Wirksworth | 18/10/26 | Elohim | Steve Young

And it uh yeah it's it's the name of God, the creator of all.

So let's kind of hope that this changes.

Um so it comes from El or Eloh, which is God, um, but it's plural.

So Elohim makes it plural.

And that plurality um you could say might be a hint at the Trinity, the Godhead, um.

But actually it was a common form of speech in Hebrew to emphasize something, right?

So it's a bit like the royal we, you know, we are not amused.

Um it's an emphasis, God of gods, lord of lords, great above all, supreme authority.

Um I think that hint at the Trinity, although some Christian uh believers have preached on that being a sort of hint at the Trinity uh Godhead, I think probably in the Old Testament times anyway, it wasn't perceived as such.

And it was always thought of as a singular God.

Um it's a plural noun, but it's associated with singular verbs, pronouns, and adjectives.

So in Psalm 44 you read, you singular, are my king of God, Hellim, plural, uh a singular pronoun with a plural noun.

And in Jeremiah 10, verse 10, you see uh, but as for Yahweh, he is a true singular God, Elohim, glorious.

Jeremiah 10:10

So singular adjective with plural name.

It's used over two and a half thousand times in the Bible, starting with the very first verse, in Genesis 1, verse 1.

Genesis 1:1

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

And it's often used in the context of creation, the supreme authority and originator of all.

So God created the heavens and the earth, uh, and we, I'm sure all of us read Genesis 1 and 2, the account of that creation.

It was God's account to mankind of how the earth and the heavens were formed and created by him.

Technical details are absent, uh, and that's probably a good thing for most people, right?

Especially in those days they didn't know much about biology of living things.

So the technical detail, yeah, probably would have bought them down a little bit.

Um six days, six days God created all heaven, the heavens and the earth.

Um there's two views amongst Christians as to whether that's six days as we know them, or six periods of time.

Um my own view is that it's a bit difficult to believe that that was six days as we know it, because the sun and the moon weren't even created till the fourth day.

Um, and I do think there's precedence that day is used to talk about a period in the day that the Israelites were banished from their land in God's day of vengeance and so on.

So I think there is some evidence that that word can be used for a period of time.

I don't think we need to fall out about it.

If you believe it for six days, that's fine.

It's not going to affect your salvation or mine.

The important thing is that God created all of this out of nothing.

He breathed it into being.

Psalm 33 says, by the word of the Lord the heavens were made.

They're starry host by the breath of his mouth.

For he spoke and it came to be.

And, you know, going back to the six days of it, God created time.

Because before creation, there was no time, there was no meaning to time, because God is from the beginning to the end, forever.

Creation is subject to time, but God is not.

In Psalm 19, we read, before the mountains were born, or you were born brought forth, or you brought forth the whole world, from everlasting to everlasting, you are God.

So God is outside of time.

Time has no meaning to him because he is eternal.

And so, you know, when we s when we when we read things like you know predestination, when we read about God knowing the end from the beginning, because it's like for him, it's just a different dimension that he can see.

He can see the end from the beginning.

So God is distinct from creation, but he remains involved, and creation is dependent on.

In Job 12, we read, His hand in his hand is the life of every creature and the breath of all mankind.

When you sing that song, don't we hit in him we live and move and have our being.

Yeah, he's he's distinct from creation, but very important and sustained creation.

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

The only verse of the Bible.

Why is that?

Because creation is a key witness.

We just sang didn't we about the witnesses that uh to God's existence, and uh and creation is one of those witnesses.

And in Romans we read, For since the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities, his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen, been understood from what has been made, so that people are without space use.

And it's a really important witness to the existence of God, and actually, you know, as a scientist that who's been involved in uh trying to understand uh the human body and disease, it it's just a marvelous thing to see the intricacy, intricate delicacy and detail of what God has created.

Um and so the Bible's saying, look, it's a witness to God.

The immense diversity and beauty in nature shows us something of God's infinite wisdom and creative power.

How many of your words were in wisdom of the world?

