June 12, 2024 Show with David Reece on “The History of the World from Creation Until Now” (Part 1)

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Iron Trip and Zion Radio Pastors Luncheon. But today I'm excited to have back a returning guest, someone who is obviously growing in popularity in the

Iron Trip and Zion Radio audience, judging from comments and feedback and praise reports

I hear from listeners. His name is David Reese, Pastor of Puritan Reform Church in Phoenix, Arizona, and the

CEO of ArmoredRepublic .com, and we are addressing

Part 1 of a multi -part series. We're not even sure how many parts this will cover.

When Pastor Reese originally said that he wanted to address this subject in two parts,

I said, how on earth is that even possible? Because our theme is the history of the world from creation until now.

So it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Trip and Zion Radio, Pastor David Reese.

Brother, thank you for having me on. It's an honor to be here, and I'll try to figure out how to make sure to cover at least a millennium and a half this time.

Well, as always, I want you to either remind our listeners who have heard you before or inform people hearing you for the first time in our audience about Puritan Reform Church in Phoenix, Arizona.

Puritan Reform Church, praise the Lord, we've been growing. We actually just moved into a larger building.

Our previous building had kind of reached capacity, and so we are at a new location that's about a mile away from our old one.

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Bible, and our concern is to see the doctrine, worship, and government of the church have all of the things taught that are revealed in the

Word and to have no additions. So obviously, we are imperfect.

We're going to fail at that. But our goal is to be careful, to make sure that the

Word that's taught is what Christ revealed, not adding human tradition. And the same with the worship, and the same with the government.

And so that's our concern. Our desire is to see men discipled and raised up so that they can lead their homes well and encourage them to be good masters of the home, husbands and fathers, and to work with their wives as queens to govern their home together well and to build an estate so they can pass on not only wealth, but also wisdom, having been trained to their children so that dominion can increase and the knowledge of God can fill the earth as the waters cover the sea.

Amen. And an armored republic, we manufacture tools of liberty. We create tools of liberty to equip free men to defend their

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Well, let's begin where you would like to begin in the history of the world from creation until now.

Absolutely. So my intention is to acknowledge the fact that God has emphasized things that he wants us to know in history.

And so he begins the scriptures with telling us about creation.

And so I think that one of the things I really like to emphasize with people when they're growing in the faith early on is that the first nine chapters of Genesis provide for people an outline of the origin of all of the covenant institutions that God has made.

So the individual, the household, the church, and the state. And then you see, getting through Abraham's life, you see basically some really huge plot points.

You see the covenant of works with Adam. You see the covenant of grace with Adam.

You see with Noah, the covenant of grace with additional powers given to man and a change of how the administration of the covenant works.

And then when you get to Abraham, you have the same thing occurring there. And so those are three big plot points in the scripture that are all captured in a small space.

And by the time you get to Genesis 25, Abraham has died and is buried. And so that space of what happens there with creation in 404

BC, Abraham dies in about the year 1800

BC. So Usher's number is 1821 BC. So anybody who doesn't have

Pastor Usher's, James Usher's Annals of World History, you are missing out.

It is a magnificent book. I would strongly encourage people to get that. Also, Floyd Nolan Jones has a magnificent book on the chronology of the

Old Testament that has all sorts of great stuff. And Pastor Philip Kaiser has done a number of enormous things, wonderful things there.

So I just want to point those things out before I go into the more details.

But when we think about the beginning of Genesis, in Genesis chapter one, you have creation from nothing.

So we're introduced to this God who is eternal. He's outside of time. And he creates the heavens and the earth.

And he begins time. And one of the things that's interesting about the beginning of time is when you start to think about time, there's this question of what is time?

I tricked you, everybody. We were talking about history. Now I'm going into abstruse points of philosophy.

But the question of what time is, Augustine has some really wonderful things that he wrote where he talks about the idea that it's necessary that in the beginning, when

God first created time, he created the heavens and the earth. And we need to remember that the heavens would include the three heavens, right?

There's the heaven with the throne of God. There is what we think of as kind of space or outer space.

And then there's the atmosphere. And those are the three heavens. When Paul talks about the third heaven, he's talking about where the throne of God is.

And so when we engage with the reality that God created the heavens and the earth, that there's this question of when did the angels get created?

And Augustine puts forward the idea that it's necessary that the angels were created at the first moment because there needed to be, in order for time to properly exist, there needs to be a created mind that is thinking in succession.

And so the question of what is time, you know, a lot of people, we live in an age where we think of time principally in terms of the movement of physical material.

And that's because to a large extent, we are coming out of the modern era where there was a sort of domination of empiricism, where people thought about how you know things using experience as kind of the principal way of knowing.

Well, the Christian way of dealing with knowledge is to say that the word of God is infallible and that we have certainty because of the revelation of the thoughts of God given to us, the propositional content of the scriptures.

And so when we think about time, we should think about, yes, there's certainly a change that occurs in the physical world that occurs one thing after another.

But there are also the changes of minds. And so at the beginning, in the beginning,

God created the heavens and the earth. And what happens there is he's creating the angels in terms of there being spirits that are thinking, that are observing what

God is doing. And so there are thinkers that are observing from the first moment, at the first moment they're made and they're observing the work of God.

And so God's glory is on display to creatures, rational creatures from that beginning time.

And so we have the contrast there with God who is infinite, eternal and unchangeable versus we have now angels that are finite and temporal, so they change.

And so that idea of being temporal and being changeable and being finite, that's the difference between a creature and God.

God alone is infinite, eternal and unchangeable. And so we're introduced to the difference between God and creation by implication right there.

And we have this introduction to God in terms of his essence as the infinite, eternal and unchangeable one.

And we have the angels as observers, as a part of what's made with the heavens. And so there's the earth without form, it's without, and it's void and there's darkness.

And so we have this idea that there's formlessness, so God's created, but it hasn't taken on the proper order and it's void, it hasn't been filled.

And the darkness makes it so there's no differentiation between things. You can't really see the difference.

And what God is going to do in the rest of the creation process is he's going to form more to give more order.

He's going to fill more to replace the void. And he's going to cause the difference between darkness and light.

And so we can see the difference. And this is the magnificence of the glory of God on display.

As he has by his mere word, by his own power, he has made from nothing.

