#2 UNDERSTANDING GENESIS 1 + New Life Church Pastor Peter Mordh

Hello, hello! Welcome to Biblically Speaking. My name is Cassian Bellino, and I'm your host. In this podcast, we talk about the Bible in simple terms with experts, PhDs, and scholarly theologians to make understanding God easier.

These conversations have transformed my relationship with Christ and understanding of religion. Now, I'm sharing these recorded conversations with you. On this podcast, we talk about the facts, the history, and the translations to make the Bible make sense so we can get to know God our Creator better.

Hey guys! Welcome back to Biblically Speaking. I'm your host, Cassian Bellino. I'm really excited for this week. I feel like last week for our first episode, it went so well with Christian Carr. Sorry, Christopher Carr.

Oh gosh, I'm so nervous right now. I'm still trying to get my voice. But this week, I'm so excited. I'm going to talk with Pastor Peter Nord, who's a pastor in Southern California for New Life Church.

He's going to jump into his credentials, but he holds a bachelor's in pastoral theology and a master's in Christian counseling. It was actually his idea to talk about the topic we're going to jump into today, which is Genesis.

I think that's just really great to begin a podcast at the beginning. Last week, we said the Our Father. This week, we're going to jump into Genesis. I think just beginning at beginning makes so much sense.

Having somebody that is so well-read in this topic to really help us make sense of it. Why did we begin with that at the beginning? What was God really trying to say? What do these translations actually mean?

Because I don't speak Aramaic or Hebrew. I just kind of take it literally. Is that the way we're supposed to take it? Is seven days seven days on earth? Is it not? I have so many questions. For someone to kind of suggest this for a topic that I already wonder about, I'm so excited to talk Peter's ear off.

If you're tuning in again, you have no idea how much that means to me that you're actually listening. This is really just a brainchild of my own curiosities and my own conversations with God that how do I know and love a God that I don't understand?

These conversations with people like Peter and Christopher last week really just helped the Bible seem more real and accessible and understandable. Then from there, a relationship with God develops. I'm so excited.

If you have questions, we don't really have an Instagram or anything set up yet, but when we do, shoot me the questions there or find me on my personal Instagram. Right now, the handle is mama .cast with four S's.

There's no reason why you can't just shoot me a question there. There's no reason why this whole podcast can't be something everybody benefits from. If you are listening and you do have questions, let this be productive for you too.

This is just me being curious and confused and trying to be a good Christian, but if there's some questions that I can cover, send them on over. I'm excited to talk about what we're talking about today with Pastor Peter.

It's actually a funny story how we met, which we'll get into in a sec. Again, enjoy. I hope you enjoy. See you. I just got the sweatshirt off Instagram. It was one of those cheesy Instagram accounts. It's actually saying Christian streetwear.

I'm so excited to wear it for this episode. That's cool. Here we are with our second episode with Pastor Peter Nord. Do you mind if I call you pastor?

Yeah, sure.

Do you mind just introducing yourself a bit, kind of how you set up your church?

Sure. I'm the pastor of New Life Church in Palmdale, California. It's northern Los Angeles County. I am staying here for the reason a lot of people are moving out of California. I love it. We are a light in a place where a lot of people don't go to church.

I love that too. We just launched a third service. We're doing three services on Sunday. We're building an auditorium. We just bought 80 Acres. We're just a church on the move. We're just wanting to help people.

My alternate passion is helping people. Really, I found that doing that can only happen through the Word of God and through the power of God. That's why I'm so.

Excited about talking to you today. Awesome. Yeah, I'm so excited to jump in the Word of Genesis. If you could just kind of jump into your background and how you've become so well-read. Did you get a PhD?

I know that it says from the website. You got your master's and your bachelor's,.

But why Genesis? Why that? Yeah. It is the foundation. If you were to take one passage that is tied throughout the entire Bible, it would be Genesis 1 -11. There's no mistake, and it's not a coincidence, that every attack that has been had on Christianity for the last 2 ,000 years has always gone back to, yea, hath God said, which is straight from Genesis 3.

