In this sermon, the speaker discusses the importance of not overlooking the creation account in the Bible. He emphasizes the need to recognize the power and authority of God as the creator of the heavens and the earth. The speaker also highlights the flaws in the theory of evolution, comparing it to the story of the emperor's new clothes. He encourages believers to trust in the living Word of God and not to engage in arguments over false science.

Now as we begin, I'm going to make several recommendations. And because we of course immediately begin with the creation, and this is an area no doubt that as Christians we have taken a lot of heat that we are medieval in our mindset to believe in the creation passage in scripture that if we were educated and scientifically minded we would realize what a bunch of nonsense that is because of what a wondrous science evolution has proved itself to be. I'm being facetious by the way, I'm just saying this is this is the kind of balderdash that we face. I recommend these, just they are not complicated, just, and I appreciate that because I'm not a scientist, but you can pick these up. These are paperbacks. One is In the Beginning of the World by Henry Morris. It is a study of the first eleven chapters of Genesis, paperback, easy to read. This one is great, Scientific Analysis of Genesis by Edward F. Blick, PhD. Henry Morris of course being a scientist. The Early Earth, Wonderful by Whitcomb and Morris, just a great stuff. Easy to read, help you feel much better about simply believing what the Bible has to say, all written by scientists. As we begin, I want to say this, it's just kind of fun. I had opportunity last time Chuck Missler was here, I just like to, after the service, go out and have coffee with him, and I kind of bait him and get him started. And once you get him started, you don't have to say anything else, you just sit still and just see where you might go, what world you might visit, and it's really amazing. And of course he took off into the quantum physics world, which is a world that he is familiar with and has worked in with Edward Teller and the Joint Chiefs, and being involved with the CIA, advisor of the Fortune 500, branch chief of the guided missile department for the Air Force, head of, on the board of Pertec, Ducam, and Western Digital. I mean it just goes on and on, it's ridiculous. But as he started talking about quantum physics, he's kind of, now he's got a napkin out, and he's got a pen and he's writing down formulas and equations and math, and I'm just, I'm thinking, Lord, I couldn't even read Cliff Notes, you know, I just barely got out of high school, and here I am buddies with this guy who's a raving lunatic, he's a genius, he's just out there, and he's excited about it, you know, he's out there talking to me about Schrodinger's cat and all this, you know. He said as they're splitting the nucleus of the atom, as they're firing protons, they're starting to do some kind of interesting things, he said they were shocked to realize that as they split atomic structure itself and fired off a piece of proton that what they saw in their film was another piece shoot off in the opposite direction that looked exactly the same, and they couldn't figure it out because they only saw one, they only shot one off, and he said so then what they did is they shot it off, they ricocheted off something, and he said at the same time the one ricocheted, the other one ricocheted too off of nothing, and they started doing all these experiments realizing there's some communication and it's moving now twice the speed of light, they're moving in opposite directions, there is a in this atomic particle a sense of what is happening to the other atomic particle, and as they ricocheted in different directions the other one boom boom boom would do the exact same thing that the other one would do, and he said these kinds of things are driving quantum physicists out of their mind. One of the leading quantum physicists in the last 10 years committed suicide because he could not handle what he was discovering. Einstein steered away from quantum physics because he didn't like where it was going, and of course where it is going is that we're not real and none of us are really here. Now we laugh at that, but what it says is as we look at a solid object like this mic stand, that basically it's more space than it is actual reality, that if you would take the atomic structure and you would take the nucleus and you would blow it up to the size of a basketball that the closest electron revolving around it would be 3,000 miles away, so that really if you took the earth itself and took all of the space out between the neutrons and the electrons and just took all the space out, it would fit in a basket. It would be a little smaller than a basketball, very heavy, the same density, but so that what they're saying is what we see around us, this seems like this is really solid to me as I hit it, but the truth is if you would take all of the space out of it, you would need an electron microscope to see this object, but there's really nothing there. I'm just telling you what they're saying. I think there's a stand there, I don't know, but this physicist, this quantum physicist who committed suicide said before he committed suicide, it's almost as though everything that exists is really just a thought in the mind of God. I like that, but just because there's so much space that there's a possibility of more than one thing existing in the same place at the same time, and I say that because as we look at the creation and we begin here, science in many ways is not being honest with us about what they're discovering. Now there are great scientists, great unbelieving scientists, brilliant men with integrity that are genuinely working through things trying to discover, but the problem is to a very great degree intermingled with that is a refusal to accept what is being discovered because as evolution becomes ridiculous, and it is, and as they realize they don't have the explanations for this present system that we exist in, they deliberately, as Peter says in his epistle, they are willingly ignorant because they would rather do that than face the fact that all