Sunday, December 27, 2009

Why Haven't They Gone Back POST ONE

“Why haven’t they gone back?” That’s the question given as a final proof in the minds of those who reject the moon landings; that it was indeed a hoax. And it explains the reason why today’s youth simply can’t embrace the concept. The net result of the space program was the effect it had on the children of the time. I was too young to see “Star Trek” and “The Jetsons” in their first runs but they were alive and well in syndication by the time I came onto the scene in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. People my age and slightly older who had watched these TV shows suddenly said within their hearts “hey this could really happen” when they saw the moon landings. Those same young adults then devoted themselves from that point on toward the goal of achieving that dream. It’s the state of mind these people cherished that is ultimately responsible for the incredible technological progress we have made in the last 40 years.

You may remember a TV commercial about 10 years ago with Avery Brooks of “Star Trek Deep Space Nine” asking “where are the flying cars?” (You can actually find the commercial on Youtube if you look for his name and that question.) Well “where are the flying cars?” is really “I don’t see that we’re any better as a world. I still feel empty inside even with all my gadgets.” Whether they’d be willing to admit it to themselves or not, the youth of today reject the moon landings for this one reason above all others. The rest of their arguments against the moon landings are really just excuses. The promise of heaven on earth science was supposed to create simply has not happened. People don’t feel any better inside no matter how many conveniences we have today. And of course, the only way to feel any better inside is to be changed within by surrendering your heart to the Lord. Romans 12:2 puts it this way “And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.”

Still the lingering question remains, why haven’t they gone back? A history buff will give you several different answers and opinions. The most popular of which is that the U. S. only did it to beat the Soviet Union in the first place and therefore another moon shot is not needed. The USSR actually had a robot spacecraft on its way to the moon at the same time as Apollo 11. It was supposed to land, retrieve a soil sample and return before Armstrong and Aldrin, but it crashed. Another reason is that no one can afford it today. The United States spent a full 25% of their GDP on the moon project and would have been bankrupt if they continued.

“I was there” proves that Jesus did rise from the dead as we have seen. For those who refuse to believe in Him, there is also a similar comeback. “Why hasn’t He returned yet like He said He would?

I want you to imagine you are a member of the early Christian Church living at the time of John receiving the book of Revelation. This was about 96 AD. Three generations of believers have now come onto the scene. The 1st generation, those who were there, has all gone into their graves. The 2nd is now very old and the third is coming into adulthood and filling the leadership roles their fathers once had. You have lived through years of persecution at the hands of the Roman Empire, but you have grown up in the church. After hearing all those wonderful stories over and over of Jesus, how good He was and the truth that He did indeed rise from the dead to offer life to all, you are 100% sure nothing will ever take your faith in Him away. Still there is one lingering, nagging thought that has crossed your mind lately, especially as the last living disciple, John, will soon go to his grave too. That thought is “why hasn’t Jesus come back yet?”

Anyone today who reads the New Testament can clearly see in the tone of its writing that the first generation of Christians did believe Jesus would return for them in their lifetime. In John 21:23 (written a few years after Revelation) John himself tells of and refutes a common error held by many that he would not die before Jesus came back. By 96 AD that question must have grown larger and larger in the minds of those who were still waiting for Him. So if Jesus really was who He said He was, why didn’t He come back?

The explanation comes from a concept I like to call “multi-level prophecy”. This is something that we see in many parts of the Bible. One of the best examples is from the Old Testament in Isaiah chapter 65:17-25. In this text God makes all kinds of promises that obviously will never happen in this world but are promises of Heaven. These include creating a new world (17), taking away all sorrow (19), complete physical security (21, 22), the promise of His presence (24) and that of a world where everyone is nice to each other all the time (25). Yet in the middle of all these wonderful promises is verse 20 “No more shall an infant from there live but a few days, Nor an old man who has not fulfilled his days; For the child shall die one hundred years old, But the sinner being one hundred years old shall be accursed.”

