Mozambique Teaching

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This week and four other weeks, you will see members of the
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Mozambique team presenting some of the lessons that we're going to do in Mozambique to you.
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This will give you an opportunity to find out who are the people who are going. Each of us will give you a brief testimony of our lives, how the
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Lord saved us. And we will also be teaching one of the lessons that we will be actually teaching the people in Mozambique themselves.
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One thing we would really like you all to do is to pray for us because you'll see many of us sweating the next four weeks.
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We'll be sweating a lot more in Mozambique. And there is a prayer card here. So if you don't have one already when you leave, please take one and keep us in your prayers.
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August 8th is when we will be leaving and we'll be continuing our preparations until that time.
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So we will in all these Sunday school classes, we will have a brief time of testimony. We will take about five minutes to share what
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God did in our lives to save us. And we'll have a few moments of questions if you have anything about individuals, who we are and anything about our salvation.
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And then we'll spend about half an hour to 35 minutes teaching you the lesson. The lessons here, we have 15 lessons that we're going to share in Mozambique.
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They go from Genesis 1 through 11 and they'll be covering from creation until the flood.
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And this is a chronological Bible teaching. And when we leave, there'll be another group who comes and picks it up from there.
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And we will be teaching in venues such as this where we'll have men together and teach them.
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We will be preaching in the evening sermons. We'll be going heart to heart, talking to people about Christ.
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And we'll have different forums, men, women and children. And in fact, right now we have the women who will be teaching, teaching the women.
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And we have two teams who are teaching children the same lesson that we are teaching, that I'm going to be teaching you today.
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So if you are here today and you are a believer, what you will study from the
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Bible will seem kind of, OK, I knew most of these things already. But I pray that the truth that we learn will help you to look at God as creator once again in fresh light.
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And that your hearts would glorify God for who he is. And not only that, when you listen to the way in which this is presented, you will realize that there are ways in which to present the truth of the gospel to people who have no idea of who
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God is. And hopefully it will help you evangelize also when you go out from here. But if you're here today and you are not sure that who
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Jesus Christ is and what he has done on your behalf, here is a great opportunity to know this great and glorious God.
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So I pray that you would recognize what God says about himself and that you would bow your knees to him.
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I encourage questions during this whole session. And but we will hopefully have some time also at the end for questions that may be not directly related to what's being taught.
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I'll explain some of the things that we can do after the class as well. Barry here was just directing people from the front.
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We have an elevator. So week after week, if you need to use the elevator for the upstairs classes,
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Barry, this weekend, there'll be at least one man manning the elevators for you to come up. Elevators is right outside this door.
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And I wish I wasn't sweating so much. OK, so we'll begin with my testimony.
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I'm going to read a passage. You don't have to turn there. And that, I think, just will help you fix your mind on the greatness of what
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God has done in each of our lives. And in my life as well. This is in Colossians, chapter two.
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Paul is saying, after having talked about what God has already done, he says, And you who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh,
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God made a life together with him, having forgiven all our trespasses by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands.
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This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. I was born in India, as you can mostly guess.
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I was not a Hindu, as most of you probably may not know, when I was born. By God's grace, he let me be born into a
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Protestant Christian family. Sadly, even in India, some of the churches have fallen away from the truth.
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Two hundred years ago, these were strong and flourishing churches. But the church to which I used to go was mostly dead.
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It's similar to the Anglican type of church or Episcopal that you're familiar with here. My parents, when
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I was born, they raised me in a godly environment. They taught me the Bible. They disciplined me. They taught me what it was to fear
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God. And as I grew up, I was not one of those, you know, let's break all the rules kind of kid.
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I know I try to find out all the rules and try to keep them, stay out of trouble. Before society, a nice kid, everybody liked to have me help them.
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Well, not everybody, but most people who didn't know me well enough. And under this facade of conforming to rules of society,
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I thought I was doing pretty well. Until God started to show that what
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I was doing on the outside was just a hypocritical lifestyle. I knew what was in my heart.
