Creation Sermon Critique of Pastor Dave Gustavsen of The Chapel, Lincoln Park, New Jersey

This is Apologetics Live. To answer your questions, your host, from Striving for Eternity Ministries, Andrew Rappaport.

Good evening there. How's everyone doing? This is Dr. Anthony Silvestro, not

Andrew Rappaport. I think we need to get a theme song that has my name in it and Pastor Justin's name in case we do these special shows live like we're doing tonight.

So the reason why we're doing this special show is because of a friend of the ministry, Brian Simmons.

He goes to a large church, and the church is The Chapel in Lincoln Park, New Jersey.

And he was concerned. This has been his church for several years. As far as I know, it might be longer than that.

And his pastor, Dave Gustafson, has done some what seem to be concerning sermons lately.

And they all have to, they really revolve around science and mask usage.

And so he did a special sermon regarding science. And that's what we want to focus on today.

There's actually a lot of issues with this sermon. And what we're hoping to do is to really, is to be able to bring this stuff out in the open as to some of the issues we see with pastors incorrectly teaching from the

Bible. Now, here's the thing is, I don't know Pastor Dave. Brian has reached out to him.

He has tried to put us in contact with one another by text message. I was happy to talk to his pastor, because look, there's a lot of pastors just don't know any better, right?

There's a lot of pastors don't understand creation. And so I said, well, Brian, before we jump into anything, why don't we try to spend a few, why don't you spend some time trying to reach out to him, seeing if your pastor is willing to either speak to me live in private, or if he wants to come on the show, he can come on the show instead.

And that option is still available for you, Pastor Dave. I know that some people from your church are going to be listening and watching tonight.

So I am happy for you to come on. We're not hostile in this show. We are here just to ask questions.

And look, this is about apologetics. This is about learning and understanding the

Bible better. And we understand you're a pastor. I don't wish to be a pastor. You have a really, really difficult job.

I get it. If you're doing the job right, as I know my pastor does and others, you're spending 25, 30, 35 hours a week per sermon that you're putting together as you exposit through the scriptures, as you exposit through books of the

Bible as time goes on. There's a lot to it, not to mention all the other things you have to do in your church.

Yet, yet we are still responsible for what we teach. And this is where the dangers come into play.

You know, Justin Peters and I had a conversation about this several years ago. He actually said he believes that a lot of the nonsense in the church today has to do with the fact that the roles have been upheaved within the church.

Men not taking the responsibility they're supposed to have as leaders and women then deciding, hey, well, free spot for me.

I'm going to take that power. I'm going to take that notoriety. And so Pastor Justin, I'm sorry, Evangelist Justin Peters, when women have taken control within the church beyond what the

Bible allows them to do, he says that's where a lot of problems occurred. And I said, you know, Justin, I think you're right in a lot of ways, but I actually think it goes back further than that.

I think it goes back to when they started to question the creation account in the

Bible. I think when the creation account started to get questioned, that opened Pandora's box through the rest of the

Bible. And look, there's no doubt. Guys like John MacArthur, I think, he gets it right.

He says, tell me what somebody believes about the beginning of Genesis, and I'll tell you what they believe about the rest of the

Bible. Absolutely true. And Pastor Andrew Rappaport and I often joke back and forth as we are teaching a lot of conferences together.

I often make the quip that give me any doctrine in the Bible, give me anything, and I can show you how that it's rooted in Genesis.

If we get Genesis right, we should be able to get everything else right, at least the potential of getting everything else right.

If we get Genesis wrong, forget about it. We're going to have trouble with everything else.

And so that's where we stand right now. And having said that, I'm going to bring my guest in, and this is

Brian Simmons. So good evening, Brian. How are you doing tonight? Brian, you must not be able to hear me.

Oh, there you are. Okay. I'm doing well. Can you hear me well? Yeah, just try to pull that microphone up by your face a little bit closer if you can.

So Brian, I've just kind of given the introduction, as you have heard in backstage. This is your pastor.

How long have you been going to this church? So Brian, how long have you been going to this church?

I actually started going there in November of 2014,

I believe it was. So a while. And it was actually a sermon by Pastor Mike Bethune.

Sorry, I'm hearing feedback in the way. I apologize. Yeah, well, that's okay.

Give me a second. Yeah, so you can do that right now, so I'll continue. So what we've done is Brian so kindly went through the sermon that he was really concerned about.

Now, I guess there's a lot of sermons he's been concerned about in recent times, but this one was really concerning.

So he asked if a couple of us at Striving for Eternity would listen to it. And I listened to it.

If you say it's about creation, I'll probably listen. Big secret there. So I listened to it.

I was concerned. There's some things I think he says right. I think your pastor was genuine in delivering the sermon.

He just flat out wrong in a number of areas. And so what you did, Brian, is you went through the sermon and you made a bunch of clips.

We have 17 clips that are between 35 seconds and about two minutes. We're actually going to play those clips in full.

And as we play each clip, I've already listened to these. I have notes down and we're going to talk through them.

And most importantly, this is going to be for the listeners to hear. Both from our Striving for Eternity audience, as well as from anybody from your church that I know you said is going to tune in to listen.

Because this is really, really important to get this right. So having said all that,

Brian, you said you've been going there since about 2014. Have you seen a steady decline in the sermons? Somewhere along the way there's a huge decline.

It was the last five or six sermons. It was a series. Sorry, I apologize for the delay.

I'm literally, I can hear it. It's like six, eight seconds. So forgive me for that. I'll continue. So the last six weeks or so have really started touching upon some issues, as I think they were intended to.

Important issues that are coming up in a lot of churches throughout the world, which are reasons why people are leaving the church.

But rather than it just being a topical issue, I quickly started seeing it becoming a very biblical issue.

And I wanted to bring it to people who I trust to hear that second and third set of ears.

Because there's a lot of, I love the congregation at the chapel.

Everyone that knows me knows that. I've attended Bible study for five or six years. The men, some of my greatest friends that I've been able to develop in the body of Christ were at the chapel.

But I also remember that the church is a people, never a place.

In that process, I recognized that we really, there was something going on that if I didn't try to at least address it within the

Bible studies, which I kept trying to do, but I kept getting shut down. The people would listen, but I never saw anything change in certain areas, very important areas.

And obviously for me, creation was a very important one because that was where I got truly deceived in college.

As a freshman, I went to school, I thought, fully believing in God and knowing even

Jesus. And I got devastated by a freshman roommate who told me all about this millions of years and billions of years in the creation, in his story.

And I guess about six, seven weeks, every single night that he brought this up to me,

I came home one weekend and just completely broke down and told my father that my dad, who brought me up to believe in Jesus and was very faithful man who went to as a deacon for 55 years in his local church in Patterson called

Westminster Presbyterian. So in that process,

I came home and I tell him, dad, I don't believe what you told me.

The earth is millions of years old and I felt stupid. A kid made fun of me and he wouldn't stop and I had no answer to him.

Really, I said this to my dad and my dad was heartbroken. And that led to about a 17 year walk back towards God in disaster from that moment to there, even though success was in between worldly success.

If I had been taught the apologetics and my father had been taught the apologetics to be able to defend the faith against an evolutionist,

I would have had a really, I may have had one of those beautiful stories that like Nabil Qureshi, the

Muslim man, David Wood and your roommates, but I didn't have the training and I didn't have an answer to defend my faith.

And it was a fall down. And I think a lot of, I'm seeing this happening in a lot of, a lot of subjects is just, it needs to be well taught.

So we have a defense and we're prepared in season and out of season. And that's, that's why I brought it to your attention.

Yeah, no, that's great. You know, and obviously this is a subject that's near and dear to my heart being creation, but there's a bigger reason.

And, you know, I've, I've shared this in the past in, in, in not too much detail, but my wife and I used to go to a church that was a very large church, a loving pastor.

And within, I got saved there actually. And within a couple of years, I was listening to John MacArthur and Vodibachum and others.

And I'm like, you know, I'm listening to these guys. What they're telling me is when

I'm reading my own Bible, but it's not matching up with what I'm hearing from the pulpit. And, and that started me down an interesting track as well.

I started studying creation through God's providence by going to the creation museum unexpectedly, learning creation, bringing it back to the church and actually started teaching on, on creation.

And it creates a whole kind of ruckus within our, what I found out to be an emerging church.

So right down the line of, of Rick Warren's type stuff is what our church was going down.

And, and I remember before we left the church, two years of me trying to convince my wife that her church of, of, you know, the last 12 years is there's problems there.

And I'm waiting for her to, to be ready to leave the church. I'm still teaching in the meantime, but coming under a lot of flack from several pastors who didn't want to meet, didn't want me to teach dogmatically about creation.

One thing I mentioned to several of the pastors who said they believed in the young earth creation, but didn't want to press the issue is this church is huge.

It was like 18 pastors there. I said, you know, what happens is, is this is going to be a gateway to a lot of other bad stuff coming to the church.

And sure enough, we've been gone out of this church for over seven years now. And in contemplative prayer was brought in Eastern Mississippi, some types of Eastern mystic practices like contemplative prayer and others were brought into the church.

We saw a downgrade in the type of preaching style that was, that the pastor was doing more jokes or storytelling, less

Bible. You know, these, the same trail that, that a lot of people saw in their own churches as they went emergent is what we saw.

And guess where it started from in my opinion, anyway, was this issue of creation.

Granted that issue was there much earlier, right? It got exposed in part due to me teaching classes,

Sunday school classes, and it causing a little bit of a ruckus. And then the pastor decided that the third and final time

I taught this 12 week course, decided he was going to teach through Genesis on Sunday mornings as I was teaching, as I was teaching through Genesis on Sunday mornings at Sunday school.

And the pastor and I didn't match up and people knew that. And I had tons of people coming up to me saying,

I don't understand why is pastor so -and -so saying this stuff when the

Bible says this and you're teaching this, can't you go talk to him? And all I can say is I've spent the last two years trying.

It's all I could say, right? And so my heart is out to you on this, because this is exactly what I'm seeing with your pastor now is, is when this gateway is let open, it's going to be the floodgate for all kinds of other stuff to creep into the church.

So having said all that, Brian, we are going to start with going through these clips that you so graciously took your time to put together.

And here is going to be clip number one. Valentine's, I don't know what got into me.

You know what, let me, it's got to be shared instead. Well, good morning, chapel family.

Happy Valentine's Day to everybody. I don't usually do this, but I dressed for the occasion. Did you notice even my mask is

Valentine's? I don't know what got into me this morning. In my 25 years at the chapel, I don't think

I can remember a series that has created this much discussion and emotion and debate.

And I think that's a good thing. These are people that we love and that we care about, many of whom are walking away from church.

And if we really care about them, we'll take the time to listen to their concerns and their thoughts.

So this series has been an attempt to do that. A very imperfect attempt, but that's better than no attempt at all.

We are offering a question and response session. Question and answer sounds a little too smug, like we've got all the answers, but we can promise you at least responses.

You can submit questions in advance by just emailing questions at thechapel .org.

I've asked a group of other chapel leaders to join me and we're going to interact more and talk about these important matters.

Okay, so Brian, that is the first video.

And there's a couple of things I want to address. First and foremost, this is his intro, right? And he leads off in this sermon saying that people are walking away from church.

Now, one thing I want to make sure our audience understands, and I think most of our audience understands this, is that people don't walk away in terms of losing their salvation.

We read in the Bible that when you are saved, you're adopted into sonship of the Father, made co -heirs with Christ.

No one's going to snatch you out of our Father's hand. We are sealed, right?

Ephesians 1, that the Holy Spirit is the guarantee of our inheritance. We're sealed by that Spirit who's the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it.

We see throughout scriptures that we are sealed when we are truly saved.

When we see somebody who's in the church, who's going to church, going through the motions, going to Sunday school class, going to Bible studies, and then this person walks away from the church, they didn't lose their salvation.

In fact, 1 John 2 addresses this, starting in verse 18. Children, it is the last hour, and as you have heard that Antichrist is coming, so now many

Antichrists have come. Therefore, we know that it is the last hour. They went out from us, but they were not of us, for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us.

But they went out that it might be complained that they are all not of us. So as we see here,

John in 1 John 2 addresses this issue that people who leave the church leave because of the fact that they weren't saved to begin with.

That's an issue first and foremost. Here's the second one, and actually I'm going to put this up here from Chris Hudson.

Love you, Chris. Hope to preach with you again someday. You moved out to Oklahoma from the

Dakotas. But he writes this here. In that first clip, in regards to the pastor saying responses rather than answers, it seems like something a seeker, sensitive person would say.

Well, that would exactly be my issue. And so Chris, I actually have that down as point number two for this video.

My second and last point for this first segment is he wanted to make a distinction between questions and answers, which sounds too smug to him.

Instead, we want questions and responses. Well, let me be really, really clear with everybody here.

The Bible has answers. The Bible doesn't have responses. The Bible has answers for us.

We as apologists, when we go out and answer questions on the streets, when we're going witnessing for Christ, we are giving people answers.

We are not just giving them responses. Answers implies that we are giving them something that is correct.

Not that we're just giving them my opinion. Subtle, but a major problem.

And I think everyone here listening is going to see how this unfolds through the rest of these videos here.

So having said that, we are now going to jump into the second video here and start to get into this a little bit more.

A pastor named Dan Kimball recently spoke at a youth event, and he talked at this event about receiving a letter from one of his former youth group kids who had now become an atheist.

And in the letter, this former student of his said, quote, when I realized that my youth pastor and my parents really didn't know what they were talking about, being armchair theologians and scientists,

I started to doubt and could no longer trust what religion has taught me.

He speaks for a lot of other young adults and some older ones as well. So this is an important issue.

So we need to talk about it today. Okay, so first and foremost, do youth group kids become atheists because youth pastors and parents couldn't answer their questions?

No, that does not happen. What happens is that we're all born into the family of Adam.

We are all born with a sin nature. We are all born doing sins. We are all committing sins.

We are all born under the wrath of God in terms of that we are storing up wrath or God is storing up wrath on our behalf because of our sins against him.

That is what's going on in every single person alive today is that we are in our sins.

God is storing up wrath. Now, so kids don't become atheists.

Kids are already atheists and they may be brought up to believe in God. They might be brought up going to church, but ultimately they never had that heart transformation, the heart of stone being removed and replaced with the heart of flesh.

And so what we're seeing here so far in this video is that the pastor's laying out a case or attempting to lay out a case regarding the idea of people leaving the church, video clip number one, and clip number two is that there are atheists who are literally created by the church because of youth pastors and parents being ignorant of science.

