TPW 50 Creation Days 5 and 6 Versus Dino-Birds

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Yes, I was taught in modern evolutionary philosophy teaches that dinosaurs are the ancient ancestors of birds.
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That's what I was taught. And when I was in school, dinosaurs actually didn't become extinct, they just became birds. There's a big problem with this.
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Dinosaurs were not created until day six, and birds were created on day five. So if you believe the
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Bible, you cannot believe that birds came from dinosaurs. Welcome to the
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Prowess of Witness, this is Pastor Patrick Hines. Pressing on back in the creation series, we're going to look at creation days number five and six, the fifth and sixth days of creation.
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And these are pretty important days, obviously, because we were created on day six, and there's a great deal of compromise.
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It's a really sad thing to me that the very simple, straightforward, and glorious teachings of Genesis chapter one are discarded, ignored, downplayed, when we need to stand on them as firmly as ever, especially now, in the midst of all the compromise and denials of biblical history.
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Just FYI, I might put a link to this, in fact, I'm going to put a link to it in the show notes. I would recommend to everyone's reading
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Dr. Terry Mortensen, his doctoral dissertation, which is published as a book, called
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The Great Turning Point, The Church's Catastrophic Mistake with Regard to Geology.
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And Mortensen's book is gloriously wonderful, it is just an incredibly insightful, helpful treatment of the history of interpretation of Genesis one, alongside of the history of development in geology.
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And what's amazing about that book is, whether you end up agreeing with him that these are six 24 -hour days, and that the earth is around 6 ,000 years old, the universe is around 6 ,000 years old, what is undeniable is that these and other interpretations, gap theory, framework hypothesis, day -age theory, etc.,
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things like that, those other, progressive creationism, those other ideas, those other interpretations don't exist in the church until you get to the longer ages of the universe being proposed by geologists.
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And what Mortensen does in that book is he highlights six men that he calls the scriptural geologists, and they sounded the alarm that if we compromise on these issues, we're going to lose everything, and that we cannot give world history over to the secularists and to those that deny
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God's truth, and unfortunately, that is exactly what has happened, and so we've been playing catch -up ever since.
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So I hope that you'll find this informative and helpful, and that it will help to ground you in the word of God, and to divest you of the secular presuppositions that may very well have infected your thinking.
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Let us ask God to bless our minds with understanding together now, please. Heavenly Father, help us to understand what you have revealed in these simple and yet glorious verses of scripture here in Genesis chapter 1, and Lord, help us to think rightly about the creation of the world, the order of events, and what you did in those six 24 -hour days.
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And we pray that your church would learn once again to stand upon the clear and simple and straightforward reading of your holy word, not to bow to or be intimidated by the theories and ideas of sinful, rebellious humans, but to stand upon the authority of your holy word.
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Help us now to understand, we pray in Christ's name, amen. If you'll take your Bibles and turn to Genesis chapter 1, beginning at verse 20,
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Genesis 120 -31, the rest of chapter 1 is our sermon text for this morning,
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Genesis 120 -31, Genesis chapter 1, verse 20 -31,
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Genesis 1, beginning at verse 20, this is God's word. Then God said,
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Let the waters abound with an abundance of living creatures, and let the birds fly above the earth across the face of the firmament of the heavens.
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So God created great sea creatures, and every living thing that moves, with which the waters abounded according to their kind, and every winged bird according to its kind.
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And God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the waters and the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.
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So the evening and the morning were the fifth day. Then God said,
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Let the earth bring forth the living creature according to its kind, cattle and creeping thing, and beasts of the earth, each according to its kind.
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And it was so. And God made the beasts of the earth according to its kind, cattle according to its kind, and everything that creeps on the earth according to its kind.
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And God saw that it was good. Then God said, Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness.
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Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.
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So God created man in his own image. In the image of God he created him, male and female he created them.
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Then God blessed them. And God said to them, Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it, have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over everything living that moves on the earth.
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And God said, See, I have given you every herb that yields seed, which is on the face of all the earth, and every tree whose fruit yields seed.
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To you it shall be for food. Also to every beast of the earth, to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth in which there is life,
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I have given every green herb for food. And it was so. Then God saw everything that he had made, and indeed it was very good.
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So the evening and the morning were the sixth day. May God add his blessing to the reading of his infallible word.
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As an illustration of just how irreconcilable biblical creationism is with the idea of slow and gradual evolution pushed forward by survival of the fittest coupled with natural selection, this passage of scripture speaks of the instantaneous making of all living creatures over a period of two days.
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It was not a slow and gradual process leading to animals as we find them today, or even ancient animals.