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And what people thought of me was nothing to what was really going on on the inside. As I grew up,
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I didn't question the existence of God. You know, you have 33, well, too many gods in India, small g's, that people worship.
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And the thought never comes to question that. But the question that came to me when I was young was, why do
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I need to worship this God? You know, what do I, why do I have to bow my knees before one
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God? And if there is a God, so be it. But I don't need to do anything particular to this one particular
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God. Especially as I grew up, I said, well, how can just the
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God of the Bible be true? I mean, 80 % of Indians are Hindus. So, you know, they can't all be wrong.
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So growing up, had all these questions. But ultimately, I said, you know, searching after God has its own rewards.
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You know, I don't want to be in jail. I don't want to be, you know, drunk and without money. I'd rather look after the things that God says, because I was taught the things that are pleasing to him, which won't keep me in trouble.
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But then I said, if I were to die, I don't think I can go to hell.
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Because, you know, there's so many people who don't even believe in Jesus. And I'm with the majority, so I should be
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OK. In the verse that I read to you, where I was, was I was dead in my trespasses.
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And I didn't even know it. I thought I was doing fine. But when I was about 16 years old,
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God began to convict me of my sin. The church that I was going to, like I said, was dead. But people used to come and say something about Jesus.
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And they used to have something called a liturgy, which used to say like the Apostles' Creed. And then we used to have some hymns that talk about who
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Jesus is. And as I kept listening to these, which was essentially the word of God through various means being directed towards me,
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I realized that there was something more than just an intellectual knowledge or even a moral conformity to what society was doing.
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And in fact, God so chose to introduce a period of suffering in our lives at that time.
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My family was going through a severe financial strain. There was a lot of relational issues, and we didn't know when we were going to get our next meal.
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And curiously enough, when we go through suffering is when people start to look up to God. And I think
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C .S. Lewis said that's his megaphone to wake us up and call us to our
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God himself. So I started coming here, and then there were what we call
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Lenten services where there used to be services on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. And there used to be men who came and proclaimed the gospel.
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And as God was starting to do this quickening work in my heart, and I come here and I would just sit down like you're sitting here, and I'd be listening to these men, and the man would disappear.
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The words that were being spoken were just coming straight at me. And I just could not hide from the
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God who was speaking to me about the depth of my sin and the need for salvation.
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When I was confronted with the holiness of God and the righteous requirements that I need to actually give up my life of sin and repent from it and believe in him, it was too much.
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I said, you know what, there must be a better way for me to deal with this. Maybe I can work harder, do things in greater strength.
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I'm used to doing things that my parents have told me, so I should be able to do things better. I tried and tried, and by the grace of God, his spirit was continuing to work in me, where he brought me to the point where I could say, conclude by God's grace, that I need to either surrender to God and submit to him or else
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I would die. Because the record of debt against us, as we read in Colossians, was just too much.
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When I was confronted by the grace of God of his holiness, there was no choice but to submit.
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And that, by God's grace, he enabled me to do. One day, the scales fell away, and I realized that my debt was nailed to the cross by what
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Christ has done. And he made alive this sinner who was stubborn in my own sin and refusing to recognize the goodness of God.
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And he saved me. The first few months were euphoric. As those of you who have been saved know, the word was no longer just a set of rules.
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It became the word of God speaking to me. It was God intimately communing with us by his spirit.
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And it was just a joyful, joyful experience. And not only was it an emotional honeymoon, it was also a life change.
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I mean, the people around me could see that this was no longer a guy who was just conforming to moral society.
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But here was, excuse me, we've changed things around a bit,
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Carol. But here was somebody whose life was changed by the power of God, a whole life that is redirected towards the things of God and away from the things of the world.
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And as I began to grow in the knowledge of God, I realized that he had given me some gifts, and I needed to be using them for his glory.
