Beginnings (Genesis 1-11) / Lesson 2: The Foundation of Time

excited about being able to share these things with you and what we're going to be talking about tonight is lesson two, the foundation of time. Before I even begin on it though, this morning, you know, I talk about this and just, I mainly tell you this cause I hope you read or reading through your Bible in some way, have some kind of way that you meet with God. Mine has been the same for a long, long time. This morning in reading through the one year Bible, we're in Exodus in the Old Testament and of all places start this morning in Exodus 32 and 33 and Exodus 32 starts off by the people asking, saying, and here's what they said. They said to, they said to Aaron, we don't know where Moses is. He was on the mountain for 40 days and he said, they said to him, said, make us some gods who can lead us. And the Hebrew word used there is Elohim, which is one of the names that we have of God that we have. And then it goes on whenever they make the golden calf, they, the people saw it and exclaimed, Oh Israel, these are the Elohim who brought you up out of Egypt. So there was a mindset of a polytheistic mindset that all the gods are there. And so whenever we call God an Elohim, we're not saying that, that he's like all the rest. We're not into polytheism because God is the creator, the one true living God. As a matter of fact, in first Corinthians chapter 10, I've told you this, that the apostle Paul clarifies for it. And he said, they're not gods at all. They're demons. And he makes that clarity. But I thought it was interesting that we had that. And then one of the passages that was even today in Exodus 33 was whenever God was going to give them away and say, you know, I'm going to let a, and he says an angel lead them. And so we'll get into all that actually later on. But what I wanted to also look at was also this morning in the one year reading was Psalm 33. And I just want to read just verses six, six through nine, and I'm going to read it in the NLT, but here's what it says. The Lord merely spoke and the heavens were created. He breathed the word and all the stars were born. He assigned the sea its boundaries and locked the oceans in vast reservoirs. Let the whole world fear the Lord. Now here's the key. Those that don't fear the Lord may not believe any of that we just read. It says, let the whole world fear the Lord and let everyone stand in all of him. For when he spoke, the world began, it appeared at his command. So whenever we think about that, it's just starting off and where we're going tonight and where we're going to be heading into is we're continuing in our study in Genesis. And so tonight we're

looking at that idea of the foundation of time. And we're going to be looking at this tonight. And this is going to be the most technical one I do. So, um, I'm sorry in advance. I have spent at least a hundred hours over the last several months, just, just on this area in itself, just trying to get my head around and my heart around how to share this in a way that hopefully makes sense and, uh, can help us along the way. So let me go on and just say what I've said last week, the keys for unlocking God's redemptive story or redemption story. And I said in Genesis, and you've got this in your outline, Genesis one through 11 serves as the preamble to God's redemptive story, revealing that the human condition is rooted in three supernatural rebellions, the fall of Eden, the grant, and I just changed a little, some words, the transgression of the sons of God. I think I left yours, the watchers and the disinheritance at Babel, which set the stage for a cosmic war over the nations, ultimately won by Jesus Christ to redeem mankind and restore a global Eden. And so as we're going on tonight, uh, what I'm really wanting to share with you, calling it the foundation of time, a defense of biblical history and a young universe. If you were to look up today in on do a Google search on the age of the universe, they're debating between the universe being 3.7 billion years and 3.8 billion years. In other words, they've already decided it's billions of years. Now, by the way, if you were to go back, um, maybe even five years, they claimed it was 4.5 billion years. So let me just say this to you right now on everybody here, I just want to put this out, that if you marry your beliefs to science and the current scientific mindset, you're going to quickly become a widow because science is continually changing. They always change the boundaries, change the markers, change the thoughts, and I'm even going to show you some of them that they're having to scramble around and change recently. So as we come into this, there's some things that we need to look at in this idea

of what is the real argument that's going on, and I'm just going to simply call it the battle of worldviews. It's two opposing views of time. We need to understand this, and so stay with me if you're already getting angry at me, hang on, stay with me, all right? What do I mean by this? Well, the battle of the worldviews, really, first thing is the battle that we have here regarding a myth, and what is the myth? If you have your outline, just write this down. The myth is faith and science are opposed to each other. Faith and science are opposed to each other. In other words, if you're a person of faith, the science community will claim that you are either unintelligent, uninformed, or ignorant. In fact, me talking about this as a preacher would already just close the minds to anyone in the fields of biology and chemistry and astrophysics and geology who are of the secular mindset, okay? Because what do I know about it? And what I'm gonna conclude with, and you'll see it, is the arguments that I'm gonna give you are fine, but the ultimate argument is theological, and that's where I'm gonna take us to tonight. So the first thing is a battle of worldviews, and it's this idea that faith and science are opposed to each other.

