Sermon
VBS 2026 - "Scientific Foreknowledge" by Joey Morgan - Part 3
Publisher transcript
Transcript
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You hear me now? Good. I also have to give a little bit of credit
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to a little thing called Copilot that opened up in the corner whenever
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I opened up Microsoft PowerPoint for the first time in my life. It came up
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and said, do you want some help making a PowerPoint? So the words
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are mine, but I got to give credit to Copilot for pretty much everything else
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that you're going to see. But so there's many ways that people might
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answer you when you ask about having a Bible study,
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about maybe why they don't see the value in God's Word. Like,
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if you just go up to somebody and say, hey, would you be interested in,
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you know, having a Bible study? And you'll get all sorts of
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comments from different people. Maybe they just say, you know, I just don't see
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any value. I don't believe in the Bible. I don't really see a need
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for me to study it with you, or anything like that. Why they think you
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are silly even sometimes for believing it yourself. Sometimes you'll even have that conversation
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with someone. So some are going to say it's a made-up
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book. You know, you probably have heard that in your lifetime at some
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point in time. They'll say the events didn't happen, you know,
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as it was written. They don't believe that. That's where you
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may point to some of the archaeological, you know, evidence that Bill talked about on
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Sunday evening that point you in the direction of a lot of
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these events did happen. You know, there's all sorts of evidence that says the
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things that we've found, they all say the stuff has happened just like
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what we read in the Bible. Well, then some might say, and I've
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heard this one a lot, well, it's just a book written by man just
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to make people act a certain way. How many of y'all have heard that in
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your lifetime of talking with people?
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I've heard that quite a few times as well. Well, then that's maybe
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when we point to prophecy in the Bible, like what Dale had mentioned
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last night, to show that the things spoken in the Bible are not
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just written by man, they're God-breathed and not just from
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man. The Bible told of things that were going to happen before they
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happened, and then they happened. Well, a man
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can't come up with that by himself, you know, just— it's, it's not going to
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happen. Then they may answer and say,
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well, maybe they wrote it and then after after it already had
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taken place. Well, that would be impossible
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in many of the situations, as we talked about last night, because it's lifetimes
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that went by before the thing took place. They couldn't have,
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you know, done such a thing. But then those whose hearts are still
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hard after showing them all those things, they still believe it's a made-up book.
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They're still going to believe that it's a book that's just written by man to
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make people act a certain way, to keep us straight. Well, then maybe now we'll
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get into tonight's topic, which is scientific foreknowledge in the
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Bible. So this topic joins together 2 things
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that I think the world believes are in conflict
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with each other. I think they think it's science and the Bible,
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and those 2 things are at odds, you know, with one another.
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You have to— it's as if they believe you can only believe one
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or you can believe the other. It's as if they don't coexist
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with one another. Science is even usually looked at by a lot of people in
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the world as the intellectual alternative to
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God. It's the smarter way of thinking about things. It's the— if you—
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science is a more intelligent way of looking at the things of the world
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instead of looking at what the Bible says about things. It's the thing that really
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proves that God is not real in a lot of people's minds.
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As if that's the goal of what science is all about. And it
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kind of reminds me, I saw this comic strip a long time ago. Of course,
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this wasn't the comic strip, I had to recreate it, but it's
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a comic strip where man has been trying to create, you know, man from the
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dust of the ground, and they've finally done it. You know, that we finally have
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done it, we've created man from the dust of the ground, and then God just
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laughs and says, that's cute, create your own dust.
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And that's what science ultimately, no matter what we come up
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with or what we might prove, it's always going to lead us back to there's
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a Creator and they can't get past that point no matter how far they try
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to take it. So the Bible is primarily a book of
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theology. That's what it's all about, who God is and our relationship to him.
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It's not meant to be a science textbook.
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However, when the Bible speaks on matters that
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deal with science and the natural world, it does so
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with accuracy that you would not expect based on when
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it was written, who wrote it, the knowledge at the time.
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It's always right there, right in line with it.
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So the question that we'll start out with is,
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when you read a very old book, what do you
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expect it to reflect? And feel free to talk and ask questions,
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throw something at me, raise your hand. It's a group
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effort here. Talk amongst each other.
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What'd you say? Old, old times, things that were
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written in the old times. You would expect stuff to
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kind of match up with the common knowledge of whatever time period it is that
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you're, you know, reading that book. If I read a book written by
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somebody in the 1700s that
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was entitled The Best Way to Win a War, I wouldn't expect to
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open up that book and read about submarines and tanks and
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helicopters and, you know, all sorts of things like that. It's not going to be
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there because the common knowledge at that time,
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they're not going to know of those things. The ideas someone would
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have on how to win a war in the 1700s compared to now are
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going to be drastically different based on the new information, the new things
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that are out there, everything that goes along with that. So when you read an
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old book, you're going to expect them to reflect whatever is the common
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knowledge by that writer at that specific time.
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In fact, if you go find an old science book or even an old Guinness
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Book of World Records and/or an encyclopedia,
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if anybody still has any of those, you know, the big old books that you
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might have had at the time whenever you were younger, see how many errors there's
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probably in there now. If you go pull up a 1980s encyclopedia
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and look up anything that's related in the science field, even see how many things
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are different now that they have come up with something different
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between 1980 and just now. So it's very different from
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what we might know today. So if we read any book written
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by someone that's as old as the Bible, I would expect the
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scientific information that is contained within that book to be
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very outdated, probably based upon the beliefs and
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the information that someone might have had at the time that it was written.
