Book of 2 Peter - Ch. 3, Vs. 1-6 (03/06/2022)

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being out of the water and in the water, whereby the world that then was being overflowed with water perished.

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Let us pray. Most gracious heavenly Father, we thank you for bringing us together again this morning.

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Thank you for giving us the technology to reach out and worship with people that cannot be here today.

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Bless us and keep us, go through all the services today. We want to especially thank you for your son and the scripture and the

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Holy Spirit to help us interpret it. Bless us and keep us and go through all the services today. In Jesus' name we pray, amen.

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So, verse one. This second epistle

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I now write unto you in both which I stir up your pure minds by way of remembrance.

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There is some debate about who wrote 2 Peter. This should kind of put it to rest.

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Whoever wrote the first Peter wrote 2 Peter. And we're pretty sure that Peter wrote both of them.

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In any case, I write now unto you in both which

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I stir up your pure minds by way of remembrance. And I wanted to begin with the question, remembrance of what?

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Remembering what he and the other apostles wrote as well as the entire

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Old Testament. In other words, he's stirring up the remembrance of the Holy Spirit.

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Now, pure in this verse means uncontaminated, not spoiled by seductive influences of the world, the flesh and the devil.

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And I'd like to take a moment this morning as we begin to consider how different these true believers were from the corrupt apostate false teachers that we studied last time.

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And so I'm gonna go back to chapter two of 2 Peter.

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And chapter two, verse one. But there were false prophets also among the people, even as there shall be false teachers among you, who privilege shall bring in damnable heresies, even denying the

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Lord that bought them, and bring upon themselves swift destruction. And now

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I skip down to verse nine and continued. The Lord knoweth how to deliver the godly out of temptations and to reserve the unjust until the day of judgment to be punished.

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And then he spells it out more clearly. But chiefly, them that walk after the flesh in the lust of uncleanliness, despise government, presumptuous are they, self -willed.

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They're not afraid to speak evil of dignities. Whereas angels, which are of greater power and might, bring not railing accusation against them before the

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Lord. But these, these false teachers, as natural brute beasts made to be taken and destroyed, speak evil of things that they understand not, and shall utterly perish in their own corruption.

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And they shall receive the reward of unrighteousness as they that count it pleasure to riot in the daytime.

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These false teachers, and we mentioned this last time, are so corrupt that they do not even attempt to hide their evil deeds.

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And as we get closer and closer to the end times, they become more and more corrupt.

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In fact, it's already gotten to the point that it seems to me that they feel it's not sufficient to refrain from hiding their corruption, but they feel compelled to flaunt it.

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Spots they are, blemishes, sporting themselves with their own deceivings while they feast with you.

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Having eyes full of adultery that cannot cease from sinning, beguiling, unstable souls, and heart they have exercised with covetous practices.

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Cursed children. And then in verse 21, for it had been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than after they have known it, to turn from the holy commandment delivered unto them.

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Now there's a grain of truth hidden in this passage, as there are grains of truth hidden all through the scripture.

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Ignorance of the way is better than rejection of sin.

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Ignorance of the way. Though both lead to condemnation, rejection leads to a greater condemnation.

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So it's better not to have even known the way than to know it and reject it. Okay, back to 2

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Peter chapter three, verse one. This second epistle, beloved,

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I now write unto you, in both which I stir up your pure minds by way of remembrance, that ye may be mindful of the words which were spoken before by the holy prophets and of the commandment of us, the apostles of the

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Lord and Savior. Peter is telling his readers to listen to the words of the scripture.

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All the scripture. The Old Testament and the New Testament. To listen to the scripture rather than the words of the false teacher.

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Now, the words which were spoken before refer to the entire Old Testament. They wrote, the prophets wrote and spoke

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God's word, which was the task of a prophet. And they look forward in some sense to the coming

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Messiah and of the judgment that was to follow. Now, if that wasn't enough,

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John MacArthur adds this, and he's now speaking of the New Testament. The apostles of Christ fill 260 chapters of the

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New Testament with about 300 references to the second coming. New Testament revelation about Christ coming together his own, warnings about eschatological judgments, information about the establishment of his kingdom, teaching concerning God's bringing in eternal righteousness are all irrefutable proof for the second coming of Christ and the judgment of the wicked.