That's a myth. What is the reality, though? Well, the reality, if you have your outline, is this. The battle is between God's word and man's word. That's the battle. And so this isn't in your outline, but just as I was thinking about this, so what's the cure? Well, the cure is going to be to have the correct prescription. In other words, have on the correct glasses to see all of science, all the facts that we are uncovering, but to see them through the right lens. Because when you look at them through the right lens, it makes perfect sense, the things that have been uncovered. So here's gonna be the idea is currently, let me just say this, in our current Western culture, the worldview of naturalism is the predominant worldview. It is what you were indoctrinated in if you went to public schools at all. It is the view that is seen everywhere we go. As a matter of fact, just came back from a Crossgates cruise, and we went to Belize was one of the places we went, and while we were there, we went on a tubing expedition in a cave, and we got in this cave.

Now, this guy, English is his second language. He speaks Spanish by his first language, and as we are going through, he's in a tube leading us, and as we're going through that cave, he says, as we look around everywhere here, we see that this was formed 65 million years ago. Now, where'd he get that? He didn't get that from his culture. He got that from the Western culture's naturalistic worldview. It's taught now as a fact. Now, how in the world did this happen? I'm gonna show you how it happened. Believe it or not, it has only even been remotely around for the last 200 years. We think, well, you're an idiot if you don't believe it. The reality is, it's only been around for a couple of hundred years. How did it happen? Well, if you have your outline, I think I put on there, the first thing I want you to see is what I'm calling the strategy of subversion. The strategy of subversion, and who is the key figure in that? Write down this. named Charles Lyell, L-Y-E-L-L, Lyell. Charles Lyell, his education was as a lawyer, so he came to the idea and came to this study and his suppositions that he developed came from the mind of a lawyer,

and it makes sense whenever you start looking at it. But here was his key statement. His key statement that he came up with was the present is the key to the past. That is called uniformitarianism. I know that's a long word. Uniformitarianism is the belief that if we go out and we look at the geology, and he was primarily looking at the geology, the mountains, and you see all those strata, and he was looking and he says, if you measure the current erosion or the current development of different strata, it may grow maybe a quarter of an inch in 100 years. So let's just do the math. And when we do the math, we come up with millions of years. And so that's kind of the goal that he came up with. And so he said, that's what it is. Now let me say that Charles Lyell was an atheist. He lived in England, he was Scottish, lived in England, grew up in a wealthy home. But listen to what he says. Now I want you to hear this. This is his words in his strategy of subversion. He makes this statement. He says, I conceived the idea. And he's talking about uniformitarianism. If ever the mosaic geology could be set down without giving a fence, you see, the predominant view was the mosaic,

talking about the Bible, the biblical view of creation, and the whole Noah, the flood of Noah, the universal flood. That was the universal mindset. But he said, if I can do it without giving a fence, it would be an historical sketch. In other words, he said, you can't do it by hitting its head on. I've got to go and try to come up with sketching out a historical view. And then look what he says, freeing the science from Moses. That was his goal. So do not think that science in itself is, as a matter of fact, geologists 75 years after him, you know what they called what he did? They called him a snake oil salesman. They said, what he taught is a lie. And so they've even come up with another thing because what he brought in in his proponent of, he was a proponent of was deep time or millions of years that had not been talked of before 1820s. And so we need to see that. Now, how did it take any hold whatsoever? Well, it was not a big subject for a while, but it started gaining momentum in the universities because you had a lot of atheists, especially in Europe, that were in our universities, in Germany and in some of these areas,

there were tons of atheistic people who in France and all of those places. And so they grabbed hold of this as a way to get free from Moses, from the Bible, from that mindset. And so as they were going along after about 20 or so years, this is a sad thing. As a matter of fact, I talked even with Kyle today about this, about what this just frightens me because a conservative professor at Princeton University, very well known his name, which brings me to the second one. I'm gonna go ahead and let me give it to you. I'm calling it the Subtlety of Compromise. The Subtlety of Compromise. His name is Charles as well, Charles Hodge. You may have heard of him. He wrote many books, has a systematic theology out there. And he believed the Bible to be the word of God. But as he was looking at Genesis chapter one, because you see, Lyle and these others knew if they could get to the word of God, culture away from the Bible. They could have them and so they started coming up they could get to the word of God. They could get to the word of God. with all these things and having all these ideas and Charles Hodge said this, They could get to the word of God.

