G1 Conference - Session 2 (Genesis Apologetics)

Genesis Apologetics

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God of creation, King of all heaven, by your word you spoke it all to be.

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And God of the ages, high and exalted one, who am

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I that you would think of me? Who am

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I that you would think of me?

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You are the golden one.

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You are the God who sees. You are the God, God of all mercy.

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You chose to take my place and I am saved.

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Thank you for attending our annual G1 conference. Tonight you will be joining thousands of viewers to take a deep look at the

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Bible's case for origins. We welcome many tonight who already believe the foundational teachings of scripture on the topics we will cover.

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We pray your faith is made even stronger as we drill into these matters and discover together that the teachings of God's word are in fact true.

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Even starting from the very first pages, many attending tonight are already Christians but haven't explored these topics deeply.

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Some are even skeptical. We ask you to engage in all three conference sessions to carefully consider the possibility that scripture can in fact withstand the toughest pressure testing.

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We also welcome those attending tonight who are not yet Christians. Coming to Christ is the first step in a journey to a new life, one marked by both blessing and tribulation.

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We pray that all who attend tonight do so with open hearts and minds. These are life -changing truths, truths that can join your heart and mind together in your faith journey.

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No matter what your place is tonight, we make this special request that you listen with an open mind and heart.

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This is one reason we've turned chat features off to maximize engagement in each speaker's message.

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We answer all questions posed by our viewers. Please just email them to staff at genesisapologetics .com.

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This broadcast will be permanently hosted on the platform you're watching from tonight. Thank you again for attending.

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All right, welcome to the second session of our third annual G1 Conference. My name is

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Joe Walters. I'm one of the pastors in Sacramento at a church called Encounter in Natomas, and it is my honor to welcome the thousands of you that have signed up for this conference day two.

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We will have a number of experts that will speak to you about God's word and about creation, and it is a jam -packed day for the next couple hours.

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So I want to read a quote to you from pastor and author Kevin DeYoung. He writes this about Genesis.

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He says, The opening chapter of Genesis is a rejection of atheism because there is a

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God, a rejection of polytheism because there is only one God, a rejection of pantheism because the creation is not

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God, a rejection of humanism because man is not God, a rejection of naturalistic evolution because the world and its creatures come into being by intelligent design, a rejection of materialism because the physical world is not all that is really there, and rejection of dualism because both the spiritual and physical are not opposed.

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Genesis is a foundational book to your faith in Jesus Christ. The answers to the most fundamental questions that are asked by mankind.

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Where do we come from? Why is there evil? What is the answer to evil? What happens when we die?

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The answers to these questions start with Genesis and they end with Revelation and are found in the name

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Jesus Christ. So there's much at stake in regards to trusting the reliability and the authority of Genesis.

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So I'm thankful that we have these two hours together where we're going to be able to hear from experts who are archaeologists, pastors, apologists, and a

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PhD in paleo -biochemistry. So let us pray that God will use these amazing people to inform and to encourage us.

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Will you pray with me? Heavenly Father, we thank you, Lord, for people that you have anointed and gifted,

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Lord, with talents. We ask that you bless each of the speakers, Lord, and Lord, for every person who is listening to these messages, when you give them ears to hear your truth,

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Lord, may you grow us in our faith. Lord, for those who do not know you, we pray that today is the day of salvation.

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Maybe this is the unique thing that they need to hear, Lord, for their eyes to be open. Would you use these two hours for your glory?

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In Jesus' name we pray, amen. Hello again.

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My name is Dr. Dan Biddle. I'm a president of Genesis Apologetics, and I'm really encouraged tonight to be able to share my testimony of why

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I converted to a biblical creationist. So it first started out when I just was growing through my career as a behavioral scientist.

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I have a PhD in industrial organizational psychology. I spent about 20 years testifying as an expert in state and federal court cases on statistics, research, and evidence, and just grew to really love evidence and how you can build a case and testifying and statistics and things like that.

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It really grew an appreciation of the level of vetting that's necessary between when you would take something from a theory or from a book or from academic knowledge and compress it all the way through into core testimony.

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So I grew a real appreciation for scientific evidence and research. As part of my educational journey,

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I went to Western Seminary, a graduate seminary for a time, and loved taking classes there on Genesis and theology.

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And I'll never forget one of my theology classes where the professor, a really seasoned professor, said, and he's speaking from a command position of knowing the

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Hebrew and the ancient texts that were written that were used to write Genesis, and he said, whoever wrote the ancient text of Genesis was very, very clear that the days were real ordinary days and the

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Genesis genealogies that go in the first 11 chapters are clearly true history.

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That was a perspective of the writer. And so you guys have to deal with that.

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That was the perspective offered by the professor. But then he said in the very next breath, but if you believe in science, the earth has to be millions of years old and biology has to be millions of years old and even billions of years old for the origins of everything.

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So you guys go figure that out. And he sent the class out and said, well, you're going to have to deal with these two different constructs, these two different ideas of a

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Genesis that teaches from a young earth history perspective and the alleged scientific evidence that shows that earth must be billions of years old.

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So I went through a period of cognitive dissonance where I was trying to struggle in my faith.

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How can these two things fit together? And then I learned later that they really can't. I went to a presentation that was actually done by our vice president,

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Dave Bisbee, at a large church here in the area, and the title of the talk was dinosaurs.

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And the theme of his talk was dinosaurs lived recently and were named by Adam. And I went to this talk as a great skeptic and thought this is going to be hilarious.

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I can't believe this guy actually believes this stuff. So I went there, and about 15 minutes into his talk,

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I thought, you know what, my gosh, he actually does have some points here about why is it that all these ancient cultures have legends and myths and cave drawings and paintings about these dragon -like creatures that look an awful lot like dinosaurs that could have survived after Noah's flood by being on the ark and being let off afterwards and survived for centuries and go to generate all these legends.

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And yeah, it's very interesting. Where do you get that evidence about dinosaurs having soft tissue? And it's not just some types of soft tissue.

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It's lots of different types of soft tissue that we still find in dinosaur bones today. So I thought, gosh, that's very interesting.

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If these dinosaurs are supposedly 65 million years old, how is it that soft tissue could be preserved?

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Then he went through the evidence of Noah's flood and looked at all the layers and the extent of the dinosaur record.

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And the talk was so moving to me. I took about three months of my then free time that I had and burned some vacation time, and I really went into this issue obsessively.

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I spent thousands of dollars on books and DVDs. I flew to Montana. I flew to Canada. I did firsthand dinosaur research.

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And about half the way through that process, I came to the incredible realization, oh, my gosh, it's all true.

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Genesis 1 to 11 is a real historical narrative. Earth is just thousands of years old.

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Adam was present when dinosaurs were created. He took dominion over everything. He named everything just as Genesis talks about.

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And at that point, I had to really reshape my entire world view. And that's what leads us to where we're at today because when

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I went back to school night after going through this metamorphosis experience of mine, this huge awakening,

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I went back to school night at a local public school for my son and listened to the teacher in the world history class say, well, you know, we're required as part of the state curriculum to cover this evolutionary topic.

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Don't worry, it's only about two weeks of the class curriculum. And then she starts going into the story about why they have to teach evolution, and she says, well, don't bother if you're

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Catholic or Jewish or Christian and you don't believe in this evolutionary stuff. It's just a short section.

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And as she's saying these things, I'm looking at the bookshelf, and she has all kinds of books there on Darwinism and evolution teaching.

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And then I look up on the counter, and she's got three different bottles. She's got like a quart -sized bottle that goes all the way up to a gallon -sized bottle.

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And I remember my son telling me, she uses these bottles to talk about the cranial capacity of early man leading up to Homo sapiens like we have today.

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And having listened to her talk that night and being a recently awakened creationist who knew, concretely knew, that the

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Genesis account was a real historical account, I actually got sick to my stomach and had to walk home.

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I was broken at the time, just like God break my heart for what breaks yours. Because here I was reflecting on my son saying, yeah,

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Dad, all these students that are going to this class, this sixth grade class, they all have their heads down, pencils in hand, and they're just writing down whatever the teacher says.

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They're being formatted like a hard drive program. And they're being taught from an evolutionary standpoint.

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And the evidence that they were giving seemed to be quite compelling. And there was, of course, nothing against it, nothing from the creation side.

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So that really broke my heart. And, you know, Lord break my heart for what breaks yours.

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I took several months of prayer and thought about that. And then later, the Lord, I would say, gave us a commissioning to start

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Genesis Apologetics Ministry. So let's talk about science first from a big standpoint.

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When you look at the scientific method, and I was rigorously trained in this by going through my PhD with behavioral science and scored really high in the comprehensive exams dealing with research.

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I love research. I love the scientific method. I've worked with the scientific method. I've done research that's been approved by the federal government on a number of different occasions in a number of different fields.

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I love this stuff. And I've really grown to appreciate there is a clear demarcation.

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There's a clear line that divides two types of science. There's historical science on one hand that requires tons of inference.

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And that's when you're talking about things in the distant past that we can't see, test, repeat, or observe.

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Then you have the real kind of science, the scientific method, which requires observational science.

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You have to make an observation, frame some interesting questions, formulate hypotheses, develop testable predictions, and then gather data to test the predictions and then test them.

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All of these things require observation. This is how we put people on the moon and develop new medicines and things like that.

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It has to require observational, testable, and repeatable science. But when you look at the scientific method from a very objective standpoint, you know that three of these six steps cannot be done because you can't see, observe, and test evolution.

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You can't go back 100 years. You can't go back 1 ,000. You can't go back millions of years, supposedly, to test or see or videotape any form of evolution.

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And, in fact, if you take all of the historical narrative that we have in libraries today, which is between 4 ,000 and 5 ,000 years of accurately recorded history, no one's ever watched or observed evolution happening.

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All we see is animals generating and reproducing after their own kind, just like prescribed 10 different times in the

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Genesis account in the first chapter. So evolution is not observable, testable, and replicable, and I want students to make sure they understand this distinction between real science that you can take into a courtroom and testify about, which requires observation, testing, and repetition, and historical science where you can't do those things and it has a great degree of abstraction and inference.

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So when I would testify as an expert in court cases using statistical evidence, the really savvy attorneys that would come against me and come against my case and my testimony, they wouldn't address the facts.

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They're not going to attack me on the facts. They're not even going to attack me on my scientific methods or statistical procedures that I used.

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The smart, savvy attorneys who want to slam against my case are going to go straight after my assumptions because the questioning would be something like this.

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Dr. Biddle, isn't it true that if your assumptions are wrong about your analysis, then your interpretations about the facts are also wrong?

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Isn't that true? And I would have to say, yes, you got me there. So if they could stick a big enough lever and leverage under the assumptions and start deconstructing the assumptions of my analyses and the whole house that I had assembled of the evidence

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I was prepared to testify in court about would deconstruct and fall apart. So it's the same thing with origin science.

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When you want to talk about evolution, when you start going into the deep past and using historical science and historical inference, the amount of assumptions that people are making about what they're seeing with a fossil wreck at a river, when you pull out a fossil out of the ground, it's not date -stamped.

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There's some analyses that you can do, but all you know for sure about that fossil is that it died and it was buried in whatever matrix that it's buried in.

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So that's just something important to think about when we consider evidence. So observational science is what we do today.

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It's the real scientific method. It's how we put airplanes in the sky and make new medicines. And historical science requires a great deal of abstraction and inference.

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So when it comes to viewing the data, the evidence itself of the world, we really have two different opposing worldviews that are looking at the same data, the same evidence.

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One would be through a context or a lens of the Bible, looking through the Bible into the data and the evidence and interpreting it through that worldview, that lens.

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Or one that would take man's theories and the secular ideas of evolution and interpret the same data.

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And based upon those two different interpretation lenses, looking at the same set of facts, we're going to have two different belief systems and two different worldviews.

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And oftentimes for many people, two different life destinies, both possibly, of course, in this life and in the next.

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So these are heavy stakes topics that we're dealing with. So one is a naturalistic worldview and the other requires a supernaturalistic worldview.

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So this is a fun meme that's been going around the internet and generally it's true. A true science is observational, testable, repeatable, and falsifiable.

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And millions of years of evolution is none of those. It's not observable, testable, repeatable, or falsifiable.

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So we encourage people to know the difference. So what about ancient writings? I mean, don't we have ancient history that goes deep, deep, far into the past?

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Well, actually we don't. If you start talking to the leading experts on writing and the clay tablets and everything that are in all these museums around the world, yes, we do have writing that we can gather from the ancient

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Greeks, the Hittites, the Egyptians have some records. We have a really old Egyptian medical record that goes back before Christ, the

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Sumerian writings, and the Hebrew, and the Chinese probably actually go back some of the furthest writing.

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But after you start fizzling out between 4 ,000 and 5 ,000 years ago without using carbon dating, when you just have real concrete physical writing that you can put in front of you, and oftentimes what these historians will do is try to take these writings and correlate it with observable events, where a person's writing something down and saying, yeah,

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I'm seeing this big volcano blow up over here. They can tie those two events together and then correlate and concretely date that writing.