How can this be? Doesn’t the Bible say that we’ll live forever in Heaven? The answer is this is a multi-level prophecy. At the time Isaiah wrote these words God knew that about a century afterward the Babylonians were going to invade and destroy Jerusalem. This prophecy then was given as a promise to the people of that time that their Jerusalem would be restored. The promises of Heavenly Jerusalem were partially fulfilled in earthly Jerusalem’s restoration and the experience was used as a model to illustrate the eventual complete fulfillment of these promises at the end of time, which will take place very soon.

The prophecies Jesus gave in Matthew 24 were exactly the same as those in Isaiah 65, multi-level. Compare Matthew 24:15-18 with Luke 21:20-22 (this time the references are from the King James Version):

When ye therefore shall see the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet, stand in the holy place, (whoso readeth, let him understand:) Then let them which be in Judea flee into the mountains: Let him which is on the housetop not come down to take any thing out of his house: Neither let him which is in the field return back to take his clothes.

And when ye shall see Jerusalem compassed with armies, then know that the desolation thereof is nigh. Then let them which are in Judea flee to the mountains; and let them which are in the midst of it depart out; and let not them that are in the countries enter thereinto. For these be the days of vengeance, that all things which are written may be fulfilled.

These are both taken from the same discourse yet they have one important difference. Luke quotes Jesus as speaking of an event that happened in the lifetime of the first generation, the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD; while Matthew remembers Jesus speaking about something different, the “abomination of desolation”. This is taken from a time prophecy in Daniel 12:11 and did not come to pass for hundreds of years afterward. As Matthew warned, it’s one of the most complicated things in the Bible to understand; therefore I won’t spend any more time on it here. I’ll give you a clue as to what it means. It’s about the decline of the Catholic Church during the Dark Ages when through a union of church and state, oppression and persecution took place in the name of God.

Here’s a statement from the book “The Desire of Ages”, Page 628, which further illustrates this point and shows that this prophecy was for our time as well:
... when He was alone, Peter, John, James, and Andrew came to Him as He sat upon the Mount of Olives. "Tell us," they said, "when shall these things be? and what shall be the sign of Thy coming, and of the end of the world?" Jesus did not answer His disciples by taking up separately the destruction of Jerusalem and the great day of His coming. He mingled the description of these two events. Had He opened to His disciples future events as He beheld them, they would have been unable to endure the sight. In mercy to them He blended the description of the two great crises, leaving the disciples to study out the meaning for themselves. When He referred to the destruction of Jerusalem, His prophetic words reached beyond that event to the final conflagration in that day when the Lord shall rise out of His place to punish the world for their iniquity, when the earth shall disclose her blood, and shall no more cover her slain. This entire discourse was given, not for the disciples only, but for those who should live in the last scenes of this earth's history.

The best example to show that the early Christians did expect Jesus to return in their lifetimes probably comes from Acts 1:6, 7 “Therefore, when they had come together, they asked Him, saying, “Lord, will You at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” And He said to them, ‘It is not for you to know times or seasons which the Father has put in His own authority.’” The disciples are seeing Jesus for the last time here as He is literally minutes away from leaving for Heaven in a cloud and they want to know when it’s going to all be over. As we already saw from the quote above, they couldn’t have handled it if He’d told them that 2 more millennia would go by before that happened.

1 Thessalonians 4:15-18 gives us additional evidence of what the first generation’s expectations were. “For this we say to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive and remain until the coming of the Lord will by no means precede those who are asleep. For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And thus we shall always be with the Lord. Therefore comfort one another with these words.” These words were given as a promise to those believers still living that their loved ones who “fell asleep” (a metaphor for death) would see Jesus and them again. We see in these words an attempt by Paul to comfort those who may be upset that their loved ones died before Jesus came back. Yet Paul is speaking as if he also thinks Jesus will return shortly.

It stands to reason then that since the first generation wasn’t ready and the lingering expectation of the Second Coming continued at least until the end of the first century, that the timing of the book of Revelation was ideal for the early church. Just when people might have been ready to give up, God came through with a new set of visions given to the last living disciple who put them together into a message to tell the church what was still to come.
Matthew 24 and its parallel references in Mark 13 and Luke 21 speak of wars, famines and earthquakes. These things happened on one level in the first century. One famine from the days of Claudius Caesar is mentioned in Acts 11:28. They also were fulfilled on a gradual on-going basis through the entire Christian era. And who can doubt they have been happening on a greater level of fulfillment than ever before during the last 100 years. They are multi-level prophecies so that any one in any time could see something in them to make that person aware of the need to be ready for Jesus. As Billy Graham put it “Christ will come back at the end of the world. But when you die, that’s the end of the world for you.” The decision to accept Him is a decision we have to make here in this lifetime. The first generation of believers had to make it then and we have to make it now.