The earth is full of your creatures, and you see a vast and spacious team of creatures and living things both large and small.

At this point, how is it some other functions?

I think an insight to community and industry of information.

Um I'm a chemist myself for me my my my job for the last four years in terms of was using chemistry to try to make new medicines and to understand uh human biology and diseases so that we can try to do that.

So I want to show you something that for me, I mean it's so many things.

I've done something here, but I don't think any of you have seen this.

I think it's awesome.

It's it's just a little bit over yourself.

It's called a kinetic, and it's a motor protein.

And it's a protein, this is the protein here.

It it's got two feet and a long tether, and that tether attaches to vesicles that are full of nutrients and proteins and things that are needed at the at the cell surface.

They're created in the in the nucleus.

And oh sorry, I've gone, I didn't need to do that and I didn't need started.

Um there we go.

And they're needed at the cell surface.

And this this little protein here has two feet that exactly match the repeating pattern in the microtubule.

So two proteins make up a microtubule, and these little feet here match those bindings elements, and it walks along that microtubule, taking all those things to the to the cell surface.

It's actually going really fast.

Those feet that move really slow there, hundred times a second it's moving.

Each time it moves, a molecule of ATP is used to power it.

I think that's amazing.

How can that be by chance, right?

Two different proteins in a in a in a in a complex that provides a site that this these two feet follow along and move things from the nucleus to the end of the of the uh of the cell.

And it's really important for nerve cells in particular, because nerve cells have their nuclei in in your spine or in your brain, and the the the the end of the nerves are right out in all sorts of different parts of your body, all over your body.

So really long.

And there's no way that those proteins and chemicals could get there by diffusion.

This is needed.

Without this, we're in trouble, especially if you're a dinosaur.

There we go.

Yeah, Psalm 139.

You formed my innermost being, you knew me together in my mother's womb.

I praise you, for I'm fearfully and wonderfully made.

Marvellous are your works, and I know this very well.

So that was it.

So I I that's that's my contribution instead of um a uh a look at my last holiday.

Um, seem to get just to move along.

Um we know so that that's just the molecular level of God's creation, but we know that um creation all around us tells us that um this can't have happened by chance.

It's too complex, it's too interactive, different things need each other in order to survive.

How can that happen?

How can that diversity happen?

And so when preaching in Athens, Paul opens with his observation of their altar to an unknown God, and he says, The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth, and does not live in temples built by human hands, and he's not served by human hands as if he needed anything.

Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else.

Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry.

And acknowledging a creator God is actually a first step in understanding who Jesus is and why he came to live amongst them and to die on the cross.

And we know from John's gospel that Jesus was in the beginning.

He was the word.

The word was with God, and the word was God.

He was with God in the beginning, through him all things were made, and without him nothing was made that hath been made.

The word became flesh and made his dwelling amongst us, and we have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

My response to that is I've got to fall down and worship God.

Come, let us bow down and worship, let us kneel before the Lord our Maker.

But he is our God in the world.

And we are the people of his pasture and the flock under his care.

But you know, Satan would prefer people not to be worshiping the creator God.

He uses any trick he can to convince us that God doesn't exist, didn't create us, and doesn't care for us.

One of those tricks is pseudoscience providing us with unsubstantiated theories about the origin of life on earth as pure chance.

And because you know my role has been very much involved with life and maintaining life and trying to help people uh live longer, um I I wanted to talk a little bit about how daft some of those really are.

Um I want to start, and this is why I've got the white box, because I want to see how much you can remember of your low-level GCSE biology, right?

I want to talk about cells.

Alright.

So um who can tell me what defines a cell, what separates a cell from anything else?

Cell wall.

Cell wall, membrane, membrane, cell wall or membrane?

Uh okay, there's the membrane.

The membrane is made up of phospholipids.

And these phospholipids are sort of set up so that they come in here and they make the membrane which has the phosphate on the outside and the inside basing the water, and the lipids stick together to make uh this membrane.

