Back to the Basics:

Greetings, everyone. I hope you’re enjoying this Sabbath Day and taking in all that you can.

Well, this is Part 3 of the series that I started a while back, about “back to the basics,” right? If you recall, in the first two, we started with proving where Christ’s Church is, where the body of Christ is, as one of those fundamental elements that are discussed during baptism counseling, when someone’s getting ready to be baptized.

In the second part, we went into proving the Bible and getting into all the proof that shows this is the Word of God. And we will wrap this up, again, as I said, the opposite order that you would study for baptism, by proving that God exists. And as I said in the other parts, we went the opposite way, because at baptism, you prove God exists, you prove the Bible, and then you prove where His church is, and then you commit.

Once you’ve been committed to this way of life, often what will happen for those who lose track of where God is, they’ll lose the true church, then they lose the Bible, and ultimately, they lose God completely. So the goal is to give you that foundation, something to always go back to, to reconnect with what you did at baptism. Or if you’re on the road to baptism, this will serve the same purpose for you.

But belief in God, the God of the Bible, the true God, is huge. If there is no God, we are wasting our time. Everything about our way of life, what we understand, the book, all of it is an absolute waste of time. And many, many people have concluded that. If God exists, and of course, we know He does, but the goal today is to prove it, then that changes everything.

There was a moment in my life, I did not believe God existed. And I’m going to cover one of the elements in this message, changed my thinking, and I realized, “Oh, there is a greater being that created this universe that planned human beings. What do I do now?” And when we prove it, that’s the first step often is, “Okay, what do I do now?” Let’s go to Romans chapter one and look at verse twenty.

Romans one, verse twenty. We’re going to cover some basic verses, spot through. A big part of this today, you’re going to find that what we did in Part 2 of proving the Bible greatly overlaps with proving God, because they go hand in hand. If you prove God, you’re proving the Bible as His word, which goes back to proving God. So if you can prove the Bible has knowledge that’s impossible for human beings to have, you’re essentially proving a creator.

But you could argue, “No, you’re proving an alien race. You’re proving...” You can make an argument that something else created the Bible, some greater intelligence. So it’s crucial to get back all the way to proving God exists, to then therefore back up the proofs of the Bible. Romans one and verse twenty. Verse twenty reads, “For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even by his eternal power and Godhead. So, they are without excuse.”

Anyone who doesn’t believe that God exists, whatever version of that there is, today it’s not about necessarily proving a triune God or a monotheistic God, or of course, the true God; it’s about proving a God, because that’s what changes the whole formula, that there is this eternal being outside of space and time that created everything we know and everything we are.

Defining the characteristics of that God, that’s a different discussion. And that’s why you prove the Bible and then you prove the Church, because the Church, the mother of us all, then teaches you how to see the Father, and then, of course, Jesus Christ. But people are without excuse, because it’s there. So today, we’re going to build a concrete, rational, and scripturally supported case that God exists.

Let’s start at the very, very beginning. Now, a lot of smaller points, but some of them have a lot of weight to them. And this is the one that trips up science; evolutionists, all those atheistic approaches to life trip up with this one thing. This one thing could be it. I could give you this one thing and then stop. I could do it in a sermonette; we’d be done. Because it’s the thing that trips up evolutionists completely.

You could frame it in this way. It’s the necessity of what is called first cause. So no matter how you argue evolution, you can always go back further. So if someone argues for evolution, they say, “Well, it looks like this turned into this,” there’s no cases of cross-species evolution, macroevolution, as they would say, versus micro. You can evolve within side of a species. That’s micro. Macro would be a horse becomes a monkey. There’s no evidence, even today in the fossil. But regardless, all of those cases, what you do is when you’re arguing, you’re not arguing with them, but if someone asks you a question, you say, “Well, what created the monkey? What created the horse? What created the goop that you say we all came from? What created the planet? What created the universe?”

There has to be a first cause. And we know the universe began. It was in the nineteen twenties that the Big Bang was discovered. It’s a funny subject because people ask me, “Well, do you believe in the Big Bang?” And I say, “Yeah, of course, I do. It’s just God was the responsible party to create the bang. So yes, there was a Big Bang because we know the universe started.”

We can measure its expansion. We understand there was a point when it just started, and it started to expand out. So yeah, there was a Big Bang, which meant there was no universe before that moment. Oh, has science tried to figure out what caused nothing to become something? And to do something from nothing, you need an outside force that’s not part of space because it didn’t exist yet.

Time, it didn’t exist yet. To create space and time. Let’s go to Genesis one. Very, very beginning of the Bible. Genesis chapter one and verse one. “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.” That’s a bold statement. Think about any religion you can possibly come up with that focuses outside the Bible, but even those that say they believe the Bible will often dismiss, especially a lot of Genesis, because it gets into Adam and Eve and some of the various first human beings that people can’t say exist because they look at it differently.

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” It’s a pretty bold statement, and that’s why you prove the Bible, because the Bible proves God, and God proves the Bible. Those go hand in hand, and you’ll see as we go through this message, they are linked over and over again. Let’s go to Psalm ninety. Psalm chapter ninety. There’s no chapter, it’s Psalms, so the Ninetieth Psalm. Verse two. Psalm ninety and verse two.

“Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, you are God.” Before there were mountains, before the earth, the world, the heavens, there was God. Again, the Bible makes such bold statements that if we didn’t live in the modern age, you somewhat had to take as an article of faith, but because of what we live and where we live and the time we live in, we can prove these statements.

