God's Other Book (Ben Roy & Debbie Rivera, 04/15/23)

And Genesis 1, 1, that's a favorite text, isn't it?

Yes.

All right.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

And if we don't understand that, then we really

are going to have a hard time understanding

the rest of the Bible.

Or believing the rest of the Bible.

Right.

Right.

And here's the text that was read so well.

It says, but ask the animals, and they will teach you.

Or the birds in the sky, and they will tell you.

Or speak to the earth, and it will teach you.

Or let the fish in the sea inform you.

Which of all of these things does not know the hand

of the Lord has done this?

In His hand is the life of every creature

and the breath of all mankind.

Isn't that awesome?

All of nature, all of nature.

And the universe speaks to Him, doesn't it?

Yes.

Now, I love that.

And that's a picture of our solar system.

The solar system is absolutely amazing.

And I brought a little model right here.

I wonder if we have some of our younger children that

could come up and hold our model of our solar system.

Because we're going to talk a little bit

about the solar system.

We happen to live in the solar system.

And we live on a very, don't we?

We don't have any children?

What happened to our kids?

Or we could use a couple of adults.

OK.

Did you come to participate today?

I need some help to hold this.

Here we go.

Yeah, come on up.

Yeah, there you go.

Thank you very much.

Yeah, there we go.

Thank you.

I'll get out of the way.

All right.

So we have a model right here.

Hang onto that.

Here we go.

And walk over this way.

And here we go.

You can help me with this.

Here, you can hang onto this part right here.

And here, why don't you take the end right here

and stretch it on out.

There you go.

And you stretch it on out.

There you go.

Turn around so everybody can see you as well.

OK, there.

Yeah, but put the model in front of you so we won't block it.

There we go.

Cool.

Oh, yeah.

Here, help me.

Help me.

And pick those up so it doesn't drag on the ground.

OK.

You got that?

Yeah, hold that up.

That's interesting.

And stretch it out because it's really, really long.

It's really, really long.

And this is our golf ball model of the sun.

Yeah, stretch it on out.

There, stretch it.

Come on.

It gets longer and longer.

So this is planet Earth.

If planet Earth happens to be a golf ball size,

then our sun is that size.

Isn't that amazing?

Does that blow you away?

It blows me away.

And we could take 109 planet Earths.

It could go all the way across the diameter of our sun.

109 planet Earths.

Can you imagine that?

That's really quite amazing.

And we're not very close to the sun.

Otherwise, we would burn up.

We would vaporize.

We're not too far away from the sun.

Otherwise, we'd be too cold.

And we couldn't have life on planet Earth.

But we're about 93 million miles away from our sun.

Isn't that amazing?

It's just amazing to me.

Now, that distance is called a unit.

It's an astronomical unit from the sun to the Earth.

That's amazing to me.

But that's just part of our solar system.

And let's see.

What you can do is go ahead and just drop the Earth.

I mean, drop the sun.

There you go.

It won't hurt the carpet.

Thank you.

Thank you for helping me hold that.

Thank you very much.

There you go.

So that happens to be part of our solar system.

And we actually have a probe that was called Voyager 1.

And in September 5, in 1977, Voyager 1

was launched from Florida.

And it was going to take lots and lots of pictures

of our solar system.

And it did.

And in fact, you can go to NASA, and you can actually

see all of those wonderful, wonderful pictures.

And it took 35 years, 35 years traveling

at about 38 kilometers per hour in order

to get to the very edge of our solar system,

right to the edge what we call interstellar space.

What's an amazing thing?

And if Voyager is still going, which is amazing,

but if it went all the way around the Milky Way galaxy,

it would take 500 years in order to go all the way

around our galaxy.

Isn't that quite amazing?

And we're just one galaxy.

We're the what?

What galaxy are we in?

The Milky Way galaxy.

That is so cool.

OK.

Oh, you got the button?

The book.

Oh, here we go.

That's right.