barometers are pointing to a creator and to a God, because if that is true, then they are accountable. They're not here by chance. There is a moral law and there is a judge and there is one to give account to. Now I enjoy being created and having a creator, sustainer, and redeemer. I like that. My dad created the universe and he's made me his son. He loves me and it gives me great confidence to realize he's watching out for me. I don't have a problem with it at all. I enjoy it and I think that you should too. As we begin to look at the book of Genesis, again, I think our perspective should be that that is communicated to us, and I'm going to hit a few things quickly. In Hebrews 11.3 it says, it's through faith that we understand the worlds were framed by the word of God so that the things that are seen are made not of things which do appear. We're going to begin in the book of Genesis chapter 1 verse 1 where it says, In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And I want you to know no matter how many trenches are dug there, no matter what war is waged over what that means and how old the earth is and how things came into existence and whether there's creation or whether there's evolution, no matter what battlefield is borne out of these early verses in Genesis, the thing that we all have to remember is that you and I are related to something that precedes Genesis 1.1. In Ephesians 1 chapter 1 verses 3 and 4, and in 1 Timothy chapter 2, chapter 1 verses 8 and 9, and in other places in the New Testament it tells us that you and I were chosen in Christ before the worlds began. So that you and I know that Genesis 1.1 is only God beginning to set a stage for the plan of redemption to roll out. It says in the beginning of what? In the beginning of God's redemptive plan, this time-space world, this reality coming into existence was related to the fact that before any of it existed, you and I were known of God, we were in His heart, and we were chosen in Christ before the worlds ever began. So whatever argument rolls out there, you can be the most naive, gullible believer in Jesus Christ, just got saved yesterday, you can't read, you can't do math, you don't know anything about science, and the wonderful thing is the most brilliant man in the world who is a non-believer has no possibility to take away the foundation of your life because it was laid before the worlds were framed. And when Jesus Christ moved into your heart, the word of God was illumined, the author actually moved in, and for you and I, what a remarkable thing it is to believe that God created the heavens and the earth, to look at that and to read it and to just go right by it to the next verse. Not to be stumbled by it, not to pull out our hair, to realize as we relate to the word of God that we have this relationship with a living word sharper than any two-edged sword that is effective and works in our lives, and how remarkable that is. As we begin to read this, again, remember that science, and we're told in 1 Timothy 6.20 not to get involved with arguing over that which is science falsely so-called. The premise of science is that you can produce something in a You can't apply that to the creation because nobody was there and nobody can produce it. It does not reproduce the creation. No scientist was there. You need to read Job chapter 38 on your own where God says, where were you when I laid the foundation of the world, when I started all of this in motion, when I set the boundaries for the roaring waves? Have you seen the gates of hell or gone to death? Are you the one who set Pleiades and its courses? Do you understand how Orion is working, how Arcturus goes through the heavens? Is this the work of your hand, God says? I was there. I didn't see you there, is what God says, when I did all of that. So as we begin here, we just read, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The word Genesis is from the Septuagint, the Greek, which means beginning. It's very interesting that the Hebrew, Bereshith, the first word, and that word means in the beginning, Bereshith. And remember, the Hebrew goes the other way, goes backwards. I'll do it this way for me, and it'll be backwards for you. One of the interesting things about the first word in the Hebrew is the first letter, the Beth, is shaped kind of like this, kind of like a funky C, but I'll show, it's kind of like a C with an open end that way, but it's the Beth. It's kind of shaped like this, it goes down, it hits a flat bar across the bottom, and the ancient rabbis would say, this is the first word, God didn't begin with Aleph, he began with the Beth, as he began his word, and that is because the open end points, you know, the Jews read from, they read the other way, we read from left to right, they read from right to left, and the idea is the open, they say, the open end on the first letter of the Bible points towards the rest of God's word, that we're not to look back to find out the mysteries of life and of man and what this is all about, because that ends closed, we're to look forward, we're to look at the word of God as it's written out, as revealed, we're not to look down, that heavy bar is there, they say, because we're not to look to hell or to demons or to spiritual forces, and we're not to look up to the sun and the moon and the star, like the idolatrous nations, we are to look, as they say, to the next word and to the next passage and to the next chapter, we're to look at God's revealed word and his revealed plan as it is written out, so we begin there in the book of Genesis, looking at this first verse, where it says, in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters, and God said, let there be light, and there was light, and God saw the light that it was good, and God divided the light from the darkness, and God called the light day, and he called the darkness night, and evening and morning were the first day, so in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, we have the word God, by the way, 4,447 times in the Bible, we have this word, in the beginning God, which is Elohim, 2,607 times, I didn't count these this afternoon, but the idea is, this book is about God, you get the idea right away, and what he's