FBC Adult Sunday School – January 23, 2022

There's all sorts of buttons up here to make stuff work. He does. I don't know what I'm doing. Projector's coming on.

Too many buttons. So there's two sets of handouts.

There's actually a third that hasn't been officially released yet. So there's a stapled one.

We had that two weeks ago. We had it last week. And we have it today. We'll be done with that one.

And then there's a single sheet. So if you need either the old stapled one or the new single sheet, feel free to get yourself that.

OK. So to add to the confusion, the numbering on those sheets is slightly different than the numbering on the electronic stuff up here.

But that'll be resolved after today, because I go back and I tweak stuff. You guys do that, don't you? You go back and tweak it.

And you throw in another slide. So it shouldn't be too confusing. So what we're going to do, if you have the stapled handout, it should be on 24 for you.

And that's what you should see. Does that make sense? Slide number 24?

Is that what's up on the board? Same as the board? OK. So I did it right. Very seldom does that happen.

So this is the slide that we concluded with last time.

And by the way, have you begun to notice that it always snows on a

Saturday night? OK. Pastor keeps praying for more snow, so he gets a day off.

But the Lord just is not working that out for him. So believing in creation is a necessary part of worship.

We talked about that. His Lordship, we talked about that, and redemption. And what we did in this situation, and this is a critical verse, if you let's jump over and look at 2

Corinthians 4, 6 again with me, please. This bears repeating. 2

Corinthians 4, 6. There is just no wiggle room around this, ladies and gentlemen.

2 Corinthians 4, 6. Does anybody remember who wrote 2 Corinthians? This rather unimpressive minor person of the

New Testament called Paul, right? And this is what he writes. For God who said, and now he quotes directly, word for word from Genesis 1, 3.

For God who said, let light shine out of darkness. What light was that?

That was the light back in the old, right? Back in Genesis 1, 3 was total darkness, and boom, here comes the light.

Paul references that and says, let light shine out of darkness has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

What does Paul do? He compares the physical light that God put into the universe so that we could see stuff to the light that comes into our hearts when we begin to understand what salvation is.

So Paul references what? The creation and compares and contrast that physical light with the spiritual light that comes into our hearts.

Did Paul believe in a literal creation? He did, he did. There is no wiggle room on that, folks, no wiggle room.

And then if you join me over, let me finish reading this paragraph that's in front of you.

Compare John's identification of Christ with the light in one four of his gospel. Let me go then to our next slide.

Better turn this on, too many buttons. So again, what we have here, believing in creation is a necessary part of worship, his lordship and redemption.

Let's expand on the redemption. Redemption continued, Colossians chapter one, verse six.

And by the way, if you actually want that version, the electronic version of what

I'm putting up here, you can email me at any time and I will send you that, but that's constantly updated week by week.

So in Colossians 1, 16, and notice the power of these verses.

Again, you might want, not you, but folks will on occasion, they want to get rid of Genesis 1, 2, and 3, right?

Because they don't like them. But there are so many New Testament references to them, you can't get rid of them.

So 1, 16, for by him, that is Christ, all things were created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities.

What's the next word? All things were created through him and for him.

So back to our slide in front of us, all things were created by him and for him. What does that phrase for him mean?

That is, sometimes you'll, I've heard speakers say, that is a phrase that is pregnant with meaning.

And I like that, it is just full of meaning. The grand purpose, follow this please.

The grand purpose, the point of all this is redemption. The grand design is the gathering of a redeemed people into eternal glory, for the purpose of worshiping him forever and ever.

Pause there. It's not so much about the creation folks, not those six days.

It's what is pregnancy, right? It starts with a egg and a sperm creating a single cell called a zygote, which grows up into a human being and has fulfillment for as many years, right?

We understand that. So creation was the infancy, it's the literal zygote.

Did you follow that biological term? We say, oh, creation, it was a great thing.

Yes, it was, but where does it end up? Follow this, back to our slide.

All of his works of, well, let me, I'm sorry. The grand design is the gathering of a redeemed people into eternal glory, for the purpose of worshiping him forever and ever.

