Q&A 32 & 18 Revisited Q&A 33 When were the earliest ages in history

Today is miscellaneous. We're revisiting two questions and then going on to a third one. We're going to revisit the covenants with one more thing. After last Sunday, I emailed Stan. I said, Stan, I blew it because there was a key point that I forgot to make, so I'll make it this morning. OK, and this has to do with what does the Bible teach about covenants? I had the point there. One other important reason why we in the church do not have our own covenant, most of the covenants either have a condition for a man or mankind to carry out and or the covenant contains God's promise to carry out something in the future.

OK, what was what was Adam not to do in the garden? That's right. You can eat of anything, just not that one, right? Everything you can have, but just not that one. There was something for Adam to do or not do. He was also to be fruitful and multiply, right? Which was a little tough until Eve came along, by the way. But anyway, so there's these kinds of things.

How about with Abraham? With Abraham, how long does it take for the Abrahamic covenant to get fulfilled? Is it all fulfilled yet? No. Basically, it was 4,000 years ago and it's still not done, right? So the two things about the covenants are, one, there's something for man to do and or it's fulfilled over time.

One of the reasons why the church basically doesn't need a covenant is because what is there for you to do? It's not about your doing, right? It's about what God has done and what God is doing and what God will do. So it's not something for you to do. As a matter of fact, the very nature of it, it's something for you not to do.

Secondly, it's all about what has already taken place, right? And so a lot of what happens among us in the church is we're learning, we're catching up with what God has already done. We've been blessed with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ. What did Abraham have to do?

He had to wait. And even within his human lifetime, it still was mostly unfulfilled. But he had to wait for these things to happen. For the blessings of the Abrahamic Covenant to fully show themselves, he had to wait. We're still waiting, in a sense. How about with the Jews, you'll be blessed if you do this, you'll be cursed if you do that. Deuteronomy 28.

So what does Ephesians 1.3 say? We've been blessed with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ. What are you waiting for? Nothing, right? You're waiting for blessings? Don't wait around too long because it's already there. So there isn't anything to wait for.

We've been seated with Christ. We've been made complete in Him. We've been baptized into Christ. has been made to indwell us. All these things are past tense. It's already been done. God doesn't have to promise to do something because it's already happened. When we become a believer, we have to catch up with what God's already done. As a matter of fact, I would say we spend a lifetime learning what God's already accomplished and already finished.

So we don't need a covenant in part because There's nothing to wait for. And by the way, as a believer, what are you waiting for? There are very few things. What are you waiting for? Yeah, you're waiting for the Lord to take you home to be with Him, right? And that's about it. Because everything else is already done. Yes.

But even that, what does Ephesians 2.10 say? He has prepared the good works so that we should walk in them. So He's even done that. He's even done that.

There is not the sense of anticipation, waiting, you know, when's God going to fulfill this? Now, here's the difference in the way that we walk and live from the way many of the Old Testament saints lived, for them faith was in great part waiting for something future that God had said would happen. When the Old Testament saints would be promised something, it would be waiting for something to happen in the future. We in the church are not waiting for something to happen So their faith was a forward-looking faith, trusting God for what had not happened yet. Our faith is believing God for what has already happened. You see that? As believers, a great deal of our learning in the church is focused on faith and what God has said has already taken place.

And that's different from Abraham, who didn't have as much in the way of revelation, but it was looking forward to what God was going to do. And the same with the other Old Testament saints. Looking forward to what God will do in the future. When's the Messiah going to come? When's the Messiah going to come? Looking forward to what God said would happen. That was the typical thing of many of the Old Testament saints.

That was faith. For us, it's believing what he has already done. That's faith. And walking according to what he's already done. It's a real different perspective, isn't it? Both of those are faith. But when Paul writes in 2 Corinthians, we walk by faith. That's what faith means. It's believing God for what he has revealed, he's already done. Now, on page two, we have the next question.

Different subject altogether. There's a passage that was brought up on loss of salvation. This is 1 Samuel 16, 14. Now, the spirit of the Lord departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from the Lord terrorized him. Some folks look at that and they say, what? So let's take a look at that. Does that indicate? loss of salvation? Or what's that talking about? There are two main questions this verse brings up, and one relates to what it means for the Spirit of the Lord to depart from Saul. What's going on there? And the other relates to an evil spirit from the Lord.

