth, he made human beings be careful with their food. Now he did that because he said, lest any should be lost. So Jesus is economical in the methods that he uses, and he's economical in the methods he uses to bring us up. He doesn't go about it bringing us up by hit and miss method. He has an individual method of bringing up each one of us to make out of us unlikely people, kings and priests forever with him, glorious with his son. But he has to have a method to do that. And his methods are just as refined as the methods I've told you about the food, and also about the baskets which he cleared up after the feeding of the 4,000, the 5,000. Now I often think it's a very bad testimony if Christian people don't recognize that we should, in our way of life, be abstemious and economical. I don't mean mean. I don't mean that. I mean efficient. You see, Jesus isn't mean with his making of the central digestive system like that. He just shows how efficient he is. Now what is being taught to your children at school is that that sort of thinking is wrong. Because you see, this chemical program that I've been talking about there is obviously chemically very carefully thought through. It's premeditated. You have a look at the changing of the pH from the mouth to the stomach, and then the changing of the pH from the stomach to the duodenum. It's premeditated and worked out beforehand. And you know, waste is usually an example of lack of premeditation, lack of thinking about things beforehand. Now Jesus obviously did think about things very carefully beforehand. And by these 12 baskets to pick up the waste of his grand miracle, the making of the calories which the people needed because they were famished, the miracle that he did, that none was squandered. I think that's perhaps the best word. We've got to learn from these things that Jesus doesn't squander things. Now you think of the squandering which is supposed to have gone on if Mr. Darwin and Bill Honig can get their ways here in the education system of California. They say that the first cell arose by chance in a primeval soup. Now it's been calculated, and Sir Fred Hoyle did the work, that in the primeval soup if you're going to get one protein out which is fit and capable of life to work as an enzyme, if you're going to get even one out, you'd need a primeval soup bigger than the whole size of the universe such as we know it, to do it by that wasteful method. If you look in the textbooks you'll find that the way of doing things by hit and miss and then select afterwards, which is Darwinism, the thing happened by chance and then we selected out that which was useful, is enormously wasteful. Now the world, the flesh and the devil, they are all wasteful. They squander the good gifts of God. But you know as Christians everybody ought to know us, not for being mean, but for people that don't squander. Now that applies also with time. You see, sometimes I have to go to income tax offices in Switzerland, you know, they want to see how much I've earned, I haven't earned, whatever it is. And you know what they'll do, the technique, is you go into one office and they'll say, oh yes, that's not my department, that's somebody else's department. Now that's number one, A3, 567 upstairs, you see. And you go upstairs, seven stories up, you see. You go knock at the door and a girl is reading a newspaper and you say you've been sent up from below, oh that girl's made a mistake again. I'm not the person responsible, you know, I've spent a whole day running from one little girl to another, wasting other people's time all day long, like that. Now if you waste a nation's time, you think of the forms here that you have to fill in. If Uncle Sam wants to do things, he should do it the way God does it. I'm sorry, I know it says God, in God we trust and all that, I'm very glad you do. But you think, if we've got to get calories, which is a chore, God is wise enough to make it pleasurable to do so. He gives us the spices and the salt and the pepper to put with it. And if they would only remember that, the people that do things, if they're pleasurable. But if you coerce them, in the end they'll offer more and more resistance to you, more and more resistance. It'll cost you more and more to get anything out of them. So you can learn so much logos, if you look at biology carefully. Because biology is awfully careful and awfully efficient in all its ways. And it's so balanced that it wants to work. And if you run a nation like that, you get on far better than using any other method. Now listen, that's the first little system that I wanted to talk to you about, the alimentary system. And as I've got to get your attention, the alimentary system, with all the food, is a good way of doing it, so that you don't go to sleep, because it's rather hard. The second system I want to talk about is capable of far more hermeneutics than I've done on the first system, but we'll have a go. The second system in the body is the system which deals with the hunger, are you listening, the hunger we have for meaning. Now the first system deals with the hunger we have for calories and energy. The second system deals with the hunger we have for meaning. Why? Why? Why such a bad world if God is so good? Why all the pain, suffering, anguish, and anxiety, and grief all around us? And all men ask this question. I had somebody phone me up from one of the big firms here the other day, last night I believe it was, and said he'd been talking with his engineers about the Calvary tape I gave last week here. They've been listening to it. And would I please explain to him why I thought there was so much suffering in the world. Why if there's a good God who knows what suffering is, he allows us to suffer too. So I said I'd speak about it tonight. So he's going to listen to it when the tape comes out. He's on duty just now. Now listen, the system that looks after the thirst for meaning is the central nervous system such as I put up there. That is the bag of tricks, the computer up top. And its five mouths are A, the eyes, B, the ears, C, the nose, D, the mouth, and E, the general sense of touch that we