Let’s look at another verse. This is important. Isaiah fifty-seven. Isaiah chapter fifty-seven. And just one verse here, too, verse fifteen. Isaiah fifty-seven, verse fifteen. “For thus says the high and lofty one that inhabits eternity.” That is a statement of a being outside space and time because the universe had a beginning. Eternity indicates no beginning. And you and I, we, can’t think that up.

It’s easy for you and me to think infinity because you can just like see it off in the distance, and it just disappears over the horizon, infinity. But your brain, mind, all of us, the human mind cannot conceive eternity. We can’t conceive no beginning. Well, because there had to be something that... when did God come into play? Well, He’s always existed. Well, how does that...?

Because we’re physical human beings, we frame everything we do around space, time, and matter. Everything you think about is framed on those three constructs. We have a clock at the back of the room because time matters. We set up chairs, and you set up chairs in your congregation with space between them. You set up chairs. They are matter. We’re matter. Everything is framed around that.

So for us to conceive a being that inhabits eternity, that’s hard. But continuing here, “...inhabits eternity, whose name is holy. I dwell in the high and holy place. With him also is that of a contrite and humble spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble and to revive the hearts of the contrite ones.” That’s where God is. The first cause, the only explanation for all of what we see today, is magic. Just poof, everything came.

And you can argue ancient alien races. Okay, who created those ancient alien races? Well, they’re from the other side of the solar system. Who created the solar system? That, always, is the fundamental problem, is first cause. Let’s go to the New Testament, Colossians. Colossians one, verse sixteen. Colossians one and verse sixteen. Verse sixteen reads, “For him were all things created, that are in heaven, that are in earth, visible and invisible.”

Two thousand years ago, someone made a statement about the things that are invisible that God created. Were they thinking about the wind? What were they thinking about that was invisible? But they didn’t have microscopes and what we can analyze today. “Whether it be thrones or dominions or principalities or powers, all things were created by him and for him. And he is before all things, and by him all things consist.”

He was the first cause. God and Christ working together. Can you imagine? You can’t because we can’t imagine eternity, but let’s imagine millions of years because we can think that. Imagine the millions of years that God and Christ were planning the universe, thinking it through. They wouldn’t have measured it in years because years is a concept that is space and time, but for the sake of the visualization, they were working together, planning, going through all the details.

You know, we’ve heard recently, especially how much counsel God seeks. So you could imagine God and Christ and the angels were thinking through all of these things. We serve an eternal God which caused the first cause. You have to be outside of creation to be able to create it. So if the universe requires a cause, then what kind of cause, if you will, would allow for life to emerge at all?

Let’s look, we’re going to go a little deeper. Let’s look at this universe again before we start to transition. We’re going to start big, looking at the universe, and then we’re going to transition into the biological systems to continue to knock this out. But we could stop right here, couldn’t we? There had to be a being outside of space and time to create space and time. That could be it.

We could be done, but we’re just getting started. Let’s look at the precision because this universe is so finely tuned. It’s amazing because we just exist in it, and we don’t think anything of it. This expanse that goes on for light-years and millions of light-years, so far across, what is it? Fourteen or fifteen million or billion light-years. We’ve been able to know the universe’s age as certain measurements.

But you tweak a couple of knobs, literally touch a couple of knobs, and the whole thing collapses. The physical constraints are so narrow, the probability of the universe existing at all is minimal. If gravity were stronger by one part and ten to the fortieth power, so that’s ten times ten times ten, forty times, stars wouldn’t exist. It would collapse. If gravity was that much stronger, just that gravity dial, turn it up just a hair, just the tiniest little bit.

Think all those zeros, so ten to the fortieth, so point zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero. I’d just be going on all day. Turn gravity up that much, the stars have too much gravity, and they collapse in on themselves, and the universe never would have started. It would have been too much gravity. It would have been like an engine that tries to turn over, but then doesn’t turn over, and it collapses, and there’s no universe.

But even more interesting, there’s a couple of physicists and statisticians tried to calculate the entropy conditions for life to exist. It is a number that is so hard to even put our minds around. Okay, let me say it in the way I said the other number. So this is one in ten to the tenth power, and that to the one hundred and twenty-third power. If you like math, in your mind, you’re thinking, “Wow, that’s an enormous number.”

If you don’t like math, just be comfortable with big numbers. Let me see if I can break this down. So if we try to make this into a percentage, remember, if we change something by ten percent, or five percent, or point one percent, right? What would that look like? If we make it into a percentage, imagine a zero point, and then some zeros after it that are more zeros than the known particles in the entire universe.

Point zero, zero, zero, until you’ve got more zeros than known particles in the entire universe. That’s the probability of life and the universe existing. Say it in a different way. If you did the zero, point, and then the zeros, that would be more zeros than all of the atoms in the entire universe. Brethren, this pale-blue dot that we live on in this universe, in this solar system, in the Milky Way Galaxy, in this quadrant of the universe, in the universe itself, is so unique.

It’s so incredibly unique. That’s like having a million, billion, trillion, trillion, and continuing until you have a digit, is the percentage of change that would cause the universe to collapse. That’s how unique what we live in is. That’s how precise God and Christ designed this universe. And even science, it’s amazing if you let evolutionists or scientists who believe in evolution or the concepts thereof, they could be in astrophysics or whatever field, let them just talk.

They talk about the universe. They talk about biology like there’s a force behind it, driving it. Even when they talk about constants, that strong nuclear force that holds protons and neutrons together in atoms, it’s not a value that would evolve because if you don’t have the right setting, atoms don’t form. There’s not a bond. You don’t have that force. Planck’s constant. It determines the details of the speed of light.