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There are other writing that people say is older than 4 ,000 to 5 ,000 years, but almost all the time they're requiring carbon -14 dating to try to date how old those writings are, and there's a lot of assumptions that go along with that.

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So when it goes for our ancient history going back beyond 5 ,000 years, what are we going to fill up this vacancy with?

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How are we going to start inferring about what to believe about the ancient past? Because the

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Bible only has about 6 ,000 years of history that goes straight back to Adam.

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And if you follow the Septuagint text, maybe 7 ,800 years, but you're certainly not going to get tens of thousands or millions of years.

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We have to have a choice of how we're going to go back into ancient history. We can believe in the radiometric dating that will get us supposedly back millions of years, or we can hop on God's train that only has thousands of years.

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But one thing I want to point out as a scientist is there's this thing that we use in science called the standard error of prediction, and a standard error of prediction is a confidence level around a prediction that we can make statistically.

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Did you know that the further we go back in history, the wider our standard error of prediction gets?

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We know exactly what's going on today. We have records and video files and audio files. We know what's going on with politics.

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We know what's going on with world events. You can go back 100 years. We have some pretty strong confidence, too.

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But what happens if you go back 1 ,000 years? Well, that confidence interval of what we're trying to learn about starts declining, and it starts declining pretty rapidly when you go back 2 ,000, 3 ,000, 4 ,000, 5 ,000 years.

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We know for sure things about the Vikings and the birth of Christ and ancient Egypt and ancient China, but the further we go back, the less our confidence gets, so we have to fill up that shadow area, that gray area that goes into obliqueness with a confidence that comes from faith or a confidence that comes from man's ideas that are largely going to be based at that point on radiometric dating.

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So it requires faith, and the assumption levels are going to go up, up, and up. So what are we going to do to trust in that empty void when all of ancient writing runs out?

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But wait a second. What about this radiometric dating thing? Don't we have clear scientific evidence that says that the

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Earth is 4 .5 billion years old and that life on Earth started about 3 billion years and kept going from there?

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Well, one of the reasons that I don't ascribe to radiometric dating as a scientist is as a scientist, we have to do this thing called validation, and it's what

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I did for 20 years in state and federal court cases, over 100 court cases I would go in as an expert in validation, and validation is real simple.

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It's when you take your theory or your idea or your data and you try to confirm it in some concrete way, to say,

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Your Honor, look at that. We've got this theory or this statistical process that says something might have happened and that it happened in real life.

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So in job performance and test scores, we can say, Well, people score really high on test scores.

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We should have job performance at a certain level. That's what validation would do. Validation when it comes to radiometric dating is real simple.

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If we take a rock of a known age where people watch an igneous rock get formed out of a volcanic eruption, we should be able to take that rock, if it's 50 years old or 500 years old, where people in history watch that rock get formed, we should be able to take that rock into a scientific laboratory and date it, and the calculated date should match the observed date.

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It makes sense, right? If it's a 50 -year -old rock, it should come back with a 50 -year -old radiometric dating analysis or a 500 -year -old rock, 500 -year dating analysis, thousands of years, whatever it's going to be.

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But do you know that they've been trying to do this for decades and it doesn't work? Every single time they take rocks of known ages into a scientific radiometric dating lab, the radiometric dating ages are exaggerated by millions and millions of years.

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In fact, I was in online debate months with a geologist that loved radiometric dating, and he said,

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Dr. Biddle, don't you know radiometric dating is a firmly ground principle of science?

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We know radiometric dating works. And he says, I've got 5 ,000 geology books in my library.

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And I said, look, that's great. If you've got 5 ,000 geology books in your library, can you just go find one, just go find a single book that has a catalog of several different radiometric dating analyses where the radiometric dating age matches the known observed age?

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And he said, no. It's all based on theory. They don't have that type of validation.

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So when you're thinking about radiometric dating, if samples of known ages in the radiometric dating doesn't work, why would we assume that samples of an unknown age would work?

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It's a logical contradiction. If radiometric dating is true, we should be able to go to volcanic eruptions all over the world for many different centuries apart and collect samples that would clearly line up with observed science, and that's not what happens.

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The radiometric dating age always comes back with an exaggerated age. It's millions and millions of years older than the known ages of the samples.

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And, of course, when you look at several different types of geochronometers that do try to estimate the age of the

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Earth, I have a sample here of over 50 of them that are from answers in Genesis, there are dozens and dozens of geochronometers that do come back with thousands of years old for the age of the

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Earth and not millions or billions. So when it comes to ancient past and when we start going beyond the reaches of ancient history, we really can take

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Genesis as a real history account and look at an Earth that's between 6 ,000 and 8 ,000 years old, or we can take millions or billions, but the only way that you can go there is by having faith in radiometric dating or you can choose to have faith in God's word.

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So let's talk about this for a minute. Well, aren't we really splitting hairs? Does it really even matter what we believe in?

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Yes, it does, because there are some really important theological implications if we believe in millions of years.

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So if we take a literal interpretation of Genesis where God created everything in six days and stepped back and called it perfect and said,

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Behold, it is very good. Then we have six days of creation. And then at some point afterwards we have the fall.

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We have the time where Adam and Eve in their free will chose to go against God, disobeyed, and by that disobedience they brought the curse of sin and death onto the

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Earth. That's in Genesis 2, verse 17. And God cursed the Earth and said, Thorns and thistles it shall now produce for you.

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So we have death and thorns and thistles as a consequence of our sin. And so we have death and suffering are brought into the world by Adam and Eve's sin.

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It seems like a very, very clear logical flow. So now we can say, hey, death, cancer, disease, blood, suffering, all those things are our fault because our ancient grandparents,

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Adam and Eve, had a choice, they messed up, and death and suffering come as a result of that.

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That's the logical theological flow from Genesis. But if you take a non -literal interpretation of Genesis, we have creation, and somehow radiometric dating and how they date index fossils would have millions of years of death, disease, carnivorism, and suffering before Adam and Eve were even here to bring the curse of sin and death.

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So you just see the challenge here. So now we have death and suffering and thorns and thistles that are supposedly existent in the fossil record for millions of years before Adam and Eve were even here to bring the curse of sin and death.

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So then at some point under the evolutionary time frame or the theistic evolutionary time frame, we would then have

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Adam and Eve. Then at some point after that, we have the fall, which really would have no effect because death, sin, suffering, carnivorism was already here through that evolutionary worldview.

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And that would, of course, blame God for death, suffering, bloodshed, cancer, carnivorism.

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All those things that were here would be part of his initial design. They weren't. God made everything perfect.

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Adam and Eve named everything. They took dominion of everything. And it was after that that the fall came, and that's what brought death, suffering, bloodshed, and disease.

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The theistic evolutionary viewpoint has it all backwards. So man's word would say, look, time plus death is what led from this shrew -like creature millions of years ago that somehow supposedly survived the dinosaur extinction on to mammals and then early man led to Homo sapiens.

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So it would be through that process of time, death, suffering, and selection would go from mammals all the way to man.

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But God's word said that it was sin that brought death, and God did not use death to bring new biological life forms here on Earth.

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So when the Bible says that God saw all that he had made and it was very good, and we have the

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Garden of Eden here, we can't have them sitting on millions of years of stratified death in the fossil record.

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It just does not line up with Scripture. We can't have a death pain millions of years of disease and suffering present before Adam and Eve were even here to bring the fall.

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Okay, so we can't have millions of years of these things leading to man's existence and then, whereas the

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Bible says it's sin, that's what led to death. So here's some Biblical reasons why

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I converted to the Biblical creation position. If you look historically throughout the teaching of the church from inception, the

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Bible that we have today is roughly 3 ,500 years worth of recorded narratives, and if you look through the predominant teaching of the church fathers and what the historians said from the

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Bible going all the way through there, we have about 6 ,000 years of history, and we've got a clear

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Biblical creation teaching account with a predominant Christian view until just recently we had things pop up like the gap theory, or the day -age theory that was more recent, or the framework theory, or progressive creation.

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These are things that are relatively new in history, and I think the historical approach has got lots and lots of grounded foundation because if you look at the 32

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Biblical chronologists that existed for hundreds of years back, the vast majority of them, or at least all of these 32 historians, placed creation under a recent paradigm.

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There's really two camps. You can take the Masoretic camp, which is what our Bibles today are mostly based upon, and it has about 6 ,000 years of history.

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The Septuagint version goes a little bit back further. This is a very deep, complicated discussion about how we get there, but it has to do with just a handful of the dates of the patriarch being changed from one set of manuscript traditions compared to the other set of manuscript traditions, but either way we have creation that is less than 10 ,000 years old.

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The thing that really did it for me was the fourth commandment. I had to approach the fourth commandment of the ten commandments in a very honest way, and I think if there's any one scripture that boxed me into wanting to believe that the six days were real, ordinary days, it would be the fourth commandment.

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This fourth commandment says for in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day.

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Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and hollowed it. Here we have God as a communicator making a very clear message over to the

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Israelites that he created everything in six days. So the question to think about is when you break this down and look at the ten commandments objectively, while communication includes both a sender and a receiver,

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God wrote these ten commandments on stone with his own hand, and you look at the ten commandments holistically, are any of them metaphorical?

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Things like don't steal, don't commit adultery, don't lie, don't murder? No, they're all very, very concrete things that God wanted the

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Israelites to believe and do, and you think how could God have been more clear about this? He said for in six days

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I created the heavens, the earth, the sea, and all that is in them. So the question that I ask people when they say look it doesn't matter, you can interpret it different ways,

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I like to ask people two questions that I think this is an insignificant thing or you want to stretch out the days into millions of years.

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The first part is what did God want the Israelites to believe about creation week?

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What God wanted them to believe is he was obviously referring back to Genesis 1 where he created in six days as the omniscient narrator, he was talking about that and he said well

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I created in six and rested in one, and I want you guys to take that same pattern in a real way in your life and work for six and then rest on one.

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So he was saying look, what I did I want you guys to replicate. And there's some pretty famous theologians through history,

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Martin Luther being one of them that says look, God could have created in a split second, he could have created over a day, but he didn't.

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He chose to model creation over six full days that we would have a cycle and a rhythm to live by.

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So the second question is does God want us to believe any differently? Do we want to look at God in our spirit and say well you know

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I know that's what you wanted the Israelites to believe before science and before they had all this information about science and the world, but today

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I want to believe something differently. Probably not but I think it's best to humble ourselves under what God said and believe it today just like the

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Israelites did back then. Then when you start looking hermeneutically into the

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Bible and look at things about Genesis 1 we think well my gosh isn't it interesting that God himself boxes in each of the six days with three describing characteristics.

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There was evening, there was morning, there was a day, and there was a number. So he does this with each of the six creation days he says there was day one, day two, three, four, five, six, and he says for all of these there was evening, there was morning the fourth day, there was evening, there was morning, there was the fifth day on forward for all six days.

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So if you look at the six days where God created he really boxes each one in with an evening, morning, a day, a number.

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Now why would he do that? I think he's trying to be clear in Genesis 1 and then of course he goes through and was very very clear in the fourth commandment on what he wanted us to believe about these six days being so real and so practical that he wants us to live our life cycle in this same type of creation cycle that he did at the beginning.

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So and then when you look at the word day which is yom in Hebrew it's used about 2300 times in the

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Old Testament and why do people only question in Genesis? Yes there are several places in scripture where day does not have to mean a real day.

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It can mean age or a period but when you look at Genesis chapter 1 and how the word yom is used in context it means an ordinary day because anytime you take that word and use it with a number or evening and morning together without day or evening or morning together with day or night with day which in these things occur dozens of times through scripture it always means an ordinary day.

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So for me at least looking at these things and wanting to do my best to honor God with his word

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I'm coming at it saying hey he wants me to believe it was six ordinary days. Well what about the 6 ,000 year old earth?

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Where do we get that from scripture? It's very very straightforward Genesis chapter 5, 10 and 11 provide us with 87 different patriarchs and 33 of whom were given their birth and death years so we start from Adam and Eve we go back with their kids and their kids.

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God's providing a historical narrative here for us that goes back thousands of years and we have lots and lots of connected history that are in just those three chapters of Genesis.

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When you look at them more carefully and you narrow down into Genesis chapter 5 look at what

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God does here. He says well Adam lived 130 years and begot a son in his own likeness after his own image named him

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Seth and after he begot Seth the days of Adam were 800 years so 930 total. He does that for all of the pre -flood patriarchs and we can add those all up and get about 1 ,556 years so you have about 1 ,656 years of biblical history before the flood hit and then we have the genealogies in the history that go from the flood all the way to Abraham all the way through Moses and David and it goes all the way connecting to Jesus Christ himself.