done, and it begins by saying here, in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, now, it's a very interesting structure, in the beginning Elohim, which is a plurality, El is God, Elah is duality, and Elohim, like cherubim, the cherub or the cherubim is a plurality, the interesting thing right off the bat is, that it says God, masculine plural, created masculine singular, singular, that right away grammar is struggling with theology to communicate what's going on, it says in the beginning God, and it speaks of his plurality, of course pointing at the trinity, I don't have any problem with that, next word created is a singular verb, it's a plural noun with a singular verb, which defies immediately all rules of grammar, in the beginning God, Elohim, created, single act, the heavens, plural, not heaven, heavens, plural, and the earth, it uses the word bara, there, to create, used 53 times in the bible, never of man, always of God, always related to God, and it means to create something from nothing, as we read that God created the heavens and the earth, the thing that we have to realize immediately as we look at that, is that before God created, there was nothing, there wasn't space, there wasn't outer space with no stars, there wasn't space, there wasn't time, if we can comprehend that, there wasn't even space, there was nothing, he created that out of nothing, bara, he spoke into existence, now it only uses it three times in relationship to his creation, seven times written out, but three times, and we'll get it in verse 21 and verse 27, also hopefully we won't get there tonight, but he created something from nothing, that before that act, there was nothing that existed, not even space, not even outer space without planets, stars, stars, there was nothing, we can't imagine that, and it separates then God as creator from his creation, that's what makes him holy, he is completely distinct, they're the only two things that exist, is creator and creation, everything else is under those categories, and there's only one thing under the category of creator, that's him, everything else is under the category of creation, in the beginning God created the heavens, plural, and the earth, and then it says in the earth was without form and void, and we come into a second major controversy right there, first of all, we know that God created, Jesus says it in Mark 13, 19, that all things were created by him, Jesus agrees with that, Jesus just tells us that, that God created, as we get to the second verse, we run into this gap theory, as it's called, and what they say is that the earth was without form and void, tohu wabohu, what they say is, it was wasted and uninhabited, and they take the word was, that the earth was, and they change it to became, and they say that what that says, in verse 2, is that the earth became waste and uninhabited, and what they then go, is they go and build this huge theology there, that there was, God created the heavens and the earth millions or billions of years before that, to try to explain the geologic layers and so forth, and then the earth, because of Satan's fall and previous problems before this creation with man, that Satan fell, and because of that, that God then had to blast the earth and cleanse it and destroy it, so the earth became waste and void. Now, particularly early in this century, that was embraced because, from Darwin on down, as scientists begin to talk about evolution and make Christians look stupid for believing creation, there were those then, who desired to amalgamate, and they come up with this theistic evolution, try to amalgamate the idea of creation and evolution and put them together and say, oh, the Bible agrees with that, so that we as Christians don't look stupid. And of course, theistic evolution in Europe led to fascism, to Marxism, and became the destruction of Europe and produced an amoral society. We're immoral, they're amoral. And the embracing of that idea of evolution under the work of God is very destructive. Again, look at our public schools, the way children are taught, that they're here by chance, they're here without a purpose, they're here because of matter and energy, and matter and energy combining under the right circumstances produced proteins, and that began to produce life, and we evolved from pond scum to frogs to monkeys, and here we are today, and we wonder why they act like animals. And we teach them that's where they came from. And that's madness. And particularly now, because of AIDS, and the research involved with AIDS, and looking more carefully at the helix and the DNA and the genes and the digital codes involved there, we're realizing that any kind of cross-species mutation is absurd. You can have gene frequency in breeding. If you start, you can develop an Ayrshire or a Holstein cow, but that thing never becomes a dog or a bird, it's just a cow, and you develop a gene frequency with the colors and so forth, by a dominant recessive genes. But early on, they took this verse and they said the earth became waste and void, and they tried to marry it to some verses in Isaiah 45, I think, and Jeremiah 23, 14, they tried to marry it to some verses there, saying that God would never create something waste and void, therefore it proves that what God did was He destroyed it because Satan fell. I don't believe that. And we get a little further in, my personal conviction is that Satan was in his unfallen state on the seventh day when God rested and said everything that he made was good, because as we get to the book of Revelation, Satan has to be bound for the thousand years for the earth to have a Sabbath, and for God there to rest and to say all of his creation was good before Adam was in the unfallen state, and Adam had access to more than one dimension. We'll see as we go on at that point in time, it's hard for us to understand what man really was in the original creation. I believe Satan was still in his unfallen state as described in Ezekiel 28, in Eden. Now, the word was, the earth was without form and void, it's not the earth became, that word is used 1,500 times in the Old Testament, only 25 times is it translated became, and that has to agree with the grammar. The grammatical rule here