The statement made by Peter in 2 Peter 3:3, 4 has been fulfilled on an on-going basis in every generation since his time “knowing this first: that scoffers will come in the last days, walking according to their own lusts, and saying, “Where is the promise of His coming? For since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation.”

Do you see the answer to the question now of why Jesus has not come back? Those who ask that question as scoffers are often people who have looked into the prophecies of His coming, saw some part of them come true in their lifetimes; believed them, hoped for Him and waited; and waited and waited and finally got sick of waiting and abandoned them altogether. The prophecies of His coming are true and reliable. They’re just broader and wider in their scope than any one generation of people can understand. Just like those who scoff today at the moon landings and try to prove their position with the question of why haven’t they gone back, many today use the fact that they don’t understand why Jesus has not returned yet as an excuse to deny Him.

At some point though, Paul must have realized the expectations of the early church would have to wait. Though he was not alive when the book of Revelation was written, its companion book from the Old Testament, Daniel, was available to him. It’s likely that with a study of those prophecies, many of which had not come true in Paul’s day yet, that he wrote in 2 Thessalonians 2:3 “Let no one deceive you by any means; for that Day will not come unless the falling away comes first, and the man of sin is revealed, the son of perdition”.

We know this person today as the antichrist. And one very important thing that must be said about him is that some of the prophecies concerning his arrival are also multi-level! Jesus warned in Matthew 7:15 to “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves.” What does this mean? Beware of those who claim to be followers of Christ, but aren’t really. And this trend was also in motion by the time the first generation had died as is shown by Acts 20:28-31 “Therefore take heed to yourselves and to all the flock, among which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to shepherd the church of God which He purchased with His own blood. For I know this, that after my departure savage wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock. Also from among yourselves men will rise up, speaking perverse things, to draw away the disciples after themselves.”

Years later John concurred with Paul. Having seen the beginning of this trend near the end of his life, he wrote in 1 John 2:18 “Little children, it is the last hour; and as you have heard that the Antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come, by which we know that it is the last hour.”

Most people today look at the various Bible prophecies and are expecting one person to come and be “the” antichrist. However, in every generation these prophecies have been fulfilled to some degree. Though they will be fulfilled again on one final, grand scale across the whole world just before Jesus returns, we can’t wait for that to happen. We have to be ready now and have our hearts right with God now. Revelation 13 makes two descriptions. There’s “the beast” and “the image of the beast”. There is only one “beast” yes. But the image of the beast can be anyone else who acts like the beast, who is like the beast in spirit.

This is one of the main points of this entire blog. The modern world claims to have triumphed over the church, the Bible and God because of all the great scientific discoveries we have made. The teachings of the church during the Dark Ages are thought of as the teachings of the Bible. However this is simply not true. The Dark Ages were just as much a spiritual as well as an intellectual darkness. The church Jesus started on earth fell away from the simplicity and beauty of the gospel.

Sunday, December 20, 2009

One very important thing must be mentioned here. Jesus warned of “false Christs” and “false prophets” in the last days. Another description Jesus gave was of “wolves in sheep’s clothing”. Satan has the ability to pull of miracles as well and will use that ability to the best advantage he can in order to lead as many of God’s people astray as possible. Though Jesus offered many miracles and healings as proof of His divinity, in our time miracles themselves cannot be enough. We have to be ready to test a miracle by the Bible. If that miracle is the kind of miracle God would do and not just some cheap, dime store psychic’s trick; if that miracle has a purpose and a message behind it that agrees with the principles of the Bible; and if that miracle glorifies God; then it is a true miracle. If the purpose of the miracle is just to put on a big show and wow those who see it without really helping them in life or if the one performing the miracle ends up getting all the credit for it, even if that person claims to get his or her power from God, then it is a false miracle. No matter how powerful and compelling it may seem to be, “I was there” can’t enough today.