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Now, we need that as a preface to what's coming up now. Verse three, knowing this first.

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Now, not first in order of being spoken, but first in importance.

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Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers walking after their own lust.

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Peter's priority in this section of his letter is to warn Christians about how false teachers would try to deny this judgment and steal the hope of the believer.

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Scoffers will come. False teachers will argue against the second coming. In fact, they will argue against any teacher of teaching of the scripture through ridicule.

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This argument against the second coming of Christ is based on the theory of uniformitarianism, which says that all natural phenomena have operated uniformly since the beginning of the earth.

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False teachers are also implying that God is absent from earth affairs.

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In effect, they're teaching that there will not be a great cataclysmic judgment at the end of history because that's not the way the universe works.

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There has never been such a judgment, so why should we expect one in the future?

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Instead, they are teaching, everything in the universe is stable, closed, fixed, and governed by never varying patterns and principles.

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Nothing catastrophic has ever happened in the past, so nothing catastrophic will ever happen in the future.

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There will be no divine invasion, no supernatural judgment on mankind. Well, let's look at what they say now.

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Knowing this first, there shall come in the last days scoffers walking after their own lust and saying, where is the promise of his coming?

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For since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation.

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Now, there have been catastrophic events in the past, events that these scoffers simply choose to ignore.

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They chose to ignore them in Peter's time, they chose to ignore them, they choose to ignore them now, and they will continue to ignore them until they're faced with the reality of them, that things are not the same as they always are.

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Things do change, catastrophic things happen. Peter points out one, the worldwide flood, in which the entire world and everything in it was altered.

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That's pretty catastrophic. The worldwide flood should certainly count and could certainly count as a catastrophe.

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But there's an even more catastrophic event that happened earlier. Anybody care to guess what it is?

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What was more catastrophic than the flood? The fall, the fall of man.

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I mean, it involved, I don't know, did the fall of man involve more people than were involved in the flood or less people?

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And every single person that ever lives. And ever will live. It, the fall, affected even more than the flood.

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The flood was only affecting those that were alive on the earth at the time of the flood. The fall, much more catastrophic.

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And Romans 8, 22 tells us this. For we know that the whole creation groaneth and trevelleth in pain together until now.

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It wasn't just people that were affected by the fall, it was everything was affected by the fall.

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And there is an even earlier event. This one, not catastrophic.

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This one, from the beginning of creation, an event unlike any other events, the creation itself.

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We're now gonna look at two of the three events that changed all the rules.

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We'll look at the ones in the past and we'll look at one more in the future. And that one more in the future will be the

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Great White Throne Judgment, after which all the rules will change for a final time.

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The reason we're gonna look at two of them, not three, is we looked at the flood a couple of weeks ago and I don't have time to do the flood again.

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So we're gonna do creation, the fall, and that will do us for today, if I get through with that.

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First, the creation. In the beginning,

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God created the heaven and the earth and the earth was without form and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep.

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And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

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That's Genesis 1, verses one and two. In the beginning, that was the beginning of the physical universe.

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It was also the beginning of Chi, but it was not the beginning of God.

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God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, all three already existed when time and the universe began.

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So there is something before time began, before there was a universe, there was something that existed before then, and that was

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God, the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And God said, let there be light, and there was light.

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That's the first word spoken by God, let there be light. Now, our first question for today is, how did he do it?

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How did God create light? He spoke it into existence as he did everything else that he created.

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He spoke light into existence. We have in Psalms 33, six, by the word of God were the heavens made, and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth.

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He spoke and they became. In Psalms 148, five, let them praise the name of the

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Lord, for he commanded and they were created. He spoke and they were created.

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All that it took was a word from God. Now, what did he create?

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He created light, and this light dispelled the darkness that we read about in verse two.

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There was darkness on the face of the earth. Now, you understand, the greater and lesser lights, the sun and the moon, we're in day one.