As magnificent as the creation was and is, it gets even, and I'm gonna kill the

English language here, it gets even gooder folks. It does, follow this.

All of his works of creation and providence and the consummation are all associated with the work of redemption.

The work of redemption is not incidental. It is the reason why the universe exists.

It's almost like you start with a bunch of colors on a palette, not the wood palette for loading stuff, but the painter's palette.

Now, you don't wanna see what I would do with a palette on campus. That would be ugly. But you get a person and they just do something.

God created a marvelous creation, but the whole end game, if I can use that term, the end game of creation is what?

A people that are redeemed for eternal honor and glory and praise to the

Lord. And if we remove the creation, we have violated

God's turf. There's no wiggle room there, folks.

Did you catch the magnificence of that? So let's go then to Ephesians chapter three.

Ephesians chapter three, eight through 11. Again, here's this guy

Paul yakking on. And he says to me, though I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given to preach to the

Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ and to bring to light.

Thank you, somebody's with me. Here's that term light again, to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things, so that through the church, the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places.

This was according to the eternal purpose that he has realized in Christ Jesus, our

Lord. Now, I would really love for the pastor to get up and wax and wane for about a half an hour on this.

Do you see the meaning in that passage? He takes creation, he takes

Christ, he takes light, he takes future perfect union with Christ where he receives honor and glory forever and ever.

That is the end plan of creation. Do you catch that, folks?

Do you catch that? That is so rich with meaning. Continuing, there are at least 165 passes in Genesis that are either directly quoted or clearly referred to in the

New Testament. So, and again, I know I'm preaching to the choir, but if we want to get rid of Genesis 1, 2, or 1, 2, 3, or 1 through 5, or 1 through 6, or 1 through 11, you know those uncomfortable ones, we gotta get rid of these 165 references in the

New Testament. Where do you stop? You can't start. There exist over 100 quotations or direct references to Genesis 1 through 11 in the

New Testament. Every one of those 11 chapters is alluded to somewhere in the New Testament, and every one of the

New Testament authors refers somewhere in his writings to some verse in Genesis 1 through 11.

Don't mess with God's Word. Because once you start, you can't stop. On at least six different occasions,

Jesus quoted from or referred to something in one of those 11 chapters. I think we've made the point.

Essential verses. So let's look at, we're just gonna look, I think, at three of these.

I would encourage you in your own to look at all the rest, and there's a ton more. So let's go over to 1

Peter 4 .19, please. 1 Peter 4 .19. I started to look at 3 .19,

and I said, I can't make that one fit. So we'll go to 4 .19. You've never done that before, happy passer.

Oh. Okay. So in 4 .19, this is what we read, 1

Peter. Therefore, let those who suffer according to God's will entrust their souls to a faithful creator while doing good.

Do you find that an interesting verse? So what does Peter do? He says, we need to entrust our souls to, not

God. Our heart. To a faithful creator. Creator, yeah.

No, is God the faithful creator? Yes. Yes. But it's interesting that Peter uses that title.

I mean, to me, folks, to me, the most important thing is that my soul and the souls of others are entrusted to somebody that can follow through on what he says.

And here, Peter calls him the faithful creator. Hebrews 11 .3.

Hebrews 11 .3. In Hebrews 11 .3,

we have a key verse here or a key word by faith. By the way, can

I prove God? No. Can you prove God? Not in the realm of science we can.

Now, will I absolutely die for my belief that God exists?

Yes, but I can't prove him from a scientific perspective.

I can't put him in a box. I can't quantify him. Mr. Engineer over there, he can work all day long, all week long, all year long.

He cannot prove God. That's why we have to use this word by faith.

And we talked before, and I shared with you, to believe in evolution requires a whole lot more faith,

I think, than it does to believe in God. So verse 11, or verse three,

I'm sorry. By faith, we understand that the universe was created by the words of God so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible.

Okay, let me just detract here. We're gonna get to this hopefully sometime in March. But the idea, sometimes

I just get in trouble. But that's okay. Let's talk about Pastor for a minute.

Now you're in trouble. Now I'm in trouble. He has the power of the switch. He can shut this down in a second.