The cosmological constant. It’s what Einstein used in many of his relativity equations, talking about the energy density of space. And what is perplexing to science, at least the atheistic side of it, is, these values don’t look like they’ve fallen into place; they look arbitrary, like they’ve been set, because, as we would understand, they were. We understand they were perfectly set to allow for this to happen.

We’re in the New Testament. Let’s go over to Hebrews. We’ll set this up throughout the message. I’ll cover something, and then we’ll look at the Bible. We’ll put the foundation and then see the Bible back it up. So in many ways, we’re proving the Bible again today, but it will build off that. So Hebrews chapter one. Hebrews chapter one. I’ll let you turn there. And verse two, starting in verse two, “Has in these last days spoken unto us by his Son, in whom he has appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds.”

Worlds. That’s it. It’s not just Earth. As we start to explore and understand even our solar system or our galaxy, we’re starting to see other planets and planets that appear like they could or had have life on them. Remember, at a point, Satan rebelled and blew up the universe. So it’s not surprising we go to Mars and find the evidence of a planet that seemed to have been much more stable than what it is now.

Verse three, “Who being the brightness of his glory and the express image of his person and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high.” Made the worlds. Go back to Isaiah forty. Isaiah chapter forty. And verse twelve. Isaiah forty and verse twelve, “Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand and meted out the heaven with the span...”

Picture that: God, kind of holding an ocean. We now understand how a massive and large God manifests Himself as. Kind of picture Him holding an ocean in His hand. “...mete out the heavens with the span and comprehend the dust of the earth in a measure and weighed out the mountains in scales...” You just see God holding a mountain “...and the hills in a balance?”

That’s a creator. That’s someone building. See, if you’ve built anything, you know you measure and you look and you determine and plan and blueprint, architect, test. Did God test things before He created the universe? Do they come up with...? These are the things you would love to be able to sit down with God in the kingdom and say, “When you created the universe, what did you do? What did you and Christ do? How long did you plan that for?”

And He’s going to look at you and say, “Well, time didn’t really apply,” and we’ll maybe at that point understand what that means. The universe is not self-sustaining. It has to be sustained. Or it collapses. Its details are so finely tuned, but it’s not just limited to stars or galaxies or these mathematical constants. We see it here, too. We see it on Earth. Start with where Earth is, our position.

For a long time, mid-seventeenth century, we’ve known something very weird about where Earth is positioned. You probably heard the term Goldilocks zone, and that has a lot of elements that play into what makes the Goldilocks zone. If you’ve not heard of it before, it’s the space in a distance from a star that allows for life to consist. So it’s not too close. We’re not Mercury. And not too far away, for instance, Mars, that a lot of the elements don’t come into play.

And it really comes down to one element: water. If a planet has water, all sorts of things happen. And Earth is positioned to be able to sustain water. Because if you don’t have an atmosphere, the water boils off, Mars. If you don’t have the right conditions of the planet, magnetic field, and whatnot, water will boil off. If you’re not big enough, you won’t have enough gravity.

Water will boil off. And without water, there is no life. Earth is tilted about twenty-three point five degrees. Also different than most planets. Some planets will be in a different axis. Some are axis-locked. But depending on where they are and how close they are, the effect of the Sun will change that. And then we also have a moon that is effectively like a counterbalance for us falling off kilter.

Because if you have something that’s weighted, two items together, think of them on a balance, on a scale. So if you have Earth here and then the moon here on a scale, the one’s counterbalancing the other that doesn’t cause the weight. You pull the moon off, and the scale falls. But the moon keeps us on our tilt. And that tilt keeps us in a period to have seasons, which causes parts of the planet to get warm, parts of the planet to get cold, and that shifts back and forth to create seasons, which allow for growing seasons, which allow vegetation to do what it needs to do.

The moon is a great example of where this doesn’t happen. The moon’s locked. Every time you look up at the full moon, you see the same side of the moon. There is the dark side of the moon, and there’s the light side of the moon. And the difference is extreme. Hundreds of degrees colder on the dark side of the moon versus the front. That’s why we always land on this side of it.

If Earth was like that, and many planets are, then one side of the planet would be a frozen wasteland, and the other side would be cooked to a char. And the Earth is also funny in that we have this magnetic core. Iron in the middle of the planet, other metals, but they’re moving in such a way, they’re generating a magnetic field. That magnetic field protects the planet from being this close to the Sun.

Without the magnetic field being this close to the Sun, we’re getting pounded with solar radiation, and that pounding would strip the atmosphere away, which would then get the planet hotter and therefore boil off the water. Remember, it comes back down to that. You get further out, and that’s not a problem, but now it’s getting too cold, and water freezes. Not a substance to create life, but frozen water, you know, when we see that on different planets in the solar system.

Think of Europa around... so was it Jupiter? That has vast oceans of frozen water. All of these things had to come together: the position, the composition, as well as all of the tilts and the moon. If we didn’t have the moon, we wouldn’t have tides. We wouldn’t have tidal... There’s so many things that had to be perfect for us to be able to be here and live, for this planet to sustain life, any life, cellular life, any life.

Let’s go to Isaiah forty-five, over a few chapters. We’re still in Isaiah. Verse eighteen, forty-five, eighteen, “For thus says the Lord that created the heavens, God himself that formed the earth and made it.” This is all throughout the Bible. God talks about creating it. “He has established it. He created it not in vain. He formed it to be inhabited.” He put us here to allow life.

“I am the Lord, and there is none else.” Psalm one hundred and four. Psalm one hundred and four. Read a little more here. And we’ll start in verse five. Psalm one hundred and four, starting in verse five. “Who laid the foundations of the earth that it should not be removed forever? You covered it with the deep as with a garment, and the waters stood above the mountain.”