And now he's going to take and order and fill and differentiate.

And so we're introduced to the spirit of God hovering over the waters. And then in Genesis 3 we're introduced to the voice of God that he spoke.

And so this is often asserted by Christians as the first introduction of the Trinity, that we have the Father, the

Spirit, and the Son all being introduced there. And I think that that idea that we have

God and the triunity of God introduced here and the distinction between the creator and the creature, all of that there magnificently.

And then because we're so dumb that we wouldn't pick that up, God reveals all those things far more plainly and far more clearly and explains all of those things.

But there's sort of this seed of those doctrines all right there. And we begin to get into – we realize we're already in the first day of the time of creation.

And we have light and darkness being differentiated and the heavens and the earth being differentiated.

And we have a definition that's given to us of what the first day even means when we get to chapter 1, verse 5.

And it says, God called the light day and the darkness he called night. So the evening and the morning were the first day.

Now that right there, when you read the scriptures, your goal has to be to look for what the meaning of the literature is using the rules of grammar and context and trying to read in a logically coherent way.

And when we do that, what we find is this text has plainly taught us that there's a day that's defined as having evening and morning.

And we know that the evening is the night, the darkness. And we know that the morning is the light, the day.

And so those things are given to us in definition right there. And as we read about the other days, we need to realize this is not talking about some enormous, you know, eon.

This is not talking about millennia. This is not talking about billions of years or millions of years.

This is the God who created from nothing ordering the world in six days.

So he creates and orders, and then he ends that work of creation and just carries on the work of providence.

We're going to see when we get to the seventh day. But so that idea right there, we need to recognize that there's definition that occurs right there.

And people that want to take the book of Genesis and say it's not history, they want to make it a myth or a legend, what they're doing is they're making it so the whole

Bible has to be that. Because there's no way to read the book of Genesis from the beginning and find a place where it goes from myth to history.

It's giving us from the beginning definitions and clarity about time frames. And so what happens is you end up throwing away the book of Genesis.

You have to throw away, therefore, Jesus Christ. Because if you don't accept that the book of Genesis is history, then

Paul's analysis and Jesus' analysis is something that just becomes them misunderstanding, and they become primitive men who didn't understand that Genesis was a myth.

So we have to start with Genesis recognizing that God's word is true, that it's giving to us in Genesis a history.

And what we're getting is his history here first with creation that was observed by the angels and that they will bear testimony about that on the day of judgment, that they have seen it.

But also then we're going to see as there's creation coming, we get to man at the sixth day.

So that first day has all sorts of powerful things packed in there, including the definition for us of thinking about these days as literal times of darkness versus light.

And one of the big objections that comes up is people will say, well, you know, there's not even the sun yet. How can you have day and night?

Well, the sun becomes a tool. God creates the sun as a tool for the light and the darkness.

But the idea that the light and the darkness are what differentiate day and night is already given to us.

And so then the sun becomes a tool to differentiate. So we need to recognize that the definition of a day does not depend upon the sun, but rather the sun was made as the tool by God for the purpose of having the days be ordered.

So if we move to day two, day two has the ordering of the heavens and the water cycle.

And there's this preparing of the heavens and the sea to supply the land.

And so the water cycle is something that, you know, people there, you see the word firmament and people have all sorts of weird thoughts about it.

You know, whether you read Augustine or Calvin, all sorts of older fathers of the faith, not just modern people, understood the firmament being talked about to be the atmosphere, the first heaven.

And so the idea is that there's a separation of water from water. And this is so important in this chunk of text here.

You have this idea of the dividing of waters. And the dividing of the waters is the water below the sea.

And then you have the water above, which becomes, is the clouds, which provides the rain cycle. And real quickly, just if anybody doubts that that is what is being dealt with, by the time you get to Genesis chapter two,

Genesis chapter two starts a sort of recapitulation of some of the information that's already been given earlier.

It tells us things we've already heard. Then it gives us also additional information. And it starts out by talking about in chapter two, verses four through seven, we have the two big things that God talks about being important are the establishment of the system of rain, where mist rises up and waters the face of the ground.

And then also the making of man. Now these things are both going to be talked about in the original portion of Genesis, the earlier portion of Genesis in chapter one and the first part of chapter two, where we're laying out some of these two really big things that matter are the rain cycle, how water comes to the earth, so that the land can be nourished and also the formation of man.

And so those things get highlighted in chapter two, but that helps you to understand that this is a really important thing.

So the emphasis of God on the second day of making the water cycle, that is so key.

And you find this emphasized in other places of scripture, where there's this idea that God causes the water cycle, like in Ecclesiastes, it gets talked about, for example, and how important that is for the continuation of life and how things continue to work.

So that's a huge deal. This ordering of the atmosphere and of the sea, so that then the water can be taken to the earth, so that the lands are watered for man's habitation.

We get into the third day and the third day is in Genesis one verses nine to 13.

And it talks about the ordering of the land of the sea, the separation. So we had on the first day, the division of light and darkness.

Then we get into this idea of the, you know, the atmosphere and the waters for rain, of the clouds and the waters of the sea being divided.

And then we have this differentiation of land and sea. So all of these dividings, this is showing the logical nature of God.

Oh, he is ordering things in a logical way. And he is ordering things so as to show the difference of things.

And so we, we, we see God's logical beauty, his wisdom, his logos on display as he's making and differentiating these things.

And so he prepares the land. He differentiates it and he fills the land with all sorts of plants.

And these plants are going to be useful for the beasts of the field and for man. And the beasts of the field are also going to be useful for man, but they're not made yet on that third day.

And so we get to the fourth day and what happens is you end up with the things that populate sort of the second heaven.

We, and they are seen through the firmament through the atmosphere. And these things are the sun and the moon and the stars, the things that are, that are lights.

And we have this, the sun is a great light for day and we have the moon as a, a night, a lesser light to govern the night.

And it is given to us for the purpose of signs. We have, for example, the sign of the star that was given to the wise men that were seeking

Jesus. There's the seasons, the idea of, of knowing when you're supposed to deal with things with crops and instinct, things like that for days, differentiating day and night.

And it also days as they fit into the year, we differentiate years. And so this has given to us this elaborate clock, this, this grand calendar of the cosmos.

And so God gives to us all of these things for, for time ordering.