I think that's what we're getting out of this so far. So, okay, let's push on ahead here and let's go on to number three.

And this is where things are going to start to get a little bit more interesting. Let's begin with today's scripture reading,

Psalm 19, beginning in verse one. I invite you to hear the word of the

Lord. The heavens declare the glory of God. The skies proclaim the work of his hands.

Day after day, they pour forth speech. Night after night, they reveal knowledge. They have no speech.

They use no words. No sound is heard from them, yet their voice is heard. Their voice goes out into all the earth.

Their words to the ends of the world. In the heavens, God has pitched a tent for the sun. It is like a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, like a champion rejoicing to run his course.

It rises at one end of the heavens and makes its circuit to the other. Nothing is deprived of its warmth.

The law of the Lord is perfect, refreshing the soul. The statutes of the Lord are trustworthy, making wise the simple.

The precepts of the Lord are right, giving joy to the heart. The commands of the Lord are radiant, giving light to the eyes.

This is the word of the Lord. So today I want to talk about three things. I want to talk about the gift of science.

I want to talk about the rejection of science. And I want to talk about the limits of science.

Okay, the gift, the rejection, and the limits of science. Okay, so Brian, as we're sifting through these videos now, now he's starting to get into some of his talk about science.

He lays out three issues that he sees in regards to science that he's going to lay out in his sermon because we're still in the introduction here.

There's some things that should really, really concern some people right now.

When we read Psalms, and we're going to talk about this a little bit more later. You know, Psalms is poetry.

There's going to be poetic language here. So is this, are the, are the, is, so day -to -day pours out speech, verse two.

Are the days actually pouring out speech speaking to us? No, this is poetic, this is figurative type language.

Heavens declare the glory of God. Same thing. Are the heavens declaring this, speaking to us audibly?

No, that's not what's going on here. And so what, what do we see?

And this is going to get really important here because the pastor is, is going to elevate science in a way that, that is dangerous and really downright blasphemous.

And one thing I want to lay out about science as well, for those of you who, who have seen, who have read my book on the origin of kinds, we walk through this understanding of science.

For those of you who've seen my stuff on social justice movement and where it started from, there is similar, there's a similar background to that too.

That background goes back to the enlightenment age, enlightenment period of the 1700s, 18th century, where what has always been thought of to be the age of God, right, where, where people had

God first as their source of everything was starting to get questioned for several hundred years.

And then the enlightenment period, you had this new birth of all these philosophers. And now we have the age termed the age of enlightenment.

And this period of time was now no longer the age of God. It was now the age of reason. It was going to be to use science and observations of, of the natural world to try to not compliment

God, but to explain away God, make no mistake about it. That was the issue of it to explain away

God. And so we get to guys like Karl Marx, who

I have his book, right? One of his, one of many books that people have written about him is

Karl Marx, a Satanist or was Karl Marx, a Satanist. Yes, he was. He was right in a suit.

He was raised in a pseudo Christian home, but Karl Marx, if you go back to his writings, he was all about writing

God off. He was about doing everything he can to remove God from everything in life. That was, that was his, that was his main goal.

It wasn't a side idea side issue. It was his main goal was to do that. We also have to understand something else.

Then Darwin, he wrote his book on the origin of species within just a few years of the time that Karl Marx came out, right?

All these guys were popping up in the mid 1800s, having all kinds of writings based off of the philosophical writings of the 1700s enlightenment age.

So, so what did, what did Charles Darwin do? He did the same thing. He was raised in a pseudo

Christian home and want to do the best job he could to explain away God using nature, using naturalistic processes.

Make no mistake about it. Folks listening brothers and sisters listening and others.

When you, when you understand the origins of most science, that origin is not of God.

It is against God. It is not neutral to God. It is against God, right?

That's the issue of science today. So we have to be, we have to be really, really careful as we talk about science.

So, so Saul 19 is not about the heavens declaring God's glory.

Let me tell you what Saul 19 is about. At least these first six verses is that when people look at, look up at the sky, they know

God exists. When, when people look up to the heavens, the night sky, the stars, everything else, they know

God exists. When people see that sun traversing, what looks to be traversing across the sky, it's really the earth's rotation.

Of course, this is poetic language here, right? When we see that, when we see that sun, this is

God in a sense, declaring himself, right? This is the fact that we all know

God exists. This is exactly what we read in Romans one, which we'll get into a little bit later. Romans one verses 18 to 20.

Everybody knows the true God exists by his creation in the things that have been made so much so that they're without excuse.

And just in case you're not sure if that applies to everyone, the next very next verse says, for, although they knew God, right?

So, so Paul writing here, of course, writing God's words is carried along by the

Holy spirit to Paul. He is acknowledging the fact everybody knows God exists.

The ones who don't profess him suppress the truth about him and their sin. And then God goes on.

I'm sorry, Paul got through Paul and the rest of Romans one goes on to say, for, although they knew God, they didn't honor him as God.

And then it goes on and on and on. And I think most of us know the rest of the story of what happens in Romans one. When people turn away from God, where do they turn?

They start worshiping the creature. They start worshiping the creation when they don't worship the one true

God they're supposed to worship. They ended up worshiping anything else. So, so we have to understand science in the correct light when it comes to secular science that that's out there, there's good science, but that's not what we're going to be talking about today as we're going to be seeing here in a little bit.

So also in this Psalm, so that was the first six verses. The last couple of verses that he read here, verses seven and eight says the law of the

Lord is perfect. Reviving the soul. The testimony of the Lord is sure making wise, a simple, the precepts of the

Lord are right. Rejoicing the heart. The commandment of the Lord is pure enlightening the eyes. So this is talking about, about what

God's word is for us. And as we understand from, from Romans two, we know morality is written on our hearts.

We know God has made himself known through creation to every single person and that, and that God's word helps give explanation for, for all of that.

I mean, this is, this is part of what we're seeing here. Granted, I'm giving a very, very high overview on this, but so the pastor looks at, at Psalm 19 and this is going to be his launching point for, for the sermon.

He's going to, he's, he's, he said, there's three things that we can see today.

He says that we, we see the gift of science or we have a gift of science. He says, number two, there's a rejection of science.

And number three, there's limits of science. Now we have to define terms here.

What is science? This is a big problem. And we're going to see again how that plays itself out through the rest of these videos, the word science and, and of course, you know,

Chris is a, Chris is on top of this as he normally is. If I had to take a guess, will a pastor use the equivocation fallacy when using science and evolution?

Yes, yes, he will. Just like so many of them do. For those of you who don't know what equivocation is, it's where you take a word and you change the meaning on it.

And so the example that I will often use is when I talk about scientists talking about evolution, right?

So scientists will say, well, some scientists will say, well, evolution happened. What they're meaning is macroevolution has happened.

You know, kinds turning other kinds, dogs turning into cats or let's give a real example. You go to the zoo and they think that the modern day birds and chickens are from Tyrannosaurus Rex 65 million years ago.

So what they're doing is they're, they're taking their beliefs about macroevolution and then they're looking at speciation, which is a type of microevolution.

And they're, and they're saying, look, here's evidence for evolution. What did they do? They just equivocated on the term.

They change the definition. They're saying, here's evidence for macroevolution, but I'm going to give you microevolution evidence instead.

It's a huge, huge trick that, uh, that scientists and a lot of professing

Christians want to do. And, uh, as, as, uh, we see this here,

I'm going to put this up real quick, is that here we go.

Science is whatever government wants it to be. Unfortunately, that is the exact moral of this entire sermon today is, is that.

So now we go on to video number four. So first the gift of science for many centuries,

Christian theologians have talked about God communicating truth to us through two books.

The first is the book of scripture. And the second is the book of nature. Uh, probably the biblical passage that brings those two together most clearly is the passage we just read from the 19th

Psalm. So in the first six verses, it says basically this, when we see a brilliant night sky, or when we see a spectacular sunrise, or when we see, like a lot of us saw last week, ice covered branches against a backdrop of a pink and tangerine sky as the sun is setting.

When we see things like that, it does something to us. It speaks to us.

It tells us there must be a creator and that creator must be awesome.

Okay, good. so Brian, I don't know if the lag is gone yet. You'll have to let me know, um, when you, when you kind of figure that out, because I'd love to have you on speaking a little bit more.

And I can tell by your, your facial expression right now, you're still, you're still way behind. So, so here's video number four.

He says the gift of science is science, a gift. Absolutely. When we understand science correctly and use it correctly, it absolutely is a gift from God.

Now, here's where things get a little bit hairy is, is he made a distinction that the pastor made a distinction between, um, the first six verses of, of this

Psalm and Psalm 19 and the next two verses of Psalm, Psalm 19.

I don't know if you guys caught that. He said, God community communicate communicated through two books to us.

He communicated through the book of scripture and he communicates through the book of nature.

That's a problem. So he, he talks about the fact that that's on one hand, we have scripture that we have as a source of truth.

On the other hand, we have nature that is a source of truth. Now here's, here's a problem.

And in audience, I mean, feel free to make comments on this, but can we possibly have nature as a source of truth?

Or instead does nature, do we, do we peer into nature that reveals truths to us?

Do we, do we look at nature that ultimately should point us back to the truth of God?

Okay. Well, he says that in Romans one, but that's not exactly what this pastor says.

And so as we, as we continue on to the next one here, I think it's going to on the next video,

I think it's going to make this a little bit more apparent. So this will be video number five.

Nature speaks to us without using words. This is what the philosopher Alvin Plantinga calls the census divinity taught us, which means sense of the divine.

Just by looking at nature, we learn truth, maybe not specific details about God, but important truth.

And then it kind of shifts in verse seven. And, and it starts talking about the written word of God.

It's kind of, it almost seems surprising that it would shift from nature to the word of God, but it talks about the statutes and the precepts and the commands of God.

So by reading scripture, we understand truth about God. We understand truth about the world.

And so you have God's world and God's word. You have nature and scripture.

Those are the two books that God has given us to reveal truth about reality. Since they're both from God, there's obviously no conflict between nature and scripture, right?

I mean, they're both truth. Ouch. So, so all of a sudden nature is truth.

Does that sound scriptural at all? That nature is truth. And by the way, I think I said it flip -flopped earlier.

So I want to make sure I'm corrected on this is that the first six verses, he was talking about the book of science and a book of nature.

And the second, the next two verses was the book of scripture. But so in any case, he clarifies a little bit more here, what he's talking about.

He says, nature speaks to us just by looking at nature. We learn truth.

Wow. This is, this is pretty, pretty dangerous. And Chris, thanks for being on the ball.

I know you're a creation guy as well. Since the pastor made the comments about book of nature and scripture being truth, it comes across as a denial of sola scriptura.

Well, that's exactly what we're going to end up seeing happen through the rest of his sermon. As we go through these video clips.

So, so the pastor here is, is talking about, there can be no conflict between nature and scripture.

Now, now look, I'll give a caveat to this. If we're doing true science, good science, it's always going to confirm what we see scripturally.

It'll never go against scripture. Now there are some things in science that, that aren't spoken of in scripture.

Like spiders have eight legs. I don't know anywhere in scripture that it talks about spiders having eight legs.

Okay. So we do an experiment. We see a, we see a bunch of spiders, eight legs. I get it. They have eight legs.

So, so there are things that we learn out there, but that's not what the pastor is talking about here either.

The pastor is here is, is laying a foundation for doing science, experimental science and saying that that truth is on equal par to scripture.

That's a problem. It's essentially no different than what the

Roman Catholics do, where they take scripture and put it on par with the magisterium and put that on par with church history and the church fathers all equal in authority.

This is what the pastor is doing is he's setting everybody up to putting these two books right next to each other, which really means that they're going to be at odds with one another.

That's an issue matter of theology. I love this. Could the psalmist be working systematically from creation by the word to the establishment of the written word?

That's exactly what the psalmist is doing. It's exactly what the psalmist is doing. So thank you for, for bringing that up.

So as we're going to continue to watch today, we're going to see this pastor is going to be pitting scripture against science.

He's going to pick, he's going to pit the book of truth in terms of scripture and the book of truth, which he calls nature.

We're going to see him pit these two things together. So on we go to the next video, video number six.

But here's where it gets tricky. When we start to interpret nature, that's called science.

When we start to interpret scripture, that's called theology. And as we all know, there can be all kinds of conflict between science and theology.

There's actually a classical historical example of this. You know what it is? How the astronomer

Galileo was treated by the Christian church in the early 1600s. So up until that time, the church and pretty much everybody believed that the earth was at the center of the universe.

That's just what everybody thought. And the reason, the main reason they thought that was because of their interpretation of certain

Bible passages. For example, Psalm 93 one says the world is firmly established.

It cannot be moved. Ecclesiastes one five says the sun rises and sets and returns to its place.

And so the church said, look, it's clear scripture is teaching us that the earth is stationary.

We're at the center of the universe. The sun travels around us and you got to feel for Galileo because he really wasn't trying to be a troublemaker, but he had built this telescope and the more he looked into the night sky, the more he agreed with this radical thought that had actually been proposed by Copernicus a couple of decades earlier, that we're not at the center, that actually we, along with all the other planets revolve around the sun.

The church did not like that. So they basically forced him to recant his view and they put him under house arrest for the rest of his life.

So looking back in history, how do we, how do we look at that event? Well, everybody knows that in that case, the church was wrong, right?

And Galileo was right. Okay. So when we interpret nature, it's called science.

When we interpret scripture, it's called theology. And the pastor then goes on to say, there can be all kinds of conflicts between the two.

Well, this is where the things get hairy. So now he's going to bring up Galileo and he's going to talk about how he was treated poorly by the church because Galileo turned out to be right in his science.

Well, there's another, there's another equivocation going on in this issue. First and foremost, what

I want to make sure that we all understand it. And if anybody here that is listening, went through pastor

Andrew Rappaport's school of biblical hermeneutics, or just sat through one of his seminars on a

Bible interpretation made easy, you would quickly point out the fact that Psalms and Ecclesiastes are poetry.

They're poetic. These are poetic books. They're not written to be like historical narratives, not written to be, to take out literal type thoughts out of them.

Certainly, certainly not meant to be taken, not to, not to take science out of these.

So, so he's bringing up these two, these two verses. Now did the church, did some people in the church get it wrong?

Yes, they did. They should have taken Andrew's course, you know, 500 years ago, 400 years ago.

And then they would have not made that mistake of trying to, to see science in a poetry book.

But that's not the issue that we're going to, that we're discussing today, right? We're talking about science in general and the science that he is talking about.

When you're talking about interpreting nature, doing science, you're talking about doing experiments, experimental science, talking about doing experiments.