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Some of those would be outdated. So if a book is solely written by man,
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a man can only write what they can know, right? I can't
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come up with anything that I don't know and write it. So a man can
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only write what they know. The book would only contain things within that person's knowledge
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at the time of the writing. So how
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we got here, the shape of the earth, why does it rain,
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what causes somebody to get sick— their views on those
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things over the course of time has been very different from long
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time ago to today. The answer to all those questions has been drastically
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different in the mindset of mankind. They've come up with
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all sorts of things to answer those questions.
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Their views on those things at the time it was written would be outdated
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now with new information. But the Bible is different because it's not just
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any old book. My hope in this study tonight, as we
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look at some of the verses written long ago that contain information about
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the world around us, that it's going to tell us 2 things.
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The first one is the things written at the
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time that they were written by the person who wrote it, added in with
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their current knowledge on the subject, it doesn't make sense. That the
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Bible is a book filled with only the thoughts
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of mankind. It just doesn't make sense. There's no logical way
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that you would come to that conclusion, that if it's a man's thoughts
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written down by a man only, that this information would be in
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here based upon the date of the Bible. The second
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thing is the absence of some of the
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things as we read these Because some of
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the things that we're going to talk about, a lot of different suggestions
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for the reason why or how we should go about doing
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certain things are drastically different over the course of time that mankind has
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come up with. And you don't see any of those in the Bible either.
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It's only the things that are 100% true to
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the fact, things that are 100% real within the science things.
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It's not been disproven. Kind of the same with the archaeological stuff
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that we talked about on Sunday night. Everything they dig up,
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it just points to the Bible being true. Well, everything that science
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proves over the course of time, some of those things
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are already in here, and they've been here for a very long time. We're just
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coming to really know about them. So those
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are the 2 things that I hope to accomplish in this class. The one thing
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that I'm not trying to do is this: My intention is
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not to convince you that God specifically put these things in
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the Bible so that we would have the answers to the scientific questions
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of the world. These things that we cover are just things that God
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has revealed in a way. A lot of times it's in the giving of a
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law for a different reason altogether, but it's just information that we
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would call science that so happens to be in the Bible that
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is exactly what we believe today and what they've found out to be 100% true.
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And so these things are things that science— it's not a theory
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of science. There's a lot of things out there that are theories in science that
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go against maybe what the Bible might say, but those are theories. We're talking
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about proven things in the, in the world of science
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or in the realm of science that are also in the Bible. I'm also by
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no means trying to act as if there's a bunch of hidden gems in Scripture
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like it's the, you know, the Da Vinci Code or something
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or other where we're trying to find all sorts of stuff in here
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that give us the answers to all everything that's out there in the world.
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That's not what I'm intending to, to show you with this, but what I'm trying
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to show you is things that are science-related
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in the Bible match up with things
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that we see around us in the world and the things that they know that
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are true And of course, we know they're true because God said so.
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So these are just things revealed by the Creator long before
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they became scientific common knowledge. And it should allow your
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faith in scriptures of them being God-breathed to
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be increased. And because there's so many things in the Bible that when
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they were written compared to when they became scientific common knowledge, it makes
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no sense again that book— this book, the Bible, was written just
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by man. So a study like this
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is probably going to cause you to start wondering. It did me anyways.
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I've actually looked at some of these things before, and it starts to make you
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think as you read the Bible, what other things have we— are in here that
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I just read over and maybe I didn't even realize?
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There's things about this world that God mentions that maybe we just didn't even
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think about before. An example of having the kind of
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thoughts that I think we should have with this is Matthew Maury.
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He's known as the father of oceanography. He read Psalm
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8 while he was— I think he was in a hospital, if I remember
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right. I can't remember exactly. There's actually a video on this, like a documentary.
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But in Psalm 8, it says, beginning in verse 3, when I consider your heavens,
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the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have ordained,
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what is man that you are mindful of him and the son of man that
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you visit him? For You have made Him a little lower than the angels,
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and You have crowned Him with glory and honor. You have made Him have dominion
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over the works of Your hands, and You have put all things under His
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feet, all sheep and oxen, even the beasts of the field, the birds
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of the air, and the fish of the sea that pass through the
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paths of the seas. O Lord, O Lord, how excellent is Your
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name in all the earth! So our religious man,
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he read Psalm 8 and decided, you know what, the Bible says
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there's paths in the seas. And in that,
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if the Bible says it, if God says it, they've got to be there.
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You know, this is the conclusion that he came up with. That's the kind of
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faith that he had in the Scriptures, is that if the Bible says
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there's paths in the seas, there must be paths in the seas. So he
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sought out to discover them, and he ended up mapping the ocean currents and
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found that just like there's highways on land, There are paths
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and there are currents in the ocean. Now, this instance may
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not be considered, again, scientific foreknowledge by some
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people because someone could be
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discussing paths of the sea and say, well, maybe he's talking about the
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paths that, you know, fish might take, normal paths.
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If you're a big fisherman, you probably know that the channel cats,
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catfish, hang out in the channels and things like that. But again,
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it's the terminology there is pass in the sea. Are there pass
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in the sea? Yes, there's. If there weren't
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pass in the seas and then we came and read the Bible and it says
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that there are pass in the seas, then we would say, oh, well, now we've
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got a problem. But again, it's just some scientific information that's given to us
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about there being pass in the seas. And sure enough,
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this man, Maury, Matthew Maury,
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went looking for them, and then he found them. And I
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only share this with you because it shows how Maury looked at the scripture.
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He didn't feel like the Bible and science were battling each other out
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to prove one wrong. Instead, he decided, I'm going
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to look at scripture and I'm going to look in my field of science,
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and I'm going to put the two together and see what I can come up
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with. And he's decided they do go together, you know, the Creator
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and his creation. So There's 3 things that I'm going to look at tonight.