It really is the foundation of Christianity. A lot of people have, over the years, tried to cast shadows on its importance, and I think that that's a mistake. I think you have to go, and you have to ask the tough questions.

You have to do the work to know, hey, this is really important. It's why it's first. In fact, literally the first three Hebrew words are the most important, and they are repeated all throughout the Bible.

Genesis is great. My background is I was a skeptic. At 17 years old, I was really questioning my faith. I didn't really know what I believed. I knew what my parents believed, but I didn't know what I believed, and so I went on a quest to find what I felt like was true.

Today, they would say my truth, but I discovered that there is no claim to truth, that it's either true or it's not, and so after studying lots of religions and different things that I thought made sense to me, I couldn't shake the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

I couldn't shake how Muslims, Jews, people from all around the world, if they're scholarly and they're actually using evidence to back up their claims, they don't dispute the fact that was dead and rose again.

They don't know how he did it. All of the proofs from Scripture and outside the Scriptures just pointed to the fact that for 2 ,000 years, they've been trying to poke holes in it, and they just can't.

As one of my friends says, it was going to take me more faith to be an atheist, so I decided to just be all in, and that's how I am. I'm all in. Once I realized, hey, this is true, at 18 years old, I went to Bible college, and I got a four-year degree in theology and biblical languages, and then I went right into the ministry.

I started pastoring the South Fontana Community Church. I was a little young to be a pastor. I was 20 years old, but I just felt like, you know what, why not? Then I kind of dialed it back. I got a master's degree in psychology and counseling, and I became a counselor, became a young adult pastor.

I spoke in all 50 states to young adults all around the world and really was passionate about that still am, but now pastoring in Palmdale for the last seven years, it is a joy to study the Word of God.

It's a joy to walk people through transformation, through the truth. Jesus said, the truth will set us free, and so psychology comes at it from the angle that says, how do you feel? Let's try to fix it.

Jesus says, this is what's true. Now let's address how you feel. It's totally opposite, and it's a wonderful thing to start with the solution, with the foundation, and work our way up. Wow. That was a great answer.

I kind of got stuck with like, you have studied so many different religions, and I feel like I am surrounded constantly by people that are like, listen, Christianity, probably good, but I need to rule out the others first.

I think that's a pretty normal approach to deciding what faith, and just understanding all these other faiths. I'm going to ask the question later about how does Genesis differ from all the other religions, Christian stories, but just backing up just a second, when it comes to Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, what was it that, they're all valid, and people are believing in them, so what was it about you that was the clicker of like, oh, this isn't it?

Was there a moment like that?

Yeah, actually, the crazy thing about every religion is there's an element of truth in every religion. Otherwise, people wouldn't even give it the time of day, right? The Bible is all true, but it's not all truth in the sense that it's not comprehensive.

I mean, there are things that are true about medicine that aren't included in the Bible. I think we would understand that, that there's what's called general revelation, so there's some things out there that are absolutely true that aren't in the Bible, and to that we say, okay, if it's something that we can look at and say, absolutely, it's true.

The thing that I really was interested in answering was what about the religions that predate Christianity? When you think about a religion like Hinduism or Buddhism, you look at the tenets of their faith, and you realize, okay, wait a second.

From the beginning of time, we had a woman and a man who was seeking after their creator in ways that are very similar to the religions that you see, and it was so eerie to look back and see how they were almost like a projector pointing forward to say, these things are true, and it elevates our need for a savior.

The one thing that no other religion had was a suffering savior, and so that is the one thing that you wouldn't expect from a man-made religion. You would expect the savior to be triumphant and to be glorious and to not be bloody and beaten and humiliated, and so when you come to Christianity, he breaks the mold of all the other religions that even predated it, and you realize, wait a second, everything that's true in those things are almost like a projector screen pointing us forward to something that we need.