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Now as a scientist I've studied this topic exhaustively and oh my gosh did

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I run into something incredible thanks to John Sanford he's a geneticist worked at Cornell developed the gene gun he did some extensive studies on why is it that you have these 10 pre -flood patriarchs who live an average of 912 years and all of a sudden there's a shelf that their life spans dramatically fall off and begin this exponential decline rapidly right after the flood how in the world could you have these ancient biblical writers say yeah these guys that live before the flood are living you know 700 to 900 years with an average of 912 years all of a sudden you hit the flood and their life spans start going down 600, 400, 300, 200 but they don't just fall off the shelf there is a gradual systematic decline that goes down in the life spans that happen after the flood and so we can see this statistically and we can even validate it from the text itself that says here

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Pharaoh said to Jacob how old are you and Jacob one of these patriarchs and Jacob said to Pharaoh well the days of the years of my pilgrimage are about 130 years few and evil have been the days of the years of my life and they have not attained to the days of the years of the life of my fathers in the days of their pilgrimages so Jacob saying yeah there were these guys that came before me that lived a lot longer than I did and then

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Jacob died at age 147 far out living the people of today the short explanation as to why this is happening is that when you take the entire gene pool of humanity before the flood about four and a half thousand years ago and you bottleneck them down to Noah and his wife and Shem, Ham, and Japheth and their wives you take all of humanity in the genetic varieties and stick them down to a bottleneck of just eight people they're on the ark for 371 days then they get off and start reproducing rapidly and now all of a sudden we have a compression a genetic bottleneck whereby the genetic mutations that start accumulating from that slight degree of inbreeding starts decreasing our life spans dramatically in fact when you look at it statistically and plot it out you can throw what's called a power curve on this or a power law regression it's an exponential form of regression we love looking at this stuff statistically do you know that if you were to plot out these life spans

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I believe there's about 20 data points here on this curve you take the ancient biblical text it's about 3500 years old that was compiled from text before it somehow whoever wrote this stuff down nailed an

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R square of 95 % so you really have two choices here either the ancient writers compiling these life spans were writing real history that reflected a genetic bottleneck where mutations were increasing and people did in fact start living fewer and fewer years or the only other option you have is some ancient writer sheepherder out there with his feather and cap and some kind of a parchment was somehow inventing a logarithmic exponential decay curve that fits along a predicted line with 95 % accuracy with only one of those data points coming outside of its predicted range that's impossible in fact when you run the

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ANOVA on this and look at the statistical analysis the odds of this exponential decay curve coming up by chance are less than one chance in a quadrillion some phenomenon was happening whereby these life spans exponentially decreases they just didn't just fall off a list off of a shelf they're not made up it was an exponential gradual curve where the regression analysis can track it and say there's something going on and biologists know this is a biological decay curve in fact if you zoom in on some of these points and look at the prediction the standard error prediction over 10 generations after the flood we can say with great accuracy we should have someone living between 137 and 234 years old and the model predicts it all the data points are right within that value there's only one outlier you can see there about 400 and some years it's a little bit above the predicted range but if you follow through that going we have 15 generations after NOAA then the model predicts they should live between 100 and 172 years and all the data points fit tightly within that so I think it's really extremely unlikely that some ancient writer writing with a feather pin on animal parchment would be capable of developing this degree of mathematical certainty so we can't have this guy developing these formulas and following a power law curve and an exponential decline curve where the regression where 95 % of the variable

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Y is explained by the data points X it's just impossible something's going on with these life spans that statisticians today are baffled by because when they're recorded they go right down a ski slope and they level out so something was definitely going on there we also know that these are real historical people because Jesus himself referred to these

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Old Testament characters like Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel and Noah's flood and Adam and Lot and Abraham all these go back and our

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Lord Jesus referred to these people as real true historical figures in fact he threw back and referred to the

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Old Testament over at least 42 times that we can gather here and every single time

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Jesus referred back to the Old Testament was within a literal historical context when you look at the

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Messianic genealogy of Jesus Luke chapter 3 provides over 70 generations that we can track historically going from Jesus all the way back to Adam and there's a reason that this happens is to show that history and the gospel and our salvation story is grounded in real history it's not some mythical account doesn't require a lot of faith to go back there and plug in the gaps we have real connected patriarchs over 70 generations that started at Adam go all the way through the pre -flood patriarchs go all the way after the flood all the way through Abraham and David you can connect that patriarchal line all the way from Adam to Christ in over 70 generations amazing history provided by Luke what about Genesis in the

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New Testament well if you look at the first 11 chapters of Genesis it's referenced by New Testament writers over 100 times if it's not a real historical account then we might as well throw out these

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New Testament writers as well because 100 times over 100 times the New Testament writers refer back to Genesis 1 -11 as real actual history so next let's look at some evidence related reasons that I converted to a biblical creationist

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I think one of the things one way to frame this is just be to take a look at 2 Peter 3 this is an amazing passage written by Peter and he says near the close of his letter he says above all else know this that in the last days scoffers are going to come and they're going to scoff 2 things creation out of nothing and a catastrophic flood and that's exactly what we see today it's hard to turn on the news today or open any high school or college age textbook that talks about science or origin that doesn't deny and really attack those 2 things in fact there's some some textbooks coming out more recently that do outrightly make an attack against Christian and Judeo -Christian beliefs about origin so here

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Peter 2000 years ago writing says remember this above everything that scoffers are going to come in the last days and they're going to scoff openly creation out of nothing and the flood and that's exactly what we see today in fact

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I would say that from my perspective of those 2 things looking at creation and the flood they're quite obvious to me by looking at the historical evidence it's very very obvious that there was a worldwide flood and it's very obvious that God spoke everything out of nothing but it's obfuscated and the definition here of obfuscated is to render indistinct or dim darken clouded obscured and muddled so anytime you go through a natural history museum today you will see lots of evidence for creation in the flood but it's obfuscated through a naturalistic world view or lens so we'll take a quick journey through some of the highlights of creation in the flood that I personally believe are quite obvious but have been obfuscated the first one is let's start with this somehow in the past the middle of America was collapsed and filled with water sufficient to bury not thousands not hundreds of thousands but millions upon millions of land and sea creatures were buried and sandwiched together in stratified layers in the middle of America encompassing three partial countries over a million square miles in 14 states we're looking at a stretch of about 1800 miles tall all the way from the northern tip of Mexico going all the way up to the southern tip of Canada there is a dinosaur kill zone in the middle of America that's just unbelievable it's about a thousand miles wide so how do you fill these 13 plus states with dinosaurs and fish and birds and oysters and marine life and land creatures and fill them all together but it's not just that how would you fill these 13 plus state region of America with dinosaurs and marine life and ash mud and sand because that's what they're buried in when you uncover most of the dinosaur fossils in this 13 state region they're buried in those three different materials ash mud and sand so you have to have a perspective that's going to account for those three different materials making a composite well the secular idea is that several different seaways over millions of years or tens of millions of years rose and fell and rose and fell and gradually slipped under North America over millions of years as the sea floor subducted.

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The biblical standpoint is that no something more catastrophic happened to explain that massive dinosaur kill zone of 13 states and that one we'll look at today so secularists and creationists believe that there was a

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Pangaea formation that was rapidly split apart is our perspective and of course a slowly perspective over millions of years is a secular idea so what you just watched in that animation the secularists and creationists are on the same page yeah that happened but creationists say it happened in about a year and evolutionists say it happened over hundreds of millions of years but we would agree that the continental configuration was once put together and was split apart we believe it happened catastrophically and we believe that when the sea floor subducted underneath the landmass it's reflected by a huge huge amount of volcanic ash so as the sea floor subducts we have the

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Independence Dike swarm there that's about a 370 mile stretch of volcanic system in Southern California that burst open bringing all kinds of ash and then we have lots of different mega volcanoes that happened both during and after the flood that waned in severity.

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The first one Independence Dike swarm is when the sea floor began its subduction bursting out and covering about half of the

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United States in ash dramatically and then during the latter stages of the flood and afterwards we have other huge ash deposits being laid down how did that happen well the

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Bible says that on the same day all of the fountains of the great deep were broken up and the windows of heaven were open so on the same day not some but all of the fountains of the great deep were burst open and if you look at a barometric map which is a map of the ocean water removed we have all kinds of underwater volcanoes there's thousands of them most of these many of these fall along what's called the oceanic rift system which is a 40 ,000 mile network of a linear rift system that covers the entire globe about 1 .7

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times over and it was these linear rifts these linear splits that broke open bursting forth that's the fountains of the great deep and that's what served as a catalyst for pushing the land continents apart and I'm going to cover this in detail when we cover my talk on Noah's Flood later.

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The other thing that got to me with respect to a more spontaneous creation is when you look at the dinosaur family tree or you look at dinosaurs ancestors and transitions and you look into the secular literature about where did they come from and how did they transition from one kind to the next you run into things like this from the dinosaur encyclopedia that says well we have the yellow lines which is the real actual fossil data and then we have the grey lines which is all inference and so they think one type of creature led to the other led to the other led to the other but when you take away the guess work which is the grey lines which is all inference we're left with just fossil data evidence and if you subtract the millions of years we have a whole bunch of dinosaur kinds that were created on the sixth day of creation in fact creationists believe that there was about 80 different kinds of dinosaur varieties that were probably put on board the ark and brought on and died off rapidly after that but if you look here it's very clear that the secularists don't have clear fossil data connecting the transitions all they have is the created forms that show up and stay with mostly stasis in the fossil record.

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Here is a sign actually from the Chicago Field Museum that even admits we've got over 200 ,000 of these types of dinosaurs and 78

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Tyrannosaurus rexes and 287 recovered sauropods and the number of ancestors and transitions leading to these different types of body plans is zero they don't have the transitions going from one kind to the next it's almost like someone just came here on earth showed up and put out all these different animal kinds at the same time which is exactly what the bible would say so you go through and there's no common ancestor and they don't have the transitions between the kinds in fact this is even admitted by a leading secular paleontologist this is

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Dr. Weishampel says from my reading of the fossil record of dinosaurs no direct ancestors have been discovered for any dinosaur species alas my list of dinosaur ancestors is an empty one another one here from Dr.

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Viol he's a leading pterosaur expert he says we know only little about the evolution of pterosaurs the ancestors are not known when the pterosaurs first appear in the geologic record they were completely perfect they were perfect pterosaurs so when you look at pterosaurs you would expect one kind to lead to another kind lead to another kind he said no when they show up in the dirt and we uncover them they're already pterosaurs there's nothing before them nothing after them they're still just pterosaurs now what about dinosaur soft tissue you know now there's over 50 different peer -reviewed scientific non -creationist journals that established that there's now over 16 different types of soft tissue that have been discovered in dinosaur bones

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I'm going to cover some of those specifically here's a video snippet from the Is Genesis History movie showing

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Mark Armitage stretching out a piece of Triceratops horn so one must ask from a practical level if this

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Triceratops horn is really millions of years old how can you take it under a microscope and stretch it out like that this material is fresh it's still got this soft tissue inside of the horn material here you can grab these forceps and some tweezers and stretch the material out it certainly doesn't look like dinosaur material that's millions and millions of years old in fact if you take one of these 16 different organic materials that they're finding in dinosaur bones specifically which is collagen there's been over five different scientific studies that have tried to estimate the half life and the maximum shelf life of collagen because bones are an infused matrix of both collagen and the bone mineral the hard stuff and the soft stuff it's all infused together and the collagen which makes up the soft material that's going into the dinosaur bone has a decay rate and a half life that can be estimated by scientists today and depending on which study you visit some of them say look we think the theoretical maximum half life of collagen is only 10 ,000 years another study says well maybe 30 ,000 years another study comes out maybe 100 ,000 years and the latest most comprehensive study says well we think that dinosaur soft material that the collagen we're finding in these dinosaur bones can go between maybe 300 ,000 years and 900 ,000 years max but notice this that of all five studies they're all saying the maximum shelf life of dinosaur collagen in these bones can't be more than a million years old so if each one of these blue lines represents a million years collagen is only lasting one of the 65 lines scientists today are in a huge conundrum saying yeah if we analyze collagen and it's decay rate it can't last more than a million years old but how are we finding it in dinosaur bones in fact

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Dr. Schweitzer just came out with a study recently saying you know what we can now confirm at the molecular level that the collagen we're finding in dinosaur bones is organic to the creature it's not contamination it's not biofilm it's real collagen that came from real dinosaurs okay and we can even do some of our own studies we can take edmontosaurus bones that we're finding subject them to scanning electron microscopes and look at them and analyze the data and they do all kinds of really sophisticated science and it comes back as hydroxyapatite real bone when

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I was a kid it was grilled into me through public school that dinosaur bones are just rocks they're all per mineralized the bone material has just been replaced by minerals from the soil but that's not the case the dinosaur bones that we're finding today are still real original dinosaur bones in fact the head of the

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Royal Terrell Museum in Drumheller the leading dinosaur museum the biggest one in the world says yeah usually most of the original bone we find in dinosaurs is still present it's a real dinosaur bone it's not a rock that's been it used to be a bone it's a real bone still now there are plenty of bones that we find that are heavily mineralized but many of them are not they're just original bone so the question would be how in the world do we get these 14 and more recent studies have shown you can add nerves and cartilage and a few other things now we're up to 16 different type of biological organic materials that should not be in dinosaur bones things like fecks histones proteins red blood cells red blood vessels these materials are in dinosaur bones they can't be millions of years old but they do fit a flood paradigm yeah it's miraculous in itself that they could last 4400 years and still be intact because they were sandwiched quickly in mud but they certainly can't be 65 million years old okay so in summary