Now, the text that we had.

I'd rather you do it.

What's that?

I'd rather you do it.

You'd rather me do it?

Yeah.

OK.

Am I holding it right?

No.

Upside down.

Yeah, now you're holding it right.

All right.

Now, the text that was read this morning

came from God's book, right?

God's first book.

But there is another book.

What's the other book?

What's God's other book?

What is it?

It's nature, isn't it?

So let's just take a look at nature today, shall we?

And let's open it.

Are you ready?

OK, let's check this out.

Whoa, what is all of that?

It's butterflies.

Those are butterflies.

Yes.

That's amazing.

Yeah, we went to Branson, Missouri.

And we went to a, it was called Butterfly Palace

and Rainforest.

And these are some pictures that we took there.

The one right here, is that a butterfly?

Is it a moth?

Yes, that's a moth.

And how do you know it's a moth?

Oh, that's a moth.

That's, yeah, that's the, there's other things about it

as well.

But the most obvious is, it's fuzzy right here.

I took that on my porch.

So a lot of times, we think moths are boring and dull

and just brown or whatever.

But they're not.

What's another thing?

You just said it.

Yes, they rest mainly with their wings out.

And a butterfly usually hasn't folded up,

unless the butterfly, it opens them sometimes

to get the warmth so that they can fly.

It doesn't even look, it looks like a toy to me.

Isn't that interesting?

The colors are fantastic.

Yes.

And then you've got one up there.

Some people think if you touch a butterfly and you take,

and the powder comes off, that they won't be able to fly.

But that's not true.

And here's one.

And it's made that way.

It's not, somebody didn't scrape it off, but he's clear.

And then they gave us these little tubes.

And they could drink the sugar water.

And they put their proboscis down in there.

And they suck it up like a straw.

Now, some people study birds, right?

And there are other people study butterflies.

Now, have you ever heard of bird banding?

Where they will put a band around the leg of a bird,

and that way they can track it if it's ever caught or whatever.

Well, they actually band butterflies.

They don't call it banding butterflies.

But they put little tags on one of the scales.

Can you imagine that on the wings of those?

I think that's interesting.

OK.

You want to tell them about this?

Yeah.

That looks like the alphabet and some numbers.

Well, where did you find those?

This was at the place that we went to Butterfly Palace.

And this was a poster.

And then they had them individual.

But this was a poster.

And this man discovered that he saw a couple butterflies.

And it looked like they had different numbers or letters

on them.

So he spent 25 years of his life traveling the world,

finding butterflies so he could find the full alphabet in 1

to 9.

That is amazing.

Which is pretty wild.

Can you imagine that?

Yeah.

Wow.

That's beautiful.

So this is the life cycle of a butterfly.

And a moth is very similar.

There's a little bit of difference.

But it's pretty similar.

So you start out.

It starts out the butterfly will lay an egg on a leaf,

usually on a leaf.

And it'll hatch out.

And it'll become a caterpillar.

And when it's a caterpillar, that's

when it eats the most and it grows the fastest.

So you'll see them.

And they're chewing on the leaves.

They can chew.

And then a butterfly turns into a chrysalis.

And a moth turns into a cocoon.

So does anyone know the difference between the two?

OK.

Well, a cocoon with a moth, they spin their cocoon out

of like a silk material.

And a chrysalis is actually the skin of the caterpillar.

It comes off.

And it hardens around them.

And so that's the difference between the two.

And then they'll come out as the adult.

And their wings are wet.

And then they have to dry.

And then they can fly away.

But when they're in the chrysalis or the cocoon,

they turn into liquid.

Not all of them, but I mean, not their whole body.

Most of their body turns into a liquid.

So it's kind of a miraculous, miraculous way to do it.

Did you want to show them that?

I've got a.

Yeah, we have a little model kind of one.

What is that?

That's a caterpillar.

That's a caterpillar.

Yes.

And what's it going to be?