says it has to relate to the preceding clause, and that is the earth that God created from verse 1, and the idea was that that is the condition it was created in. We're looking at a seed form. The earth was still waste and uninhabited because God would continue to form it as the stage for his plan of redemption and for man, and that's clearly what's said. Now, if you want to dig into this on your own, the definitive work is a book called Unformed and Unfilled by Weston Fields. The conclusion that he comes to as a language scholar is that you can't support the gap theory as an exegesis from the Hebrew. Now, I think the gap theory is a good name for it because it's basically what it is, is a gap theory, but it simply says the earth was without form and void. We don't understand what the mass of it was at that point in time, whether it seems that it was mostly fluid at that time. God created it out of nothing. He created the heavens, plural, which would have been the vast expanse that the stars would be placed in on the fourth day, and he created the earth. He created matter, this mass, and it says at that point in time it was without form and it was void and darkness was upon the face of the deep. Now, I don't understand what all this means, by the way. Darkness was upon the face of the deep. We don't know what the deep is. We immediately assume that it's talking about the depths of the ocean. We don't have any sense at all at this time that the earth was a sphere yet. But the deep seems to indicate in Hebrew theology and language a mass that is endless in its own proportion, that there was darkness upon the face of the deep, whatever it is. I don't have an easy answer as we look at that. And then it says the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. You'll only find that word moved in Deuteronomy 32.11 and Jeremiah 23.9, and it gives us the idea of fluttering. They're speaking of an eagle fluttering over her young and fluttering over her nest. What it's telling us here is that the Spirit of God was moving upon the face of the waters. Now, I'm not sure exactly what's taking place, but I have an idea, and I'll read some out of Proverbs, what we're looking at here. It tells us in Proverbs, where I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, wherever the earth was, when there were no depths, I was brought forth. Now, this is wisdom in a personage. When there were no fountains abounding with water, before the mountains were settled, before the hills, I was brought forth. While as yet he had not made the earth, nor the fields, nor the highest part of the dust of the world, when he prepared the heavens, I was there. And when he set a compass upon the face of the depth, the deep again. That at this point in time, it seems as the Spirit of God is vibrating on this mass called the depth or the deep, that it is at that point in time that God calls the electromagnetic field into being and sets a compass or a sphere or a circle upon the depth, that he draws it into the sphere that we now see with the earth. Very interesting as we look at this. So, God, now by his Spirit, we see the Father, we see the Spirit involved here, and drawing now the waters, it seems, into a sphere, hovering on the face of the waters. And God said, let there be light, and there was light. Now take notice, there's no sun, there's no moon, there are no stars, there's just light. There's no light bulbs, there's no neon fixtures. God just calls light into being. As we get over to verse 15, we get to the light bearers. Here, it's just light in and of itself. God calls light into being. He says, let there be light, and there was light. Electromagnetic, you know, it's interesting to see the different spheres, and science can identify them, it's kind of wonderful, and energy that's produced, which are the basic building blocks of even what science agrees with. Here, God calls light into being. He just says, let there be light, and there was. Now, it's not identified for us what kind of light this is. We know that God himself, it says in the Holy City of Jerusalem, there's no sun, there is no need of candle, because God himself gives light to the city, his very presence. There is light in the sense of realization, and I don't think that's what he's speaking of here, that the light of Christ shines in our hearts. That's not physical light, and here, God said, let there be light, and it tells us there was light, and God saw the light that it was good, and God divided the light from the darkness, and God called the light day, and the darkness he called night, and evening and morning were the first day. Now, we come to another controversy here, and that is whether God created the heavens and the earth in six days, as it says. Again, those grabbing on to verse two, trying to produce a prolonged period of time, and they even move that period where the Spirit is hovering, they try to put it in a different place. The Bible seems to indicate, as far as I can understand, that it was six 24-hour days, and we get the sense here that there's no light bearer, there's just light, but if there's evening and morning, we have a sphere on an axis rotating at this point in time, and it's almost like God is making it as simple as he possibly can for us. Doesn't it sound like that? Listen to this, and God called the light day. Now, only scientists can confuse this, and God called the darkness night, and evening and morning were the first day. You feel like somebody's saying, can you say neighborhood? You know, God is trying to make this as simple as he can. He called the light day, and he called the evening night. Exodus tells us this. You don't have to turn there. It says, remember the Sabbath and keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labor and do all thy work. The seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God. In it thou shalt not do any work, speaking of the nation of Israel, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, nor thy manservant, your maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor a stranger that is within thy gates. For in six days the Lord made the heaven and the earth and the sea and all that in them is and rested on the seventh day, wherefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath and hallowed it. Same writer, Moses, inspired by the Spirit, writing Genesis 1, writing Exodus, says God created everything that exists in six days and rested the seventh day. Now, the word here, as it's used in the Bible over 700 times in the Old Testament in the plural form, days, always speaking of 24 hours, and in the singular hundreds of times, whenever it's used in relationship to a numerical value, one day, the next day, whatever, it is always a 24-hour period. There is no evidence anywhere that these are, you know, day ages or a thousand years for each day we're hearing about. It simply seems to communicate to us that in six days, and we'll go through each day of creation, that God created the heavens and the earth. Now, I don't have any problems with that at all. You see, there are those who feel they need to help God out and give him much longer periods of time, and then they produce a system where we have 40 billion years or so with the world developing, and because they know those periods of times are needed for life to be produced by chance and so forth, but there are scientists today that are coming up with data that is very interesting, very, very different from that. I had an opportunity when Wilder Smith was here to spend a day with him in the park. And we just walked, and we talked, and we looked at the creation. He told me the name of every tree and every plant in Latin. He told me all the chemical properties. He told me what they would do. A duck walked by us, and ducks walk like this, and he says, now, you see the way that duck walks? That's because the cerebellum is shaped like this, and the nerves flow. He said, you'll notice when a chicken walks, it has to walk in time with his feet. Instead of walking this way, a chicken walks this way. Here's a guy, three earned PhDs, a habillation in Europe, which meant he could be a professor at any university on the continent, awarded the Countess of Lisbon the highest academic award in Europe on the continent, and he would speak at Oxford and at Cambridge and debate the evolutionists, and so embarrassed them that death threats began to come against his life. As the death threats came, they were taken to Scotland Yard, and some of them were letters clipped out of different newspaper articles and stuff to state the death threat. Scotland Yard told him, these are done by professionals, and you need to genuinely be concerned about your life. He said to me, look, I'm 83, I'm not going to be real worried. When I go to bed at night, I shut the shades on my house in Switzerland that face the mountains and the forest. I leave the ones that face the road open. He was very good friends with the mathematician from Pakistan. I can't think of his name. He had square roots memorized up to 200,000. Genius. And loved the Lord, born again Christian, and he would go to the same universities and prove mathematically that evolution was an impossibility. The death threats were so severe on his life that he had to go back to Pakistan and leave Europe, and he was a professor there at Oxford, I think. So there are those who are willingly ignorant, who do not want to admit to some of the evidence. Now, all the evidence is not cut and clear, I'm not saying that. And I am not a scientist, so I'm very happy just to stay in the Bible. But there's a malevolent force behind the foisting of evolution on the minds of a generation of people around the world as scientific fact. Some of the things that we have discovered lately, and even in regards to the Carbon-14 dating system, which supposedly dates things at millions of years old, they tested of late a shell from a live clam, living clam. The Carbon-14 said the clam was 3,000 years old. Now, don't laugh because the Carbon-14 dating system is a great dating system when it works, and for different things they use it for. They took a seal carcass, 30 days old, dead seal. Carbon-14 said it was 4,600 years old. So it has flaws. It isn't as simple as they want to make it seem. Dr. Melvin Cook, physicist, chemist, who probably knows more about helium than anybody in the world. I wouldn't brag about that, but, you know, my knowledge of helium had nothing to do with science. Balloons, other things, you know. But his life work is studying helium and the fact that it can escape from our atmosphere the way we know it, and by the saturations of helium in our atmosphere, he feels the earth, the evidence is there that the earth is 10,000 to 15,000 years old. That the levels, if the earth was billions of years old, would be ridiculous. Dr. Harold Schlusher, geophysicist, astronomer, one who was involved with the project when we put the lunar module on the moon. One of their great concerns was there are hundreds of tons of dust every year. I forget the numbers, incredible, that settle both on the earth. It doesn't burn up because it's so light. It hovers down through our atmosphere, not like a meteor. And hundreds and hundreds of tons of dust that settle on the moon every year. And they were expecting that the lunar dust to be anywhere from 10 foot to estimates even up to 400 foot. They weren't sure what was going to happen. When the lunar module came down, they went to great lengths to design the engine so they wouldn't clog with lunar dust. And when they landed, they found the lunar dust was a third of an inch to four inches. And that sent everybody scrambling back to the drawing board saying, well, our calculations were wrong. Because they said the moon was, you know, billions of years old. One of the scientists at MIT, as he studies the moon, says it's easier to tell you why the moon shouldn't be there than it is to tell you why the moon is there. And of course, the small layer of dust again proved that the moon, they estimated, was seven to 10,000 years old again. The sun is shrinking at a rate, and we're fairly accurate with our measurements, of five foot per hour. That is the diameter of the sun. And that doesn't mean anything to the sun because the sun's so giant. But if you shrunk five foot an hour, it would mean a lot to you. But it doesn't mean much to the sun. It loses four million tons of mass per second. Four million tons of mass per second. Now, if we take that and work it backwards, a hundred thousand years ago, and I believe I misquoted these when I was in Revelation. I'm back to them now because we're in Genesis. A hundred thousand years ago, the sun would be twice its present size. One million years ago, and of course, they say that we're billions of years old. One million years ago, life would be impossible on earth. It would be so hot here because of the size of the sun. Twenty million years ago, which has nothing to do with the billions of years they say are necessary for evolution. Twenty million years ago, the surface of the sun would have been touching the surface of the earth. And 400 billion years ago, which is a figure that some scientists quote as the age of the earth and universe. 