All of those religions, they create thirst for something more, because when you try to be your own Buddha, which is essentially what Buddhism is, is you are your own god, and there are 330 ,000 gods in India, and again, I'm not putting down anyone who follows those religions.

What I am saying is, if you take all of the nuggets of truth out and just live them, it does produce some frustration, and some frustration that hasn't really been talked about until the internet, and now you have a younger generation who are voicing some of those frustrations, and the frustration is this, that you can't be your own savior.

Self-fulfillment brings frustration. It's a futile pursuit. For me, it was like, okay, they have some elements of truth. There are some things that Confucius and Buddha and Hinduism, they say that are good things, but now that we have scripture, we look at meditation, and we realize it's not about being at one with ourselves.

It's about being at one with God, and meditation is taking truth and emptying our soul of the lies we tell ourselves, and filling it with truth. You could take every religion around the world, and it lacks the suffering savior that we all long for.

We long for someone to feel our pain, to know what we need, and to meet that need. Only Jesus did that, and so that's, again, just to give you a synopsis of all the different religions, I'm saying this was my pursuit.

This is my journey. I saw all of them, and I was actually amazed by some of them. I learned from some of them, but none of them could transform me like Jesus could, because Jesus came down to me, and here's the other thing.

Jesus claimed to be God, which is a big deal. He didn't just claim to be a good teacher. He claimed to be God, and then he rose again, and he still lives. Again, even if you don't believe in Christianity, you still have to ask, is he alive?

Is he still existing? Because Buddha is confirmed dead. Muhammad, a great teacher, prophet, whatever you want to label him as, but he is dead. We know where his bones are, but Jesus is alive. Again, you have to deal with that.

It always comes back to the resurrection. I had a thought, and it's gone now. But even thinking about other religions and their creation stories, since you do have this in-depth knowledge, I know loosely that Buddhism is based off Buddha, who was a prince, and then he saw poverty and decided to seek that human experience in a way and give up all earthly possessions, and he found enlightenment under a tree.

That's literally the extent of my knowledge, super, super basic. That seems very cut and dry, but Genesis is God baking a cake out of the atmosphere. It's him pulling together elements that weren't there before.

Was that the first people of that time had ever heard of that type of creation story? The first person to ever hear Genesis, were they just mind boggled, or were they like, oh, no, no, I'm used to that because I used to believe in this God, Baal, and his creation story was two titans clashing.

What was the background of the first person ever to hear Genesis? What would their reaction have been?

Genesis, Ancient Near Eastern Creation Stories, and the First Audience

Yeah. First and foremost, again, I want to start super simple for someone who's just coming to the Bible. Job is the first book, so that was the first book written chronologically. Would the people in Moses' day, when Moses was receiving the creation story, would they have been absolutely shocked by this?

No, I don't believe so. I believe this was something that was absolutely recorded and passed down. Was it scripture yet? No. Do I feel like the Talmud and some of the rabbinical writings are extremely helpful in lots of historical evidence out there?

I don't know what that is, Peter. You might have to back up. Okay, sorry. The Talmud is traditional writings by Jewish Sanhedrin priests. The rabbinical writings that add to the Talmud are just basically this growing document of things that they would add to scripture.

Much like other add to scripture. The Mormons have the Pearl of Great Price. The Muslim tradition has lots of different writings, obviously the Koran, but you would look at that scripture and say, oh, that's great.

That's a historical document. I would look at scripture as it is the God-breathed word, meaning it's exactly what God wants for us. It's been preserved. It's literal. When it's not literal, it's figurative.

We can get into that later. For me, you look at all the other things that are salt and peppered around scripture, and you realize, no, they knew that God created the heavens and the earth, that we are stamped with God's image.

To what extent? I don't know. We weren't there. There's not a lot of historical documentation outside of scripture. In fact, if you throw out the Bible, which a lot of people want to do nowadays, you don't have any historical documents that match the criteria that you're going to set if you want to throw out the Bible.

