Episode 79: The Age of the Earth

Rural Church Podcast 2.0

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Welcome to the Ruled Church Podcast. This is my beloved son with whom

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I am well pleased. He is honored and I get the glory. And by the way, it's even better because you see that building in Perryville, Arkansas?

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You see that one in Pechote, Mexico? Do you see that one in Tuxla, Guterres down there in Chiapas? That building has my son's name on it.

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The church is not a democracy. It's a monarchy. Christ is king. You can't be

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Christian without a local church. You can't do anything better than to bend your knee and bow your heart, turn from your sin and repentance, believe on the

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Lord Jesus Christ, and join up with a good Bible -believing church, and spend your life serving

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Jesus in a local, visible congregation. Happy July. Happy July. No, I mean, not really.

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We're technically, like, recorded that far ahead, but it's April. I'm pretty sure this one isn't going to come out in July.

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No, it's beautiful. It's a beautiful April day. We're preparing for our first round of probably tornadoes.

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Is it supposed to get that bad today? I haven't looked at the weather. Not today, but, like, I think this weekend.

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Actually, it's been a really, like, last year seemed kind of tumultuous, but this year it's, remember, last year we recorded a whole episode,

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I don't remember which one it was, on the sovereignty of God and tornadoes. There was that tornado on West Little Rock.

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Yeah, I remember that. Because I had a church member that was a couple, a mother and a son, that were, like, in the middle of that.

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Wow. Welcome to the Rural Church Podcast. I'm your co -host, Allen Nelson.

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And with me, oh, where am I from? Perryville, the big city. One of the pastors of Providence Baptist Church.

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And then with me is Eddie Ragsdale, the pastor of First Baptist Church of Marshall. And we talk about life, ministry, theology, the gospel, all these things from the perspective of the local church.

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And in our context, that's both rural areas. But if you're from a non -rural area,

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I think you can benefit, too. Yeah, that's right. Hopefully so. So let me tell you something.

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You might have to look this up. But there's this picture.

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How do you say it? A petroglyph in a Native American. So I want to ask your explanation of this.

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There's a petroglyph that they have dated to sometime B .C.

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in Utah. And it's from a Native American tribe in Utah. And in fact,

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I don't know if you can see my, I just put on my most recent Facebook status. So if you can log in, you can look at this picture.

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And this picture looks, I'm not good at my dinosaur names, but this picture looks like exactly like a bronchia, is it a bronchiosaurus?

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Are you looking at it? That is exactly what it looks like. So let me ask you this, Eddie. Since those dinosaurs lived, obviously, was it quadrillions of years ago or something?

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Something like that, yeah. How did they draw a picture of that? How did this Native American tribe in Utah, you think that it's possible, do you think it's possible they saw

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Jurassic Park? No, obviously, we know that they dug up the bones, reconstructed them, and knew that that's what it must have looked like.

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That's plausible. Okay, yeah, that makes sense. So they dug up the bones, and then they painted this thing on the rock, or drew it on the rock, exactly what it looks like.

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That's pretty amazing. Yeah, they were pretty archaeologically advanced.

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Those ancient peoples were so smart. I mean, is there any other possible explanation? There is the possibility that they lived alongside.

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No, Eddie! Weren't you taught during the

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COVID crisis of 2020 that science is always foolproof and always trustworthy?

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Always, always. Weren't you taught that? Yeah, I was taught that. Yeah, you know what?

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I think, brother, that's what we're going to talk about today on the Rural Church Podcast. We'll talk a little bit about Age of the

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Earth. Eddie nor myself claim to be scientists, but we do claim to have a brain, and we're able to think, and we're able to read the

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Bible, and by God's grace, able to interpret it rightly. But I think the most plausible explanation of a

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Native American tribe drawing the picture of a dinosaur is they saw it.

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They saw it clearly, yeah. I think that it's very sad. And by the way, that's not the only one.

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I don't have it up in front of me, but I think there's somewhere in Central America of a picture of a stegosaurus, and there's strange stories.

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There's a story. People have to look this up. There's just stories in the 1800s of someone walking, of claiming to have found a pterodactyl.

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Now, here's, again, the issue about that. It's not like, okay, so like today, if someone described a pterodactyl, you would be like, okay, well, you saw that.