And he, he allows this to have a, a physical external way of dealing with the measurement of time, as well as the internal experience of the passage of time, the succession of thoughts.

And so there's this grand visual change that occurs. And so you think things like, like Psalm 19, it talked about the sun running like a strong man to, to run a race.

And the idea that so many people have worshiped the sun in history, but the sun is changeable and it's finite.

And so in, in thinking about any of these things, the, the heavens, as we think about them, where any voice exists in the world, you cannot escape the thought that these things are not infinite, eternal, and unchangeable.

And so we are, we are foolish. If we suppress the truth and unrighteousness and, and worship the creature rather than the creator was blessed forever.

Amen. So, well, we have to go to our first break right now. So we'll pick up right where you left off there.

And I probably should have asked you this before we went on the air, but I'm going to leave it up to you because we have so much information to cover.

Do you want me to open up for listener questions or would you rather we postpone the listener questions to one of the other parts in the series we're doing?

Why don't we see where we are after the second segment? And maybe we can, maybe we can do questions at the end in the fourth segment.

Okay. Sounds good to me, but don't go away. We'll be right back. Puritan Reformed is a

Bible believing kingdom building, devil fighting church. We are devoted to upholding the apostolic doctrine and practice preserved in scripture alone.

Puritan Reformed teaches men to rule and lead as image bearing, prophets, priests, and Kings.

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We're now back with pastor David Reese of Puritan reform church in Phoenix, Arizona and CEO of armored republic .com.

And if you could, pastor Reese pick up where you left off as we continue today's discussion of the history of the world from creation until now.

Right. Thank you brother. So we had just talked about the idea that there is a, on the fourth day,

God gave the, he filled the heavens for signs, seasons, days, and years. Did they have a greater light and lesser light to govern the night?

So on day five we have is we had previously been dealing with God was, was, was forming that which was formless.

He's differentiating things and now we're going to have the filling work where he's taking the void and filling it.

And so there was this darkness, he enlightens, he differentiates. And so we have that all of that work of God.

So what we get to in what we get to in day five is this filling of the first heaven with, with flying beasts.

And we get to the sea also being filled with fish. So the sort of the swimming beasts.

And so now what's happening is the air and the sea are both being made more useful for man as these creatures are there, but also there's a way in which

God is displaying his creative powers and beauty in all of that. So this filling work and that's all symbolic pointing to the ultimately the commission is going to give to man.

And so we get to six day six and there's the filling of the land. We have beasts, but we also have man being created.

So the beasts are prepared and the beasts are useful to man even before the fall because some of them can perform different tasks.

You think about a horse and let you travel quickly. You think about a camel and its ability to travel through some sort of a desert.

You think about an ox and its capacity to tread out the grain. It can deal with a heavy amount of labor.

So there's different utility or different animals as well as just the sheer display of God's order and beauty and creating things.

But he creates the kinds and this is in contrast to evolution. We think about evolution and evolution is presented as sort of this process where you have the animals that are killing each other, the red and tooth and claw from the beginning.

You've got the vast, you know, billions of years to try to justify the gradual changes and formations of things, the changes of things.

So you have this, you know, all these problems that are coming up. The Christian story, the Christian meta narrative, the grand story of Christianity, it is something that doesn't have logical problems, has things that people attack and make fun of, but it doesn't have logical problems.

What we have with the logical problems of, for example, of atheism or anything that has a changeable

God is you can't have everything having been around forever because time itself, if time has been going on for an infinite amount of time, you have a logical contradiction.

You have the idea that a infinite series has been completed. And so you have to have a God that's outside of time to deal with the problem that infinite time doesn't work.

So God is outside of time. And this is, we're getting the initial portion of the timeline. And so time itself is created.

It begins with the creation of the heavens and the earth and the angels. And so as we proceed down the timeline, we're seeing there's also not only, you know, how do we deal with the issue of time, but we're dealing with how, how does life come about?

Well, you know, evolution is going to ultimately have what's called a biogenesis, a non -biological creation of life.

And, and you're going to have essentially, you know, sort of rock slime that is, that is the stuff from which microorganisms come and then from which more complex organisms, and then eventually you get man.

And the other problem that you have is if there's no such thing as objective truth, and there's no mind that thinks truth, you go from non -thinking to thinking.

And all of a sudden now truth is created by matter and truth is, is therefore changeable and has a beginning.

And so you've got these three big issues where you go, where does time come from and start?

Where does, where does the, the, the world that is changeable come from? And you've got this issue of where does life come from?

And you've got this issue of where does thought and truth come from. And when we start to have thinkers, as we have man being created on day six, you also have the issue of is there any meaning to choice?

Do we have a basis for choosing one thing versus another? Is there a definition of good?

And without God, you don't have that. And so R .C. Sproul famously likes to ask atheists, you know, what do you do with your guilt?

And he doesn't say, do you have guilt? He says, what do you do with your guilt? And that was one of these things that he would use as a, as a thing to show, you know, if you're not dealing seriously with the psychological difficulties of atheism or of, or of all the false religions that don't have a way of dealing with guilt.

So all of these things, these problems we see Christianity, it has answers as we get to the issue of guilt and the fall.

There's also an answer for that that gets presented in Genesis three. So we'll wait and we'll get to the answer of guilt as we get to Genesis three.

But in day six, at the end of Genesis chapter one, day six, you have the filling of the land with beasts.

You have man being made and you have man being given a covenant of works and you have man being given dominion.

And you have this explanation that he is the image of God. Now the covenant of works is going to be explained more in Genesis two, but the fact that man is the image of God is laid out that he's male and female.

And we have an answer to all of these all the nonsense that's going on with transgenderism and everything now. And, and, and the reality that there's a difference between man and woman.

And we know that there's only two genders because God made man and he made him male and female.

And so we have man and man is also, he has dominion over the creation.

He's not under it. He's not a servant of it. He, he rules it to use it to glorify

God. And he's made as the image of God. And as the image of God, we know he's a rational being.

He's a, he's a thinker. And we are told elsewhere in scripture that that image is knowledge, holiness, and righteousness.

So the image of God is rationality and rationality implies that there's thought, content, knowledge.

It implies that there's purpose, which is when properly formed holiness. And it implies that there's choice and rightly formed choices, righteousness.