The Bible sets the standard. The Bible has more manuscripts per verse, per chapter, per book of the 66 books than any other historical document. It goes back the farthest. It has more confirmation, archaeological confirmation, historical confirmation.

Again, we could get into the in all of the different manuscripts and all of that. The Dead Sea Scrolls, that was the final straw on the back of those who were trying to say that scripture really wasn't exactly divinely.

Preserved. In my mind. For those listening that may not understand me, what exactly are the Dead Sea Scrolls? I feel like I know, but I'm not 100 clear.

Sure. The Dead Sea Scrolls were in this cave in Qumran. A shepherd boy, I think it was in the 1930s. I'm going to get that wrong. Fact check me on that. He throws this rock into these small caves, which are everywhere in Israel if you've ever been there.

He hears something break. Obviously, curiosity gets him. He goes and he grabs these perfectly sealed, other than the ones he broke, these jars, these clay-filled pots. Inside them were these ancient documents that were documents dating back to 600 BC.

We're talking about the time of Hezekiah, the king Isaiah. In fact, Isaiah, everything that you took from those ancient scrolls and matched them up to what we had 2 ,000 years later, they match. They're a perfect match.

Again, that's just one of many examples. If you go to the Jerusalem Museum, downtown Jerusalem, it is fascinating. The evidence is overwhelming for Scripture. Again, a lot of people would say, well, what about this?

What about that? You could debate it, and it's been debated for centuries. But if you're just stepping back and saying, okay, bring me the evidence. You put all the evidence on one side for either claim that the Scripture has been tampered with and changed over the years.

Constantine made up a bunch of stuff. The evidence doesn't match that. I've always said to my young adults, truth fears no question. If you have evidence, bring it to me. Show me the proof. The truth always wins.

Sometimes it takes a while, but the truth always wins. It doesn't have to be manipulated. It's something that you can just rest in.

I absolutely agree that the Bible can be absolutely debated, but I think it was what Jordan Peterson, he had some PowerPoint. He's great, but he aligned every single part of the Bible. This is within the Bible, not outside, but everything in the Bible that really connected itself to the beginning.

There's a cross-reference in the hundreds, essentially, that really said what happened before. I'm not too familiar with the prophets and Isaiah and Elijah, but what was already said perfectly matched with what happened and what was fulfilled.

Yeah, that's incredible. Just backing up. You said that people, with Job, people in Moses' day, they would have heard Genesis, that's God's brief word, and they would have been like, oh yeah, that totally checks out.

I can get on board with God whipping up earth with his hands in a matter of seven days. What was their belief before that?

God's Voice, Moses as Mediator, and the Need for a Written Word

Well, yeah. Let me answer what was their belief before that, but let me also say that it was in a time where they did not have the written word. God interacted with people in a different way. Peter even said this in 2 Peter 1 that we have a more sure word, more sure than Jesus standing right there and saying it.

He said, because you can forget what someone said. I mean, I forget half of the things I said last week. Your mind has a way of losing some of that, but when you write it down, and 140 times in Scripture, it commands us to write it down.

He told prophets, priests, and kings, and moms and dads to write down what he was saying, which is why we have the word of God. I think the first thing before we talk about what they believed before is the fact that God was actively thundering from the clouds.

His presence was visible and literal in the sense that they just saw it. When it says, in the beginning, God, it's like, oh, okay. We don't see him, but we see the fiery pillar at night, and we see the cloud by day.

It's wild, but it was a different time period in the sense that God was literally interacting, and you were hearing the voice of God literally. It scared them so much that they told Moses and Aaron, hey, wait a second.

We can't do this anymore. Our children, you have to be a representative. You have to be a mediator between us and God. This is where the story of Jesus comes in because Jesus is our final mediator. He is a better Moses.