It was a mess, especially after Satan rebelled. “And at your rebuke, they fled. At the voice of your thunder, they hasted away.” God recreated the Earth. There was initial creation. We can only fathom and then look at some of the archaeological records that show what the Earth was like with dinosaurs and reptilians, and when Satan was here, before he had rebelled. We have pictures of it, history of it, but we don’t really know what it was like.

But you can imagine, God creates nothing in vain, it says clearly. So it would have been beautiful, but then the rebellion caused things to fall apart, and it was just void and waste. And then God said, “No, I’m going to recreate it.” “In the voice of the thunders, they hasted away. They go up to the mountains, and they go down to the valleys unto the place which you have founded for them. You have set a bound they may not pass, and they might turn again to cover the earth.”

He stopped the waters from covering the whole earth when he recreated it. Job twenty-six. Job is so full of amazing things, showing creation, showing the Bible. It’s one of those, forgive the term, but God flexed. He was talking with Job, and he said, “Okay, Job, let me show you something,” and, in the course of doing that, laid out so many incredible proofs of God and why the Bible is such a unique book.

Job twenty-six and verse seven, a simple one. “He stretched out north over an empty place and hangs the earth upon nothing.” I’ve talked about this verse before because nothing wasn’t a concept even a few thousand years ago. But yet the Bible clearly says nothing is where the earth was hung because they wouldn’t have or yet understood gravitational fields, but they are nothing. They are invisible.

And God just plopped the earth there in the perfect place. Because if you look at our solar system, you hear this, “Oh, there’s an asteroid that’s going to get close to the earth.” You know why they have to monitor that? Because most elements in our solar system, remember our solar system and our galaxy, that’s in our part of the universe, so we’re talking small in astronomical terms.

Most things don’t stay in the same orbit they are; their orbits degrade. That’s why things fall out when they’re spinning around satellites. They’ll degrade that orbit, so then it crashes into the earth or crashes into the atmosphere and burns up. Earth’s orbit isn’t degrading. It is minorly, but we’ve got several billion years before it’s an issue. But there are a lot of things that are not that, and they just go spiraling into the Sun.

But God placed it in that perfect spot. He placed it in that perfect spot. And all of that needed to come together to enable life on Earth. And most of those elements, as I said earlier, really come down to ensuring that there’s one thing on this planet that’s unique, and that is liquid water. It’s the key. It’s got to be liquid. It could be frozen. It could be boiling. It can do all the different things that water can do, which, as a substance on its own, is very unique. But there has to be liquid water.

All forms of life on this planet need it. You drink it. We have to consume it or we die. We use it for so many things. Bathing and cooking, and all the systems that we have. Plants drink. Water keeps things green. If you stop for a moment and think about what water does, or applications and where it’s used, it’s everywhere. From the summertime to the wintertime, precipitation, activities that go out on water. You go on a canoe. Water is so fundamental and so odd.

It’s one of those substances that don’t follow a lot of the rules, mostly because it’s got a funny polarity with the bond between the hydrogen atoms. It doesn’t behave like a lot of other substances because of that polarity. And that polarity creates a very high surface tension. So, if you take a lot of substances and put them out on a surface and put a little light ball on those substances, most things, it’ll fall in because the ball itself would be solid, you say.

It would break the surface tension of most substances. But water has an extremely high surface tension. That’s why you see those little water striders going across the water, those little spiders that collect the things, because their weight is pushing down on that surface tension, but not breaking through it. Most substances, if you put those same little critters on, they’d fall right in.

Water also has a very high specific heat. And it transfers heat in a very consistent way across its spectrum of temperatures. From frozen to boiling, its transfer of heat is very consistent, which moderates climate. You can go out on a summer day into the rain, and the water that fell from the sky is still cool because water doesn’t quickly become hot. It slowly releases that heat or cold when it’s transferring temperature.

Water is a solvent. It is able to dissolve more substances than any other liquid that we know. And you think, “Oh, that’s great for cleaning.” Oh, it’s more than just that. Your cells in your body need water to dissolve things, to have those things removed from the cells. Both nutrient in and garbage out requires water to dissolve it. Otherwise, you’d have chunks of things floating through your bloodstream because it wouldn’t dissolve without water.

Never mind everything else we use to dissolve, the rocks that exist today because water flowed over them. Water always wins. We’ve joked in building this campus, the biggest thing you need to learn to do when you’re building something of scale is, determine, “Where does the water go?” Because, ultimately, water always wins. It finds the crack. It finds the crevice. It pushes it in.

It expands and freezes. Cracks open this item. If you don’t control where the water goes, eventually the water wins and can destroy things. It’s powerful. It allows us to do and to live as we do. And not just us, plants, animals, everything from the mosquito all the way to the elephant, rely on water. And it’s not a normal substance. It’s a substance that falls outside of the norm that just happened to be on Earth.

I say this in jest, of course, tongue-in-cheek, that just happened to be in a place that allowed that water to stay liquid. Let’s go back to Job. We’re still there. Go back a chapter or ahead of ten there to Job thirty-eight. Job thirty-eight, and you’re still there. In verse eight, Job thirty-eight, and verse eight, “Or who shut up the seas with doors when it broke forth as if it issued out of a womb, when I made the cloud the garment thereof...?”

“When I made the cloud.” God just says it. Poor Job. You can kind of picture yourself, and he’s like, “Oh, yeah, you made the clouds. Maybe I’m not such hot stuff.” “When I made the cloud the garment thereof, and thick darkness a swaddlingband for it, and I broke it up for my decreed and set bars and doors,” oceans, rivers, streams, “and said, Hereto shall you come forth, but no further, and here shall your proud waves be stayed?”

