Scripture, Ben: Job ~ Camp Ministry-2003-04

We have been enjoying music. What is music? It's a sound that moves through the air, and it vibrates our eardrums and sends a nervous signal into our brain, and we perceive it. But it starts with an idea that is written down, usually in the form of notes on a page. There's a lot of different ways that music has been written down. A long, long time ago, they would write it down with a quill pen and ink, you know. Now, uh, you've got big printing presses, you have computers. How long do you suppose it would take a monkey to step back and start throwing stones at a computer keyboard that was set up so that it would record notes on bars and come up with, oh, Jesus loves me. In other words, randomly, till the notes all came out with Jesus love me. Or how about how great thou art? How about how great thou art with all the parts? Or a symphony with all the various scores for all the different instruments. You know what? The complexity of a music score like that is truly, truly very, very simple compared to the kind of complexity involved in the arrangement of the atoms that are put together in DNA and protein and carbohydrates and all those things that work so that right now those electrical impulses are going from our ear into our brain, and a molecule called hemoglobin is taking oxygen from our lungs and carrying it to our brain so that it can burn glucose, so that those nerves will work, and the the complexity of biochemistry, the chemistry of life, puts the complexity of the notes in How Great Thou Art, or Beethoven's Symphony, or anything to shame. And yet, a naturalist, a materialistic evolutionist believes that indeed those molecules got together by chance, just like someone might say, well, I think that if you had a monkey throwing stones long enough at a keyboard, they could come up with Jesus loves me. That is, brothers and sisters, a huge leap of faith that they think, that anyone would think, that eventually, given enough time and enough tries, you can come up with such incredible complexity out of total randomness. It takes a lot of faith to believe that, and yet there are millions who do. I assume that most in our room tonight don't believe that. You believe that there was a fantastic, majestic, intelligent power that designed and put together the molecules that made the plant that we considered last night on the third day of creation, when the first material life forms were produced. And I can't even tell you how many times I've heard people say, you know, it takes more faith to believe, you know, that the monkey could throw stones and get Jesus loves me, that evolution could produce living organisms. It takes more faith to believe that than it does, you know, to believe that God created everything. Be careful. What we say. Okay, it's easy for you to, maybe it's easy for me, although it wasn't once upon a time. Uh, it's easy to believe that, yeah, God created, not, not time and chance. But might an evolutionist indict us with their faith in trusting time and chance to produce the complexity of life when we don't express that much faith in other parts of God's revealed word. And it's just as clear about dying to self, trusting God in difficult circumstances. Ever think of it that way? An evolutionist might truly indict a God-fearing, Bible-believing Christian with the amount of faith that they have versus the amount of faith that we exercise when it comes to other aspects of God's revealed word to us. Job, in spite of fantastic circumstances, trusted God. He believed God. He placed his confidence in an all-knowing, all-powerful God, and he, in spite of how he felt, feared, honored, obeyed, trusted Almighty God. What I'd like to do is consider now day four in the creation account, and first of all, I just want to read it, Genesis chapter one, starting at verse fourteen, and then consider what I consider to be just some very, very important issues that relate to even how God encourages, draws out our faith, especially as it relates to the display of his power and glory in creation. Genesis 1, verse 14. Then God said, let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night, and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years. And let them be for lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth. And it was so. And God made the two great lights, the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. Made the stars also. And God placed them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth and to govern the day and the night and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, a fourth day. One of the things I've been trying to emphasize as we've gone through step by step this creation account is one of the very helpful things to keep in mind as we consider what God is doing here is we see God with a purpose in mind through each step, that purpose being he is preparing a place for his masterpiece, for his real reason for doing all of this in the first place. He's preparing a place for man. And this day four is especially important as we understand that principle, as we see that principle, it leaps out. If we consider carefully verse fourteen especially. This is a, if we