He is a better Adam. He's a better David. He's a better mediator between God and man because he is God, and he was man. Again, everything points toward Jesus. I would even say, and some people might get extremely bent out of shape at this, but I believe that even things outside the Bible point to Jesus.

Again, that's my own personal belief, but I believe that every religion and every book and everything that honestly we look at is super interesting. People who don't even believe in Jesus, I think that even those people not even knowingly are pointing to him as the Savior.

I mean, you look at our whole existence, and it bears record of that. I hope that you don't hear the motorcyclists.

Outside, but please, if you have an example top ahead, please share it because I totally agree with you, but I mean, we're in the Christian field, so we kind of want to see Jesus everywhere. It's that confirmation bias, but what is your example that people that are unknowingly.

Praising God, unknowingly pointing to Jesus? Yeah, I love that. A lot of times, people will say, why would God let really bad things happen to really good people? I'm dealing with a family and I don't want to say any names, but her husband just passed away.

They have a three-year-old boy. She just found out that her mom has stage four cancer. She is asking, why? Why would God allow this to happen? I think even that question is a confirmation. Again, I understand confirmation bias, but you have to think about it from an objective.

Step out and really think about what we're asking when we say that. What we're asking is, why, based on my measure of what is good, is God bad? You're A, confirming that what is good and bad actually matters.

If there's no God, it doesn't matter. Then B, you're assuming that he cares. If he does care, then he has to somehow, some way, right the wrong of sin. Sin entered the world. It corrupts everything. Ultimately, what we're asking is, why isn't God doing anything about the sin problem?

Because cancer and all of the things in our world, that's not God's original design. You go back to creation, his original design had none of that. We're the owners of the new Ferrari that wrecks the Ferrari and then blames the Ferrari, right?

We're blaming God for something that we ruined. Yet God says, wait a second, that inside that question is a longing for belonging. What we're really asking for is we're asking for God to understand our need and to somehow enter into this need.

Somehow, some way, not just understand and have empathy, but somehow right all the wrongs. That is who Jesus is. Jesus is the one that came down to us. He suffered. He didn't come down to us all aloof like, you've got problems, I don't.

He brought heaven down to earth and he entered into our mess. He entered into our sin and he felt our pain. He was in all points, tempted like we are yet without sin. He felt all of the infirmity. He felt all of the pain and he still died.

He is in the process right now of continuing to bring heaven down to earth. He is going to right every wrong, but it's in his time. You say, well, what time is that? All of eternity. We look at our existence, 80 years.

God has all of eternity to have the last word and to bring justice to all of the pain and suffering. In a question as common as that, we see the answer is Jesus. That's not confirmation bias. You don't have any other answers outside of Jesus that will meet that deepest need.

Yeah.

Just jumping into time. That is one of the hardest concepts for us to really understand is that God created time, so he exists outside of it. That's why this concept of eternity and the concept of creating the world in seven days, it just seems unfathomable for us.

I love this explanation. I love that every question I ask, we just go farther down this rabbit hole, but just to bring us back to people hearing this, just to give us some context, is if I was experiencing God's fiery pillar, which I truly, that could be a whole different conversation of how people experience God.

I thought this was how they did. We wake up, and we go to work, and then we watch Netflix. That's how we experience God. They were hearing this God-breathed word. They were seeing God, but then Moses was like, actually, it was this way in seven days.

He had made the earth, and then he made the land, and then he made the water. Were they like, okay, this is similar to what I thought before,.

Which was what? Yeah. Again, we weren't there. I don't know exactly how they felt about it, but I will tell you right now that if we would have been in their shoes, I don't necessarily think we would have questioned that.

Here's why. We think of the miraculous in terms of past tense, like God used to do miracles. He still does miracles, but we don't recognize it. A lot of people think, well, I asked God to help me. I prayed, and he just didn't come through for me or whatever.