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I believe in biblical creation because I believe honestly it's true it sets my life under the authority of scripture there's a lot of scriptures in God's word that talk about the rewards that come to people for honoring his word and believing it certainly shapes my world view and differentiates me from the world every time

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I go to movies or a natural history museum I understand there's a clear difference between how the world is going to perceive things and how

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I'm going to perceive things it helps me raise stable grounded children and the bible says look blessed are those who hear the word of God and keep it that's in Luke chapter 8 verse 28 and Luke also says records

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Jesus saying for whoever is ashamed of me and my words of him the son of man will be ashamed when he comes in his own glory and in his fathers and of the holy angels and then the bible also says those by the wayside are the ones who hear and the devil comes and takes away the word out of their hearts lest they should believe and be saved so my encouragement to everyone tonight is don't let that happen don't let the enemy come and take doubts and discouragement and disbelief that's going to take the powerful word of God out of your heart and out of your mind so thank you very much for letting me share thanks

01:00:29

I'd like to welcome Scott Hollingshead is he is the lead and founding pastor at Doxa Church right here in Rockland California Scott is married to Erin and they have three children

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Jolie, Matthew, and Emma Scott has a Masters in Divinity from the Masters Seminary and a

01:00:45

Bachelor of Arts in Communication Studies from UCLA I'd like to welcome my friend Scott Hollingshead G1 Conference 2021 my name's

01:00:57

Scott I'm the lead pastor at Doxa Church in Rockland California and it is so good to be with you today even through this means of technology this has been something

01:01:06

I've been looking forward to a long time and I only wish we just could have done this earlier and could have done it in person but rejoicing in God's providence that he would allow for so many more people to take part of this event and I'm excited to come to you today because I have the privilege of preaching on maybe my favorite subject in the whole world which is this the title of the message is living under the authority of scripture can change your life and I gotta say this sounds a little self -serving and it may be that but here's my thought

01:01:44

I think the whole conference is driving you towards making the subject of my message a reality in your life like I am convinced that the reason ultimately that you are being supplied with a robust Genesis apologetic is so that you can submit yourself to the

01:02:04

God of the Word by submitting yourself to the Word of God and so I'm excited to bring that truth because I am as confident as ever

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I am a product of the reality of the very message I'm preaching namely that living under the authority of God's Word can change your life and so in the short period of time

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I have with you I want to show you that that's actually God's intention all the way really from the beginning of the

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Bible in Genesis all the way through to the end of the book of Revelation and I want to show you that five evidences that the

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Word of God the Scriptures can change your life so if you've got a pen pencil you want to write some of these down would encourage you to do that number one first reason first evidence that I have that the

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Word of God can change your life is this God spoke creation into existence okay

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God spoke creation into existence okay well what does that have to do with me well there is a rhythm that God establishes in the book of Genesis and God said and there was and God said and there was

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God creating everything that is out of nothing by His own

01:03:19

Word the psalmist testifying to this in Psalm 33 said it like this by the

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Word of the Lord the heavens were made and by the breath of His mouth all their hosts verse 9 says for He spoke and it came to be

01:03:35

He commanded and it stood firm you fast forward the same concept comes up in the

01:03:42

New Testament in the book of Hebrews talking about how our faith plays out you and I were not there for the creation account to actually see it take place and so we trusted by faith in the

01:03:53

Word of God Hebrews 11 3 says by faith we understand that the universe was created by the

01:04:01

Word of God so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible it becomes so clear in the

01:04:10

Bible as you see this is God's process of bringing things into existence out of nothing my first conclusion to this piece of evidence that God spoke creation into existence is this if God can speak creation into existence can't

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He change your life by His Word if God can make everything that is by His Word then changing your life by His Word doesn't seem to be that difficult now does it but if you're not on that train yet let me give you a second piece of evidence it's not just that God spoke creation into existence but that is that God number 2

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God sustains all things by His Word Hebrews 1 in the

01:04:57

New Testament talks about Jesus coming Jesus being the exact imprint of the image of God right the radiance of the glory of God and by His Word He upholds the universe

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Hebrews 3 says it or 1 3 says it like this He upholds the universe by the

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Word of His Power everything that is atoms the chair that you're sitting on the pen that you're writing with the

01:05:24

TV that you're maybe taking this in on or the laptop or whatever it is all of that holds together by the

01:05:31

Word of God Colossians 1 17 supports that as well by saying in Him in Jesus all things hold together listen if God can create all that is by His Word and if God can sustain all that is by His Word then trust me when

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I say He can change your life by His Word now the question is though why isn't that happening more often right like what's up with that what happened that made it that we're discussing that we're discussing the subject where I'm even having this conversation with you why isn't it just automatically happening and I think that's such a important question to answer and if I were to break it down one of the best verses in the

01:06:20

Bible that talks about that is Romans 3 23 and it says for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God that every one of us has sinned going all the way back to our first parents right if you have a good

01:06:37

Genesis apologetic then you hold fast to a historical Adam and a historical

01:06:43

Eve and it becomes clear from our first parents onward that we are born in sin because of the rebellion of our first parents rebelling against God's Word not to eat of the tree that they were forbidden to eat from they chose to disobey the

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Word of God and that sent humanity spiraling into the place that we are now where us born sinners then engage in and live out our sinfulness such that we invert our worship of the living

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God and worship and serve created things instead of the creator who is to be forever praised amen and so we don't look out at the creation and see the power of God and recognize

01:07:29

His majestic greatness instead we look out at creation and make some sort of futile attempt to explain it by some sort of man centered evolutionary theory it is the epitome of the futility of the mind and so we as sinners that have fallen short of the glory of God that have not lived up to the standards of God's Word that have more than not lived up to the standards of God's Word you and I have rebelled against God's Word and we have no hope of reconciling ourselves to the

01:08:03

God of whom His Word has been rebelled against by us and so what does

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God do? God could leave us where we are in our hopelessness in our despair in our sin and left in our sin you and I would die and stand before the living

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God who spoke all things into existence and be cast rightly so judged for our sin and cast into eternity in hell but this is what's so amazing about God and this is why

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I'm so in love with God and this is why it's so clear God loves us and this is why it's so clear that He can change us by His Word the third evidence that the

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Word can change your life is that God sent the Word Jesus Christ God sent the

01:08:53

Word to those who had disobeyed His Word to live faithfully in perfect obedience to the

01:09:01

Word in His own life this Jesus, this God man, the second person of the

01:09:07

Trinity took on human flesh and dwelt among us in the language of the book of John in the

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Gospels is that the in the beginning was the Word talking about Jesus and the

01:09:19

Word was with God and the Word was God eternally existing as God and by verse 14

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John 1 says and the Word became flesh God took on a bod y 'all,

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He took on human flesh and it says He dwelt among us and we've seen His glory it's like everything

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God ever wanted to say to us in a person the Word that had communicated that had created all things and sustained all things now made flesh in the person of Jesus, Jesus Himself is the

01:09:59

Word and He was sent to save us from our sins, to save us from our disobedience to the

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Word of God which leads me to my fourth evidence that the Lord can change your life not just that He can speak creation into existence and does and has, not just that He sustains all things by His Word, not just that despite our disobedience of the

01:10:25

Word, He sent the Word Jesus Christ for us but number four, God saves us through the

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Word this is His plan this has been His plan that He would save us by the

01:10:41

Word of God now, the reason why an unbeliever comes to the

01:10:48

Bible and is bored, comes to the Bible and finds it irrelevant, comes to the

01:10:53

Bible and finds it to be not helpful, is simply because the

01:10:58

Word of God to a natural person does not register 1

01:11:04

Corinthians 2 verse 14 says it like this he says, the natural person does not accept the things of the

01:11:12

Spirit of God and guess who inspired the Word of God all Scripture is God breathed and profitable inspired 1

01:11:19

Peter by the Holy Spirit so 1 Corinthians 2 a natural person does not accept the things of the

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Spirit of God for they are folly to him and he's not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned, so what does

01:11:34

God do He sends preachers to proclaim the Word of God, that's folly to those who are perishing but to those who are being saved, the gospel that gets proclaimed about a

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God who is holy and a man who is sinful and Christ who is a Savior who delivers us out of our bondage to sin and reconciles us to God through the proclamation of the

01:11:59

Word, God brings people to himself, God saves people from their sins He does it through the rock solid

01:12:07

Word, He brings that conviction that leads people to Jesus, here's what the

01:12:12

Word does in our salvation, Jeremiah 23 29 says, my word isn't it like a fire declares the

01:12:21

Lord and like a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces, so what the Word of God does is by the

01:12:27

Spirit of God brings conviction about sin to the heart and God by His Spirit opens our eyes, 2

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Corinthians 4 says that the God of this world has blinded the minds of unbelievers to keep them from seeing the light of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ but then you go two verses later and what's so stunning about it is

01:12:53

He uses the same language as creation to talk about how God saves people from their sin how

01:12:59

God reconciles people into right relationship with Himself by saying for God who said let light shine out of darkness has shown in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ that God is supernaturally involved through the proclamation of the

01:13:25

Word to remove the blinders on the eyes of unbelievers so that they might actually see the

01:13:31

Word of God as revealed in the pages of the Word of God and you might see your sin for what it is and you might see

01:13:39

Jesus for who He is and you might turn from your sin a gift of God's grace and receive by faith as a free gift the work of Jesus Christ on your behalf who lived a perfect life one that you have not lived the

01:13:59

Word of God you have transgressed He fulfilled all of the righteous requirements of the law perfectly

01:14:05

He then died a sinner's death for the wages of sin is death and rose for our salvation for anyone's salvation who puts their faith in the

01:14:15

Word of God Jesus is the Word and God saves through the

01:14:20

Word that's why Peter can say in 1 Peter 1 23 since you have been born again because that's what you need to be you need to be born again you don't just make a decision for Jesus Jesus changes everything about you and how does

01:14:37

He do it through the living and abiding

01:14:42

Word of God loved ones this is

01:14:48

God's plan to save you through the Word that is being firmly supported through this conference to give you the confidence that you can place your trust in the

01:15:00

God of the Bible and submit your life to the Word of God last evidence five evidences

01:15:08

God can change your life God spoke creation into existence God sustains all things by His Word if He can do that He can change your life that's nothing to Him in comparison to those things number three

01:15:23

God sent the Word Jesus because we were lost in our sin dead in our trespasses then

01:15:30

He saves us through the Word of God bringing us through the proclamation of the death burial and resurrection of the

01:15:37

Word of God to a life -giving faith in Jesus and number five fifth evidence is this

01:15:45

God sanctifies through the Word God changes us through the

01:15:52

Word God conforms us into the image of His very

01:15:58

Son this is what He does by the Word of God He takes dead spiritually dead sinners and transforms them entirely to make them to redeem the image of God that's in them

01:16:12

John 17 17 says it like this sanctify them in the truth your

01:16:18

Word is truth Jesus says of course praying to the

01:16:23

Father and perhaps one of my favorite verses that explains this sanctification process the power of the

01:16:31

Word of God to literally change us from the inside out such an awesome picture Isaiah 55 10 through 13 gives us this awesome picture coming on the heels the back end of the suffering servant who was to come and be crucified and die for our transgressions as a substitute for us and we get to lay hold of the benefits by turning from our sin putting our faith in Jesus our confidence our trust then

01:17:01

Isaiah describes the work of the Word like this in Isaiah 55 10 he says for as the rain and the snow come down from heaven and don't return there but water the earth making it bring forth and sprout giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater so shall my word that goes out from my mouth it shall not return to me empty but it shall accomplish that which

01:17:28

I purpose and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it now the basic picture here is that in the ancient

01:17:36

Near East you had rain was the difference between life and death between food and starvation and what

01:17:44

Isaiah is saying is like the rain doesn't return to heaven without effectively bringing life and sustenance to the crops right so the word of God does not return to heaven without doing its worth to bring life and sustenance to the people of God now it may take some time and that harvest may not fully break through right away just like the rains effect on the ground but it never fails to fulfill its purpose and then of course we love the fact that the word of God never returns void but what's the purpose what's that mean it never returns void well he continues on for you shall go out in joy and be led forth in peace the mountains and the hills before you shall break forth into singing this is echoes of the exodus and the people returning to the promised land this language of going out is like a slave being set free like when you come under the word of God you're finally in the place you were supposed to be that every other place to confide in to hide in to operate under is not enslaving and the place that sets you free is when you sit under the authority of God's word and it says the creation is singing and the trees of the field shall clap their hands the creation is celebrating at the thought of sinners being made holy through the word of God and then he gives this really interesting picture and he says instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress and instead of the briar shall come up the myrtle and it should make a name for the