“I was there.” “I saw Jesus” is what the disciples have said. His miracles and infallible proofs did come from God and do agree with God’s word. “I was there, I saw Him too” is what Paul said. “I was there”, is my own personal testimony both to the moon landings and to Jesus. I saw Him because I was full of guilt and He made me clean and pure again is what anyone today can say if they will turn to Jesus. Just like the moon landings, Jesus is real. I know because I was there.

From an engineering point of view, the moon landings were the highest and greatest technological achievement our modern world has created. Here’s something interesting to think about. How many men have walked on the moon? Twelve! How many disciples did Jesus have? Twelve! What does that tell you? I agree wholeheartedly with Marvin Moore, whom I quoted in the last chapter. This event definitely was the crowning achievement of man’s quest to reclaim heaven.

After all my attempts to set my friend Neil straight he always counters quite firmly with one statement “if it’s really true that they landed on the moon, why haven’t they gone back?” We’ll examine this next.

Friday, December 11, 2009

Of Course They Landed on the Moon POST TWO

Paul’s experience makes the situation quite a bit more interesting. What he saw he spoke of several times, one is in Acts 26:12-23 ““While thus occupied, as I journeyed to Damascus with authority and commission from the chief priests, “at midday, O king, along the road I saw a light from heaven, brighter than the sun, shining around me and those who journeyed with me. “And when we all had fallen to the ground, I heard a voice speaking to me and saying in the Hebrew language, ‘Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting Me? It is hard for you to kick against the goads.’ “So I said, ‘Who are You, Lord?’ And He said, ‘I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. ‘But rise and stand on your feet; for I have appeared to you for this purpose, to make you a minister and a witness both of the things which you have seen and of the things which I will yet reveal to you. ‘I will deliver you from the Jewish people, as well as from the Gentiles, to whom I now send you, ‘to open their eyes, in order to turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins and an inheritance among those who are sanctified by faith in Me.’

“Therefore, King Agrippa, I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision, “but declared first to those in Damascus and in Jerusalem, and throughout all the region of Judea, and then to the Gentiles, that they should repent, turn to God, and do works befitting repentance. “For these reasons the Jews seized me in the temple and tried to kill me. “Therefore, having obtained help from God, to this day I stand, witnessing both to small and great, saying no other things than those which the prophets and Moses said would come— “that the Christ would suffer, that He would be the first to rise from the dead, and would proclaim light to the Jewish people and to the Gentiles.”

Paul’s encounter with Christ was just as supernatural as what Peter described. Yet Paul saw Jesus at least three years after He returned to Heaven. The Lord was not a ghost, just as He said to the disciples that Sunday night in Luke 24:37-43, He was still the same Jesus! Paul never met Him that we know of before the cross yet his account harmonizes well with those who did.

Do you trust these men? A liar can’t keep his story straight indefinitely and will always slip up somewhere because he has to make an effort to remember what lies he’s told to whom. And what are the odds that liar would remember his story perfectly 30 years later in Peter and Paul’s case and 60 years later in John’s? When one is telling the truth he or she does not have to remember it in that sense because the truth just is what it is. The overwhelming changes in the disciples from their encounters with Christ testify to the fact that they did experience something real. They all abandoned Him in the garden that Thursday night and their entire world was crushed when Jesus was put on the cross. Yet 50 days after that in Acts 2 and for the rest of their lives we see nothing but courage in them. They might have gone to their graves for a lie to avoid shame and embarrassment but would they have lived so courageously for that same lie until then?

Paul also said in First Thessalonians 2:4, 5 “But as we have been approved by God to be entrusted with the gospel, even so we speak, not as pleasing men, but God who tests our hearts. For neither at any time did we use flattering words, as you know, nor a cloak for covetousness—God is witness.