400 billion years ago, the sun would have filled the known universe at the rate that it is burning off now. Dr. Thomas Barnes, and this is very interesting, physicist, well known, given his life to study magnetic fields. They figured that the magnetic field of the earth loses half of its strength every 1,400 years. 1,400 years ago, it was twice as strong as it is now, the magnetic field of the earth. If we work that backwards, 10,000 years ago, the magnetic force of the earth would have been comparable to a small, to a dwarf star, which is almost unimaginable. 25,000 years ago, the magnetic field would be exerting so much force that the surface of the earth would be over 240 degrees, no water, no life possible. 100,000 years ago, the magnetic field would have produced so much heat that the earth would have been molten 100,000 years ago. And the idea is there's a lot of evidence we're surrounded with that tell us that the earth is much younger than we think it is. Now, Kathy and I got married in Portland, Oregon. Joanna was born there. We lived there. And at the university hospital, Joanna was born. And we used to go to some of the caves. They're famous. They're the caves with the stalactites and stalagmites. I forget which one goes up and which one goes down. Stalactites, I think, come down. And you go in and you see these and they say, well, these are millions and billions of years old. Takes millions of years to form these stalactites you see hanging from the ceiling. What's interesting, they built the Washington Monument in 1923. 1968, they were working on it, went underneath to do some cleaning, and there were five-foot stalactites hanging underneath the Washington Monument, produced in 40 years. A little over 40 years. So that kind of blew that theory out the window, that millions of years stuff. Now, the interesting thing is, again, and I shared this this morning, the whole evolutionary field is a little bit like the emperor's new clothes. You remember the story where the emperor told his tailors they had to produce the finest garments the world had ever seen. If they didn't, their name was mud. So the tailors huddled and they got together and they said, look, the king's going to kill us. We need to come up with something. So they told the king, we've invented a new thread. It's the finest thread the world's ever known. It's invisible. It's an invisible thread. We'll make your garments. And the remarkable thing is only the wisest and most learned people can see this thread. So, of course, the king, when he rode down the street naked, everybody stood around and said, wow, those clothes are beautiful, because everybody wanted to be included in the wisest and most learned club. And it was some fool who finally said, the king is naked. And the evolutionary theory is much the same. And Christians early on just bowed the knee to it and figured out some way to harmonize the Bible with this theory because they didn't want to look stupid. They didn't want to say the king is naked. They wanted to be the wisest and most learned club. And I've discovered that as we search the natural world, the creation around us, it's fun to find things that agree with what the scripture already tells us. And when we accumulate our scientific knowledge in relation to creation, that's what we should do. We should look for what is in the world around us that agrees with the record we're already given. We should never take the record that we're given and begin to twist that to the evidence that surrounds us, because once we compromise that, it has no strength at all in what it offers to us any longer. It says in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Very interesting as we look at this system. And I had somebody running around this week looking for me. I want you to know something. As we look at our solar system and we look at what God has done, there is not presently a shred of evidence for another solar system in the universe. There is not a photograph. In the 1950s or 60s, everybody was excited, thought they saw a planet somewhere, I forget where it was, and it ended up to be a brown dwarf sun, something like eight times bigger than Jupiter. The remarkable thing is, and there's warbles, and they look at the pulse on the star, and they quantify the light, and there's all these different theories that, by the way, the light is acting on the star, therefore there has to be planets revolving around it. The truth is, and I don't care if they find other planets, that's fine, but the truth is, as of now, there is a single solar system in the known universe that is the one that revolves around our sun. There is not another planet anywhere that anybody has ever found as of yet off the internet this week. Now, they try to say that there's, again, seeing the quantified light, all these different things, oh, there's evidence. Well, maybe there's evidence, but it's a hypothesis. There is no fact yet established. And you see, they're excited to do that because what they want to do is they want to prove there's life somewhere else. Carl Sagan and his buddies are getting millions of dollars for the SETI project, which is in search of extraterrestrial intelligence, SETI, and we're getting primed by all the TV shows and everything about UFOs and all the nonsense. You know, to me, if I wasn't a believer, that would make more sense, UFOs and colonization, than evolution, because anybody who's willing to be honest and to read begins to see the