want to put important verses, uh, out there in the creation account, this is one of the most important, I think. Then God said, let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens. And then there are what we call purpose clauses, phrases that give the reason for putting these lights in the expanse of the heavens, in order to separate the day from the night, and let them be for, we could say, let them be for this purpose, for signs and for seasons and for days and years. You see that God is telling us why he created the sun, moon, and stars. For this purpose, let them be for this reason. And what is the reason? Well, to give light, yes, but there's more specific reasons here given in the second phrase. Let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and for years. Now, when you think of the sun, moon, and stars being placed in the heavens for the purpose of signs and keeping track of time, do the animals care what day it is? Do the plants, um, go, well, it's now two thousand three? Oh, they're governed by the length of day, you know, the flowers begin to sprout as the days get longer. But who really cares? Who notices the season? And who keeps track of the days and the years? Not the plants, not the animals, man. God is telling us that the purpose he put the sun, moon, and stars in space was for man, for man's benefit. We keep track of what day it is. We keep track of what year it is. And based on what season it is, we know it's time to plant. And more importantly, and we, we aren't accustomed to this because we're, I assume, not Jews. But for the Jews, keeping track of what season it was, was absolutely crucial to carry out the commands that God gave on Mount Sinai to Moses. All of those festivals, the Passover, the Feast of Tabernacles, the Feast of Unleavened Bread, all of them were based on the time of year. How would they know what time of year it was? Well, there were the seasons that, according to the stars and the movement of the moon, they could keep track of time and obey God's commands. The plants and the animals simply, you know, just don't care about these things. They don't even know about these things. But my favorite of these reasons given for God placing the sun, moon, and stars in space is the first one here. Let them be for signs. And what are the signs? Well, that word is often used to describe, you know, miraculous manifestations of God. However, that word can also refer to God's communication through man in whatever ways he sees fit, even through nature. So what are the sign value, the sign values of the stars, of the sun or the moon? Well, let's see, there's the, the, uh, star of Bethlehem. You know, uh, I, I believe your speaker next week, Ken Fleming, has done a lot of work, and he proposes that another aspect of the sign value of the stars is related to the zodiac. Now, I don't want to hear everybody gasp. But there are some interesting things to consider that perhaps, way, way back before God gave the Bible, that the story of the gospel, the coming redeemer, the defeat of the archenemy of man, the dragon, was told in the stars. Have any of you ever heard that? Now, um, I think we should be careful with how we take that, especially since, you know, we don't need stars to tell us that. We- we've got a very objective, marvelous, huge message here in the, in the Gospels to tell us about Christ's coming and everything. But it may very well be that way, way back, maybe even in the Garden of Eden, God explained some of the signs in the stars to Adam. And those stories were recalled and passed on generation after generation. But you know what happens when you just pass something on verbally? It gets distorted. It gets distorted until finally the story that you end up with is nothing like the original story. So what do we have now? We've got astrology, a total perversion, if indeed God placed the gospel story through the various constellations. But that could even be one of those sign values of the stars. But I think the most important sign value of the stars comes in what we call God's general revelation to every human heart. That general revelation is how God speaks to every single human being, even if they don't have a Bible. And through creation, and I think especially through the stars, God works in the heart of every human being a sense that there is a God. He's great, he's awesome, he's majestic, he's eternal. That's what Romans chapter one tells us. I'm going to read Romans chapter one starting at verse eighteen, and we're going to find that there are some amazing details that God communicates to the heart of man from the stars. Romans one eighteen, for the wrath of God is revealed from heaven, the wrath! Against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because that which is known about God is evident within them, for God made it evident to them. For since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes, his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse. For even though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculation, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures. Especially through the stars, as man looks up and sees the expanse and recognizes that that had to have