That required the moon, because you need the tide coming in, and you need the tide going out. If the tide just stayed in, you would dissolve beaches. You would dissolve retaining walls. You’d dissolve all of the things that are meant to stop the water from coming further, because it would just work away at it. Because again, water always wins. But the tide goes out, gives things relief, the tide comes in, brings in nutrients, and everything when it does that, too.

But rivers flow into lakes. Lakes flow into huge, larger rivers, and then ultimately those all flow into the ocean. Isaiah fifty-five. Brethren, we live in an amazing world. What we are a part of, who we serve, come back sometimes and think, “This is the Church that understands who God is.” There’s no other place on earth that understands the nature of God. There are many in the splinters who understand elements of it, but they have God the Father in the back.

He’s just hanging out in the back after the Millennium, not really involved. But we understand that, no, He is central. In fact, He’s the one getting work done in this first kingdom. We’re the only ones that understand this God, the one that created all the things that we’re covering and will still cover. You’re probably there in Isaiah fifty-five. I should turn there, too.

Verse ten of Isaiah fifty-five, “For as the rain comes down and the snow from heaven and returns not hither, the waters in the earth and makes it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word go forth out of my mouth and not return unto me void. But it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it.”

Verse ten, “as the rain comes down and the snow from heaven and returns not hither,” because the rain doesn’t go back; the snow doesn’t go back. No, it flows into the oceans, and then it evaporates. And you can see why God compares the Holy Spirit to water and the spiritual implications of that for a substance that is so essential for life. So we’re located in a perfect spot.

The planet is equipped perfectly. Let’s zoom out for a moment and look at a bigger question. Why does the universe allow any of this to be? There’s a principle called the anthropic principle. It was introduced by a physicist in the nineteen seventies, suggesting that specific properties exist because if they didn’t exist, we wouldn’t be here to observe it. Said in another way, it’s kind of a funny way to say it.

If God wouldn’t have created the universe as it exists today, we wouldn’t be alive to exist to observe the universe as it’s created today. And also in that, God created the universe to be observable. He could have made the universe in such a way, or even our planet, our position in the planet, or any of the planets nearby. We don’t need them. If you adjust the orbit slightly in the planets, you don’t necessarily need the other planets in our solar system. But they’re there, and we can see them, and we can see the stars.

Why have stars produce so much light? What’s the point? Why would you create? It’s unnecessary. It’s actually not terribly efficient because it’s just throwing photons all across the universe. It causes those stars to burn up faster, doesn’t it? It’s like if you try to cook something in your oven with the door open, it’s going to take a lot longer to cook because you’re losing energy. Those stars didn’t need to produce so many photons. They could have produced heat in different ways, but yet, God created the universe to be observable. Because, remember back in Romans chapter one, verse twenty when we were there, He made it so we could see Him through what He created. He made it observable for us to observe it and be able to say there’s no other way this could exist unless a God created it.

Is that not the brilliance of our creator? Not only did He create something that is impossible for anything besides a being outside of space and time, He created it in such a way that we could look at it and be able to see Him in it. God wants us to look up at the stars. He wants us to feel the power of the Majesty of the universe. That’s a God who wants to be known. He’s invisible, but He chooses to create a universe, a world, that allows us to look up and find Him in it.

Psalm nineteen. This is one of my favorite subjects to preach on. I love this topic because it’s what cracked the nut with me to start to pay attention to God. But also, there’s just so much there, and it’s so inspiring, brethren, to be able to find and dig and look at the Bible and see the universe and use science the way God meant it to be used to point toward Him. Psalm nineteen and verse one.

“The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament shows his handiwork” because he chose to do it that way. “Day unto day utters speech, and night unto night shows knowledge. There is no speech nor language where their voice is not heard.” God is in everything that’s out there, aware of it. Creation speaks, if you will, a universal language. It’s a universal pointer that points back to the being who created all of it.

Okay, so He created it. He made it observable. He put us in the right location. Start adding up. Remember, the probabilities of all of these things as we build through now, as we get closer and closer to biology, what are the probabilities that this would exist without God? Brethren, you should leave today, even if you believe God existed before, but more solid than ever of, “No, this being created everything. I serve the one true God and the one true Church.”

You should be inspired. It’s all finely tuned. It’s all well-structured, but that requires some laws that allow nature to actually govern itself. From about the sixteen hundreds, sixteen eighties, you had Newton and his published works, and then Einstein’s field equations in nineteen fifteen. When we started to fully and really appreciate, there are mathematical laws that govern nature and the universe that can be measured, calculated, and then create hypotheses and conclusions from those laws.

And they’re not things that should be there or need to be there. Again, God set things up to be observable so we could observe. To have mathematical laws requires a mind that has mathematical thinking, has mathematical structure, who puts systems in place that allow that to happen. You can create something. If you put any thought into it, you can make a doghouse and just slap it all together.

One way to approach it. That doghouse may or may not be strong, depending on how you make it. Or you can go in utilizing the mathematical laws that exist in this universe that were put down by someone thinking outside that, and apply those to that doghouse, and you would have the perfect angles, the golden triangle, the golden rule of various aspects of architecture, all of these elements that are principles that we understand as just simply math.

And because of it, we can create ships and buildings and skyscrapers, and replicate over and over again because of the math. It’s not necessary. But a being who wanted to be known, who wanted to give you and I a way to prove that He exists, who wanted us to create. Because those laws of physics and mathematics and science, all those laws give you and I the space in which we can create.