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They weren't created yet. The sun and the moon were created on the fourth day.

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So what's providing the light here? It's not the sun.

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Not? Spell it differently. Spell it differently. Okay, I surrender.

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You are absolutely, totally, 100 % right. I used the word

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God instead, and I was rebelling against the sun producing the light, but you gave me a different sun.

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God was the direct provider of light. In 2 Corinthians 4, six,

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Paul tells us, for God, that would be the sun. God the sun, Jesus, commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our heart to give the light of knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

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Now, you need to pick up something out of that. Light, what kind of light did he give?

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He gave physical light for sure, but that's not really the light we're talking about.

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What does this light do? The light of the knowledge of the glory of God, the light of the knowledge of the glory of God, and in the eternity, future eternity,

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God will again be the direct source of light. We see in Revelation 21, 23, the city had no need of the sun,

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S -U -N, neither the moon to shine in it for the glory of God, enlighten it.

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And the S -O -N, sun, lamb, is the light thereof.

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So clearly there are two kinds of light, spiritual light and physical light.

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I could, but Moses didn't.

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He called it light. And God saw the light, that it was good.

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And God divided the light from the darkness. Now, I've got some science people in here today.

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What do we know about light? In science, we learned that dark is the absence of light, not a kind of light.

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So how can God be dividing light? Well, maybe he's not talking about physical light at all.

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Maybe he's talking about spiritual light. And what I believe in, I want to stress,

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I put this in boldface back for me to make sure I said this, I believe, and you can take it or not take it,

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I may be wrong. I've been wrong a bunch. What I really believe is physical light is a model or an image of spiritual light.

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Spiritual light goes much further than physical light. It's not physical light itself.

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It is only a model or an image of a greater kind of light, spiritual light.

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In any case, Moses goes on to continue describing the creation. And we get to verse five, and he says this.

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And God called the light day and the darkness he called night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

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Now, I owe this to Chuck Missler, who is dead and gone, and he knows now whether he was right or not.

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I think he was. He brought this to my attention.

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It's odd for God to define the day that way. In the

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Western world, technically, when do we begin our day? Midnight.

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Technically, we begin the day at midnight. And when do we end the day? Midnight the next night, right?

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But operationally, that's not what we do. When do we begin our day? When did you begin your day this morning?

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Whoops. When did you begin your day? This morning when you got up. So we begin our day in the morning when we wake up and end it when we retire for the night.

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We spend our day working and then we go to bed and we rest. So we begin our day with work and we end it with rest.

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First part of our day, operationally, work. Second part, rest. Now, God started his week the same way, beginning with a day of work and ending with a day of rest.

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Rest. So why did he begin the day with rest and end it with work?

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He began his week with work and ended it with rest. Why did he begin the day with rest?

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Why did he begin the day with work and end it with... I got it all confused.

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Why did he begin the day with rest and end it with work? He began the week with work and ended it with rest.

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We begin our day with work and end it with rest. But he began the days of creation with rest and ended it with work.

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And Mr. said this, there is a hint of something that may be deeper. And I'm gonna lay this out for you.

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And again, you can reject it or accept it. Entropy laws reveal that the universe is winding down.

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Science predicts that the universe is becoming more and more disorderly and that will continue until all order is lost, resulting in what they call, scientists call, the heat death of the universe.

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You've heard the story of Humpty Dumpty. I can recite that if you wish.

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Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put

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Humpty Dumpty together again. What does that tell you? You can't unbreak an egg. If you see an unbreak, an egg unbreak, you know time's traveling backward because that's not the way time works.

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We go from order to disorder. Now, he also mentioned, this is

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Missler, if the universe is winding down, obviously it must have been wound up.

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This winding up or reduction of entropy or infusion of order is described in Genesis 1 in a series of six stages, six days of creation.

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Now, the days, the terms used to describe this progressive reduction of entropy are avar and volcar, which ultimately led to their being translated evening and morning, as we'll see in just a second.