So rightly formed thought content is knowledge. Rightly formed purpose is holiness and rightly formed choice is righteousness.

So these, this idea that man is a rational creature, he's given authority, the authority, the dominion is not the image of God.

The dominion is something that requires that a man be rational to have dominion, but God grants authority over specific things, over, over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, over the cattle, over all the earth and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.

God grants the authority, but the authority gets defined for us in different ways at different times.

God, for example, Genesis nine is going to grant the authority to eat some of these things. And so what we find is that God is the one who gives the authority.

Dominion is not something that's inherent in man, but rather that God has granted authority.

What's inherent in man is the being the image of God being rational. So as we move on, we find that there's this commission that's given and this commission is a, is a mandate.

It's sometimes called the dominion mandate or the culture mandate. And the mandate is this be fruitful and multiply.

So the being fruitful and multiplying here, this is for filling the earth, right?

Fill the earth and subdue it. So there's, we have this idea that man exists to, to subdue by forming the world that is formless, taking the wilderness and making it into garden and civilization, filling the void by having children and replacing darkness with light by causing the knowledge of God to fill their minds so that you have children that are filling the earth and the knowledge of God is filling the earth.

So the knowledge of God will fill the earth as the waters cover the sea. And that way, as the church gets introduced, we're going to have this idea that the church is filling the earth so that as the body of Christ, it fills the earth.

So these things connect back and the great commission is not exactly the same, but it's certainly connected in the sense that the great commission is sort of a giving of a command to go and fill the earth with the knowledge of God, to go make disciples of all the nations.

There's connection to this idea of, again, seeing the knowledge of God fill the earth. It's always been

God's command and commission is to see the earth filled with the knowledge of God. And so as we, we move, we find that God gives authority at the end of Genesis one to eat the food that is the plants.

And so that grant of authority to eat the, the trees is something that obviously is going to end up being dealt with in more detail as we get to the, the two key trees in the garden.

And so the right to eat of the trees can be dealt with more. And now we get to the beginning of chapter two and we're introduced to the seventh day and the seventh day is called a

Sabbath, which means rest in Hebrew or sorry, in Greek. And this, this idea of a

Sabaton in Greek, but so thus the heavens and the earth and all the host of them were finished.

And on the seventh day, God ended his work, which he had done. And he rested on the seventh day from all his work, which he had done.

Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctify it. So we have this idea of God's example of resting.

We have him blessing the day. And then we have him calling it, making it holy, sanctifying it. And so he, his example is given to us as a reason for obeying that command.

And furthermore, the idea that he's blessing it as a blessing upon it for us, for our use.

And it's made holy. It's set apart for him. So it's a rest from one kind of work to be holy unto

God. And because in it, he rested from all his work, which God had created and made.

Now we're told in John that God doesn't rest from all work. He's resting for one kind of work.

He's working and he works even until now is what Jesus said. And so the work that he picks up is the work of Providence.

Creation is making from nothing in the space of six days. And all very good. Providence is him governing his creatures and all of their actions.

He rules them. He preserves them. He gives them law, but he controls what happens. And so this idea that Providence is continuing, but the creation is complete there.

The Sabbath marks the fact that that is the case. And in the Lord's day, we have the idea of the new creation.

And we have this idea of the rest from the work of redemption. And so now there is this applying of that work of redemption.

So these are ways in which that gets connected. And then at chapter two, verse four of Genesis, you have the introduction of the second giving of a, of a sort of, of a history and man is placed in a garden.

He's told to work and to keep. And so we have that great divider, this idea of working and keeping we're called to, to work, which is adding and to keep, which is to preserve what's been added.

And what we find is there. Now we have the, the different trees being talked about in chapter two, verse 16 of every tree of the garden, you may freely eat, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat for in the day that you eat of it, you shall surely die.

So this is the covenant of works. Perfect obedience leads to life disobedience at any point death.

And this gets summarized by Paul in Galatians. He differentiates the covenant of works from the covenant of grace. He says, the covenant of work says, do this and live.

The covenant of grace says that just by faith, she'll live. So those who are righteous by the instrumentality of faith, have life as opposed to those who are just by means of their own works, having life.

And he says, so which covenant do you want to try? You know, and the idea is that we're all condemned under the covenant of works, but we, those who believe they're saved by Christ, keeping the covenant of works for them in their place and in their stead.

And so we're given this commission to work and to keep, we take the garden and we expand it.

So the wilderness is replaced by garden and we build up the garden to go to city. And so we see at the end of, of, of the

Bible in, in, in revelation, you have the heavenly Jerusalem, the coming to earth.

You have this idea of the, of the, the garden city. And so man having artifice and managing nature beautifully.

So there's this glorious manifestation of the beauty of God's creation and government.

And man is given this authority and he's a vice regent. He's given authority from the

King to act on the King's behalf. And so we see here, this giving of authority to be prophets, to teach the truth and see that spread to other people.

We have the idea of being priests who are to worship God and be the Holy end to God and to seek his glory. And we see also this idea that there is to be a, a

Kingly work of providing and protecting. And so this work of adding and the keeping the, the maintaining the preserving.

And so this tree of the knowledge of good and evil, it's not like eating it magically causes some sort of a, a knowledge.

The idea is that if you eat of the tree, you're rejecting the law order of God. And instead seeking to have your own law order,

God is the good. And he's a definer of good and evil. And if you choose to try to define good and evil for yourself, instead of following God's law and knowing that you learn good and evil from him, then you're claiming to be

God. And so this is the ultimate rebellion, the rejection of the creator and the creature pretending as though he is the definer of good and evil.

And so what we find is that's the test that's set up. And then God not only has made an individual.

So the individual has this duty before God, Adam representing the race of man, but also he causes this look upon the animals and realizes none of them are fit helpers for him.

So he needs a helper that's fit for him. And God makes woman and Adam sees the woman and his response is to break out into poetry.

This now is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman.

Because she was taken out of man. And so this idea that woman was made, she was taken out of man and she's made to be the helper of man.

And they're equal in essence. They're both equally man, but they're also in marriage.

The man is to lead and to rule over the wife. And then we find also that there is to be, we find in the public spheres of authority, that church officers and state officers, that those are supposed to be men.

And we find that ruling principle continuing on. And we find in chapter two, verse 24, that marriage is given to have a way of having man leave the household.