They could get to the word of God. it is of course admitted that taking this account by itself and he's talking about Genesis 1 where it says day 1, day 2, I'm gonna look at this in just a minute, day 3, you know it would be most natural to understand the word day there in its ordinary sense. Now listen to what he did, but if that sense brings the Mosaic account into conflict and notice what he says with facts and another sense avoids such conflict, in other words millions of years, then it is obligatory, it is our responsibility instead of science, our responsibility, it's obligatory on us to adopt that other and that opened the door because not long after that Lyell along with another one I'm gonna mention in just a minute began to cater to the liberal theologians who were just looking for ways to be socially accepted, it's the monkey trap, I want social acceptance more than I want truth and that brings us to what happened next because these two dominoes had to fall before another guy who was actually a friend and student in some ways of Lyell by the name of Charles Darwin and the third thing, let me just give you this, is the third thing I have is there called the triumph of naturalism is the third one, you need to understand this, you need to understand this, you really need to understand this, I don't know how to say it any more clear, this is way Charles Darwin puts it, he who can read Sir Charles Lyell's grand work on the principles of geology, which is the book he wrote, which the future historian will recognize as having produced a revolution in natural science, yet, now here's what he says, yet if you can read it, yet does not admit to how incomprehensibly vast have been the past periods of time, in other words if you don't believe in deep time, if you don't believe in millions and billions of years, may at once close this volume and that's what he put in his book, The Origin of Species, do you see what's here? Does this make sense? Lyell had to sell the lie, sadly a theologian who I hope he's in heaven, but I can't imagine standing before God having done this, had to cower to the facts of science, open Pandora's box, open the door for Charles Darwin, listen to what Darwin says in the

Triumph of Naturalism, he said this, I have read lately that direct attacks on Christianity produce little permanent effect, now here's an atheist, listen to how he comes, listen to what he says, this is important, real good seems good, that means attacking scripture, coming against Christianity, coming against the Word of God, real good seems only to follow the slow and silent side attacks, don't take on God head on, just, sounds almost like what we're going to look at next week or the week after, did God really say? Do you hear the demonic undertones? This is how we got here. You see, 200 years ago, I would not have had to spend five minutes on this. I would have just been able to say, hey, the universe has been around about 6,000, less than 10,000 years, and we know that, you know, and the days, we're going to look at each one of those days and where they were 24-hour days, and everybody here going, well, yeah. Now, and I hope many of you still believe that, but now, you're considered naive, ignorant, foolish, not with it, because the paradigm shifted, and you and I have been raised in it. So here's what we're going to look at over these next few minutes. I'm just calling them the four foundation pillars. We're going to just wander through this, history, science, theology, and then logic. And so pillar number one, if you have your outline, is history, and this is what I mean by history. I'm talking about, I should have, could have said church history, but basically, what has been the position of the church throughout history? You see, here's probably, you've had some people say, in fact, they've even got it written in books, and even make arguments, and make these statements, and if you're uneducated or you just haven't read it, we just kind of say, oh, well, I guess that's true, is the idea that, well, man, this idea of a young earth, that is nothing but these young earth people that are around. It's a recent idea, and it's simply an attack against the true science that's out there. These guys are just quacks, and they don't know what they're talking about. Now, that is what is out there, and there are even people that are in ministry that

say these things. I read recently, one that I like has cowered to the deep time, the billions of years idea. And I'm going to show you the danger, and why it's a danger in a little bit, but let me go on. So let me just go, and let's go the myth of the old earth church. It's an idea that's out there that just says that this young earth view is a modern invention, but here's the truth, and here is the truth, okay? Now, I know you don't know some of those guys up there, but the consensus of the church fathers, the consensus of the church fathers, you haven't probably heard of some of these, Thomas Aquinas, you know, Irenaeus, you know, Ambrose, Luther, Basil, the greats, his name, that literally 98% believed in a young earth and a six day creation. The theology and foundation of the church that you say you're part of has believed that. And the other 2%, so people kind of, they'll have some people, oh, Augustine didn't say it that way. You know what Augustine believed? He believed in an instantaneous creation. He still believed in six days being literal days. So here's the statement. The myth is basically this. For the first 1800 years of the church, the overwhelming, 98% plus that other 2% also believed it just in a different way, was in a young cosmos and a literal six day creation. So what I'm sharing, it may, you may say, well, gosh, he doesn't know what he's talking about. Neither did Isaac Newton, who invented calculus, by the way. So as we're looking at that, we need to see those things. Now let me go on to the next part because I think it's important, and this is about all I'm going to be able to say, and I'll talk more on other things, about the literal six days of creation. So let me just kind of put this out there, and this is going to be a little technical, but I'm going to try to not make it too technical, all right?