come from someone. It couldn't have just sort of happened. And even though we can't measure it with our eyes, you get the sense that it is vast, it is huge, it's unreachable, and it is a manifestation, it's a reflection, it's a emanation of this great God that must have put it there. But what does man do? Oh, I want to worship this God. I want to, uh, no. He runs from that God, suppresses that he even knows there is an eternal God, and he comes up with his own speculations about where he came from. Even, uh, says, well, you know, we weren't created in the image of an incorruptible God. We came from crawling creatures and four-footed animals. What's that sound like? Precisely what evolution teaches us. You know, evolution is not a new idea. This isn't something that just came along with Darwin in the eighteen hundreds. Evolution has been something that civilizations, nations, man has been devising way back in the days of Paul. What was so different, I guess we might say, about Darwin's proposal was that he not only proposed this idea of simple creatures becoming more complex and more complex and more complex, voila, look how smart and complex we are, but he came up with a mechanism to explain how that could happen, called natural selection. And this is how then the scientific community latched onto it, because they thought, they felt that, well, now this is something we can test. Evolution is not new to the nineteenth century. Man has been speculating and making his own god from which to then say, I came from him, and I will worship him. It's one that I made for as long as man's been around speculating without God's revealed word. God uses his creation to work in the heart of every human being that he is, and that he is eternal. He's divine. And brothers and sisters, we need to acknowledge that. Something else we need to acknowledge is that the age of Sunday school is over. We do not live in a culture where everyone has had a Jewish background, and all we've got to do is tell them about the Messiah that they can go read about in Isaiah fifty three. That's what was going on in Israel. And so the apostles had a whole lot of ground to work with already. And it used to be even a few generations ago, I mean, even though people weren't saved, they all, you know, they'd all gone to Sunday school, they'd learned about the Bible and things like that. But, uh, you know what? We don't have a world like that anymore. They don't know anything about the word of God, and we need to recognize that God has given us something to begin with, and that is he is the creator. This is one of the reasons why I feel that understanding God as the creator is so important to the church. It's vital in evangelism as well as in worship. Remember when Paul was in Athens, and they had all these gods, but there was the unknown god. And so Paul said, I see you're very religious. Let me tell you about this god. And the first thing he said about that god was, he is the creator of the heavens and the earth. He began with what he knew God has already revealed to every single human being, down, down deep inside. Now, granted, what did they all do? Well, a lot of them suppressed it, and but some of them said, hmm, we want to hear more about this. I mean, because he was sort of a kook talking about miracles. Well, a lot of people are going to call us kooks talking about miracles, but some recognize that there is a divine miracle worker, and the explanation for that is look at the stars. So tell me more about him. God not only, however, works in the heart of man a sense of, wow, there must be a God who's eternal and divine. God uses his creation and that manifestation, that demonstration of his great power to elicit faith, to draw faith out of his children. This is one of the things that we've been considering with Job. Remember, God just keeps talking about the days of creation, starting in Job thirty eight. And this theme of the creator is so prevalent throughout the whole book. And to see just how this pulling, I guess you might say, or or eliciting faith from a wavering heart of a child of God works, and how important it is. Turn to one of the greatest examples, one of the bedrock examples of a person's confession of faith in all the Bible. It's in Genesis, and it's in Genesis chapter fifteen. It's an account that is quoted time and time again in the New Testament as an example of saving faith. Genesis chapter fifteen. I'll just start at verse one. After these things, the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision, saying, Do not fear, Abram, I am a shield to you, your very great reward, or your reward shall be very great. And Abram hears this from this one who has spoken to him before. But Abram does have reason to fear. He has just, uh, won a great victory, but he lives in a dangerous place, and the greatest desire of his heart is to have a son to pass on his inheritance, to continue on through his seed, and he doesn't have one, and he's getting real old, and he's beginning to think, well, I know God promised this to me, but I don't know if God can do this or not. Maybe I'm confused about what God really meant. And so Abraham questions the Lord. Lord God, what will you give me