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You saw it on a movie. You saw it on a Discovery Channel. In the 1900s, someone walks into town, and I think there was actually a newspaper article, and they talk about seeing a pterodactyl.

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How would they describe it? How would they know what it looked like? Yeah, yeah.

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They would only know if they had seen it. That's right. You put all this stuff together, and this is going to get us to the biblical text in just a minute.

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We'll go to Genesis 1. But you put all this stuff together, and it's quite obvious that mankind lived with the dinosaurs.

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And I actually would say that this picture that the

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Native Americans put on the cave wall or on this rock, this stone, I would actually say from a biblical point of view,

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I think it's more credible to me than our modern representations.

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Yeah. I think we're imagining what we think it may have looked like. We're putting the bones together, and we're saying, well, if it had this much flesh over the top of those bones, then maybe this animal would look like this.

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But I actually think they saw it. So their representation is more credible.

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Yeah. Credibler. Yeah, credibler. That's right. They had a firsthand witness.

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And that's a hard maybe for some people to process, but let me just lay it out there for you.

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Dinosaurs, the dating of dinosaur fossils is simply inaccurate.

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It's just not what the carbon dating is, just not what they say.

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Yeah, carbon dating is simply not reliable. That's the argument we're making.

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We're making the argument that dinosaurs existed. Let me ask you this. Why? Because some people, even conservative people, would say, well, you know, dinosaurs were destroyed by the flood.

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What's the problem with that argument? Well, certainly they were destroyed like the flood, just like cows were and buffalo were and all the other animals were, but they were also preserved on the ark, just like all the other animals were.

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Yeah, that's right. So certainly they were. I don't disagree with that. That's right. Well, in fact, that's why the idea.

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Okay, a brother in our church, Alex. But they weren't made extinct by the ark. Well.

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They weren't made extinct by the ark because they were preserved on the ark, the same as the other animals.

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And I'll tell you this. The people that don't hunt, it may be hard for them to understand this analogy, but they should just listen.

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Alex is a brother in our church. He brought this up one time and he works for Creation. I can't remember what it's called.

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But anyway, it's off the top of my head right now. But, you know, you think about let's say that you walk into the woods and you find a dead animal, a deer, whatever the case may be.

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Okay, you come back a day later, two days later. What's happened? Oh, is that animal just laying there?

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And then you come back a million years later and it's just laid there week after week after week after week and nothing's touched it.

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And just over a million years or whatever the case may be, so much soil and everything got over the top of it.

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And now it fossilizes. Now, if you hunt or if you're outside, you understand, that's actually not a plausible explanation for the fossil record.

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You don't have to be a hunter. All you have to do is drive because you see whether it's armadillos or raccoons or deer, you see them having been hit and they're laying there on the road and they don't just lay there until they become a fossil.

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They decompose and we've all seen that. So everyone, whether they're hunters or not, they've seen evidence of this in the roadkill record.

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And everything drags all their parts away, right? So maybe you say to yourself, okay, but what if it, okay,

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Eddie, but maybe, but what if it could have happened one time?

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And you say to yourself, okay, I'll give you that, which I disagree, but I give you that. Maybe there's this one animal that there was no other animals around.

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It was the one animal that lived in this area. It died and absolutely the wind, the rain, no other animal, nothing touched it.

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And so that's how you get the fossil. Well, again, I disagree with that, but let's grant you one.

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Okay, but what about, where am I getting at with this, Eddie? How did we get all these fossils? The tar pits, tar pits.

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They got caught in tar pits. Is that a reference to Land Before Time?

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I think so. They got caught in the tar pits, man. Or just go with me.

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I honestly, this is crazy. What if there was a cataclysmic event whereby the whole world, not just one area of the world, but the entire world was covered with,

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I don't know, a worldwide flood. Does that have any say, maybe?

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Well, and I think what's amazing, I was thinking about this because I seen a couple of clips from the

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Joe Rogan podcast last night, and one was talking about how all these different Christians, and we could argue whether or not all these people were genuine believers, but it just seems like Joe Rogan has gotten into several conversations over the last several months to a year with different people who have talked to him about Jesus and about God.