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I've got some other stuff at the end if we have time, or again,
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if you all have one that you've studied before and you want to bring
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it up, feel free to do so. But there's 3 of them that I picked
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out specifically in our time that I want to look at where I feel
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like the Scripture— Scriptures and science are not battling it
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out against each other, but they go hand in hand with one another. And the
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first one is circumcision. And vitamin K.
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So if you want to turn over to Genesis, Genesis chapter 17,
Genesis 17 chapter mention
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we're going to start there where in Genesis 17:1-2,
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God makes a covenant with Abram. It says in
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verse 1 of Genesis 17, when Abram was 99
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years old, the Lord appeared to Abram and said to him, I am Almighty God.
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Walk before me and be blameless, and I will make my covenant between
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me and you and I will multiply you exceedingly.
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And then in verses 7 through 11, God says that
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covenant is not just with Him and Abram, but also Abram's
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descendants. And a sign of the covenant, that was that the male children
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were to be circumcised. That was going to be the sign of this covenant that
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He made with Abram. And then we get to verse 12,
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which says, He who is 8 days old among you shall be circumcised.
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Every male child in your generations, he who is born in your house
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or bought with money from any foreigner who is not of your descendant.
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So Genesis 17:12 commands that male
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children be circumcised, and the key is on the 8th
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day, so whenever one is 8 days old.
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Now, as we read that, we may skip over the time
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between a male child being born and when
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he is to be circumcised, and we just may not think twice about it.
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You know, we just may say, you know, that's just the day that God
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picked. He just decided 8 days for whatever reason. That's what he decided
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to do. Or maybe your inner Maury kicks in and
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you say, I wonder why God decided to do it in 8 days.
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Why did he say whenever they're 8 days old,
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that's when you circumcise the male child? Is it significant
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for some reason? Would the people just know why? Or— because
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God didn't explain why. He didn't give a reason for the 8th day.
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He just said, do it on the 8th day. So the question would be,
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did the people already know the answer to that question, why to do it on
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the 8th day? If it wasn't significant or important,
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then why didn't God just say, as soon as you can,
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within a week, at some point,
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circumcise the male child. But no, he was pretty specific on
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when he wanted that male child to be circumcised.
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He just said the 8th day.
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Now let's look at the science side of things and what we now know.
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Again, it wouldn't be known at the time of where we're reading
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that in Genesis chapter 17,
Genesis 17 chapter mention
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but has anyone in here had surgery before? Pretty good chance,
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probably. It's an adult class. If you're a bad kid like
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me, you probably were in the emergency room all the time, had surgery all
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the time. But sometimes when you have surgery, depending upon what
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it is that you are having to do, you have to do some pre-op stuff
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sometimes. You got to go in, give blood, you got to, you know, they might
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check out your heart and see if you're going to be, you know, stout enough
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to be able to have the surgery, whatever it is. Even some tests again to
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see if you might have some kind of a complication from it. One complication
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of any surgery really is you might bleed to death.
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I guess I would think if they're cutting you open, that's always a possibility.
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I mean, probably not all the time going to happen, I wouldn't think, but it's
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a possibility if you're bleeding. Well, if circumcision,
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if that's a surgery, there's going to be blood with that. So that's a
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possibility unless there's something to stop the bleeding whenever
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you're cut. There's a chance that you might bleed to death.
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Then comes learning about vitamin K. So in the early
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1930s— and now I'm not sure if
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I was to Google when was Genesis 17 written,
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there probably is some kind of debate about that. I'm not sure what the dates
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are that they give, but how many of you believe it's before 1930?
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Everybody, probably, right? So I
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don't think it's very hard to find somebody that wouldn't say that. So in the
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early 1930s, a Danish
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biochemist, Henrik Dam, discovered vitamin K while
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studying cholesterol metabolism in chicks. And I
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mean baby chickens, not chicks, but baby chickens.
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1930s. Its name, vitamin K,
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for the German word starting with K,
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coagulations with a K. So it's
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the coagulations vitamin. So our word coagulate
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with the C means what? Anybody know what that is?
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When your blood does that, it kind of gels
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up, it coagulates. It's the process, it says, by which a
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liquid, most commonly blood when you're talking about it, thickens into a
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gel or solid state to form a clot.
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So that's what the definition of coagulate is. It acts as a
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crucial defense mechanism to stop bleeding after an injury and begin the
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tissue repair process. So 1930s,
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Henrik Dam figures out vitamin K is really the vitamin
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that helps blood clot. Basically, he figured that out by working
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on studying cholesterol metabolism in baby chickens.
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So I'm sure people in the time of Genesis 17 was
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written have cut themselves before. I mean,
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we— how many of you cut yourself pretty often? I work in construction. I cut
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myself almost every day, it seems like. They probably have
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cut themselves as an adult and saw the blood
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stop. And didn't think twice about it. Just, that's what happens, you know. If I
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cut myself, as long as I do something to it, you know, put some kind
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of something on it, or depends on how bad it is, blood stops.
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That's what happens. They didn't know how it happened specifically,
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probably. They didn't know anything about vitamin K, but they knew if
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I cut myself, if I do something,
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eventually it hopefully will stop bleeding by itself.
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I'm also sure anyone at that time might— would understand
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if they circumcised a male, that would obviously cause them to bleed.
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But my guess is they would expect, just like their own cuts,
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if I circumcise this child, that bleeding will eventually, you know,
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stop. So that wouldn't be a thought process in their mind
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of, what is going to happen when we circumcise this child?
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What if they don't— what if they don't quit bleeding? Probably not
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even in their realm of thought process. They didn't need to know about vitamin
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K again specifically to know blood ends up clotting.