You're talking about making observations, testing those observations, retesting observations, trying to come up with, with a confirmation of those, of what your hypotheses was through those tests.

And if you seem to confirm it through your tests, you can now call it a theory. This is operational or experimental science today.

This is an observation here in poetic literature, poetic books that people made.

So there's not a conflict here that, that Galileo is making observations in the night sky and seeing what's, what's going on.

In fact, the poetry, the sun rises, the sun goes down and hastens to the place where it rises. Look, Pastor Dave, have you gone to see a sunset before?

Have you gone with your wife to watch the sun go down? We all call it a sunset. And yet we know it's not a sunset.

We know it's that the earth is rotating. So, so the fact that they didn't get this right because it's poetry does not make for a good example of what we see today in terms of bad science.

That is undermining what scripture clearly teaches as we're going to be getting into.

So now we're going to go to the very next one here. Video number seven.

So does that prove that scripture contradicts science? Not at all.

It just proves that the church's interpretation of scripture was wrong. When Psalm 93 one says the earth is firmly established, it cannot be moved.

That was never meant to be a scientific statement. It was a poetic statement about the enduring quality of the world.

When Ecclesiastes one five says the sun rises and sets, that was never intended to teach that the sun actually moves.

It was simply describing the way it looks when a normal person looks out into the world. So because the church failed to recognize that, they thought they were defending the

Bible, right? And yet they were actually defending the very wrong interpretation of the Bible. Everybody with me?

Okay, so good. And in all fairness, you know, Brian, we talked about this earlier.

There are some things your pastor said right. And this was one thing that he said right. I agree with him completely on what he said there.

The problem still remains though is that what he ends up doing the rest of his sermon is going to be going after experimental operational science.

And he's going to be attacking literal historical narrative in Genesis to do so.

Having said that, I want to bring another guest on here. Alan, can you hear me? Hi there?

Yeah, I can hear you guys. Can you hear me? Wonderful. I can and no lag. So Brian, I hope you can fix that lag so we can get you back on.

But Alan, so for everyone who doesn't know Alan, Alan is a faithful church member of ours.

He married our former assistant, Rachel, who's a sweet, sweet sister.

And somebody who my wife and I have just loved her for years. And so we're enthused that she is married to Alan and that Alan's married to her.

They're great for each other. So it's been wonderful to see that. Alan's also a very, very smart guy.

And what's funny is that tomorrow morning he's going to be meeting with a couple guys from our church, younger guys who he's going to be teaching some stuff out of Genesis.

Asked if I'd be there just to kind of hang out. And, of course, you say Genesis and I'm there. And so I'm going too just to hang out and watch

Alan teach. But, you know, so Alan, I know I kind of told you about this video series.

And you're kind of coming at a good time. We've laid a lot of the groundwork. And we're getting in some of the nitty -gritty right now with everything.

So I'm just going to have you kind of sit back with us and pipe in as you see fit going forward.

So next one is going to be video number eight. So we need to be very honest and say, you know, throughout history, there have been times when the church actually has been anti -science, sometimes for the purest of motives.

Most of them probably thought they were doing the right thing. But it's been anti -science in those cases. And we need to learn from those mistakes.

Here's the exciting thing, though. When we are interpreting Scripture responsibly and accurately, there is this beautiful harmony between faith and science.

And so rather than looking at science as a threat, we should look at it as a gift.

I mean, we should be so thankful for biology and chemistry and physics and all of these other great tools that we have for understanding our world.

Those don't threaten our belief in Scripture. Sometimes they may even help us understand

Scripture better. And that's a good thing. Okay, so does science help us understand

Scripture better? Wow, that's a kind of loaded question.

Alan, this is a short answer show just so you know, but I know you could talk for an hour about this.

But, I mean, in short, does science help us understand Scripture better? Well, I would say there's a problem there.

There are two kinds of problems that science can provide.

There is science that would support Scripture, but there are also sciences that are out there that don't support

Scripture. So we have to be very careful. Science is too broad a category. And I even saw him break it down into physics and other things, which

I would say he's breaking down into laws. I'm not sure if you can still hear me or not.

Yes, yes, we can hear you just fine. And as just one of our faithful watchers says here, science doesn't help us understand

Scripture better. The Holy Spirit does. Amen. Hallelujah. That's exactly the right thing.

Science doesn't interpret Scripture. Scripture interprets Scripture. The Holy Spirit illuminates our eyes to Scripture better and better as time goes on, as we're learning

Scripture. But science does not interpret Scripture. We don't have to have science at all to understand

Scripture really, really well. That's the reality there. And, yeah,

Alan, he broke down different types of science. Well, here's the thing, though.

The dominion mandate. People want to say, well, why do we have science in the first place? Because a lot of people have used it for a lot of evil.

And I'm going to make the case that most science that occurs today is with evil intent or evil purposes.

And the fact that, while it doesn't seem to be, it's anti -God. So I laid out the case earlier in that most science today by secular scientists is anti -God in its foundation.

Right. That's the part that we have to battle. And so when we look at why do we have science, here's my argument for why we have science.

We go back to Genesis 1 here. And in Genesis 1, we have the dominion mandate.

And so it says. Actually, let me move.

Let me do the Genesis 2 instead here. Yep. I'll pull up in a moment here.

I can't find it so quick. Having trouble. So I just got a new phone. It's being buttoned for some reason.

In any case, the dominion mandate is where we see that Adam and Eve was given to Adam.

This is helpmate. Adam and Eve are to multiply and spread over all the earth.

And they're to take dominion over the creation. Literally everything. Literally everything.

We're to have dominion over it. We're to use creation for our purposes. Not abuse it, but use it for our purposes.

If we want to use fossil fuels today, use fossil fuels. If you want to eat a cow, enjoy your steak.

I mean, we have the right to use these things because God gave them to us. We're above the rest of the creation in that sense.

We're made in the image of God. Animals are not. We're made in the image of God. Nature is not. We have dominion over all that.

So my argument is why do we have science? It's because God gave us science in order that we can understand his creation better.

The very creation he gave us dominion over, we have science in order to learn more about it.

And therefore should be in awe even more of him. Right.

Yeah, absolutely. And the categories that he started listing off within science, we would restrict down to laws and principles.

We can see at work that God has ordained for the creation of all things.

Yeah, that's right. You cannot say—because science is too broad a statement there for us to just say that all science is going to validate

Scripture. There are plenty of sciences that are out there that are not going to validate Scripture under our errant sciences.

So even within that category, you have to break it down. You can't use that big category to say all science comes in and validates

Scripture. Right. And so Matter of Theology, thanks for chiming in again. Those who want to disprove

God are under no obligation to be truthful in their interpretation of science or sciences.

That's absolutely right. And look, most scientists are very willing to tell you that as well.

Most of the scientists that are out there that are promoting evolution, that are promoting

Big Bang, that are promoting who knows what else associated with it, are under no obligation to be truthful.

Because their number one issue is how do we explain the way God? That really at the core of it is their number one issue.

And so on that, we're going to go on to our next video. I call this one video eight and a half because I numbered them all and this one was kind of—I left this one off.

So our next video here. I think we have to be really honest and say, you know what?

There's parts of this critique that are really pretty accurate. That at times the church really has been anti -science and Christians have been anti -science.

That's not good. It's not good for our kids growing up in the church who have a passion for science.

And yet it's presented in such a way that you have to choose between either being a good Christian or a good scientist.

What a disservice to those intelligent kids. It's not good for the church's reputation.

It's not good for the world. So if we are people that say we want truth, we're really interested in truth, we should fearlessly pursue that through science.

Because if it's really true, it's not going to threaten our faith. It'll just make our faith wiser.

Wow. Okay. So let me put a couple of comments here. Joshua Payne, science can only do two things.

Observe that which has been created by God and manipulate that which has been created by God. Both of which fallible man is interpreting and manipulating.

God is creator which all science must be subject. It's a great synopsis right there, Josh, is we're fallible man.

And so we have to understand how we interpret things in general. And you bring up an interesting point because the pastor is talking about how people can interpret the

Bible wrong. He's made that crystal clear that the church has interpreted the

Bible wrong in the past. Does he make any mention that people can possibly interpret science wrong?

Not yet, and it won't happen the rest of this video. Well, he directly compares pursuing science is pursuing truth.

And that's in that little clip there because he points out that if your children are pursuing science, they're pursuers of truth.

Right. Isn't that what he said there? Exactly. He said pursue truth through science. But pursuing truth for the

Christian is pursuing God's word. It's exactly contrary to what he's pointing out.

Absolutely. You know, it's funny you say that because, you know, one of the things that bothers me about certain

Bible translations is I really wish they would capitalize he when it's referring to, you know, all those.

But we should also be capitalizing the word to describe him. Like when we say holy or we say the holy one or the just one or those things should be capitalized.

When I type out the word truth, almost always I capitalize it.

And I don't know that you need to always. But the reason why

I do that is because there's one source of truth. Right.

It's God. And the truth that we can get to know is what's revealed in his word to us.

That's the only source of truth we have. Science doesn't give us truth. Science allows us to discover some of God's truth if we do the science correctly and interpret the science correctly.

But it's not a source of truth. This is a huge, huge problem that we're seeing with this.

So, okay, let's move on. I think you got that right. And we'll say one other thing about this video is he makes a plea here.

He says that people are being forced to choose between church and science. I don't know about you,

Alan. Brian, I don't know about you. I don't have to choose between science and church.

I don't have to choose between science and scripture. Right. I mean, yeah, that's not a good idea.

Yeah. There are definitely scientific principles and scientific laws that we understand at play.

And we understand them not just from scripture, but just because we can observe them.

We can test them. We can repeat them. We can do the scientific process on them correctly.

And so we as truth tellers, we should embrace truthful science.

But there is plenty of science that is done untruthfully, that is done with wrong intentions, wrong motives.

Like you said, with the intent to deny God, to deny him of his attributes, to deny him of his holiness.

And the result then is that all of that science is not truth. You cannot label all science truth.

Yes, that's absolutely right. So Brian, is your mic working now?

Can you guys hear me right now? We can. Yep. So it sounds like you are now, you're now on with us.

Perfect. Okay. So now we're going to go on to the next video, video number nine.

You know, all the way back in the fourth century, St. Augustine said these famous words, all truth is

God's truth. Very simple, but very true. So if we're really interested in truth, we should celebrate it wherever it's found in the

Bible or in the lab. Just last week, there was this really good article in Time Magazine about Francis Collins.

I really encourage you to read it. If you could just probably find it online, Time Magazine. It's the February 4th issue.

In case you don't know, Francis Collins is the only presidentially appointed director of the

National Institutes of Health who has served under multiple administrations. So he served under President Obama.

He served under President Trump. He continues to serve under President Biden. It seems like no matter who the president is, they all agree, we want this guy to stay.

He's that good at what he does. Years ago, I can't remember, 15 or 20 years ago,

Francis Collins led the Human Genome Project. And so he was leading that team that essentially cracked the code of human

DNA. So brilliant scientist. And Francis Collins is also a very committed

Christian. So in this Time article from last week, he said that for him, as a believer, science is actually a form of worshiping

God. Isn't that a great thought? He said, quote, it's a glimpse of God's mind when you do a scientific experiment.

I love that. In that same article, it says that one of Francis Collins' life goals is to address, quote, the longstanding tension between evangelicals and rigorous science.

So let me just stop and ask the question. Why is that tension even there? Why is it that some

Christians view science less as a gift and more as a threat? Okay, so there's a lot in this one.

Here's a good one, clergy talk. God spoke creation to existence. Science rejects that and trying to blend the two could be dangerous.

I completely agree with that statement. Okay, so there's a lot going on here.

And, Alan, I don't know if you want to tackle this first. The first thing

I want to say is anytime I want to gain a glimpse of God's mind, I go to his word.

I mean, there's no better way to find out what God's thinking than what God's saying.

That would be my first instinct, would be, if you want to gain a glimpse of God's mind, go to his word.

Everything else falls into place from there. Yeah, that sounds pretty logical to me. I mean, it's kind of what the

Bible says, right? I want to learn about him and we're going to go to him. By the way, I posted the

StreamYard link several times in the chat. So if anybody wants to join live with us here and talk or ask questions, anybody is at Pastor Dave's church or Pastor Dave himself.

We'd love to have you on and talk through this. And, you know, maybe you misspoke. Hey, come on.

Talk about how you misspoke. Maybe you understand that you now stand corrected.

Hey, come on. That's fine. Tell us that, too. But we're happy to have you on to be able to talk through some of this stuff.

Okay, so he says science is a form of worshipping God. Do we do science to worship

God? I mean, look, we can do science for the glory of God.

We can observe his creation to the glory of God. We can be in awe of his creation to the glory of God.

We can be in awe as we do scientific experiments, which, if it wasn't for Jesus upholding the laws of nature, that we couldn't do those in the first place.

We can be in awe of God there. I don't know that I like the phrase that science is a form of worshipping

God. It sounds like somebody is worshipping something other than God when you're using science to worship.

So I think we've got one more that is joining here. So, Rob, are you in?

Can you hear me? We can hear you. How are you doing, Rob? Good, brother. How are you? I'm good.

Good to hear your voice again on here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know we disagree about other areas of theology, but we agree on Genesis.

We do? Yeah, we do. The necessity of reading Genesis is literal because Jesus said so.

Yeah, yeah. Pretty clear. We disagree on stuff. I mean, we can disagree on those.

So, brother, it's not. No, I know. I like to be honest, though, the way people don't think.

Yeah, it's been a really interesting listening to this guy talk. It was really interesting at the beginning.

He mentioned about how nature could speak to him. It's a very pagan notion that you could almost get a special knowledge from nature itself, that it speaks in the same way the word speaks.

That's not correct because Romans is pretty clear. Creation can tell us God exists, but it cannot tell us that Jesus is the

God. You're right. We get general revelation, not special revelation. And you're right. That's exactly what he did with Psalm 19 is he acted like nature speaks to us.

And so when we do science, then that nature is speaking to us as well. And it's a source of truth.

I mean, that's how all this is bundling together so far in his sermon.

So great, great point there. Something that's jumped out to me is something that out of all the things he said,

I was kind of like, it's a really weird way to say something. But, yeah,

I've really enjoyed the show so far. It's going to be interesting to listen to the rest of it as he starts to really get to the heart of,

I think, his argument. Yeah, well, the heart comes at the end, and you'll probably pull the rest of your hair out.

I think I already pulled some of mine. So, okay, so I don't know if anyone else has anything to say about this video.