So let me just, I'm just calling it the linguistic mandate, and I know you're saying, oh my gosh, what in the world does that mean? Well, let me talk about it for just a minute, and really what I'm saying is that words matter. Now that little word in the middle, that Hebrew there, everybody can say that, that is the word yom. Yom, it's Y and then the O would be the sound in the middle, the middle and then the M on the end, Yom. Yom is the Hebrew word for day. Now here's what people will say, well and this is very common, some of you probably believe this, well but day can be you know a period of time and it sure can. So in other words it could have said, whenever he said day one it could be that it was like the period, it was the first age of period of time and it could be that and people say that and I've heard that and I've had people try to teach that, there's a problem with it and that is the grammatical linguistic reality of where it is in the scripture. In other words you know words carry meaning and in the context in which you read them it defines the word, I've told you this before, if I said I love chocolate and then I say I love my wife you know that I may love both but not the same, I don't mean the same thing. Let me say about the word day, the word day in our language has multiple different meanings, in other words if I said, let me just come over, if I said the sun sure is bright today I'm talking about the daylight hours, I'm not talking about 24 hours in a day, right, I'm not saying at midnight boy the sun sure was bright unless we were in Alaska or on the North Pole or something I guess or being my age if I said well back in the day the music was a whole lot better than it is today. When I say day in that sense you know I'm not talking about a 24 hour period, I'm talking about a time back in the past. If I said someday I'm going to get around to repairing my fence my wife knows that means never but what I mean is there's coming a time but if I said, if I combined day with a number it would take on a different meaning and actually when you combine Genesis 1 the day it says two things to even, it's not even just day one, it says it this way and there was evening and morning day one and there was evening and morning day two and there

was evening and morning day three. Now let me just say this I think I've got it on here, yeah I've got it on that slide I don't know if you can see it or not, there's over 400 instances in the Old Testament where the word yom, day is combined with either a number day 20 or with evening and morning over 400, guess how many times that does not mean a literal 24 hour period, zero. Not one time in the Old Testament when the word yom is put with a number day one or put with evening or morning, there's never one time in the Hebrew Bible that it means anything other than a 24 hour day. Now I know some of you are saying yeah but brother David you know I mean and you're struggling and I get it. I know some of you probably went right now went back to second Peter where he says in chapter three he says that you know with the Lord a day is like a thousand years and a thousand years like a day and I get that so we go oh well you know I mean that's even saying God thinks that way, well how about has God ever had a statement that he made about this and this is the kicker for me. You remember the story of the children of Israel being brought out of Egypt and they're brought out and God brings them to Mount Sinai and then you remember what happened? God came down remember and there was a pillar of fire and a pillar of smoke on the mountain and then God starts talking and all the people hear him speaking and it freaked them all out just like it would freak all of us out if. Suddenly that thing opened and God started talking and What did he do when what did he say he gave the Ten Commandments, right? Listen to what God this is God talking verbally to the people of Israel Listen to what God said This is God's this God talking That's a preacher Exodus 20 verse 11 for in six days the Lord made the heaven and earth The sea and all that is in them and rested on the seventh day Guys

Here's what I'm trying to say and I think we got a lot of people here that believe what I'm saying, I think But I'm gonna tell you if you're a shaky on this You're not shaky on the science we are but you know, that's not the issue the issue is the Bible Did God really say yes he did God really said So as we come to this and we're looking at it We need to see that that's that's kind of the we're talking about The idea here and I think in your outline, I think I put this down there if you want to put it down So I just said in context The word means a 24 hour period of time in context the word means a 24 hour period of time. So if you have you outline I want to put that in there All right we're gonna move on to Let's go on to the next part Calling it science is pillar two is science and the question is this this does Christian faith close its eyes To the scientific facts. That's what a lot of people would say. I'll be able to say well you got your get your eyes closed So we're gonna we'll look at some facts Scientific facts, these are the evidence the scientific evidence and I listen I there is so much out there This is what I wore myself out on. I was just like going I can't take anymore and they're not gonna care after we get going anyway, but let me just give you some quick ones Okay, just a few things The evidence first of all, we're gonna look at some evidence in the heavens. All right And so as we look at this So the the first first one is what's called the if you have your outline one right in the the wind-up Problem or the galaxy wind-up problem. It's the wind-up Problem now as it was we're looking at that picture right there Many of us have seen these pictures of galaxies and they're spiraling like that and so The idea has been in the in the scientific community is that as we send out things like the James Webb? Telescope telescope out and we send it out there and it goes out and he can see these galaxies as it