Verses 9-13 of the same chapter say “For you remember, brethren, our labor and toil; for laboring night and day, that we might not be a burden to any of you, we preached to you the gospel of God. You are witnesses, and God also, how devoutly and justly and blamelessly we behaved ourselves among you who believe; as you know how we exhorted, and comforted, and charged every one of you, as a father does his own children, that you would walk worthy of God who calls you into His own kingdom and glory. For this reason we also thank God without ceasing, because when you received the word of God which you heard from us, you welcomed it not as the word of men, but as it is in truth, the word of God, which also effectively works in you who believe.

What the men of God had to say was the word of God. Their character backed up their words. When someone initially searched for God who has no previous knowledge pf spiritual things, that person will look to the one sharing with him and base his decision to some degree on that person’s character. The student looks to the teacher and says “what is truth” but is also saying “does this work for you.” Once the student comes into his own faith relationship with God he will have that faith tested by being allowed to see that his teacher is not perfect after all. Therefore it behooves Christians to live out what they believe every day. The consistency of character these men showed for the rest of their lives is evidence they can be trusted.

It is the Lord who ordained that humans would be used to reach each other. Not everything therefore, will come to us individually straight from God. He will raise up and call some, so they can help others. He will show it’s His word by the changes in your life He makes.... that’s the proof! Just like the proof of creation we’ve already seen, the life, death and resurrection of Christ is proven the same way, by the peace of mind Jesus brings to those who receive Him. Psalm 51:10 says “create in me a clean heart

Remember Jesus words to doubting Thomas in John 20:29? “Jesus said to him, ‘Thomas, because you have seen Me, you have believed. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.’” Ultimately none of us were there. We have to trust those who were. The ultimate proof of creation, Psalm 51:10, is also the ultimate proof Jesus is the Saviour of the world. How could His salvation mean anything if He hadn’t made us in the first place? How could His creation mean anything without His saving Grace either? To repeat the verse, it says “Create in me a clean heart, O God, And renew a steadfast spirit within me.”
The fact that there are people today who reject the moon landings is proof of the principle of human nature that ultimately one has to experience things for oneself in order to believe them. They youth of today weren’t there so they can’t believe it. If mankind did return to the moon then many of those same youth would likely admit it was true after all. We all need a continual refreshing like this in order to sustain what we believe in. It’s the same in spiritual things.

Friday, December 4, 2009

Of Course They Landed on the Moon POST ONE

OF COURSE THEY LANDED ON THE MOON

I’ll give him a fake name – ‘Neil’. He is a composite character taken from a few people near me in life. A modern minded person, into science, philosophy and science fiction/fantasy, he is a lot like I was when I was his age. There is one crucial difference though. My friend, like many young people today, does not believe the moon landings were real. There have been books, TV documentaries and websites speaking about the issue and calling into question what was once fully accepted. The lack of stars behind the astronauts in any of the lunar surface pictures, the way those pictures were lit, the way they seemed to walk in their spacesuits, the way the shadow lines cross the ground, the waving of the U.S. flag; all these and more are given as “proof” that the moon landings couldn’t possibly be real. These have also clearly been debunked in other books, TV documentaries and websites. Those things that couldn’t happen, like the uneven shadow lines, are shown there to be everyday occurrences.

What shows those in the “against” camp to be completely incorrect and what I find fascinating about the whole debate is the incredible amount of evidence they ignore. Thousands of people were involved in the launching of the spaceships. After all these years and not one has cracked and spilled the beans, what does that say? Where did the rockets go each time they launched? They went up; if it was a fake they would have had to come down somewhere. Could you hide a 300 foot tall rocket? As my wife suggested to me in our conversations on the issue, how far would the conspiracy have had to go? Was every single Mercury, Gemini and pre-landing Apollo mission also a fake or was it just the actual moon landings? Do these same people who watch TV every day believe the satellites those TV signals come from are unreal? If the helicopter had the capsule in tow and dropped it into the ocean before it picked it up, where did it come from? There would have been thousands of people on the navy ships to see this part of the hoax. They never said anything. What about the total and complete disdain any living astronaut has for the issue. It’s entirely beneath them to even discuss it at all. If it was faked, then why have an Apollo 13 near disaster? Surely anyone who would lie to that degree would gloss things over so well that they would be seen to succeed without any problems. Not one of these points is ever dealt with by those who discount the success of the Apollo missions.