And guys, you guys that are married, you can do, don't try this on your wife, though. It's not gonna work.

It's gonna backfire. Is there basically, between pastor's ears, is it basically empty space?

Yes. Yes. Absolutely, just ask his dear wife. No, you guys know that we're made of atoms, right?

Ever seen an atom? No, no. But now with the advent of scanning and tunneling electron microscopes, we can actually image individual atoms.

But that didn't occur until about the 50s or 60s. So before that, everything that we saw, at least since about the late 1800s, we theorized the atoms because we could kind of prove electrons and neutrons and protons, right?

We're not gonna get into the physics of that because I'd get confused in a hurry. But we said, yes, we know they exist, but we couldn't see them until about the 1950s.

But you guys know, I think you remember back to your physics days or general science days.

You have the atom with the electrons buzzing around out here and the nucleus with the protons and neutrons.

But there's a whole lot of space between the nucleus made of the protons and neutrons and the electrons.

If we were to take an atom and we were to enlarge the nucleus to the size of a tennis ball, the electrons would be outside of a major baseball field, the professional baseball fields, right?

So is an atom basically empty space? Yes. It is only one 100 ,000 there, the electrons, protons and neutrons.

The rest of an atom is empty space. So if we could take just the core, the neutrons and protons, which is solid matter, and we could crush an atoms down and get rid of the space between the electrons and the nucleus, that would weigh in the neighborhood of about 10 million tons per cubic inch.

So is Pasteur empty space? Yes. No, don't get crazy on me.

But are you sitting on a chair that basically is not there? How many of you have a two -story house?

How many of you have a basement? So you're walking on a floor that doesn't exist. We'll say, okay, you're messing.

I know that I love to mess. So anyhow, let's go back. By faith we understand the universe was created by the word of God so that what was seen was not made out of things that are visible.

So everything that we see is made of atoms, correct? Which are not visible and they basically don't exist because they're empty space.

Make sure when we get to the worship service today, you start tracking back with the pastor.

Forget what I've talked about here so far, okay? And finally, Acts 17, 27.

Acts 17, 27. Well, we'll start with 22.

I really like this passage in Acts 17, 22 through 27. And the reason I like it is because at this evangelistic moment in the life of Paul, what he decides to do to engage people is to reference the creation.

Now, for me, I find it very easy to go from the creation around us to start a conversation about spiritual things.

And when I was teaching at Salk on occasion, the students would ask questions and they would say, well,

I would say, okay, if we're talking in the world of biology, especially the human body, and we look at the complexity of the systems, which we're gonna start doing perhaps a little today, but especially next week and going forward,

I would say, explain to me how evolution could ever get there from the original.

And students occasionally would come up afterwards and they say, you know, all I've ever heard is evolution, evolution, evolution.

This idea that maybe there's some problems with evolutionary theory in what you've kind of described makes sense.

Because all they've ever been exposed to is evolution. That's their only default option for how things, but they struggle with it.

They struggle with it, they really do. So here we go with Paul in Acts 17, 22.

So Paul standing in the midst of the Areopagus said, men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious.

For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also one altar with this inscription, to the unknown

God. What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you, the

God who made the world and everything in it. That's the creator, right? Being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything.

And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods in the boundaries of their dwelling place that they should seek

God in the hope that they might feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us.

So some of the stuff hopefully that I'll get to today, but especially next week, it'll just be, you're gonna say it just makes sense that there is a creator because evolution does not make sense.

So I'm gonna give you some very practical, non -technical stuff that you can share with other people.

And then as we get more towards into February and March, then we're gonna get into some of the more complex parts of the human body, just so that you say, wow, we are fearfully and wonderfully made.

So homeostasis, homeostasis, a dynamic state of equilibrium or balance.

I'm gonna explain all this too, because I want you to get this concept. This is engineering at its finest.

So we can take all 100 trillion cells. And if we can take one cell at a time carefully, now we're talking humans, but this is true of other living organisms as well.

We can pull virtually any cell out, put it in a right medium environment, and that cell will continue to live for a period of time.