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And then at the same time, he has a lot of podcasts, it seems like. I see a lot of clips from a lot of his podcasts where he's talking about the origins of all kinds of ancient things and the

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Younger Dryas Theory, and I don't know if you've ever heard about that, but supposedly there was a cataclysmic event on the

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Earth 12 ,000 years ago or something like that. And, you know, it seems amazing to me that he can be so open -minded, and I'm not making this all about Joe Rogan, but I think he's a picture of the way that people think.

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So open -minded to all of these theories about what could have happened 11 ,500 years ago or 12 ,000 years ago, and how the pyramids could have been constructed, and all these kinds of things, but so closed -minded to the idea of a worldwide flood.

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And I would actually say a lot of these theories that people are coming up with that are pretty far -fetched, what they're trying to explain is the evidence that it's easily explained by a global worldwide flood that, as Ken Ham would say, laid down millions of dead things all over the world.

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Well, that's very good, brother. Okay, but let's establish this with our listeners.

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The worldwide flood theory from a secular standpoint, which from our standpoint, it's not a theory.

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From our standpoint, it is a truth. It is the biblical fact. It is reality. But from their perspective, okay, that's a worldwide flood theory, but it's not a neutral theory.

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In other words, if you accept the worldwide flood, that's a problem.

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Right. Because it says the Bible's accurate. That's right. Go ahead, bro.

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Well, what I was thinking about with that comparison that I was saying about with Joe Rogan was simply the reason why he can be so open -minded to the

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Younger Dryas theory or whatever is because it makes no claim on his life.

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It makes no moral. There's no moral. I don't have to live differently if I believe that an asteroid struck the

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Yucatan Peninsula and that brought on something, or there was a massive volcano somewhere in the

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Middle East and that brought on something. If I come away with one of these explanations for the geological and archaeological evidence all over the planet,

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I don't have to live differently. I don't have to submit to a law.

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I don't have to submit to a righteousness. But if I conclude that it's true that the world was covered in a global flood, then

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I am responsible to the other things taught in that book. The world doesn't want to be responsible for that.

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Yeah. That's good, brother. Let's get into some of the nuts and bolts.

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We believe in general revelation is good. Science is good.

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We support science. We love science. The issue is we know that mankind is not neutral. At the end of the day, we've made an argument that science actually supports, overwhelmingly supports, the biblical narrative.

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But there's something else that supports the biblical narrative, which is the Bible. Because there are time periods when you live when it says, well, science seems to be saying this, okay, but what does the

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Scripture say? And we have to go with what does Scripture clearly reveal. And the

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Scriptures clearly do reveal. And I'm not saying people in the church haven't got it wrong. I understand that there are evidences.

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People try to cite this stuff all the time. Well, they used to believe this or that, you know. Or they'll say like, you know, in Joshua, the sun stood still, you know.

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Well, the idea, I mean, we still talk about those dumb people, they thought that the sun revolved around the earth.

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But if you turn on the news today, they'll tell you what time sunset is.

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Okay, guess what, Eddie? The sun doesn't set, you Neanderthal. That's right, yeah. But that's the way we talk from our observation, you know.

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And the point is, so the first thing I want to talk about is the Bible's support for a young earth.

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And the second thing I want to talk about is why it matters that you hold to a young earth. So first, when you go to Genesis 1, you know, the argument is that the

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Hebrew word yom is a lot like our word day. And when you say day, you can mean a 24 -hour period.

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But you can also mean like, you know, Eddie, you're so old. You'd be like, back in my day, boys, you know.

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Yes. You could say that. I am old enough to say that. That's true. Back in my day. Well, when you say back in my day, you don't mean back in a 24 -hour period.

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Right. Thus, the argument follows that the word day in Hebrew doesn't mean a specific 24 -hour period, but it means a long period of time.

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Now, what's the problem with that argument? The problem with that in Genesis 1 is that he keeps talking about evening and morning, keeps talking about the first, the second, the third, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth, and the seventh day.

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And so those qualifiers make it mean individual days, not a past era.

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Yeah. Yeah. Exactly right. So the context, just like in the

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English, when I say the word day, you don't know what I'm talking about unless I give context. But if I start talking about morning and evening day, you're like, okay,

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I understand he's talking about a 24 -hour period. That's exactly what you have in Genesis 1.