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Avar originally meant dark, obscure, randomness, and it corresponds to maximum entropy.

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As darkness envelops our horizon, we lose the ability to discern order and patterns.

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The darkness is without form and void. From this term, we derive the concept of evening.

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When the encroaching darkness begins to deny us the ability to discern forms, shapes, and identities.

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So that's avar, that's evening. That's disorder, that's chaos. Volcar originally meant order and design.

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It corresponds to the advent of light where things begin to become discernible and visible.

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Order begins to appear. This relief of obscurity and the attendant ability to begin to discern forms, shapes, and identities has become associated with dawn or morning.

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So evening and morning then reveal the principal stages of creation. Six evenings and six mornings became the days corresponding to the creation week.

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Now I'm gonna reread the opening of the book. And just remember, every time you see darkness, every, let's just do it.

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In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth and the earth was without form. That is to say it was not in its final form.

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And it was void, it was empty of life. And darkness, chaos and disorder was on the face of the deep.

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And the spirit of God moved upon the faces of the water. And you may notice this, even among all the chaos and disorder, everything is observed and controlled by God.

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And God said, let there be light. And there was light.

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And God saw the light, that it was good. And God divided the light order from the darkness disorder and called the light day and the darkness he called night.

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And the evening and the morning were the first day. So what happened on the first day of creation?

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Some chaos, all chaos became some order. So day one of creation, order was created where there was once only disorder.

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Abraham Booker, from disorder to order, day one. So day one of creation is complete.

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And along with it, one cycle of disorder to order. Where there was once nothing, there is now something.

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Where there was once chaos, there is now design. Now look at the last sentence we read.

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And evening and morning were the first day. Keep that phrase in mind. And we're gonna go a little bit later into chapter one of Genesis.

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Go to verse 31. I'd like for you to actually go there. Genesis one, verse 31.

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And I'm gonna ask you a question. Did you find the phrase evening and morning in that verse?

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And God saw everything that he had made and behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.

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Now let's scroll along down to the last day of creation. That would be found in verse 31.

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That's the one we just did, isn't it? We looked at the first verse, evening and morning was there. We now look at the verse 31 and evening and morning is there.

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Now we're gonna go one more day. We've done the six days of creation and now we're on the seventh day.

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And pop over to one verse, chapter two, verse one.

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We're gonna read three verses and you can look on further if you wish but I'm gonna stop after three.

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Thus the heaven and the earth were finished and all the host of them. And on the seventh day,

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God ended his work which he had made and he rested on the seventh day from all of his work which he had made.

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And God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it because in it he had rested from all his work which

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God had created and made. Now my next question is, did you find the phrase evening and morning in that passage?

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And you can look further if you want. On the seventh day, did you see the phrase evening and morning?

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What do you think the seventh day had in evening and a morning? It certainly did.

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So why was it not mentioned on the seventh day? Well, no, it's referencing what he did on the first six.

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What did he did on the first six? He took disorder and made order. He took disorder and made order.

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He took disorder and made order. He took disorder and made order. He did that six times. On the sixth time, he had done all he's gonna do.

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He stops, he rests, his work is done. So he didn't have to say evening and morning.

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He didn't do anything. He rested. Now, what's gonna happen at this stage is, go to verse eight, chapter two, verse eight.

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And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden. And there he put a man, the man he had formed.

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He did that back in the creation. Remember, back in the creation day, one of the days, he created man. And he created woman.

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And he put him in the garden, an almost perfect paradise into which

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God put man that he might have fellowship with him. And the

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Lord God commanded the man saying, of every tree thou mayest eat freely, a wonderful gift.

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Everything a man could want and need and only one rule, which gave him an opportunity to obey or to disobey.

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Now, what was that one rule? That's the next verse. But the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it.

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For in the day that thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die. Now, with that rule was an opportunity to obey or disobey.

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And if he had obeyed, one thing would have happened. If he disobeyed, a second thing is gonna happen.

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That rule has consequences. What was the consequences? He spells it out clearly.

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Adam knew that on the day you ate it, you shall surely die. Eve knew it too.