Along with that, does this verse have a bearing on loss of salvation? So one critical insight is that the people of Israel did not have assurance of the universal, continual indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Now that is going to happen in the future for the people of Israel to have the universal, that is everyone, continual, non-stop presence of the Holy Spirit.

When is that going to happen? In the Millennial Kingdom, this is the fulfillment of the New Covenant. What's interesting is they have, will have, the continual universal indwelling of the Holy Spirit in order to live out the law, we have in the church the continual universal indwelling of the Holy Spirit to live apart from the law.

Isn't that interesting? God has done the same thing, but carried it out differently. Carried it out differently. Okay. Then in the middle of page 2 there, but the second part of 1st Samuel 16-14 is that there is an evil spirit from the Lord that terrorized him. It is of value for us to realize that the Lord uses evil spirits for his purposes in various ways, both in the Old Testament and the New. 1st Corinthians 5-5, so this is one we've taken a look at.

It's very similar in 1st Timothy 1.20.

Paul writes in 1st Corinthians 5.5, I have decided to deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus. Let's ask this question. If he doesn't have the destruction of the flesh, will he not be saved? Is that what this verse is talking about?

Yes? No? Yeah? Mm-hmm? Uh-huh? No? Mm-hmm? Uh-huh? Yeah? What? What's that? Oh, okay. Alright. Do we need to have our flesh destroyed so that we're saved on the day of the Lord Jesus? Is that necessary? Do we need to add that to the conditions for being saved? Ah, okay. What does he mean by destroyed? It seems to me that it also depends on what does the word flesh mean, right? Because flesh means different things. Yes? Okay. Took care of what? Okay.

The sin nature, right? And the flesh is simply the expression of the sin nature through this body, right? And he took care of it. What did he take care of? Does it mean we no longer have a sin nature? We're separated from it. Okay? Alright? And what does it mean for us to be separated from it? What does it mean for us to be separated from the sin nature? Yeah, Stan? Sin nature doesn't have any power. Nobody in this room has any problem with the sin nature then?

Yeah. Yeah. What's that? Pardon? What's paid for? Okay, the debt of our sin is paid for. Like I say, I don't want to buy the sin nature. I don't want anybody to pay for it, you know, for me. But yeah, our sin is completely paid for. We are spiritually separated from Which doesn't mean it doesn't exist, but we're spiritually separated from the nature, which is the opposite of the joined-to condition that we had before. Now, let's get back to answering this question.

I've decided to deliver such a one to Satan. Was that a bad thing for Paul to do? Was that a mistake? Why would he do that? I mean, is that the best of all the options? Yeah, yeah, that's right. It actually is the best of the options. One of the points we make is that only Paul makes this statement, and he doesn't ask anybody in the church to do it, or he doesn't instruct the church, well you ought to deliver this one over to Satan. It seems to be exclusively an apostolic authority. And I don't say that because scripture exactly says it, but simply because it's limited to Paul doing it, and he never asks the church or anyone else to do it, or encourages it. The destruction of the flesh, what is that talking about? And why deliver someone over to Satan for that? Why was that a good idea for Paul to do? To bring him back. Pardon? To bring him back. Bring who back? The first one who was Paul's pregnant son. OK. All right.

And I mean, that seems kind of strange. You know, who are our enemies? The world, the flesh, and the devil, right? And so you're going to get the devil help with the flesh? Wow, that's pretty amazing. So how does this work? How does this work? Yeah, this hurts. This hurts. It is a matter of discovery.

And while calling in Satan to carry this out doesn't seem to be something that we're called or encouraged to do, still you can find instances of people saying, I went that path, it doesn't work. Yeah, ultimately you look at it as, while this explicit thing may not go on, what you've brought about does go on. That is, believers at this stage and throughout time have been disciplined by the Lord. And that's a process that does take place.

And why does the Lord discipline us? Is it because He's just ticked off at us? Or why does the Lord discipline us? Ultimately, there is a good end to discipline, and it's painful for the time, right? Yeah, ultimately, what is discipline directed for? Discipline is not directed so that God can kind of, you know, some sort of Freudian expression where God's got to get his anger out, you know? God does not have an anger problem, okay?