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But back to our original question, why the 8th
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day? So modern medicine tells
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us that through studies in the 1900s that infants
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are born with low levels of vitamin K that
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steadily rise naturally peak in the newborn,
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guess when? Not on the first day,
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not on the second day, not on the third day.
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I'm gonna skip the other for time purposes, but we're gonna— on the 8th day
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is when it peaks. Now you may
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be like me and thinking, I've had 2 boys myself, so maybe
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there's some of you in here that have had boys or You know, we just
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had a grandson this last week, and on the second
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day of him being in the hospital, they circumcised him and he came home.
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And you'd say, well, what happened there then? That's not the 8th day. Why did
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your grandson not bleed to death if he doesn't have enough vitamin K?
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Well, it's because back— you must— they must have figured out something else
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since the 1930s then, because in the 1940s,
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due to Swedish scientists scientist Jorgen Lehmann's studies,
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they began administering vitamin K to newborns to
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get them to day 8 levels prior to performing circumcisions.
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So if you've had someone in your family that's had it before the 8th day,
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it's because they basically give them a vitamin K shot now to get them up
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to the 8th day vitamin K levels before they perform that circumcision
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so that the newborn's blood will clot
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And all that will happen. So the question
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then becomes, in Genesis 17, we can
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all agree well before 1930, how do you
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think Moses, who wrote this, if it's just his
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thoughts and it's just a man-written book,
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how do we have any kind of explanation of why did he pick
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the 8th day? What would be someone's thought process
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on that? Anybody have a good thing that someone might use against that of how
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did he just come up with the 8th day? Was it a random coincidence that
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he just decided, I'm going to pick a number? Maybe Moses' favorite number was 8.
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I don't know. That would be the only thing. Yeah, that's the
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only thing you can come up with. Did he spin a wheel or did they
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even have a wheel? Spin a wheel with numbers and picked one?
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I mean, how would he have known it? Or did God,
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who created us and knows exactly how we work,
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give detailed instructions because he already knew the science behind
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blood and how it clots? You want to know how he knows it? Because he
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created us and he knew that they
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needed to wait 8 days before they performed this circumcision.
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Yeah, Bill. Abraham was circumcised at 99 years old. Yeah,
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he had plenty of vitamin K. Yeah, yeah.
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But just like a doctor planning a surgery,
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they want you to wait until the body is at the strongest point. So if
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you go in for those tests and you need to do some things before surgery
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or whatever it is, they're like, you gotta, you gotta get yourself ready, you know,
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for this surgery because it's a big deal. You got some things you've got to
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do you know, God gave this instruction
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thousands of years before we understood
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how blood clotting worked. Again, it's not that the people in Genesis didn't know blood
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clotted. Again, I'm sure they've cut themselves,
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but they didn't understand what we know now. But then
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again, what we know now just backs up what God
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has told us. It just doesn't make sense why,
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if it wasn't an inspired book given to us by
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the one who created us to have the 8th day in there. It would have
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been— it would have been easier to just leave that out if it was
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written by a man and just not be wrong in that case. But again,
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what does— what does this show us about God too?
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Does he care? Yeah, and he,
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he cares about us too. Like, he created us He cares about
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us even in this law that He's given to make a covenant with
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people and the thing that was required. He's still making sure that
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I'm not going to do something that is going to cause, you know,
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harm in some bad way. He cared enough to protect in
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His giving of the instruction. And to me, this also shows, and this goes
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with everything we're going to cover tonight, that His wisdom comes
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way before our understanding. We may not
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understand, and this doesn't— outside of even scientific foreknowledge, we're coming tonight.
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As you read the Bible, you're going to read some things that say that
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you're going to say, well, that doesn't make sense sometimes. But his wisdom
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comes before our understanding. He's wiser than us.
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He's the one who created us. He knows more about
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us than we would ever even begin to know. So sometimes when
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you read things and you say, I don't understand why I can't do this,
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or I don't understand why I have to do this,
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It's the same reason why he said the 8th day, because he knows us
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intimately and he knows what's best for us and he cares about us
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and loves us. All those things going to play. Do you have something, Russell?
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Yeah,
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yeah.
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And there's even— I didn't even know that they do this, which it makes sense
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to me now because I'm sure there's some, uh, Jews that still,
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you know, because there's a, there's a lady that Amanda used to
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work with that works at Gray's and Gilbert now, and like, that's one of her
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roles is the people who bring in their babies on the 8th day still because
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they don't take the vitamin K shot. They wait and bring their babies in on
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the 8th day and still do it. On the 8th day. But again, that,
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that just blows my mind. I mean, how many times have you just read over
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that on the 8th day? And, and again, as you, as you see that,
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you're going to start looking at scripture differently now because you're going to start seeing
-
things and say, I wonder what— just like I said, the Maori guy
-
with the, oh, it says there's passing seas, I'm gonna go look for them and
-
see if I can find them. And again, I'm not saying that that's what the—
-
that 8th day was in there given as an instruction because God is making
-
a covenant with Abram.
-
It just so happens that that is scientific information given to us.
-
I don't think God put that in there so that we'd find it in 1930
-
and say and point back, but he may have. I can't speak for God.
-
I don't, I don't know, you know, his ways are higher than my ways.
-
That may very well be why it's in there, but I'm not saying that that's
-
why any of these things are in here. It's just scientific information you're going to
-
find in the Bible that doesn't disprove any anything.
-
So next we're going to look at the water cycle.