I have never doubted for one second that the moon landings were real. One thing that confirmed my beliefs over the years and closed my heart to any doubts was when I saw the video of the astronauts proving Galileo right. As a young person I greatly valued seeing this in light of being taught the story of Galileo’s persecution. What the astronauts did was to take a hammer and a feather up to the moon and drop them both at the same time. People disagreed with Galileo’s statements that all things fall at the same rate and used the feather as their example. Without air on the moon, the feather and the hammer fell at exactly the same rate landing on the moon’s surface at exactly the same time. This was not something that could be faked.

When you take all of the supposed reasons for the moon landing to be faked into account, what those who believe and promote them are really saying is not that they don’t believe, but that they can’t bring themselves to believe. It’s just too far beyond their worldview to surrender their preconceived notions.

In a way it’s not surprising that today’s youth do feel this way. The situation is the same one that we were in during the 1970’s with the book “Chariots of the Gods”. Its premise was essentially “how could those ancient peoples have built such great monuments when as far as we know they were nowhere near as advanced?” Today’s youth are well aware of the factoid that the average car has had a more powerful computer chip in it than was on the Apollo spaceship for at least the last twenty years. Therefore, how could they have done it? Your car couldn’t make it to the moon right?

The answer is simple, they were smart. I was quite adept at doing math in my head until I started using a calculator. Then I lost that skill. The entire world is the same way today. A slide rule may not be as fast as a computer, but the engineers at NASA could get the same results with it if they needed to. The kind of computers we have now were not what they had then. What they couldn’t get their computers to do, they did themselves. I’m not the first to say this but it’s something everyone should know. That is even though today’s computers are much more powerful and much smaller, they run complicated applications for processing video and picture files that the computers back then did not do. All they used those giant, room-sized computers for was number crunching. There were no operating systems to load up on the Apollo Command Module. Neither was there a mouse, printer/scanner nor a wireless router for high speed internet with their associated driver programs. There wasn’t even a monitor in the capsule the way we think of one. The display screen simply showed the numbers they needed to see. The majority of the computing was done on the ground anyway.

Computers are only as popular as they are today because they have been made so user friendly. They’re nothing more than glorified video game consoles, typewriters and stereo systems. Have you the average layman reading these words ever wrote any programs on your home computer yourself? People today take these things for granted, which leads them into error. Having been raised with them their whole lives and knowing nothing else, its no wonder young people today can’t picture the world any other way. The thing is; it was.

I know it’s true that they landed on the moon because I was there. I was four years old watching the rocket lift off live on television. I will never forget the wonder that filled my heart as I saw the great blasts of smoke and steam shoot out from the side of the Saturn V booster to a distance beyond it that was greater than its height. I remember the scene a few days later with the helicopter coming to the capsule, already in the water, and the frogmen leaping out into the ocean to gather and collect the astronauts and bring them home safely. No one will ever be able to convince me of anything other than the truth of the matter. They did land on the moon every one of those six times.

It was not my purpose to get into a major discussion on the topic of the actual moon landings. Instead rather, to springboard into why there is so much doubt among the young of today and what lessons we can draw from this controversy as it applies to the spiritual things we’re discussing here on this blog.

What about the stories of those who can say “I WAS THERE“ to seeing Jesus rise from the dead, were they fakes, yes or no? What does that mean for us today in the age where so many think they no longer need God?

Acts 1:3 says “to whom He also presented Himself alive after His suffering by many infallible proofs, being seen by them during forty days and speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God.” Take the example of the Lord’s appearing to 500 at once mentioned in 1 Corinthians 15:6. How could that possibly be attributed to mass hysteria? Note that the text here says “He presented Himself”. The crowd didn’t control the appearance.

John was one of those who saw Him many times after His resurrection. 1 John 1:1-4 says “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, concerning the Word of life— the life was manifested, and we have seen, and bear witness, and declare to you that eternal life which was with the Father and was manifested to us— that which we have seen and heard we declare to you, that you also may have fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ. And these things we write to you that your joy may be full.”
John was the youngest disciple. He wrote these words at least 60 years later. Growing up a Jew he knew of the hopes Israel had in the coming Messiah. He knew the true God, the God of the Bible, was not the same as the statues worshipped by every other culture in the entire world.