The household is established here and says, therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife and they shall become one flesh.

That joining is a covenanting action. So there's an act of secession and declaration of independence for the formation of a new house.

You leave the old house and you join a new one, the leaving cleave. And so we see this idea that man is to be nurtured in the home and to work in the home.

And then he leaves to start his own home. And this is the process of the multiplication and division of households and the formation of new ones.

And then children are supposed to come from those new marriages, the building of an estate, the increasing of dominion and the spreading of the knowledge of God.

So you pass on wealth and wisdom to your children. And in this time, there was no shame. And we get to Genesis chapter three and we enter into the source of where there's shame.

So nakedness was without shame and the need for a covering is a pointer to the need for a mediator because there's animal sacrifice that's given.

So we'll, we'll see how that works. Genesis three, you have Satan come and he causes

Eve to doubt the word of God. Did God really say now Adam was supposed to keep the garden as a temple of God and to keep out the unclean things.

He is a king was supposed to provide and protect for his wife. Prophet helped to speak the truth and make sure that Eve knows the truth.

And he fails as a prophet priest and king and fails as the first Adam. And he fails at protecting his wife.

And so what happens is Satan tempts her. She ends up eating of the tree that she is not to eat of.

And she gives to her husband and her husband. It is a reversal of roles here. He ends up obeying her voice rather than God's voice.

And so what we find is that there is this total overthrowing of the order that God has given.

And there is this way in which Adam and Eve have sought to be like God, knowing good and evil.

In other words, knowing good and evil the way that God knows good and evil as the definer of it. And that's not their role.

They're creatures. And so what happens is they realize, Oh no, something bad has happened here.

So they try and they try to go cover it up. And then God finds them the voice of God in the wilderness, the cool in, in, in the, in the garden and the cool of the day.

And this calling out to Adam, where are you? This is a callback. And God, we run into is, is

Adam first seeks to justify himself and cover himself with figs. He's hiding.

And then he's trying to cover himself, cover his shame. And then he also tries to blame Eve. And so you find these, these three big things.

There's this, this idea of the, the covering up the, the self justification and blame shifting, which all human relations have to deal with those sources of strife.

Now, in fact, let's pick up right where you left off. Very crucial point in the history of mankind, which is the fall.

And we are going to our midway break right now. And please be patient with us folks, because the midway break is always a little longer than the other breaks in the show, because grace life radio 90 .1

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Don't go away. We'll be right back with pastor David Reese. After these messages, armored Republic exists to equip free men with tools of Liberty to defend

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give us your first name at least city and state and country of residence so pastor Reese right before the break you were entering into a very crucial part of the history of the world and that was in regard to the fall and you had just reached the point where Adam and Eve partook of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the garden, a tree where they were forbidden to eat the fruit from it and nonetheless they did so, first Eve being seduced by the serpent and then

Adam being a wimp listening to his wife even though he knew what she did was a violation of God's commandment, he followed her lead nonetheless and they realized that their nakedness was something to be ashamed of and covered themselves with fig leaves and if you want to pick up where you left off there.

Absolutely so we have those two trees, one is the tree of life which is an emblem of the reward of obedience from the covenant of works and the other one, the tree of death is a symbol, sorry the tree of the knowledge of good and evil which is essentially the tree of death, the eating of it is an act of spiritual death, there's a rejection of the truth and so we know in scripture that spiritual life is the knowledge of God John 17 3 teaches us that but the darkening of the mind, the rejection of the truth, the rebellion against God is death and so there's a physical death as well but there's spiritual death and so we have this idea of a physical and spiritual death coming as a consequence and we find that this idea of there was a sense of horror, of the meaninglessness of the rejection of God and this sense of boredom that comes from meaninglessness follows, there's guilt that comes, we have this idea of shame and fear that come forth these are the horrors that come out of a rejection of the knowledge of God and so there's this blame shifting that occurs, we start with the idea of hiding and then there's the covering up with the fig leaves to self -justify and there's blame shifting and so there's a logical order to that but I don't have time to go into it, so we get into the curse and the idea that the curse is given and God gives, he says because you have done this he says to the serpent, you are cursed above all, more than all cattle and more than every beast of the field on your belly you shall go, it's a perfect position to be crushed by the foot of the saviour by the way, and you shall eat dust, in other words you'll be the loser think about this eat dust is the thing you say to people when you're telling them they're going to lose a race so this idea of being on the ground, being in a position to be crushed being in a position to be losing all the days of your life and I will put enmity between you and the woman, this is called the doctrine of the antithesis, the city of God and the city of man are at war, there's this idea of the children of the serpent and the children of the woman, enmity between you and the woman and between your seed and her seed, so this is the church and the world in other words the kingdom of Satan and the kingdom of Christ and then he the seed of the woman which is a weird phrase that points forward to the idea of the virgin birth, normally you talk about the seed of the man but the seed of the woman and so this is talking about Christ he shall bruise your head or crush, he'll crush your head and you shall crush his heel, now a venomous serpent biting somebody on the heel before anti -venoms, that is a death sentence and so we have is this idea of the crushing of the heel of Christ and the crushing of the head of the serpent, so in defeating the serpent he dies and his death in fact of course is how he defeats the serpent he overcomes the devil, he overcomes the world and the flesh he saves his people from their sin by his death and in that dying there's that crushing of Satan's head so this right here, we had the covenant of works before, do this and live, this is the covenant of grace, this is the first time the gospel is given, a promise of the

Messiah and so this every time God makes a promise God is swearing because swearing is a bond in blood sovereignly administered and God gives a promise as a bond and it's always in his own name, he's always doing it calling on his own witness he is swearing it's a life or death thing because if God is a liar, he's not

God it is not possible for God to lie when he says a thing it happens and so God tells the truth and his promising is a promissory oath and so he makes covenant and so this idea that he shall bruise the head of the serpent crush the head of the serpent and the serpent would crush the heel of Christ, this is the first giving of the gospel, sometimes called the proto -evangelium and so that idea that this is the covenant of grace being instituted and so then there's this to the woman