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But, Eddie, the Lord is so good to us that he understands our foolishness.

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And just to make it clear, he says things like in Exodus chapter 20, when you're talking about the

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Sabbath day, verse 8, remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a

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Sabbath to the Lord, your God. On it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter, your male servant or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is with your gates.

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Okay? Now here's something the Lord gives. Verse 11, for in six days the

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Lord made heaven and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day.

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Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. So if you say, I mean, I do not grant you that Genesis 1 can mean millions of years per day.

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But if you're just convinced Genesis 1 could mean whatever, but when you get to Exodus 20, it's clear.

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He's laying out the pattern of a week. And the reason that the pattern of a week looks the way it does is because that's exactly how

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God created in six days, six literal 24 -hour days.

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Oh, but Quatro, haven't you even read Genesis 1? It says, and God said, let there be light in the expanse, lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night, and to let them be for seasons and for signs and for days and for years, and let them be lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth.

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And it was so. And God made the two great lights, the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night and the stars.

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And God set them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth, to rule over the day and over the night, to separate the light from darkness.

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And God saw that it was good, and there was evening and there was morning the fourth day. Quatro, don't you know that you couldn't have 24 -hour days in the first three days if you didn't even have a sun and a moon?

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Yeah, that's where people mess up. The sun and the moon are not the keeper of time. God is.

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God is the creator of time, not the sun and the moon. And I want to say something furthermore, Eddie. Our entire religion is built upon the supernatural.

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You say, well, all these things can't happen. You know what else can't happen? A man can't rise again from the dead.

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That can't happen. A donkey can't talk. Yeah. Well, I'm just saying the central focus, and that's true, but the central focus of our religion is the resurrection of the

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Lord Jesus Christ. You say, yeah, but no, God ordinarily works, as 1689 said, ordinarily works through means.

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He's free to work outside of those means. That's right. And the reality is that if you want to start, well, we'll talk about this in just a minute, but let me just first make the point that you can't start playing with Genesis 1.

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It's interesting, right? How far in the Bible do you have to go before men start twisting stuff? Right.

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The first chapter. That's right. Yeah. Were you going to say something? No, no.

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I was just agreeing. So I was going to say, how big a deal is this really?

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Let's be fair here, and let's work through this. How big of a deal is it really to come to some disagreements on this?

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How big of a deal is it to come to a disagreement on the age of the earth? Yeah. Let's say someone says, y 'all are crazy.

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I don't buy it. The earth is millions of years old. I would say it depends on how consistent that person is.

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Yeah. Because honestly, I think what happens often is that people, they want to interpret

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Genesis 1. I'm saying brothers who are seeking to be faithful.

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Yeah. I'm here trying to take the most gracious view possible.

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I'm saying brothers who are seeking to be faithful, but they're just like, I look at the world, and I've listened to all these scientists talk, and we've got all these rocks that have dated to however many millions of years.

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It's just got to be the case that it's an old earth. And so they reinterpret Genesis, but then

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I would say they inconsistently start. Maybe they start at the fall, but then from there on, they start interpreting the

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Bible the way it speaks. And I would say if they can hold that inconsistency, we're probably going to be fine.

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The problem for them is going to be that they've got to hold to something that doesn't work.

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But I mean, we can probably agree on everything after that, except for the problem that they have, because they've got to hold these two different things at the same time.

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Years ago, when I first became the pastor here, my ministry assistant, and I think she was just getting to know me, and so she was trying to kind of figure out where I stood on everything, and she just asked my thoughts on creation.

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And I said, well, the real issue is Romans 6, because there we're dealing with clearly the

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Apostle Paul's talking about Christ being the new Adam. And if you don't have

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Adam, and you don't have the creation, the way that God stated it in Genesis 1 and 2, then you can't have the

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Christ the way the Bible teaches him either. Yeah, and you have a whole problem with death, you know, the wages of sin.

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I thought when you said Romans 6, I thought you were going to say the wages of sin is death, you know. But the idea, and of course at the end of Romans 5, you have the contrast between the first and last

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Adam. But yeah, so let me say, first of all, be gracious. You can still be a

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Christian and have erroneous views about the age of the earth. So it's not a salvation issue.