Continues to go out and what they would call back in time That it's going to find These some galaxies older ones one on one side older ones that have lost their spin In other words the wind-up is it's winding some just are gonna be not right Shockingly, however That didn't happen But the reality is this that what they thought was that galaxies should lose their structure over billions of years and Yet they are all all still tight spirals And Let me go to the next one and this one's gonna be fun You're gonna have fun looking at this one as well because it's something we don't think about but it's them It's called the magnetic field problem magnetic field problem So you may not know this but Earth has a magnetic field Our moon does not It's just a big rock, but the earth does and the scientists were shocked When they found that mercury still has a magnetic field now, our magnetic field is winding down It's becoming less and less In other words, it's it's it's degrading and here's the problem and here's the magnetic field problem is That as as it's winding down

The problem comes in that that if you go back, kind of look at its time, and how it's doing it, the percentages, and how they're working, if you work them back the other way, in other words, let's go back the other way. What would it have been like a million years ago? Here's the crazy thing. You go back 60,000 years from the mathematics, it's just your hardcore mathematics, the magnetic field, even 60,000 years ago, would have been so intense that many scientists believe, they won't, you know, that study these things, that any living being would have had the iron that's in their body literally sucked out of them. No life could have existed because the magnetic field would have been so intense. However, if the Earth's only 10,000 years old or less than that, no problem. Here's another thing that's just along with that, that's kind of interesting, the next one, I'll just call it the heat problem. Now, this is science, okay? I know it's boring in some way, but let me just try to help you a little bit because what do I mean by the heat problem? Well, the heat problem is that as they go out and look, that as they go out and look, you have these planets that I have on the screen, you've got on the left, you have Jupiter,

on the right, you have Neptune, and the idea is that, you know, they should start burning out. Now, here's the truth, and this is interesting, is that the heat energy that comes from the sun is less than the heat energy that is expelled by Jupiter. In other words, Jupiter loses two times the amount of heat that it receives, does that make sense? So in other words, if every time I gave you $2, you gave me $1 back, and I have $100, I'm gonna, before long, going to be giving you my last, I won't have any, you'll give me $1, and then I don't have any more, right? In other words, I'll run out. Well, that's the issue with heat. Neptune loses its heat at 2.7 times that of what it receives so if you take those numbers and you work back, they would have not been able to exist, even 100,000 years ago. It'd have been fireballs, does that make sense? And if they would have been, and let's go back, if not that case, if they would have been planets, they would have burned out millions of years ago. Here's the next one, this is a new one. This comes actually from the James Webb Space Telescope. Now, here's the idea, let me just, I'll show you the picture. The idea was, and this is just new, this is like in the last year,

that as they were sending the James Webb Telescope out, they were saying, we're gonna be able to go out and see the beginning itself, and so they believed that when they got out there, they were gonna see what they called the beginning. They were gonna see what they called these red planets, red galaxies, they call them, putting off, exuding red light, and they said, it's gonna be the birth of galaxies. As we get out there, we're gonna be able to see this, because that's what they believed was out there. That was their secular prediction, they would find, was that it would be that. However, when they got out there, you heard nothing but crickets in the science community. Because what they found was fully formed galaxies. They didn't find what they thought they would find. In other words, when God said, let there be, it was. And so as we look at that, we find fully formed, massive galaxies, as far out as humans can see. And so we see that there's problems there, but let's go on, and I didn't give you all of these, but let me just, so many of us know this kind of stuff, and I'm not gonna spend hardly any more time on this, because I need to move on, but one of the problems they got is the geological issues, and they look at all these strata that are out there, and say, look at that, that proves the millions of years, but then they run into problems.