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So did the serpent. Now, the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field, which the

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Lord God had made. And he said unto the woman, yea, hath

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God said, ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden. Now, the tactics of Satan have not changed a bit over time.

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The first weapon in his arsenal is doubt. Doubt of the inerrancy of God's word.

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Doubt in what God says is true. If you don't believe every word in the

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Bible is true, then Satan has a foothold in your mind.

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Now, it's interesting to note that Eve's error was not one of omission.

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She didn't leave out anything God said. She added some of her own. And it was the stuff that she added on her own that gave her the opportunity to be deceived.

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And when the woman saw the tree was good for food and that it was pleasant to eat and a tree to be desired to make one wise, and by the way, it was also forbidden, she took the fruit thereof and did eat and gave it also with her husband with her and he did eat.

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So why did Eve eat? Because she was beguiled, bewitched.

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How do we know she was bewitched? Because Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians 11, three.

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But I fear lest any means as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtlety, so your mind should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ.

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What is Paul complaining about here? Paul is complaining about false teachers who are adding stuff to the gospel, stuff that will allow them to be tripped up just like Eve was tripped up.

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Now, why did Adam eat? As brother Otis would say, because he wanted to.

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We all do exactly what we want to do. And the eyes of both of them were opened and they knew that they were naked.

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And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons. Their eyes were open and both of them knew the difference between good and evil.

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Whereas before they had only known good. Now they knew both good and evil.

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Moreover, they knew evil in an intimate way. They knew because it had been corrupted by their own action.

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Their innocence, which was mentioned at the end of chapter two, I'll read that. You might go back. At the end of chapter two,

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Genesis 2 .25. And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.

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Their innocence has now been replaced with guilt and shame. Now they have to rely on their conscience.

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What's their conscience? This newly acquired ability to distinguish between good and evil.

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Now they know the difference between good and evil. It wasn't evil that they were naked.

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It was evil because they knew that they had disobeyed God. Their conscience revealed to them that they were unclean and not worthy to come into the presence of God.

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So what did they do? First, they tried to cover their sins.

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They made themselves aprons out of fig leaves. Did that work? No, they made the aprons they knew, and they still knew that they were naked.

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Actually, what they still knew is they had disobeyed God. They had no means of repairing the damage that they had done.

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There was nothing that they could do to undo. Just like Humpty Dumpty, there's nothing they could do to unbreak the egg that they had broken.

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They had no means of approaching God. They were in a real sense dead, just as God had warned.

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In fact, they had no desire even to approach God. In fact, just the opposite. When God approached them, what did they do?

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They hid from him. Verse eight, and they heard the voice of the Lord, the

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Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day. Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the

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Lord God among the trees of the garden. So why did they hide?

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Because they expected, yes, they knew they had disobeyed, and they expected a vengeful God. They expected

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God to come in and kill them. That's what he said he was gonna do. So what did they expect his judgment to be?

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They expected his judgment would be to kill them right then. And the

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Lord God called unto Adam and said unto him, where art thou? Now, do you think

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God didn't know where they were? They may have been expecting a vengeful

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God, but what they had was a loving, seeking

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God. And he said, and he said, this is

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God, this is, I'm sorry, this is Adam. And he said,

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I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked and hid myself.

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Now, Adam's answer indicates he has two new found emotions, fear and shame, both arising from his newly acquired knowledge of good and evil.

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Verse 11, and he said, this is now, this is God speaking. And he said, who told thee that thou was naked?

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Hath thou eaten of the tree whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?

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Now, here God gave Adam a perfect opportunity to confess. Adam probably should have said,

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Lord God, yes, I disobeyed you, I am so sorry. I repent of all the evil, do with me as you see fit.

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That's probably what he should say, but Adam didn't choose to do that.

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Adam chose to do what we always do. Adam chose to shift the blame.

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And you might ponder the outcome, had Adam chosen to repent? And I did ask the question, do you think that it surprised

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God that Adam chose to shift the blame rather than to repent? It didn't surprise

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God at all. And the man said, I want to ask you a question before I read this.