So who can tell me what else is in the cell?

What what what's the what's a nucleus?

The nucleus, you're right, the nucleus.

What's in the nucleus?

The nucleus has another membrane, and in the nucleus there's what?

DNA.

What's in the nucleus?

DNA.

DNA.

DNA is in the nucleus.

DNA.

I'm not going to draw it all out because uh technical daddy bases.

Integgable, intactable daddy.

It's only four bases.

It's only four bases.

And a lot of sugar.

And a lot of oxygen is in sugar.

But basically, so DNA stands for D oxy, nucleic.

And my my writings are poor in some.

And that what that means is you've got a sugar which is made into a big long polysaccharide here, and each of those has a base.

And um I'm gonna draw all the bases here.

And these bases um hold the code for everything in a second.

They hold the code for everything, and they have uh they have four bases, and any combination of three of those bases codes for an amino acid.

We didn't get two amino acids yet, but that's what it does, it codes for that.

So, you've got DNA in the nucleus.

How does the information get from the nucleus out into the rest of the cell?

Anyone?

No idea.

RNA.

RNA.

RNA comes along and it's basically very similar to this, but it's a different sugar, so it's not deoxyribose nucleic acid, it's ribosonucleic acid.

Right?

So you've got these.

And you've got four bases A, U, G, C.

Three of them are the same, all of them different, fairly similar, but five different bases needed, two different polysaccharides needed, okay?

The messenger RNA take comes in, make basically uh the proteins unravel the DNA, make a copy of the DNA as messenger RNA, and that then goes to anybody?

A ribosome.

It goes to a ribosome, which is a complex of RNA, multiple RNAs, and multiple proteins.

The RNA and then this this ribosome then reads the messenger RNA and it starts to assemble a protein.

What's protein made of?

Amino acids.

Amino acids.

And amino acid.

And when you join them together, you create bonds.

In doing that, you take out water.

So you take out water and you make an AI bond.

So what else?

One more thing.

One more thing is that in order to make this protein, this um ribosome needs to get the amino acids in the right order, right?

So you've got, you know, you've got A U G, I don't know what that codes for, but it codes for an amino acid.

That's the next three bases on that on that messenger RNA.

How's it going to get the amino acid it needs to make the protein?

So actually, what there is is another RNA called T R.

T R N A That's called transfer RNA.

And it takes each amino acid, 20 protogenic amino acids.

Each one has a separate tRNA that matches receptors in the ribosome and brings that amino acid and only that amino acid into the ribosome to be connected by making a peptide bond to make a protein.

It happened by chance, it happened by chance.

Oh, in millions of years you'll get some proteins coming together.

Yes, you will.

But in millions of years you'll also get water going back in here and hydrolysing those proteins.

Because this is reversible.

So in a million years, so what?

So not possible.

I want to tell you about the simplest self-propagating cell.

It's called JV JCVI SIM3.

It was actually engineered by some American scientists in 2010.

They took this Mycoplasma bacterium, which is a really small bacteria.

It doesn't have a cell wall.

It has a membrane but not a cell wall.

And it's normally dependent on a host because it needs some, it's missing some of the genes that are needed for cell reproduction and making all these different things.

And they basically removed all the genes not required for survival.

They deleted each one and checked whether it can still survive.

The first attempt succeeded in a replicating cell, but the cells were a little bit dodgy because some of them were big, some of them were small, they were different shapes, didn't really quite work.

So they had a second attempt in 2019 and they added a few more genes, and it got a cell capable of robust and reliable replication.

Only in a very nutrient-rich bath because this simple this simple bacterium doesn't have all the infrastructure it needs to make these bases and these amino acids, right?

So it doesn't, you have to feed it the amino acids, but it can still replicate.

What's needed for this to survive and replicate?

Over half a million base pairs coding for 493 genes, RNA, 38 of the genes coded for RNA, proteins, 452 of the genes coded for protein, and of course your phospholipid membrane.

That's this good mice out.