But ultimately, discipline is directed to us because the Lord loves us. Yeah, that's right. Because we have an eternal relationship with us, the Lord will bring about discipline in our lives. And it won't be this specific one, I don't think, because the specific one is an apostolic authority from anything that we can tell from Scripture. But the Lord still will bring about discipline in the life of the believer who is straight off the track. So that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.

Is this necessary for salvation, or what's the last half of that verse telling us? I'm not aware, because there's no if in there. But that's a good thing to take a look at. Now, ultimately, if I don't do this, this person won't be saved. But ultimately, it is a part of a person's salvation that they may be, along the route, disciplined. One of the passages that I frequently will tell a sort of a joking statement about, a joking truism, is 1 Corinthians chapter 3, 10 through 15.

This is where there's good and bad works, gold, silver, and precious stones, and wood, hay, and stubble. And what happens to those works? Yeah. You're rewarded for the gold, silver, precious stones. You will have loss, be burned up for the things that are not of the Lord. And so what's Paul's final statement in verse 15 in 1 Corinthians 3? What he spells out there is that they will be saved, yet as through fire. And so my way of putting that is some people will enter heaven naked and smoking.

And that's, I think, what we have to look at. The person will be saved. The person will be saved. But there is a difficult process along the way. And that's what this is looking at. The person will be saved and this is not necessary for their salvation like we have to add it to belief. But it is in fact a part of the process of bringing this person along the way.

Because they're saved and also just as that first Corinthians 3.15 passage says, saved as yet through fire. So it's not bringing into question, will we be saved? There's plenty of other scriptures say that that's not the case. But the truth is, some will have to go through various disciplines. This appears to be an apostolic area discipline. Yes, in other words, this is being done to the end that this person is saved, but it's not a requirement for salvation.

Something else, in 2 Corinthians 12.7, because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations, for this reason, to keep me from exalting myself, there was given me a thorn in the flesh, A messenger of Satan.

How did this messenger of Satan come along? Did he just happen to sneak in there? How did the messenger of Satan come into Paul's life there in 2 Corinthians 12. Yeah? One thing I can think of is when Jesus said that the things that Paul was going to have to suffer for Yes, that's from Acts chapter 9. Here's an interesting thing.

In the first passage, 1 Corinthians 5.5 that we referenced there, here this person has been delivered over to Satan for discipline.

Is Paul being delivered over for discipline in 2 Corinthians 12.7? Is it discipline or is it something else? No, it's not discipline, I don't think. Endurance. Pardon? Endurance. Yes, certainly that. And that's interesting. You see, both of these, Satan is being used of the Lord. In one case, the first instance, it's a discipline issue for destruction of the flesh. The other thing is, what is it for?

What does he say it's for in 2 Corinthians 12.7? Humility. Well, he's supposed to learn humility, but let's look at the book of the Bible, Job, where the same thing's happening there. Job, it's to prove his faith. To prove, I think, to the whole world, even the spiritual world, where he stands and the strength of his faith.

Here's the wild thing. is the Lord uses Satan to get us back on the path, and in this 2 Corinthians 12, 7, the Lord uses Satan to keep him on the path. You see that? Very interesting. We think of Satan as this kind of wild guy who comes in and does all sorts of awful things and pulls terrible surprises. And that characterization is not entirely untrue. However, Very interesting that Satan is also God's instrument, both for the believer who needs to be disciplined, as well as the believer who just simply needs to be kept on track there. Now we aren't given an explanation as to what this is, but he does attribute it as a messenger from Satan. Very interesting. Okay, when we get back to this 1 Samuel 16, 14 passage then, We've got a good question. Here is Saul.

The Holy Spirit departs from him. That is characteristic of the Jew before this coming millennial kingdom because they could not count on the Holy Spirit being there all the time. They just simply couldn't count on the Holy Spirit being there all the time. And then the last part, an evil spirit from the Lord. Well, we've seen examples. What does the Lord send an evil spirit for? And the Lord does it, right? One is to discipline someone. Secondly, it's to keep someone on track.