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I can no longer live for myself, but I need to live for Christ. So I used to teach in Sunday school in India, and then
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I got to teaching children mostly when I came here. And now, by God's grace, he has taught me more, and I just graduated from my
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Master's in Divinity. And I hope that he will continue to use me for his glory while I live.
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God is good indeed, isn't he? Okay, with that, we'll jump into our lesson.
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The lesson that we are going to be looking at is God creating the heavens and the earth. There were two parts to this lesson.
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One was to be taught today and the next week, but we will not be doing our regular class next week.
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We'll meet up again, I think, in three weeks from now when the next Mozambique teacher will be before you.
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There are two purposes for this class. The first one will be looking at the events of God's creation on day one and two.
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We are going to see how God created everything out of nothing. The second aspect of this lesson is going to cover
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God's character and attributes. When we see how he created this world and the heavens, when we see how
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God is our creator, we are going to learn something about him, his power, and we are going to glorify him for that.
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As I'm going to go through this lesson, whether you like it or not, you're going to be thinking of certain theories that are very popular in the world today.
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Any idea what they might be? Evolution is very popular, so you'll be having some questions.
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I will not be covering evolution or why it is false. My goal here is to just give you the biblical account of creation and why that is true.
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We will have some time later to talk about some of the problems that the world comes up with.
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Sadly, I think even some Christians are being drawn into. The beginning.
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There are two things, especially if some of you are interested in origins, you will realize that there are two things that people are very, very concerned about in the world.
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One of them is the creation of the earth and that if you extrapolate it, it will go all the way back to creation of everything.
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Where did everything start? And then the other creation that people are interested in is the creation of life.
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How did life begin? In fact, some of the theories of beginning of life on earth are out of this world.
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What can I say? I think aliens brought life here first. But feel free to ask questions if you have.
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I have some books here, some good books. I think all these are the good ones that will talk to you about scriptural understanding of the creation.
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And here are some bad books. And I just put them there because if ever you are playing with evolution and you are a
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Christian, you want to deal with how do Christians who believe in evolution deal with the atonement.
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And if you see the hoops that these men will jump through, you will start a campaign against that.
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No, just stick to the Bible. So what we are going to do is we're going to just study what
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God has told us in the scriptures. We are going to look through the book of Genesis. And what you will find is everything that is said in the book of Genesis is affirmed in the rest of scripture.
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And why is that? Because it is true. And God doesn't change his mind.
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What he has said in the first book remains true in the last book. What he has said will not change.
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In fact, Genesis was written 3 ,500 years ago.
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And you have the New Testament written 2 ,000 years ago, which is about 1 ,500 years later. And everything that is said there has been affirmed.
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In the world, people take the book of Genesis and say, oh, you know what, that's just myths, things that are there in the book of Genesis.
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Somebody write a story just like the Babylonian creation myths. And one thing that these people cannot avoid is egg on their face when constantly, over and over and over again, things that the secular scholars have disputed, they say, well, that can't be true.
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And they go around, and 20 years later, they find, oh, that town, yeah, it is there. We just dug it up.
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And archaeology has constantly proved these people to be false for things that they said never existed, names of people, towns, and cities.
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You and I don't need archaeology to prove that this Bible is true, because God has said it is true, and that's sufficient for us.
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But that is a problem that secular people run into all the time. So we are going to listen to what God says in the
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Bible. It is true history. God is going to tell us what happened in the beginning.
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If we were going to teach this in Mozambique, we would have taught three lessons already. We would have taught them about the reliability of God's word.
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We would have talked about who God is. And we would have talked about the creation of spirit beings, which happens before this.
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But we are just picking up in the fourth lesson, which is the creation of the physical universe.
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How many of you here know what Genesis means? What does the word Genesis mean? Beginning, origin.
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And that's why the book is called Genesis. It is the beginning of many things, but today we are going to look at the beginning of the universe.
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All things had a beginning. All things had a beginning, except God.