So if I were to say that each one of you are a cell, so he has his own specific internal environment.

And Ed has his specific internal environment. Do you follow me? So that environment, though similar, is slightly different than that.

Every cell in your body has its own specific environment, which is carefully protected.

The ability to maintain a constant internal environment, no matter what happens outside the cell is called homeostasis.

Homeo the same, stasis condition. Do you get that? So again, if each one of you are a cell, if his internal environment changes too much, what happens to him as a cell?

He dies. If too many of your cells die because they can't maintain homeostasis, what do you do as an organism?

You die. So let me give you a quick example, and then we'll back up and we'll hit this again.

If we were to take you today and you say, man, I look so good in a swimming suit. So you get your swimming suit on, and you get your little chair out, and you go out and you lay outside.

And you say, you're nuts. I know, but that's okay. Not only do each of your cells have to maintain homeostasis, but all your systems, right?

Your cardiovascular and your lymphatic, and you as a whole organism have to maintain homeostasis.

Well, what do you begin to do as a organism to maintain homeostasis outside in the swimming suit when it's eight degrees out there?

You begin to shiver, right? Uncontrollably. Your surface blood vessels vasoconstrict to pull blood into the core.

Pretty soon you turn blue, and then pretty soon you're dead. Got it?

So all your cells, all your body systems, you as an organism have to maintain homeostasis, or you will, anybody know what this is?

It's show and tell, boys and girls. This looks like a piston. Okay.

Actually, what I should do, now if I make a mistake, you just be quiet over there, okay? Because this guy can rebuild these things with his hands tied behind his head and blindfolded, okay?

So this is a piston. You can try to, maybe you can tell me what this came out of.

I just found this at work, so. Out of diesel?

So anyhow, so I know he wants to finish this lecture, but we're just, keep a hand on him, okay?

So you guys know that in, unless you're one of those electric people, right? You got an engine, and this baby goes up and down.

First of all, what I really should do, does this look like it's been designed? Yeah, I could have, and I couldn't find this.

If I would have thought, I could have brought in a chunk of iron ore, right? And you can look at a chunk of iron ore and you say, there's no design to that, but this has been designed.

They purified the metal, they machined it, they did the whole deal. So this baby goes up and down.

You guys know this, right? You say, we want to get along faster than a horse. So let's just create an engine.

Now, follow the craziness of this. So here's the piston, it's going up and down.

And then you got a connecting rod right here, and the connecting rod goes down and it hooks up to a crankshaft, right?

And if you have eight of these things going like this in a row, do you follow me? That crankshaft turns.

So you need the piston. First, you got to design it, you got to engineer it. You got this in the, what's that called?

A wrist pin. Wrist pin. It's a wrist pin, goes through here in the crankshaft, down to the crankshaft, and the crankshaft turns.

And the crankshaft, which is highly engineered, right? And that's got to hook up to a transmission, which is then going to go to a driveshaft, which goes to a differential, which goes to axles, which goes to wheels, right?

You got all that stuff. But you got to have a block. There's a sleeve that this slides up and down with, and then you got to have gas.

So somebody's got to refine gas. And then you have to have either a carburetor or injectors to shove the gas to the intake manifold to go down to the spark plug, which you had to design.

And then those exhaust valve and intake valves, they've got to open because at the right time.

And those require camshafts. And then you got to have a chain that drives the camshafts, you with me?

And then the exhaust gas has got to go out to the exhaust manifold. And those all have got, there's a test on this, don't laugh at me.

Okay? And then you have to have the right timing. So you either have to have a distributor.

What's that? That runs off the... Runs off the camshafts. Thank you. Okay, runs off the camshafts.

I knew he would be here today. Unless you go to electronic and everyone wouldn't want to worry about that one.

Do you follow me? How complex is an engine? Lots and lots of parts.

And is this precision? Oh, are we getting down to like one 10 ,000th of tolerance in these babies?

Oh, and we got to have piston rates. Here you go. Okay. That's just an engine.

Really expensive. Anybody had to put a new engine in your car? Those babies get expensive, right?