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It was an instantaneous creation event where God created these animals already formed, all in the categories called their kinds.
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Henry Morris has this wonderful two sentences in his commentary on Genesis that says this. The first introduction of animal life was not a fragile blob of protoplasm that happened to come together in response to electrical discharges over a primeval ocean, as evolutionists believe.
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Rather, this is very important, the waters suddenly swarmed abundantly with swarming creatures.
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So when God created all these sea creatures, all the birds of the air on day five, and then all of the cattle and beasts of the field and all the land animals on day six, it was a creation event.
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It was instantaneous. God said, let there be all these different types of animals. It was not a progressive, gradual, or slow event.
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It was suddenly, God had set the stage with dry land, vegetation, He created food source for all these living creatures, and then
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God puts all the living creatures there and does it over a period of 48 hours, two days. Now let's go ahead and look at day five in more detail here.
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I'd like to read just those four verses, verses 20 to 23. I've got a sermon outline there for you. We'll look at day five first, and then we'll look at the two parts of day six, towards the end of the sermon here.
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Day five, living creatures and birds. Living creatures and birds, verses 20 to 23, let's look at those verses again.
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Then God said, let the waters abound with an abundance of living creatures, and let the birds fly above the earth across the face of the firmament of the heavens.
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So God created great sea creatures and every living thing that moves, with which the water abounded according to their kind, and every winged bird according to its kind, and God saw that it was good, and God blessed them saying, be fruitful and multiply, and fill the waters and the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.
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So the evening and the morning were the fifth day. Now it's very important to know something technical here that's real critical for us to understand.
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The terms that are translated here as living creatures are very key technical
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Hebrew words, the terms nefesh and chayah. Nefesh chayah means living creatures.
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Animals of all kinds and human beings are nefesh chayah. The term nefesh, if you want to write that down, is n -e -p -h -e -s -h, nefesh.
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It's simply the Hebrew word for soul, nefesh, n -e -p -h -e -s -h, nefesh, and then the other word is chayah, c -h -a -y -a -h, c -h -a -y -a -h, nefesh chayah.
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We are nefesh chayah, animals, your dog is a nefesh chayah, the cows that come up to the barbed wire fence in my backyard are nefesh chayah, they are living creatures.
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Animals and humans, in direct contrast to vegetation, are living creatures because we have consciousness and we have souls.
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Biblically speaking, plants are not nefesh chayah, they are not living creatures.
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They're really just biological machines. They were created primarily to act as food for all of the nefesh chayah, for all of the living creatures, as you saw last week and as we just read in verses 29 and 30, that's what all the nefesh chayah we're going to eat.
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We're going to eat the herbs and the fruit from the fruit trees and everything else. But plants, while they are said in scripture to die, trees die, just like the nefesh chayah die, they do not have souls or consciousness, and so animals or plants are not living creatures.
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In the scriptures, they're really just biological machines that God created to be our food source.
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Notice here that God engaged in only what is the second act of creation, that Hebrew verb bara, where God is the only one who can create something.
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Remember, human beings, we make things out of what God has already created, but only God can call something into existence.
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Now commentators think that the reason verse 21 is only the second time that verb is used in all of Genesis chapter 1, it says
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God created great sea creatures and every living thing that moves is because the nefesh chayah have souls, they have this consciousness, they have this mind,
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God has to create that part of us. Because plants and vegetation don't have souls or minds or consciousness,
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God didn't have to engage in any kind of creative act on day four when he brought the vegetation into existence, they're just biological machines, they're just made of matter.
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But all of the animals and humans have an immaterial aspect to their being,
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God created it here, he created the soul living creatures, the soulish creatures in this passage here.
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Notice also that in this passage it says that God created great sea creatures, that's the way the
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New King James Version, but the specific Hebrew word that's used there, the word tanin, for sea creatures, the word tanin, very interestingly enough the word means sea monsters or sea dragons.
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In fact there's only one English translation I found that actually translates it that way, it's actually the one in your pews there, the
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New American Standard, which is probably one of the most literal word for word translations you can get in English, is the only one that actually translates it that way, sea monsters it actually says.
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It can rightly also be translated as sea dragons, so God creates the great sea monsters along with every living thing that moves with which the waters abounded and it says in the text that they were created according to their kind, great sea monsters and birds of the air were created with the ability to reproduce, they were told to be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters and fill the air, so all these animals were created according to their kind, they reproduce according to their kind.
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Henry Morris has some great comments on this, he says this, quote, like the various plants, the actual biochemical reproductive systems of the animals were programmed to assure the fixity of the kinds.