Which one do you think it is for Saul? Do we have any clue? Maybe we'd have to study the passage. What was Saul's spiritual problem? King Saul. Yeah? Well, he went to the seer. Okay. And he asked for advice from the seer, not waiting for Samuel to come and give him the advice from God. Plus he also lied. And he also allowed the people, he blamed the people when it was actually himself as well that took some, or saved some of the sheep and stuff. Yeah. So there's a lot of things that he did wrong in that process.

King Saul did a lot of things wrong and never was wholehearted. In fact, one of the summaries you could say of those first three kings of the nation of Israel, Saul and David and Solomon, Saul had no heart for the Lord. David, though he stumbled horribly, had a heart for the Lord. Solomon's problem was that he was half-hearted. So quick summary, Saul no heart, David whole heart, Solomon half heart.

Okay. Now moving on to page three here. Got another question that comes up. In Luke 9, 23-26, and Russ, I think this was your question. If anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake, he is the one who will save it. For what is a man profited if he gains the whole world and loses or forfeits himself? For whoever is ashamed of me and my words, the Son of Man will be ashamed of him when he comes in his glory and the glory of the Father and of the holy angels." So that might be taken as a loss of salvation passage. So let's take a look at that.

So to read the passage and the others in the four Gospels and all of Scripture, it's critical to recognize context. This will be addressed to Jesus' disciples in a Jewish context, that's this Luke 9 passage I just read. And what's the event? Peter says Jesus is the Christ of God, is the context in greater part, and we see it recorded in Matthew 16, Mark 8, and Luke 9.

Jesus had just sent his disciples out two by two, telling them not even to go in the way of the Gentiles, and then he initially turned away a Gentile woman. In both cases, the clear target was the lost sheep of the house of Israel. So he's talking specifically to the Jews in a Jewish context. In Matthew 10, 2-7, This is the middle of, assuming a 30 A.D. date for the crucifixion, the middle of A.D. 28, that is about two years before the crucifixion.

Now the names of the twelve apostles are these, and it goes on through the list, and I'm going to move down there into verse 5. These twelve, Jesus sent out after instructing them, do not go in the way of the Gentiles and do not enter any city of the Samaritans, but rather go to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. Why not go to the Gentiles and the Samaritans? Why only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel?

Yeah. That's why he came. Yeah. His initial direction to the disciples was that. Later on in Matthew 15, 21-24, and this gets to your point, there in the middle of AD 29, so about a year later, Jesus went away from there and withdrew into the district of Tyre and Sidon. And a Canaanite woman from that region came out and began to cry out, saying, Have mercy on me, Lord, son of David. My daughter is cruelly demon-possessed, but he did not answer her a word. And his disciples came and implored him, saying, Send her away, because she keeps shouting at us. But he answered and said, I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.

Jesus was very focused in his ministry early on there. So one should observe that seemingly extreme appeals from rabbis to their disciples about the cost of being a rabbi's disciple was typical of rabbis. That's one of the things that is frequently overlooked as people study the Gospels, is Jesus will make various appeals to the cost of being a disciple, but one of the things we have to realize is that rabbis always did that. Rabbis always did that. And it was sometimes put in very extreme terms.

You've got to hate mother and father as a figure of speech, not telling you that you hate your mother and father. As a figure of speech, that your love for the Lord and your dedication as a disciple must be so intense that your love for your parents is, by comparison, hate. So it's a figure of speech.

I don't think it's that much different than what it is for the Muslim and Islam imams today. I mean, they're demanding the same thing. They're the teachers, they're the religious leaders. They want that kind of control over their disciples, the true believers. I don't want to get on a rabbit trail, but any kind of cult or religion, serious religion, follows this same path. You have to have faith and you have to be convicted.

Now one other very important thing, looking at this as to the Jews before the cross. It says, take up your cross daily and follow me, right? Now think about this. What part of the cross were people who were going to be crucified, what part did they carry to their crucifixion site? The cross piece, okay? It's called a patibulum is the Latin term. They carried this cross piece And he says, take it up daily. That's two Jews before the crucifixion. What are we told to do regarding the crucifixion, or what are we told has happened regarding the crucifixion of Christ?

Here's Galatians 2.20, I have been crucified with Christ. Romans 6, I was baptized, immersed into His death.