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But we do need to be cautious, and there are some pretty popular leaders. We do need to be cautious about those who get that wrong, about just taking them wholesale.

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I mean, here's the deal. I want to mention this earlier. One of the things, the Lord is doing so many things at once, and one of the things that happens in COVID in 2020, one of the blessings is the

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Lord pulls back the curtain. Yes, he does on some squishy evangelicals for sure, but he also pulls back the curtain on the scientific community.

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And he shows the world, he exposes their nakedness, if you will. It's like not everything these people say is right.

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In fact, let me say this. I think that's why you see, now I understand that there is, you go back further than 2020, but I think that's why you see in the last four years, there's more and more people, more and more podcasts, more and more lost people now questioning everything.

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They're like, well, wait a second, and they're always coming up with all these conspiracy theories. Wait a second.

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Well, that's because in 2020, that's one of the reasons, is because in 2020 things were exposed.

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And so you see the foolishness of, so if you just say, well, science says somebody somewhere in a lab says this, so it has to be accurate without thinking yourself.

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Like Darwinian evolution is absolutely foolish. Right. The only way that you can believe in Darwinian evolution is to suspend reason and to say, oh, it has to, okay,

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I have to accept Darwinian evolution as a presupposition, and now I'm going to try to force all the evidences

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I have, which actually point in different directions, but I'm going to try to force all the evidences

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I have into this Darwinian evolutionary model. Even unbelieving people are seeing the foolishness of.

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But because it's become for years, it's become a religion, and it's really hard for people to let go.

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And you say, but you're saying, Quatro, that all these people can be wrong about that. Yes, absolutely, I am.

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Yeah, they can. Yeah, of course they can, right? And even the high priest of Darwinian evolution in our day doesn't want to live in a world where that reigns.

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And I don't know if you've seen this, Quatro, by the time this podcast comes out, this will be way old news, but essentially

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Richard Dawkins himself came out and said that he is a cultural Christian because he wants to live in a world where you have to live by Christian mores.

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Yeah. Where everyone around him basically lives like a Christian. He doesn't want to live in a world where the people around him live like Muslims.

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And he really and really honestly doesn't want to live in a world where the people around him live like secularists.

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Yeah. He wants to live in a world where he can do whatever he wants, but the people around him still act on Christian morals so that the streets are clean and it's a nicer world.

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Yeah, that's right. So the point I was just trying to make, kind of a convoluted point,

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I guess, just convoluted in the sense of going in 100 different directions, but you can be a

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Christian. This isn't a salvation issue. Right. But it really is. I say that, and then the other breath

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I say it is an important issue because if you start to go wrong in Genesis 1 through 3, inevitably there's going to be other issues down the road.

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So it's an important issue to get right, and we have to take what the

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Scriptures say. And what we've said for a long time, what Christians have always said, is at the end of the day when all things are said and done,

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Christianity and science are going to stand hand in hand. I think it was Tim Challies I heard one time, a sermon at G3, talked about God's two books.

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God wrote two books. He wrote the Bible and general revelation. And we understand that.

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It's not God being deceptive, but I'll give you an example. We just had baby Margie last fall.

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Baby Margie at one day old looked a lot different than baby

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Adam at one day old because Adam was created mature.

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Yes. So again, I'm not trying to get too far into these weeds because I know there's a lot of disagreement and stuff, but that's not

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God being deceptive. Oh, how old is Adam really? I imagine Adam looked like a 30, maybe 20, 30 -year -old man.

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We don't know, but we know he was fully grown, right? We know he didn't look like one day.

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And so for God to create mountains and streams and trees and rivers, we understand that for a tree to be 30 -foot tall, it takes a long time, but not when

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God made it. So again, this is not God being deceptive.

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I know there's a lot of stuff that we could talk about and get off in the weeds in that. I'm not trying to do all that. I'm just trying to say we have to think about those things.

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And then another thing we have to think is the cataclysmic event in Genesis that happened in Genesis 3, which is what?

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Which is the fall of man and sin. Yes. Sin changed everything about the state of the world from the point of creation to the point of the fall.