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Thank you, because there was no one who existed before the beginning, except God himself.
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The question is, what did God use to create things in the beginning? Nothing. And how do we know that God didn't use anything to create in the beginning?
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It says in Scripture, and let's read that in Genesis chapter 1. You can open your Bibles to Genesis 1.
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The Scripture will be read from there. The other verses you don't have to turn to, but my brother Joey here will read those too.
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In the beginning, God created. In fact, that word that is used there for created is a very special word, which talks about only
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God doing this kind of creation. It is not a creation that man does where he fashions up buildings.
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Here is a word, it's called bara in Hebrew, and it is a word that is uniquely used of how
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God creates out of nothing. He is the one who creates out of nothing.
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When we build things, if you build a house, what are the things you need to build a house? A few things, a lot of things
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I know. Lumber, tools, concrete.
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There's a number of things that you need to collect together, put them together, and then build them up. That's fashioning, forming.
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You need to put things together and then create them. Is there anything you can think of that you can create out of nothing?
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Can man create something out of nothing? Yes? Yeah, that's buried deeply in our heart.
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It's not that hard. But to fashion something out of nothing is impossible.
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No matter what you look, even concepts, you have to start with something, and it is starting with something outside of yourself.
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But God and God alone was able to create everything that we see around us out of nothing.
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Now, if you tell me that you understand that fully, you should be teaching the lesson here. I don't, and it just blows my mind that God can just create everything that we see out of nothing.
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In Hebrews 11, verse 3, we read, What is seen was not made out of things that are visible.
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And the only way that you can understand and believe it is by faith. It's when God reveals it to you that you can know that the heavens and the earth that we read in Genesis 1 .1
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were all made out of nothing. And it was literally made.
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Here is not just a thought or an idea. God made everything that we see physically out of nothing.
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And God alone can make things out of nothing. So how is it possible for God to make something out of nothing?
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Nothing is too hard for God to do. We read in Jeremiah 32, verse 17.
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Oh, that's okay. I got it. 32, 17.
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Our Lord God, behold, you have made the heavens and the earth by your great power and by our outstretched arm.
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Nothing is too difficult for thee. You know a song that goes with this verse? We should sing that in our church someday.
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It just blows our mind to realize how nothing, absolutely nothing, is difficult for God to do.
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And when you think of God, and I want you to think in terms of evangelism here.
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When we say God, we have a lot of biblical concepts that are filling our minds. When you think of an unbeliever, the
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God that they can think of is most likely not the God of the Bible. And the way for people to understand how otherly
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God is than us is to start with where they are. You know, human beings. And try to compare man with God.
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And that just quickly gets to the point where you realize God is incomparable with man. So is anyone stronger than God?
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The strongest of men is not stronger than God. Now think of spirits. Are angels stronger than God?
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Absolutely not. They were created by him. Is Satan the arch enemy? Is he greater than God?
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No, he was kicked out of heaven. Are there demons? No. There's nothing, no one who is stronger than God is because God alone is all powerful.
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Not only is he all powerful, he is also all knowing. When we talked about creating out of nothing or creating through something, we all had to learn how to do that.
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If you ask me to build a house today, and even if I attempted it, it won't be standing too long.
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I don't know how to build houses. I have to go read a book. I have to get some help. And most of you, us here, well, all of us here were born without too much knowledge.
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And we had to learn it, you know, whether we went to school or we learned as an apprentice by trial and error, by making mistakes and learning from it.
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And, in fact, most of you who are working, you probably have some specialized knowledge in a particular area because you've learned it, you've worked at it, and you've grown stronger at it.
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But if I were to ask you, you know, are you the world's expert on this subject from the beginning of time until now and for all eternity,
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I think you'll be humble enough to admit that you're not. None of us is. No matter how much we know in our subject, we can always keep learning more.
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And in any other subject, we would humbly admit that we don't know too much. And the question is, when we think about ourselves and our limited knowledge, and we look up to God who created everything, did he need anybody to teach him?