have, the tactile system, the touch. The five mouths that feed our system up here so we know what we're about and what we're doing. Now if that's the case, just think of this. One of the things that gives a man most satisfaction is to find out why. If he can't find out why, he'll get frustrated and irritable with bad temper to his wife and all the rest of it. I once had the case of a little boy called Tommy. And Tommy was a nice little boy, about six years old. And he came home from school and he took his satchel off his back and threw it in the corner, of course, little boys do, and started to play. Now his mother said to him, Tommy, you know, first of all, your homework, then the playing. Well Tommy knew his mother and she said what she meant and she meant what she said. Very important thing in parents that, you know, to say what they mean and to mean what they say. And he said, yes, mum, and went over to the corner and sat himself at his little desk in the corner and was not heard of anymore. Now the others continued with their life, but the mother, as mothers do, kept an eye on the boy. She looked over there and after about a quarter of an hour, she saw what looked like rain gutters down his face. You know, he hadn't washed himself very well. And when tears fell from his eyes, it made little sort of tracks down his face on both sides. Mother caught that, so she took another look at him. And there was another one just starting up here, she'd run down the side of his face. So she said, Tommy, what's the matter? Tommy stood up and he stamped with his foot. And he threw the little arithmetic book he'd got in his hand into the corner and said, it's all nonsense. The sum won't come out. So the mother said, now come along. And she fetched a chair and sat next to him and she started to work through the little sum he'd been doing. After about a minute she said, Tommy, two plus two, how much does that make? He said, two plus two, mummy, four. She said, well, why have you written down here five? Two plus two equals five. Oh, he said, have I done that? And she showed it to him and he saw it. And you know, immediately he cheered up. Immediately he was, the tension was gone. So mother took him out and washed his face for him and said, now you sit down and work it out that way and we'll be all right, you'll have your homework done in no time. So he did. The thing to learn from that is this, if you've got problems that you can't solve, you will be irritable. It's quite natural, because we're made for meaning. If you can't solve a problem, you can't get the meaning out of it. And it makes you irritable, touching. I am when I'm like that. The thing is this, to get the answer. If you want the answer, ask your wife. She'll usually tell it to you. So anyway, they got him straight and Tommy was a new boy. He was out whistling and doing his football and all the rest of it within 10 minutes because he got it all straight. Now look, there was meaning in those sums, but he hadn't got it out. He didn't understand it. And when his mother went through it point for point, point for point, and showed him where the meaning was, that took out the whole tension in Tommy's head and he became a new person. Now you think what's being done to the school kids here? They're told that the most complicated mechanism known to man in the universe, the human egg and the human brain, they're told to believe that that most reduced entropy aggregate in the whole universe, the most refined machine of which we know, that that all arose by randomness and chance. That is that there's no meaning in it. If it arose by randomness, nobody's responsible for it. And there's no meaning in it because it arose by chance. Now don't you see what that's doing is this. I want to make this ever so clear to you. I'm made with a stomach and my stomach is very healthy, goes along nicely and doing well, thank you very much. The American food agrees with me very well. Now if I've been given a nice stomach like this and there wasn't any food to be had in the whole universe, good, what would that be a reflection on the man, on the creator who made a being with a stomach like that? There's nothing dissatisfied. You get a dissatisfied universe on that basis. To have an organ made for food and there's no food. Well, you couldn't go on like that, could you? Now what the Mr. Honig and the other people are saying in Sacramento is this, that the brain which is made for meaning, the brain which is made for meaning, hasn't any meaning to find out. There's nothing for it to suggest. Nothing. It's all by chance and the most profligate method of making things known to man, angels, or anything else that might have an influence on these things. It's incredible. Now if you do that sort of thing to children and teach them thus that two plus two equals five, as I said before, you'll never get them to do any mathematics in all their life afterwards. If you tell them that optical activity and enzymic activity, such as we've been talking about in these days, if those things have no meaning and arose by chance, then I'm a Dutchman, as the Englishman said. It is incredible. It's uneducation of the worst, the worst kind, because it's done dogmatically. This is the only fact in the universe. Ladies and gentlemen, no. The answer for that sort of thing is this is unscientific, because the job of the scientist is to try to find out the meaning. And if there's no meaning, then scrap all science. And you want science teaching, because science is to find out the meaning of things. And if there isn't any, on ideological grounds before you start, well then, why bother about it? Take them all out and dock the salaries and put it into the Federal Reserve, and that would be it. I don't see anything, I don't see any other way out of these difficulties. No machine is ever made without thought. And we're the most complex machine known to man anywhere in the universe. And therefore, the thought behind the machine must be stupendous. And to say there's none is begging the whole question. So it's a simply denial of all possibility of education. Well, now that's how the second system works. It