I will greatly multiply your sorrow and your conception, in pain you shall bring forth children, your desire shall be against your husband, for your husband and he shall rule over you, now this idea that there's going to be difficulty in her place of work now but in having children and raising children there's going to be sorrow and pain there's going to be strife in that and then there's also going to be in the area of the relationship with the husband difficulty, the husband was already given rule but now the rule is going to be an unpleasant thing it's not a command to husbands to make marriage unpleasant, it's the reality that in the desire to rebel against the husband, there is going to be pushback from the husband, it's going to be alienating, so alienation of relationship women are generally focused more on relationships than men are and the idea that the relationships are going to be places of difficulty with children and with the husband, that's part of the curse that we have to deal with now this language of being against somebody, that comes up again in the section on Cain and Abel and so the idea that Cain has to that sin is at the door and it's against him, it's waiting for him so we have to resist, so this right here is about this idea of this usurpation of the husband so then

Adam's given things and he's told cursed is the ground for your sake the place of work of the man, in toil you shall eat of it, toil is fruitless labor and so that's a part of the curse and all the days of your life but both thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you, and you shall eat the herb of the field, and the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, so work was given before the fall but now work is difficult and it often is toil till you return to the ground for out of it you were taken, for dust you are and to dust you shall return so now there's death, so there's this issue of here's the curse, there's strife there's toil and there's death and what we find is these things get maximized when you look at the book of Revelation it talks about kind of the worst forms of these the worst kind of strife is war, the worst kind of toil and poverty is famine, and the worst kind of, when you think about just death generally, you know, old age, sickness and death you actually end up with plagues with mass death from that and so those things you see in some of the curses of Deuteronomy and some of the curses that you find in Revelation and so we find the idea of God brings curse, these are categories of curse that we'll see repeated throughout the scriptures and so what happens is there's a confession of faith made right after this in Genesis chapter 3 verse 20,

Adam calls his wife's name Eve, which means life or living, because she was the mother of all the living in other words,

Adam believed that even though there was this death sentence upon them, he believed that they would have life by the

Savior, and that they would not be physically dead right away, they'd have children and so they're believing the promise of God that the seed of the woman would crush the head of the serpent, that's them believing the gospel, and so Adam knows his wife after that, well sorry, before that, the

Lord gives tunics of skin, which means he killed an animal because he stopped creating from nothing he didn't create the tunics from nothing he killed an animal of skin that gave them clothing as a symbol of their need to cover their shame by a mediator and the animal sacrifice points to that so we have the institution of animal sacrifice here and then there's this casting out of the garden and an angel is put to guard the private property of God so this is the first introduction of the sword we have a flaming sword in the hand of an angel to defend the private property of God from man and it's to prevent man from eating of the tree of life now think about this, if the tree of life causes life to continue if there's not a death, then man who is incapable of dying and man who is in sin and under curse and is in that way forever and can never be released from that, that would be hell and so the idea that God is preventing sort of hell from happening for Adam and Eve, what he's doing is he's saying instead,

I'm going to have you ultimately be released from the curse of this life by death and we're going to go forward to Christ and he's going to die to remove guilt and to remove the power of sin and to remove curse ultimately from his people so we get into chapter 4 and we have this new era, we're in this period after the fall, there's been a giving of the gospel and what we have is we have

Cain and Abel now these are the children of Adam and Eve and we have is all of man coming from Adam and Eve and what we find is that we have

Cain and Abel and Cain kills Abel because Abel offered right worship to God he offered an animal sacrifice as was instituted by God and he did it in faith, now when we talk about giving sacrifice in faith, there's this idea that you believe the gospel but there's also you're believing the word of God about what he commands and then you're doing the thing on the basis of what

God commands in order to glorify God and so there's both the external forms and the internal reality of faith on the basis of God's word and so what we find is

Abel worshipped God according to his commandment, didn't add to it didn't subtract from it, whereas Cain without faith offers a sacrifice and God disapproves and says, why are you angry?

Why has your countenance fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well sin lies at the door and its desire is for you or against you, just like the desire of Eve would be against her husband but you should rule over it so this need we're commanded to exercise dominion over our flesh and Cain being unconverted does not do so and he murders his brother and God talks about the blood of his brother

Abel crying out to him so we have this idea of blood curse that's introduced and this idea that God brings vengeance for blood curse and no sword has been given to man yet, only we have angels with the sword but no man given the sword so we have the church existing with the sacrament of animal sacrifice and we have the separation now,

Cain gets cast out he's excommunicated, he's removed from the city of God now he's part of the city of man and so you have these two cities now and the church is separate from the world and what we find is that the city of man becomes this place where you have all sorts of awfulness like hyper -patriarchy and vigilantism being put forward in the

Song of Lamech and what we find is at the end of that separation when there's now the city of God and the city of man and they're distinct

Seth is born, his name means appointed and he's a replacement and so the line can continue and then you have also this idea that there is from that point forward, that's when men began to call on the name of the

Lord well that doesn't mean that's the first time there was ever prayer, there was prayer before that talking to God is prayer that's what

Adam was doing with God before there was already prayer, the calling on the name of the Lord here, this is the idea that there was already worship too because we already have

Abel worshiping so what's new? The new thing is that this is the first time that there's worship by the people of God that's separate from the city of man and so we have the church as a distinct society here for the first time and so we have, we've had the church but now the church is distinct it's a separate society from the world and as we get into chapter 5 we have all these lists of names and it takes us down and gives us all this long lives and we see this idea that there are men that are living for essentially a millennium and we find that there is this special scenario where we have a taking away of one to be with God in terms of Enoch and we find that there's a man who does not die but we also have this idea of the long life and we find in the book of Isaiah the idea that in an era of the covenant of grace that the one who lives to be a hundred will be counted as a babe and so we have this idea that as the gospel goes forth there's a removal of curse more and more and so we see that from this idea of the decline in curse as we head towards Christ and the rising up away from curse from the time of Christ's return in history so we have these huge themes and patterns that are being given to us chapter 6 we find that man is starting to murder so much that there's this huge amount of punishment that's being stored up and there's this idea of the doctrine of total depravity where we have man thinking evil continually we furthermore begin to see that the city of God and the city of man are not only distinct now with the murder committed by Cain but we also have the sons of men we have the sons of men who have daughters and those daughters are viewed as beautiful and as a temptation so the sons of God the men of the city of God the men who are in the church start to marry unbelieving daughters and as a result their children who should be holy are instead going to go after the gods of their mothers and they become these men who are mighty men upon the earth who had godly fathers who gave them all the heritage and the glory of the industry of the church and handed over all of this training and all of this wealth and all of their work and give their inheritance to these children that are ungodly and they are tyrants amongst men and so more and more the world is filled with this evil and the church is killed and persecuted and seduced away but Noah finds grace in the eyes of the