And you need all this 500 genes, and they're telling me this happened by chance.

So the host continues.

If you go online, you can find all sorts of videos about apiogenesis, which is the origin of biology, of biological life.

They talk about deep sea vents and warm little ponds and amino acids being made by lightning strikes in a reducing atmosphere.

And RNA being made in warm little pond experiments.

Capable of self-replication, even you know, you can make RNA that makes more RNA.

So what?

Blah blah blah.

Basic chemicals of life, yes, but not the basis of life.

But surely we're just we're just a bunch of chemicals, aren't we?

We're just a bunch of chemicals.

Didn't I just say that?

This is it.

We've got all these chemicals.

That's no, we're not, you see.

You remember Dolly?

Who remembers Dolly?

A sheep.

She was cloned.

So they took the egg of one breed of sheep and inserted its nucleus into the egg of the uh sorry, took a cell, something cell, from one breed of sheep, and they inserted its nucleus into the egg of a different sheep, and they cloned the original sheep.

So they made a different sheep inside another sheep.

You can only do it within a species, you can't make a lion inside a lion.

Well, God can have the lion.

So, so so maybe you know if we were just a bunch of chemicals, then, you know, surely when I next have my put the lamb chops on my Sunday dinner, I can take a little flavour off that chop, that means.

And all those chemicals that we've just been talking about, they're all in there.

They're all in there, even the ATP's in there, everything's in there, except it's dead.

It's dead.

Because in his hand is the life of every creature and the breath of all mankind.

For in him we live and move and have our being.

Paul says, as some of your Greek poets have said, we are his offspring.

See, what's amazing is that you can you can look at all this chemical stuff, and you can you can believe that by chance you won't get a few chemicals.

You can't look at the complex.

You can't look at that walking protein and tell me that this happened by pure chance.

It's not possible.

So I hope I've convinced you and not bore you too much about chemistry.

But um, God's creative character persists, right?

Throughout the Old Testament, God points to Jesus and his saving grace.

Um, this is quoted in Hebrews, but it's it's it's from um where it's from.

This is the covenant I will make with them after those days, declares the Lord.

I will put my laws in their hearts and inscribe them on their minds.

So he is still at work, and these the Old Testament refers to his creation of a new heart within each believer and to the helper Holy Spirit.

So Ezekiel we read, I will also sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean.

I'll cleanse you from all your impurities and all your idols.

I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you.

I will remove your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh, and I will put my spirit in you and cause you to walk in my statutes and carefully observe my ordinances.

So God points forward to Jesus and the Holy Spirit's work in us, and he's called each one of us by name.

This is what the Lord says.

He who created you, Jacob, he who formed you, Israel.

Do not fear, for I have redeemed you.

I have summoned you by name.

You are mine.

He's called each one of us by name.

And he's given us breath, he's given us life.

We might be a bunch of chemicals, and without God, that's pretty much what we're a bunch of chemicals.

But he's given us something more.

He's made us who we are, he's put in us his spirit, he's given us life, and he's created each one of us to be unique and complex.

In Christ, we are Elohim's new creation.

So that almighty God of gods, Lord of Lords, creator of all things, has created a way that we can draw near to him.

Without guilt, without fear.

And we can call him Abba to children and become Allah.

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.

The old has passed away, the old new has come.

So God continues to create, God continues to create in us a heart of flesh, a new heart that can walk with him by the power of his Holy Spirit.

So again, my only response to that is to fall down and worship an amazing creator of God.

So I shelding if we can sing around a great old claim to close.

But I yeah, before we do that, can I just pray?

That Lord, you made it possible for us to understand that you created everything without all the chemistry, without all the details, without all the technical details.

You told us that you breathed it into being.

And we thank you for that creative power.

We thank you that that creative power is still at work in us.

We see it when somebody accepts Jesus.

We see a change in their lives.

And we thank you for it.

We thank you for that change for each one of us.

You reached out while we were still in us and you revealed yourself to us.

You you shone your light into our lives and created in us a new heart.