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Physically and chemically animals are similar to plants, modern genetics has shown that all replicating systems function in the framework of this marvelous information program in the
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DNA molecule. The DNA for each kind is programmed to allow for wide individual variations within the kind, but not beyond the structure of the kind itself.
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Now, this is a very important point for Christians to understand, this is a very important thing for us to grasp mentally,
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God created the various kinds of animals, but his way of designing them and their
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DNA and the way that they reproduce them through genetics, there is the allowance for a wide variety within those kinds.
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That's why, for example, dogs come in all sorts of shapes and sizes and yet they're all part of the dog kind.
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If you've ever studied the history of evolution and what Charles Darwin, when he was on the HMS Beagle and went to the
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Galapagos Islands, he noticed what? That the beaks on finches came in all sorts of different shapes and sizes and over time, as they would breed, they were changing.
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Very often, the evolutionists will point out, how can you believe that everything always stays the same?
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Animals change all the time. Animals are always going through wide genetic variation and yet that's true.
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God has built that into their kinds. It's what's called technically mediated design.
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If you want to write that down, it's a really helpful term to remember. Mediated design. There is a medium point for the different kinds of animals.
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Through breeding, through environmental issues, through other factors, and breeding and genetics, the species, the animals can go this way, they can go this way a little bit, but they never go all the way over into another kind.
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That's why you find birds of finches of all sorts of different shapes and sizes. That's why individual single -celled organisms, bacteria, can change and adapt and do all kinds of things because God allows for things to change.
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Look how different all of us look. We're all very different and yet we're all human beings. As I just mentioned, dogs.
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Dogs can be widely different from one another. When animals reproduce according to their kind, their offspring are never cookie -cutter identical to their parents, just as our children are not either.
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You may look at the biological offspring of individuals and say, wow, he really looks a lot like his mom or really looks a lot like his dad or his grandma or something like that.
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We do, and yet we also look different, don't we? We also can vary wildly.
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Sometimes you have a child and you wonder, where did that one come from? They don't look anything like either of us or anyone in our family.
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God enables us and enables all of the nefesh hayah, all of the animals, all of these living creatures are able to have very wide diversity within their kinds through genetics and through breeding.
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That's called mediated design. There's a median point for the kind, but animals can vary widely within the kind.
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I recently heard an evolutionist make the statement, quote, dinosaurs did not become extinct.
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They just went up into the sky. Yes, I was taught and modern evolutionary philosophy teaches that dinosaurs are the ancient ancestors of birds.
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That's what I was taught when I was in school. Dinosaurs actually didn't become extinct, they just became birds. They went up into the sky.
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Now, you need to chew on that one for a moment. That dinosaurs didn't go extinct, they just went up into the sky.
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I say that because the scriptures teach that animals reproduce according to their kind. They don't ever become other kinds of animals.
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It's also very important that we remember, we're being told by the philosophies of the world and by Christians who have compromised with millions of years and have these progressive creationist theories that these days are long, huge periods of time and God uses evolution to get there.
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There's a big problem with this. Dinosaurs were not created until day six and birds were created on day five.
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So if you believe the Bible, you cannot believe that birds came from dinosaurs. Now, we're told specifically by evolutionary philosophy that birds arose from what are called theropods.
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Theropods are dinosaurs that look a lot like Tyrannosaurus rex. In fact, the Tyrannosaurus rex is a theropod.
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The dinosaurs have kind of the big body, long tail, you can picture them in your mind. When I say T -Rex, you think immediately of what,
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Jurassic Park or a museum where you've seen the skeletons there, real big head, big body, big long tail, big huge hind legs, and then they have these tiny little arms that stick out like this.
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Now, evolutionists and paleontologists, people who study ancient bones, have wondered for the longest time, what in the world did the
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T -Rex do with these teeny tiny little arms? They're not long enough for a T -Rex to grab anything and put it in its mouth.
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In fact, it can't even reach its mouth with them. They didn't walk with them either. The one thing I can guarantee you that T -Rex was not doing with his arms.
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Dinosaurs did not become birds and I don't care how much you may want to believe that, to think that scales could fray themselves out and become feathers, that bones that were once solid could gradually become hollow, and that these things could eventually learn to fly, is absurd.
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It's asking too much to believe such things. It's very interesting, I read several articles this past week about Tyrannosaurus rex and to hear the theories about what they did with these arms, nobody knows what in the world they were really doing.
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Some said that they just used them to kind of grab a hold of prey, if the prey was squirming they could grab it with those arms.
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Others thought maybe they were there just to help if they fell down in battle with another dinosaur, they kind of used their arms to push themselves back up.