Okay. Highly engineered. And that is just an engine. And I will submit to you that an engine is absolutely kids play compared to a cell.

Absolutely kids play. There is not a person alive that would say that this just evolved.

And yet they say, what does the cell do? Evolves. And what does the cardiovascular system do?

Evolves. And what did we do? Evolve. Remember we talked about time and chance?

And remember, let me go back and find this one. Okay, I love this.

The very bottom. George Wald. One only has to wait.

Time itself performs the miracles. Given so much time, the impossible becomes possible, the possible probable, and the probable actually certain.

I wonder if George would say that about his engine. Do you follow the disconnect with the logic on this, ladies and gentlemen?

And they just kind of lose it. So back to homeostasis. That's all the intro onto homeo. It is a dynamic state of equilibrium.

In other words, dynamic means it's not just passive. So if we go back and we compare each of you to a cell, is there a constant ongoing challenge inside a cell?

Yes, because the outside is always there and it's always trying to change the inside. And the inside resists that through active mechanisms.

And I have to skip a lot of stuff because I don't want to turn this into too complex. But it's not just like you got a brick sitting there.

It is in a dynamic state. And what are each of your cells trying to do?

Maintain a constant internal environment no matter what happens outside the cell.

When you get in that chase lounge in the eight degrees in your swimming suit, you are gonna try to maintain a constant core temperature.

It's not gonna work, right? Because your system's gonna get overloaded. Internal conditions can vary within limits.

Even though the outside world or environment continuously changes. Do you get that?

I don't care how deep asleep you are, your cells are in constant, constantly being challenged to change their environment.

And they resist, they resist through tons of mechanisms. Parts to homeostasis.

Receptor control center and effector. Okay, we're not gonna make this too bad here. Receptor. A receptor is a sensor.

What is a sensor? It's a thing that senses. Right, right, right? So think of back on the wall there, we have a thermostat.

So in the thermostat, and you guys, unless you're throwing coals in something, you've got one of these at home.

So here's your little wall thermostat. And inside is a sensor that tells you what?

How, what the temperature is, right? We got that? Easy peasy. Just a little thing, and it says, okay, it's 68 or 70 or 72.

It tells you what it is. A sensor that sends information of outside conditions, and it sends that then to the control center.

So the sensor says, or I'm sorry, the receptor says, this is what it is, the environment.

So in the room, right now, everybody's happy in here at 70 degrees. Control center has a predetermined set point.

So when pastor came in this morning, he moved the set point from 60, whatever it was, up to 70.

And that kicked in the effector. What's the effector? The furnace.

So the control center is like the little computer. Slides it over, electrical signal to the furnace.

The effector brings it up until you get to the set point, and then it shuts off.

This summer, he's gonna walk in, and it's gonna be too hot. So he's gonna turn it down.

What will the effector be? Air conditioning. And the whole time, the receptor is telling you what it is.

The receptor tells you what it is. The effector makes the change, and the set point is where you should be.

And if the receptor and the set point are the same, it is well with your soul, and you're comfortable, right?

And that's just temperature, got it? In your body, you have all sorts of receptors that tell you position, tension, et cetera.

So have you ever gone to lift something, or you're carrying something with somebody, and the person at the other end drops their end?

You ever experienced that? And all of a sudden, you get this, you get the weight of the whole thing.

What you have in your muscular system, to give you an idea on this, you have two different little feedback mechanisms, one that sit in the muscle fibers, and the other one that sits in your tendons.

Well, the ones that sit in your muscle fibers are called the interfusal fibers. And if I was carrying something with Mr.

Young, and he tripped and started to fall, and I got the full weight of it, instantly what would happen is those interfusal muscle fibers would send a signal up to the brain and said, it's too much.

And so the brain would send a signal back down and recruit more muscle fibers so I could get the whole weight.

Do you get it? And those signals travel at about 210 meters per second.

They book. But on the other hand, if it's way too much, then the

Golgi tendon organs in the tendons, the brain sends a signal because these guys say, whoa, we're getting overloaded way too much.

So the brain shuts it down and your muscles relax so you don't tear a tendon. Do you kind of get that?