It's going to be a beautiful butterfly.

It's going to be a beautiful butterfly.

And see what happens.

What is that called when that happens?

They have a complete metamorphosis.

So if you have three or more complete changes

from babyhood to adulthood, it's complete metamorphosis.

So since he went from an egg, and he

went to four different stages, and he looks different

in each of those stages, it's a complete metamorphosis.

And there it is.

Yeah.

Wow.

And as soon as those wings, the liquid inside of the wings

harden, then they'll be stiff and it can fly away.

Yes.

And when they fly, how do they fly?

They fly, they flutter by.

Yeah, they just kind of, the wind sometimes carries them.

And that's so that that's kind of one of their defenses

so that the animals don't know which direction

they're going to catch them.

That's neat.

Wow.

Do we go through a metamorphosis?

Kind of, yeah.

But it's not a complete metamorphosis.

I'd like to be a butterfly.

Yes.

OK, on this side, you have the butterfly.

You can see the difference.

The antenna are thinner, which is the most obvious.

And then this one over here has a feathery look.

But this is, this kind of blew me away when I saw this.

Oh, we can't see the numbers very well.

In the world, there are 17,550 different kinds of butterflies.

Wow.

In the US, we have 750, OK, which is pretty wild.

But this next one's going to really be.

That is amazing.

Watch this one, though.

Moths, there's 160,000 different kinds of moths in the world

and 11,000 in the United States.

That's amazing.

I wonder how long it'd take you to collect those.

Yeah, or to count them.

I mean, I don't know how long it took them to do that.

But that's pretty wild.

All of God's creation.

So what are butterflies good for?

Pollination, yes.

So what are moths good for?

Say pollination, yes.

They take the second and third shift.

The butterflies are during the day and moths are at night.

Some of them eat holes in your clothes.

Yes, yes.

Yeah, so they're good for that.

And they're not good for anything.

Yeah.

I wouldn't go that far.

But anyway, yeah.

So this is the one on top is going

to be turned into a what, chrysalis or a little

turn into a what chrysalis or a cocoon?

What chrysalis?

Yes, it's going to turn into a chrysalis.

So this right here is your cocoon.

You can see they get a like the silk is they tie it on there.

But he's got something that comes out of him

that makes him stick.

And then this is you can't see it very well.

But that's a very shiny gold color.

So they come in all different colors.

Some of them are even clear.

Yeah, that's a beautiful one.

I've seen one of the gold ones.

Yeah, they had them at that place.

If you've ever been to the Tennessee Aquarium,

have you ever been to the Butterfly House?

Yeah, that is beautiful.

They have all different colored chrysalis in there as well.

You can look at.

Does anyone know what this is?

It's a caterpillar, right?

But what's hanging off of them?

Parasites.

This is how God has even in sin, he has made nature work together.

My trees in the backyard were all getting eaten down.

I didn't have any leaves on them.

And I saw all these little guys hanging around.

And I decided to take a picture of them.

So then I went inside and I googled what it was.

And what it is is when my tree was being eaten,

they can send out a signal.

It's just automatically.

They don't think about it.

It just happens.

It can be a gas they send out.

It can be just the fluids inside are making a weird noise

or not running right.

Or it could be an electric impulse.

So my trees sent out a signal that it was in distress.

And this little thing was flying by and decided to help out.

So what can this thing do?

She can lay eggs.

So she needed somewhere to lay her eggs.

And so she found the caterpillar and she put them in.

And when she puts them in, she puts a virus in with them

as well.

So she can't fight off whatever's happening to her.

So she lays the eggs in there.

Then when they hatch out, the larva is in there

and it eats the insides out.

And then they chew their way out, make a cocoon,

and hang there till they're ready to hatch out and go out

into the world.

That's amazing.

That's pretty wild.

Yeah.

And there's other insects that do this as well.

You might see some on your tomato plants.

You get the little green caterpillars eating your things.