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No. He had and has all of this knowledge in and of himself because he is
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God. And when we think of all that we know and how much time it has taken for you to gather them, and how much we don't know, and you realize that God knows everything, and he knew that before time began.
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He didn't have to learn it. That should tell you something about the nature and the greatness of our
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God. So there is nothing that God doesn't know and doesn't understand.
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I'd like to read Romans 11, 33 and 34. Who has known the mind of God?
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What a great God we serve. Now let's get into verse 2 of Genesis chapter 1.
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The earth was formless and void. It says tohu and bohu, desolate, empty and formless.
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We're going to now see how God is going to form this heavens and the earth that he has created. And we're also going to see how he fills it, populates it with life.
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We see that the earth was covered with darkness. How many of you have been in a cave where you see these stalactites, stalagmites?
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And did they do that trick of turning off the light when you go down? My daughter hates it.
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But you know how it is to have darkness. But here you go to the primeval history and here you have utter, total and complete darkness.
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The earth is fully, tangibly dark. Not just is it dark, but we hear that it was covered with water.
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There was no dry land to set our feet on. The water covered the entire world and there was no life in the waters either.
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And we're going to now see the power of God as he creates out of this matter that God had already created.
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We read in verse 2 that the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the water. It was hovering.
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It was God, the Father, God the Son, God the Spirit, ready to create out of this matter, fashion, form things that we can enjoy, that we enjoy today.
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There is a power of God. In fact, when we create machines, things that move, you need a motor or something that will let things move.
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And you need to plug that into the power before it will let everything that you created work out. And God is our ultimate prime mover.
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Without God, nothing can have its existence. And here you're going to see God fashioning and giving life to his creation.
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And he begins that in verse 2. I mentioned already God the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. All of them were involved in this creation.
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Here is an attribute of God. God is one, and yet he is three in one.
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The Almighty God, who is the creator of everything. Now, just as we've realized we don't understand how powerful
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God is, how God knows everything, we don't know how God is a trinity.
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We just know that the Bible says so, and we believe it. And that's all we need to know. God is powerful, and yet he is three in one.
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Let's now go to the first day in Genesis 1, verse 3. Let there be light, and there was light.
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God said, and it was there. Many of us would like to create things by just saying things, but I imagine that they are there, but they're not.
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I like to say when I'm driving down the car, Lord, let there be a gas station around the corner.
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Well, God sometimes graciously lets me get to the point at that point in time, but I can't create out of nothing.
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In fact, light is a wave or a particle. Yes, thank you.
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Scientists are understanding the nature of this marvelous thing called light that God has created, and we are still learning.
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We are learning to use it. We are experiencing it. But God alone created it, and our science is getting to the point where we are learning a lot more of how great this
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God is who created what we see around us. But not just did he create it by speaking.
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Can you read verse 4, Joey? He saw that it was good.
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You will see that each time God creates something, he's going to say that it is good. You know, when we create things as humans, we like things.
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We like our cars. We like our clothes. Everything around us we like.
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But we'll be honest enough to say that nothing that we create is perfect. Most of the things that we have, cars, they need repair.
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They wear out. They need to be replaced. The things that we make, no matter how much money you spend on it, maybe
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Charlie can tell me, what is the most expensive sound system in Bose? Thank you.
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And in another 10 years, will that be improved upon? Thank you.
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No matter how hard we try, what we know today, we will improve upon it tomorrow.
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But what God did was perfect. It needed no improving upon at all.
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And the reason is because God himself is perfect. And when he makes things, he makes them exactly as he wants them to be.
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And not only is God perfect in his creation, he is flawless in himself. And the
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Bible calls that holy. God is utterly and completely holy in all that he does.
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If you read Psalm 18, verse 30, it says, as for God, his way is perfect.
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And, in fact, Isaiah 6, 3 says, holy, holy, holy is the Lord. God's ways are just beyond our ways, but he is perfection himself.