I hear that all the time as a pastor. The reality is, well, how? How did he not come through for you? Was there something that you had an expectation of that he didn't meet? Because that's a different conversation.

Could it have been that he prevented something miraculously that was going to happen that didn't? That game is an infinite game that you can't play because we're finite players. I think for them, again, putting myself in their shoes, I think that they saw the miraculous all around them and the supernatural all around them.

To hear the miracle of creation would have just been one more miracle. Again, not to say that it wasn't faith. It is faith. By the way, whoever wants to debate creation, I will give them this, that from one angle, you can look at it, and the evolutionary process makes a lot of sense from that angle with all of those details, but you cannot place that onto scripture because everything else falls apart.

If God stamped his image onto us, that cannot be progressive because that's not how God works. The miracle of life happens immediately. We know that because we see it happen all the time. The spark of conception is a beautiful thing.

Ask any parent. It is a miracle. It is an absolute miracle. Dreaming, we know more about the stars and the universe than our own dreams. It's a miracle that we have this whole world when we sleep that sometimes is wacky and crazy, but it's a world inside our head, and we're still trying to figure all that out.

The reality is there's miracles all around us, but Satan tries to tempt us and doubt us or cause doubt within us that says, maybe it wasn't so miraculous after all. If he can pull on that one thread,.

The whole sweater unravels. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, that definitely makes sense. I'm just going to do a pause right here. We could take this out, but I was just curious, historically speaking, and I don't want to ask a question that you don't know, but I was provoked to have this podcast because I heard somebody that wasn't very Christian, but more into the books, essentially say, before the Genesis Christian story, there was this other religion, and it was this type of God, and it was this type of mythical story, and the pagans and the women that worshipped God, all the things.

I don't know when that was in the timeline of the Bible. I am curious if I was praising a female God, or I was praising a Zeus, was that creation story is a violence, and it's of oppression, and just being simply more powerful, so that deemed them the God, whereas with Genesis, it's of love, and creation, and cultivation, and miracle.

Relationship. And relationship. I don't want to go outside your knowledge block, but if you do, I mean, shed some light to me on just what kind of existed before, if you feel comfortable.

Competing Creation Myths, Power, and the True God

No, absolutely. Here's the thing. There are so many people that are far more skilled and understand this far greater than I do, but I will tell you this right now, that the whole idea, and I love Elon Musk.

I love a lot of the things that he says, but the whole idea that we're in a simulation, and there are multi-universe possibilities where this is our God, but those people have other gods, and other planetary.

Again, you can build all of these possibilities outside of the scriptural account, but it still doesn't take away, is the scriptural account true? You still haven't answered that. Again, you can build things outside of it.

For instance, one of the theories is the gap theory, where there was a whole other human race in between Genesis 1 -1, and Genesis 1 -2. I could go on for an hour about all the different theories in Genesis 1 -2.

There have been so many theories trying to explain the miracle that in the beginning, God created Elohim Barashit. He created. The thing that you have to level with is, it's here. Again, you can debate how it came.

You can debate what was before it, but it's here. What didn't make sense to me as a teenager is, it's here. It's incredibly beautiful and complex. The ear and the eye are so irreducibly complex. It's like, that evolved?

It didn't work for millions of years, and then all of a sudden, it did? It didn't make sense to me. Again, maybe it makes sense to other scientists and all that, but again, you have this one theory that fits everything.

It literally checks all the boxes, and yet we constantly want to go outside of that theory. Ultimately, I think the reason why I wanted to go outside of it is because I didn't want to be accountable to Him.

It's not a matter of intellectual ability. It's a matter of personal accountability. If we're honest with ourselves, we don't like a God that we can't and I know that's a double negative we can't manipulate.

We want a God that we can say, well, I'm just not that way, or I don't do it that way, or that's good for you, but not for me. Whenever we step outside of our Creator and we become, as the creation, the one that calls the shots about how we are to operate, then what we're really saying is, I want to be my own God.