This is an invitation to a Jewish disciple to take up this cross daily. But for us in the church, what the constant message is, is that's already happened. It's past tense. It's a done deal. And do we have to pick up the cross? No. All we did was believe and God identified us with Christ in His death. Do you have to pick up the cross? No. It's a done deal.

And here's one other thing. Here's one other thing. Are you left there on the cross? Is Christ still on the cross? No. When you go through the five sequences of the identification through death, burial, resurrection, ascension and seeding, what's the last one? Seated in the heavenlies, right? Where does that leave you? Seated in the heavenlies. That's where you are now. That's where it leaves you. So it's not a matter of picking up your cross daily. That was for Jewish disciples. And it doesn't recognize what God has already done. It doesn't recognize what God has already accomplished. I'm going to leave it on page four and leave it for you to cover things at the last part because we've got some things to cover for the next question. Okay. The question was, and it was interesting, there's quite a bit of interest in this.

What were the earliest ages in history? Now here's where we come into a bit of a quandary. We could ask the question another way, how long ago did Adam live? Assuming that Adam was the first human being, and that Adam's creation, along with all of God's creation as recorded in Genesis, are counted as historical.

That is, having historicity. Being of, by character, historic. Now historians have developed a system of techniques for things that are recorded in writing in history. And we can put a lot of things together back through time as long as things are in writing. And there is somewhat of a systematic approach to history on that basis.

But the one difficulty we have is The world has some assumptions about history and assumptions about how things began. And once you get past the realm of written history, you get into a minefield of questions. And here's the key point. It's all based on assumptions. Even within history and written history, Assumptions still play a big part. We have the point in here on page 5.

There's the minimalist and the maximalist. What does the minimalist say? The minimalist says, I don't believe anything the Bible has written in it unless it's confirmed by some other historical document. That's part one. Part two is the minimalist says, if there is a God, he's irrelevant and I don't allow him to influence my decisions or belief in God to influence my decisions or conclusions about history. So if the Bible says that God parted the waters so that the Israelites could go through the sea, I don't believe that because God, if there is a God, is irrelevant to history. So the minimalist won't allow the Bible to be taken at face value. Everything in the Bible is set aside unless it's something that's purely natural, not supernatural, and unless it's confirmed by some other outside document. That's the minimalist.

That minimalist view is consistent with evolution, consistent with the long age of the earth. The maximalist view says, well, I believe that we ought to be able to take the Bible at face value. One way to put it is we give it the benefit of the doubt. That when the Bible does make a claim about God, that we take that as valid and don't automatically a priori, as it's somehow stated, we don't automatically discount what the Bible says took place supernaturally. The minimalist says this can't possibly be God's revelation. The maximalist says yes it can. So the minimalist view is going to look at this as our distant relative. Here I think is the point we have to look at.

For all those skulls that are out there that are either human or somewhat humanoid, They are primate, hominid appearing. For all those skulls that are out there, the reality is that they fall within certain kinds, identifiable kinds. The other reality is that there are thousands of them. And the question with thousands of them out there comes to this.

If there are gaps with the number of fossil finds that we have, perhaps the gaps are real gaps. And not simply, we haven't found enough yet. Something else to look at, this map has a bunch of dots all over it. I don't expect you to look at all the details, but the point is they've been found all over the place. So imagine yourself, you've found these various parts of human looking, fossils or in some cases human fossils. Human fossils or human looking fossils. They're spread all over the earth.

How do you tell what's related to what? You can't get the fossils to reproduce. That's just really hard work. You can't get the fossils to reproduce. How do you tell if one fossil is related to another? What's that? They could use DNA if they had it. It's extremely rare that they actually find it. But they could. The problem is that it's just extremely rare that you find it in these fossil materials.

The reality is there isn't a way to tell what's related to what except by assumption. This looks similar to this, therefore this is related to this. How can you check the assumption? You can't. So you have an unverifiable assumption, right? So they're all over the place. You can't tell what's related to what, not really, without assuming some things. Some assumptions you can't verify.

I think also here is a chart that shows, and I'll expand it a little bit so it's a little more visible. Here's a chart that shows a bunch of these different skull types of hominids. And you'll notice that there's lines between them. The lines between them translate assumption. It's assumed that there's a relationship between them. That's all it is, is an unverifiable assumption.