The Lord is beyond our reality and yet here he tells us that same God came into our reality to give us life. He was an eyewitness and he shares what he knows to be indisputably true. Even more so, he not only saw Jesus he touched Him! John’s main concern is not all that Jesus did to prove Himself after He rose form the dead, but the way He lived His life during the time of His ministry when He taught so much truth, gave so many practical demonstrations of His love and reached out to save those who would reject Him.

Peter actually uses the word “eyewitness” in 2 Peter 1:16-19, specifically talking about transfiguration of Luke 9:28-36, when he, John and James were with Jesus. They saw Jesus in a glorious white light and saw Moses and Elijah. They also audibly heard the voice of God the Father. Peter wrote these words many years later. “For we did not follow cunningly devised fables when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of His majesty. For He received from God the Father honor and glory when such a voice came to Him from the Excellent Glory: ‘This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.’ And we heard this voice which came from heaven when we were with Him on the holy mountain. And so we have the prophetic word confirmed, which you do well to heed as a light that shines in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts;"

Elsewhere Peter speaks of the “more sure word of prophecy”. In other words, even though he did have eyewitness experiences, the real proof of Jesus Messiahship is found in the prophecies of the Old Testament that the Lord fulfilled while on earth. Some of those prophecies, like how Judas would betray Him, were not ones Jesus could personally control. Here in the above passage Peter notes how those prophecies were confirmed by this supernatural encounter.

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Job Learns What We All Must Final Post

THOUGH WE MAY THINK DIFFERENTLY, HE SHOWS THAT WE REALLY CAN DO NOTHING

Job 40:6-10 Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind, and said: “Now prepare yourself like a man; I will question you, and you shall answer Me: “Would you indeed annul My judgment? Would you condemn Me that you may be justified? Have you an arm like God? Or can you thunder with a voice like His? Then adorn yourself with majesty and splendor, and array yourself with glory and beauty.

We opened this chapter with 1 Timothy 6:16 which tells us God dwells in “unapproachable light”. Self-glorification is the principle behind the fashion industry where only those who have the latest are considered to be of any value. When people wear shiny pieces of metal or colored stones that reflect light (jewelry) they are trying to create a light of their own to dwell in. It’s also the reason people pierce themselves and get tattoos. They’re not satisfied with what God gave them and think they’re improving upon their appearance when really it’s a form of mutilation. The whole idea of “he who dies with the most toys wins” is another attempt at self-glorification. Any form of elitism, whether through business, education or culture is an attempt to say “I’m better than you” and therefore keeps with the principles of self-glorification the Lord balks at here. It’s possible to be a corporate Vice-President and still be humble, if you don’t think you’re worth more as a person because you’re not a garbage collector.

Job 40:11-13 deals with this idea a little further: “Disperse the rage of your wrath; Look on everyone who is proud, and humble him. Look on everyone who is proud, and bring him low; Tread down the wicked in their place. Hide them in the dust together, Bind their faces in hidden darkness.”

There are many ways humans attempt to deal with pride. Every attempt to defeat another person, whether it’s in something small like cutting someone off in traffic or something grand like a great war, all have one thing in common. Each is an attempt to bring down others. The thing that humans can’t understand unless they have surrendered their hearts to Jesus is that you don’t bring down pride with more pride. That doesn’t help. In a war the side that wins may have had God’s blessing, but no one has ever won a war without casualties. That’s because war is also a punishment for a nation’s sins.

Job 40:14 contains the most important words in the Lord’s challenge to Job: “Then I will also confess to you That your own right hand can save you.”

Here’s the way the first great king of western civilization, Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, put it in Daniel 4:34-37, “And at the end of the time I, Nebuchadnezzar, lifted my eyes to heaven, and my understanding returned to me; and I blessed the Most High and praised and honored Him who lives forever: For His dominion is an everlasting dominion, And His kingdom is from generation to generation. All the inhabitants of the earth are reputed as nothing; He does according to His will in the army of heaven And among the inhabitants of the earth. No one can restrain His hand Or say to Him, ‘What have You done?’ At the same time my reason returned to me, and for the glory of my kingdom, my honor and splendor returned to me. My counselors and nobles resorted to me, I was restored to my kingdom, and excellent majesty was added to me. Now I, Nebuchadnezzar, praise and extol and honor the King of heaven, all of whose works are truth, and His ways justice. And those who walk in pride He is able to put down.”