-
Now anybody know what the water cycle is? I think that there was a
-
song for this whenever we were in school, but I can't remember what it is,
-
so I'm not going to sing it. But possibly there's one, maybe somebody here knows
-
it, or maybe it was one of those Schoolhouse Rock things or something, I don't
-
know. But basically we have evaporation,
-
which is when water heats up and rises as individual invisible
-
vapor, condensation, that vapor cools,
-
gathers back into the water in the clouds, and then precipitation,
-
the water falls back to the earth as rain.
-
That's the cycle of water, you know, on our planet. We have it
-
evaporates up, gets in the clouds, clouds get heavy, rain comes
-
down, cycle repeats itself, you know, over and over
-
again. Well, what about the science of that?
-
Anybody know of any kind of weird ways that have been out
-
there for a long time of how people thought we got water?
-
There's all sorts of stuff out there. Google that sometime. It's very interesting,
-
some of the stuff. Well, 600 BC,
-
Thales thought rivers were fed by ocean water pushed up through
-
the mountains. It's almost like a reverse French
-
press, I guess, or something like that, where The water goes up and then it
-
just runs down the mountains. 350 BC,
-
Aristotle saw the sun evaporate water but still doubted
-
that it was enough to fill the rivers. You know, that evaporation just didn't make
-
sense, that, that little amount of condensation-y type water
-
vapor and all that, how does that fill up all these rivers? How does that
-
cause the seas to be full of water? The water has to come from somewhere
-
else as well. Well, Leonardo da Vinci in the 1500s began
-
removing the idea that water had to come from somewhere else.
-
And there was all sorts of stuff that I read before this about different things
-
dumping water out and all sorts of things. But then John Dalton in 1802
-
put the numbers together and proved that the water cycle is a closed loop,
-
like what I mentioned at the beginning. Water evaporates up
-
in the air, the clouds gather together, dumps back out as rain that runs
-
down the rivers, goes into the ocean, evaporates out, same exact
-
thing. Why did it take so long?
-
Why did it take so long to understand that this is— I mean, we all
-
know that that's what it is now, right? Well,
-
the human eye cannot see water vapor at
-
the level in which it's actually being vaporized and going up there.
-
We can't see how much water vapor is around us all the time. Now you
-
can feel it during the time of year right now. I worked outside all day
-
today and My shirt tells a different story. Lots of water vapor out
-
there, lots of humidity. It required also the invention of measuring tools
-
and advancing in accounting. We had to get some people like Roger out there,
-
the big numbers guys, to finally prove that there
-
is enough for it to be a closed-loop system,
-
to make sense that the rain that comes down
-
is enough to fill the rivers and the seas and the oceans
-
and all those things like that. But this is something that Scripture's already
-
told us long ago, long before all that— those
-
dates that are up there. The verses are Job 26:8,
-
Job 36:27-28, and then Ecclesiastes 1:7,
-
which I feel like is basically the water cycle. It says that
-
all the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full.
-
To the place from which the rivers come, there they return again.
-
So he's basically saying it's a cycle there. Of course,
-
that's Solomon who was given wisdom by who?
-
By God. It's the closest thing to the water cycle word
-
for word that John Dalton finally figured out and put into numbers in 1802.
-
Solomon telling us and wisdom God gave him that the water we have
-
is a closed-loop system. Because if it
-
wasn't— so a lot of the people at the early stages again felt
-
like we still have to be getting water from somewhere else. Like it doesn't make
-
sense that all this water comes from
-
just out of the sky and keeps replenishing itself and all those kinds of things.
-
But it really does make sense because if new water, if we
-
kept adding new water and it kept running down
-
the mountains and in the rivers and into the oceans and into
-
the seas, what would happen?
-
Yeah, we'd be covered in water, wouldn't we? It only— it makes sense
-
to us now, and again, it's right there in Ecclesiastes 1:7,
-
but for a very long time that didn't make sense to a lot of people.
-
And that's what I was saying at the beginning, you'll see some things that are
-
It doesn't make sense that they're in there based on the time in which they
-
were written if it was only written by man and of
-
the thoughts of man. And then there's also things that aren't in there, like the
-
weird ideas that I mentioned of all sorts of things that are possibilities
-
that people have come up with over time. You're not going to find those in
-
scriptures either. And then in Job, we see in 26:8,
-
it says, he binds up the water in his thick clouds, yet the clouds
-
are are not broken under it. Again, that's kind of that condensation part
-
of the water cycle. And then Job 36:27-28,
-
for he draws up drops of water which distill his rain
-
from the mist which the clouds drop down and pour
-
abundantly on man. So now
-
one could say those aren't specific enough.
-
One might say, even some people might say, well, Job, some of Job
-
is figurative and maybe you can't take some things literal.
-
It's lacking details. Again, that's you thinking that
-
the Bible is a science book. It's not meant to be a science book.
-
The revelation of these details weren't given for the purpose of us
-
understanding the water cycle. That's not the purpose of these things
-
given to us, but it's to show us God's wisdom and
-
that he is the Creator and he is the one who is in control over
-
everything. That's what those verses are telling us. But they're also giving us the information
-
that matches up with what science tells us about how our water works here
-
on this earth. So you can, however, look at these verses and
-
come away with these conclusions. They do contain information given
-
to us that was not fully understood by mankind at
-
the time of its writing. Yet now we know them to be true, which again
-
points to it being divinely inspired. They also do
-
not contain any information other than what is at the current time what
-
we scientifically know is true, even though again it was
-
written much earlier. If it was solely written by
-
man and his finite knowledge, it definitely would have some
-
of those other things in there. So this one,
-
the next one is several things within one thing, but I kind of titled it
-
hygiene and germs. There's all sorts of things about this.
-
Today, nearly everyone understands that tiny organisms
-
called germs spread disease. I mean, we understand that.
-
We wash our hands, we disinfect surfaces, we cover our coughs,
-
we isolate sick people because modern science has
-
proven these practices help to stop different illnesses.