There's something else that this chart has on the left-hand side and that's age. How could you prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that you've got the right age for something, for a skull, for a skeleton? They use carbon dating. I'll tell you having worked on carbon dating systems, guess what?

They have unverifiable assumptions. Everything that you do to try to put together relationship and age is based on unverifiable assumptions. Yes. However, I think the thing to recognize while someone who is a skeptic will frequently point to the one who believes and say, well, you've got belief in this thing, you can't see it and all that. You've got a whole set of assumptions. The reality is the person who believes in God and believes that God made things has a set of unverifiable assumptions, just like the person who believes that the lines between those skulls represent actual relationship and descendancy. It's faith.

And both of them are founded on unverifiable assumptions. And let me ask this question. Why would God make it? such that human beings, no matter what position they hold, have to rely on unverifiable assumptions. I would put it this way. God made us to be beings that require some fundamentals to be given to us. That makes sense. There was a fellow several decades back who went and put forth this proof.

He says, even the logic that we use in mathematics requires unverifiable assumptions. We all believe in logic. And you can even ask the question why, but that's a logical question, right? We all believe in logic and we all, you know, one and one is two and we got all these things together. But guess what?

That relies on unverifiable assumptions. And if we're truly, truly honest, we all have to make assumptions about things that can't be verified. We can't go back and check everything out. We can't. Here is the top chart there shows a timeline of of Earth history. If you can't read it, that's fine. I can't either.

But it goes from 3000 BC up to about the year 1600. If you expand that out, you get the 3000 BC part here on the front part of this lower part of the timeline. My point is this, that both Egyptian and Mesopotamian, that is Middle Eastern, history began around 3000 BC. Before that, we don't have records. And so how old is something?

You've got to do some assuming, right? And so when you step back into that, the person who is this, you know, careful scientist has got a bunch of assumptions he can't verify. The person who reads the Bible and says, I go by this, has assumptions they can't verify. The careful scientist, highly trained and with millions of dollars worth of equipment has assumptions he can't verify. Yes? And doesn't it come down to all these unverifiable assumptions comes down to the main problem which is how did it all begin? I mean do you have the big bang or do you have God? And we have no way humanly to establish that without making assumptions we cannot verify. And the guy who's got multiple PhDs and multi-million dollar laboratory, after all that, he's got unverifiable assumptions, just like the rest of us.

Here is an outline of Egyptian history and one of the points to make is, The items in the top part of that chart going from 664 up to 3100 BC, the historical details are iffy. From 664 to the last part of the chart, into the Roman era, is pretty well tied down. Before that, for centuries, it's kind of sketchy.

Yes, the pyramids were built before Abraham was born. Those big three that you see over in the pictures in Egypt. The Jews did not build the pyramids. The Jews saw the pyramids when they were working there. Abraham saw the pyramids. Those were built prior to Abraham's time. What's that? Now, to give you an idea, here is civilization, you've got to look carefully, 3000 BC. I'm going to jump it now, get ready, I'm going to jump it a thousand years to 2000. There's 2000 B.C. That's civilization on the map. OK.

I go to a thousand. There's a thousand. And now I can't go to zero. I got to tell you, during the year zero, there was nobody alive because there never was a year zero. Right. It was 1 B.C. A.D. But here we go. There's 1 A.D. There's civilization by 1 A.D. OK. There's a thousand. I'm sorry, what? That's when they had written records. That's when you have a developed society where they've got, you know, buildings and there's at least some degree of different occupations. There is a social structure. Pardon? No, no, this is only showing the old world, so to speak.

And then, so there's 1,000 AD, here's 2,000. So you've got, let me step through that again. It's real interesting to look. Okay, here's 3,000. 2,000. 1,000. 1. 1,000. 2,000. So you see civilization expanding greatly during that period of time. But bottom line is before about 3000, you really start leaving history as anything recorded and developable.

When you start saying how old were things before that, then you run into a bunch of assumptions that's not based on human observation. I heard that the Chinese, they were doing their religious, whatever they do religiously, thousands and thousands of years before, 7,000 years before Christ came to the earth. Is there any truth to that? I don't think so. Here's what you'll see.

