Thorpe, Sam: My Bible And I-Creation Theories Of Gen 1 ~ Word Alive SE

Turn with me to Genesis chapter one and verse one. Genesis chapter one and verse one. We'll read just the first five verses. Genesis one one, In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth, and the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, let there be light, and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good, and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light day, and the darkness he called night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. You know, this is one of the, one of, I believe, the most critical passages in all of scripture. Genesis is a foundational book. Genesis chapter one, two, and three form the foundations for most of the truth that's later revealed in scripture. It's the foundation that supports the truth that's later revealed in God's word. And you know, like any structure, when you destroy the foundation, the building crumbles. And so there has been much criticism, much hostile criticism toward Genesis and toward particularly Genesis chapter one in terms of interpreting this passage. Genesis chapter one, more than any other chapter, I think, requires what we call good hermeneutics. Anyone here from the Timothy Project? What is hermeneutics? Somebody. Uh, more than study. It's how to interpret? How to interpret the word of God, okay? In other words, it's how to determine what is God really saying to us in this passage. And so Genesis chapter one, more than any other chapter that I can think of, is critical to truly understanding what God is saying to us and to have good hermeneutics. In fact, to say it another way, when we look at many of the religions in the world today, many of the false religions, many of the cults, many of the false philosophies and teachings in the world today, they all come from, listen carefully, they all come from a distortion or a misinterpretation of Genesis chapter one. Many of the false cult- cults and false teachings have their foundation in construing and distorting and changing good hermeneutics of Genesis chapter one. It's that important. Now, I want to just take one subject, and that is the, the different creation theories. And I use the word theory because a lot of what we're going to talk about and mention today are not factual truths. They're theories, theories of man. And then we'll go on to present what we believe is a good interpretation of Genesis chapter one, uh, which is, we believe, the truth of creation, the creation account. But if you look in your notes, there are some common creation theories. There certainly is a sec- a secular, uh, theory that's known to many of you today that we won't take time to, uh, go into. Our brother Mike calls it evolution, and, uh, the more I look at it, the more I believe that's probably a, a better term, evolution or evolution, because it begins by Genesis chapter one, just eliminating the whole passage. It just rejects the whole concept of a supreme being and rejects the whole idea that God is the origin of all matter. In fact, uh, they propose that some mi- microscopic pieces of dust are the origin of all matter, but they have no answer for where those microscopic pieces of dust came from. But then there is, uh, some theories that falsely are presented, and yet discouragingly so, many Christians have adopted, and many Christians hold to today. For instance, there is one called theistic evolution. And what that basically does is hold to the process of evolution, but ascribe it to God as the process he used to bring things into being. In other words, the theistic evolutionist would say, I believe that God caused these two little particles of microscopic dust in the atmosphere to come together and start it all going, and then he watched as everything evolved like the evolutionist said it evolved. And so it's a theistic evolution. Again, that, that just distorts and rejects everything that we read in Genesis chapter one. My Bible says God said, and it happened. That's what the Bible says. God spoke these things into being. And, uh, then we have what was called an allegorical account of Genesis. Uh, the allegorical account basically says that there really wasn't the Adam and Eve, there really wasn't a Garden of Eden. Those are just the storyline of how it may have happened. You see, it's an allegorical account. It's not a historical account. There was no such thing as truly Adam and Eve. It, it was just a storyline to give us some feel for how God may have brought things into being, okay? And so the literal, literal, uh, acceptance of the text of Genesis chapter one is rejected. And then there is what we call the gap theory, a very common theory that is, uh, held by many, many believers even today, probably more so of the past generation than of the present generation of believers. But the gap theory basically says that, uh, between verses one and verse two, uh, you have two different, uh, creations. You have Genesis one, which is the original creation, and then they put the fall of Sa- Satan and the destruction of the current earth into a big gap between verses one and two. and then beginning at verse three, it's a recreation of the old Earth that was originally destroyed. And the gap that they put between verses one and three can be billions and billions and billions of years, as many years as you want to pacify the scientists of our day. That's the length of the gap that it can be, and so anything they come up with, you just throw it into that gap, and uh, therefore you've eliminated all controversy and dispute with modern science, and uh, that's the gap theory. And then the day age theory. The day age theory basically rejects the literal day description of Genesis chapter one. Instead of taking it as a literal twenty-four-hour day, seven of them making up a week of creation, as we believe the literal interpretation of it is, the day age theory said, well, the first day was maybe billions of years, and the second day was billions of years, and so each day of creation was a geological age. So you might still have the same billions of years, uh, symbolized in their view, with the days of creation being these vast periods of time. And I asked myself the question, why do believers become so distracted by these theories that don't seem to be there at face value when you read Genesis chapter one? When you read the text, we don't see those things. Uh, and I, I would like to just illustrate why these different theories are adopted by, by believers by, by reading to you a quote, you have it there in your notes, from J. Sidlow Baxter. Now, let me just say that I've really appreciated over my lifetime studying the writings of J. Sidlow Baxter. I think he's an excellent Bible scholar. I think he, he really knows the book. He's written some good material, one of which is called Explore the Book, a volume about that big, and it's an excellent overview of scripture. I've used it to teach, uh, Old Testament and New Testament survey a number of times. It's good material. He's a good man. But I say that to illustrate that you will find today within your assembly and within many different Christian gatherings some really good, sharp Christians, good men and women, that still hold to the theory of the gap theory. And, uh, it gives you here, in this quote from Sidlo Baxter, it gives you the motivation of why they hold to it. And I'll show you the problems with it in a minute. But he says this on page thirty five of his book, Explore the Book, that was written in nineteen sixty: Modern geology furnishes data proving the immense age of our globe. Now there's a problem there, in that he's accepting what modern geology says as fact. And the interesting thing is, since nineteen sixty, the things that modern geology has said over the years have since been proven to be false. Geology has changed considerably in the last forty or fifty years. But anyway, he says they furnished us data proving, keyword proving, so he's accepting it as fact, the immense age of our globe. Genesis has no controversy with geology on that score. Between the first two verses of Genesis, there is an ample scope for all geological errors. None can say what lapses of age, lapses of age lies between them. Let me ask you, as I read that quote, what is driving a man like J. Sidlo Baxter to believe in the Gap Theory? What's the motive? To try to be like the world, but still believe in God. Absolutely. You see, he believes in the Bible, but he also wants to believe in what geology says. And to make it more pointedly, let me just say that this is God's word, and this is man's word. And you know, when we put the two on the same level, we have immediately developed a bad and very dangerous premise, because what we've done is established in our own thinking that man's word in the area of geology is of the same level of authority, the same level of worthy of our faith and trust and belief as God's word and the Bible. And so, in order for these perceived two very factual, real, equally authoritative statements to exist and be reconciled, there has to be something added. And so, in order to bring these two together, we have what a Mr. Chambers in eighteen fourteen first coined as the gap theory. And in the early nineteen hundreds, it was jumped on like a chicken on a June bug. Those of you that are from the country know what I'm talking about when I say that. Uh, the Christians just loved it, because, you see, the world was saying, and science was saying, and Christians going to college were listening to their professors of geography, uh, uh, geology and science and biology, all these so-called facts about carbon fourteen dating and testing. And you know, if they were going to believe man's word, well, then how could the Earth only be six thousand years old? How could all the genealogies add up, according to Mr. Usher, to be that creation was about four thousand and four? Well, there must have been a world before that, that accommodates for all the fossils and all the dinosaurs and all of the billions of ages of Earth's strata, and we'll just dump it all in this gap. And therefore we can say that we're intelligent Christians. We don't reject science. The Bible is not old fashioned, it's modern. And we and the scientists agree. Has that ever been the objective of Christianity, to agree with science? Has that ever been the objective of God's word, to conform to man's word? I think my Bible says somewhere, let God be true and every man a liar. And yet you can see that some of these theories that we look at with regard to creation in Genesis one had their very origin, had their roots, had their inception in the dilemma that believers faced of listening to what the scientists said and reading what their Bible said, and instead of saying let God be true and every man a liar, they brought God's authoritative word down to the level of man's faulty wisdom, put them both on the same par, and then tried to reconcile them together. And because of that, you now have the gap theory. And as we say in our notes there, uh, it is the theory that introduces the original creation of verse one, which was later marred by the fall of Satan, verse two. then verse three starts the recreation of the Earth as it presently exists. This allows for a gap of billions of years between one and three to accommodate the old Earth and all the claims of modern science. Now, why do we have a problem with this? What are some of the difficulties with accepting this theory? Well, first of all, Genesis one five says, and the evening and the morning were the first day. Now, it either was the first day or it wasn't the first day, right? I mean, was it the first day? God said it was the first day. Who are we going to believe? We're going to believe man, or we're going to believe God? If it was the first day, the article there, the, means it was the, uniquely the first day. And if it truly was the first day, you can't have billions of years preceding it. You can't have time preceding it. If what the Bible says is true, it literally was the first day. Exodus chapter twenty and verse eleven, a great verse to use with this. It says, for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that are in them is, and rested on the seventh day. Wherefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it. Now, it says, for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that are in them. Now, did he really do that, or didn't he? Exodus twenty eleven says it only took six days. Well, now wait a minute. Was there billions of years before that? And if there was, is God accurate? Is God credible? Is God trustworthy in hiding from our understanding the fact that there was original creation and that there it was billions of years ago? And then in six days he just remodeled it. Is God being accurate? Is God being true? Or did he really make everything in just six days? Romans chapter five, a beautiful passage from verses twelve to twenty one. I won't read all the verses there, but as you read down through those verses, it makes it very clear that death entered the world because of Adam's sin. That before Adam had sinned, there was no such thing as death. Now, God came up with the idea. You know, death is God's idea. God said, in the day that you shall eat of the tree, you shall surely die. It's the first time we find that concept of in- death introduced. It was introduced by God when he said, if you violate my commands, you shall surely die. But before sin entered in, there was no such thing as death. And so how could there be a destruction of the past world? How could there be judgment, a catastrophic judgment by God because of sin entering in through, uh, Satan and, uh, life being destroyed and captured in fossil-like form, uh, preserved billions and billions and billions of years ago, found in this gap before Adam ever sinned. What accounts for the death of that period of time? The Bible says that death came about through sin of Adam only. Look at Genesis chapter one and verse thirty one. It says, and God saw everything that he had made. Now, did he really mean that? Let me ask you, God said when he saw everything, did he mean everything? Would that include the angels? Would that include heaven? Would that include Lucifer? These are things that God made, and it says when he saw everything that he made, he said it was very good. Does that include Lucifer? That means that at the end of the sixth days, Lucifer had not fallen. Lucifer was still described as perfect. Lucifer, as well as all the other angels that eventually fell with him, here in the end of the sixth days, is described as very good. Now, if God doesn't describe a fallen, condemned, cursed, uh, Satan with all of his angels as being very good, now, do I fall into the term of everything he made? Yeah. And so we have a problem saying that between Genesis one and two, Satan fell and God destroyed the earth. If after the sixth day, God's describing Lucifer and all the angels as being very good. Revelation chapter twenty one and verse one states that there was only two heavens and two earths. Uh, let's look at that together. If you, uh, believe in the gap theory, you have to introduce a third. It says in Revelation twenty one one, and I saw a new heaven and a new earth, and notice what it says, for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away. Now, what is the first heaven and the first earth? If we believe in a gap theory of Genesis one one being the first heaven and the first earth, then it couldn't be the earth that we're now sitting on. That would have to be the second heaven and the second earth, and then what Revelation is looking forward to in verse twenty one one is the third heaven and earth yet to come in the future. But we know that's not true because he's talking about the earth that now exists, and I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away. The new heaven yet to be is what will replace the current heaven and earth that we know to be as our earth today. And then in second Peter chapter three, verses four through six, it says that all things continued as they were from the beginning of time, from the beginning of creation, with the exception of a flood. God is saying there that basically he created all things, and all things continued stable, with one exception, there was a catastrophic event, and that's called the flood. Now, if there was another, another catastrophic event that occurred from the time that he created all things and the time that he reconstructed all things. He forgot to tell us about that, didn't he? God says, oh yeah, I forgot. There was one other catastrophic event, but I didn't mention it there. No, I don't see God doing that. The only catastrophic event that occurred in the history of mankind between in the beginning God created the world and today was the flood, and that's what the Bible tells us. That was it. It's very clear. And then Ezekiel chapter twenty eight, we looked at that this morning when we were looking at create at looking at the eye problem and the pride, but I want you to look at that again. Ezekiel chapter twenty eight, and we see verse thirteen. And it says, speaking of the serpent, thou hast been in Eden, the garden of God. And so it says that Satan was in the Garden of Eden. Then it goes on to describe him, and it describes him in his perfection. It describes him in the way that he existed while he was in the Garden of Eden. You see at the end of verse uh thirteen, in the day that thou was created. It says in verse fifteen, and thou was perfect in all thy ways from the day that thou was created, till iniquity that was found in thee, and you were in the Garden of Eden in a perfect state. Well, there's no way that Satan could be part of a huge catastrophic event between chapters one one and one two that causes big gap because of his judgment and his fall from heaven, if he was in the Garden of Eden, and the Garden of Eden was formed after the seventh day, and he was perfect in the Garden of Eden. And so you see, all of these things have to be considered when we hermeneutically look at scripture, and we come to Genesis chapter one and verse one, and it says, in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. That's clear and simple, isn't it? And the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. This is a snapshot of what the earth looked like in the process of God creating all things. You know, if I'm going to build a house, and I first started to dig the foundations, and I had maybe a little concrete board, and I had a bunch of two by fours over here, and I had a bunch of, uh, sheetrock over here, and I had a big pile of nails over here, and I took a picture of it. You'd say, my, that's not a house. It's empty, and it has no structure. And I'd say back to you, no kidding, I just started. I just dug the foundation, and I'm in the process of building it. Give me a few days, and I'll have it built. And that's exactly what verse two is. Verse two is a comment immediately after God brought space, matter, time, and, uh, life into existence, the basic building blocks of creation. And at that point, like a potter who is about to make a beautiful vessel, but as he begins with that beautiful v- vessel, he's just got a, a ugly lump of clay. And if you were to look at the potter as he just picked up that ugly lump of clay, you'd say, that's no vessel. Must have been a disruption. Must have been a chaotic event. No, the potter just started, and he's just got a big lump of clay, and he's about to form. And we see the days continuing through the sixth day when he continues all of creation in those six days. Let me quickly touch on the day age theory. The day age theory is a record, uh, a re- rejection of the fact that you have seven literal twenty-four-hour days, and it says, of course, it's a very long period of time. And again, this is said to accommodate the theistic evolutionists and those that want to accept man's word as factual with regard to a very, very old Earth, as opposed to a young Earth, six thousand years old. And so if you want to somehow try to reconcile the Bible with geology, again, we said that's a bad premise to even attempt to do that because God's word is much higher authority than man's word. But if you bring God's word down on man's level, and you put them on equal footing, and then you say they have to agree, it has to be reconciled, one of the ways that Christians have come up with it is saying, okay, well, maybe each day was a huge, huge age, a geog- a geological age. And, uh, th- there's problems with this. Let me just go through some of the problems. You know, anytime a Bible student tries to become an a geologist, or a geologist tries to become a Bible student, there's going to be problems. And what we have here with the day age theory is Bible students wanting to be geologists so that they all could be happily cohabitating together. And some really foolish fupars have been presented in this theory. Number one, the Genesis one order of creation does not even match the evidence found in geological strata of the Earth. In other words, fish fossils are not limited to the thick layer of strata. You see, here I am a Bible student. I know there are five, six days of creation, and so I come up with the idea, okay, each one is a geological age. But if I'm over here as a geologist, I'll have a problem with what you say because you say the fish were created on the fifth geological age, and according to me as a geologist, I have fossils that show fish up here in the first geological age. And what does the Bible student say then? All he can say is, oops, I'm not a geologist. You see, the very concept isn't even humanly integrated because Bible students were so set on reconciling God's word to man's word, they came up with an idea that didn't even make good geological sense. But today it's still held by many believers. Fossils are evidence of death, which results from sin. Who was responsible for the death in the early ages of time before Adam. That would con- that would contradict with Romans five. The Hebrew word for day is yom, which can also be translated as a general reference to time, as we see it in Genesis three four uh, three. However, every reference for a specific or fixed time period is u- it uses the word in the sense of a twenty-four-hour day. In other words, Exodus twenty eleven, it says, and God made everything that he made in six days. There's only one way to interpret the Hebrew word yom there, and that's the same day that was already in place, governed by the moon and the stars and the universe and all that we know today, uh, with regard to the rotation of the Earth around the sun. If Adam was created, here's an interesting one, if, if the six days of creation are six geological ages of time, and Adam was created in the sixth day age, he certainly lived to the seventh day age, which would be the seventh day. How old would he be later on when Seth was born? My Bible says in Genesis chapter five that he was one hundred and thirty years old. Well, now wait a minute. He was created in the sixth geological age. He lived through the seventh geological age, and these geological ages are millions of years. How come he's only one hundred and thirty years old, long after the first seven geological days of creation? It doesn't make sense, does it? And, uh, it again reflects the foolishness of man seeking to conform God's word to man's word. Another beautiful thing we see with regard to Genesis chapter one, and you see it repeated over and over in this passage, is the unique way that the first day is described. It's a very Jewish way. It's a way that the Jewish people, even today, keep track of their days. You know, if you would describe today, when would you say today started? When did your day start? 