What do you do with things like this? These gigantic bends in the strata, these are solid rock. Rocks don't bend, they break unless they were formed first as liquid or clay and then hardened. Now I didn't take time to do this, but if you ever want to go watch a Christian documentary on Mt. St. Helen, you'll be amazed at what you'll see because we were actually living in those, at least people my age were, I don't know, some of you were living when that happened. But we got to see fossils made, we got to see a petrified forest made in seven days. But here's the observation is, that's called the Tapeat sandstones, what's there in the middle is, we see a 90 degree fold in it without any fractures. They had to be soft and wet whenever they were formed. So the conclusion is that they were deposited and folded rapidly in what we would call the flood. Here's another one that's interesting that goes along with it is that, well, you know, but it still is millions of years and you find what's called a polystrate fossil, polystrate fossil, poly means many and then that's just strata layers, many layers. You find that's a petrified tree stuck slap dab in the middle of multiple layers of strata. And so here's what now, you know, this is why a lot of these secular geologists that are still atheistic, still believe in billions of years, they see this stuff and this is why they say Lyle's idea of uniformitarianism is snake oil, it's why it's not real, that's not what happened. So they have bought what's called, they call it the neo-catastrophe model and that is, well yeah, but there was a catastrophe in these billions of years, millions of years, there'd be a catastrophe and all this layered and then you go through millions of years of nothing and then another catastrophe and what's interesting and I didn't take the time to do it is, you find these strata lined out across continents, not just in some little area in Arizona or New Mexico, but across continents you'll find them. Here's another one that just recently came out in 2005, a lady by the name of Dr. Mary Schweitzer discovered in a fossil, is a T-Rex bone, it was a bone in a T-Rex, found, discovered elastic blood vessels, stretchy and red blood cells and here's the reality and this is why science doesn't want to talk about it, is because that's impossible to happen in 65

million years, that it would still be there. In fact, one guy said it this way, that would be like us breaking into one of the pyramids, going down to one of the tombs of one of the kings and find a fully preserved banana sitting on top of the sarcophagus there with not even a bit of rotting to it whatsoever. That's how impossible that is. So that brings us to just what I'm saying is that there's thousands of examples, I didn't even touch smidgen, thousands, now this is all scientific evidence, this is not, these many times these are atheistic scientists that are uncovering these things, but whenever they get them, they quickly put their millions of years eyes on and they come up with some kind of make up something basically. So like that right there, here was what they said, they concluded this, well I guess that in certain conditions that soft tissue can last longer. It can't, biologically it's impossible, however if there was a global catastrophe, the fact that we find marine fossils on Mount Everest, the fact that we find these polystrate fossils, in fact there is a polystrate, that means multi-layer fossil of a whale like this, up and down, vertical, find them all over the world, there are millions of these things all over the world, but that brings me to the last area. I'm doing better than I thought I would by this time. Does it really matter which way one believes about time? And I'm going to say a categorical yes. Because the real issue is not science. The real issue is theology. That's the real issue. The real issue for us as believers centers on the theological dangers associated with embracing the current secular world view. The theological ramifications are frightening, they really are. I know that some of you may still say, does it really matter? But I can tell you this, forcing scripture to cower to modern science and a secular cultural world view has dangerous, even catastrophic effects. Let me just say this, this way.

So in the fossils, for just a second, let's say you're saying, well, you know, I still don't see the problem with saying that dinosaurs lived 65 million years ago. I mean, gosh, if I go to the Smithsonian, those people believe that and gosh, they have to know the truth. Or my guide in Belize, I mean, he believes that. Now let me just tell you about the fossils though. In the fossils, you find animals fossilized eating another animal. So you have in the fossils, carnage. You have in the fossils, you have even, they found like a dinosaur bone, a hip bone that had cancer in it. So you have disease and death 65 million years ago. And here's the problem. Day six, God looked at everything he had made and he called it good. The time says that all of this existed millions of years before man. So just write this down, just going to give you this, three things. First and they're not going to be on the screen, you've got them on your outline. The first is this, if the fossil record represents millions of years, that means everything with the evidence, the fossil record, represents millions of years of history, then death existed before Adam. You see why it's a theological issue, not a science issue. Death existed before Adam, if millions of years is what you have embraced. Second, if death existed before Adam, then God is the author of death. If death existed before Adam, that means if the fossil record was 65 million years before Adam and Eve were on earth, then God is the author of death. He brought it around before Adam and Eve, not, in other words, the Bible says that Adam brought death into the world. That sin brought death into the world, right? That's what scripture says, but if the fossil record represents millions of years of history, then death existed before Adam. If death existed before Adam, then God is the author of death.