Ed's liking this stuff. And this occurs all the time when you're doing lifting of a heavy nature.

If you need more, the interfusal fibers say more muscle contraction.

If it's way too much, the Golgi tendon organs say shut it down because we're going to tear. And that's just how you do carrying.

That's about as simple as we can make that. So questions there?

Okay. Ed, can you run up here quickly please? So apply that to, you've all heard stories of like a woman whose child gets trapped under a car and she runs to the car and is able to lift up this car to release that child.

Okay. Well, you know, that's a good analogy, Pastor. Mine's better. Oh, okay.

Okay. What I do to really stick it in their mind, I always tell the story,

I used to when I was actively lecturing, of the gal who's in the house and she hears a scream because her husband was working under the car and the jacks fell over.

And she goes and lifts up the car, pulls up, takes his wallet, puts the car back down. She goes, shut it.

How many of you like my version better? Okay, yeah. Okay, yeah. So what could she do?

Part of that one is just good old adrenaline. And you just, you kind of get superhuman strength.

Now, even with adrenaline going, where you get the surge to do really dramatic kind of stuff, you could still exceed those limits.

And then your homeostatic mechanism would kick in and shut you down so you're not tearing stuff.

Or you would feel the adrenaline a little bit later. Yeah. And then you wouldn't be hurt.

You could get a muscle strain. You could get the tendinitis, the whole bit. Yes. Yes. Okay.

So, but that's essentially, now you're, and that's an excellent question. So you're getting some adrenaline in there.

Okay, so here's what we've already talked about. And these are pretty small. I would have enlarged this more, but some of these diagrams you get if you enlarge them too much, you can't read them anyhow.

So this is just showing me what we talked about. So right over here, you've got the thermostat, right?

So this is just a diagram to talk about what you have. So here's the effector, there's the receptor.

And again, if you want these, the electronic. So this is just a memory jogger. That's the thermostat on your wall.

Then we get to this one. Okay. Temperature homeostasis.

This is what we've talked about. What's normal for an adult male?

What's too high for an adult male? Too high for an adult male?

Too high to do what? Pollute? Well, no, just temperature wise too. 98 .7,

because then there's wine and carry on. You guys are so serious, golly.

Actually, when they talk about hypothermia and hyperthermia, they had a case of a gentleman.

He was in his 60s, elderly, kind of in not the best shape. And the heat, the air conditioning, power outage.

So somebody finally realized this guy was, nobody was seeing him. So they called the paramedics.

They went and broke in and they found the guy. His core temperature by the time that, so they got in, they saw he was in distress, got him to the hospital.

So probably 20 minutes, even after the fact, after they'd started with ice packs, his core temperature was north of 115.

And when he recovered fully, there was no apparent side effects. Now, how do

I know that's true? Because that was in a chapter heading in one of the biology books about this guy.

And had I not read it, I would have said that was impossible. So I wouldn't try that at home.

Yeah, Roger, don't get in the microwave. Yeah, okay.

Okay, so we're gonna have to pick it up here because we're gonna run out of our time. But this is, so we'll pick it up on this one.

In essence, this is what we've talked about. What you have here is as you begin, as your core temperature begins to go up a 10th degree, your blood vessels will dilate.

Blood's gonna come to the surface. You're gonna look flushed. You're going to perspire. On the other hand, if the temperature gets too cold, then your blood vessels will vasoconstrict.

You will get a blue hue to you. And your muscles will contract uncontrollably to produce heat.

So let's close in prayer. Father, thank you for this time to look at this marvelous creation that we call humans.

And as we look at this, and we marvel at your handiwork ongoing, and yet the greatest miracle, the greatest transformation is what you've done to our hearts.

As Paul's told us, where you have caused light to come into our hearts, which are spiritually dark.

So as we progressively understand what it means to be fearfully and wonderfully made, may that help us in our worship for you on a moment by moment and day by day basis.

Also, Lord, give us the wisdom and the opportunities to share some of these simple truths with others as a doorstep, as an opening, to talk about what you have done, not only as creator, but as savior.