01:19:29

Lord now something is going on here if the thorn the rain comes down and the thorn bush becomes a cypress and the briar becomes a myrtle you may not know much about plants but let me just put it like this if you were to water a thorn bush what do you expect to get from that you would expect to get a bigger thorn bush right which is even more frustrating if you have those already but in this case what he's saying is if you water the thorn bush something radically happens to the thorn bush it's transformed it becomes a new creation something altogether different comes forth rain of the word of God falls on the hearts of people taking thorn bushes and making them into cypress right taking briars and making them into myrtles taking these these kind of weed dead looking plants if you could even call them that and turns them into something transformed entirely he's giving us a glimpse into what the purpose of the word is which is to take us and our broken sin stained confused reality and causing us to be born again fully transformed new creations in Christ through the word of God that he sanctifies us it's the word that means we become more holy and here's the crazy part that as you live under the authority of the word of God the goal is that you become like the

01:21:06

God of the word you live under the authority you become like the word of God Jesus himself and this is all built into the narrative of the scriptures

01:21:18

God's word is what we come under authority and because we worship the God of the word and as we submit our lives to the word we become like the word like his son

01:21:29

Jesus Christ and I can testify to this because I've seen this in my own life

01:21:35

God has taken a guy who grew up with not a strong Christian background by any sense who knew nothing about the word of God and radically transformed my life

01:21:47

I'm talking about knowing nothing and little by little as I position myself under the word he took kind of my stilted early even

01:21:55

Christianity that was filled with a few kind of cliche verses I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength on the soccer field right and just like by hearing the word in its context preached in an applicatory way to my life

01:22:11

I watch God like a wrecking ball come through my life and tear down the scaffolds of the life that I had built and began to rebuild my life such that my entire existence is a product of the very foundation of this message which is namely that living under the authority of God's word can change your life

01:22:32

I'll go one step further I'm confident of this the spirit of the Lord is in it living under the authority of the word of God will change your life loved ones there is no better place to be and there is no better conclusion to this conference than to submit yourself to the word to delight yourself in the word to ask the spirit who super intended the word of God itself to give you eyes to see the glories of God in the face of Jesus as revealed in the scriptures for your good and for God's glory that's my prayer for you and trust that as you continue in this conference that you will be richly blessed by what you come across let's pray father thank you so much for the opportunity to get to preach your word and to let your word speak from so many places in scripture and to see this pattern that you have to use your word to change people by the word to become like the word your son this is the pattern this is the play and it's the privilege that we as those who call themselves

01:23:52

Christians who have turned from their sin and put their faith in Jesus Christ we are living trophies of this reality that you take dead lifeless spiritually dead sinners and bring them to new fully transformed lives once lustful now pure once thieves now givers once angry now gentle because of Jesus radically transformed

01:24:17

God I pray that you do that work in the lives of the people listening here today and that they may leave and spend their lives living under the authority of your word we pray this in Jesus name amen

01:24:39

I'd like to welcome Dr. Carl Morgan he has been the pastor at Woodland United Fellowship for 34 years and a biblical archaeologist for 25 years for last 12 years he has been director and curator of the

01:24:53

Woodland Museum of Biblical Archaeology today he will demonstrate how the

01:24:58

Bible and archaeology work together work well together as we look briefly at 10 archaeological discoveries that demonstrate the authenticity of the

01:25:08

Bible welcome Dr. Carl Morgan I am Carl Morgan one of the pastors at Woodland United Fellowship in Woodland California and also the director and curator of the

01:25:21

Woodland Museum of Biblical Archaeology I'm also a biblical archaeologist and have participated in three different archaeological digs in Israel and Jordan and my task in this presentation is to share with you 10 archaeological discoveries that I consider to be very important in demonstrating the

01:25:42

Bible to be absolutely true and reliable. I could show you at least 100 more but we'll focus on a few of my favorites.

01:25:52

The first one is called the Dead Sea Scrolls now you may know more about these than I do because these are well known and they were found in the caves at the

01:26:06

Dead Sea above the Essene community at Qumran in 1948 when some boys threw some rocks in one of the caves and heard the sound of pottery breaking and they investigated and found ceramic jars that contained writings from as early as the second century

01:26:23

B .C. Ultimately the caves in the area produced 100 ,000 fragments from 1 ,100 different scrolls and 11 different caves now these scrolls called the

01:26:38

Dead Sea Scrolls tell us much about Jewish life before 70

01:26:43

A .D. and other commentary on the many Jewish writings around 230 of the scrolls are from the

01:26:52

Old Testament and these scrolls contain portions of every book in the Bible, well the Old Testament, except the book of Esther including a complete book of Isaiah until the discovery of these scrolls the oldest version of the

01:27:07

Old Testament text was the Aleppo Codex and that was in 935 A .D.

01:27:12

that it was composed and that's over 1 ,000 years after the originals were first written so a major criticism of the

01:27:21

Old Testament is that the scribes through the years had made mistakes when copying and recopying and the

01:27:28

Bible is not reliable and it can't be trusted amazingly that argument was shattered because the scripture that we have and use today is almost identical to that copied in the 2nd century

01:27:42

B .C. only a generation away from the original manuscripts so we can have great confidence in the accuracy of our translations today the second one that we're looking at the discovery is called the

01:27:59

Merneptah Stele and this is Pharaoh Merneptah, he's an

01:28:04

Egyptian Pharaoh about 1213 to 1203 B .C. and he looks pretty good to being that old

01:28:10

I think and he created a large stone victory stele that brags about his victories over his enemies and this engraved slab it's of granite and it's more than 10 feet tall and was found in 1896 in western

01:28:29

Thebes in Egypt by archaeologist Flanders Petrie and it was written in hieroglyphics it contains the oldest certain reference to Israel outside of the

01:28:40

Bible and it's referred to as the Merneptah Stele it was carved in around 1210

01:28:47

B .C. and is currently located in the Egyptian museum in Cairo.

01:28:54

Israel is listed here on this stele down at the bottom and it's right along with Libya and the

01:29:03

Hittites, Ashkelon, Gezer, Syria as the enemies of Egypt.

01:29:10

Now why is this important? There are many archaeologists and biblical scholars who believe that the conquest of Canaan did not take place and that Israel did not escape from Egypt as the

01:29:23

Bible says. They believe that Israel emerged out of the Canaanite peoples at a much later time and the biblical history of Israel is incorrect.

01:29:33

Now this early evidence lets us know that Israel was a powerful enemy of Egypt powerful as early as 1208 to 1210

01:29:43

B .C. Now there is no reason to doubt then that the Bible is accurate concerning the history of Israel as it presents it.

01:29:51

Also Israel did not emerge out of the Canaanites and come to power much later in the

01:29:57

Iron Age after King David although these scholars would not believe there was a King David either.

01:30:03

They were already a powerful nation at this point separate from the Canaanite peoples.

01:30:09

Now the next one is one of my favorites.

01:30:15

It's called the House of David stone and this stone was found at Tel Dan and it's in northern

01:30:23

Israel by Avraham in 1993 and is a basalt stone secondary use.

01:30:31

It was found in a wall though originally it was a monument and it was written in Aramaic probably by Syrian King Hazel about the victory over Jehoram of Israel and Ahaziah of Judah of the 9th century

01:30:46

B .C. Now it reads on it Beit David or Dynasty or House of David.

01:30:52

Now why is this important at all? It's really important. Because it affirms that David and his dynasty existed.

01:31:01

Now while I was in college there was a trend in religion departments to question whether David even existed at all and I had professors like that because he was only found listed in the

01:31:12

Bible. His history was only in the Bible and the Bible was not good enough historically. It was not credible evidence and he was a myth to many in their minds.

01:31:23

So now we have this name and dynasty mentioned by a pagan king written in stone just over a hundred years after he lived and now there's a

01:31:34

David in their minds, everybody's minds and that's not questioned by anyone of any real authority or credibility.

01:31:41

So that's a very important archaeological discovery. The next is what we would call

01:31:48

Hezekiah's Tunnel and Hezekiah's Tunnel is a fun site to go to if you ever go to Israel you can walk through it and it's about 1750 feet long but here's what it looks like when you get inside the tunnel and it's and the water is cold year round.

01:32:08

This discovery is related actually to 2 Kings chapter 20 verse 20 and 2 Chronicles 32 30 where King Hezekiah is said to have stopped up the

01:32:18

Gihon Spring in Jerusalem and channeled the water westward inside the city.

01:32:25

Now this tunnel was discovered in 1838 by Edward Robinson and it's 1750 feet from the

01:32:32

Gihon Spring to the Siloam Pool and today you can walk through it as I said earlier.

01:32:38

Now there is a inscription that was written in Hebrew and it was found in 1880 by boys swimming in a pool that the tunnel empties into and it's from the end of the 8th century

01:32:52

BC and describes how the tunnel was dug how the workers were going from two ends and they met and their pickaxes hit and water flowed through and that inscription was chiseled off by vandals in 1890 and today is in the

01:33:09

Istanbul Museum and there's the Siloam inscription that you can see today if you ever go to Istanbul.

01:33:16

Now this proves that the Bible is accurate even in details such as Hezekiah's preparation for battle along with the

01:33:26

Assyrians in the 2nd Chronicles 32 .30 passage. Now close really related to this is what is called the

01:33:33

Siloam Pool and it's mentioned in John chapter 9 verse 11 as a location where Jesus sent the blind man to wash the mud from his eyes so that he could be made to see.

01:33:45

Traditionally this pool was identified as the small pool that Hezekiah's tunnel emptied into but this has turned out to be a

01:33:53

Byzantine pool from the 8300's which is problematic to try to put it in the time of Christ.

01:34:01

It doesn't fit. Well in June 2004 during construction work to repair a large water pipe near this older pool or this other pool, steps were found that revealed a much larger pool and archaeologist

01:34:15

Ronnie Reich and Eli Shacron identified two stone steps and after excavation revealed a monumental pool.

01:34:22

It's 160 feet wide and 220 feet long. So pottery and coins found indicate that this pool was used in the 1st century during the time of Jesus Christ.

01:34:34

Now the pool has yet to be completely uncovered but the discovery does solve one major problem that many have looked at through the years.

01:34:43

On the day of Pentecost 3 ,000 were saved and baptized. Well where were they baptized? We know that there were small pools or mikvahs around the temple area but this pool would have been an ample supply of water for these baptisms.

01:34:59

We also know from other Jewish writings that every morning during the feast of tabernacles a priest would take a golden vessel to the pool, fill it with water, bring it to the temple altar in this great processional and there was a road that is recorded in other writings that led to the temple from the

01:35:18

Siloam pool and that leads us to the next and that's the Siloam stairway or the pilgrims road that was discovered not long after the excavation of the

01:35:28

Siloam pool. This step stairway runs from the Siloam pool to the western wall of the temple mount.

01:35:36

Now this is important. It's made of limestone the stairway runs uphill and is at least 26 feet wide and covers a third of a mile in length and it lies beneath the surface of modern

01:35:51

Jerusalem meaning unlike most archaeological digs which begin from the ground and go down this excavation is done subterraneously tunneling beneath the hustle and bustle of modern

01:36:03

Jerusalem above. So there are reasons why this archaeological discovery is so very very important.

01:36:10

Many today are advocating that the Jewish temple in the time of Christ was not located at the present day temple mount within these massive retaining walls built by Herod the

01:36:23

Great. They say it's in the lower city of David but this discovery is very special because it makes it easy to locate where the temple actually stood.

01:36:35

You follow the pilgrims road and it leads you to the temple and guess what?

01:36:41

It leads to the southwestern corner of the temple mount so we know where the temple was and now if you plan to visit

01:36:47

Jerusalem in the next year when tourism opens up again the road should be open for you to walk on the same steps that millions of pilgrims and worshippers including

01:36:57

Jesus Christ would have walked on as they made their ascent to the temple. Now there's another one that's called the

01:37:03

Caiaphas Ossuary. This is number seven. An ossuary is a bone box and in December of 1990 a 2 ,000 year old burial cave was accidentally opened in Jerusalem during construction and inside were four of these ossuaries or bone boxes with the remains still in them.

01:37:27

One of the limestone boxes was exceptionally decorated as you can see as you look upon this one.

01:37:34

Inside the box was found among five other skeletal remains of individuals the bones of a 60 year old man.

01:37:42

Now on the outside of the box was a crude inscription in Aramaic that listed his name his name was

01:37:49

Joseph Caiaphas Now the first century historian

01:37:54

Josephus identifies the high priest at the time of Jesus as Joseph Caiaphas Most scholars agree that this is the high priest at the trial of Jesus Now the bones of this man who presided over the

01:38:07

Jewish portion of the trial of Jesus and then sent him on to Pilate are actually the first remains of someone mentioned in the

01:38:14

Bible to ever be found. This discovery gives authenticity to the details some of the minute details of the arrest and trial of Jesus which many think never did take place.

01:38:26

That leads to another archaeological discovery also found in an ossuary it's the crucified man

01:38:34

In 1968 during construction again in Jerusalem a lot of archaeological discoveries are made and found it's through construction sites they unearth something and then the archaeologists have to go in and finish it up and take care of it.

01:38:50

Well anyhow this unearthed a Jewish tomb and we know the man's name and his name was

01:38:56

John son of Hadcol and his death took place during the first century A .D. Now there was also the bones in the same ossuary of a four or five year old male whose name was also

01:39:08

John so probably John and little John are in the same same box.