There's only two choices. Either God is on the throne of our lives, or we are. You can name any religion. You can name any we could talk about any possibility. There are limitless possibilities, but those are the two choices on the shelf, serving God or serving self.

I mean, this might be a hot take, and we can speak as freely as we want. This podcast is my questions. I'm not trying to assume or speak to anybody, but does that mean you don't I don't want to say you don't believe in evolution, but I think that there is an overlap.

I don't think science excuses God's presence. I think it creates for me, it's reason in our human mind. I have a hard time reading Genesis, and my logical mind wants to picture God whipping up earth and heaven and Adam and Eve.

I don't want to talk about Adam and Eve in this podcast, maybe in a future one, but really just what it was where does God's creation end, and where does our understanding of dinosaurs and evolution and the millions and billions of years ago in the epochs where does that begin, and does that have overlap?

I've heard I ask everybody this, and no one really has an answer because we all wonder the same thing. We want it to relate, but I think no one can find the bridge. I was just talking about this with friends.

This might sound so silly, but really, was it just like a bubble of Eden and a bubble of this creation while evolution was happening, or was it happening at the same time? A day for God was millions of years for us, and Adam and Eve was the culmination of evolution from the human terms, but God doesn't want to talk about evolution.

He wants to talk about his creation, so that's all he's going to mention in Genesis. I'm really trying to I know that science supports God, and I know that God doesn't try to dispute science, and I'm not trying to separate either one of them, but I do think that we evolve a species.

We continually improve. We continually evolve. The better oh my gosh, why can't I think of it? You're going to mate with the best version. The worst versions are going to die off, so I think evolution will happen.

It's not saying it's ungodly, but also, how do we get a fully formed human? How do we get a fully formed sea creation? Is that, in your opinion, and again, not trying to pin you down on anything, but do you just think that what God was saying, he's creating heavens and the earth, and that was just loosely saying over the billions of years, evolution?

Microevolution, Macroevolution, and Genesis

Yeah. Well, I mean, there are definitely, you need to distinguish between macro and micro evolution. I mean, I'm talking with the creation story. The macro evolution, meaning like there was like an amoeba or a big bang or something was like these particles that just happened by chance, just happened to kind of form together.

Again, could God have done that? Absolutely, he could have. I don't believe he did, and again, because you have to go to the fact that he stamped his image onto us. We are image bearers, and the first two chapters, I mean, if you want to parse that out properly, and you would even Jewish rabbis would agree with this.

You take the first two chapters of Genesis, you have to come to the conclusion that that is God saying, I am well pleased with the reflection of me in them. So again, the amoeba, how does that reflect God, right?

So macro evolution, again, I have really good friends that believe that God created the that he caused the big bang or he caused the amoeba and then everything developed. I absolutely I mean he would be crazy not to believe in micro evolution in the sense that

I mean I have a golden retriever. His name is Kobe, and the reality is golden retrievers weren't in the Garden of Eden. I mean I'm sorry they weren't. They evolved as a species specifically in Scotland to go hunting, but that's beside the point.

I mean you look at dogs, you look at lots of other things that have evolved over the years, but that's micro. We're not talking about like popping out new eyeballs or growing tails or massive mutations.

And so again, you have to ask the what type of evolution, and then the other thing you have to ask is are we really OK with saying that the world is billions and billions of years old? And again, that's a big question to ask.

I'm not saying I have the answer to that. I think that's a really tough question. That's something that I think is there's a lot of evidence on both sides of that. But everything will kind of come down to, OK, then how old is the earth?

Was there a flood? All of those things. But I like to stay with, hey, God created us. He created us in his image with a specific purpose. Now let's live that purpose out. Again, the origins are incredibly fascinating.

I think it's a wonderful discussion. But Deuteronomy 29 .29 does tell us that there are many mysteries that do not belong to man. They belong to God. And so these mysteries are sometimes things that we want, but they don't belong to us.