We can build. We can understand the universe because we serve a God who wants to be seen, even though He’s invisible. Proverbs three. Just over a little bit. You’re probably in Psalms still. Proverbs chapter three, verse nineteen. Three, nineteen. And “The Lord, by wisdom, has founded the earth. By understanding, he has established the heavens. By his knowledge the depths are broken up, and the clouds drop down their dew.”

God created what modern science has only relatively recently come to understand. But even those scientists struggle with this one. For all of the talk and explanation of evolution, all of the theories that have tried to be put in place, something doesn’t make sense to them. Even getting away from first cause. Let’s give them first cause. Say, “Okay, we don’t know.” See, dating is complicated because, well, for one, there were two floods.

So you had when Satan rebelled, water was everywhere. It would have crushed and compacted things. You think what you’ve put water in the bottom of a glass, and you have pressure, and all that pressure will compact something. So you had an earth that was whatever there. You had the dinosaurs, Lucifer at the time ruling. Everything blew up, got flattened. Then God recreated it, went on for a time.

Man did what man did, another flood. Flattened everything. God continued, started all over. So that makes what would be normal dating very difficult to do and especially if you dismiss those accounts. Although the flattened surfaces are there. So it’s another one of those proving the Bible with science. But I say all that because these dates are rough. It’s estimated, about five hundred and fifty million years ago, something very weird happened.

From nothing suddenly became something. Life just appeared. It’s called the Cambrian explosion. When we went from a planet that had nothing on it, no organisms, nothing, to suddenly complex life forms that were fully formed with no ancestors. Poof, just came into being. That is impossible under the theory of evolution, Darwin needed those micro steps to be able to justify macroevolution.

That our first view into the life on Earth came like that. Suddenly there were these fully formed organisms. And that simply cannot be explained. They try. They come up with like scaffolding. There’s all these theories about how it could have been, and it’s just a dating issue, and because there was some sort of event worldwide that killed the dinosaurs. So it would have caused confusion. All sorts of nonsense, to just simply not accept what the Bible says happened.

Satan rebelled. It destroyed the planet. No dinosaurs when the whole planet’s covered in water. But it just exploded. Life just appeared because life was created. Life was created just like human beings just came to appear because life was created. Genesis chapter one. And verse twenty. Genesis one, verse twenty. Verse twenty reads, “And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that has life, and the fowl that may fly above the earth, and the open firmament of heaven. And God created great whales, and every living creature that moves, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind. And God saw that it was good.”

There was a moment, this is post-dinosaur, this is a recreation event, that God just simply created things, just like would have happened before Lucifer rebelled. And life appeared after its kind. That is a problematic explanation for evolutionists. It’s why you don’t see horses mating with deer or elephants with rhinoceros. Because interspecies procreation is almost impossible.

There are a few, you get donkeys and horses, that are close in nature, but most of the time, never mind the physical differences, but actually, artificially inseminating that doesn’t work. Because God created things after their own kind, and therefore, designed to reproduce their own kind. Life didn’t evolve; it appeared. Complete. Functioning in harmony. Okay, let’s start getting into the biology of it.

Because there are systems that, again, disprove evolution, since that’s just kind of a fun side effect of this, but also prove God, because you had to just appear in a certain state for things to work. There’s a concept in biology, and frankly, anything, of a system being irreducibly complex. So, irreducible complexity, you’ve probably heard the term before. So you can’t take a component out of that system, and that system still functions.

Electricity is a pretty critical thing in modern society that is irreducibly complex. You pull the plug, things stop working. If you have an engine, take out a spark plug, the engine stops working. You can’t go any less parts for that thing to work. You take a part away, the organism or system, in this case an engine, remove the fuel pump, and the engine stops. In organisms, it’s the same exact thing.

There are some that are so complex, you remove one part of them, and the entire organism ceases to function. They’re irreducibly complex. And that flies in the face of evolution to be able to explain steps, because if they didn’t have the item, they don’t exist. Let’s talk about two of them. There’s a flagellum, a bacterial flagellum. It’s basically a little motor, and it spins.

It’s how it gets around. It requires over forty proteins to function. Over forty bacteria. You remove any of these proteins, you modify any of these proteins, that little engine stops. That can’t evolve, because it needs every single... and this is a bacterium that’s very well-known, so they’ve been able to test and try and modify and remove and add proteins and change it.

If you break what God created, it fails. Because it didn’t evolve. It didn’t just tack on and tack on. No. But we can go way bigger than that, too. We can go way bigger than that. You and I have them. Every mammal has them: our eyes. The human eye, the mammalian eye, is incredible. Not for just what it can do, the fact that you and I can see all of the elements of it. Think about what the eye is.

The eye is a sensor that transmits data, very basic data, kind of think of it as a computer, ones and zeros, to a central computer, our brains, that take that abstract data and build what you and I see as reality. There’s no constraint of what we see, because everything you and I see is what our brain thinks we should see. That’s why you can have those little tests that do optical illusions, because it throws the brain off.

It throws the software off. All of those have to work together. You have to have the lens, the retina. You have to have the optic nerve, and then the ability with the software God put in our brains from the moment we were born, when we could see, pre-built with it, all of it has to be in place, or we don’t see, or we don’t have any concept of reality. When people can’t see, they learn to compensate.

But a big part of why they can learn to compensate is because the people who can see give them tools to function in the world that they see. If we were all blind, mankind would not have moved very... If all mammals were, we’d just be dead. We’d be eaten. We wouldn’t be able to get food. And this is where scaffolding theory comes in, where they try to, “Well, if this was here and it built up these multiple things and it got to a point, one part fell away,” probability is a problem.

Statistics are a problem. That probability does not allow for scaffolding theory to work over the time needed, no matter how many millions of years you want to say the earth is old. There’s not enough time for scaffolding theory to work because you have to build up something and take a part away that happens to fall into the other part. You can’t take a million monkeys and pound on a keyboard and out comes a novel.