01:39:15

A nail had pierced his right heel bone and early examination even determined that his wrist had also been nailed.

01:39:24

Now this was disputed by a later examination I go with the first one it also appeared that his legs had been broken.

01:39:33

So the value of this find is that it is the only physical evidence that has ever been found that a person was even crucified during the time of Jesus Christ.

01:39:45

So it also shows how a person was crucified during the time of Christ and it proves that the biblical account of Jesus' crucifixion was accurate in every way.

01:39:57

Number nine Kibbut El -Makadar or Biblical Eye. The site for Biblical Eye has been the subject of much debate during the last 50 years.

01:40:07

Eye is the city that was destroyed by Joshua by fire after the Israelites destroyed

01:40:13

Jericho as they entered into the promised land. Tradition has placed this city at a site called

01:40:19

Et Tel and in the 1970s a professor Joe Calloway of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville had dug there and found no indication that the city was even occupied during the time of Joshua whether you use a 15th century

01:40:36

B .C. date or a 13th century B .C. date, nobody lived there. So no one lived there at the time and his conclusion was that there was no destruction by Eye by the

01:40:47

Israelites and therefore there was no Joshua and that puts into question the whole

01:40:52

Israelite events that took place. So it's a slippery slope if you go into that direction.

01:40:59

Well in 1995 Associates for Biblical Research Bryant Wood they began and he began excavating another site nearby.

01:41:08

It's about a mile east called Kibbut El Mekotter and it proved that Calloway had been digging in the wrong site.

01:41:17

This seal is an Egyptian seal and it's of a scarab seal that was found on site that dated the site to the time of Joshua in the 15th century

01:41:30

B .C. which works nicely with a 1446 B .C. exodus date and also 1406 conquest date.

01:41:39

So we know that this site, that city gate has been found and that was needed according to the story in the

01:41:46

Bible. The city was burned with fire. Excavation has proven that Kibbut El Mekotter was inhabited at the time of Joshua and that the conquest actually took place.

01:41:56

And every detail just as the Bible describes it's a long way from saying nothing of it happened.

01:42:03

Finally, and my favorite I have a little connection here and that is Tal El Hamam and that is

01:42:10

Biblical Sodom. Biblical Sodom, this Tal is in Jordan, right northeast of the

01:42:15

Dead Sea and it's a large mound and in Jordan they call them Tals in Israel they're

01:42:21

Tels, in Jordan they're Tals in Jordan at the northeast end of the Dead Sea. It's a site that is believed to be

01:42:27

Sodom of the Bible and has been excavated for 15 seasons under the direction of Dr.

01:42:33

Stephen Collins of Albuquerque, New Mexico at Trinity Southwest University. Now, I have helped with 13 of these excavation seasons and plan to return again in February of 2022.

01:42:46

If anyone wants to go along, get in touch with me you can go dig as well. The site is large, it's 67 acres and has produced everything necessary for it to be classified as Biblical Sodom as found in Genesis 13 through 19 in every detail.

01:43:02

Now for many, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah is just that it's a story it's myth.

01:43:10

Well this site has proven that to be totally incorrect. Now, what do you need?

01:43:16

First of all you need the right location and the location we have is at the northeast end and if you look at this detail

01:43:24

Babi Drah and Numero are the traditional sites of Sodom and they're down at the southern end of the Dead Sea.

01:43:29

They don't fit and the reason is why that doesn't fit Abraham and Lot were at Bethel and I, or Bethel, and they looked eastward to the

01:43:38

Kakar or the circular plain of the Jordan that depression there and you cannot see the southern portion of the

01:43:45

Dead Sea from the location they were at, but you get a perfectly good angle of the Kakar and that's where we find our site.

01:43:53

It's the largest and it sticks out very plainly. The other thing you need is the right time, which would be classified as the middle bronze period that would be the 18th and 19th century

01:44:05

BC during the time of Abraham. This is a square that I dug in the second season and it's in 2006 actually, and as you see it, the lower portion is from the middle bronze to period and that would be the time of Abraham.

01:44:22

We found there a full meter of ash and we had to go down about 15 feet through what's called iron age segments of more recent occupations until we reached this, but we did find everything needed there to place it in the right time frame.

01:44:37

We know that we had to have a walled city and that was necessary we had to have a gate complex because Lot sat in the gate complex, the gate plaza when the angels came to destroy the city.

01:44:54

This is the gate complex that was actually found and you can see it a lot clearer here as we see it's highlighted you have towers, you have a gate complex it's a very large area, very unique so we do have the towers and the gate plaza.

01:45:11

Architectural archaeologist Lane Rittmeyer did a reconstruction drawing of the lower city entrance and this is how

01:45:17

Sodom would have looked during the time of Abraham. Now what about the evidence?

01:45:22

What happened? I think we figured that out completely actually after this summer we will know even more as we can't dig this season but we're doing a lot of archaeological analysis of the ash layer of the soils of the other objects that have been found, bones things like that.

01:45:41

So this is a hard -fired mud brick and it was, it's like stone.

01:45:48

You can fire mud brick, not usually for walls but in this case this is like stone and it got extremely hot.

01:45:56

Another thing that got hot was roofing material I have pieces of this and this is where it's just mud that you would put on your roof and it's called wado and dob, you can see the imprint of the reeds in this.

01:46:10

This is hard as a rock and it got fired extremely hard and then you have pottery that is glazed and also bubbled.

01:46:20

The middle bronze pottery shirt from the time of Abraham is on the left, on the right is trinitite.

01:46:27

Trinitite is the melted and fused silica material found at the site of the first nuclear bomb testing site in New Mexico and scientific testing that we've had done, several universities have shown it took at least 10 ,000 degrees

01:46:41

Fahrenheit to accomplish this. The area of the present work is at a palace area on the top and this is the upper tall and this is the palace of King Bara that's mentioned in the

01:46:55

Bible and hopefully this will be where we will find cuneiform writings that will give us even more detail about this wonderful site.

01:47:03

So what have we learned? A lot. We know that the destruction is at the right time, just as the

01:47:09

Bible said. We know that the destruction is at the right place, just where the Bible says it is.

01:47:15

We know that how it happened. It was a meteorite airburst that God used and it lasted just a few seconds and he wiped out this city with up to 10 ,000 degrees and I anticipate we find it even be hotter than that with extreme winds.

01:47:32

All the foundations are shifted to the northeast because it came from the southwest. There's an ash layer of at least a meter.

01:47:41

The destruction temperature again 10 ,000 degrees Fahrenheit and dead sea mineral content of 8 % is in the soil and that indicates that a tsunami impact came when it came from the dead sea area and brought with it mineral salts from the dead sea and hit our site.

01:47:59

So that may even explain Lott's wife who turned to a pillar of salt. There may have been many pillars of salt that day as these 10 ,000 degree mineral deposits hit that site.

01:48:11

So what I'm getting at is that this occurred exactly as the Bible indicates. Now, I hope that this short presentation has encouraged you to do more study on your own concerning the relationship of archaeology and the

01:48:27

Bible. You're invited to visit our Woodland Museum to learn more. Give us a call or email us to make a reservation for you.

01:48:35

We're open at this point. The website is www .woodlandmba .org

01:48:43

and you can receive all the information you want there. Remember that no matter what the skeptics say or what you hear or what you see on these crazy archaeological

01:48:56

TV shows, remember biblical archaeology, true biblical archaeology, never, never has succeeded in refuting the

01:49:06

Bible. It only confirms it. Thank you very much. Hi, I'm Dr.

01:49:16

Brian Thomas and I'm here at the beautiful and lovely Discovery Center at the Institute for Creation Research in Dallas.

01:49:23

Sorry I couldn't be with you in California. I wanted to be, but you know what, we're going to praise the

01:49:30

Lord for technology. I'm a dinosaur scientist and I really enjoy the study of fossils and that began when

01:49:39

I was young. In fact, I was like six years old and I was in a playground.

01:49:44

I remember I was on a swing set and I jumped off the swing. You swing yourself out and land and see how far you can land.

01:49:52

I landed into like gravel and I looked at the gravel and every little piece of gravel was like a little oyster shell and I recognized that it was a shell from the ocean, but I'm in the middle of Kansas.

01:50:09

I picked up one of these little oyster shells that had like rock, you know, glommed onto it and I took it inside.

01:50:18

I said, Mommy, Mommy, what is this? Why are there oyster shells all over the yard here?

01:50:24

We're nowhere near a beach. My mom deflected and said, well, ask your teacher.

01:50:30

I put it in my lunch box and got to school the next day and found an opportunity to say,

01:50:37

Teacher, teacher at school there, what is this? She deflected and said, that is a fossil.

01:50:45

I said, but what does that mean? Where did this come from? I've been curious ever since.

01:50:51

Now, the answers I started to collect over the years just came passively.

01:50:57

Like, I would get a clue from a TV show or maybe an article that I read or maybe something in the textbook or something that my teachers would have said and the answers said something like this.

01:51:11

Millions of years ago, there was a vast, shallow sea that covered the middle of the

01:51:16

United States and so all these sea creatures are from when the ocean, you know, was in the middle of the

01:51:23

U .S. That's why you have these fossils there. I said, okay, fine, that explains it.

01:51:33

I believed in millions of years and I believed that the fossils represent ancient and extinct creatures.

01:51:42

Today we're talking about fossils, do they represent evolution or do they represent, like,

01:51:48

Noah's Flood? So I switched over to believing in Noah's Flood from believing that fossils show evolution.

01:51:56

I'm just going to give you a few basics of reasons why I made that switch. Those reasons started to come out later in life, like after I got to college.

01:52:08

I really rethought. How could you get a shell from the sea turn into a fossil in the middle of a shallow sea millions of years ago?

01:52:22

How could that work? What I began to realize is basically it doesn't pass the common sense test.

01:52:30

I'll show you exactly what I mean and what I found. The way we're going to do that is by looking at specific pretty common fossils that I've got here just for us to look at.

01:52:41

We've got this camera set up and we're just going to talk about what you can observe and infer by just looking at these fossils.

01:52:51

Let's come here. The first one I've got comes in a cute little display box and it's from China.

01:52:59

A little Chinese set of fossil fish. These are pretty common.

01:53:06

The most common vertebrate, that's animal with a backbone, is a fish. You see them all over.

01:53:13

If you have an animal that's got a backbone it's going to be a fish more often than not. Here's some little bitty fish.

01:53:20

You can see but here's the thing I started to notice whether it's these from China or fish from let's say the famous Green River Formation in Wyoming and places elsewhere in western

01:53:32

United States. Look at the fins. I started looking at these fish fins.

01:53:39

The tail fin is there. The dorsal fin. The pectoral fin right here.

01:53:45

It's front flippers. They're fins. I got to thinking about these and I realized after I got older and had a pet fish.

01:54:00

My daughter had a pet fish and the pet fish died. What's the first thing that happened to the pet fish?

01:54:08

Its fins rotted within hours. They were covered with this white fungus.

01:54:14

It was ugly. Anyway, that didn't happen here.

01:54:20

Here we have perfectly preserved even the thin fins. Never covered with fungus.

01:54:28

This never happened. How do you get this? How do you get these animals preserved so quickly?

01:54:38

It had to be quick. It had to be fast before the fungus could take hold.

01:54:44

That began my journey into I guess caution or suspicion that what

01:54:53

I had been told, the story that I had been told, didn't really fit all the facts.

01:54:58

If it was millions of years ago in a vast shallow sea, then why do we have the fossils themselves of fish, for example, why do we have such fine preservation?

01:55:14

It had to have happened in a rapid catastrophe, not a slow and gradual everyday life in the ocean scenario.

01:55:23

For that matter, have you been to the ocean? Have you been to the

01:55:29

You're in California, right? You've been to the ocean. Are there fossils forming in the bottom of the ocean?

01:55:36

Or in the margin of the coast? The margin where the land meets the water.

01:55:44

No. No fossils forming anywhere in the ocean today. When a fish dies in the ocean, like what happens when it dies in my daughter's fish tank, what happens to it?

01:55:55

The first thing is, other fish eat it. Turtles eat it. This thing is instant turtle food. I mean, it's gone.

01:56:01

And then if the turtles don't get it or other fish, then it rots within, I mean, these little fish, gone within a week for sure.

01:56:10

So they're not turning into fossils. They're getting scavenged and they're rotting. Microbes eat them up.

01:56:17

That did not happen in the past with millions of fishes that got buried in Earth's rocks.

01:56:24

So I started to see a really big difference between what I had been told about how these things formed and what

01:56:30

I'm seeing in the actual rocks. So there's my little fishes from China, but you can find fossil fishes everywhere.

01:56:37

Look at the details when you see them and ask yourself common sense questions, like if these formed over millions of years, then why don't they form today?

01:56:48

They don't form in lakes. They don't form in streams. They don't form in the oceans. You need some unique set of circumstances.

01:56:54

Something like a catastrophic covering of mud and you need that mud to dry out fast.

01:57:02

Otherwise the fish will rot even down in that mud, even without oxygen. Cool, huh?