-
Seems common to us, right? We understand that.
-
But it took a very long time for us to come to that understanding.
-
As mankind. What is remarkable is that the Bible
-
instructed God's people to practice many of these things, many of
-
these same health measures that we now say that that's common
-
knowledge, you know, everybody knows that, but thousands of
-
years before anybody even knew germs existed, you know, there's no microscopes,
-
none of that kind of stuff, lots of times before that. So the Bible never
-
uses terms like germs, disinfect,
-
etc. Instead, it's just simply God giving
-
commandments to protect his people.
-
They're not going to understand it at the time that he's telling
-
them in the full scope of how maybe we might understand it today,
-
but that's what he's doing with this. So many see commandments of
-
God as coming from an angry man in the sky, you know, forcing them to
-
do things that you know, that they maybe want to do or keeping them from
-
doing things. But ultimately, again,
-
he's just there watching out for us, telling us what's best.
-
Maybe the Israelites felt that way about some of
-
these things because they don't know what we know now. Maybe whenever these commandments that
-
I'm going to read off to you, maybe whenever they heard these, they're probably thinking,
-
this is the dumbest thing I've ever heard, that we've got to do this.
-
But now we know it makes perfect sense, some of
-
the things that he asked. So looking back again, we can see that some of
-
these commands were far ahead of the medical knowledge of the ancient world.
-
So what some people believed about disease. So for
-
most of history, no one knew germs existed.
-
Sickness was blamed on angry spirits. A big one was
-
bad air, curses, astrology,
-
Superstition, cures, these cures that mankind
-
has come up with over the course of time often made people worse, whether it
-
was the bloodletting, animal waste sometimes was used
-
as medication, mud packed on open wounds,
-
even Egypt, Greece, and Rome had little idea
-
really about how that disease actually spread
-
as it comes to it. Even the idea that
-
invisible living organisms caused disease was completely
-
unknown. Again, they didn't have microscopes, they didn't have those kinds of things like we
-
have now. And with the Bible, again,
-
not being a science textbook, it doesn't come out and say, do these
-
things because there's germs and little organisms out there that's going
-
to get you. But God has given Israel several laws that promoted cleanliness,
-
and then prevented the spread of disease. And one of those was washing after
-
contact with disease. And I'm only going to read the first 8 verses of Leviticus
-
15. I feel like you're going to get the point because it's over and over
-
again kind of saying the same thing. And it says in Leviticus 15,
-
beginning in verse 1, and the Lord spoke to Moses and Aaron, saying,
-
speak to the children of Israel and say to them, when any man has a
-
discharge from his body, his discharge is unclean. And this
-
shall be his uncleanness in his regard to his discharge, whether his body runs with
-
his discharge or his body is stopped up by his discharge. It is his uncleanness.
-
Every bed is unclean on which he who has the discharge lies,
-
and everything which he sits on shall be unclean. And whoever touches his bed
-
shall wash his clothes and bathe in water and be unclean until evening.
-
He who sits on anything in which he has had the discharge shall
-
sit shall wash his clothes and bathe in water and
-
be unclean until evening. And he who touches the body of him who has
-
the discharge shall wash his clothes and bathe in water and be unclean until
-
evening. If he who has the discharge spits on him who is clean, then he
-
shall wash his clothes and bathe in water and be unclean until evening. Again,
-
it goes on and on. You can continue reading there. The entire chapter
-
repeatedly instructed people, wash yourselves.
-
And wash your clothes after coming in contact with bodily
-
discharge or someone considered unclean or someone who is sick
-
or someone who is, you know, has some sort of disease, whatever it is.
-
And again, that seems pretty basic to us, right? If you're around somebody
-
and they're sick, stay away from them.
-
If you come in contact with somebody that's sick, wash yourself.
-
Pretty basic to us.
-
I've always thought about 2 scenes as I was going over this. I thought
-
about 2 different scenes of some shows that one of them I watched pretty regularly,
-
one of them has been since I was a kid whenever I watched it,
-
but there's a scene from Everybody Loves Raymond. I don't know if anybody watches
-
that show, but the title of this episode is The
-
Sneeze, and it starts out at the very beginning. He's in the airport and this
-
guy here is washing his hands,
-
and then he's about to sneeze and he just turned around and just violently sneezes
-
all over Ray Barone. Just, I mean, goes crazy. And then Ray is
-
like freaked out. As soon as that guy walks out, he's over like basically scrubbing
-
his face. And of course he thinks he's sick then the whole entire episode,
-
and he actually does, I think, end up being sick at the end.
-
But that's today. If I was to walk around
-
and get sneezed on by somebody, it would gross me out because now
-
I'm thinking I'm gonna be sick, whatever that person has. It's on
-
me now, I'm gonna be sick. And then there's Ace Ventura 2,
-
I think it's Pet Detective, where it's a show. He's out there
-
in the— I don't remember what the name of the tribe was, but it was
-
a show of respect if you spit on each other. So then they
-
sit there and spit all over each other, and they come out of the tent,
-
they're just covered in spit. And again, neither one of
-
these are a true thing that happened, they're TV shows, but it is kind
-
of showing you Like us today, we understand
-
I don't need to be around somebody who's going to make me sick and spit
-
on me. And, you know, there's germs out there, there's things like that, versus someone
-
in a tribe or something like that that doesn't know those things. They might have
-
the idea of it's a very nice thing for us to spit on each other,
-
it's a show of friendship, not knowing that they're spreading germs
-
of whatever somebody might have. Yes.