Lord and God brings punishment into the land, brings a huge flood that destroys the whole earth he saves

Noah and his son's household so we have four households and two of every kind of beast so they're saved on the ark along with seven couples of each of the of the clean animals so they're going to continue to be animal sacrifice and we find after the destruction of the world in this flood that God then gives two great things in the covenant of grace with Noah as it's extended out and what he does is he gives one, the authority of the sword to restrain evil so now we have the fourth covenant institution, we've got the individual, the household and the church and now we see the state and the state uses the sword to restrain the wickedness of man so the church will not be overthrown in the earth so we have the

God giving more and more in terms of he's giving more authority and more revelation, giving more power cause the dominion work to be done and to see the knowledge of him preserved in the earth and extended into the earth and he also makes the animal sacrifice now includes the ability to eat the animals which obviously would have made the animal sacrifice way more fun and so if we didn't have that before, you think about the difficulty of raising animals to sacrifice them and not being able to participate in eating them and there's one limitation that's given you're not to eat the blood of these animals it's the symbol of life and so we have a part of the ceremonies of God's law given to us there, that continues and we see that in Acts 15, the idea that we're not supposed to eat of the blood, not eat things that are strangled we're not supposed to commit the sexual sins that are defined for us in the laws of consanguinity and affinity in Acts 15 and this idea of things that are polluted by idols so those things are ceremonial laws that are continued in the

New Testament but one of them begins right here in chapter 9 of Genesis and as we move forward and God makes this covenant, he also promises that he's going to cause us stability in the seasons and so we have the ability to track that with the signs that were given to us in the sky that were told back in Genesis with the creation in the earlier, in chapter 1, the creation of those things into the heavens and so what we find is then there's this table of nations where we have

Japheth and Shem and we have Ham and all the nations come and we get the table of the 70 nations and so we find that the 70 nations are spreading out but then they start to gather and we find that there's

Nimrod who begins to enslave men, he's known as a great hunter, he hunts men, he's enslaving them, he's building an empire and he's enslaving them and pulling them into cities and builds the

Tower of Babel and he's rebelling against God and building up a tower and God causes confusion so we have the sword to restrain evil and now multiple languages so the nations disperse to further restrain evil to avoid a single world empire and instead they have nations spread out and what we find later on is that the nations are going to be brought back in as they have as they're baptized as you find that the

Gentiles are discipled so we have the one nation, the Jews, that are going to be set apart Israel and we also have the nations are going to be brought back in as the gospel goes forth and they're undeceived as we find that they're no longer bound by Satan and so we find in chapter 11 of Genesis the

Tower of Babel there and it's spreading out and then we find that the world is essentially in this place of chaos and we're only really informed of two people who are sort of great men that seem to be preserving the knowledge of God in the earth, there's

Job around this time of Abraham and we find Melchizedek and then we find in Terah's house in a house that has idolatry in it

God calls out Abraham and so with the calling out of Abraham what we find in Genesis 12 is the calling out of Abraham there's this number of places where Abraham fails but we find that by the time of Genesis 15 there is this giving of a covenant with Abraham in Genesis 14 we find that Abraham with Lot out and they've had a problem where they were working together, they were getting very rich because the

Lord was blessing them as they had left the city of Terah's home in obedience to God and the

Lord was blessing them in their faith and causing them to grow but they started to have strife amongst themselves and this is one of the great problems that comes to the church where there is strife between believers and where rather than working together they without just cause separate and get closer to the world and what we find is

Lot gets close to Sodom and Gomorrah and when he's there as opposed to being right next door to Abraham because his herdsmen there started to fight with each other what we find is that Lot goes and Lot is closer to Sodom and Gomorrah and eventually when the curse comes on Sodom and Gomorrah he participates in that curse, he gets captured by foreign kings that come and invade.

Abraham takes his army of 318 catechized men they do a night march, a forced march and they do a flanking maneuver a pincer and they attack the line of the army that has been leaving and they rescue

Lot and his family so this idea of catechizing men in his home, he also had confederates other men that he'd been covenanted with so he brought other men into covenant with himself but also with the

Lord and so this is evangelistic and discipling work there and so we're starting to see he and his allies there where Abraham is a evangelistic influence and so after the victory of that battle there's a running into Melchizedek, the king of peace, the king of Salem and there's this covenantal meal of bread and wine and there's a blessing by Melchizedek and Abraham tithes there and that's the introduction of the tithe,

Abraham tithes to Melchizedek and so that's a part of the Melchizedekian priesthood is the tithe right there and we find that Hebrews interprets this as Levi through Abraham tithing to Melchizedek so we find the tithe here and in Genesis 15 you get to the covenant of Abraham with God where God makes this covenant and promises, uses a symbol of the cutting in two which is the promise that God will fulfill this or death comes to him in the form of he loses the

Holy Spirit as the deposit, now that can't happen so he's going to keep his promise and so what we find is this promise of all this land all these other things, this is a extending out and increase of the covenant of grace we had

Abraham, we had Adam, we had Noah and now we have Abraham and so God then what we find after that covenant we have

Abraham he ends up with a child that is trying to fulfill a promise there because the promise of this child is going to be born to Abraham he doesn't have a child yet, his wife is barren and so what he finds is he wrongly ends up taking a second wife or concubine having a child

Ishmael and is disobeying God trying to fulfill the promises of God by the arm of the flesh and so that creates many problems and what we find is there is eventually we find that there's a giving of in Genesis 17 a symbol of the covenant and this is a new thing, this is a sacrament that is a symbol of the covenant of grace and it's a symbol of the promise that was given and it's supposed to be given as an entry ritual and it's given to all those who profess it's given to those who are in the house by birth those who are bought into the house and so it's given to children and so we find that this entry covenant that's given this symbol, it's a symbol of the covenant from Genesis 15, all the promises of the gospel that were given to Abraham and so we find that this covenant is called an everlasting covenant which means there has to be something where it either continues or it's replaced and so baptism replaces circumcision and we find that this symbol is given as an entry symbol in the old covenant whereas the new covenant we have baptism and so we find that this is to be given to all of the male children and we find later of course that baptism is given to women as well as to Gentiles you don't have to become a