since I am childless? We see Abram's faith wavering a little here. He's got doubt. Verse four, Then behold, the word of the Lord came to him, saying, This man will not be your heir, but one who shall come forth from your own body, he shall be your heir. And now look what God does. He took him outside and said, Now look toward the heavens and count the stars, if you are able to count them. That's all God did. He didn't talk to him any more than that. He just said, Abram, let's go outside. Look up there. Now try to count those. Put yourself in that place. Who is talking to you? Yahweh, Creator God Almighty, he's talking to you, and he's taking you outside to look at the stars. And look at Abram's response. Then he believed in the Lord. What did he believe? He believed what God told him, that he would have a son from his own body. Not Eleazar, he wavered again and thought maybe he'd do it through somebody else's body, not his own wife, but he believed in the Lord. This is saving faith. Believing what God tells you, even when you don't understand how, when you've got a lot of doubts and wondering, uh, but you come to the place where you go, okay, Lord, I, I believe. I don't know how, but I believe. What did the Lord use to bring Abram to that place? I think showing him the stars made Abram think, wow, you know, this one who's talking to me, if he can, if he can cast the stars in space, if he can create the universe of galaxies, because I don't know if he knew about galaxies, but just the expanse that he could perceive, then surely he can give Sarah and I a child. And he believed God. The key to saving faith is believing what God has told you. The Old Testament saints weren't told as much as we've been told. We are responsible to believe what God has told us. Abram was responsible for believing what God told him, and he did. I find it interesting that what Abram was believing was a miracle. What a magnificent tool God has made in the heaven. The sign value of the stars to work in the heart of every human being, that there is a God, that he's majestic, eternal, awesome, and in his children, when they're wavering, when they're struggling. Son, daughter, come here, look at this. I did this. Don't you think I can take care of whatever needs you have? Yes, Lord, of course you can. Well, it's not always that easy, is it? But that is what the Lord does in his children. That's what Job was, was resting on, that in spite of all the confusion and the frustration and the pain and the hurt, God knows everything. He can do anything, and I will fear him, and I will obey him to the end. And sometimes he said, God, I just wish you would make this the end. I'm tired of this, but he never, ever sinned by cursing God. So again, I ask, how much faith do we have in the things that God has told us. I don't have any trouble believing that God, uh, spoke and there was life. I don't have any trouble that he said, let the earth bring forth vegetation, and the molecules just did their thing, and what we've got is fancy rocks. I don't have any trouble with God placing the sun, moon, and stars in space, but do you have trouble believing other things God tells you? I struggle with things. Let me, uh, read a story of a man who had a, a marvelous... profession isn't the right word. A marvelous demonstration through his action of faith in something that God said that by virtually any standard would be considered virtually insignificant. The man's name is Matthew Murray, and uh, he was in the Navy. But what's interesting, as we read this story, you'll find that he wasn't a captain or a, a sailor. This is the story of Matthew Murray. He undertook a research project based on the Bible and once again confirmed the scientific accuracy of the Bible, which so many people really struggle with. They, they just, you know, when it comes to science, history, things like that, well, the Bible, that's not what the Bible's for. Murray was in charge of the depot of charts and instruments in the Hydrographic Office of the United States Navy from eighteen forty one to eighteen sixty one. So basically, he was a clerk. We- we might say he was a secretary in an office where they stored the- the charts after the ships would sail, and they'd keep their logs, and then they'd keep, they'd store them. Not exactly a glamorous job. He was a Christian who loved and respected the word of God, and one day in the eighth Psalm, he read the following words: Thou hast put all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen, yea, the beasts of the field, the fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever passes through the paths of the seas. Now, Murray was one who was familiar with some of the problems that beset the sailing industry of that day, and he immediately recognized the significance of that verse, verse eight in Psalm eight. The Bible says there are paths in the sea. And he thought, if the Bible says it, I believe it. And he was also aware of Ecclesiastes chapter one verse six that says, the wind goes toward the south and turns about to the north. It whirls about continually, and the wind returns again according to his circuit. So Murray, based on the Bible, concluded that there are well-established