-
Huh? Well, it could be a lot of different things. It's basically
-
just— yeah, so like a
-
sore, sore that's open, or it could be just any sort of, any sort of
-
fluid essentially that's coming from you that shouldn't be type of
-
thing. And like a leper would have a lot of discharges all over
-
his body. Or their body, huh?
-
Oh no, I know what you talk about. Yeah, I got you.
-
So again, I'm sure most understood this as a religious
-
ritual whenever they were given the command. They're like, God's just asking
-
us to do this for whatever reason. He wants to make me
-
do this. Again, that's what some people's thought process
-
is about God sometimes, and it doesn't make sense. But it's also a greater
-
teaching, really what God is doing about being clean and unclean in His presence is
-
what He's teaching throughout this. But it's also on top of that, giving us
-
information about you need to be clean. Like,
-
if you're around someone who's sick, you need to clean yourself and also stay away
-
from them and those kinds of things like that. So we now understand God is
-
speaking truth even about health in these verses. And again, if it was just
-
a religious ritual, He would
-
have told them to do anything. If it was just a religious ritual, He could
-
have said, you know, and I don't mean this in a bad way,
-
hop on one foot or do whatever, you know, it's— but He's given them specific
-
information to protect them about cleanliness, and on top
-
of that, it's a teaching about being clean and unclean in His presence. So today
-
we know washing removes bacteria, viruses, and then also
-
other harmful organisms. Again, go in any bathroom that deals
-
with food, etc., and you're going to see employees must wash their hands.
-
I don't think they do it, but they're supposed to wash their hands
-
before they go deal with your food. And then although the Israelites might not know
-
under how the washing worked and what it was actually removing
-
was germs and all those kinds of things, following God's instructions would
-
have helped reduce the spread of disease.
-
One of the more remarkable practices is the quarantine.
-
In Leviticus 13, God instructs priests to isolate anyone showing
-
symptoms of infectious skin diseases. So,
-
like leprosy was mainly what we're talking about here. And in verse 3,
-
we see that the person was examined. In Leviticus 13, verse 3,
-
it says, the priest shall examine the sore on the skin of the body,
-
and if the hair on the sore has turned white and the sore appears to
-
be deeper than the skin of his body, it is a leprous sore. And the
-
priest shall examine him and pronounce him unclean. So that's the first thing,
-
you have to examine somebody. In verse 4, they're separated from the community
-
for 7 days. Verse 5, after 7 days they were
-
examined again. If that disease had spread, they were to remain isolated, and if not,
-
then they could return. They were considered, you know, not to have leprosy.
-
Well, today hospitals use that exact same principle.
-
I think in 2020, I think we maybe learned it a little bit all too
-
well. About quarantine. When someone has a contagious
-
illness, they're isolated. What's the purpose behind
-
that? It's to protect everybody else, right? That's the whole purpose behind
-
it. Again, seems common to us. I can sit here and say that in
-
front of you and you're like, this is a no-brainer,
-
but that's only because it's common to
-
us now. It's not common at the time in which this
-
was written. So then we
-
have handling dead bodies. I might be about out of time, but we'll,
-
we'll get through this. Numbers 19:11-12 required anyone
-
who touched a dead body to undergo cleansing before returning to their normal
-
life. It says, he who touches the dead body of anyone shall be unclean
-
7 days. He shall purify himself with the water on the
-
3rd day and on the 7th day. Then he will be clean. But if he
-
does not purify himself on the 3rd day and on the 7th day, he will
-
not be clean. Again, modern medicine recognizes that dead bodies, especially during epidemics
-
and things like that, can carry harmful bacteria and infectious diseases.
-
Again, the Israelites simply obeyed God's command without understanding
-
microbiology like we understand today.
-
The disposal of human waste, probably one of the
-
most impressive health laws found in Deuteronomy 23:9-13. When the army
-
goes out against your enemies, Keep yourself from every wicked thing.
-
And if there is any man among you who becomes unclean by some occurrence in
-
the night, then he shall go outside the camp. He shall not come inside the
-
camp. But it shall be when evening comes that he shall wash with water,
-
and when the sun sets he may come into the camp. Also you shall have
-
a place outside the camp where you may go out, and you shall have an
-
implement among your equipment. And when you sit down outside, you shall dig with
-
it and turn and cover your refuse or cover, you know,
-
your waste. So God instructed Israel to place outside
-
the camp for human waste to bury it. The Israelites followed God's
-
command, but today we understand why. Again, to them, they might have
-
said, why, why do I have to do this? Doesn't make any sense.
-
But human waste can spread cholera,
-
dysentery, typhoid, hepatitis,
-
parasites. And throughout history,
-
there's no telling how much poor sanitation— how many people have been killed
-
by poor sanitation. Probably millions of people.
-
I've even seen older videos. Now they're starting to put some like older videos of
-
New York City and stuff. They've like added the color and stuff to
-
it and all that kind of stuff where you can watch those. And I've seen
-
where people are just throwing it out their windows out into the streets.
-
Like that's just what they're doing with it. So that, that's in
-
our country, and we just celebrated, you know,
-
250 years. Of course, New York City's been there maybe a little longer than that,
-
but tons of pandemics throughout history were
-
spread by poor sanitation practices. In 1846,
-
the London cholera pandemic killed 16,000 people, you know,
-
at that time. But the Bible instructed proper sanitation
-
over 3,000 years before modern public health
-
discovered how important that it truly is. So dealing
-
with all these things, science eventually discovered—
-
for centuries, again, doctors still do not, didn't understand
-
disease transmission. 1847, Ignaz— your
-
guess is as good as mine— Semmelweis required
-
doctors to wash their hands. And then deaths dropped sharply.