So sometimes you'll see those with the little white things

on them as well.

Oh, now this is interesting.

OK.

Tell me what's in this picture.

Is that a puzzle?

It's a camouflage.

Camouflage.

You're going to have to study that one.

Yeah, you have to look at this pretty good

and figure out what's in this picture.

I had a hard time finding this.

Yeah.

I don't know how long I did.

Does anybody see it?

It's an animal.

It's an animal.

How many of you have seen the animal?

Anybody?

Something to the left of the, this way?

No, it's on this side.

It's on the right.

You're right.

It's a giraffe.

It's a giraffe.

She did.

Oh, wonderful.

Yes, it's a giraffe.

Very good.

It's very camouflaged.

Yeah.

Very good.

Yeah, I think that's it.

Can you pick it out?

Did you shine your light?

Oh, I can shine my light.

It's right here is its head.

And there it goes down.

But he's pretty camouflaged.

I didn't realize that till I found this picture one day.

And I was like, that's pretty wild.

You don't think of giraffes being camouflaged.

Yeah.

If it was a movie.

That's amazing.

Shine the light.

Here's his head.

It's eyes right here, and it's horns.

And then it goes down.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Pretty wild.

But that's why they're spotted the way they are.

It's their camouflage.

And each of them, it's like their fingerprints.

No one has your same fingerprints.

No one has the same pattern as these guys.

And there are seven different types of giraffes.

If you go online and look at them,

there's actually one that's white.

But it's an anomaly.

They don't want to be white, because then they

can't hide very well.

They could hide in the snow.

Yeah.

Yeah, that wouldn't work.

I don't know if they could hide in snow.

I mean, they're a little tall.

Yes.

OK.

Oh, yes.

And we went to someplace where we could actually

feed the giraffes.

How many have ever fed a giraffe?

Oh, yes.

Wonderful.

Lots of people.

You can do it at Chattanooga Zoo now as well.

Oh, you need us to move over.

Well.

You need to move over.

And they are so tame.

I mean, the ones that we fed were so tame.

And they're just so gentle when they take the food out

of your hand.

Yeah, they weren't aggressive at all or anything.

And they were just eating lettuce.

That's lettuce that we're feeding them.

So this is a giraffe.

And of course, you can see how long their neck is.

It's extremely long.

Some of them can be 11 or 12 feet long, just the neck part.

But they have the same number of vertebrae in their neck

as we do.

So this is.

Yeah, that's me.

That's him.

That's my neck.

Yeah.

And that's the neck of a giraffe.

And that's not it.

I mean, that's from the floor.

So that giraffe, he's still that much taller than him.

But if he had his body with him, he's huge.

And you actually have a real vertebrae of a giraffe.

It's coming in the mail today, actually.

So yeah, it's about 12 inches long.

So it's going to be pretty neat.

But anyway.

OK, so here you got the giraffe.

And he loves this kind of tree.

Does anybody know their favorite kind of tree?

Acacia, look at you.

Yeah, Acacia tree.

OK, so Acacia trees, a giraffe can eat up to 100 pounds

of food a day.

So that's a lot of leaves.

So if he comes after a tree and he eats 100 pounds of it,

that tree is going to be stripped.

So this is one line of defense that this tree has.

And that's these big thorns.

But there's actually birds that build their nest

between those thorns.

That's a pretty neat thing.

That'd be a good place for a nest.

It would be excellent unless a giraffe

wanted to lick your nest out.

Anyway, so a giraffe has a very long tongue.

Does anyone know how long it is?

It's 18 to 20 inches long.

And they can use it and wrap it around things.

And so he's got quite control of it.

And it's a dark color.

It's blue or purple.

Does anyone know why it's that color?

It's that color because they're so high up in the sky.

What's up there with them?

The sun.

They got their tongue out all the time trying to eat.

So they don't get sunburned if it's like this.

So God thought of everything with these guys.

Anyway, so he eats these acacia trees.