7 in the morning. Seven in the morning. What happens around seven in the morning? Sun comes up. Does the sun come up? I thought the Earth went around the sun. All right, anyway, we won't argue that. The sun comes up, right? And we all say, when the sun comes up, a new day. A new day is dawn. Today now is Saturday, brand new day. Tonight, about eight thirty, nine o'clock, quote, quote, the sun is going to go down, right? And what, what are we going to say? The day is Over. Over, right? We think of day as sunrise to sunset. So if we're going to speak of today, we're going to say that our day started at sunrise this morning and it ends at sunset tonight. The Jewish people don't think that way. The Jewish people have a different way of recording days. You see, their day starts when the sun goes down. And so they go from evening to morning is the first day. We would go from morning to evening is the first day, but they go from evening to morning. It's a total reverse of how it is described. And, uh, you find that all through scripture. You find the Hebrew calendar is built that way. You find as you go through the gospels, you find it mentioned that way, and uh, it's the only way to keep track of time from a Hebrew standpoint. In fact, it's the only way you can understand how God, excuse me, how Christ was in the grave for three days and three nights. The only way to understand how Christ was in the grave for three days and three nights, just like Jonah was in the belly of the whale for three days and three nights, is to understand this Hebrew way of counting days and nights. And if you understand the day starts at sunset and goes to sunrise, you can then count uh three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. Outside of using that, you can't get it. It won't be there, using our reckoning of how days are. And so you have that in Genesis chapter one. you have it at the end of verse five, and you have it at the end of every, every day that's recorded here in Genesis one. And the evening and the morning were the first day. And so the writer of Genesis, which we believe ultimately was Moses, who edited the writings of the patriarchal fathers, is using verbiage, is using the present day language that they would use to describe a normal twenty-four-hour day. There is no hint of any geological age or long period of time here. And so what is a good interpretation of Genesis chapter one? What is the biblical approach to interpreting this critical foundational passage. Well, I believe it's what we call the continuous creation. The continuous crea- creation, the seven twenty-four-hour-a-day day continuous creation, and that is that Genesis one records the historical facts of the miraculous work of the hand of God, who in one continuous process over a period of seven twenty-four-hour days created all things. In other words, as we said before, that phrase in verse two, and the earth was without form and void, simply means that it was empty and it was not yet finished in its construction. It was empty and incomplete because we're looking at it right as soon as God began to bring the building materials into the building site. For those of you that are familiar with construction, in the construction world, we have what is called the laydown area. If you're going to get ready to build something, you have what is called the laydown area, and that's where you bring all the building supplies and materials to the construction. You haven't started building yet, but you brought all the material in, and you got it available, so when you need this, you can go get it. When you need this, you can go get it. It's in the construction lay down area, but it hasn't yet been incorporated into the process of the construction job. Genesis chapter one, verse one, God has established the construction lay down area for creation. He's brought matter, time, space, life into existence in the construction laydown area, and now the rest of the passage, it's a continual process of him building day by day the, the twenty four hour, seven day process of creation of everything that he made. Uh, and so, if you study verse two of Genesis, the only way that you can come up with a gap theory is be motivated by this, conforming God's words to man's words. If you study the words themselves, and I've given you on the notes on the back of the handout, the, the, uh, a little outline of some of the words. The word and supports the continual process, not a new event, as verse two begins. The word was, uh, is the Hebrew word heyefa, uh, which translated ninety eight percent of the time is the word was, and, uh, only becomes became when the text demands it, such as in chapter two and verse seven. Seven, and he became a living soul. But the gap theorists will say that, um, the word was, and the earth was without form, they will substitute the word became. They will say, and the earth became without form and void, as if it was an event that occurred. But that's bad interpretation, that's violating all of the hermeneutical rules of interpreting that word Hethia. Uh, also, as we said, the phrase without form and void is more accurately translated unformed and uninhabited, or empty and incomplete. And so, Genesis one one and two could be translated this way. In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth, space, matter, and time, and the universe, so created at this point, was unformed and uninhabited. Again, we're jumping into a process, a process of God divinely bringing things into existence in a very orderly way, one day at a time, according to his divine plan. The word create sometimes is a word used and disputed within this passage of Genesis one. It's the Hebrew word bara, and it uniquely means to make something from nothing. Uh, the word bara in the Hebrew is only used of actions by God. It's never used as anything that man does. It's a unique word that applies only to God, and we find it used three times here in Genesis one. And it's interesting, as you look at Genesis one where the three times the