holes that the emperor is naked. And anybody in the right mind, I would be more willing to believe. And you see, the evolutionists, as they're being shaken, they don't want to just go to one alternative. The only thing that's left is creation. So now they're coming up with something else. One of the leading evolutionists today has said what he believes now is that we were colonized, that UFOs came here, you know, more intelligent life from somewhere else, and came here and colonized life on the planet. Instead of realizing as evolution falls apart, creation is what we're left with. Because his theory doesn't get rid of the problem. Where did they come from? What big bang brought them into being? You know, where in the world did they come from? How did life start where they are, whoever they are? And as far as I'm concerned, anyway, any UFOs that come around in my mind are IFOs, identified flying objects. They're demonic. That's all I need to know about them. Friends from outer space, cutting me a break. Satan comes disguised as an angel of light. If that deception comes as an alternative to creation, there's no doubt where the origin of it is. And we'll run into some strange things as we go on in Genesis. Tells us in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth and the earth was without form and void. It was in bud form for what he would do. Darkness was upon the face of the deep and the spirit of God began to hover or vibrate or flutter upon the face of these waters, probably drawing it into a sphere at that time. God said, let there be light. There was light. And God saw the light, that it was good. And God divided the light from the darkness. And he called the light day and the darkness night. No doubt we have an axis now. We have rotation. And the evening and the morning were the first day. And God said, let there be a firmament, an expanse. I think the Hebrew word means to beat something out, to spread it out. God said, let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, plural, interesting, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament. And it was so. And God called the firmament, and our word heaven is plural again. He called the expanse the heavens. And evening and morning were the second day. Now, of course, the question is, and some feel, and maybe right, I don't know, that what it's talking about here is God separated the waters, took some of the earth and put them above the atmosphere of the earth and that there was a vapor canopy that filtered infrared and ultraviolet light. And that's why Adam and Eve, as we get to it, lived 900 years. Their life expectancy was much longer. As we study Genesis, we'll see those years get shorter and shorter until God finally says 70 years are determined for a man's life by the time we get around chapter 11 or so. But some say what this is, it's the great myth. It says in chapter 2, there had never been rain before the flood of Noah, but a great mist went up from the earth and watered the surface of the earth. We know that in Antarctica, that it was tropical at one point. They go down 100, 200 foot under ice and find charcoal, find remains of tropical vegetation. In Siberia, they find the woolly mammoth frozen with tropical vegetation in his mouth and in his stomach. And there's a great evidence that one point in time, the entire earth was tropical and that there was a vapor canopy around the earth and that the environment was beautiful all over the entire earth. Maybe that's what it's speaking of here. The other possibility is that there's water that we don't know of, separated by the expanse of the heavens, plural. Very interesting. I remember when I first moved back here from California, 1981, it was somewhere in there, 81 to 83, there was an article in a Philadelphia newspaper. And I'm not sure if the Bulletin was still alive then. I think it was the two papers, the Bulletin and the Inquirer. And a scientist somewhere had done something with lenses and mirrors. And what he figured was, if I do this, I will get a picture thousands of times further than anything we've ever seen. So he flipped around the mirrors and his lenses. Don't ask me, I don't understand all this stuff. And the photographs he came back with looked like, he said, water, like an ocean. And then he figured, well, something's wrong with this and that didn't work. And, you know, how could there be way out on the very edges of the known universe water? But as the article ended, it ended with this verse. And God made the firmament and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament. And it was so. It just kind of freaked me out to read that in a newspaper, you know. So either we're looking at here the atmosphere with a vapor canopy, or we are looking at the watery mass of the earth, God taking what was not needed and pushing it out to the outer limits of the known universe. Possibly. I don't know that. God called the firmament heavens and the evening and morning were the second day. So the first day, day and night, earth created, brought into a sphere on an axis, light and darkness. The second day, the separation of the waters above the firmament from below the firmament. And God seeing that it was good. And maybe in that creating the vapor canopy, we have fossils of 50 foot asparagus ferns. Now just imagine what a grape would have been like. You know, you know, if you've got raised little kids at home, you know, when they're little, they want their grapes peeled. And it's really hassle to peel a little grape like that. Imagine if you had a grape about this big, you just could cut it in half and take a one an ice cream scooper and scoop out big scoops of grape and give it to them like that. Imagine what flowers would have been like. Would you just love to run and dive into the middle of a 20 foot rose? You know, I read an article in the Smithsonian that scientists are discovering floral therapy, that the scent of flowers and the way that it relates to our brain, that that scent is most closely related to memory. And they're discovering that there is a floral therapy that actually soothes people and helps them. They also in Smithsonian read about light therapy. They're discovering that more people are depressed in the