wind circuits, and there are literally paths in the sea. Now, on what basis did he come up with these two conclusions? All his long hours of noticing, as you're trying to get from Spain to Virginia, you know, you keep on getting pushed up the New England coast. No, he just read God's word, and it's astounding that nobody ever noticed this kind of stuff before, but what Murray then did was, if, if there are paths in the sea and there's established wind circuits, we ought to be able to get a, a feel for that. We ought to be able to see it somehow. So he starts pulling down all these logs and all these charts, and he sees them, and he got out a great big map, and he started just charting it, and he noticed that, you know, all these boats are trying to go in this place, but all of them seem to get keep swept, get swept along this way. And by doing it, he recognized that there was this pattern. He spent hours and days taking down dusty old log charts, and he discovered a secretary in an office. He discovered the ocean currents, the Great Gulf Current, a path in the sea forty miles wide, two thousand miles long. He discovered the California Current and the Japanese Current. This man and his discoveries literally changed the economics of this planet. Because now shipping was greatly enhanced. Things can get, instead of fighting these currents, hey, use them. A man who never sailed a ship. Why did he accomplish this amazing feat? Because he had a very simple, childlike faith, so simple that the Bible says that I believe it, there's paths in the seas. Can you imagine how many people probably scoffed at him? Paths in the seas? From a little phrase, and whatsoever passes through the paths of the seas, the man changed the world. Because of his faith. How much faith do we have in God's word, when it tells us things about God, when it tells us things about ourselves, when it tells us how to live, what to do, what not to do? Do we sort of, uh, judge what's really important, and I'll try to work on that stuff, but these other things, you know. How important is a little phrase, and whatsoever passes through the paths of the sea. God is so gracious to us in even creating the sun, moon, and stars for our benefit, and one of the most wonderful reasons that he created those suns, that some of them are unfathomably far away and unfathomably huge. You know, there are stars that we've discovered that if it was placed where our sun is right now, the outer surface of that star would reach out to Jupiter, would fill our solar system. The fact is, our star, sun, is a average star. It's ninety two million miles away, and every one of us right now are experiencing the discomfort of that average sized star, ninety two million miles away, having shone during the day. I wish that we could turn the AC on a little bit more. We don't have heat on in the room, do we, Bill? No, this heat is from the sun. You know, I've heard that that ninety two million miles, if the Earth was one million miles closer, what is that? About one percent closer? Life couldn't, life couldn't survive on the planet. There'd just be no life here. Wow, how convenient that we're put here just in the right spot so that we can have ice and we can have water, and we can have vapor. God did all of this for the benefit of man. If we consider that God put those lights in space for man's benefit. Then, what might God do for you in your time of need? You see, God not only displays his power and glory in creation, but he has displayed his personal interest and his love through his son. And an understanding of how much God loves us and how personally he takes the interaction that we have with him and him towards us is one of the most heartwarming, one of the most encouraging aspects of the Christian life, isn't it? And so David knew God much more than just as a star creator. David knew God as one who was very, very personally interested in him. And what especially encouraged David was the fact that this one who cared so much for him was the same one who cast the stars in space. Turn to Psalm eight. I know that you're familiar with it. It says, O Lord our Lord, how majestic is thy name in all the earth, who hast displayed thy splendor above the heavens. What's he talking about? Splendor of God displayed in the starry host. And when David would get the sheep all down on a nice cool Palestinian night, he would lay down, and there's no light pollution, there's no air pollution. He would look out and see the Milky Way, and the Big Dipper, and Orion's Belt, and the Pleiades, and those beautiful constellations, and he would worship. In verse three it says, when I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which thou hast ordained, what is man that thou dost take thought of him, and the son of man that thou dost care for him? David would look at the stars, and he would recognize, as Abram did, what a powerful, awesome. He can do anything. And he sits enthroned above those heavens. And so he goes, so what? For the person who is running from that God, for the person who would deny that God down deep inside, that would be a terrifying thought, wouldn't it? And it is. That God does know them and knows all their deeds, knows