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And we don't know exactly how long that it was between the seventh day rest that God took and then the day that the serpent met with Eve and Adam there at the tree.

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But at any account, we know that that changed everything from the state of the world in Eden.

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Could have been millions of years. Certainly was not millions of years. Some people, I doubt that it was.

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I don't think it was very long at all. Some people theorize it was on the Sabbath.

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Yeah. But anyway, I mean, you could work through all that yourself. But regardless of the position, it's not very long.

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It's not very long. We're talking about hours or days, not years or decades.

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Right. So this is an important issue. But I would say, I mean, I'm just saying the

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Bible is enough evidence. The Bible is enough. But you don't be careful.

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I'm saying this because the scripture is sufficient. It's enough. You don't need anything else. But you don't have to be just this dumb person in the world today and be like, oh, yeah.

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Hang your head. Yes, I believe in the literal creation, six 24 -hour periods.

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That is enough. But beyond that, what we're saying is the evidence all around actually points toward the biblical narrative.

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That's right. We actually don't have an excuse for not believing in a younger.

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And we don't have to be embarrassed about it. Yeah, that's right. That's right. I actually think when you look at and like you said, we don't really have time to get off into the weeds.

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I would encourage people, if you want to think more about this, you can look up Dr.

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Jason Lyle. He's got a lot of good stuff, especially when it comes to the issues of like the cosmos and what do you do with the distant starlight and those different things.

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But I think when you look at our universe, yeah, I think when you start thinking about the different possibilities and just realizing that if you take that kind of view, common scientific view, there's actually much harder things to explain.

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Like, why hasn't the sun already burned out? If you take the I mean, it's much more difficult to explain it from that position,

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I think, than it is to explain it. The same variables. We have the same evidence to look at, but I think it's much more explainable.

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Yeah. According to what the scripture says. I want to argue, too, is like, yes, we have the same evidence, but from 50 years ago, 20 years ago, and certainly hundreds of years ago, we have more evidence as far as what we know about the world today.

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And that evidence should expand our adoration of our great and holy

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God. Right. The heavens declare the glory of God. As we examine the far reaches big and small.

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So we examine the far reaches of the universe. Well, we're not doing that. I understand. I know that's too far.

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Hyperbolic. We're not actually in the far reaches of the universe, but we're seeing so much more now in the universe.

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And so that's big scale, small scale. We're seeing so much more about the human body. Those things should push us to worship.

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People today who are unbelievers will be held even more accountable because we know so much more about God's creation.

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And it's even more of an indictment against a man to say, ah, this just randomly happened.

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Right. It's even more an indictment against an atheist today compared to someone, you know, a hundred years ago, even.

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The point is, I mean, they're still both held accountable and both will suffer God's punishment in eternity.

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But the point is, the more and more that we knowledge we gain of our universe and the things in it, the more and more we should adore and worship our great and holy

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God. Yep. That's right. So we're not scared of these things anyway. That's kind of winding down here, brother.

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But anything, anything you think of that you'd like to say that has left unsaid so far, you know, one other thing

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I'd like to refer to here in the scripture, you know, oftentimes one of the arguments that people will make is they'll try to draw a distinction between Genesis one and Genesis two.

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And they'll try to say that, well, Genesis one was just poetry. Well, I don't have a problem actually with us acknowledging that there is a poetic nature to the way the

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Lord structured Genesis chapter one. I actually don't have a problem with, with acknowledging that from a, from the

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Hebrew language point of view, that there are structures there in Genesis one.

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But whoever said that poetry isn't what truly happened. Yeah. Right now, this last

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Sunday I preached on Deborah and Barack and the story in, in judges chapter four, this coming

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Sunday, I will be preaching on Deborah and Barack and the song in judges chapter five.

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Well, you know what you find in the song are many of the details. So that is

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Hebrew poetry, right? Everybody will agree. Judges chapter five is Hebrew poetry, 100%, but you know what you find there the same details of the same story that really did happen in judges chapter four.

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So I actually don't have a problem. If, if people want to point out some nature of the structure of Genesis one, that to say that there's poetic parts in the way that it's put together, that doesn't make it not true.