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In Genesis 1, 5, I think we read that before, we see God dividing the light from the darkness.
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And, in fact, this is the first day and the first night. Out of the complete and utter darkness, we now see the day and the light.
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And how do you think the sunrise was on that first day? Spectacular, yes.
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Thank you, Steve. I didn't mean to do this, but that was a trick question. There was no sun, but whatever it was, it was spectacular, yes.
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We see God create the light, but we will see in day four God create the sun. In fact, you see a day and night, so the earth was rotating.
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And there was an object of light that was fixed, so that you could see day and night in periodicity.
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But the light that was created was not the sun. That was created in verse 4. But that began the motion of the rest of the creation that God would do in six days.
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So, now let's go to second day, Genesis 1, verses 6 through 8. Yes. In the new heaven and the new earth,
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Christ himself is the light and you will not need the sun there anymore. And that may very well be true.
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The Bible doesn't tell us that he created another physical light that was giving the light till day four.
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And we don't know. Yes. Absolutely.
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That is definitely true, that light in itself was created at that point. But how that was visible to the earth could have been just light without a light -emitting body to do it.
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Or it could be God himself. And actually, if you are interested, some of these books here talk about what
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Christians think and those two books talk about what everybody else does. Yes.
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And that is a good question. In fact, I want to talk about it once we are done. We are almost done with the lesson here. To talk about why some
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Christians have some hermeneutical challenges with reading this. And we will cover that.
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I'm glad you brought that up. So, day 2, verses 6 through 8. We see now
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God creating the air and the sky. We have firmament, expanse.
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Until now, what we were looking at was the waters covering the face of the earth. But we are not told what was above it.
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And here you see for the first time, there is an atmosphere. And God is stretching out, the word used is rakia, which is like hammering it out and leaving it over the earth.
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Here you have a breathable, livable atmosphere for all his living creatures that he is going to make.
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And here he is saying that the waters are separated from above and below. And in fact, we will look at some of the other views on this.
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But basically all it is, is you have waters on the earth and you have waters above in the atmosphere.
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And you have water that will actually come down later. But you see the separation of the water vertically.
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And not just that, when God merely spoke, once again, by his word, the whole firmament was created.
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If he could make a hole through that and see the expanse of the sky, that would still dazzle us.
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You know, the extent and the vastness of the sky that God has made. And all of that we can see,
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God just spoke into existence. And what a glorious sky that he has made for us.
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We have seen day one and day two. So let's kind of summarize what we have learned today. Unlike man's theories,
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God's written account of revelation does not change. Man's theories, over time, they came up with various ways that they thought the beginning of things happened.
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And that will continue to change as people come up with more theories. But God's account does not change.
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It is going to remain the same. And the reason is because God was there at the beginning. None of us were.
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We can summarize, guess, come up with theories. But he alone can tell us.
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He was the sovereign creator. And he alone knows all things. And how they came to be.
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And he has told us in his word how he has created it. And that should be sufficient for us. So that was the first aspect.
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We've seen what God has created. And secondly, we also learned that God is absolutely sovereign. We've seen the power of God in creation.
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We've seen the knowledge of God in making all these things come to pass. And when we look at creation around us, especially as believers, we should not walk away from it like it says in Psalm 19.
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You look at heavens and they should declare God's glory to you. And your heart should rejoice at this great and powerful
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God who has created, we will see later, all of this for us. So when you go about this week, and as you see the sky, as you see the waters,
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I mean even as you drive across the reservoir, you want to just thank
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God for the beautiful creation that he has made. We see day and night because God decided that we would have an earth rotating on its axis.
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He is infinitely greater than all that we can imagine. And he has given us the Bible, his word, so we can know him.
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In the moments that we have remaining, I want to take some questions. I'll reserve your question for the last because I want to deal with it more carefully.