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But I didn't find anybody who said that T -Rex was doing that with his arms. Nobody even suggests such a thing, and yet that's not just me making fun of a silly idea, that's actually what they believe.
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Theropods became birds and T -Rexes are theropods. So you have to scratch your head and wonder how can anyone believe something like that?
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Especially if you hold to the Bible, we know that birds existed before dinosaurs, they did not come after them.
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So what about changes? What about the changes that we see happening in animals according to their kinds?
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There is a logical fallacy that we have to learn how to identify, because I've seen it committed in every conversation
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I've ever heard in an interview or anything I've read with people who are proponents of evolution.
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They make the fallacy of equivocation. The fallacy of equivocation, using one word with two distinctly different meanings in the same sentence.
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For example, we're told very often that evolution is true, we can see evolution, evolution happens every day, animals are constantly changing.
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In other words, using a word, evolution, in two entirely different ways within one sentence.
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We're told evolution is true, we see evolution happening every day, animals are constantly changing.
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That's not what evolution is though. In fact, the DVD that just came out where Ray Comfort is interviewing biology professors and paleontologists at different universities, he asked them, can you give me an example of evolution?
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And so help me, almost every one of them says, yes, look at finchbeaks. Finchbeaks change all the time and Ray Comfort says, yeah, but they're still finches, aren't they?
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Bacteria, they've changed a little bit over time. Yes, but they're still bacteria, aren't they? You see why it's important to understand the mediated design principle.
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God created animals with a wide variety of possibilities in terms of their genetic possibilities, but they are always within that kind.
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And what Comfort was asking again and again, no, no, no, I'm asking for an evolution, evolution from one kind to another kind, is what
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I'm asking. The formation of something completely different now, do we see that happening? The simple answer is no, we don't.
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And yet the fallacy of equivocation is used constantly by proponents of evolution. Yes, we see evolution happening all the time because animals are always evolving.
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They're always changing. Now, as an example of the fallacy of equivocation, I put down this example here.
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Notice the equivocation of the word practice. Premise one, practice makes perfect.
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Premise two, doctors practice medicine. Conclusion, therefore doctors are perfect.
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That's the fallacy of equivocation because practice in the first premise means something very different than it does in the second. Don't let people misuse the word evolution.
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The changing of animals a little bit within their own kind is not, is not evolution.
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All that means is that animals change. All that means is that finches have babies whose beaks are a little smaller or a little bigger.
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That has nothing to do with evolution at all, nothing. And yet sadly, because we're often ill -equipped to detect such fallacies, people are very often taken in by this kind of thing.
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Taken in by this kind of argument and aren't sure how to answer it. Just remember, animals can change a lot. We're changing all the time.
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We're changing all the time. Animals have offspring that vary widely, but that's not evolution.
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Dr. Jason Lyle in his book, The Ultimate Proof of Creation, has an entire section on common logical fallacies, and that book is fantastic.
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It's really, really worth reading. The Ultimate Proof of Creation by Jason Lyle. He says this on page 109 and 110, quote,
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Evolution can simply mean change in a general sense, or it can refer to the idea that all life descended from a common ancestor.
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Either meaning is legitimate, but the two should not be conflated within an argument, and yet that happens all the time.
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This is exactly what happens when evolutionists talk about evolution, the fallacy of equivocation, and as I said, sadly, many aren't sure how to respond to that and are taken in by that argument.
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The fact that animals often change within their kinds is not evolution. Evolution is one kind becoming another kind, and that's exactly what we don't see happening today.
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So day five comes to an end. God has filled the waters with sea monsters and living creatures, and he's also filled the air with birds, and so winged birds were busily flying in the sky on God's earth before dinosaurs ever existed.
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They did not descend from dinosaurs. Let's move on to day six, verses 24 and 25, day six, part one, the living land creatures.
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Verse 24, and God said, let the earth bring forth the living creature according to its kind, cattle and creeping thing, and beasts of the earth, each according to its kind, and it was so.
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And God made the beast of the earth according to its kind, cattle according to its kind, and everything that creeps on the earth according to its kind, and God saw that it was good.
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Henry Morris has some great comments about what God did on this day. Listen to his insights here.
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The land animals made during the early part of the sixth day are categorized as cattle, creeping things, and beasts of the earth.
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This description is evidently intended to be comprehensive insofar as land animals are concerned.
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Very likely the term cattle refers to domesticable animals. Beasts of the earth refers to large wild animals like dinosaurs, and creeping things refers to all animals that crawl or creep close to the ground, to the surface of the ground, like ants and everything else that creeps around on the ground.
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All three categories of land animals were made simultaneously. A very important point.
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When God creates these animals, he creates them all at once. There's not one becoming the other or anything of the kind.