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And I simply think that when we get to Genesis chapter two, verse four, what we pick up on is

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God explaining in more detail, the actual sixth day of creation when he created man and he created woman and he, and he authored the first marriage and he brought the animals about all that happened on the sixth of the day.

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And so I think that's clearly what's happening, but, but I just want to state those arguments that you sometimes kind of hear were maybe try to people get, try to get above people's heads and say, well, you guys just don't understand.

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This is Hebrew poetry. And if you really understood the language, then you listen, if you can read your

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English Bible and just read it for what it says, you can understand Genesis. Give the

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Bible, give the Bible to the man back in the hills of Arkansas, let him read it and tell you, and what he believes about the age of the earth.

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It'll be right. Yeah. Assuming he's a Christian. Yeah. He doesn't have to know

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Hebrew. Oh, we're, we're supportive of the original language. Yes. Yes. But I'm just saying the average everyday rule church member.

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Yes. And I understand these things. That's right. And, and, and, and I think we, I think we kind of know, you know, innately,

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I think it, you know, when we start talking about millions of years, I mean, it's really kind of like, it really is a fan, a fantasy, you know, like we got started.

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We'll end kind of where we started. These people saw dinosaurs. That's because the source didn't live millions years old.

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Let me just make an exhortation to pastor. Like this isn't every Sunday, of course, but when it comes up, like preach this stuff unapologetically, like this is where we stand.

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The age of the earth is it's not old. It's young. You don't have to be apologetic about you got members in your church.

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They may disagree. They may have different, different positions on that. And that's okay. We can, and the sense of that, we can be gracious with them.

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We can be patient with them. And we can explain over the course of time, the, the realities, but you don't have to be apologetic about it.

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And nor, nor is, nor let me say this. Is this an issue where you're like, well, you know, some people believe this and people play that.

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I'm just going to take a neutral position. No, don't do that. Stand upon what the word of God teaches and know your people.

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When, when you come across information too, like we don't need science to confirm the

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Bible, but because the Bible is enough, we should trust the Bible in and of itself. But it is interesting and encouraging.

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Sometimes when things come along, you're like, Hey, look, these people saw the dinosaurs. Well, that, that fits exactly with what

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I believe. So it's okay to, to, to show those things too. Like, like, like, let me just be clear.

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I'm not, I don't care. When people share the art, the articles, they found Noah's Ark. Like, I don't care about those things.

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Right. I'm like, Noah's Ark. I already know it happened. How? Cause I got the

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Bible already. No, we found evidence for a worldwide flood again. That's great.

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That's encouraging, but I already knew it. How come? Cause I got the Bible and same with the age of the earth.

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We found evidence that maybe the earth is not as old as we thought it was. That's great. I like to encourage people that, but at the end of the day, the scripture is enough.

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And so this is a biblical issue for me. So teach these things and don't, don't be afraid. It's okay.

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The rural church is going to take over the world. Yep. Well, and, and, and I would also say to something you said earlier, you know, you think about examples like when the sun stood still in Joshua and a lot of people say, oh, we know that couldn't have happened.

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No, no. What we have learned about the cosmos should only make us be more at all because we know to a greater degree what

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God had to do supernaturally in the cosmos to cause that to happen.

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Like instead of us saying, oh no, because the earth is rotating and it's going around the sun and there are all these variables.

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So there's no way the sun could have stood still. Instead we ought to say, oh man, we know even, even to a greater degree than they knew then just how far

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God had to go in the, in controlling every aspect of the universe so that the sun could stand still.

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I need to say again, Eddie, we really will end here. A man can't die and come back to life.

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That's right. So I don't understand the Christians that have a problem with the supernatural when our whole religion is built upon the supernatural, the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.

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All the sun couldn't stand still. Jesus couldn't get up out of the grave. That's right. This is the

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God we serve and this is the gospel that we preach. And so you got anything else? No.

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I hope you found this episode profitable. We hope that, I don't know when this is coming out, but whenever time of the year this is out, we hope that you're having a good time of year, spring or summer, whichever that may be.

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Thank you for joining us on this week of the Rural Church Podcast. Sign us off,

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Edward. See you guys next week. If you really believe the church is the building, the church is the house, the church is what

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God's doing. This, this is his work. If we really believe what Ephesians says, we are the poimos, the masterpiece of God.