word create is used, each time something new is added that didn't exist, and it was made from nothing. For instance, in Genesis one one, in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And here you have, uh, matter without conscious life. It's equivalent to the body, you might say. It's that composition of matter, flesh, bone, fluid, blood, hair. I- it's matter. That's what was created. Matter was brought into existence in the first time the word create was used. And then we find it again used in verse twenty one. And God created great whales and living creatures. Now he's beginning and he's creating something that has matter and it has a soul. The soul was introduced, okay? And we know that animals have a soul, not an eternal soul as a human being, they have a temporary soul, a soul that is only living as long as they are living, and when they die, their soul dies. Their soul doesn't go anywhere, but they still have a soul. And so the animal world now is created, and a new element is brought in, the soul with the body. And so the word ba occurs again, but then the third time you find the word bara, it's in verse twenty seven, So God created man in his own image. And here you have a third thing that's added. It's different than the animal world. Man has a body, matter, and has a soul, a consciousness of life, but it also has a spirit. Something that separates it totally from the animal world. The spirit is what gives us the ability to understand God and to speak to him, to communicate, and for him to communicate to us. The spirit, it was something new, something that hadn't been added before, and something that was created from nothing. And so you see the process of creation from that which is inanimate in life, like rocks, soil, uh, water, things that had just matter, like the body, to things that had a body and life, the animal world, to things that had a body and life and a spiritual element, the spirit that was given to man. And so you have those three words used specially to commemorate the three different times that something new was added into the process. And so what do we conclude? Well, I've given you two conclusions here with this study, and that is that number one, our sovereign God orderly brought about a complex creation according to his perfection, the perfection of his divine plan. It was not disrupted or delayed by Satan. Satan had no incentive to destroy a world that he could play God over. You see, uh, Satan wanted to be the prince of this world. Satan wanted to rule the world. Satan wanted to play God, as it were. He would have no, uh, incentive to bring ruin or destruction to this world. And number two, that man is the pinnacle of all of God's creation, placed there for fellowship with God and communion with him. And so, man wasn't an afterthought of recreation. If you accept geology and you accept the evolutionary understandings that geologists hold, for instance, if you accept the gap theory, you're given authority to geologists as that his word is true, something that Christians haven't thought of, most geologists are evolutionists. Most geologists hold to evolution. So a geologist is going to hold to the primeval development of mankind from a monkey and all the different stages of man at different points of development. My Bible says that Adam was the first man, and it's very, very clear in First Corinthians chapter fifteen. And so, when we embrace geology in an attempt to reconcile the Bible through a gap theory, without knowing it, we are also giving the same authority to the evolutionary theories that that geologist holds and upon which his theories have been developed to come up with those ages of time. And, uh, my Bible says Adam is the first man. He either was the first or he wasn't. What do you think? I'd rather say God be true and every man a liar. These are important things, and I think that most of you understand them. Most of you probably hold to the beliefs that we just taught, and I don't think any of you probably were mixed up with evolution or the gap theory or things of this sort, but you're going to run into believers who are. You're going to run into people who hold dearly to these thoughts. So you need to be armed, you need to be equipped to understand Genesis chapter one and understand the simplicity of what God did when he spoke the worlds into being, and we can accept just a very literal, face value interpretation of that first chapter as foundational to all the other truths that God is going to give us in scripture. And remember, when you begin to change Genesis chapter one in any way, you're opening the door for false doctrine and false teaching and putting cracks in the foundation of the rest of scripture. Let's pray. Father, we just commend this time to you. We thank you for the time that we've had together today. We thank you for the challenge that we've heard from your word with regard to our own estimation of ourselves, to be men and women that are humble before you and to walk before you in humility. And Lord, we pray that you continue to give us wisdom to put in perspective who we are and who you are. And may we truly have the boldness to speak forward and give forth the gospel to those that are lost and encourage us to become involved in the things that Doctor John is doing, and uh, may we as well find ourselves able to communicate the gospel in a very practical way, wherever you may bring us and send us for your glory. We do pray, Lord, that you'll just encourage us to have a thirst and a hunger for the truth of God's word, that you'll give us a desire to interpret it properly, to understand where false doctrines emerge, and to accept the word of God as your absolute truth, and not to be intimidated by the wisdom, the faulty wisdom of the world and fallen man, but to stand absolutely solid on the truth of God's word. Challenge our hearts with all of these things today, we ask in Jesus' name, amen. November twentieth, the next Word Alive team.