Jew in order to get baptized and so those great things are followed by Abraham asking

God that Ishmael would live before him and God says okay well he's gonna live he's saved but he's not gonna have the covenant, the covenant is gonna go through your son

Isaac and so what's gonna happen is the Christ is gonna be through Isaac later on there's gonna be two covenant children and we're gonna have

Jacob and Esau and what's gonna happen is Esau's not even gonna be saved and we're gonna have Jacob on the other side who is but also

Christ comes through him and so we find these things laid out there and we get into the promises that are given to the son and we find that there is

Isaac is the heir and we find that there is a removing of Ishmael from receiving the inheritance, he receives gifts but he does not receive ultimately the inheritance, along the way we find in Genesis 18 that God comes and visits

Abraham that we have the Abraham interceding for Sodom asking your spirit if there's even 10 righteous men

God says okay but there's not even that, there's not a church there that's properly formed and so Sodom is destroyed by God and Lot is taken out, his wife is turned into a pillar of salt and then what we have is the formation of two nations we have

Iman being formed by an incestuous relationship from Lot and we also find that we have the formation of Moab and as we move forward

Abraham continues to have failures and difficulties but he has the birth of Isaac in chapter 21 of Genesis, the promised child and Abraham enters into a series of continued difficulties to the end of his life, eventually

Sarah dies and we get to a promised bride for Isaac where we continue the line going towards Christ and we have in chapter 25 the death of Abraham and in this we've passed through 2117 years of world history from 4004

B .C. to 1821 B .C. with the death of Abraham having gotten through three administrations of the covenant of grace from Adam to Noah now to Abraham and so the next time we'll be able to pick up and look at how things go going up through more of the

Old Testament there but we can spend if there's any time available for any comments or questions from people. Great and we have to go to our final break and if you have a question send it immediately because we are rapidly running out of time chrisarnson at gmail dot com chrisarnson at gmail dot com as always give us your first name at least city and state and country of residence only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal or private matter don't go away we'll be right back

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And Pastor Reese, we have a question from Butch in Alabaster, Alabama, and Butch asks, do you believe that the

Nephilim were the spawn of angelic beings from the netherworld and humans, or were both of their parents human?

Yeah, I believe the Nephilim were humans that were born from two human parents, and so those would be the sons of God would be essentially the church member men, these men that are part of the visible church, the city of God, as opposed to the city of man, and so the daughters of men are women who are coming from the line that we see in terms of the city that Cain establishes in the city of man and the broader division that's occurring.

That's the whole theme when you're reading through the beginning of Genesis here, you look into the time descending into the flood.

If you try to make it into this idea of demon spawn, that sort of destroys a big part of the emphasis.

The emphasis is on the importance of godly marriage and household and the raising of children, and so I don't know about you, but I've never had the grand temptation of having to worry about any sort of sexual interaction with a demon, and I don't think that that's a general temptation that occurs for people.

I think that what happens is there's the temptation of sexual interaction with unbelievers, and so certainly demons have a role in that in terms of tempting and even possession of people and stuff like that, but the idea that we're worried about some sort of human -demon hybrid spawn as a major theme here, as opposed to the rule of Satan over the world and the way he uses worldly people and their flesh, but that's the real thing to be focused on being worried about.

That's a major theme of Scripture, the importance of being equally yoked and how having godly children that are raised, having a holy seed that's raised in godliness, is such a key way that the church is preserved and extended, and so that's the point of that text, and it's showing us that there's this great danger in how the two main things that caused the world to be filled with violence were the city of man growing in terms of people apostatizing from the church, like Cain, and committing evil crimes, and then we see also people being seduced by the world, and demons have a role there, the doctrines of demons, the temptation of demons, demonic power and influence and all of that, but it's not this, and the other thing is angels are spiritual, they're spirits, they don't have material bodies, and obviously

God could make it so that a spirit has the ability to cause a physical birth of a child, but that's not the case, we don't have that, there's nothing in Scripture that shows that, and it is a thing that is taking the point away as opposed to focusing on the reality of avoiding wicked covenants with the world, we have this fanciful idea of demon spawn as the thing to be worried about, that's not the point, the point of the text is plainly that we are to avoid wicked covenants with the world, including

Mary and believers, and we're supposed to be careful to guard our children, to raise them as holy seed, and that's the point of the text.

Cindy in Findlay, Ohio asks, Good afternoon, David and Chris. What do you believe is the significance of Eve saying that they were told by God not just that they were not to eat of the tree, but that they were not to touch it?

Yeah, so I believe that that is a pharisaical addition, and her not believing the command is a sadduceical reduction, and so she is, we are not to add to the

Word of God or subtract from it, and so there's a failure there, so the original source of the sin would be unbelief, a failure to believe what

God has commanded and to add to it, and then furthermore, that manifest, that unbelief manifests itself in eating of the tree, and so the good life is, spiritual life is the knowledge of God, and we find that the sin starts with thought, unbelief, error, and then proceeds outwardly as well in terms of the actual eating of the tree, and so she is adding to the

Word of God, and what needs to be happened is we need to have careful protection. It's very important that we not go beyond what is written and that we also not fail to see what is implied in the

Word, so we have to be very careful to understand the Word and to draw good and necessary consequence from it, not fanciful consequence, not possible consequence, good and necessary consequence, and we need to make sure to not add stuff or subtract stuff from the

Word of God. Well, we are out of time, and any of your other questions, we'll try to squeeze them in future segments of this series that we're doing with David Reese, and just to remind you, the website for Puritan Reformed Church in Phoenix, Arizona is puritanphx .com,

puritanphx .com, and you can also find out more about the company where David Reese is the

CEO, Armored Republic. That website is armoredrepublic .com,

armoredrepublic .com. Thank you so much, Pastor Reese, for, as always, doing such a remarkable job.

I'm looking forward with bated breath to your next installment in this series that we are doing on the history of the world from creation until now, and thank you so much, and I want to thank all of our listeners, especially those who took the time to write in questions, and I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater