Anthropology Arithmetic (Pastor Aaron Trelfa, 04/29/23)

I pray and trust that you had a blessed week this past week. They say that if you end your day

thinking of a couple of positive things that you can be grateful for, that you thank God for,

that it does wonders in helping ease thoughts of negativity or bring a little bit of relief to

maybe more serious depressions or something of the sort. So tonight would be a great time if you

haven't done it yet before you close your eyes for your nightly rest. Eight hours they tell us.

Offer up a prayer of thanksgiving. End your day on that positive note. Think and you will find it.

Think about how God has made himself known to you today and how he's blessed you and recognize it.

And just say thank you. It's a great way to end the night. It's a good way to begin your sleep

because if you end on a good note you're more likely to begin on a good note. You wake up in

the morning thinking of the last thing. I want to share with you one little bit of news before we

get into our message. This has nothing to do with the news per se but last week we had inserts in

the bulletin from our health ministries talking about the benefits of sunlight, vitamin D and

energy and it makes you more alert and so on. There is also really really good evidence to say

that if you can get a little bit of sun on you in the first hour of waking up that your alertness

and and the motivation actually lasts well into the day and it helps start your your body's natural

rhythms in a healthier way that it does better than a cup of coffee. That it it's good. It's good to

do that. I also have another study I came across. This is not a new one but it was new to me because

it got emailed to me this week. This is a study from 2016 done in Sweden so still very relevant.

It was done with 29,500 and change women and what they assessed were the differences in sun exposure

as a risk factor for all cause mortality. In other words what benefit do you have compared to

other risk factors if you just get some sun? Just gets a little bit of sun.

What they found primarily were three things. So this was a long term over many years with a large

sample group 29,000 plus ladies and what they found first was that these women with active sun

exposure so that's actually being outside. Don't be locked up in a basement or just indoors with

artificial lights but get outside a little bit and it doesn't have to be long but a little bit.

Active sun exposure habits were mainly at a lower risk of cardiovascular disease and non-cancer

non-cardiovascular disease death as compared to those who avoided sun exposure. Well in the

United States the top two killers are cardiovascular disease and cancer. Top two and it's

actually not close. They're way up there especially the first one. So they found a

little bit of active sun exposure can help reduce your cardiovascular disease risk. Wouldn't that be

a good thing? I think so. Two, as a result of increased survival because what they find is that

active sun exposure helps in your longevity. You'll live longer if you have active sun exposure.

Live longer if you have active sun exposure. It's a good thing. As a result of this the relative

contribution of cancer death increased. Now that might sound like you don't want it.

What we know is that the longer you live the more at risk of developing cancer you have.

Regardless of what causes you to live longer the longer you live the higher the risk. So if more

sun means you live longer you just happen to have a higher increased risk of cancer. They did not

find a correlation though that the sun exposure brought about the cancer. Just that you lived

longer and that increased your risk. And then three and this is our last this is our last one. Three,

the point about the longevity promoting properties of sunlight is driven home strongly by this.

Non-smokers who avoided sun exposure had a life expectancy similar to smokers in the highest sun

exposure category. If you don't smoke but you avoid the sun you're in the same risk in terms of your

mortality risk as those who do smoke but they get their sun. So what they concluded is that avoidance

of sun exposure is a risk factor for death of a similar magnitude as smoking. I had no idea.

I think that's good to know. I wanted to pass that on to add a little supplement to what we were

already blessed with last week with our insert. You can have everything right but if you just

lock yourself up indoors you're putting yourself at risk. Go touch grass, go breathe the air,

go let a little bit of sun hit on your face and your arms, expose your skin a little bit to it.

Don't burn, don't do those things we know that that aren't healthy but a little bit. It'll help

it'll help your hormone balance, it'll help your energy and it helps your longevity and keeps you

out of the higher risk categories. So now we're going to get into our message that was a freebie.

If you'll indulge me in one more brief word of prayer then we will dive in. Lord God now that

we are turning our attention in a focused way on your word we thank you that you inspired the authors

and you preserved it through time so it's not only a blessing and a benefit for instruction and

encouragement to those that have lived in the past but also to us right now in the present.

And we pray that that would be our reality. May we learn of you, may we learn more of ourselves

and may we appreciate the plan that you have for us. We pray this in your name amen.

The last time I was here I greeted you with a Shabbat Shalom, a Feliz Sabado,

right? A happy Sabbath, a Ton Sabaton, that's Greek. They say that there are about 7,000

spoken languages in the world. I'm assuming they're including some dialects but we'll just go with

about 7,000 spoken languages and about 300 writing systems. Mandarin, English, Spanish, and Arabic

make up the top 10 and Bengali is also among them. So you can just kind of look at the countries

around the world and that makes sense. Mandarin, there's a lot of people that speak Mandarin in

China and elsewhere. Lots of people speak Spanish. The countries that have Arabic as their main

language, there's many many many of them and then English in addition to those places that speak it

proper like England and otherwise like American, it's also the world language. If you happen to

do anything in business, any kind of real international travel, you can generally find

people who speak English. That's the accepted international language. I am not very good at

most languages. I do like them. I find some of them more confusing than others. I have heard

that American English is one of the hardest to learn because we just wear a hodgepodge of so

many different other languages kind of come together and then in America we have slang and

we have other things and then you go to the south and just you know forget about it.

Of the languages in the world, it seems though that aside from spoken languages, we have other

languages that we can consider. I'm thinking of Morse code. That's a language. I'm not up on my

Morse code but I believe it's a standard. I think Morse code is a standard. They don't do Morse code

in Mandarin. You know that's the same dashes and dots for their words. That's a universal language.

I think of music as a language and a universal language at that. You can express beauty and

sound and rhythm and all of what comes with music anywhere around the world, no matter what you look

like, no matter what you talk, no matter about your family background. Music is universal.

You have different flavors but the notes and what you can do with it. And then there's also math.

I've heard it mentioned that math is a universal language. We can thank the Egyptians for much of

how we do math today and then the Babylonians for adding on to it and then it goes on from there but

they kind of gave us a lot of our foundational mathematics. I was never really exceptional at

math. I did okay. I passed my grades and I did well enough on the ACT to go to college but it was

not my best. Reading, English, science. I liked those. Math I just kind of did. In large part

because I think I'm I looked at it too rationally. You know math is very fixed. One plus one equals

two and so on and then you get into the more complicated stuff. Algebra and calculus and trig

and college algebra and I just I got to a point in my education fairly early on and I decided I am

never going to do this again. That's not going to help me. I'm not going to use it. I have no

ambitions of being an engineer or an astrophysicist or anything like that but I guess I need the grade

so I'll do it and then like many many students you finish your last exam and out the back of your head

all of it just dumps out. My last math class was in 1999. I haven't had to inverse a matrix since

or find the angles on planes since. I'm sure some of it I use without even realizing it

but arithmetic now that's math I can get behind. Arithmetic you need day in day out. Pluses,

minuses, multiplication, division, sometimes some squares and cubes,

spatial relation maybe with the arithmetic and geometry but that will get you mostly through life.

It really will. I like how simple it is. I like that I don't have to really

try to plug in the x's and the y's or Greek letters that are supposed to mean something

and so on. Arithmetic one plus one equals two. Simple. I like that.

There was a book I've mentioned before in a previous sermon 1984 where the the ruling class,

part of how they controlled people, was to get them to accept a non-truth as truth and one example

in it was, what was it, two plus two equals five. I believe that's the example in the book. Two plus

two equals five and the moment they could get the population to accept an arithmetic calculation

that was incorrect as truth that was absolute dominance. They could control people, they could

manipulate, they could you could start to break down other things in society if you can get at

the most basic of understandings and fracture it apart. One plus one does still equal two. Two plus

two does still equal four and three squared is nine. It is nine. Did you know that there's math

in the Bible? And I'm not talking about prophecy. Of course there's math in prophecy. You count your

years from the time that Artaxerxes made this declaration, four word four hundred and ninety

years and who do you find? Messiah. And then you go the 2300 days and what do you find? The beginning

of the judgment. You have math in the Bible. You also have math in the Bible when it comes to humans.

Are you aware of that? If you have your Bible turn to our scripture reading but go a little bit

before that. We are in Genesis chapter two and we are picking up where we left off in our sermon

series from the beginning to the end and today it is anthropology arithmetic. The study of humans

anthropology. The languages, the behaviors, the how they live, how they build, how they dress,

just the study of humanity, anthropology and arithmetic. We are going to learn about God's

original math plan if you will for mankind today and we're going to touch a little on how some of

those equations like 1984 are being adjusted and telling you a different solution. Let's begin with

the first one we come to Genesis chapter two and verse seven. Leading up to that is it's just simply

a brief historical record where Moses penned that these are the generations of the heaven and the

earth when they were created. He repeats that and he kind of tells you that at that time there were

certain plants not there because rain hadn't fallen and man hadn't come about yet. That's it.

And then we get to our verse. Then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed

into his nostrils the breath of life and the man became a living creature. If you're reading from

the King James that would be a living soul. If you have another translation it might say living being

or something like that. Living being, living creature, that's the more accurate translation.

There's been some confusion with the soul but did you notice the arithmetic in this verse?

In a very personal anthropomorphic way God is being described like he's relatable to us in this

context. He's present. He's on this earth that up until now he has just spoken into existence

and he's kneeling down in the dust. He's moving about it. He's about to do something with it.

The dirt and the dust are about to be his medium for not speaking into existence but crafting

into existence. He formed the man of dust from the ground. That's very personal and that gives us our

first part of the equation. The dust. Elsewhere in the Bible Job is an example we're told that when

you die your body returns back to the dust. From dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return.

We're familiar with that. So our first part of this equation in our study of humanity is that

there is a physicalness to you and I. The dust, the earth, there's physicality to humanity that

we shouldn't overlook and it's very important. There are times throughout history where the

physical nature of who we are or about our world has been looked at as purely negative. The Greeks

were very good at doing this. They believe that you didn't have to preserve the physical or look

at it with any kind of care and not really reverence but importance about the physical world.

You could use and abuse the resources and of the person at will with zero repercussions in the big

scheme of things. That's why they were a really debaucherous society. 1st Corinthians gives us a

clue to that. Use the body however you will. It doesn't matter. But God is telling us in this

passage that our physicality is important because with his own hands he shaped the forms that we

still have. The human form hasn't changed over the thousands of years. The arms, the legs, the feet,

the uprightness and so on. So part one to our equation is our physicalness, our form.

Then God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. You can imagine if you will

a potter with his clay shaping the body there on the dirt and in only the way that God can.

He can take dust and earthly particles and actually make it look really human and like it's alive but

it's still just kind of there. But it's inanimate. It needs something and our second part to this

equation is that breath of life. You have the dirt plus God's breath, the only giver of life.

You need it. You and I need to breathe. We need that spark of life that can only come from he who

exists without another source of life. He is that source. You have to have it. The Bible regularly

talks about our life as being represented by the breath in the nostrils. The breath in the nostrils

is how the Hebrews talked about being alive and are your arteries working, your blood pumping,

is digestion going on. All of that is kind of represented by the existence of God's breath

in your nostrils. So you are also alive. But then our final is what we become. So you have one,

the dust from the ground plus two, the breath of life from God equals three, a living being.

We could dig deep into what it means to be a living being as humans. You can't divorce your

physicality from being a living being. You can't do it. You have to be physical. We do not exist

as purely metaphysical or spiritual beings. You have to have that breath. You have to have the

air that we can't see but we can feel and we inhale and we exhale. You have to have that. You

take that away. It's not a good day but you're also not only that. To be a living being also

means that you have a mind, an intellect, you have a will, you have a conscience, you dream.

To be a living being are all of those things that happen up here and it's not only physical,

meaning that it's not only firing synapses, but there is also, because we're made in his image,

a spiritual nature to what we don't see, to what we think, to what we feel, our morality.

All of what makes up the mind of humanity is very much a real part of our being a living being.

You can't divorce the one from the other. We're all together. Humans have tried to do this.

We've come up with a couple of different ways of undoing this equation. Two main ones. One would be

monism, meaning that you are only one thing. You're not comprised of separate different

elements that come together as one, but you're only one. You're either only spiritual or you're

only physical or you're only whatever the case may be. It's usually only physical. You're only

physical and by perfecting your physical self, then you're perfecting who you are.

That's where you get into, well, it doesn't matter about my physicality. I'm just going to die and

I'm going to go back to the worms. It's rather nihilistic, so I'm going to abuse myself and off

you go. Or a more ascetic way of doing things. I'm going to isolate myself physically from all of

the other temptations around the world. I'm only going to drink water. I'm not going to listen to

anything corrupting. No music, no nothing because I need to really get my physical self perfect. I'm

going to be great at exercise and I'm going to be great at everything else because if I

physically am perfect and I don't have to see the doctor or a dentist, then I'm good.

Another part of it is dualism. This is the one that seems to have really grabbed hold and this

is the idea that you have a spiritual self encapsulated by a physical self, but they're

separate from each other. The one doesn't affect the other. From Egypt to Greece to Rome to modern

day kind of understandings about that, that dualism, just the two. You can die and then maybe

you go into a reincarnation cycle or your soul goes back, your spiritual self goes back to heaven

or you know we have, we hear about this. That's dualism. Neither one of those are correct.

Because what we see in our equation is that we are physical. We know that we have

a mind that we can't quite really map even with our best technologies, the emotions, the dreams,

the morality. You can't map that. You can't really see it, but it's very much there.

And we are made in God's image. We are spiritual creatures. We have a spiritual element to us.

Even the most hardened atheist looks for something spiritual to fill that need in his life or her life.

We're all of that combined.

And I would encourage you that if you are considering your anthropology that you would take

your creator's word as it says and don't make it something else. You are physical, dirt. You are

breath, life, and that means you become something more than both of those on their own. Intellect,

will, morality, etc. Let's look at our second equation. After we look through and we're skipping

many, many, many verses. The rivers that flowed, the stones that were present, the fact that God

took the man, at this point only one human on earth, put him in the Garden of Eden to work it

and keep it. That's why in landscaping I always said I was carrying a stone, a stone, a stone,

carrying on the tradition of the longest career that ever has been.

God says in verse 18, the Lord God said it is not good that the man should be alone. I will make him

a helper fit for him or comparable to him. You might think this doesn't sound very much like

an equation because it's written in the negative. That throws us off a little bit.

This would be like saying one plus zero, one plus zero equals zero. That's the equation that God is

saying. Man plus being alone, one plus zero equals not good. That's a negative, a zero, a null outcome.

We're social creatures. God is a social God and we are made in His image. Three members, the Godhead,

a whole array of heavenly hosts, other created beings. Then God makes man in His image and

clearly there's something personal about it. He wants that interaction. There's a social fabric

to who we are. You can't escape. You can't escape. We know you can't escape. We also know that it's

still not good that man should be alone because if you're in prison and you break the rules and

you're put in solitary confinement, we have laws that say you can't do that for a certain period

or longer than a certain period of time. It hurts the psyche. It makes people very depressed and

so on. Whether people follow those laws or not, that's on them, but we know this for a reality.

It is a truth. You cannot be all alone and have a good life the way that God intends it. We know this

in recent application. In April of 2020, March of 2020, when everyone was sent home and told to stay

in their houses and you couldn't go out and socialize and you couldn't go talk to grandma or

grandpa in the nursing home, you couldn't bury your dead, you couldn't have marriages, you couldn't

all of that. Even if you did go to the couple of places that were open like Walmart, weren't you

supposed to stay apart from each other and cover up your face? All of that speaks to the social

nature that humans are. Communication broke down. Kids weren't learning how to speak at the proper

rate. Education on our youth, they believe that this is going to take much longer to write itself

than the months or the year to two years that it impacted them.

Rates of, I have to think, what do they call it, rates of deaths of despair

rose significantly during and shortly after that time. People became anxious and tense and can we

trust one another? I can't hear what you're saying. I don't even know who you are because I've only got

your eyes to go on. All of that as social creatures creates an edge. It creates something in our psyche

that is not healthy. Some people, many people might have had good intentions with what they

were doing or suggesting, but the reality is that as social creatures, God has said it is not good

that they should be alone and any time that we have tried to forcefully separate, it doesn't end

well. That's why people who really struggle with depression really kind of get in on themselves and

the more they just isolate and get in on themselves, the worse the depression gets, not the better.

That's why as a punishment, I might take my kids and put them in timeout, but only for a handful of

minutes because then they need to be reunited with the family. We need those social aspects and it's

baked into our spirituality. You cannot have the most fulfilling spiritual experience as a Christian

on your own. You are saved one-on-one between you and God, but we are the body of Christ.

The body has many components. The body has many parts. The body necessitates those parts

being attached to one another. You take a finger and you separate it from the body and you set it

off over there. What happens to the finger? It dies and then it decays and it's good for nothing.

You can take a separated finger from an accident, put it on ice, get to a doctor who knows what

they're doing and what can they do? Reattach it. When the finger that's been separated by one means

or another is reattached back to the body, is that a good thing? Can you save the finger?

Can it retain its function and its purpose? Absolutely.

And that's true for any body parts. My kids seem to be doing well without tonsils, but we're not

talking about them. You are a social creature. Humans are that and it impacts you not just in

your personal life, but your spiritual life. In Hebrews it talks about there are some of those who

don't come and meet and worship together with the congregation and the writer says don't be like them.

Don't neglect the gathering of yourselves one to another. Throughout the New Testament church,

what were they doing? Coming together, worshiping together, eating together,

staying up so late at night together that kids are falling out of windows. But together,

one of the first things that the enemy tries to do to fracture that is to start separating one

from another. Many different tools at the disposal force physical separation, gossip,

slander, unhealthy prejudging someone because you don't like their shoes that day or that they sat

in your pew. The enemy has different ways of interrupting that social fabric of ours that

ingrained a part of our being and setting us against one another or telling us that we're

better on our own. The United States is a immensely hyper individualistic society.

And it's not been good. It's not been good. So in this equation rather than what God is saying one

plus zero equals zero, that's what God has said the equation is. It really is one plus any other

number equals good. So in this equation, God is saying that one plus zero equals zero.

Another number equals good. You need more added to you than just you. It's good for you. It's for your

benefit. For Adam who was alone, God wanted him to find this out for himself. I don't know why. I have

a thought. But God wanted Adam to find this out for himself. So he gave him a task to do. And in

the task of naming the animals, Adam noticed that every animal had a pair. A male and a female. One

went with the other. You never found one all by itself and you never found two exactly like one

another. But they were same in kind but different in purpose or makeup if you will. Two dogs, two

elephants, two platypies, platypuses. Everything had a pair and I can imagine, I can picture in my

mind Adam doing this. Oh you're this animal and you're that and oh that's funny. Long neck, long

legs. Wow. This is your name. This is that name. And after you go through, I don't know, 50 or 100

or 200 of them and you're giving names to all of them, maybe he just started looking around.

Maybe he looked behind him. Maybe he wanted to wander and kind of look behind bushes or see if

a tree was hiding something. Maybe he started calling out Marco. Maybe he wanted to find who

would respond with Polo. Here I am. But the man didn't find his other half. He didn't find who was

supposed to be his complement. He didn't find the other part of the equation that he discovered he

was missing. God had already said that it wasn't good for him to be alone and now God fixes that

broken equation. In verses 21 and 22, the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man while

he slept. He took one of the ribs, closed up its place with flesh. From the rib, the Lord God made

into a woman. That's the same word as like building a house. God is a builder in this. He's fashioning

this woman for him and brought her to the man. You were looking for your other half. You were

looking for someone like you but not exactly like you. Here you go. God brought that missing part of

the equation to the man and the man immediately recognized this at last as bone of my bones and

flesh of my flesh. She shall be called a woman because she was taken out of man. Even in the names

you have that super close relationship between the sexes. You need it. So in other words, the equation

is M plus F equals capital F. Male plus female equals family. The core social structure for

humanity. Male plus female equals family. You have to have it. It's been, it's been, you can read so

many different types of takes on what it is to have someone, a helper fit for him or a helper complement

to him. When we look at men and women, we know that they're not exactly the same. We know this.

It doesn't take long. We know that men, broadly speaking, and that's how we're talking, in broad

terms, men are more oriented to spatial relations. They're more interested in mechanical things.

Their minds tend to be just much more logical in just how they go and they're just like, oh,

that makes sense. ABC. That's what I'm going to do. We also know the faults of men. We also know

that the greater tendency towards the mechanics means that they sometimes often miss the softer

parts to life. You get so caught up in just the machines and fixing and doing and building and

conquering, you forget to actually settle down and have a life sometimes.

Men get so focused on the logical that we often hurt others not thinking about the empathy part,

that compassionate part. Sometimes we're so caught up in just being strong that we forget

to protect. We hurt men are just wired that way. At times men don't talk as much. We don't share

as much of our feelings. We prefer a lot of alone time and the list can go on what men are like.

Women on the other hand, well, we need women. I need my wife to balance me out. She's perfect at it.

She brings an energy to our marriage. I appreciate she is so much more empathetic to what other

people are feeling and kind of going through. She surprises me. Are you sure? They don't seem

that way to me. I have to take her word at it. She has and ladies, I think you're going to know

what I mean and men you're going to know this too. There's a female sixth sense.

How many of our ladies here have known something but you couldn't quite express that you know what

you know about a person? I don't have that. My wife has it in spades and I've talked to many other

ladies that can say the same thing. I can't really tell you but I know about so and so.

We need that. We need women with their more nurturing side to be the child bearers because

little kids need the nurturing. Remove moms out of that equation. Men can kind of do it.

Dads can kind of do it. Not like a mom. Absolutely not like a mom.

You remove a dad from the equation and kids moms do it and there are

heroic mothers that have raised their kids on their own. You remove a dad from it. Our society

tells you what fatherless homes turn into on a broad scale. Increased crime, increased depression,

a fracture in the home, less trust, etc. That's just born out by data. Dads add to the family unit

something that moms at their best efforts can do but it's not like a dad. It's just not.

And then of course we have to look at if God had just led another Adam to Adam,

our family tree would have been really short.

There's also just a basic necessity for different but complementary on the biological level. We

know what I'm talking about. You have to have men and women for the continuation of humanity.

You can't do a different equation and have a continuation of humanity. Not going to happen.

I find that this equation,

more so than the breaking down of our social aspect,

this equation is most under attack. In who men are as men and women are as women

and one cannot be the other or vice versa. No matter how hard you try,

you cannot. You might gain the appearance of a man who is a woman.

You cannot. You might gain the appearance of one. We're really good at some of our surgeries.

You might gain the appearance of one but you can't be one. It is anthropologically incorrect

to suggest anything other than a binary.

It's teleologically incorrect. That's the philosophy of being

to suggest that men can be women or women can be men. You can't.

And on a broad scale, it's under attack and it has not been good.

For longer, the equation of man male plus female equals family has been under attack.

Many, many, many years ago, it was proposed that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.

That started the inevitable trend towards a fracturing of God's original equation.

Because one men and women are not perfectly identical in all things at all times. Men need

women. Women need men. You take one of those away because the other way is true. Men. You can't say

a man needs a woman like a fish needs a bicycle. That also doesn't work. Then you have the

redefinition of marriage in recent years. That also breaks apart God's equation.

And it does break down the family. And if we're looking at continuing the species,

it also breaks that down. That's not to say that people can't love and that's not to say that we

are unkind and that's not to say any of those other things. I'm just simply looking at God's

design for humanity. God's equations in our lives are not just about the definition of

humanity. God's equations in our anthropology. Because if we are to understand who we are in

the big picture of things, we have to see how God our creator made us and designed us with that

purpose in mind. And that purpose is to be a combination of the physical, the spiritual,

the mental, and the breath, the life. God's equation he intended. He designed us to be

social creatures. Even into eternity, we're all gathering together like a great multitude on the

sea of glass. That's social. God says, I want to be with them. I'm going to dwell in their midst

and be their God and they will be my people. That's social. Can't break it apart. They will

come together from new moon to new moon, from Sabbath to Sabbath to worship God, Isaiah says.

That's a social worship. God intended us to be that way in our anthropology arithmetic.

And then God also purposefully designed male and female to complement each other. Not one superior

or one inferior, but equal and different. And we need the differences and the equal. We need it all.

The moment we start to break apart any of these equations, you're going to end up with a failing

grade in the anthropology arithmetic test. Something's going to go wrong. Something's

going to get messed up and God's original intention and design is not going to be realized.

I don't have the answer for all the other many reasons or studies or philosophies about us and

what makes us up. But when I look at these three sections of Genesis chapter two, these five verses,

four verses, I can't help but walk away with not an overly complicated calculus equation or even

inverting a matrix that takes forever to do. This is simple arithmetic. This is one plus one equals

two. And God knew all along what he had in mind. And it was perfect. In its original design,

in its original fabrication, in its original purpose. At the end of the sixth day, after

mankind had been made with all of this built into us in his image, God didn't just say it is good.

What did he say, my friends? It is very good. Our anthropology arithmetic

is at the heart of God and not just saying good, but very good.

And I would encourage each one of you to thank God for those truths, to defend them where you can

and to praise him that he knows best. I believe and the Bible tells us that even though we won't be

marrying and giving in marriage, Jesus says when we get to heaven, the rest of it stays the same.

Men and women will be there. Our social fabric remains. Our composition of physical, spiritual,

and breath is still there. From beginning to end, our anthropology arithmetic stays the same.

Our anthropology arithmetic stays the same. I would encourage you all to praise God that that is true.

Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you for your word. We thank you that you knew what you were

doing when you fashioned us. And I pray that you would forgive us where we try to break apart

what you intended as a very good and what you declared as such. I pray that where we stumble and

fall, where we fracture our families, where husbands and wives are unkind or cruel to one another,

where we don't respect one another or love as you have loved us, I pray that you would forgive us

and put that bond back together. Lord, I pray where we have abused our bodies different than you intended.

Overworking, not enough sleep, gluttony in its various forms, substance abuse in its various forms.

Lord, I pray that you would forgive us and set us again on a right path. And Lord, where either by

our own choosing or by what is forced upon us, when we have separated one from another,

Lord, I pray that you would bring us back together. I pray that we would be called your sons and

daughters saints of Jesus, united by, in, and through the Holy Spirit. Lord, I am so grateful

that Jesus Christ saw fit to become one of us, to unite humanity with heaven, not just for those

years he was here, but for eternity. I am grateful that you know us in and out and you are compassionate

towards our needs. And Lord, we praise your name for all of us. May we not forget it, but may we be

true and faithful to your intent and purpose. Lord, we pray all of these things in Jesus Christ's name.

Amen.