That’s just ridiculous chance. All of these parts in our eye, in that bacterium, they’re interdependent. They need each other to function. Without each part, the other part is useless. If you don’t have an optic nerve, you don’t need an eye. You don’t need a lens because it serves no purpose. And God does not create anything for naught, for no purpose. Well, let’s go to Exodus four. We’re in Genesis, so it’s closer. Exodus four, verse eleven. Exodus four, eleven. “And the Lord said unto him, who has made man’s mouth?” I couldn’t be talking to you if I wasn’t constructed in such a way that I have lips and a tongue and vocal cords and how air comes up over the vocal cords and how our brains learn to stretch and squeeze and shape the words in our mouths right down to the sounds. “And who makes the dumb or deaf, or seeing, or the blind? Have not I, the Lord?” God creates us.

Go to Psalm one thirty-nine. End of the Psalms, one thirty-nine. Start in verse thirteen. Psalm one thirty-nine, verse thirteen. Verse thirteen reads, “For you have possessed my reins, you have covered me in my mother’s womb. I will praise you,” verse fourteen, “for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” Aren’t we? “Marvelous are your works that my soul knows right well.”

Brethren, God made human beings to be unique. We have elements to us that are even beyond what other mammals have. Our minds, our ability to have a spirit in us that is... exceeds whatever God put inside animals. It’s amazing as science continues to learn. We continue to learn a lot more about animals, a lot more about their processing power, their ability to reason. God made animals a lot smarter and a lot more there than what most people have thought for many, many years.

It’s another one of those conversations of, okay, God, what happens to the animals? What did you do? Because you’re seeing what we would call human-like behavior in some tests as we modernize this. That’s fascinating. We are wonderfully and fearfully made. Everything came into place when God chose to create it. Everything that we talk about and look through in scripture confirms the divine authorship of this book and the being who authored it.

Okay, let’s look at the problem, a problem in evolution. Evolution is a big problem. It’s often called the information problem. It can’t explain where all the information came from, because when things mutate, they change. So all of us have tons of mutations. So if you have green eyes or red eyes, or black eyes, or whatever, blue, those are all because of different mutations and how your genes got mushed together in the chromosomes when the ovum and the sperm came together and made you, me, all of us. And we were a cocktail of that genetic makeup of our parents.

Those reasons we look and are different is because of mutations. And some are basic, our eye color. You could be paler and that’s just the nature of you. Is that always great? No, not if you live in the sunshine. You could be darker. Eh, not as great if you don’t... if you’re in the winter. God made people to live in different parts of the world for a reason. That’s a whole different discussion. But most of the time when there is a mutation, you... think about it.

Just a term. Attack of the mutants. Are you picturing like Hercules with big muscles? No, you’re like these alien creatures coming because the mutants are terrible. Yes, because mutations create problems. For instance, there’s a gene mutation on BRCA-one, highly specific gene mutation. So that would be in all your genes because if you have a mutation, that permeates throughout the body. That’s why they can use technologies like CRISPR and others to change genes because it basically flows throughout the body, roughly. But that mutation, if women have it, one mutation increases their risk of breast and ovarian cancer. That doesn’t get you to superhuman status. It takes you the other way.

To increase something, you have to add information to that system. To add information to a system means you need an external source putting in that information. The only other thing that happens is information is lost. So when you lose information on our genetic code, we lose features. We lose parts of who we are. We don’t become better, we become worse. Think of all the things you could... all the birth defects that you can be born with. Those don’t make you better, they make you worse. To have code, you need coders. You don’t get random chance to produce more information.

Like I said before, you don’t get novels from no matter how many millions of monkeys you have on a keyboard typing things. You just get mess, chaos. It’s why a highly prominent evolutionary biologist, an author, you would know his name if I said it, generally in his books will admit that evolution, for it to function, needed an existing replicator, meaning the base foundation had to already exist to allow for it. And we would agree at the microevolution scale where you can have mutations within a species that doesn’t jump a human over to being a monkey or vice versa, or a giraffe becomes a donkey. It doesn’t jump between species, but you can have variations because you can have blue eyes or green eyes.

Job twelve. Back to Job. Job chapter twelve and verse ten. Or excuse me, verse seven. We’ll start in verse seven. “But ask now the beasts and they shall teach you, and the fowls of the air and they shall tell you, or speak to the earth and it shall teach you, and the fishes of the sea shall declare unto you, who knows not in all these that the hand of the Lord has wrought this, in whose hand is the soul of every living thing and the breath of all mankind.”

When God started this with Adam and Eve, when he breathed into him life, the human spirit, life, that started a series of events that allowed every single human being, you and I included, to exist today. Design requires knowledge, structure, and foresight. So in us, in every living thing, is that code. It’s read and it’s the single, most complex thing that mankind has ever discovered. For all of our ingenuity, nothing is as complex as this code. And that code is DNA. Inside every single cell of your body, inside every living thing, is encoded DNA. Every cell of every living thing.

To me, this is a personal one. This is what got my attention. I read an article by Stephen Meyer, I think it was, DNA and Design. And he went into the information system and structure of DNA. And it uses, you’ve probably seen the four, the bases, the A, T, C, and G. And how you get that helix shape, it’s going up that ladder, you can kind of picture it twisting. And what is amazing about DNA is it shouldn’t exist with the information in how it exists. There are no chemical bonds between each of those ladders.