And let me tell you, this is where it gets me. This is why I cannot go there. Third thing, if death is... not the result of Adam's sin, then the gospel is false. I know that's a hard pill to swallow, but the Bible is very clear that Jesus came and became sin. He died to defeat death. Well, if God is the author of death, if Adam's sin didn't bring death, okay, maybe we just need to straighten our act up. But the Bible says through one man, sin entered into the world and through that came death. So does that make sense? So if we just decide to believe the Bible, that brings me to pillar number four, which is logic, is just a simple question. Which worldview makes the best logical sense of reality? Science is going to continually, because of a rejection of the foundation, when you remove the foundation itself, everything crumbles. So whenever we looked at history, hopefully, at least we exposed Lyell's agenda that opened the floodgate for a naturalistic worldview, that his goal was to do away with the Bible. That was his focus, get the Bible out of the way, because he was an atheist. The history of the church is very clear. For 1800 years, the church in almost every, 98% of the scholars, that doesn't mean the bad things, the scholars held to a young earth and six day creation. Science itself, we've looked at all the various things in science. The fact that the galaxies are not winding down at a pace that would make them billions of years old. The fact that the heat that we find in them is not something that could even be possible for billions of years. The bending of rocks, all of these things. Whenever you look at all this stuff, when we go to the theology of it and we see fossils of death all under our feet, we have to decide either the Bible is true or not.

And that just brings me to this last slide, I'll just show you. We must stand on the word. Psalm 11 verse three that I have up there, if the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do? All right, I told you this is going to be the most technical one I do. But I felt that I needed to kind of get a little bit that way for us. Because we've, and I've told you last week how our culture and even the church culture has kind of put a first floor is science, second floor is faith and that everything down here is the real world and that up there kind of ever so often might kick in if you believe any of it. So what does that do to us on a day to day basis? Well, it opens us up to not really seeing God having an active role in our everyday life. In fact, it even kind of makes God not even distant, it makes him dangerous, even the author of death. Let me tell you what else it does and this is one of the reasons I decided to go on and do this is as we go forward and I start opening up what the scripture says and what the worldview of the people who received the text and the scriptures when they got it, what they believed, what they understood about the world. And we look at that. If you've already shut down this, you've lost that. You won't go there, you'll just, and so it's a big deal. And so I'm very clear, I think everybody knows by now, I believe in a young earth, and I don't believe in it out of being mean about it. It's a, you know, and I would say this, somebody says, well, but you're not a scientist, but I am a theologian. I do know something about the Bible. And if we're gonna be biblical,

and we're gonna be theological, and we're gonna be real to the text, true to the text, we have to be true to the text. And so that's why I'm there, all right? Okay, well, I did all that before I got done by, before seven, that's amazing. All right, let me pray for us. And by the way, she reminded me. Janet said, I gotta remind you, I know. So, you know, this weekend is the weekend. All this behind me is about that. Students are gonna be here, and one of the things we do here, and every group that's meeting right now is gonna be doing this, but when you walk out of here, there's gonna be little armbands that you can get, and they have students' names on them. Grab one of those names, and I just ask you, I mean, this is a Wednesday night group, come on, man. We're the ones that are in. Pray for them by name, all right? Take that name and just pray for them. Ask the Lord to guide you. Ask Him to gift you with words of knowledge and wisdom. Ask Him to show you some things to pray in particular, and pray for them for this weekend, that God will just literally enter in and transform their life, okay? So they'll be out there when we leave. You can pick one up, take it with you.

All right, let's pray together. Father, I thank you that, Lord, though man be a liar, and change with the shifting sands and the wind, you always remain the same. I thank you, Father, that you have a plan, a story, a story that you've been telling, and Lord, I pray that as we begin or continue forward, but as we're beginning this journey together, Lord, I pray that you will open our hearts to the truth, that you'll guide us along the way, that you'll encourage us through your word, and Lord, that when we walk from here, we as your children, Lord, we'll walk from here more excited about the word, more excited about our faith, knowing that our faith is sure and firm, and can stand up to the most rigorous studies of science, biology, geology, astrophysics, it doesn't matter. God, you created it all, and you're God overall. So I pray that we would be encouraged in that. Go with us now, and give us opportunities to just share the love of Jesus in practical ways the rest of the week, and we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.