Here is 3000 with very tiny evidences, comparatively speaking, of civilization. Here is 2000 and you begin to see some Chinese civilization. And the only thing is, if you hear claims prior to that 3000 BC, you're stepping in again to these assumptions. And the radioactive dating systems, carbon dating is the primary one that we've got for historical era.

And it has some real surprises. Some very interesting surprises. And it's also based on assumptions. Now here's the interesting thing. Carbon-14. The carbon-14 dating system formula that they use to develop the ages assumes the earth is old. So guess what? Then you use the assumption that says that the earth is old to prove that the earth is old.

Oh good. This is round and circle logic. Oh yeah, this is really good. But again it's assumption. It's assumption. Now there are places where we have something we know a date of and then you can go into a carbon-14 dating you know test on it and sometimes it comes out reliably and sometimes not. Yes.

I don't believe that they were created on different days. Although there are others that hold different view. I don't believe that they were Because if you look up Genesis 1 on the sixth day, what did God do? Creates a male and female so I would see that as north what you see it's inscribed in in chapter 2 as a kind of a zoom in effect So chapter 2 is not a different creation account. I But just like we have a zoom lens and zoom in on the details on something, I think Chapter 2 is of that effect. Yeah. Okay, so you're talking about a day. Yeah.

And the sun, moon, and stars wasn't created until, what, the fourth day? Yes. So you've got 1, 2, and 3 that are of some undetermined amount of time. So did that length of days continue? all the way through the seventh or did it change on the fourth day? I believe that they were the exact same and there's nothing other than that creation on the fourth day that would tend to indicate that there was anything different about them.

Now here's the thing. We tend to think of a world in which the sun and the moon determine our time, right? But suppose God created light and simply created the light and maybe even a light source, but it wasn't the sun and the moon. You would still have the effect of a day, and the same rotation and everything else, evening and morning, because the evening and morning pattern is already given there, even though the sun and moon don't show up until the fourth day. By the way, I think one of the reasons that God did that is because that dispelled the tendency for people to worship the sun and the moon, which was real common in ancient times and even exists today among some folks.

And also doesn't carbon testing depend a lot on environmental consistency? Yes. Part of the problem is relative leaching, introduction of newer material, The assumption is when something dies, it's no longer taking in carbon-14 from the atmosphere, and therefore the carbon-14 following its radioactive decay pattern gives you a half-life, about 5,700 years, and then using that is used to calculate the age. The difficulty is, what if I have, let's say there's a water environment where modern Carbon-14 is leaching into the material.

All of a sudden my age is out the door, out the window. We also have some real puzzlers. Dr. Melvin Cook and I had talked to him on the phone. I think he's dead now, but I talked to him on the phone at one point in time. He was working at a mine site where they found a piece of wood. in rock material that was many millions of years, according to the dating system, before wood was supposed to have gotten into existence. He did a carbon-14 test on the piece of wood that was found there at the mine site and came up with an age of 4,000 years. So you know there's this thing supposed to be 600 million year old rock and it's got a 4,000 year old piece of wood in it.

Something's a little funny, right? Something's a little funny. Pardon? Yeah, but that's also limited in terms of who would allow it to be published. Yeah. All right. Well, we've plum run out of time. Yes. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Pardon? Up here, in this area.

There's Kuwait, you got Kuwait, you got the Tigris and Euphrates rivers here, up in Iraq. But the Fertile Crescent is up there on top, right? The Fertile Crescent goes from here to here. And that would be the path where Abraham went from Ur, which is right now, right inside Iraq, at the southern end. and then went up along here, stayed in Haran, and then went down into Israel, what is now Israel, and into Egypt even. And that 2000 BC was about the time of Abraham. All right, let's close it up. We've got people pressing their nose against the doors and soon they will crash the gates. The barbarians are at the gates. We've got to close. All right. Yes.

Lord, we do thank you for what you've allowed us to learn and to look at here. And we thank you that as we look at the millennia of time, we thank you for your faithfulness. And you are indeed a faithful God. And we also thank you as we look back 2,000 years to the first coming of your Son. can count upon all that you've done and accomplished 2,000 years ago impacting us every minute and on into eternity. We just give you thanks. We praise you in Jesus' name. Amen.