works by feeding into the eyes, the data. By feeding into the ears, the data. Where necessary, enzymic activity, for example, feeding into the mouth. I mean, look, feeding it, touching it, all these five mouths feed into the computer, and the computer gives you a reason. Now, if there's no meaning and no reason behind it, then, well, the whole operation is simply foolish. Now, I think this, that the whole of biology shows, A, the wisdom of God. You think of the chemistry, which is able to contain a stomach, which will burn a hole in a carpet, and digest half a cow in very short time, and yet pass it on through the duodenum into alkali, which will neutralize all the acid, and get that digested, and then of those pieces, make a human being out of it. I think it's one of the most superb pieces of chemistry that you could possibly think of. Now, if Jesus did that, and he shows the fingerprints of his hand upon it, in the economy of it, it's so economic, and so efficient, and so exact in all its ways, that we can only take our hats off and say, well, I'm glad I learned a bit of chemistry, to understand how wise he was, when he was premeditating making us. He says, you know, all our members of our body, and all the days of our life, were known to him before any of them was, 139, Psalm 139, known to him beforehand, so well premeditated. The thing about the Darwinian view is this, it wasn't premeditated. There's no thought behind us. Yet the whole thing shouts at you, of thought, and the greatest premeditation of which you can conceive. So, okay, leave that there. Now, what have we got to do with regard to our own preparation for which God gave us a body? He gave us a body so that I have hands and a brain to know what I'm going to do, to know what I'm going to think. And I use the environment to produce these thoughts that then I can put into practice. So, by using the energy that I get in biology, I'm able to do the will of God. You see, somebody said once that God didn't have any hands, we were his hands. Well, it's partly true, isn't it? He gave us the hands to work with. Now, if that's the case, just think of this. Jesus became a man so that he would understand us, and he could bring many sons to glory. Now, he became sin for me and reaped the cost of that. Do you remember when Adam and Eve had taken the apple and God had shown them the gate of paradise, told them to go, he says he put an angel in front of the gate, doesn't that, with a rotating sword. And it was to keep the way of eternal life, so that they couldn't get to the tree of life and live eternally in their sinful state, which would be a catastrophe because they've been sinners in forever. So, what he did was pushed them out of paradise into the dimension of time. The first thing that Adam and Eve got to experience as they went out into the cold world round about them was the thistles and thorns. Now, thistles hurt. I don't know whether you've ever done any harvesting where there's a lot of scotch thistle about. I have as a boy, and it's very, very painful. And the other thing is the thrash corn, which has got a lot of thistles in them. You learn quite a lot about the suffering of Adam and Eve if you do that. Now, just think of this point. They got out and started to experience the results of the fall. Why did God push them out? Well, you see, if they'd stayed in paradise, where time doesn't run as it does with us, the chances of change would have been very much more difficult. Because Adam and Eve had fallen, and now they need to go into a dimension where they can change. And the dimension where you can change is time and space. But time and space is outside the area where God transcendently lives. And Adam and Eve were pushed there, and it was the sin which prevented them from having the fellowship with God, which they had learned before. Now, having been pushed out as far as that, they began to experience the suffering. But you see, the suffering was to bring them to the view that they couldn't stay where they were and get into the eternity, which is God's presence, which they'd experienced in paradise. They had to have that by changing in themselves. So the only thing to do was to send them out into a dimension where change is the rule, and that's space and time. So it was God's mercy who didn't want them ever to stay in there, live forever in their sin. He sent them out into time, but the consequence is that in time, where there's change and decay, there's all the things that we're grumbling about. That is, pain, grief, anxiety, suffering, death, all those things that we don't like. But they're a part of the possibility of decay and change. They're a symptom of the possibility of decay and change. Okay then, God sent them out there so that they should have a chance of repentance. I don't think, you know, the devil can repent. You see, he's an eternal spirit, and if he's an eternal spirit who doesn't perish like we mortals do, then of course, I don't know. I'm not a theologian in this respect. I have to have a quiet talk with your pastor one of these days about this. But I don't think he can, you know, because there's one very significant thing that God did with the devil, and will do with the devil. At the end of time, God is going to cast down the devil from the throne where he is, and accuses the brethren, and will push him into time. And then it says, the devil will know that he hath but a short time, and will rage because he knows that his time is short. That is, the devil is out of eternity into time where he could change. But he says he's bound for a thousand years. And afterwards, he went out to accuse the nations again. Now, you think what that means, theologically? Maybe this is a bit of speculation, but never mind. It's useful to think about these things. It means that if the devil is going to be cast into time, the same as Adam and Eve were cast into time after they'd sinned, that maybe, maybe he will have a chance to be treated just as like we are, to repent. Because he can never say to God, I never had a chance to repent like the others. Maybe that's what's to come. But he says at the end of time he