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As I read this, I want you to answer this question in your head, who is God blaming? Is he blaming

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Eve or is he blaming God? So here we go.

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And the man said, the woman whom thou gave us to be with me, she gave me the tree and I did eat.

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Who's he blaming? He's blaming God. Now, Eve also chose to shift the blame.

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He asked her the same question. And the Lord God said to the woman, what is this that thou hast done?

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And she could have said, I have sinned, I have disobeyed. I throw myself on your mercy.

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But she said, the serpent beguiled me and I did eat.

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Now, God to be just has to deal with sin. And so he does. First, he deals with creation.

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He curses everything. He curses the earth. Then he curses the serpent.

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Then Satan, the inhabitant of the serpent.

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Then Eve and then Adam. The all of creation is cursed, but a special curse on the serpent.

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And the Lord God said to the serpent, because thou hast done this thing, thou art cursed above all cattle, above every beast of the field.

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And upon thy belly shall thou go. The dust and dust shall they eat all the days of thy life.

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A quick question. What did God use to create

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Adam? Dust. Now the serpent is gonna crawl on his belly and eat dust.

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Is that telling me that the serpent and Satan are gonna prey on man all the rest of eternity or all the rest of before the final judgment?

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Well, we certainly can infer this. All creation was cursed and man along with it. Verse 15, and I will put enmity between thee and the woman and between thy seed and her seed.

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And it shall bruise thy head and thou shall bruise his heel. But along with the curse comes a message of salvation.

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What's the message of salvation? I will put enmity between thee and the woman and between thy seed,

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Satan's seed and her seed, and it shall bruise thy head and thou shall bruise his heel.

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Yes, Satan will have some short term advantage over the

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Messiah, but in the end, the Messiah will destroy. Satan.

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Bruise thy head. So along with the curse comes a message of salvation.

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Now it's true we shouldn't read into the scripture things that are not there, but it's just as true that we should study the scripture carefully to see what is there.

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Now, I am running way late, so I'm gonna skip the flood all together,

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I told y 'all to do that, and look at this. In reality, there are several sets of rules in play.

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Remember I told you there's the uniformitarianism, say that there's one set of rules that's in operation all the time, there's really several sets.

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There's one set from creation, one set during creation, and that was from chaos to order.

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And then another set from creation to the fall, and that's all order all the time.

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What that says is from the creation to the fall, there was no aging, there was no death.

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Then there's a third set from after the fall to the flood. That was from order to chaos.

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Entropy came into play. The second law of thermodynamics came into play.

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Aging, albeit slow, came into be.

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Death and decay. There's a fourth set from the flood to the final judgment.

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Order to disorder at a faster pace. Aging is faster, and death comes quicker.

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Do you know what the normal, typical lifespan of a human between the fall and the flood was, typical age?

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Around 900 years. What is it now?

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About 70 years. One of the obvious differences, people live 70 years in the present world instead of 900 years, which was the common age of pre -flood humans.

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And of course, we have no idea how old Adam was when he died.

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We do know this, after the fall, he lived 930 years. Adam, after the fall, lived 930 years.

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That's only 39 years less than Methuselah, who was the oldest recorded living person.

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What we have no idea is about Abraham, and not Abraham, Adam is, how many years he spent in the garden before the fall.

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He could have spent 100 ,000 years. He could have spent two days. We don't know.

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I doubt that he fell on, I doubt that Adam and Eve fell on the first day they were put in the garden. I suspect it took a while for them to begin to be resentful of the fact that they were told they couldn't eat one of the trees.

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They could do everything else, only one rule to follow, but eventually they couldn't follow it, and they fell.

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Well, that will give us a good stopping point for today. Most gracious heavenly father, thank you for this day, and thank you for all the many blessings.

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Protect us, keep us, go through all the services today. Help us to understand what you want us to understand.

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Help brother David as he goes through his sermon today to deliver a message that we can take and bring into our hearts, and with the aid of the

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Holy Spirit, interpret exactly what the Holy Spirit wants each one of us to gather from his sermon.