And once he gets down to a certain amount,

the acacia tree, not meaning to, just does it,

it will start tasting bitter.

And so that the giraffe won't want to eat there anymore.

And so that's its protection from the giraffe.

And all the trees around it, I think it's 50 yards

or something like that, about 50 yards around it,

all the acacia trees around, they start tasting bitter

because this tree signals them to taste bitter,

that there's giraffes coming by

and they're gonna eat all the trees.

So then they just move on.

But the other interesting thing is the adult leaves do that,

but the baby leaves are bitter until they become adult

so that they're not eaten at all.

Well, that's a real safeguard for the tree, isn't it?

But it's amazing that all the other trees

are gonna start tasting bitter

because they don't want to get wiped out, all those leaves.

Wow.

Yeah, yeah.

It's pretty neat.

Now, someone said that, I don't know if you drink coffee,

if you do, stop, but coffee is bitter.

Tea.

I'm sorry?

Tea.

Oh, it's tea, not coffee, I'm sorry.

Okay, forget what I said about coffee.

Well, don't drink coffee either,

but it's tea that we were talking about.

Okay, it's tea.

Yes.

All right, I'm sorry, I got it confused.

But tea, the caffeinated tea is bitter naturally.

Yeah, like if you get tea and you don't get sweetened tea,

it's bitter, like black tea, those kinds of things.

They're bitter.

So you have to put some kind of a sweetener in there.

Yes, yes.

And so why is it bitter and non-caffeinated

is not so bitter?

It's the same as these trees.

They cut them down, and when they cut them down

and the way they cut them down,

it brings out the bitterness of them,

and we just eat it anyway,

when it's really a warning not to eat it,

but we say, well, we're gonna eat it anyway

and just throw some sugar in there.

But yeah.

That's amazing.

No, not quite sure that was true.

But anyway, but if you get herbal tea,

it's not the same as that,

because it's not harvested the same way

they get the whole leaf.

They don't do like the black teas. Yeah.

Wow.

Okay, and what is this?

It's a tree with roots, right?

So when you have a adult tree like this,

can you distinguish what roots belong to it

and what belongs to something else?

No, you can't tell.

Well, if there's baby trees in the forest,

and it belongs to the same group or family of this tree,

if the sun can't get down in there,

then the babies can't produce food for themselves.

So the adult trees, somehow or other,

they know those babies are struggling.

So they will get their roots,

and they'll tie in with the babies

and give them nutrition until they're big enough

to make their own food.

Wow. So yeah.

So they nurse them in a way.

Yeah, yeah.

That's fantastic.

But it's just amazing that that mess

can go and find another mess

and figure out whose roots are whose.

I mean, that's incredible.

Anyway.

Oh, Proverbs, this is good.

Proverbs 6 and 7.

It says, go to the ant thou sluggard,

consider her ways and be wise,

which having no guide, overseer, or ruler.

I wonder what our kids would do

if they didn't have a ruler and overseer.

Would they be like the ants?

Well, mine weren't, but yeah.

The Bible tells us that we should know,

you know, we know what to do.

We should do what we should do, right?

We don't need to be nagged about it.

We don't need, our children don't need the mom

and dad nagging them.

They know to clean their room.

Go clean your room, right?

So what is this?

That's an ant hill, right?

So we've got, we're gonna show you

what's underneath, right?

So this is what's underneath.

This is the ant colony.

And so it looks like just a big mess in there,

but it's actually very organized.

And if you look at the screen,

you'll see that an ant colony has several entrances.

And within that ant colony is the queen ant,

who is the most important ant.

She's the one that keeps the colony going.

She's laying eggs constantly.

So once she lays the eggs,

there's ants that come over here and they put,

oh no, they're over here.

The eggs over here and they tend to the eggs.

Then once they hatch out, then they come down here.

And there's another group of ants that take care of them.

There's ants over here that are storing food.

You know, they just, different things that they do in here.