all about them, and there's nowhere to hide. For the child of God walking with that God, what a precious thought. For the child of God suffering, even like a Job. Shouldn't it be that knowing the God who flicked the stars in space with his fingers, as David says there, like that? Shouldn't it be a comfort to know that he takes thought of me? He knows all about me. He knows what I'm going through. And it's not just an occasional, hey, how you doing? It's not like an email. You get tired of forwards? You see the FW there and delete, you know, you get... That's not the way God thinks about us, communicates to us. Look at another Psalm, forty. This is another Psalm of David, by the way. In verse five, David expresses, by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, how much God thinks about us. Many, O Lord my God, are the wonders which thou hast done, and thy thoughts towards us. There is none to compare with thee. If I would declare and speak of them, they would be too numerous to count. God is continually, beyond measure, thinking towards us. His desire is to have a relationship with us, a friendship with us, a worship relationship from us. That's what he wants. That's what he created us for. And that's what he created the stars for, to just sort of help draw us a little closer to understanding who he is, how great he is, but then also to go, what is man? Who am I that you would take a thought about me? Who am I that you would be continually thinking about me. Th- these, these, uh, incredible, uh... They're not contradictory. They're, they're extreme in the character of God. He can be so great that the word of God tells us he's got to sort of stoop down, you know, see what's going on. All the way to his thoughts are continually toward me. What a magnificent, fantastic God we have. And to think that not only is he even great, and he's one who thinks continually about me, but when the Lord Jesus came along, he introduced us to that God by means of the closest kind of human relationship you can have as a father and child. Turn, turn back to Genesis chapter one. God said, let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years. And God made the two great lights, the greater light to govern the day, the lesser light to govern the night, and he made the stars also. That's just, that's almost like a little, oh, the stars also. I've already mentioned, you know, what some of these aspects of the stars. Some of them are just so huge, powerful, burning, atomic. How many of them did he make? Well, estimates now that we've got the Hubble telescope shined up pretty good are that there are one hundred billion galaxies. That's with a B, One hundred billion galaxies. And your average galaxy has one hundred billion stars in it. So, as best as we can tell so far, there's a hundred billion times a hundred billion stars out there. You know, it's been said, wow, with that many stars out there, and maybe lots of them, lots and lots of them have, uh, solar systems around them, uh, probably there, one of those would have life on it. I can't tell you how many times people ask me, do you think there's other life in outer space? Well, uh, no, I don't. Because I, I, I put aside this, this evolutionary kind of thinking that life is a product of chance. If life is truly a product of chance, then, you know, well, maybe there is a chance that one other one out there somewhere else, it could have happened too. But you see, life isn't a product of chance. Life is the intent of God. And I see that God's attention is on man. In fact, I see that the Son of God is a man. And now we move into the realm of who can understand it, and we can talk about it, and we can try and discuss it, but these are the kinds of things that, frankly, I consider to be gifts of God to keep us in our place. We cannot fully comprehend him. We cannot understand fully how he can be fully God and fully man, but we can sure understand that that's what the word says. So you know what? I believe it, even though I might not be able to explain it completely. And it's a wonderful place to be, a place where I humble myself and I say, God, I don't understand all these things, but you sure are great. It's incredible to think that of the vast expanse of space, that this little speck of dust called the Earth is where God came and walked in that dust and wore a crown of thorns and died to save us. So no, I don't think there are other life, aliens and stuff in other places. The only other life forms in the universe are the angelic beings. God's program, his focus is this place, the Earth. And sometimes I would just like to leave these things out, but I can't because it is a part of our culture. The issue of, okay, so how long did all this take? And, and uh, again, you know, when we were thinking of the miraculous and then the, the natural, how does it all fit together? Because our understanding is that some of these stars are ten, fifteen billion light years away. And remember in one of our earlier sessions, I said that basically, um, we're locked into the EM, E equals MC squared realm, where energy, matter, and time are all interrelated, and you can't have any one without the other two. That C in that little equation