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There's no evolution here. You cannot reconcile that idea with special creation. When God creates the various kinds, he does it all at once.
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They're all there simultaneously. Once again, it is obvious that there is not the slightest correlation with the imaginary evolutionary order.
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That is, insects, which became amphibians, which then became reptiles, which then became all of the mammals.
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As a matter of fact, evolution places insects, amphibians, and land reptiles before the birds that Genesis says were made the day before.
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There was no evolutionary struggle for existence among these animals, for God saw that it was good.
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Neither could one kind evolve into a different kind because God made each category after his kind.
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Very important. God creates all the animals according to their kind. All the living creatures in the sea, in the air, and on the land are made according to their kind, and they are all vegetarians.
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They do not eat each other. They're not hunting each other down and eating each other or anything else of the kind.
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That's one of the reasons that we know that the fossils that we see are over the earth were post -sin fossils, because you see animals in the act of eating each other.
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You also see fossilized animals where they've got other animals in their stomachs, and their bones of other animals are fossilized inside their stomachs.
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Those fossils were created after these days. I say that because progressive creationists and those who hold to the day -age theory believe that by the time man got here, there was a huge mountain of dead things underneath our feet already.
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And that's just not, you can't square that idea with the biblical creation model. Animals were not killing and eating each other yet.
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Okay, point number three, day six, part two. The image bearers of God. The image bearers of God be fruitful and multiply and the menu.
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So let's look at the first little section here versus verse 26, the image bearers of God, verse 26.
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Then God said, let us make man in our image according to our likeness. Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.
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It is absolutely essential. Brothers and sisters, please hear me. It is absolutely essential for us to live and operate in this world, knowing the following human beings are not animals.
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Human beings are not animals. We did not come from animals. We are not descended from animals.
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We are not animals. There is much discussion about what exactly is meant by man being made in the image and likeness of God.
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I would just point out most reformed theologians see the two terms image and likeness as being roughly synonymous to one another.
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They don't refer to different things about us, but there's nothing said in the text of Genesis that really explains what exactly is meant by the image of God or the likeness of God.
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However, we do get to expansions of it in the New Testament and two critical passages.
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I would encourage you to write these references down. These are very, very important. Ephesians 4, 21 to 24 and Colossians 310.
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Ephesians 4, 21 to 24 and Colossians 310 give us more insight as to what it means that man is created in the image of God.
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It's very hard to really tell, except by a subsequent revelation where we see man interacting with God.
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We see man able to communicate and speak and man has a soul. Man is able to have fellowship with God.
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But these passages in the New Testament give us more insight into what that means, which is why in our church's catechism, in the
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Westminster Shorter Catechism, we have question number 10. As my catechism students should be able to still repeat, how did
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God create man? God created man, male and female, after his own image in knowledge, righteousness, and holiness with dominion over the creatures.
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Knowledge, righteousness, and holiness with dominion over the creatures. That's what it means that we were created in the image of God. Listen to the
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Ephesians 4 passage to describe this for us. It says in verse 24, and that you put on the new man which was created according to God in true righteousness and holiness.
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You see, Adam, contrary to the animals, had a moral facet to his being. Animals are neither moral nor immoral because animals are not in a covenantal arrangement with God.
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Animals can't sin. They're not in a covenant of works as we are. They don't have a moral facet to their being.
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We, on the other hand, were created in righteousness and holiness. Man was righteous and holy when he was first made and put upon this earth.
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Sadly, that's not the case of us any longer. Colossians 3 .10 adds one more facet, which says, and have put on the new man who was renewed in knowledge according to the image of him who created him.
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That's why that catechism question says that we were created after the image of God in knowledge, righteousness, and holiness.
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That's borrowing directly from those two passages. That's part of what it means that we're created in the image of God.
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We have holiness, righteousness, and a true knowledge of God. When Adam was first created and first opened his eyes to look at everything
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God made and was there with God, his knowledge of God was correct. He had true knowledge of God and it was right knowledge of God.
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He was not an idolater. He was not a sinner. He was also righteous and holy through and through.
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The theologian Robert L. Raymond in his Systematic Theology has this great sentence. Listen to this. God created man in his image, that is, with a creaturely but true knowledge of God, with justice toward his neighbor, which virtue was originally expressed in Adam's relation to Eve and vice versa, and piety or covenant faithfulness toward God.
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One other point I want to make as a point of application of man being created in the image of God and the fact that man is not an animal.
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Man is more important than and is to be valued more than animals. We need to trumpet that to our culture.
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Man is more important than animals and we are to be valued more than animals. We are not to be unnecessarily cruel to animals, but man is higher than, more important than, and more precious than animals.