He did end it with a question, though. He said this, is science a gift or is it a threat?

That sounds like a logical fallacy there as well, because I believe science is a gift.

I don't believe that good science is a threat at all. I believe bad science is a huge threat to Scripture.

But I wouldn't even say that necessarily bad science is a threat to Scripture as much as the people who are using false science is a threat in attacking

God. So they're using partial truth, which Satan does as well.

He uses God's word against Jesus to accuse him and try to trick him. And what does

Christ do but correct him in his trying to use truth against him? And we see this throughout

Scriptures that usually when Satan's speaking, he uses a portion of truth to actually try to convince us that we are wrong.

And so what scientists want to do sometimes is take an element of truth and kind of build on top of that to ultimately tell us a lie.

You know, it's funny you say that. We're going to be addressing that just a little bit later in this show because he's going to reference some more on this.

But I think, Alan, you had something else to say before you jump to the next video here. Yeah, I would say there's a big problem.

And it's when you hit the Gospels and Jesus starts doing miracles, right? It's God doing supernatural things that cannot be explained through science, which is the observation of natural things.

So you have to be very careful to put science in its place.

And you can't use the broad stroke brush that he's doing with this.

He's painting a very broad picture of science. And that's one of the huge problems.

You have to put it right in its place. Theology is separate from science in the fact that it's

God doing supernatural works that we cannot observe, we cannot repeat, we cannot calculate through natural means.

We don't have that capacity. So we have to make sure that we have the understanding that science is put in its place.

And this is where you get kind of in that weird place where science and worship go hand in hand. You've got to be very careful there.

Yeah, it's interesting, Alan, that you brought that up because we literally – right before you said that, we had somebody who's claiming to be a clergy member say the exact opposite of what this guy is saying, that the two cannot be mixed at all.

But he's coming at it from a completely different angle than the guy we're actually reviewing. So it's interesting that there's error on either side, in my opinion.

There certainly can be. So we've listened to nine videos so far and laid all the groundwork, right?

For what now he's getting into, which is some of the heavy stuff in this sermon. And so listen to this video, and you're going to see the turn really start to take shape now.

Let's go on to point number two, rejecting science. Rejecting science.

Now, we have to be fair. Some of the conflict, some of the tension is created by aggressively atheistic scientists.

For example, the famous British scientist Richard Dawkins wrote this. Faith is the great cop -out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence.

Okay? The late Peter Atkins, who was a professor at Oxford, said this.

It is not possible to be intellectually honest and believe in gods. And it is not possible to believe in gods and be a true scientist.

End of quote. I do find it kind of funny that you could say that Francis Collins, who does believe in God, is not a true scientist.

That seems like a real stretch. But the point is, when you make insulting and dismissive statements like that, it's not surprising that some

Christians would feel threatened and a little bit suspicious of mainstream science, right? So that's part of the tension, are those aggressively atheistic scientists.

But I think we also have to be honest and say sometimes the tension is created by religious people themselves.

And let me mention two ways that I see this. Two ways that Christians sometimes reject science.

First, I'm going to call it closed -minded theology. Closed -minded theology.

When the church in the 1600s punished Galileo for saying that the earth revolved around the sun, that was closed -minded theology.

I mean, they were really certain they were interpreting the Bible correctly. Turns out, they weren't.

So I think one of the places that we need to remember that lesson is when we are discussing the origins of life.

And here we go. Alright. I mean, right away, to me what pops out is when people start talking about closed -minded viewpoints, this is the modern evangelical catchphrase for everything subjective.

I find a lot of times people use these narrative -building words like this to kind of build up a, hey, if you actually believe dogmatically things from scripture, you're closed -minded.

And that is not the proper use of the term. I also want to just briefly mention that I find it interesting in this particular clip,

I wonder if this pastor, no offense to the guy who actually goes to the church, is starting to crumble on anthropology.

Because to me, his bondage of the will doctrine is not up to par.

Because that clip right there really said to me that he is not well catechized on that doctrine.

Well, good point. So let me bring something out about this video too. Number one, he said gift of science earlier.

He broke his sermon down into three points. Gift of science. We are now on to point number two, which is the rejection of science.

What he calls the rejection of science. And he acknowledges there's bad scientists out there.

I would agree there are bad scientists out there. I would probably place many more in the category of bad scientists than he would.

But at least it's a minor point we can agree on. Yeah, and the problem about anthropology,

Doctor, is that if they are not from faith, they are necessarily in some way, shape, or form, even if they're not outwardly as bad as, say,

Dawkins, they still have problems. They're still opposing God. They're still opposing Jesus Christ.

So even if they would be extreporous in their behavior, sorry to borrow a term from Matt Slick, they would oppose

God ultimately, deep down. Yeah, that's right. And speaking of Matt, he should come on the show tonight.

I don't know if he's watching live or not. Sometimes he pokes in. So Matt, if you're watching, join the show.

We had a great conversation on your couch back last August. So a good time talking. If Matt Slick comes on and I have to get voted off the

Hollywood Square, send me off, okay? No, no, no. We've got plenty of room on the show here. Okay, so there's a couple of statements he made that I want to point out.

He says it's not possible to be a good scientist and believe in God. So he throws this kind of out there.

He says that Christians feel threatened by science. I certainly don't.

I don't feel threatened by any science whatsoever. I find it repulsive that there's people who bring up – professors and Christians who bring up science that would oppose scripture.

But nowhere am I threatened by science. And as Matt of Theology is pointing out, his first argument in the rejection of science is taking an ancient view and attempting to apply it to today.

Well, that's correct. And as we said earlier, he's taking a view that people misinterpreted poetic literature versus – let's face it.

Okay, Alan, you've been studying Genesis a lot really recently. So if we had to categorize the genre of the

Book of Genesis, what would it be? It would be theology. Theology?

I mean it's theology and history. It is not poetry. Yeah, exactly.

So as we put our hermeneutics hat back on, again, if you haven't gone through his stuff, order

Andrew's workbook on Bible Interpretation Made Easy and go through it and understand how to read the

Bible in the proper context. But there's one thing I want to point out because I speak on creation a lot and I run into a lot of people who talk about Genesis being poetry.

There are studies that have been done. You want to talk about some good stuff? There's some science that's been done.

Here's one of them, a statistical analysis by a Hebrew scholar named Stephen Boyd. He went and he looked at the words that are used in the beginning of Genesis.

He did a word study. He did a word study because you could do a word study on all kinds of Hebrew literature, and by the words, you can tell.

By the words, by the sentence structure, everything, you can tell if this is poetry or narrative.

This is not hard to do, right? And so he did this. And he gets a probability that Genesis 1 -1 through 2 -3, being a narrative, at a confidence level, 0 .99999726.

I agree. Essentially 100%. There is no way that this is not historical narrative.

And his is not the only study that's been done. There's been a number of them, a number of word studies done in the beginning of Genesis to show that this is clearly historical narrative.

We're not looking at this as poetry. I know there are some professing Christians who want to look at Genesis, and they want to repackage it so that they can try to fit it to some scientists.

But they're not being faithful to the text. They're not being faithful to Genesis 1 and 2 in doing that.

Well, and one of the problems that people run into is in interpretation, often they look at the repetitive nature of Genesis 1 and 2, and they say, oh, this must be poetry because God is repeating himself.

God is repeating himself for the sake of making very bold statements about who he is.

I mean, we were talking about this even earlier today. God, the name for God, it's 33 times in the

New Testament, in Genesis 1, that he refers to himself as Elohim, meaning that God is the sole party doing everything in Genesis 1.

And all of the repetition is for our understanding, for our learning, is not poetry.

Yeah, there's a rule that we Lutherans like to use. If God repeats himself, you should pay attention.

Amen. Yeah, amen to that. Later on in the show,

I'm going to show one spot that he repeats himself many times as well. Okay, next video here, video number 11.

Look, there are some things about our theology where the

Bible doesn't leave much room for different interpretations, right? The virgin birth of Jesus Christ, the death on a cross of Christ, the literal physical resurrection of Christ, the eventual return to earth of Jesus, salvation by grace through faith alone.

Let's hold those things tightly. But there are some other things about our theology where we need to recognize the

Bible leaves room for good Christians to disagree. And on those things, let's keep more of an open mind.

And let's allow that sometimes the discoveries of science can help us understand Scripture even better.

There's another kind of thinking that leads to a rejection of science, and I'll call it us versus the world mentality.

An us versus the world mentality. This is kind of tricky because there is a sense in which following Jesus puts us at odds with the world, right?

And Jesus said, in this world, you're going to have trouble. If the world hated me, don't be surprised if they hate you too.

And so when it comes to our allegiance to Christ, there are times when the secular forces of culture really will be against us.

And those need to be times that we need to stay faithful to God rather than give in to the pressure of the world.

OK, so first of all, there's a Facebook user who wrote this. There's some science that I don't know who this is.

There's some science that has been done, thought we were refuting science here with your creationism. Not sure you are.

You must not know me very well. But we don't we're not here to refute science.

As a creationist, I believe in really good science. And I believe first in Scripture.

I believe that there's truth in Scripture. And I believe that we can we can reliably read the beginning of Genesis and get an understanding in the creation account.

I believe we can reliably read other parts of the history of the Bible that add into a proper understanding of of creation.

We're not refuting science of creation. We're not pitting creationism versus science as if my creationism is just a fairy tale that some

Bible guys have come up with. We're creationists because God says this and this and this and this and this right on down the line in Genesis one.

He he he literally lays out everything that he did as a historical narrative.

We see that there is good science out there that actually supports what we are seeing in Scripture.

I'm getting feedback from somewhere. I can't tell where I'm getting it yet. I believe it's the guy that was delayed.

OK. Yeah, I'm not sure. But so in any case, this is

OK. That's an issue. We're going to deal with that as we go on and understand what creation science actually teaches, where there is good science out there that supports what we read in the

Bible or confirms what we read in the Bible. But what the pastor does here in this video is he goes into an us versus the world mentality.

Right. He is. He is literally saying it is us the Bible versus them who believe science.

That's clearly not what we believe here. Right. We are people who, Alan, I know you've studied a lot of science as well.

We enjoy the science. We enjoy the science. We just understand what our source of truth is first and what good science is going to confirm.

Yeah, that's why, in my opinion, some most of the arguments you've played so far are of a rare form of straw man where you select certain arguments and deal with them and ignore the presence of stronger arguments.

Yeah, that's right. No, he does. You're right about that, Rob. He and he does. He did start off this this segment of video saying that the

Bible doesn't leave room for interpretation on some things. Amen. He would agree with all of us here about Jesus' death, birth and resurrection.

He would believe the gospel. Amen to that. I mean, that is the core of why we all do this is is for the gospel.

But the problem is, is that the Bible also has many, many other truths. And in it, we have a we have a book that we live by.

Right. As Alan, as you said earlier, you want more truth and we want to understand the mind of God more.

You don't go to nature. Right. You go to his word. Right. And so. So for us, we enjoy we enjoy the word, and that's where we want to continue to go.

And we have to understand that all of the Bible is true. Not just it.

I happen to pick that up as well. I wonder what his doctrine of perspicuity would be, because he's saying

Scripture is very clear on certain topics, but not so clear in others. We as me as a confessional loser would vastly disagree.

I would say Scripture is largely pretty plain to understand if we're willing to hear the word of God.

The problem is the sin nature interferes with that. So I wonder how he would say besides those select few topics, which he wants to say is abundantly clear.

If we went through verses that I would say are very, very, very clear. If he would say the same thing there, if he would be consistent in that,

I don't think he would. But I mean, I can't say that for certain, but I'm just I'm wondering where he would be on the clarity of Scripture and the clarity of God's communication to us.

Yeah, well, it seems to be pretty obvious this far. Yeah.

One of the big problems here is that he's not giving evidence to support his arguments on several of these items.

He throws out the fact that closed minded Christians were at fault with Galileo.

But he doesn't define what a closed minded Christian is or this particular people, what they did that made them closed minded.

He doesn't define these things. And it becomes very dangerous because people are hearing this and they're grabbing these little notions and they're not defined.

And that's very dangerous. It's a common form of argument that I see in the modern world.

I think we all know people who utilize this form of argumentation. And for me,

I would say that's the most troubling part, is that it seems like the world has influenced how he is arguing somewhat on this topic, is that he's building certain narratives in a way that I see worldly people build.

Yeah. And see, and that's exactly what kind of my point was in doing the show in this way and how

Brian laid out these videos. Because this is exactly what he was doing through his entire storm. And as he's getting to his punch lines, as we get closer to the end here, a review, whoever you are,

I hope you stay on a little bit longer. You know, his his comment or your comment is God used evolution. I'm going home.

Unless you're Beth Moore and you should go home. Some of you who know who know the

SBC know, understand the background of that. I hope you go home. I hope you stick around for just a little bit longer so you can understand this a little bit more here.

My my suspended. And if you want to jump into the show, I'd love for you to come in and ask questions as well.

So, OK, so that's that's video number 11. We're going to now jump into video.

Thank you. If you I guess he's going to stay now. So if you want to tell us in the chat, are you do you believe you're a

Christian? Are you professing Christian or are you an atheist? Just kind of tuning in. I'd love to know kind of a little bit about who you are.

So this is going to be our next our next one here. Number 12. So let's talk about that for a minute.

When geologists and biologists and paleontologists and astrophysicists, etc.

Study the fossil record, the layers of sedimentary rock and the earth. When they see what

Edward Hubble discovered in the 1920s that the universe is expanding. When they see DNA research that shows the genetic similarities and differences between different human different living things.

The overwhelming majority of those scientists have concluded that the earth is billions of years old.

And that life on earth developed gradually over billions of years. That's the clear scientific consensus.

Are there exceptions? There are always exceptions. But let's be honest and say that is the consensus.

In 2009, a survey by the Pew Research Center found that 97 % of American scientists believe that life on earth developed gradually over time.

There's no significant debate on this in the scientific community. Then we open the book of Genesis.

And we see the creation account. And some people say, look, this is clearly straightforward history.

And it's telling us that God created everything in six literal days. And when you add up the dates you see in Genesis, it's clear that the earth is between 6 and 10 ,000 years old.

And so for people who take that view, that interpretation of scripture. They look at the scientific consensus that the earth is billions of years old.

And that life developed gradually over time. And they say, that scientific consensus is just wrong.

Disagrees with the Bible, I'm going with the Bible. There are other Christians who look at Genesis.

And they say, you know, I'm not convinced that Genesis 1 and 2 was ever meant to be straight up history.

Because for one thing, we measure time by the earth's rotation in relation to the sun.