01:57:10

So that was my step, my first step like, okay, maybe the flood of Noah or something like that explains what

01:57:18

I see better than the stories that I've been told. And that was part of my journey. And we'll get to why that's so important here at the end.

01:57:28

Let's go to another fossil. What's in here? So I keep these in like cute little boxes. Oh, here's a fun one.

01:57:35

You guys know what that is? This is fossilized poo.

01:57:45

And so we call it a coprolite and, you know, my dog drops its waste in the backyard and it's not turning into a fossil.

01:57:56

Rabbit droppings in the forest, they're not turning into fossils. They get, in fact, it's soft, it's squishy, and within months it's biodegraded.

01:58:07

It just turns into soil. But that did not happen here. So this is from a phytosaur,

01:58:15

P -H -Y -T -O not F -I -G -H -T phytosaur.

01:58:22

So anyway, it's a Triassic reptile and it was like a crocodile but its nostrils were out on the end of its snout.

01:58:29

And so he made these droppings and these droppings were collected in rock deposits, buried in sediment, and you can brush away the sediment and it reveals these droppings that it left behind.

01:58:41

Wow. I mean, how do you preserve fossil, I mean, how do you fossilize a dropping? That does not happen today.

01:58:48

Something unique happened in the past and I'm starting to think more and more in terms of the uniqueness of Noah's flood as it's laid out in scripture.

01:58:58

It says, not just in Genesis 6, 7, and 8 that talks about the Genesis flood, and 9, but,

01:59:05

I mean, think about 2 Peter chapter 3. And he says, for these he talks about these scoffers and he says that they're willfully ignorant that the world that then was was overflowed with water.

01:59:21

So Peter treats Peter, the apostle, who knew the

01:59:27

Lord Jesus, he treats Genesis flood as though it was real. So what would you expect? He said the world that then was was destroyed being overflowed with water.

01:59:35

The world that then was, even Kansas. Kansas was overflowed with flood water, according to the

01:59:41

Bible. And no wonder I found those little fossil clams and oysters.

01:59:49

Speaking of clams, I've got a great little clam fossil here I want to show you. This is unique.

01:59:59

It's, well, it's how do I say this? It's common but it's special to me.

02:00:05

Okay, so here's the inside of the clam. So this is the clam's soft tissue.

02:00:13

Now it's turned into rock. So this is one side of the clam. And there you could see where the two valves were hinged together.

02:00:22

You know, the clam shells, the valves. So you had one valve here, one valve here, and it hinged open and closed like this.

02:00:29

In fact, we can see the last remnants of shell material in the form of a little brown stripe and a dot here.

02:00:37

So that's shell, clam shell. But the rest of this is mud that filled inside the clam.

02:00:44

Well, here's the thing. Think about this. You've been to the beach. You've seen clams at the beach. Do you typically find a clam shell just the one valve by itself?

02:00:57

Or do you typically find them more often with both valves still joined together?

02:01:02

And maybe the clam body has rotten or been eaten. Starfish love to eat clams right out of the shell.

02:01:11

So how do we find them? And the answer that I've discovered on my many walks up and down beaches is

02:01:18

I always see them more often with the shells separated. Shells separated.

02:01:24

So how long does it take for the shells to separate once a clam dies? We're talking about in terms of hours, not even a day in most cases.

02:01:35

So in just hours, there's a little ligament that connects the two valves and once the muscle that closes that clam shell, once that muscle rots and dissolves in the seawater, then the ligament lasts a little longer but hours, days, at most, and you've got those shells just, and the wave action of course is going to tumble those shells, the valves, and they're going to separate.

02:02:02

So that's why you see separated. But look at this. The valves must have been still together when this was packed with mud.

02:02:11

I mean, it speaks of rapid catastrophic burial and injection of mud in replacing the clam's soft body.

02:02:24

So it's kind of like a fossilized dung like we just saw. It's a soft tissue that's been turned to stone but in this case, the clam valves were still together and that gives us a time stamp and it says this happened fast because any length of time, hours or a day or so, and those valves would have separated and you would never achieve this shape.

02:02:50

So rapid, catastrophic. Well, where did I find this? This is here in North Texas. And so North Texas was underneath this same rapid catastrophic watery burial.

02:03:01

Well, what would we expect if the worldwide flood really happened? I mean, if Peter was right in saying that the whole world that then was got destroyed being overflowed with water.

02:03:12

Well, we'd expect, you know, sediment brought in by seawater, creatures buried faster than they could get away from the water's rising.

02:03:22

And we'd expect to find that evidence all over the world. That's exactly what we find up on the land.

02:03:27

Sea creatures up on land speak to Noah's flood. And so the more of this evidence that I saw, rapid, catastrophic burial, the more

02:03:35

I realized it's not a series of of sedimentary rock layers with fossils in them that tell a story about evolution and how we evolved from worms, which is literally what

02:03:51

California textbooks have said. You evolve from worms whether you like it or not. I mean, talk about the least scientific statement you could make.

02:04:00

You evolve from worms. Believe it, believe it. I mean, that's like pulpit pounding from the textbook. We did not come from worms.

02:04:07

Worms were fossilized. Clams were fossilized. But we have worms and clams today. That does not speak to evolution of worms to humans.

02:04:16

It speaks to rapid, catastrophic, unique, and different from regular life burial in something like Noah's flood.

02:04:26

Okay, just a couple more, couple more fossils here. Okay, this fossil, now, I got to tell you, this is one of my absolute favorite fossils right here.

02:04:37

And guess who gave it to me out of his goodwill and kindness? Dr. Dan Biddle, who's putting together this very

02:04:46

G1 conference years ago. He sent me this. This is an ammonite fossil in a concretion.

02:04:53

A concretion. So mud got packed around this ammonite and so that's what this fossil is.

02:04:59

Before I tell you why this is my mostest favoriteest fossil, let me just backtrack and sort of illustrate what an ammonite is.

02:05:09

So an ammonite is an extinct marine shelled creature. Lived in a shell.

02:05:16

Here's when I got this one when I was in China. This is a chambered nautilus shell.

02:05:23

And so an ammonite was like a chambered nautilus in a lot of ways. Chambered nautilus still alive.

02:05:31

Ammonites extinct. One of the differences between them was that the chambered nautilus had a different material for its door.

02:05:41

It has a little door. It opens its door and then out come these tentacles and it's able to, it's a predator and a scavenger.

02:05:49

It's able to swim and grab things like a squid or an octopus. So that's in today's oceans.

02:05:56

And then in yesterday's oceans, the pre -flood oceans I have now become convinced. We had ammonites look very similar to today's chambered nautilus.

02:06:06

And by the way, chambered nautiloids are buried and fossilized right alongside ammonites in many places of the earth.

02:06:15

So they were alive and looked exactly the same back then. These were alive but for some reason couldn't survive the flood.

02:06:22

In fact, 95 % of all the sea creatures that existed, I'd say species level, so all the varieties of creatures, 95 % of those were gone.

02:06:34

Did not survive the flood. And so even sea creatures suffered, suffered, suffered and only the most,

02:06:41

I guess the ones who could tolerate all that sediment and silt and heat, the water got hot, those survivors, the 5%, lived through the flood and repopulated the post -flood oceans that we have in our world today.

02:06:58

So here we have, looking up close here, we've got the shell material and then we've got sediment that's packed inside the shell.

02:07:07

And we have pearlescent shell material. This is called

02:07:14

Nacre, N -A -C -R -E and it's, I don't know if you could see how shiny that is, but boy is it pretty. It's kind of like, similar to the material that oysters use to make pearls.

02:07:28

But anyway, so it's a coiled, shelled creature and died by the billions, probably by the billions.

02:07:36

And they're found in North Texas here, they're found all over the place. And here's one from California, a place called

02:07:45

Redding and I've never been but Dr. Biddle did go and he got this one. So if you look close you can see there's a slightly different color between the concretion which is dark grey and this brown shell material.

02:08:02

So there it is. So there's a little ammonite, kind of like that, packed inside there. A little brown, coiled up sea creature.

02:08:10

So what? You say so what? Well we took some colleagues of mine, took the shell material from inside this, broke it open like we have here, cracked open the concretion.

02:08:21

It's like a rock ball. And then inside this concretion is the shelled creature, the ammonite.

02:08:27

They took that little piece of that shell, several pieces, and sent them to radiocarbon dating laboratories.

02:08:34

The thing is though that this shell is over 100 million years old according to conventional wisdom which has to assign long ages to rock layers because you need long ages for evolution to do its work.

02:08:51

Well if the flood formed those layers then you don't have the time for evolution because the flood happened just thousands of years ago and it would have formed all those layers within that one flood year.

02:09:03

What we have so here, let me just explain the radiocarbon result real quick and then I'll get to the last fossil and we'll be finished with this session where I'm trying to show you basically some of the science that supports a literal, straightforward reading of what

02:09:22

God's word says about the past. The ancient past. The flood and before that the creation.

02:09:31

So the creation and the flood, Peter says the scoffers will mock both of those.

02:09:36

They'll mock both of those and that's the culture we live in today. You believe in creation? You believe in the flood?

02:09:43

Science has disproved that. Well what about the science of forming a fossil? Why don't fossils form today?

02:09:48

They formed in the past. The flood explains it. So there's science that does support the flood. And what about radiocarbon inside a fossil shell that's supposed to be many millions of years old?

02:10:02

Radiocarbon has a shelf life. It's got a half -life. Anyway, it decays. It turns into nitrogen.

02:10:08

It's a radioactive isotope or version of carbon. It decays into nitrogen. Just let it sit there and it will turn itself into nitrogen over time.

02:10:17

And it's 5 ,730 some odd years is the half -life. So if you have a pound of pure radiocarbon, then after 5 ,730 years you'll have only a half -pound of pure radiocarbon and you'll have a half -pound of nitrogen.

02:10:38

Well maybe it'll weigh a little less because in the decay process it gives off radiation and particles.

02:10:47

So anyway, based on that measured decay rate we would never expect to find radiocarbon in a sample that's even a million years old.

02:10:56

Because after say 100 ,000 years, in theory, all the radiocarbon, even in a block of radiocarbon the size of the

02:11:06

Earth, would have turned itself into nitrogen after 100 ,000 years, in theory, taking today's decay rate.

02:11:13

So by the way, scientists don't use radiocarbon to come up with the ages of millions of years.

02:11:19

They use radiocarbon to date archaeological artifacts that they consider are only thousands of years old, not millions.

02:11:31

So here we have a fossil that's supposed to be millions of years old and if we find that there's radiocarbon in the fossil shell then we have very young -looking material.

02:11:44

And that's of course what we found. Published online, you can look at it for free.

02:11:50

Just go to the website and go to the interweb and look at it and you can see all the details about how the processes that my colleagues went through to radiocarbon date this.

02:12:05

Now the date I'm not concerned about, the date I'm not interested in. What I'm interested in is the fact that it still has any radiocarbon left in it.

02:12:13

And it does! And so it looks like it's thousands, not millions of years old, based on the radiocarbon.

02:12:20

I have more to say about that in our dinosaur session, which is coming up later on.

02:12:26

Okay, so that's it. We have scientific evidence that supports recent creation, recent flood, thousands, not millions of years ago.

02:12:33

We have fossils, period. I mean concretions aren't happening today and animals aren't turning into mud balls that turn into rock and then get deposited on land.

02:12:44

It happened in the past, though, and I think the flood might help explain that. My last fossil is a chunk of dinosaur bone.

02:12:55

And this is typically how we find dinosaur bone, as far as just a chip of it.

02:13:01

It's just a chunk. So this is a hadrosaur, probably the tibia, and it's sort of the part of the bone, the top end of the leg, and this is going to be its knee up here.

02:13:12

Anyway, so you could see, what I wanted you to see is how white this is. Why is it white?

02:13:19

Well, bone is white and you've got these little black streaks. Well, that's mud and dirt and a little bit of soil.

02:13:29

The sediment, you know, it's just dirty from being in sediments. Sedimentary rock. It's a loose sedimentary rock.

02:13:35

This came from the Hell Creek Formation in Montana, famous for its dinosaur fossils.

02:13:42

Now, when I went to my first dinosaur museum, I think

02:13:49

I was in Wyoming and I was like seven years old, and my uncle lived there, so we were visiting my uncle, and we went in, and there had this big

02:13:56

T -Rex, you know, right at the door, and I was scared. I was seven, and there's a giant head with big teeth, and so I was clinging to my mommy, and I was like, what is this?

02:14:05

I recognize that there's like the remnants of an animal, but hopefully it's not still alive because, boy, is it scary.

02:14:12

And I said, you know, what is a fossil? What is this? And seven years old, what do you tell a kid?

02:14:18

So my mom didn't know, and she deflected again, like she did with the oyster in Kansas, and she said, well, let's ask the museum expert.

02:14:27

So we walked over to the museum expert, and my mom said, well, my son has a question for you, and I said, well, what's that?

02:14:33

And the lady said, well, it's a fossil, and fossils form, little boy, through millions of years of mineralization.

02:14:44

Mineralization. So the rock, it's now rock. So the bone is all gone, and it's turned into rock.