So the information is stored on each side of that ladder, those rungs on that DNA helix. And that information is encoded in such, these two grouped together do something that are linked with the next two things that are grouped together to do something. Let’s say it’s A with T down here, and then it’s C with G up here. You need that spiral of that information to be able to determine the blueprint that makes us.

You hear about fetal tissue and being able to use spinal tissue that goes back to the beginning. Those are cells that haven’t gone down a certain path, that don’t make a fingernail. They can be made into anything because they have the instructions. Brethren, inside of every living thing is the instruction for that living thing. As cells are destroyed and built, and die, and created in our bodies, it relies on DNA’s chemical language that allows them to build those cells.

When your nails are growing, that is DNA creating cells that cause them to grow out that you clip off. You’re clipping off a bunch of pre-coded cells that your body keeps producing. When your skin peels after a sunburn and you get the skin underneath it starts to come back to normal, those are cells that are programmed with instructions. You can picture it like a bookshelf. And inside your every cell, this concept is insane, every cell in your body has this massive library.

And the cell builder, God, but let’s just pretend these little engines, have to go over to a shelf and pick off the nails instruction book to build more nail cells, or pick off the skin to build more skin. That entire library is in every single one of your cells. And it’s not just hope for the best. There’s error correction. They have replication systems. You have DNA and RNA, and how those marry. You have how DNA expresses or genes express themselves, which are different based on the environmental factors. We are so complex. We are fearfully and wonderfully made.

We’re just beginning to understand how genes work. And it’s really only recently that we’ve come to understand they can actually express themselves differently. For a long time we thought, okay, here’s the code. It builds skin or it builds an eye or whatever it does. But now we’ve come to understand it does that, but they may be this condition if the environmental factors or other genes are a certain way in your body. It’s just incredible. That doesn’t happen by chance. Brethren, that just simply does not happen by chance.

We’re back in the Old Testament, so let’s look at a verse here. We start to wrap up. Psalm one thirty-nine. In verse sixteen. Psalm one thirty-nine and verse sixteen. “Your eyes did see my substance, yet being imperfect, and in your book, all my members were written.” Think about that, brethren. In God’s book, in the books he put in our cells, in our DNA, all our members were written. Everything about who we are is encoded inside every single cell. It’s so efficient that it’s in every single cell.

So your nail cells have the same information in them, in our DNA, that whole structure, that your skin or your heart tissue. Replicating and improving. And the system is so good, they can keep making that tissue. New cells can be created and we don’t die. When things go wrong, that’s when cancer happens, which is often an effective environment. We are fearfully and wonderfully made by a being who exists outside of space and time.

And finally, as we come to a close, there’s one other problem that science runs into. You can’t create life from things that are not living. So again, let’s give them the rope. First cause. Okay, maybe first cause, we don’t know. Maybe the earth just kind of came over time and the universe formed. So you have this planet with no life on it, because they will all... every evolutionist will say it started before there was life. But somewhere in this soupy goo of whatever it was, lightning struck it and poof, we got our first living cells. And from then, you started to evolve over time.

You say it out loud and you realize how ridiculous it sounds. But that’s how they say. But there’s only been one experiment that gets a little close. The topic is abiogenesis, that life cannot come from non-life. Organic things cannot be created from inorganic materials. 1952. This is the big argument of... and it gets dismissed, and they say that it can be done. The Miller-Urey experiment, they tried to say, okay, if life was created, we have to create an atmosphere that showed this... what it was like then.

So they mixed a bunch of gases, methane, ammonia, water vapor, all sorts of things in a closed system, introduced electric sparks, highly controlled, and this is always lost. So these scientists controlling all of the elements in very precise closed conditions introduced outside forces and managed to create some amino acids. Those amino acids never resulted in anything biological, but it created amino acids.

In effect, what they proved had nothing to do with evolution. What they proved is you need highly structured outside intelligence controlling systems to create life. God. And you got such amazing chicken and egg situations when it comes to biogenesis. DNA, we just talked about that, can’t replicate without proteins. Proteins can’t be created without DNA. If both didn’t come into effect at the same time, organic matter doesn’t exist. It’s funny, even scientists who believe evolution call abiogenesis a dead end for science because you can’t create life from nonliving things.

First John one. First John chapter one. A few more verses and we’ll finish up. No, excuse me, John one. The verse did not look like it made sense. John chapter one. Start in verse three. John one, verse three. “All things were made by him,” by Christ, “and without him was not anything that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men.” All things were made. Simple as that. We prove the Bible, we prove God, we combine the two, and these words are simple.

Acts seventeen. Acts chapter seventeen. Verse twenty-five. Acts seventeen. Seventeen, twenty-five. “Neither is worshiped with men’s hands as though he needed anything, seeing he gives to all life, and breath, and all things.” God gives life. God gives breath. God gives us what we need. Brethren, every single thing we looked at today points back to a creator, points back to a being who put it all in place and in a way that you and I could discover it.

Proverbs nine is our final verse. Proverbs nine. Verse ten. Proverbs nine and verse ten. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the holy is understanding.” Brethren, to know God is to know he exists. To know his power means we look at what he created. When we know who God is, when we know he is there, when we prove he exists, we don’t shake our foundation. When we then prove that the Bible is his word, is how God communicates with man, the instruction book for you and I to live our lives, we see our creator even more.

And then when we go on to prove where and how God is working through his church, through The Restored Church of God, the one true body of Christ, we have an opportunity to become like him. Brethren, never forget your God. Never forget his book and never forget the organization that teaches you to be like him. Whenever you waver, whenever you start to question, go back and listen to these sermons again. Reconfirm the things you confirmed at baptism so you can ensure that you can have those conversations with God about how things worked. You can be sure that you are a part of the family of God and the very, very soon coming kingdom of God.