doesn't do it. He goes out to test and tempt the nations again afterwards, as he'd done beforehand without any change. Well, now, that's all right. Leave it like that for the present. If you take the Son of God, Jesus, in the garden just before he was crucified, you find that he was in such an agony and pain that he wept sweat like drops of blood, thinking of what was going to happen to him, because he became sin for our sakes. Now, when he went back after the resurrection to Paradise, he said to the thief, didn't he, today thou wilt be with me in Paradise? When he went back to Paradise, obviously, he met the angel who was there guarding the way to the Tree of Life, because he was coming to take the Tree of Life and rise again. And I think that he was struck down by the sword which is the Word of God, that the wages of sin is death. And he died for my sin and became sin for me. And I think he was struck down by that word, so he died for me and was struck down by his own judgment. Now, he went and took the Tree of Life and rose again from the dead and is there evermore to make intercession for us. Now, the problem before God is this. Let's just have a look at this problem, see if we can solve that one and then we finish for tonight. The problem is this. Jesus, it says, are you listening? Jesus, it says, was made perfect by the things that he suffered. Do you remember? He was made perfect by the things that he suffered. Wasn't he then perfect before that? And of course he was, because it says, this is my Son in whom I have my pleasure. So he was well pleasing to God before that. But in order to bring many sons to glory, the pioneer of our faith was made perfect by suffering. Now, here we're getting to this problem of meaning why the world is such an awful place and why God allows it to be such a place like this, and it doesn't stop it. The reason is this. It's the God using the terror of the devil to achieve his own ends. You see, the cross was the most frightful miscarriage of justice that you can think of. Yet by that miscarriage of justice, and by the hatred of the high priest and all the other people who did it, God redeemed the world. Because Jesus became sin for me and redeemed me. Now that's how he did it. Now the problem for God with us is this. Jesus has become sin for us, so we're free of all condemnation. What condemnation is for those that are in Christ? There isn't any, because he's taken all the condemnation on himself. But how is he going to make us perfect such as he was made perfect? He was made perfect by the things that he suffered. You see, if he's going to have perfect fellowship with us for all eternity, you need to have things in common, don't you, to have perfect fellowship. And when Jesus looks back and sees what he went through to be made perfect, and sees that the many sons and daughters that he's bringing to glory have been made perfect by the hatred, anguish, and grievousness of the devil, when you see how God's used that to his own glory, then you can see he's preparing us by the same means as he was prepared himself to be in the glory of God. So it's to increase all this grievous pain and suffering and all the rest of it that we see. In the last analysis, it's to increase the fellowship of the sons and daughters of God with Christ himself when they go the same way. Now I know when you see people dying in hospital, vaids, when you see them dying of cancer and all the rest of it, you have to forget those things. But if they are true, and they certainly were true in the case of Christ and the case of all his servants ever since, they are true, then just think what a cheap price, a low price, I wouldn't say cheap, a low price we're paying to remain glorious with the Son of God. Now I don't know, they might, it's just possible, I have a British passport, you know, they might ask me one day to go to Buckingham Palace, have a cup of tea with the Queen. Now it's highly unlikely because I've never bothered myself about political matters at all. I've prepared myself not in the very least because I'm not the least desirous of things like that. But if I were to go, they were to ask me, I hope they won't because I hate social dudes of that sort. If I were to go, you know, generally they'd give me a week's instruction on how to do it. What you say and when you say your majesty and when you don't say your majesty and all the rest of it. Oh, it's a do, a rigmarole. Many people are afraid of it because it's such a rigmarole to do it. But do you think we've got to be made perfect because we're sons and daughters of glory? And the making perfect process is achieved by suffering, grief, anxiety, and all the things that go with it. And if that's the price we've got to pay, then I say it's a very low price to pay for eternal glory. All these things show these things, how they're worked out, how God does them. And I'm quite sure that if God can work out his chemistry as he did work it out there, and his computer science as he worked it out here, he'll work out the other things to make me fit for the glory of the sons of God where he is. Now that'll be enough for tonight on that subject. I'll continue, the Lord willing, next week, something more on the logos in biology. I want to do something about the nature, from a scientific point of view, of the human psyche, the human soul. It's rather difficult to do, but since I have the elite of Southern California with me, perhaps we'll have a try. Now out the back, you'll find two books. One of them is He Who Thinks Has to Believe, and it's a book anybody can read, and it's particularly of importance for those who realize how important it is that we use the computer that God has given us if we're going to trust and believe in him. The other one is this very, very, very vexed question which is getting out of control just now, the question of the AIDS problem. It's written for anybody. There's one chapter on medical matters which some of you might not like, but just skip over that. The other is quite plain sailing, AIDS fact without fiction. May I thank you very much for being so kind to listen to a subject like that tonight. Thank you.