02:14:52

So what you see in these fossils is rock in the shape of the bone. Do you understand, little boy?

02:14:58

Uh -huh. So I'm listening and getting it, you know, and I believed it. That's what I was taught, until I found the real dinosaur fossils.

02:15:07

And, guys, it has not turned into minerals at all. You can still see the pore spaces,

02:15:14

P -O -R -E, that means tiny holes. They're darkened because it's so old, but it looks like fresh bone, the shape of fresh bone.

02:15:24

And so you could see that it hasn't been replaced by mineral. This is the dinosaur bone itself.

02:15:32

So the lady was wrong. Why was she telling me that dinosaur bones are rocks in the shape of bone, and I just,

02:15:40

I don't know why. She just wasn't, she just, people don't know. They don't hear these things. They don't get out and dig for themselves.

02:15:46

And so when I saw this, I was like, oh, I've been told another lie, you know, about how these things happen.

02:15:52

And it didn't happen over millions of years because it hadn't been mineralized. Now, I'm saying this particular sample hasn't been mineralized, but there are that have been mineralized, of course.

02:16:07

But some have not been. And in fact, some have not just the original bone, but what

02:16:12

I specialize in is finding original protein still in the bone.

02:16:19

So not just the mineral part of the bone remains, but tiny remnants of the proteins are still inside these fossils.

02:16:27

How incredible is that? And to me, that says the timing of the flood is right.

02:16:34

God got it right. He got it right in his word. We can trust what he says. The fossils don't show evolution.

02:16:41

They show catastrophic burial. Sea creatures first, lowest in the layers because the flood would have flooded the creatures that were already down there first.

02:16:52

Later during the flood year, creatures that lived in shallow seas were buried.

02:16:58

Lots of shallow sea creatures buried next. And then swamp creatures next. And then on the very top layers, we have continent dwelling hard ground living creatures that were buried in that flood.

02:17:10

So we don't see a progression of evolution. We just see a progression of the series of fossils that were formed in the flood.

02:17:16

But you got to think big. You got to think basically you have to think to yourself, is it possible that God's word could actually be right about this worldwide flood?

02:17:26

And if you're willing to go there, then the evidence supports exactly what the scripture teaches.

02:17:32

And that's what we all do here at the Institute for Creation Research in Dallas.

02:17:38

We want to show how the science supports scripture. And to help you do that, we have lots of resources including a free monthly magazine called

02:17:50

Acts and Facts. And I want to encourage you to sign up for that. You just go to icr .org

02:17:56

on your little device or big device and icr .org and click sign up.

02:18:02

And I want to sign up for this. I want to hear more about these fossils. I want to hear more about the design features in creatures that support the idea of creation.

02:18:11

Creation in the flood. The Bible got it right. And every month for free you can get sort of more faith building science.

02:18:21

Science that supports scripture. Well I hope you have the great rest of your conference and we'll see you in our next session about dinosaurs.

02:18:37

I'd like to welcome Dr. Derek Zahn. He is the lead faculty of the Jessup School of Christian Leadership.

02:18:43

Derek is a passionate, he is passionate about developing leaders for the cause of Christ. Since 1990 he has served as a youth worker, cross cultural church planner, associate pastor, interim pastor and senior pastor.

02:18:57

He has ministered in nine countries, spoken at conferences in Cameroon, Uganda and India and lived and ministered with his family for ten years in Mexico.

02:19:07

His undergraduate degree is from University of California Davis. He has a Master of Divinity and Doctor of Philosophy degrees from Fuller Theological Seminary.

02:19:16

At William Jessup University Derek teaches leadership to undergraduate and graduate students.

02:19:21

Welcome Dr. Derek Zahn. Good evening. My name is Dr. Derek Zahn and I have been asked to speak on why

02:19:30

I trust the Bible. First, what is the Bible? The Bible is 66 books, 39 books in the

02:19:39

Old Testament, 27 books in the New Testament written by over 40 authors, scholars and kings, shepherds and farmers, priests and physicians, tent makers and fishermen, peasants and philosophers.

02:19:57

Some wrote in the wilderness, others in dungeons, some from a palace, others on a military campaign.

02:20:06

The earliest books of the Bible may date from around the 13th century before Christ and the last books from around 90

02:20:15

AD, more than a 1300 year period. The Bible was the first book ever printed and has now been translated into over 2 ,000 languages.

02:20:28

The Bible is the most studied book in world history. But what does the

02:20:34

Bible say about itself? Over 2 ,000 times in the

02:20:42

Old Testament there are clauses like, and God spoke, the word of the

02:20:47

Lord came, and God said. In the New Testament, 2

02:20:52

Peter chapter 1 and verse 21 says, Prophets, though human, spoke from God as they were carried along by the

02:21:02

Holy Spirit. The Bible claims to be the word of God. But the mere fact that the

02:21:09

Bible claims to be the word of God does not automatically mean that it is.

02:21:14

If your friend claims to be a watermelon, that doesn't mean he is.

02:21:20

What matters is the convincing evidence inside and outside the

02:21:25

Bible that it is the word of God. Before we go into that, let's talk for just a moment about why we should not trust the

02:21:35

Bible. Do not trust the Bible because of your parents' faith.

02:21:43

Now, understanding the faith of people you respect is a great place to start. But don't stop there.

02:21:50

Make your faith your own. Come to terms yourself with the trustworthiness of the

02:21:58

Bible. You don't dress just like your parents, do you? You have your own music.

02:22:05

You have your own habits. Be sure to have your own faith. Well, why should we trust the

02:22:13

Bible? Well, one reason is its amazing unity. Although the

02:22:19

Bible is composed by a diverse group of people from different cultures and different languages over more than a millennia, it's a unity.

02:22:29

And that unity reveals the hand of God. The Bible deals with some controversial topics.

02:22:37

Marriage, Satan, deception, sin, sex, murder.

02:22:44

That's just the first four chapters. From there, it goes on to destruction and politics, race,

02:22:51

Israel, Jesus, the church, hope, and a closing battle that is better than any

02:22:57

Avengers movie. Yet the Bible coheres. Lest anyone think that this is not remarkable, consider this exercise.

02:23:07

Find ten people from your neighborhood with similar cultural backgrounds who happen to speak the same language.

02:23:15

Ask them to write their opinion on only one controversial topic like, let's say, the meaning of life.

02:23:24

Would you expect them all to agree? I don't think so. The Bible does not consist of merely ten authors, but forty.

02:23:34

It was written not in one generation, but over thirteen hundred years or more. Not by authors of the same educational background, culture, and language, but with vastly different educational experiences from many different cultures, from three continents, speaking three different languages, who wrote not just on one subject, but on many.

02:23:57

And yet the Bible is a unity. It's harmony unexplained by coincidence.

02:24:06

From beginning to end, the Bible is one unfolding story of God's plan to win his family back, to bring his kingdom fully to bear.

02:24:22

God does this chiefly through the saving work of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

02:24:29

Jesus is the center of the Bible's unity. The Old Testament points to Jesus and the

02:24:34

New Testament springs from Jesus' life, ministry, and spirit.

02:24:42

No other book has such credentials, or even comes close. Victor Hugo said,

02:24:48

England has two books, the Bible and Shakespeare.

02:24:54

England made Shakespeare, but the Bible made

02:25:00

England. Well, we can also trust the Bible because of fulfilled prophecy.

02:25:07

In the 19th century, there was a philosopher named Philo, and there was a historian named Josephus. They considered all

02:25:14

Biblical authors to be prophets. 2 Peter chapter 1 and verse 19 says, we have the prophetic message as something completely reliable.

02:25:27

The purpose of prophecy is to let us know that God exists and that he has a plan for this world by foretelling events hundreds of years in advance.

02:25:39

The Bible demonstrates a knowledge of the future too specific to be a good guess.

02:25:46

Consider this example. The prophet Isaiah wrote around 700 B .C.

02:25:52

At that time, the city of Jerusalem was built and the temple standing.

02:25:58

And yet, Isaiah chapters 44 and 45 prophesy about a King Cyrus who will say of Jerusalem, let it be rebuilt and of the temple, let its foundations be laid.

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It doesn't sound quite right. At that time, Jerusalem was built and the temple was on top of its foundation.

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100 years later, Jerusalem and the temple were destroyed.

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And sure enough, 160 years after Isaiah, a Persian King named

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Cyrus decreed to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem.

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Isaiah predicted that a man named Cyrus who would be born in another 100 years would give the command to rebuild the temple which was actually standing when he wrote.

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It happened and as far from the only scriptural prophecy to be fulfilled.

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Fulfilled prophecy evidences the trustworthiness of the Bible and the existence of God.

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Well, we can also trust the Bible because of Jesus and the apostles.

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John Bright was an Old Testament scholar. He reminds, Jesus Christ himself trusted the

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Old Testament and treated it as authoritative. In his time on earth,

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Jesus knew no other scripture. Jesus knew no other God than the

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God of the Old Testament, his father. Jesus confronted the devil face to face saying, it is written.

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Referring to the Old Testament. So, it is not simplistic but entirely profound to say if the

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Old Testament was good enough for Jesus, it is good enough for you and me.

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But Jesus was not alone. For the first two decades after Jesus' resurrection, the only parts of the

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New Testament were fragmentary accounts of his life and teaching. During this time, the church dramatically extended its influence into Syria and Asia Minor and North Africa.

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And what the church was teaching and preaching was the

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Old Testament, reinterpreted by Jesus and his followers.

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We can also say if the Old Testament was good enough for the first followers of Jesus Christ, it is good enough for you and me.

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Well, we can trust the Bible because of its promise of reward. Now, I'm not talking about a heretical prosperity gospel, which of course is no gospel at all.

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The lives of Paul, Jesus, the first Christians, the early church, they all clearly testify to the emptiness of the so called prosperity gospel.

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But I am saying that the Bible contains unflinching promises of reward for those people who will live by it.

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Joshua 1 .8 says, keep this book of the law always on your lips. Meditate on it day and night so that you may be careful to do everything written in it.

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Then you will be prosperous and successful. Psalm 1 said, blessed is the one whose delight is in the law of the

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Lord. In Matthew chapter 7 verses 24 to 27 Jesus said, everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock.

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Second Timothy chapter 3 and verse 16 reminds, all scripture is God breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness.

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My friend, scripture brings its own reward. You and I need to be taught.

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You and I need to be rebuked on occasion. You and I need to be corrected.

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And you and I need to be trained in the righteousness of God. Well friends, another reason we trust the

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Bible is a recognition that life is tremendously complex and sometimes heartbreakingly difficult.

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Yet the Bible explains human suffering. It points to the great reality that this world is not as it should be.

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It reminds and it enables the possibility of human flourishing.

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And the Bible even allows for mystery. So why trust the

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Bible? Well, we just lack other good options. Our culture today abounds in technological advances, religious pluralism, and secular humanism.

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But I do not see other sources of wisdom that approach the

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Bible. Now, cool thing is that the resources that I have used to put this message together, you can use as well.

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I would encourage you to check them out and to go on further in your own study about the trustworthiness of the

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Bible. People have wondered if the Bible really works for a long time.

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But I can tell you based on my personal experience that it does.

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For nearly 2 ,000 years in culture after culture, in language after language, person after person has personally experienced the trustworthiness of the

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Bible as I have. When I was 21 years old,

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I was in the Central American country of Honduras working at a medical clinic.

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And in that season of my life, my particular assignment was to help build a wall around that clinic.

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Now at the time, I was praying about how to live my own life. And it occurred to me that each of our days is a little bit like a brick.

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We lay one brick down, we pick up another and we put it in front of the previous brick and we are building a life day by day brick by brick.

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We want to build a life that somehow by the end of it would be worth it, worth our effort.

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Now I'd like to think that way back then in Honduras that I worked just as hard as the

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Honduran bricklayers that I was working with but I certainly didn't work as effectively.

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The part of the wall that I built ended up crooked and weak.

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Their part was straight and strong. I was placing each brick in relation to the last, doing the best

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I could at a skill that was entirely new to me, frankly guessing quite a bit.

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Brick after brick what I was doing never seemed wrong until I backed up and got some perspective on this wall

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I was trying to build. Those Honduran bricklayers they had something

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I lacked. An external point of reference. A fishing line stretched right along the section of the wall they were building.

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It was easy to miss but it was their true guide. It was the key to the power and beauty of their work.

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They didn't trust their eye, they didn't trust the brick they'd just put down. They trusted an external reference.

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I needed something outside me to guide me as I built my life day by day.

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That standard had to start before me and extend long after my time would be done. It had to be level.

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It had to be reliable. It had to be true. It had to have been tested for centuries.

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It had to be absolutely trustworthy. My friends, that standard is the

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Bible. I have never regretted putting my trust in the scriptures.

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Whatever brick you're about to lay down in your life, maybe you're making an important decision about a relationship or maybe you're making an important decision about where you will continue your education or what you will give the days of your life to.

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You want to benefit from having a trustworthy guide in your life.

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That guide is the Bible. If you want a life that is satisfying, full, and fruitful, a life that is strong and beautiful, trust the

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Bible. Read it. Memorize it. And live it.