-
So this is in 1847, they still weren't washing their hands. I think if I
-
remember right, I think it was my son was telling me that it was even
-
a sign of a good surgeon the bloodier his apron
-
was because it meant he had performed more surgery. Like didn't even
-
wash their, you know, aprons or anything like that for a very long time.
-
So even his colleagues were mocking him for washing his hands in 1847.
-
Before surgeries. Louis Pasteur in the 1860s,
-
he was a French scientist. He developed the germ theory of disease,
-
demonstrated that tiny microorganisms cause many illnesses. And again,
-
that completely changed medicine to how we know it now.
-
And then Joseph Lister in 1867 was a British surgeon who
-
applied Pasteur's theories or discoveries to surgery and began
-
sterilizing instruments and cleaning wounds with antiseptics
-
and things like that, and death rates from surgery fell dramatically.
-
Again, today those practices are used worldwide.
-
We don't think anything about them, but that's totally different than the people
-
in Leviticus and the people in the age of that. That's a totally different
-
realm of dates. It's totally different. So the timeline is around
-
1445 BC, or again, whatever date you want to throw at that, Moses records
-
laws on washing, quarantine, sanitation, all those
-
things. And then we get to 1847 when we finally
-
start saying, maybe we should wash our hands, and maybe
-
we should, you know, do something with our waste, or maybe
-
we should kind of stay away from people that are sick and quarantine people and
-
things like that. You know, it's quite an age gap. There between those.
-
How do— again, the question comes to, how do we explain
-
what Moses wrote with such accuracy? How do we explain that
-
he came up with these things if it's just a book written by man?
-
Was he just writing what he felt would be a good
-
idea on all these issues, and it just so happens that he was right
-
on all these issues? Or Again, was it the
-
Creator of the universe who gave these instructions to Moses,
-
who knows how we work, who knows the things that are best
-
for us? And that's the reason why we have these written like this.
-
Again, it's— they weren't— they were written in there as laws
-
to keep people clean and unclean, but they're also
-
Now we see the benefits of it as we read over them now today,
-
knowing what we know now that maybe we didn't know there.
-
Someone might say, why doesn't
-
God just give us the specifics? You know, instead of just
-
do this and don't do that, why not say circumcise
-
the babies on the 8th day because of vitamin K? Why didn't
-
He put that in there? Or why not expel it— spell out to us exactly
-
how the water cycle works? Or why not simply announce, you know what,
-
there's little germs out there, you can't see them, you don't understand it,
-
but they're out there, so wash your hands and do these things.
-
Goes back to my introduction. The purpose of the
-
Bible is to teach people about God and salvation,
-
not to help us figure out the world's details.
-
I'm giving you this information because it's scientific information that we now know to be
-
true, and it just so happens that it's in the Bible.
-
Again, I don't know that God gave us the day 8 for the specifics
-
so that today we'd understand. It's a faith-building
-
thing if we go back and now know, hey, it said it here in this.
-
I don't, I don't know. I can't speak for God. I don't know why he
-
says things that he says. I'm not on his level. But all I do know
-
is everywhere where a scientific thing is mentioned in the Bible,
-
anything that is a proven scientific fact, there's nothing that's
-
refuted. There's nothing in the Bible that has been proven—
-
that science has proven it to be wrong. And there's nothing in there
-
that could be proven wrong by science. Now there's theories out there,
-
that's a whole different thing. There's lots of theories out there by science that aren't
-
proven things, it's just the thoughts of people that may not match up with what's
-
in your Bible, but there's nothing that is proven by science that
-
is outside of what you have in your Bible that would say that
-
this is the smoking gun that proves that God is not
-
real, that this is just a book written by man.
-
None of that stuff is out there. But what we do see, that is,
-
whenever the Bible touches subjects involving the natural world
-
It is consistently accurate all the
-
time. Sometimes we don't see the accuracy until
-
many years later, many years later, which should again tell
-
us— see, I'm behind on a click. I knew I was going to do it.
-
His wisdom comes before our understanding. And this class
-
was about scientific foreknowledge, but I want you to leave with
-
that in your mind, that that goes with every verse.
-
That goes with everything that's in the Bible. So whenever you
-
read something and you just say, I don't understand this,
-
his wisdom comes before our understanding. So anybody have any comments
-
or questions yet? Yeah, I just didn't want you to move on from
-
the germs and the waste. God took it
-
a step further, and it's kind of sprinkled throughout the Old Testament, but basically
-
the recipe for antibacterial soap is in there. Ashes run
-
through water, hyssop, and cedarwood. And like the oil from the cedarwood has
-
some sort of antibacterial— yeah. So he didn't just say
-
like stay away from them and like run yourself under water. There's literally
-
like a chemical makeup here. And then who knows when Dial
-
came up with like, hey, this will work. Yeah. And there's—
-
I, I've got this up here too, like if y'all wanted to take— there's,
-
there's way more than this too, like The life being in the blood, Leviticus 17:11.
-
Of course, like everything, that's like they can take our blood now and
-
tell you every single thing about you. Like everything about us is in our blood.
-
The round earth or a sphere, of course you could go to Job
-
where it says it hangs on nothing. That's one of those things that some people
-
debate about. Again, it's— again, it's just scientific information though.
-
It depends on how you're looking at scientific foreknowledge. I see it as scientific
-
information in the Bible that we see now is true.
-
The vastness of the stars, which they talked about how they're in the,
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in the skit of how they're innumerable, that we now
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know that now, like you, you can't count them all. That's why he said don't,
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don't go by the telescope. I think we all believe
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details matter, but God is in the details.
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Yeah, he's there. Yeah. Try to outwit him or
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outthink him. Yeah. You got to go create your own dust.
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Well, thank you for your time. Thank you.