And so some of them are in there

and they're keeping it clean.

And when ants from each colony, they each have pheromones.

And a pheromone, they emit it as they walk along.

And that pheromone is a odor or smell

that they can smell from each other.

And they know if they belong to their colony.

The longest colony that they have found

is almost 4,000 miles long.

And this is it where those big black dots

goes all the way down here.

And how they know that's one colony

is they got an ant over in Italy

and they took it over here and they let it in.

Then they took an ant from another colony

and they did the same thing and they did not let it in.

So they knew it was the same pheromone, same colony.

So if humans were to build a colony this big,

it's comparable to the Great Wall of China.

So they worked pretty hard at this.

And it's got all those rooms like that colony

that he's walking around with.

It's like that, it's very elaborate.

So what are these ants doing?

They're building a bridge.

They need to get from point A to point B.

So they're working together, right?

So the Bible tells us to study the ants,

so what should we do?

We should work together, help each other out, right?

Build bridges, there you go.

This is another one, you can't see,

this isn't a very good picture, but I like it.

This is another bridge

and you probably can't tell what that is.

Does anybody know what that is?

It's a wasp nest.

So these ants have built a bridge all the way here

and going up and they're going to destroy

what's in that wasp nest.

The wasp all run away and whatever's left,

they take it and take it back home and eat it,

whether it's the babies or whatever's in there.

Or some of the adults can't escape quick enough,

so that's a problem.

What are these ants doing?

That's my favorite picture right there.

They're what?

They're leaf cutters.

And it looks like this guy here is hitching a ride, right?

But he's not really hitching a ride.

You can see he's cutting that.

So I think he's lightening the burden of this other ant.

So what should we do?

Lighten the burden of each other, help each other.

You see somebody in need, go help them.

Don't we have something for the kids?

We do have something for the kids.

Can I pass this back?

Yeah.

If you're a kid, raise your hand.

We have little toy ants and I want you to put it somewhere

and when you see this, think of the ant.

So the ants can carry 10 to 50 times their body weight.

So they're extremely strong.

But this guy's helping him anyway.

He could carry that leaf easily.

And does anyone know what this is?

It's what?

It's a pile of fire ants.

Fire ants are very difficult to destroy.

You get one ant, you can drown him.

You get a bazillion ants, they turn into a raft.

They're holding on to each other and they're floating.

And the ones on the bottom,

when they get tired of holding everybody up,

they go to the top and the next level they come down

and take over until they get tired and they keep rotating.

And they can do this for several months.

And it only takes just very few minutes

for them to organize this.

But like if it's a hurricane comes through

and there's a lot of water or whatever,

that's how they survive.

Another thing about ants is they have two stomachs.

So they have one stomach to share

and one stomach to eat their own food.

So.

So they have potluck.

They have potluck, yes.

Yes.

So they're helping each other in that way as well.

So that's the last slide.

Yeah, that's another one of those.

Nathan Green, yeah.

Pictures.

And that comes from the First Corinthians.

It says, I have not seen nor ear heard,

neither have entered into the heart of man

the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.

Isn't that amazing?

So even if somebody has never heard about God or Jesus,

or they live in a world that just couldn't

have happened on its own, it's amazing.

So the universe declares the glory of God.

That's quite amazing, isn't it?

Yes.

Wow, we have a God, a great God.

The God, we have no idea how powerful our God really is.

We have no idea how powerful.

And all this that they're doing now is after sin,

so it had to be extra incredible before sin.

That's right.

And we talked about how long, like Voyager,

Voyager has been up there now for over 40 some years,

and it's traveling very, very fast.

And if it went all the way around the Milky Way galaxy,

it would take 500 years.

But you know, someday, Jesus is going to take us all up

to heaven, isn't he?

How long is that going to take?

Seven days.

Seven days.

I wonder how far that is.

It's way out of our solar system,

maybe out of our galaxy for sure.

That's quite amazing.