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Are there any other questions on what we have seen so far? Yes. The earth was formless, so the earth having a form happened obviously beyond the existence of the
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Trinity. The earth being formless was a day one event or day one situation or pre -day one situation?
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This is everything. In verse 1 is when time begins. You don't have time before. And we see
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God creating heavens and earth. And I think this is good for us to understand this verse. Heavens and earth talks about everything.
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It is a phrase that talks about everything that we can see was made in the beginning.
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So you are looking at day one going all the way until there is light. And we don't have really day and night until the light because we don't have the earth spinning and the light given.
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But the first moment of creation, you have the heavens and earth, which is everything. And in the first forming of it, you have the light.
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I don't know if I answered you clearly enough. So the heavens and earth, the entire world would be considered universe.
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Yes, thank you. That is the word. The universe was created in the beginning. Yes, yes, yes.
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So he, he, what is that? A spinning gooey rock.
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Rock and water. Yes. Any other questions?
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Very briefly, let's walk through the rest of the days and we'll get into this question because that will help us in our hermeneutics.
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Day one and two we've seen. Day three, day one we have light separating darkness from the light.
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We have day two where we have the waters above and the waters below. Day three, you see the waters below separating.
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You see dry land up here because God has a plan for the dry land. He doesn't want water world, you know, just water and fishes.
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I haven't seen it, but it doesn't look too attractive to me. So you have the dry land.
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And then in day three you also see vegetation. So, in fact, if you look at any plant and tree outside, they are out of their own kind.
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So they have a direct line of link that goes back to God who created them on day three.
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So you have day three, the creation. Day four is when we see finally the stars and everything filling out the expanse of the space that is beyond us.
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And we see the sun, moon, and the stars. And day five you see the fishes and the birds.
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And day six you see the animals and ultimately man. And we see how
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God makes all of these things for man in order for him to have dominion over and reflect
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God's image as his creation in his image.
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But let's take a moment now to talk about hermeneutics. So how do you read
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Genesis 1? Actually, you know, all of Genesis, but Genesis 1 I think most people have trouble with.
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How are we supposed to read Genesis 1? Yes, Lewis. The language that is used is it says what it means.
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Right. And one of the reasons that they said a 24 -hour day.
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Well, they said, well, a 24 -hour day, but there's no reason to not think it's a 24 -hour day.
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Thank you. The writer here, it doesn't indicate the writer is using similes or using a metaphor.
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He says day. He means a day as Moses would have thought of a day. And he thinks,
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OK, sunrise and sunset. That's a day. That's the way to write it. So a little reading of the text, you know, without any other input will lead you to that conclusion that everything that we're seeing is literal.
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In fact, if some of you have are interested, you may want to read this book.
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This has a lot of both scientific as well as hermeneutical issues about how do you read the text?
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And what normally happens is Christians, they look at the scientific theory. And, you know, before I even begin this,
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I want to say there is no conflict between the Bible and science. The Bible tells us what has happened.
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And science, the purpose is to discover what is around us. And in fact, this this
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I went to this class. This man's name is Dr. Kurt Weiss. He is a scientist. He's a geologist.
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And he says the biggest problem scientists have is they're throwing away the most important, valuable piece of data that they should have in their scientific research.
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And that is the Bible. The Bible tells you what happened. And the scientists throw this away and look at everything else in the created world.
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And with we will find after a day, not day six, but after the fall, man's mind is not as clear as it was created to be.
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Man fell and he is deluded and he seeks to pervert the truth. And without the truth of the scripture, many of the scientists, scientific theories are getting flawed.
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And in fact, that book, if you are a scientist, you would really want to read because he says, you know, here is the data that the scientists see.
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And here are the theories that you try to reconcile this data that you see around us. But if you go down a path where you reject the truth of scripture, then you have a difficult time.
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You know, just saying that these two are reconcilable because the scientific theories of evolution today are irreconcilable with the truth of scripture.