But it says in Genesis that the sun wasn't even created until the fourth day. And they point to some other things in the context which suggest that it may be more poetic.

Still teaching truth, but in more of a poetic way. And so many times those people are more accepting of the scientific consensus.

They say, look, there's no conflict between the Bible and science. Just like there was no conflict between the

Bible and science at the time of Galileo. As long as you're interpreting the Bible correctly. I find this fascinating.

About 15 years ago, Billy Graham said this. I don't think there's any conflict at all between science today and the scriptures.

I think that we have misinterpreted the scriptures many times. And we've tried to make the scriptures say things they weren't meant to say.

I think that we have made a mistake by thinking the Bible is a scientific book. The Bible is not a book of science.

The Bible is a book of redemption. And of course I accept the creation story. I believe that God did create the universe.

I believe that God created man. And whether it came from an evolutionary process. And at a certain point he took this person or being and made him a living soul or not.

Does not change the fact that God did create man. Whichever way God did it makes no difference as to what man is.

And man's relationship to God. I think there's some wisdom in those words.

Okay. So I think we should let you handle like the science stuff.

Because a lot of the stuff you brought up is in your book. Because I read it a lot. But I just want to point out that most of the argument is argumentium ad populum.

Yes it is. And that's actually one of the notes I have written down here. So there's a lot on this segment

I want to go to. I want to bring in another guest. This is from Matter of Theology.

Yeah. Drew good to see you back again. What's up. I wasn't going to. I've been doing laundry.

But I was like you know what. Maybe I'll just come in just for a little bit. I love that you're doing laundry in a suit.

Well my wife's asleep. I told her. Actually I put this on to look presentable.

But I've really got pajama pants on. At least you've got pants on. That's good. But when you were playing that clip.

The one thing that really really stuck out is you see his presuppositions.

You see that he's reverting back to what the scientists say. As I think the fallacy that Rob was alluding to.

That's where he's going to in order to base his foundation. So it's not.

He's not going to scripture and say this is what scripture says. Therefore I'm going to take what these scientists say.

And I'm going to compare it to scripture and where they differ. I'm going to hold the scripture. He's saying the overwhelming majority of scientists say this.

Therefore this must be true. Therefore God's word is not the final authority for him.

Right exactly. Which is really weird because he talks about astrophysicists and all this stuff. And I'm going I believe striving for eternity knows an astrophysicist.

Yeah. Yeah we do. Jason Lyle. Last week with us.

Yeah. Yeah. We know a few guys that that are doctors that could come on and talk about this stuff.

So you guys you guys hit the nail on head. And this is one of my notes here on this section is is that there is an argument ad populum.

Right. So this is just because lots of people believe this that therefore it must be true.

This is also mixed with another one argument from authority. So because these are scientists and there's a populace of the scientists that well they must be right.

And we just got to take their word for it. Two logical fallacies literally wrapped into one statement right there.

So that so that's that's an issue. Now I do want to say this. I don't know who this is but I'm going to pull this up.

It says to give some perspective this sermon isn't a defense of science. It's part of a series talking about a study showing more people in the

US are increasingly not identifying as Christians. Now look this may be the pastor

Brian. I don't know. You might know his his name on YouTube or maybe somebody on staff at the church.

And I'd love to have you come on and talk about this. But so far what we've seen in this sermon is that you've pitted the

Bible against science. You've done this on numerous occasions in in in the video clips we've pulled up.

And we've not only that but it's not it's not the thrust of the of what he's been saying. It's not saying,

OK, we have a case of a bunch of Christians, quote unquote, leaving the church. And then we got to address this topic.

He brought up very briefly and went on opposing science versus scripture. What you're also seeing here is with this pastor.

It's like he went to the school of Andy Stanley because Andy Stanley does the exact same thing. Mm hmm.

That's right. And we we brought up earlier. Drew, I don't know if you heard the early part of the show. But there's there's a lot of emergent church stuff that we see happening in a sermon like this.

Right. Yeah. I lived through a church like this early on in my in my walk. But I want to bring this passage up because I wrote this down.

It seems it seems to be to be really big for us here is Romans 1 verses 18.

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who by their righteousness suppress the truth.

For what can be known about God is plain to them because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world and the things that have been made.

So they are without excuse. What this passage says, I alluded to it earlier. I read it now.

It's that everybody knows God exists by his creation, things that are made. They either profess the truth about him or they suppress the truth about him in their sin.

So so whoever wrote this thing about to give perspective that this sermon is in defense of science. It's about a study showing where people in the

U .S. are increasingly not identifying as Christians. It is not this passage should tell you it is not the science that is taking people away from Christianity, so to speak.

It is not science that is causing people to not identify as being a Christian. It's sin.

Yeah. Amen. It goes back to the beginning of time. It's always been sin.

It is done. Yeah. I heard a pastor today say, you know, he was interpreting a dream he had and he was saying, you know, why are people, you know, you can preach, preach to your heart, hearts, you know, dead or whatever.

But, you know, people are still leaving the church and their hearts are. And I'm going, yes, because you're not preaching the gospel.

That's why. That's why people are leaving the church and why, why, why people aren't turning to Christ or identifying as Christians is because you're not giving them

Christ. Right. I know this is getting off topic, but I come from the

SBC and I lived through the SBC slowly slipping away from the gospel.

We see this in the emergent church. We see this with this whole, the whole charismatic movement, the whole thrust of church mainstream has moved entirely off of the gospel and moved towards this idea of seeker sensitive jargon.

And the result has been people that weren't true believers to begin with coming and then leaving the church.

And just to be fair, we Lutherans have quite a record of starting a lot of the errors that we see today.

Like, for instance, you know, higher criticism. Yeah, yeah. It started in Germany amongst

Lutherans, things like that. So we have our own fair share of problems, too.

There's a lot of problems within the LCMS. A lot of pastors are starting to move towards more of a church seeking kind of behaviors and things like that.

And there's a lot of controversy amongst that. Now, I personally belong to the Wells, but yeah, it's not just a

Baptist thing. It's not just a Presbyterian thing. It's a church thing. Yeah, that's right.

So I want to bring up a couple of things, too, based on this video, a couple of points that I had written down here. You know, when

I was a kid, so we're talking 30 years ago or so now, 30, 35 years ago, I remember on TV watching a new breakthrough.

Because up until this point, medical doctors, the vast consensus, I mean, we're talking 100 percent of doctors, almost 100 percent of doctors thought that stomach ulcers were caused by some type of stress or extra acid in the stomach.

Right? This is the scientific consensus. This is the way they dealt with it for years. If you had an ulcer, cut your acids out, cut out acidic foods out, diminish stress, do whatever you can do so that those ulcers go away.

There was one doctor who thought a little differently, started doing some cultures of stomach ulcers, and guess what he found?

That stomach ulcers, by and large, were infected with a bacteria called H. pylori.

And so now all of a sudden, he gives an antibiotic, H. pylori goes away, and the ulcers go away.

Amazing. And so I bring this up because there's plenty of times that we can look at in the history of science and the history of medicine where there's been a scientific consensus and they all were wrong.

Many, many times this has happened. I also want to say this. He brought up an example of Genesis in where he says that it can't be true because of measuring days.

He says, well, the sun's not created until day four, so therefore how can we have days one, two, and three of creation because we don't have a way to measure days of creation?

Well, let me give you a science lesson. We do not measure days by the sun.

It's convenient to look at when the sun rises and sets and sun rises again, but that's not what's going on.

It's the Earth rotating on its axis, and when the Earth rotates on its axis one full revolution, that is one day, which is very near 24 hours.

That's where we get a day from. It has nothing to do with the sun. This is actually a very tired, old, poor argument that is propagated continuously by pastors and other

Christians who are unwilling to actually look at people who have done the research on these topics.

These are really easily refuted objections to the beginning of Genesis being historical narrative.

Alan, you and I talked earlier about history, history of Genesis. You said, when does history actually start?

If it's not in the beginning, when do we actually look at Genesis as being history?

I think you phrased it this morning when we were talking about this. When did the poetry stop? Right. Yeah.

So if we start with Genesis 1 being poetry, at what point in Genesis do we pick up as it being literal?

Yeah. Right? Yeah. You have to decide right there. It's a moment of faith when you open the book and it says, in the beginning, you have to make a decision right there.

Am I going to take this literally or am I going to take this figuratively? If you take it figuratively, at what point in Genesis does it hit and all of a sudden become literal?

The text does not change from Genesis 1 all the way to the end of Genesis. It is the same writing throughout.

The repetition there that we see in Genesis 1 had a purpose to it, but it was not for the sake – it was not a literary purpose for poetry's sake.

And that's the danger that he has fallen into is the idea that this is poetry, which could be taken figuratively.

This is repetition, which is not necessarily poetry. We can't fall into that gap.

You're right. So I was thinking about this. I'm like, so for the people who believe that the beginning of Genesis is poetry, where do they stop, right?

Is it in Genesis 12 when Abram is being spoken of? Is it Genesis 11 with the

Tower of Babel? Is it Genesis 5 and the genealogies? Is that poetic? How about Cain and Abel in Genesis 4?

Is that poetic? How about did the serpent really tempt Eve in Genesis 3 and God curses creation?

Now, what I find really funny about this as I was working through this is this sounds kind of familiar.

This did God really say sounds familiar. So I think

I'm going to read this here in Genesis 3, verses 1 through 4. Now, the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the

Lord God had made. He said to the woman, did God actually say, you shall not eat of any tree in the garden?

And the woman said to the serpent, we may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, you shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it lest you die.

But the serpent said to the woman, you will not surely die, for God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you'll be like God, knowing good and evil.

The first thing he said is, did God actually say?

Was that poetic? Obviously, the entire creation was thrown into brokenness because of what had happened there in Genesis 3.

So I find it interesting when Christians want to say, did God really say? Well, guess what?

You are committing the exact same act that plunged this entire creation into what we see it as today.

That's right. And it's important to say what God really said was literal to Adam and Eve.

He literally gave them a literal command, and then Satan contorted that.

Yeah. It was not poetic either. It was not a rhetorical command. It was a literal command.

You do this, death will be the result. So wait, okay, hold on, Alan. So you mean it wasn't poetic?

You wasn't just saying, ah, maybe you shouldn't touch that tree? It wasn't from that one. I mean, you know. No, it was a command.

So now the problem, let's take that thought, and now let's stretch that out through the entirety of Scripture. If this is a literal command from God, right, but they're viewing this creation account and all this narrative as poetic, well, now you can take that command of God, and you can apply that standard to all the other commands of God.

Well, now it's just subjective. So it's whatever you want the command to be.

So now it completely – you completely wipe out God's law. Yeah, in my opinion, that's how a lot of the churches that go literal go wrong.

So what Dr. Anthony Sylvester was saying earlier is usually you deny Genesis. Errors pop up elsewhere.

And ultimately, like you said, if you don't take that command as literal, then you take no command.

You can possibly take no command as literal. Therefore, gay marriage is correct.

Abortion is good. Things that we see in the liberal wing of the church.

Yeah. Absolutely. I don't know if anyone has anything to say.

I was going to kind of go on from this point here. Okay, so Billy Graham – he quoted

Billy Graham here, who Billy Graham said, whichever way God did it, right, whatever, as long as God's the creator,

I don't care. Now, for a lot of us who understand, there's a lot of problems with Billy Graham in terms of his theology and whatnot.

But is this really how we're supposed to be viewing the beginning of Genesis? Is that, well, it doesn't matter.

As long as God did it, we don't – it is not a battle. It's not a hill to die on, so to speak.

It could be a thought that people have. It's like what is the big deal? I see this motif throughout modern churches.

Does it really, really matter in the long run? Does all this theological stuff really matter?

I just need Jesus. And in my opinion, no, it does really actually matter. Yeah, it absolutely does.

And so here's why it matters. This is where I bring my organs back to. And I'll share this story.

I've shared it on this podcast before. But when I was finishing up my book, it's four or five years ago now.

I'm losing track of time. Our COVID brain has just kind of – when you lose that year, it just changes your memory of things.

But when I was finishing up my book, I was doing the final edits on it. I remember I was sitting in Starbucks. Yes, Starbucks.

It's a great place to witness. I mean anywhere you turn, it's probably a liberal. So anti -Christian.

So it's a great place to go. But I was sitting there and doing editing, and I always listen for conversations.

And then I interject myself and witness to somebody. Well, just what happened this particular day, there was two guys next to me who were having a discussion about God.

Great. I let them talk, and I'm continuing to do my editing, just kind of keeping an ear on it. I could tell the one was discipling the other.

And so when one said to the other, hey, I got about five minutes left. We got to wrap this up. I got to get going.

I interjected myself. I said, hey, guys, couldn't help but overhear you. Are you guys Christians? They said, yes. I said, what are you doing here?

And they talked about the discipleship. The one guy is a newer member to the church. The other guy is the pastor of the church. It was an assembly of God church.

And then he said, well, what are you doing here? I said, well, I'm here, and I'm just – I'm editing my book.

And he goes, well, what's your book on? I said, well, it's on biblical creation, biblical evangelism, and presuppositional apologetics.

Basically, how is our frame of mind to be as we go out and evangelize and give a defense of the faith and a way to be able to answer any objection that comes our way?

And so he says, oh. I said, what do you mean? He goes, well, I just don't know that creation is that important anymore.

And I go, what do you mean? I go, your assembly of God, I thought you guys are still one of the few denominations left that actually believes in literal creation.

And he said, well, we used to. And I said, wow,

I think you guys are going in the wrong direction, pastor. He goes, well, what do you mean? I said, I've got a question for you.

Why did Jesus have to die? And he looked at me, and he goes, can you repeat the question?

I go, sure. I go, why did Jesus have to die? I mean, I know that without the shedding of the blood, there's no remission of sins. I get that.

That's not what I'm saying. But why death? Like, why did God not take the son and just put him in the corner for a timeout?

Why did he not give him a spanking? Why was it death? He looks at me in silence.

He goes, I know this is a trick question and all. I go, pastor, I assure you, this is not a trick question.

I go, why did Jesus have to die? And it goes back to Genesis. I literally had to open up Genesis 2 and Genesis 3 to him.

God commanded Adam not to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. From the day you eat of it, you shall surely die. An immediate spiritual death and the promise of a future physical death.

Death had now entered into the creation as a result of the sin. Jesus came to take that penalty.

That was for sin. Which goes all the way back to Genesis. If you don't understand Genesis and you don't understand that right, you actually have removed the foundation of the gospel.

To me, this is where the greatest importance is on a proper understanding of creation.