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This is why the death penalty is instituted against those who murder man after the flood of Noah. In Genesis 9, verse 6, we read this creation ordinance.
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Whoever sheds man's blood by man, his blood shall be shed for in the image of God he made man.
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So often we hear today that man is just a highly evolved primate, a highly evolved animal, and that we have no more significance or importance than the animals.
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And very often groups such as the Humane Society will say that the ants in your backyard have just as much of a right to live there as you do.
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And it's wrong for us to just arbitrarily exterminate things like that. However, for purposes of illustration,
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I would point out the following. If I were forced to make a decision between the following two options,
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I want to tell you what I would pick. First option, every endangered species on earth perishes, or two, one unborn child is aborted.
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I would pick every endangered species on this planet to go extinct every single time. We are more important and are to be valued more than animals.
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It doesn't mean animals are not important, but our lives are more important than theirs. And it's not arrogance or anything else.
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It's what the Bible teaches. Man alone is in the image of God. We are created in his image. And it's because of that, that only
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God is allowed to take human life. And we are only allowed to take human life in situations such as war or in situations of capital punishment.
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God is the one who gives life. God is the one who takes it. We are not allowed to touch that. And man is not an animal.
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Man did not evolve from animals. Man has dominion over the animals. Man alone communicates in language.
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Language is the invention of God, and it is unique to human beings. Yes, do dolphins make little sounds and communicate, quote unquote, communicate to each other?
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Can you teach a chimpanzee sign language and things like that? Yes, you can. But language is the invention of God, and only human beings can use language.
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Language is not the evolutionary leftovers of animal grunts and squeals, as we are told.
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Language is the invention of God for man to commune with God and with one another. Man alone is capable of sinning against God.
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Man alone has the capacity of communion and fellowship with God. Man alone has creative artistic ability.
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No monkey can compose a sonnet or a symphony. Man alone can reason and think abstractly.
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Man alone makes decision based upon moral inclination and not just raw instinct. My point, my conclusion is we are not.
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We are not animals. We have dominion over the animals.
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We were created last to have dominion over them. We are created in God's image and true knowledge, righteousness, and holiness.
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We have that moral facet to who we are that is distinct from animals. We can think, reason, and have communion with God.
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That's what makes us different. We were created especially as man, and man has always been man.
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Psalm 8, verse 5, great individual verse, says this about us, for you have made him a little lower than the angels, and you have crowned him with glory and honor.
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Man has significance that is different from those of animals. Second part of this passage here in point number three, be fruitful and multiply, verses 27 and 28.
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Let's look at these two. So God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him. Male and female, he created them.
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Then God blessed them, and God said to them, be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and subdue it.
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Have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.
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So God creates male and female. As we're going to see later on in Genesis chapter 2, to combat, one of the reasons that God created a wife for Adam was to combat
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Adam's aloneness. In Genesis 2 .18, God looks at Adam and says, it is not good that the man should be alone.
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I will make a helper comparable to him. And also, to fill the world with more image bearers, to take dominion over and subdue the world to the glory of God.
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And with regard to having dominion over the creatures and to fill the earth and subdue it, the great commentator,
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John Currid, one of the very few reformed Genesis commentators, who is a six 24 hour day guy.
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So John Currid, three cheers for John Currid. He says, only human beings have been endowed with a status of loyalty in and over the created order.
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This directive has often been called the cultural mandate. This reflects the idea that being fruitful, multiplying, and filling are not merely commands relating to human reproduction.
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Rather, they apply to all of life, including the socioeconomic and spiritual realms, as well as the giving birth.
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The concepts of subduing and ruling support the interpretation of this verse as a world and life directive.
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Man is to be overseer of the earthly kingdom. He is to be fruitful and multiply and take dominion over the creation.
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So what about this be fruitful and multiply? Is that imperative still valid for us today?
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Well, I actually have a book in my library called be fruitful and multiply what the Bible says about having children.
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And in it, there is this marvelous section of the various terms that are used throughout the Old Testament to describe the way in which
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God commands his people to have children. And listen to these five terms. I'm going to read several of these passages to you.
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Here are the five words that describe the way in which God wants us to be fruitful and multiply number one abundantly to exceedingly three mightily and greatly for plenteously and five multitudinously.
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Genesis nine, seven, as for you, be fruitful and multiply. God, it's almost like starting over. He, he wipes out all of creation.
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There's there's Mr. and Mrs. Noah, Shem, Ham and Japheth and their wives. And God says to them, be fruitful and multiply, bring forth abundantly and in the earth and multiply in it.