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But I wouldn't even call it scientific theory. I would say the theory of evolution is incompatible with this, with the theory of with the truth of scripture.
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But to go back a little bit further. So what happens is some well -meaning Christians, what they do is they say,
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OK, let's say, for example, one of the theories is, you know, the sun is spinning at some speed at some mass and you have some particulate matter coming out and forming planets around the sun.
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So you have an X amount of time between the sun's creation and the and the Earth's creation and a certain sequence in which this is created.
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So that's science. And I have Bible. I don't want the Bible to be false. So what do
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I do? Let me look at ways in which I can interpret it. I mean, honestly, that is the truth. You read these two books.
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That's what they will say, which is if I just read the Bible, I won't come up with a non 24 hour day.
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But since I have to reconcile science or the theories that are going around in science,
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I have to come up with some ways of interpreting it. And in fact, Lewis picked up one of those things, which is the 24 hour day.
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And this man in that blue book, he does an excellent job of talking about how all the word Yom is used in the
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Bible and how difficult it is for you to kind of twist it to get it to the point where it's anything but a 24 hour day.
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And in fact, if you do that, the bigger problem that the people will have is, all right, where does that twisting stop?
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In which chapter of Genesis do I stop doing that non literal reading of the Bible? And and sadly, like I said, these two books, they will go all the way to saying, when did the first death occur in India?
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And because they go so far and each you will find some Christians who who just step a little bit over.
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And I think right there is a danger because once you do that, it's a slippery slope. And some men have gone all the way to accept evolution and then come up with a theory to work out what that means to human life.
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And that, I think, is very dangerous. We need to stick to the word.
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And as scientists, we need to not reject the data of of scripture. You know that God was there in the beginning and he has told us.
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And then we look at the data and do a good job as a scientist, not just what we think the world agrees.
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I think I went a little bit. Did I answer your question? Yeah. Yes, that is correct.
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Yeah, it is used in many different contexts. And there is only, I think, two times where it is used in a like a day rather than a little day.
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And I don't remember the references. Do you know? Yes. Every scientist believes
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X. Yes. Well, you would be hard pressed to find any X that every scientist believe that the nature of science is the question.
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As one of my professors said, what the scientific method really is, is that we observe some data.
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We then make up a story. Right. Except we call it material. Right.
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But we make up a story that will fit all these pieces. But then we go and try to break our story. Well, it was pointed out, actually, in the movie
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Expelled, if any of you have seen that, one of the men they were interviewing was talking about the alleged uniformity of belief on evolution.
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He said, if you get some evolution scientists together at a conference after the session is over, he said, after about the fourth beer, they'll begin to admit to you that there's this huge lack of unity of what any of this means.
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And like you say, people get intimidated by this and say, well, I don't want my Bible to be wrong, so I've got to somehow make my
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Bible fit this theory. And it never seems to occur to them that maybe the theory is wrong.
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Right. Yes. Yes, Charlie. He's saying, it's a day.
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It's a day. Any question, it's a day. Yeah. And he says that every single time.
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Yes. The interesting thing, too, is that if we lose our mind, that evolution is what's behind it.
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It's the whole engine of what's called uniformity. You know, with the Hubble spacecraft, we can see other stars throwing particles out and creating their own little solar systems and things like that.
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And the whole model of evolution is what's observable today has always been in the same way at all times.
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And therefore, if we can observe the solar system being made this way, that's how our solar system must have been made.
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Discounting the idea that a deity was hovering over the surface of the Earth with its own light sources.
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You know what I mean? So you have to discount that what we see today is the same.
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It has to be the same. It has to be the same. Yeah, right. It breaks.
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Exactly. I can't have that.
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Yes. Oh, yes.
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Right. Right. Right.
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You know what? I think there's a lot of excitement here, but I know some of you may have to leave. Why don't we close and we can continue talking.
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Those of you who can leave, need to leave, can leave, especially if you have children. So, Bruce, would you pray for us, please?