winter than any other time. And that if they get up at five in the morning, turn on a sunlamp with the right spectrum of lights, it really lifts the depression, that the more light we have in our lives, the less depression. I thought God knew all that stuff. That's what Eden was like. It was filled with light. It was smelled like flowers. There was no air pollution. Must have just been wonderful. I'm looking forward to the restoration of some of these things during the millennium. What will it be like to travel through some scenes like this? I look at it and I think how wondrous this must have been. You know, I do not want to press on to the third day here. Because the third day is a lot of fun. We can't do the third day in four minutes. I mean, God did it in 24 hours. We can't do it in three minutes. That wouldn't be fair. So what I want you to do is read ahead. I just want to take some time and kind of bump through these verses. We'll get to a breakneck speed as we get out of chapter one and start to move and come to Eden and the temptation of Adam and Eve and just great things, Cain and Abel and Noah's flood. We're going to move along at a reasonable rate so that we'll be in our Bibles underlining and understanding what in the world we're talking about. But this is kind of fun to look through this stuff to see what some of the scientists have to say these days. I'm thankful Time Magazine one week ago came out with this article. It's called And God Said. Imagine that, Time Magazine, article about Genesis. I said, thank you, Lord. Thank you, Lord. I'm starting Genesis next week. I appreciate you supplying me with the information. And basically it's one of those, you know, articles, evolutionary biology has punctured the notion of a six-day creation. Well, that's a bunch of nonsense. And hundreds of you gave me these articles last week, how the Vatican's thinking is evolving, where the Pope is willing to embrace evolution as long as they can still maintain the doctrines he wants to maintain. I don't see how you can do both of those things. In the first twelve chapters of Genesis, every major doctrine of the Bible is developed from sin and suffering, the creations of the heaven and of the earth and of man and of life and of marriage and of clothing and of children and of sin and of temptation and of the devil and of redemption and of the difference between mankind and the animal kingdom. It's all there developed. Remarkable to me that anything that calls itself the church could embrace. To me, this malevolent teaching that calls itself evolution, that has undermined the foundations of society and morality, has undermined the foundations of what is right and wrong. Thank God, as we look at this, that we know that as God set up the world, he set it up in response to a plan that he had enacted before he made anything, that you and I were in his hearts before he made the world. So I'm thankful for that. As he sets the stage of creation, it is to enact redemption. It's not just he's making something to see if it's going to work out. It wasn't just an experiment. God isn't just doing something because he thought, man, I have all this creative power and here I sit. I'm all alone. Let me set up a terrarium. I'll make this and I'll make these little critters and put it in there. It'll be a sealed life unit and I'll put little people in there. It had nothing to do with that. He set it up to enact the redemption of mankind, that he could take us to himself eternally by a choice that we would make. And at some point in time, as he created the heavens again, they would be the heavens that he would descend below to be born in a manger of a virgin. As he created the earth, it would be the earth that he would come to to be brutalized and to be beaten. And it tells us in Colossians chapter 1, verses 17 and 18, that he himself, Jesus Christ, is the creator of all things and that it is by him that they consist, that they are held together, they're sustained. And again, scientists have no idea why the nucleus of an atom doesn't blow apart because the protons are clustered there. You know, if you take two north ends of a magnet and try to push them together, how they push apart. Well, there's no reasons why protons should be clustered and electrons, the opposite force revolving the negative charge, why they shouldn't be drawn into collapsing in an instant like that. And that's sustaining existence. And the Bible tells us that it's Jesus Christ himself who maintains and sustains. He's the creator and the sustainer of all of that. Now, of course, the incredible thing about that to me is this. It means, in some mystery, that the night they took him to the house of Caiaphas and blindfolded him and began to beat his face, he couldn't even see the punches coming to duck, that he was holding together the knuckles of the Roman soldiers that were hitting his face, that his men spit on him, that he held their mouths and their saliva glands and he held the spit together as it flew through the air to come onto his own face, that as they ripped his beard out, he held together the nerve endings that felt the pain as his beard was ripped out of his face, that he held the thorns together as they were driven through his scalp, that he held the nails together as they were driven through his wrist and his feet, that he came into the midst of his own creation. Instead of going to plan B, assumed responsibility by subjecting himself to his own fallen creation, taking the full brunt of it upon himself and with his shed blood paying for the sins of a lost world. No, it wasn't ever that he just set up a scientific experiment. It was the plan of the ages whereby God set the stage for redemption to take place. And as he separated the land from the sea, he separated a place that would be Jerusalem and it was there on a hill where he paid for our sins, which in my mind makes Jerusalem and the earth the center of the universe because it's the center of God's plan for redemption. So it is a wondrous thing that we begin to enter into. I appreciate it if the evolutionists keep their dirty hands off of it because it's sacred ground and it's holy and it's a place where we have learned to live and be forgiven and enjoy life.