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In Genesis 16, 10, the angel of the Lord said to her, I will multiply your descendants exceedingly so that they should not be counted for multitude.
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Do you remember when Rebecca's brothers sent her away to become the wife of Isaac? They said to her on her way out, may you become the mother of tens of ten thousands of people.
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I've never heard that said at a wedding, sending someone away. May you become the mother of ten thousands of thousands of people on the earth, mightily and greatly.
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Deuteronomy six, three, therefore, hero Israel, be careful to observe it, that it may be well with you and you may multiply greatly as the
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Lord God of your fathers has promised you. Psalm 105, 24, he increased his people greatly and made them stronger than their enemies.
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Deuteronomy 30 verse nine, the Lord, your God will make you abound in the work of your hand and the fruit of your body and the increase of your livestock and in the produce of your land for good for the
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Lord will again rejoice over you for good as he rejoiced over your fathers. And then finally, this, this word multitudinously.
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Genesis 32, 12, for you said, I will surely treat you well and make your descendants as the sand of the sea, which cannot be numbered for multitude.
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Leviticus 26, nine, for I will look on you favorably and make you fruitful, multiply you and confirm my covenant with you.
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Deuteronomy chapter one, the Lord, your God has multiplied you. And here you are today as the stars of heaven and multitude.
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May the Lord God of your fathers make you a thousand times more numerous than you are and bless you as he has promised you.
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So when you are out in public with a baby or with a bunch of babies or a bunch of children, and someone says to you with contempt in their voice and heart, don't you know what's causing that?
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You can reply with, I most certainly do. It's called the very blessing of almighty God. Children are a blessing.
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There's something that all of God's people through all the ages cried out to God for. And once, even the pagans in the days of Genesis, during the patriarchs, people like Abimelech, when
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Abram went in there and lied and said, she's, she's my sister. And they took her. What was one of the ways that God judged the house of Abimelech?
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He closed all the wounds. It was seen as a curse, as a disaster, a calamity.
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And yet today we see that as a blessing, as a good thing, barrenness. We want that today.
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You see, when the nations are under the judgment of God and cursed, they rarely realize that they are. If we call that which the word of God calls a blessing, a curse, something's wrong with our thinking.
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If there is one thing this culture of death doesn't want, it is descendants. That's why we've killed more than 55 million of them.
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But we must not think like the culture of death. We must embrace and welcome life. And remember, God's imperative, be fruitful and multiply.
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And learn to see children, all children, however God sees fit to create them, healthy or unhealthy, formed or deformed, wanted or unwanted or whatever, as blessings from God, the blessings of God that they are.
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My parents took me to church my entire life. From the time I was about 18 months old, my mother would scrub us down.
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My father was not a believer then. Scrubbed me and my sister down and they dragged us to church and went to church my whole life. I wanted to tell you,
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I have listened to probably at least tens of thousands of prayers in my lifetime.
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And in my entire life, I have heard exactly one Christian man ask God for children.
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One. In all my life. One. And it was amazing to hear this guy,
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Lord, please give me a child. He was a newlywed. The only wedding I've done so far,
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I've prayed and asked God for children. I've never heard a man do that. Not once in my entire life. Psalm 127 says this,
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Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord. The fruit of the womb is a reward. Like arrows in the hands of a warrior, so are the children of one's youth.
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Happy is the man who has his quiver full of them. They shall not be ashamed, but shall speak with their enemies in the gate.
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If we don't find ourselves asking for things described like that, we need to ask ourselves why. God said be fruitful and multiply.
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One of the ways he promised the children of Israel to bless them was that they would multiply as the sand of the sea.
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Children are a blessing. We must see them that way. We can't allow the culture of death all around us to influence the way we think about children.
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It was part of the cultural mandate. Be fruitful and multiply. Adam and Eve, I'm going to bless you with children.
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Imagine them being able to have children into your 900s. Probably a very big family.
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Let's move on to the menu. Verses 29 -31. The menu. And God said,
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See, I have given you every herb that yields seed, which is on the face of all the earth, and every tree whose fruit yields seed, so it shall be for food.
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Also to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, in which there is life,
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I have given every green herb for food, and it was so. Then God saw everything that he had made, and indeed it was very good.
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So the evening and the morning were the sixth day. As I mentioned to you last week,
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God here creates the menu and points out, here's what you are going to eat. You're going to eat all the stuff I made on day four.
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That's your food source. For all of the nefesh kaya, all of the living creatures will eat the fruit of the trees and the herbs.