To understand that this is where it goes back to. The punishment that God laid out for sin.

This is an issue that I'm seeing with a lot of churches. This is why this is so important. It's because it's the foundation of the gospel, let alone it's the foundation for doctrinal truth in the rest of the

Bible. You want to answer questions about transgenderism today? It's really easy. God made them male and female.

Period. Done. Who's denying the science in that one?

Isn't that comical, right? If you want to talk about science screaming, science is screaming male when your entire body is made of XY chromosomes.

Screaming female when your entire body is XX chromosomes. Yet the authorities are starting to bend to the will of the world and actually denying science there.

It's funny. But that's the whole point of the show, right? Is that it's not necessarily about the science.

It's that the science is always anti -God. The foundation of secular science is anti -God.

It's not neutral. It's anti -God. And so we have to understand that portion of it.

I will also say this. I know there's people on here who are listening who believe that God could have used evolution.

There's a couple of problems with this. First and foremost, in Genesis 1 alone,

God says he made everything after its own kind to reproduce after its own kind.

He says this 10 times, Genesis. So as you guys said earlier, if God repeats something, you should listen up.

He said it 10 times in Genesis 1. We have to understand that God created everything after its own kind.

God put the kinds out there. Nowhere in the Bible do we see he took one created kind and made it into another created kind.

No, he said here's the fish. Here's the birds. Here's the beast of the earth.

Here's humans. Very clearly he makes everything after its own kind. I also find this interesting.

And, Alan, we might talk about this tomorrow morning. When we look at Genesis 2, which is essentially a wider view of what happened on day 6 of Genesis 1.

There's a little recapitulation of the other days, but then mainly day 6. We look at God, and he puts

Adam into this naming process. So I'm going to read this to you. Genesis 2, verse 18. Then the

Lord God said, it is not good that man should be alone. I will make him a helper fit for him.

Okay, so God, in his infinite wisdom, knew that Adam needed a helper. So now out of the ground the

Lord had formed, already formed, every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them.

And whatever the man called every living creature, that was his name. The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field.

I'm going to stop there for a moment. God brought the animals. Adam named them. Lots of us want to say, hey, this is the great passage where Adam names all the animals, right?

Okay, cool. He does. He names all the animals. And we have our creation apologetic as to how he was able to name all these animals in a very short period of time.

It's actually very easy to understand and explain. But I don't think that that's

God's main purpose in this passage here. Because here, the very next words is this.

But for Adam, there was not found a helper fit for him. God paraded the animals, which included monkeys and apes and orangutans and chimpanzees and every other type of ape -like creature past Adam.

None of which he said, let's put lipstick and a dress on it and call that my wife. Right?

They continued on as he named them and says, there's not a helper fit for me. So God then caused the deep sleep to fall upon the man, takes out his rib, fashions

Eve. Now he's got a helper for him. Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh. I think that that is actually the main point of this passage.

It's about there's no helpmate within creation. He allowed Adam to see that for himself.

He was creating the image of God. The animals were not. And so for an evolutionist to say, or a professing

Christian to say, well, God could have used evolution. I say, wait a minute. Nowhere in the text do we see this.

And in fact, in parts of the text like this, it would be exactly opposite of what we would expect out of an evolutionary process where God would have just said, oh, that monkey is a man.

He's going to be the first human man. And that monkey is going to be the first human woman. Completely opposite of that process.

And I know there was a comment earlier about how science manipulates kind of what we have.

And it brought to mind Lucy. I don't know if you all know about Lucy. But for those who don't know,

Lucy is, they try to make it this kind of intermediate evolution between ape and man.

The problem is only 40 % of Lucy is actual fossils that have been found.

Now, when you look at it, you see hands, what look like human hands, what look like human feet. None of the fossils that were found were hands or feet.

There's nothing that would indicate this is any type of intermediation between a monkey evolving into a man.

So there you see the scientific, the academy, the scientific,

I don't even know, things are slipping my mind. But they're trying to manipulate what we have in order to discredit

God and validate their points. Yeah, that's right. Well, you know, look, they changed the hip structure of Lucy.

When you see Lucy in field museums or natural history museums, they literally change her hip structure to make it look more human -like rather than ape that Lucy is.

In fact, there is a special that goes so far as this. I don't know if you guys have seen this clip or not.

I should probably bring it up and do this on another special show at some point that we do just on creation. We've got a lot of people

I'm not going to be able to get in tonight. I'll try to get a couple of them in that are in the back room. But I know this is a popular topic.

But there's a scientist, I say that term loosely, who took Lucy and he looked at it and he said, this is not how this fossil once was.

His theory was that that somehow her hips were crushed, broken as fossils, and then actually somehow reforms back together and now looks more ape -like.

So he did this two hour special where he literally breaks apart the hips.

He dremels them and he glues them together in the way that he believes they actually were before they were broken and mysteriously fused back together while in the fossil record.

I mean, it's complete lunacy. If any of one of us have done that with science, people would hang us out to dry.

And yet here he does this on a special thing. I mean, he seemed sincere too.

He seemed like this is what he actually believed. It's just so far off base. So, and I could talk about Lucy and apes for a long time.

It's just we don't have time really in the show to do that tonight. We will go to Anthony time tonight because we're already at an hour and 58 minutes.

So we're going to go a little bit beyond our two hours. We'll probably end, I don't know, 20, 30 minutes or so because I do want to get some of the guys in that are waiting right now.

Does anybody else have anything to say about that video before we go on to the next one?

Once we get to the end of the video, I don't mind dropping out to allow other people in. Okay, no, that's fine.

We should have plenty of room on here on stream yard, but thank you for that. So here's the next video.

Now this video, we saw a lot of foundation being laid of us versus science or Christians versus science, the

Bible versus science. This was made very, very clear through this entire sermon.

Now we get to the end part of the sermon. So he lays this out. Then he disputes the creation account as if creation is one other black eye for the church.

And now here's another really, I think is probably the point of everything he's trying to bring up here.

And don't cry too much when you see this. There are times when the secular forces of culture really will be against us.

And those need to be times that we need to stay faithful to God rather than give in to the pressure of the world.

Here's where we go wrong though. It's when we take that us versus the world mentality and we apply it everywhere.

When we start to see persecution around every corner. Some of you are thinking, what does this have to do with science?

We are in the midst of a global pandemic. Hopefully we're toward the end of a global pandemic.

So when the coronavirus pandemic started, state and local governments took various steps to protect people and try to stop the spread or slow the spread of the virus.

So we all know this, right? There were shelter in place orders. There were mask requirements. There were certain businesses and establishments that were closed.

Including in a lot of states, churches for the first few months of the pandemic. I think we can all agree the process was sloppy, right?

Sometimes it's the rules seem to be kind of inconsistent. Sometimes the government leaders who are making the rules didn't even seem to be following the rules themselves.

And so it was frustrating for everyone. But some Christians took it further than that. They said, see,

I told you they're out to get us. They're using this as an excuse to shut down churches.

Some took it even further. They said this whole thing is a hoax. Don't believe it.

Some people made it political. They said this whole thing is a ploy to drag down the reputation of President Trump.

Just watch. As soon as the election is over, the whole pandemic is going to go away. By the way, the election was over three months ago.

The pandemic is still here. Some people took it even further. They said, I think Dr. Fauci, I'm not exaggerating.

I think Dr. Fauci is collaborating with Bill Gates, and they're in it to get rich together. These are the kinds of conspiracy theories that were out there and still are, despite the clear consensus of the scientific community around the world that this is a very real pandemic, that it's taking the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.

Here's the part that grieves me the most. For some reason, Christians seem especially susceptible to those conspiracy theories.

It seems like some Christians take that us versus the world mentality, and they read it into places where it's not actually happening.

They seem sometimes quick to believe something a friend sends them on the Internet and quick to forward that to their friends without really taking the time to verify that it's true.

They'd rather do that sometimes than listen to established scientists, established scientific institutions, and rather than give the benefit of the doubt to their government leaders who are usually just doing their best to keep us from dying.

Okay, so now I think we're getting to the point that he was desperately trying to make.

The overwhelming scientific majority comes up yet again. He really likes that argument.

Now, what does he do about the CDC when everything first happened? And they said, don't wear masks, right?

And then all of a sudden the CDC flips and says, well, now wear masks. Dr. Fauci came out and said he knowingly lied about that.

Right, right. What does he do about that? He did say that it was flip -flopping.

But it's a very important issue,

I think, maybe for another show in the future maybe. But this is walking towards something that has a narrative with a science -government -controlled church, and it concerns me.

That's why I really brought this here. Yeah, and I think that's what bugs me most about this whole thing for the last year that it's been going on is that there has – the idea of scientific consensus, whatever that means to him and to others, is we are all supposed to just be lockstep with everybody.

We're supposed to throw off our own thinking caps. We're supposed to all of a sudden just assume the government has it for the best for us and just follow in what their lead is.

Last I checked, we all have intelligent minds, and we are supposed to be analyzing things for ourselves.

One major issue with this – look, I'm a dentist, for those of you who don't know. I've been practicing now for 18 years, something like that.

I don't feel like I'm that old, but I've been in private practice for a while. And I can tell you this one thing.

When masks – we learned about masks in dental school. So now

I'm putting myself 20, 22 years ago. We learned about masks. We learned about what they did and what they don't do.

General knowledge, not just consensus knowledge, but it's knowledge because we've got lots of scientific experience, studies on what masks do and what they don't do.

We've known this for a long time. And here's the reality. Masks don't stop viruses.

They never have. They were never designed for that. Masks are only for splatter.

So we knew, even in dental school, like, hey, if patients have this, this, and this, you still have to be careful because masks don't block everything out.

And if you sneeze or cough in your mask, you better exchange it right away because guess what?

When your droplet's dry, you're just going to be breathing the stuff through your mask. Like, we've known this.

This has been around for 40 years of mask research. And so people like me sit back and say, wait a minute.

When these masks started to get touted, like, something's wrong here. This isn't the science that I have always known.

This isn't the science that has been taught to my profession for many, many years. That was the main issue.

You know, we see an issue with vaccinations. Do we have – does a church –

I'm sorry, Walt, let's get back to this. We have an issue with the church. So, Drew, I know you guys have discussed this as well.

Who is the head of the church? Is it government or is it God? Right, yeah. God is definitely the head of the church.

He is the head of his church that he has established. That he has established, yeah. And he put pastors in charge of those churches to have the autonomy within those churches.

I think the Christians that were upset last year were rightfully upset because you have government institutions trying to come in and tell the church what to do, something that they're not allowed to do scripturally nor allowed to do constitutionally in this country.

Right. Now, one of the things that's interesting about the clip we just played is, one, Donald Trump doesn't need any help with his reputation.

He sullies his own reputation. He doesn't need any help from anyone. But looking at the church – well, another point is,

I don't know anyone that is saying that this is a hoax. I think everyone, even within the church, is saying, okay, this is a virus.

It is real. But we're looking at the data and saying, okay, but it's really only deadly to a certain demographic of people.

But back to your point about the church and who is the head of the church, what we saw with John MacArthur in California is you saw

Gavin Newsom trying to shut down John MacArthur's church while opening up bars, strip clubs, all these other things where people can congregate together, no social distancing, no masks, nothing like that.

So, yeah, I mean, it's not a conspiracy theory when that's actually taking place and you can watch it on the news.

It's not a conspiracy theory when you can look – and I see a comment from Facebook about Pastor Coates.

Pastor Coates' last sermon before being taken to jail is probably – yeah, there we go – the best response to the issue.

Absolutely right. What we're seeing is the government is, in fact, trying to tell the church what they can and cannot do.

They have no right. One of the other problems with this argument that he laid here is he said basically this whole – the whole church's stance on the coronavirus is that basically it's a conspiracy.

We treat it based on conspiracy. But he has taken that leap from creation and science.

So he's tracking several different arguments here which don't line up.

So either you're saying creation is a conspiracy by the argument that you just laid out, because you're saying we're not following the science and science is true, therefore we cannot treat it as conspiracy.

Therefore, because we backtrack his argument, creation is a conspiracy. That's right.

And in preaching, when you're analyzing a sermon, every sermon should be linear.

You should be able to follow from beginning to end and then also backtrack so that you make sure you got everything.

The problem with this is, like you said, he starts in one place, and it looks like he's making one argument, but where he's finishing is with the coronavirus.

And now once you backtrack everything that you just said, well, those things don't go together.

He's trying to take these multiple arguments and mash them together, and they don't fit. Well, yeah, because –

I wouldn't even say he's mashing them together. I would say he's trying to juggle balls, and he's trying to juggle six of them at the same time, trying to keep them all in the air at the same time instead of connecting them or trying to say

A plus B equals C. Right. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, and that's all great stuff.

And I think what I see as a major problem is how he's wrapping all this together. One of the last statements he made in this clip is he said

Christians are especially susceptible to conspiracy theories. So he called all this conspiracy theory. The thing

I want to make really, really clear is, look, are there some Christians and non -Christians alike that like conspiracy theories?

Yes, there are. But from a Christian's perspective, I think a more helpful way to understand where Christians come from is this.

There are two worldviews, God and not God, scripturally, right? You're either with Christ or you're against him.

No neutral grounds, no middle ground. There's nobody who's neutral to both sides. You're either with him or you're against him.

Scripture is clear in this. Anybody who understands precepts or read my book, you've seen a big section on this. No neutral grounds.

That means then if it's the world, chances are it's against you if you're a

Christian. And Jesus pretty much says that a bunch of times throughout the scriptures, that the world is against you in literally every way fashionable.

And so I'm really uncomfortable with the word conspiracy theories because Christians, I think, have a –

I think Christians have an obligation to question the source when they are not

Christians. They have an obligation to question what is being said when they are not professing Christian. That's right.

Right? I think that's right. Yeah, we should.

And what you see in this clip is the use of conspiracy theory. Well, he's conflating everything under the label of conspiracy theory because are there conspiracy theories?

Yeah. With all the QAnon stuff, I had people, Christians, sending me all this stuff, and I'm going, please don't follow that.

Right? Please go read Isaiah 8 where we're not to call conspiracy theories what the world views conspiracy theories.

All right? But please study up on that. But he's also taking things that we can verify by actually seeing and calling those conspiracy theories.

Well, they're not. I'm sorry. They're not. Which, again, tells you about the underlying presupposition here is that what is not being spoken, in my opinion, in this section starts to become very, very clear.

Yes. Just to add very quickly in regards to very specific statements in regards to Fauci and Bill Gates, the

NIH, which is the National Institute of Health, owns six patents. The gentleman,

I forget the director, that he was kind of praising and putting him up as like this Christian scientist.