is the speed of light. It's considered to be the great constant, one hundred eighty six thousand miles per second, and so light travels in one year, one hundred eighty six thousand miles times sixty times sixty times twenty four times three hundred sixty five. You got that? That's a long way. It's trillions of miles, what it boils down to. And you start having these numbers, and they don't mean anything anymore. It's just, it's just, you know, a huge number. That's how light, far light travels here. But we understand that, that some of these stars are billions of those light years away. Well, doesn't that mean then that that light took fourteen billion years to get here? So what's this day thing? There are several ways to try and explain that, and I- I'll just share one with you. I'm, I'm, uh, I- I've, I've had all kinds of different, uh, ideas about, you know, what's the best explanation if I still will hold to, you know, that God did this on day four, you know, and then the fifth day he created birds and, and fish. He, he moved right on. He wasn't... Okay, well, remember why he created these things? For man's benefit? If he's going to create man in two days, I, I find a problem with, but I got to wait fourteen billion years for the light to get to the planet to do what I intended it to do. There, there's lots of different ways, light intact, um, the speed of light has changed. By the way, you know, we call this c, one hundred eighty six thousand miles per second, but we've stopped light in the laboratory. How constant is the speed of light? I know it's in a vacuum, but you know, there's another thing that we understand about light. It is drastically affected by gravity. So I- I'll throw this one out for a- a- a way to somehow justify the idea that God created light on the fourth day, and what- what's that day referring to? It's the point of reference on Earth. The Earth turning one time, that's how you get an evening and a morning. The Earth is turning. How you can have one day here, and in fact, that light can travel billions of light years, and maybe even over what we would call fourteen billion years, but not fourteen billion years according to Earth time. Because what we are learning is light is drastically affected, the speed of light is drastically affected by gravity. We have an atomic clock in Boulder, Colorado, and we have an atomic clock in Greenwich Village in, uh, not Greenwich Village, Greenwich, England. Sorry. Uh, one's at sea level, one's way up on the mountains. And do you know that these atomic clocks tick at a different rate, five microseconds per year? The clock on at sea level is slower by five microseconds per year. Now, that may not seem like very much, but I mean, we're only talking about the distance of, of the top of some Rocky Mountains to sea level, and the difference, as best as we can tell, the, the, the important factor here is the amount of gravity. You're that much further away from the center of the Earth, there's that much less gravity. It's called gravity time dilation. Well, we don't know exactly what was going on in here, but if, in a sense, and I'm don't, please don't get me wrong, I'm not talking about the Big Bang that so often is proposed in, in secular scientific circles, but if indeed where God talked about and he stretched the heavens out, if things began down in here with a fantastic amount of gravity centered around the Earth, and I'm not a geocentrist, but I might be a universal centrist in the sense that the Earth, you know, the sun doesn't go around the, the Earth, but the Earth may be pretty much, you know, at the center of the universe. Um, as God stretched out the heavens, all these, this distortion of gravity and so forth may have literally had time moving much more slowly with respect to time out in outer space during this, this period when God placed the stars in space and stretched out the heavens. This is a, a theory that is, uh, right now especially being, uh, worked on by the Institute for Creation Research, and the man who's, uh, um, one of the experts on this and proposing it and doing a lot of work on this name is Russell Humphreys, if you're interested in some of these sciences. It's a really interesting proposal that, uh, you know, light, light didn't necessarily speed up. It's the creation account is given to us from the perspective of what's happening on Earth, and the Earth rotated one time a day. But, you know, out there in space somewhere, maybe light was going really fast compared to what we would think it should be going, one hundred eighty six thousand miles per second. It's interesting. It, uh, maybe can help some figure, you know, yeah, there's a lot of possibilities, and I don't have to accept this idea that, that, uh, God's word, as it's written right here, is, is not really what God means. And so let me conclude tonight by sharing with you from my own personal experience, what happened to me in this whole issue of needing explanations and, and struggling with, you know, God's word, and what does it really mean? As it relates to day four? I told you the other night that when I had gotten far from the Lord and I was trained as a zoologist at the University of California at