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That's what the soulish creatures are going to eat, the non -soulish entities, the vegetation. And it is not until after the flood of Noah that God specifically tells
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Noah and his family to begin eating animals. He actually says in Genesis 9, excuse me, verse 3,
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Every moving thing that lives shall be for food for you. I have given you all things, even as the green herbs.
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But before that, man just ate fruit. Of all the trees in the garden, you may freely eat, God told
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Adam. Now coming up in the following weeks, we're going to begin walking through Genesis chapter 2.
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Genesis 2 is an expansion of the activity on day number 6, and it is here that we will look carefully at the institution of the family and the purpose of the family.
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We'll also look at the issue of family as it relates to the growing issue, sadly, of homosexuality and the monstrosity of homosexual marriage that is on the front burner in our cultural context today.
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The church must respond to this issue, as uncomfortable as that is, and as much as I can think of a lot of other topics
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I'd rather study, we must have answers. And we must be able to respond to the twisting and perversion of scripture that goes on in so many churches in our land today on this particular issue.
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So we saw on days 5 and 6 here, the living sea creatures and birds were created on the same day.
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And on day 6, the living land creatures were created and then man was created on day 6, the image bearers of God, with the commandment to be fruitful and multiply, and God gave us our food to eat.
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God provided for us completely. Now when you get to the end of Genesis chapter 1, you almost can't help but want to just jump up and cheer at this point.
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What an incredible work week. Now I've had weeks where I was happy because I got so much done, but nothing like this.
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It stirs the imagination to consider what it would have been like to take a prop plane ride over the land and sea during this time.
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Can you imagine such a thing? What would you have seen? What land and sea and air creatures would we see that no living humans have ever laid eyes on?
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What would a sunset have looked like on the earth prior to sin? What kind of mental abilities did
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Adam and Eve have before they fell into sin? I remember reading a Reformed theologian saying once that Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, and all the geniuses that have ever lived,
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Newton and Einstein, could not have matched Adam on his worst day. Adam's mental capacities must have been astounding.
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And what did the Garden of Eden look like? When God plants a garden, what did that look like?
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It must have been truly astounding. We see the reflections of it still in the world as it groans under sin and under the curse, and it's still beautiful.
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But the world must have been pristine in ways that almost cannot be described in words. When God says, saw it, and said it was very good, who knows what he really meant when he said that.
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One day we'll see it, when he makes it again, when he renews it. In closing, I'd like to close with the verses
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I read as the call to worship this morning, as they're very relevant to what God has done in these first six days of the universe's existence.
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I will extol you, my God, O King, and I will bless your name forever and ever. Every day I will bless you, and I will praise your name forever and ever.
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Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised, and his greatness is unsearchable. One generation shall praise your works to another, and shall declare your mighty acts.
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I will meditate on the glorious splendor of your majesty, and on your wondrous works. Men shall speak of the might of your awesome acts, and I will declare your greatness.
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They shall utter the memory of your great goodness, and shall sing of your righteousness. The Lord is gracious and full of compassion, slow to anger, and great in mercy.
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The Lord is good to all, and his tender mercies are over all his works.
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All your works shall praise you, O Lord, and your saints shall bless you.
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Let's pray. Father, it's still beautiful, all that you've created.
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And we see things that would have been there on those days, plants and animals, which would have looked very similar to the way they do now, even, as a part of that original creation.
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But we know it has fallen far from its original glory, just as we have. We see that in Psalm 8, that we were created with glory and honor, and we are so saddened by the fact that we've rebelled against you, that our glory has become shame, that our honor has become dishonor.
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Father, as your renewing work has begun in our hearts, it's our sincerest desire that we would please and honor you in the way we conduct ourselves, the way we live, the way we worship, the way we do everything that we do in life.
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Father, thank you for giving us an account of our own history, so that we understand where all these animals came from, where all these plants came from, and what their original purpose was.
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So that we understand why there's air in the sky, why that water falls down from the clouds, that we understand what we were put here to do, and that is to subdue the creation, to take dominion over it, to be fruitful and multiply, to subdue the earth for your glory, for your namesake.
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Lord, may we never forget, that is our history, that is who we are. Help us to see that, and we pray that you bring revival and repentance to more and more people that they would see it too.
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We ask in Jesus' name. Amen. This is
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Pastor Patrick Hines of Bridwell Heights Presbyterian Church, located at 108 Bridwell Heights Road in Kingsport, Tennessee, and you've been listening to the
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Protestant Witness Podcast. Please feel free to join us for worship any Sunday morning at 11 a .m. sharp, where we open the word of God together, sing his praises, and rejoice in the gospel of our risen
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Lord. You can find us on the web at www .bridwellheightspca .org,
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and may the Lord bless you and keep you, the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you, the