That guy, as a director, they own six patents for Moderna. Fauci, for his variants of the

HIV, there's some HIV variants in the COVID vaccine, and he gets paid four times every single time a vaccine is sold from each country each month.

There's like a limit of like $150 ,000 per month, per country, per vaccine.

Yeah, there's literature out there. I haven't verified any of that stuff. I see a lot of it out there, and it always makes you wonder, right?

But one thing I want to make sure we don't do is jump into all of that stuff right now because there's a bigger issue at hand, which is what the pastor has done to conflate these things.

When we talk about government and what they've propagated this last year, we've watched many people's lives get destroyed.

We've seen businesses get destroyed. We've seen relationships get destroyed.

We've seen churches, unfortunately, because of pastors who weren't willing to stand, we've seen churches get destroyed.

We've seen a lot of destruction. Now, why are Christians questioning government in so many ways?

Well, we have a government today that is promoting homosexuality.

We have a government today that is promoting little kids being able to choose their gender and undergo surgery. We have a government today who is continually funding the killing of babies at abortion mills to the millions.

We have a government who is doing so many things against what they were supposed to be designed to do.

Government in Romans 13, 1 Peter 2, is supposed to be God's representative.

They're slaves to God on earth. They're servants of God on earth and supposed to carry out

God's law, supposed to carry out the good and punish the wicked. That's what their job is to do.

We as Christians have watched them do literally the opposite of that in so many areas. I'm very uncomfortable with the term conspiracy theory being used with coronavirus because I think we all have a distrust of government and for really good reason because they've been against us.

One of the things that we have to address here is the term conspiracy theory is the hot word of the month.

It's the word to dismiss what an opposing argument might say about something.

We're seeing this used regularly. I sent a few people the

Snopes argument. They said creation may as well be a conspiracy theory. They're using this on a broad scope to just dismiss arguments.

They may as well say, I think you're crazy. Instead of listening to an argument, they may as well say that because that would be the easier, at least then you're on the playing field of where everybody lies with how they feel about everything.

It has become the hot term. If we don't agree with you, we just call you a conspiracy theorist instead of actually hearing you out in any capacity.

Great point. I'm going to play one more video.

That'll be the last of the videos we're going to show. There's a couple others that I think we're going to skip over due to time. We're going to let another guest come in and just let us close as to what we've watched here thus far.

This is the beginning part of his closing. I think it's the most pertinent part of his closing.

We're going to bring that up right now. I hope it's clear.

I just have a really high view of science. I think it's an important gift that God has given us.

At the same time, we also need to be aware of the limits of science.

Third point, the limits of science. So true story, right before Christmas, I went out on my front porch and there was a gift for me.

And I opened up the gift and it was a cake. It was a cake made by my friend

Lars who's from Norway. And he's kind of a specialist in Norwegian baking.

And so I want to show you a picture of this cake that Lars gave me. Isn't that beautiful? So the interior of the cake,

I'll try to explain it a little bit. The interior of the cake was made of these finely chopped almonds mixed with butter and sugar and other exquisite ingredients.

The surface of the cake was this delicate lattice of woven pastry.

I mean this thing was just perfect to have with a strong hot cup of coffee on a cold winter morning.

I'll stop now. But it was a great cake. So imagine if I opened up that cake and I had this question.

Why did Lars make this cake? And what was his purpose? And to answer that question, imagine if I decided to scientifically probe the cake.

Took it to the lab and did some tests on it. I could find a lot about the cake in the lab, couldn't

I? I could probably find out the component ingredients that went into the cake. I could give you a nutritional breakdown of calories, proteins, carbohydrates, and fat.

I could determine that yes, this cake is suitable for human consumption. Especially by this human. And I could tell a lot of true things about that cake.

All true information. You know what I could never do in the lab though? No matter how much scientific analysis that I did,

I could never find out why Lars made the cake. The only way for me to find that out is how?

Lars would have to tell me. Lars himself would have to reveal to me why he made the cake.

You see the point? Science is an incredibly useful tool to analyze our world.

To learn the mechanics of our world. And we can use that knowledge to do tremendous things.

To make the world a better place. To love people in the name of Christ through that scientific knowledge.

We should never be afraid of it or suspicious of it because it is the pursuit of truth.

But here's the thing. There are some things that are simply beyond the realm of science.

Science just can't tell us those things. If we want to know about the purpose or meaning of our lives and of our world, we're not going to find it by analyzing the ingredients of our world.

It just doesn't do that. Only the designer of this world can reveal that to us.

Okay, so anyone want to take a stab at that? I disagree. If you assume evolution, a possible way that you can arrive at a possible heir is believing in science, the way he's using it, is ultimately you can deny several things in scripture.

And ultimately have serious problems with things like the incarnation. With the atonement.

With the original sin. With the bondage of the will. I mean, doctrine after doctrine after doctrine could be seriously compromised.

If you follow that advice. There's a severe problem with his analogy.

And that's we can tell exactly and duplicate the making of that cake. You can't do that with Genesis 1.

Nobody can create the light that God created when he created the light and spoke it into existence.

So that becomes a huge problem with that illustration. Because we can go back and we can duplicate

Lars' cake. And we can ask Lars why he made the cake. And we can find all of that out.

You can't do that with Genesis 1. It's a theological passage where science cannot duplicate, observe, or repeat.

Or test it. That becomes a huge fallacy. And anytime they try, it's not quite capturing what is captured in Genesis.

The collider is perfectly preserved in a science lab. It's contained.

Everything that what scripture is telling us happens in creation is the opposite of.

So that's what you're talking about there. Just to try to back you up on that one. So we've got a couple of comments here.

God declared in his word he made all things for his glory. Cynthia Longfellow Hunter. And local pastor here,

Buckley Allen. I know you helped him plant his church back in the day. Great guy.

Excellent point. Thank you for standing up against those who compromise the Bible. You're welcome, Buckley.

That's what we always do. We've got to get together one of these days. Haven't seen you in a while. So, yeah, you know, we don't have time for this today.

But, you know, Answers in Genesis, Creation Ministries International, Institute for Creation Research, they do a good job with showing what experimental science is versus forensic science or historical science.

We understand that experimental science is where we can test things in the here and now. Right? So you want to test a cake, figure out what's in it.

Okay. You can do that here and now on that cake. When we look at creation, we are looking at clues and trying to put together these clues to figure out something that happened in the past.

To which there are no eyewitnesses alive today except for one who is

God Almighty. And so God himself, who was the eyewitness, the

Father, Son, Holy Spirit, the three persons of the Trinity, they were eyewitnesses.

We see that written down in scripture as historical narrative for us to understand. And it's reconciled very easily with the rest of the

Bible. And it's reconciled very easily with good science that is out there. It's not a conspiracy theory, as Snope says.

It's not a conspiracy theory, as this pastor was alluding to. It is genuine history of the

Bible. And so when people start questioning the Bible in the beginning, guess what they're going to do with the rest of it?

They're going to start to question it. Pastor, I'm assuming it was you that wrote in earlier that said that your point of the sermon series is about people walking away from the church.

Well, preach the gospel to them. Preach the gospel. The gospel is the power,

God, and salvation. It's not science. It's not even creation science as much as I would love it to be.

The gospel is the power, God, and salvation. If people are leaving, you might not be preaching God's word right.

Because God's word is the one that does the convicting. God's word is the one that separates bone from marrow, soul from spirit.

God's word is the one that never returns void. That's right. If you claim to be a

Christian, that means you are a Christ follower. Therefore, Christ is your Lord. So you must take the view that Christ took of the scriptures, more specifically of Genesis, as he quoted

Genesis. He quoted it as historical narrative, that which God did in history past.

So if you are a Christian and Christ is your Lord, then you must hold to scripture as you must have the view of scripture that Christ had, which is a high view of scripture.

Science is a great tool. I'm not a big science guy. But science is a great tool.

It can help us see the world in which we live in, in God's creation.

But ultimately, science isn't going to change the heart of the nonbeliever. Only the gospel is going to do that, to Dr.

Silvestro's point. So you preach the gospel, you stand on the gospel, and you point people to Christ, not to science, although science can be fun and it is a great tool.

You point them to Christ, who is the one that changes the heart and soul. Amen to that.

So we're going to bring one other person who had a question in the private room.

And so I'm going to add Metanoia to the stream. So Metanoia, are you there? Hi, can you hear me all right?

Yeah. So what question do you have? You said you had a question regarding Genesis. I just want to real quick make

Drew feel better because I'm also in my PJs, but I'm keeping my camera off of it. So my question is in how we determine when we are overstepping our bounds as interpreters versus what the word of God is saying.

And I think I can best exemplify that if I just read this really short quote by Martin Luther. Do you mind if I do that real quick?

Go right ahead. Sure. So we Christians must be different than the philosophers, i .e. scientists, in the way that we think about the causes of these things.

And if some are beyond our comprehension, like those before us concerning the waters above the heavens, we must believe them and admit our lack of knowledge rather than either wickedly denying them or presumptuously interpret them in conformity with our own understanding.

And so my concern with that is that Martin Luther there is he is bringing forward what he believes is the plain, clear meaning of scripture, which is, in his view, a flat, domed earth that has a firmament, a solid firmament in which the stars are fixed.

And he is binding people's consciences by saying that this is what the word of God teaches and that you are even questioning

God's word by questioning that this is the way that the universe is. So my question basically here is how do we keep ourselves from falling into that kind of trap that Brother Luther found himself in?

I would disagree with that interpretation of Luther. Well, unfortunately, Luther did not leave himself up for interpretation in this matter because he said, indeed, it is more likely that the bodies of the stars like that of the sun around that they are fastened to the firmament like globes of fire to shed light at night, each according to its endowment and its creation.

That's from Martin Luther. And nowhere in there does he say the earth is flat, sir. He says that the firmament is a solid dome.

I may have misspoke about the flat earth. We could just stick to the solid firmament dome. Well, like many, many theologians from ancient church history have different ideas of what exactly the firmament is.

So how do we keep ourselves from binding people's consciences on things that are doubtful like this?

Try not to be super dogmatic like Luther could be sometimes. Well, it seems as though we find ourselves in a similar situation where we are acting in a more dogmatic way than is required.

No, because he's making an inference about this firmament where, as young earth creationists, we're just reading what the text says.

We're looking at genealogies that tell us about how old the earth is. We got six literal 24 -hour days of creation.

We have about 4 ,000 years of genealogy that go from Adam to Christ.

We have a calendar that goes about 2 ,000 years from Christ to now. So those are really good understandings of a simple reading scripture without having to make inferences on something.

So Luther may have tried to make inferences there. I will say this about Luther. We're going to bring Luther up. Luther was one who staunchly defended a six -day creation.

As well as a solid firmament because of his plain reading of the text. But again, the firmament doesn't cause us issues in terms of an understanding of biblical creation the way a six -day did.

He was clearly a six -day creationist. He was clearly a young earth creationist in terms of his writings.

And he actually has writings against some people today who Christians were arguing with him saying that God must have created in an instant.

And therefore Genesis 1, the six days, were just a way to explain in a way that he created an instant.

They couldn't understand why he took so long. And Luther has a really pithy statement about that saying something to the effect of if you don't understand what

God says, then give the Holy Spirit the honor of being more learned than you are. Right. And I totally agree with that.

And he's saying that in the context of defending things that we understand are established science. He's attacking things that we now understand as established science.

Like the fact that there is no solid dome above the earth in which the stars are literally fixed. And that's something he clearly thought came from the clear reading of the text.

But the point of his sermon here is we must be careful about, again, pitting science against scripture.

Sometimes things must be taken on faith. Luther did this all the time. That sometimes we have, as humans, fallen humans, we have a tendency to view things from our perspective, for instance, in baptism.

Many see that as a work of man. Luther would say, no, that's a work of God because we must see with the eyes of faith.

He says this all the time. He does not reject philosophy. He does not reject science.

He says that it must submit and be underneath the word of God. That's his fundamental point.

If you would read the Fuller Context, you would see that. Well, the Fuller Context is about him believing a flat – sorry, he did not establish flat.

He said a solid domed earth, and he believed that came from the clear, plain meaning of the text.

No, no. I mean like besides that quote, the surrounding thing, the heart of his message is to caution people about falling over the wisdom against God's word.

That's the heart of it. That's just a portion of it that you're selecting. That's part of my concern is that how do we determine whether or not we are taking the clear – sorry, the clear, plain meaning of scripture and saying, well, this is just the

Bible, and you have to take that on faith and not trust infallible science. Like how do we know we're doing that correctly and not as what

Luther was doing here incorrectly in a solid dome?

Yeah, so that's a great question, and I think we're going to let our panelists –

I'm going to answer this. I'll let the panelists kind of save mine. We're going to kind of get off the show because we're now at the two -hour and 30 -minute mark.

This is the issue here is that the firmament doesn't bother me.

If people in the past looked at the firmament and didn't understand it correctly, that's no different than the Galileo argument who didn't understand what he was seeing quite yet.

That doesn't change scripture. That only is an interpretation of the scripture that's there.

Let me tell you what is really crystal clear. There is evening, there's morning, the first day.

There is evening, there's morning, the second day. There's evening, there's morning, the third day. There's evening, there's morning, the fourth day.

There's evening, there's morning, the fifth day. There's evening, there's morning, the sixth day. God created in six literal 24 days.

And just in case you can't figure that out, in case that doesn't seem to be quite clear, we can go to Exodus 20, verses eight through 11 and see where God shows that he modeled his work week of six days, the rest on the seventh, and modeled it for our work week, working for six days and resting on the seventh.

The text couldn't be any more clear on this. This isn't about science. It doesn't matter how much science is out there.

It doesn't change what the text plainly says. And that's different than the firmament argument. That's different than the

Galileo arguments on that. So - Brother, you're making my exact point because as Brother Luther would have told us, when he says, you know,

Genesis 7, 9, clearly says God made firmament and divide waters that were under the firmament, which were and divide them from waters above the firmament.

He even went against people of his day who wanted to allegorize that, saying, no, there's no real solid firmament.

They're just talking about other things. He said, no, the clear, plain meaning of the text is a solid firmament, which divides waters from waters.

So that's my whole question, is that - Yeah, so we don't have, there's different interpretations even today of what that firmament means in terms of that upper firmament.

That is irrelevant to the issues at hand. The issues at hand, the firmament doesn't change anything regarding days of creation, doesn't change anything regarding the fact that God created everything after its own kind.