Berkeley, no great, uh, institution of, uh, evangelical learning. I, uh, learned and accepted, uh, evolution. And then, through the Lord's working in my life, I came to the place where I repented, and then I believed that, yeah, uh, there is, evolution doesn't make sense. It can't be, but still, somehow or other, the ages and all that, you know, the time stuff must be right. I mean, how could so many scientists be wrong? You know, we don't apply that kind of rationale to Buddhism and Hinduism and Islam, do we? Why do we apply that to scientific stuff? How many, how could so many smart scientists be wrong? Anyway, um, I'm sitting in seminary class still struggling with how do I really interpret God's word? And my professor came to day four, and he said, okay, here what we have, he just said it so matter of factly, here we have the monkey wrench for all attempts to harmonize evolution with the creation account. He said, there is no way, any way, shape, or form, that any theory of evolution can tolerate the sun, moon, and stars being created after plants. And it just, just hit me like a ton of bricks. Of course! I mean, if the stars, you know, are gonna take, and the sun wasn't even there yet, the moon wasn't even there yet, and we've already got plants on the Earth. You, you can't have all these billions of years and so forth. Now the, the plants can, you know, go for an afternoon without the sun, although it doesn't mean there wasn't any light. And what it really boiled down to, brothers and sisters, was, okay, either I take this account and it really just doesn't mean what it says. It's, it's a story to give me some happy, good feelings about what God did, you know, he really made it all, but that's not it. If you really want to know what happened, you got to go talk to a geologist. You got to go talk to an astronomer. You got to go talk to a biologist, and we'll let you know what really happened. But this makes you feel good to know that God is great, God is good, and he's made our food. Or, uh, you know, this is true, and a lot of this stuff that seems to contradict it is either wrong, or I'm just not looking at it correctly. And like I've shared, a lot of things I find is I'm just not looking at it correctly. And a lot of stuff, you know what, that I was taught in college is just flat out wrong. And I'm not the only one who knows it. What I mean is, you know, the professors that were teaching me that stuff back at Berkeley know it now too, because that's the wonderful thing about science, it keeps changing with new evidence. So the next time the, the latest proof for evolution comes along, just say, excuse me, I'll wait till next Tuesday and see what you say, or next year, or, you know, whatever. Or maybe you'll never know how to explain it. Won't you be happier if you stand before God and he'll ask you, you know, what, you didn't seem to understand about that starlight stuff, and you think maybe you're going to get in trouble. No, God, I didn't, you know, I didn't really study those things out. I just sort of believed what you said. What's he going to say? Well done, good and faithful servant. I'm sure that's what he'll say to Matthew Murray. Well done, Matthew. Your faith has done you well, and you've glorified me. And by the way, it really helped mankind. The stars are a wonderful thing. And to think, brothers and sisters, that he put them out there for man's benefit. I don't know how the light got here, but I do believe that when God put those stars out there on day four, the birds that were created on day five could see that light. I don't know what you're struggling with tonight in your life of faith, but God is trustworthy. I don't know what you might be suffering in your Christian life, but God is almighty. He is all powerful, he is all knowing, and he cares for you. And I commend him to you tonight to believe him. And we should be praying for one another, to help one another increase in our faith. Let's pray. Lord, we ask you tonight to increase our faith. Oh, not necessarily in creation things, but I sure thank you that you work with me in my life that way, because it was, for me, a real stumbling block. And, uh, Lord, I just pray that for the stumbling blocks that my brothers and sisters here face, and you know the ones that I have now too, that you would encourage us with who you are, that, uh, we would recognize you are majestic in your power, you are all-knowing, and you can take care of us and will take care of us. And Lord, might, uh, that not be something that, uh, we just think about now and then when we're in trouble. I pray that you would move us to take advantage in the proper sense of the word, take advantage of the relationship that we have with you moment by moment, to talk with you and walk with you, our great God and creator and savior and friend. How can all those things describe you? Lord, we love you. We love you because you first loved us, and I just pray that we, as your children, would do things that make you proud, bring joy to your heart. We pray these things for the sake of your blessed son, who died for us, who became one of us, who intercedes for us, and who we want to glorify with our lives. We pray in his name, amen.