He didn't use evolution to create everything we see. So it's really an irrelevant question.

Now we can bring this up on a different Apologetics Live show. That question really doesn't fit into what we're talking about here.

We want to talk about specific creation, we can do that. We can do that on another show, but that's really not the flavor of what we're talking about here.

You're talking about details. That's exactly what that pastor did. It was pointing out these little things about something that is obviously from science and not something that scripture takes a hardened view on.

Scripture does take a hardened view that God created everything after its own kind. He does take a view on how old the earth is.

I think that you're sort of proving by concern, correct? Because I'm taking a literal meaning of the script and you're saying, no, we can see this in other ways.

We can understand this. This is what's really clear. And I think what you're refusing to allow people who believe in evolution is what they're trying to tell you is we understand there are clear messages in scripture that God is the one who creates.

He creates alone. He creates male and female. He creates in front of the beginning all by himself. It's no one else. It's no other gods.

And we understand the exact specificities of that in a different way.

And it seems like you want to be able to do that when it comes to the firmament, but you don't want to give that to your brothers and sisters who may believe in evolution.

So that's my concern is that there seems to be a lack of consistency. And I understand where your concern comes from.

I think you're wrong in terms of - I think you're wrong too, brother. But I still - No, and that's fine. And that's a great -

I agree with almost everything else you guys said tonight. Like, I am all with you guys on every, like, literally, like, you know,

James Coates stuff was just horrible. And, you know, the way in which our government is, you know, ramming through this stuff, you know, it is really horrible.

I just think that, you know, with so many battlefronts that are open to us right now, I don't think this is one of those that needs to be opened up.

And especially when most of the casualties are fellow brothers and sisters. I would argue against that.

Okay. But the reason this is so important is the rest of scripture hangs on the beginning of it.

You don't start any book by the middle of it and try and gain the context at the beginning. You start at the beginning.

Well, you know, technically, if you're a Hebrew poet, the most important stuff goes in the middle.

You know, that's where most of the important stuff in Isaiah is. This isn't Hebrew poetry. I'm sorry. I was just making a joke, as you know.

Right. But the danger is, for some, that this would be Hebrew poetry. So I wanted to make it clear that -

Oh, yeah. No, no. I fully affirm that there is a, you know, that Genesis is not poetry.

I just don't think that you're allowing for people to interpret this in ways that they feel is faithful to the text.

Well, I'll tell you what, Metanoia, you ought to come on to a Thursday night show that we do. So this is a special shape tonight.

We normally do Thursday night from eight to 10 Eastern Standard Time. And I'd love for you to come on and we can chat more.

In fact, we can get some other guys on there, like Jason Lyle and whatnot to work through some of these things.

I'm gonna kind of, I'm gonna give this and then I'll give each of our, I'm gonna put you back in the back room, Metanoia. I'm gonna give each of our panelists a chance to kind of close if you guys want to close.

I want to pull this up from Buckley. I know Cynthia had this here as well. No death before the fall. Buckley, consistent views of the curse came after sin, death, and suffering did not exist before sin.

And so this is kind of like the rest of the story. And I talked earlier about the fact that Jesus paid the penalty that we owe for our sin and death.

Death is a sting to us. That death is the last enemy to be destroyed as we read in 1

Corinthians. Death is only a result of Adam's sin.

Death entered into creation because of Adam's sin. There was no death before Adam's sin. That's why death meant something.

Now, would Christ's death on the cross mean as much as it does now if God had used death for billions of years to bring about everything we see today?

It just seems to be ludicrous, right? Death is a bad thing. It's a really bad thing. And that's why we see that in Genesis 2 and Genesis 3.

So thank you, Buck, for bringing that up. There's no death before sin. When we understand there's no death before sin and Adam and Eve were about 6 ,000 years ago, according to really good genealogies in the

Bible, there is no way that evolution could have happened because the fossils out there could not be billions of years old.

They have to be in the last 6 ,000 years. So on that, I'm gonna let you guys kind of close out here.

Rob, I'll start with you. Well, as Lutheran, the cross is the center of our theology.

In order to observe the cross, the justice and the gospel is there, both law and gospel.

We must understand the sin that drove them there. We see in the Proto -Evangelium, the promise of the one who would defeat sin to death and the devil and basically conquer the world one day.

So if we have an issue with understanding Genesis and we reject

Christ's clear words when he interprets it as literal, then we are saying,

Lord, I do not believe thee. And then we're in a very dangerous place because it goes straight to the heart of the center of theology for us as Lutherans.

And I'm not saying my brothers here who are Baptists, probably mostly Reformed, although I think one's

Presbyterian, they would also say the cross is central to their theology. The atonement is all important.

The atonement must ride on what our idea of sin is, how bad that sin touches our lives to this day, how deeply it affects us.

It's a lost word nowadays, but concupinance was a word that was often used by the forefathers of the

Protestant Reformation. Luther, Calvin, all used this word. We don't use it as much as we should, but we're so bad that we're actually driven by the law to sin, that the very giving of the law actually drives us to rebel because we're like brats.

God says, hey, you should really do this because if you don't, you're gonna ruin your life.

And we say, well, I don't care what you say. I'm gonna go do what I wanna do. And that's essentially concupinance.

So if you have this, my problem with this is that how do you understand the necessity of the atonement?

How do you understand the why of the giving of the promise to Eve that one day for the fruit of her womb will come, the one that will save us all?

It can't. It ultimately loses a value. And ultimately at the end of the day, creation has been existence for eons and eons, all where in Genesis we see

Lord speaks, the world is created. And then immediately we see history being written down and then the

Lord promises to come. Whereas the other view, there's long, long periods of time with no special revelation.

God's just quiet until he happens to speak. I just, I'm sorry,

I struggled. I struggled to how you comprehend and deal with the word of God consistently once you deny

Genesis. It's not because it only touches several different issues, but it touches the central issue, which is how does

Christ forgive our sins? What is sin?

Where does it come from? That's all right at the heart of Genesis in my opinion.

Yeah. And so, you know, it looks like our friend Metsunoya's real name is Matthew. He did a super chat.

He donated $2 of ministry. So I'm gonna read this. Hey brothers, thank you for having me on and allowing me to respectfully disagree with you.

All to my Lutheran brother, amen on your closing statement. So Rob, at least he liked you.

Drew, if you wanted to give a close. Sure, yeah. I would just like to ask all the listeners, what is your standard?

What is your, what's your authority? What's your anchor? Is it, are you holding to scripture,

Sola Scriptura, but also Tota Scriptura, or are you first holding to science and allowing science to be your interpreter of God's word?

Because the scientific community, while I'm sure there are many, as we would say,

Dr. Jason Lyle, who are honest, there are many who are dishonest, right?

And we see them trying to actually deny science by affirming transgenderism and things of that nature.

So I would say first cling to scripture. You must know scripture.

You must know theology. You must know doctrine. You must know the gospel. Don't first run to science because there's something in scripture you don't understand.

Where scripture is unclear at one point, it will interpret itself at another point. So know scripture.

Scripture is your authority. Scripture is infallible. It is inerrant and it is sufficient.

So I would tell you, run and cling to scripture. Amen to that,

Drew, thank you. Alan, if you got a closing. Yeah, I mean, I would say, obviously, the first thing that we have to understand with Genesis, like I said earlier on in the segment, it's theological.

It begs us the question of what do you believe and do you take God literally at his word?

If you don't start here literally in Genesis one, then you're going to struggle throughout the rest of his word to hold fast to the different passages.

I mean, that's just the way it is. To agree with Drew and Rob, the gospel is essential to any

Christian. And in order for us to uphold God's sovereignty and salvation, we have to uphold

God's sovereignty and creation as well. So when we look at scripture, we don't bring a high view of science to scripture.

We take a high view of scripture and we lead it to science. Thank you for that.

So Brian, I know the reason why we did this show is because this was your pastor, right?

And so what do you hope is gained out of this show? I heard the pastor say a lot of times that this discussion is very important.

I heard him specifically give an example about people like per se falling away from the church or attending church.

And I think that it got around to a more of a philosophical reasoning as why people were leaving.

And a couple of the other gentlemen said on the show that the gospel of being truly saved is obviously first and foremost.

The other things that were wrapped around it, the reason why he gave basically saying, people are leaving the church, it was the reason why

I literally took a 17 year walk, not even pursuing

God at all. Now that could definitely mean I was never saved before, absolutely. And I was wandering around the earth, but that moment in college,

I was just a kid and I didn't have the defense of the faith. So I want everyone to understand, this was so important, not because it's about me, but it's about everybody that it happened to.

And I've seen in that youth go from high school to suicide in college because their perceivable worldview, which was not

God's worldview, comes crumbling down at the hands of some wicked atheists that hates

God at their center. So that was the core of this was, I know that I have many brothers and sisters in the chapel, this was not meant to be in any way, shape or form disrespectful.

I have brought Dr. Anthony's books and a lot of other resources to the pastors themselves within Bible study.

Every single time it really was kind of handled like this sermon was. And I just wasn't okay with it because I understand what depression is.

I understand what suicide ideology is. And this is a real thing where kids are getting alone for the first time and they could be literally locked in the room like I was with an atheist, a guy who hated

God and wanted everyone that he knew to hate God too. Within the church?

No, no, no, no, no. This was in college. I was 17 years old. My freshman roommate, his name is

Sean. I actually mailed him your book. It was one of the first people I ever, on the originofkinds .com

is a website, but on the origin of kinds, origin of kinds was the book that really pushed me towards looking at this saying,

I felt stupid in the past. I felt unprepared. I was actually probably definitely unprepared and science words and theories and all these, they made me swirl.

I didn't have an answer. I didn't have a reasonable defense to my faith until I started actually studying it.

And I think that that's what find yourself approved because there's day it's gonna come, like Anthony said at the beginning, it's not responses.

There's answers in Genesis. There's answers in the Bible. And I think that every, not just, especially the pastors, everyone should have this sanctification edification of this type of training.

And the past, it starts with the pastor and the leadership of the church. So my push to me,

I'm hoping that Jacksonville Chapel and Lincoln Park that they embrace this as an opportunity to say, you know what, maybe we could bring in somebody or study this from a creation apologetic standpoint because the answers are not, that was not a defensible.

I didn't learn anything in that sermon. And while watching it, it made me sad. It made me sad.

There was things that made me sad, but I didn't have the truth be told, the knowledge or the wisdom to actually put it into words and formulate it into something.

But I was so ashamed for many reasons. And this is important. Who am

I? Who was I to say something? But that it was what the feeling that pressure that you're nothing and you, or you're not important and poo poo your ideas or what the

Bible says even, and you present it in a different way. And I think that that became a major issue because I was bringing to me, you know, you guys may look me up.

I did martial arts and I got around some of the most famous fighters in the world and I love those guys. But when

I got around like the great theologians that I was able to have personal friendships and mentorship with, it was like, to me, it was like the moon.

Like I got an opportunity to actually learn things that I have real questions about from people who were cared about my soul.

They knew the truth and they were willing to spend the time with me to show it to me. And that's what

I think the reasonable defense of faith requires is us to be able to be, to study the things that matter, that can lead many and do lead many people off the path.

And that's, I just appreciate what you guys do. Striving for Eternity Ministries was the first, like I was lost in the summer of 2014 and here

Andrew Rappaport drives three hours to my house, spend six hours with me because that's how many questions

I had and how many issues I thought I needed to address. And I had at the end of it,

I really can say probably 80, 90 % of every question I'd ever had was gone. Not responses to questions, answers and standing on the word of God, standing on the rock.

And I just, I appreciate this type of ministry because it's what the world needs to, I mean, I think it's what the body of Christ needs, especially in some of these churches where people are, they're not even saved potentially and they're sitting in the pulpit being, having their ear tickled by stuff.

And I'm not saying specifically about Pastor Dave, but specifically in general,

I think this is happening and I think it's a major issue. I appreciate what you guys do. Well, yeah, and I'm thankful.

Thanks for being on Brian and bringing this to our attention. I think it was a good learning experience to walk through this for people listening.

And cause the reality is, is this is happening a lot around the country. This is not an isolated church, right?

And this is happening to a lot of churches around. And I think there's some takeaways for this.

I mean, number one is, there's a comment here.

I don't disagree with you. I don't think the pastor was lifting science above scripture, but I agree the sermon probably needed more research and prayer.

It's certainly needed more research and prayer. And that was one of the points I was going to close on is when we stand up and give the word of God, like people often ask me, are you terrified when you travel around the country and teach in front of churches?

And I say, honestly, no. Like for crowds, I'm not terrified at all. But you know what I'm terrified about is getting

God's word wrong. That terrifies me. It terrifies me every street corner I stand on, every pulpit

I stand in front of, or even every person I talk to just on the street or just at my dinner table or anywhere else.

I'm terrified about getting God's word wrong. And as a pastor, you should be terrified of getting

God's word wrong. Not only should you be terrified of you getting God's word wrong, you should be terrified to make sure that everybody that's teaching within your church in Sunday school and everything else is also having the same fear of God and getting

God's word right the same way. And when you talk about the science that you actually are seeking good resources to get good science to be able to teach, and that it's not science versus the

Bible. We need to quit that rhetoric that is out there. Science is not against the

Bible. God is not against science. Christians aren't against science. I mean, none of those things work. No, we believe the

Bible is our source of truth. There's not two books. There's not the book of nature and the book of God. There is just the book of God, just the book of God.

And as we have that book, we can look at the world. We can see the science and the science that confirms what we see in scripture, plainly, is good science.

The science is not science. In the meantime, we're going to continue to do science for the same reason that I said earlier in the show, because God gave us dominion over this earth, and he tells us to control it, subdue it.

And in part, how we do that is by discovering the creation through the science in some ways.

So on that, we're going to end the show. Thank you all for joining. We had a lot of people tuning in live, and I guess

I'll put this up here too from Buck. Amen, we need churches that teach the

Bible and answer the why, helping people to be rooted in biblical doctrine so they don't end up with a mixed theology of the lost world and the living word of God.

We won't stand up to the storms in life when we have no foundation. Amen. Well said.

Great, yes, well said. It was a great close to the show. So with that, I just want to say, I'll be praying for you,

Brian, because you've got to go back to your church after this. It's not going to be easy, sir. No, it's probably not.

You might have to find a new church at some point here, but you know what? Pray that it opens up conversations from the pastor.

My offer is still open. If the pastor wants my phone number, we'll give it to him. I'm happy to talk to him. Thank you.

On that, good night from Strident Fraternity. Thanks for tuning in to this special Apologetics Live episode.