This king actually wrote most of Daniel chapter 4. He was full of pride and took the credit for his achievements himself, so the Lord gave him seven years of insanity to teach him his real place in life. These words are the summary of the lesson he learned.

DO ANY OF US REALLY KNOW THE TRUE ANSWERS TO THESE QUESTIONS? LIKE NEBUCHADNEZZAR, JOB LEARNS WHAT WE ALL MUST!

Job 42:1-6 “Then Job answered the LORD and said: ‘I know that You can do everything, And that no purpose of Yours can be withheld from You. You asked, ‘”Who is this who hides counsel without knowledge?”’ ‘Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, Things too wonderful for me, which I did not know. Listen, please, and let me speak;’ ‘You said, “I will question you, and you shall answer Me.”’ ‘I have heard of You by the hearing of the ear, But now my eye sees You. Therefore I abhor myself, And repent in dust and ashes.’”

There’s no other way to say it, we need God. We’re not as smart as we may think we are. Even though life has gotten much easier with technology, technology itself will not create a heaven on earth for us. Marvin Moore wrote in “The Coming Great Calamity”, page 11 “This secular, scientific mindset has dominated Western culture during my lifetime and the lifetime of my parents and grandparents. Most people would probably feel comfortable with the idea that it reached its peak during the middle of the twentieth century with the exploding of the atomic bomb over Japan in 1945 and the Apollo moon landing in 1969.”

After between 100 and 150 years of trying to create a heaven on earth through our own endeavours, the culmination of this was in those two great achievements. As discussed in chapter one, humanity thinks it can embrace the ultimate power of destruction and take its place in the universe back again. What’s fascinating is that many of the grandchildren of those who were adults at the time of the moon landing don’t even believe it really happened. There is also a great deal of significance to that fact. We’ll look at the issue next.

Sunday, November 15, 2009

THINGS MAY WE THINK WE KNOW BUT REALLY DON’T

Job 38:1-7: “Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind, and said: “Who is this who darkens counsel By words without knowledge? Now prepare yourself like a man; I will question you, and you shall answer Me. “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell Me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements? Surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? To what were its foundations fastened? Or who laid its cornerstone, When the morning stars sang together, And all the sons of God shouted for joy?

We looked at some of this already and saw how the rest of the universe was here to watch God create this solar system. This issue of creation versus evolution is of course one of the greatest challenges modern man has ever made to the Lord Himself. Charles Darwin took a trip to the Galapagos Islands and saw how an isolated community of birds varied within its own species according to the needs each kind of bird had (microevolution, which does keep with Bible truth). From there the leap was made to all life forming out of other life (macroevolution, which is a fanciful guess). I ask you, although there was variation in these particular birds, why do we not see the same thing in every single lake in the world? Why are there so many of the exact same species of fish in lake after lake in a given area when these lakes are completely isolated form each other? God created one cat and it micro-evolved into the lion, ocelot, siamese housecat etc. He created one dog and it became the coyote, wolf, hound etc. However, cats have always been cats and dogs have always been dogs. Geologists went around saying “these are old rocks because they have old fossils in them”. At the same time biologists were saying “these fossils are old because they’re in old rocks”.

I once heard put it this way “Skepticism and that which is called science has to a large degree undermined the faith of the Christian world in their Bibles. Error and fables are gladly accepted, that they may pursue the path of self-indulgence and not be alarmed, for they are striving not to retain God in their knowledge. They say, ‘Tomorrow will be as this day and much more abundant.’ But in the midst of their unbelief and godless pleasure the shout of the archangel and the trump of God is heard.” And this way as well “The Bible Our Guide in Science.--We are dependent on the Bible for a knowledge of the early history of our world, of the creation of man, and of his fall. Remove the Word of God, and what can we expect but to be left to fables and conjectures and to that enfeebling of the intellect which is the sure result of entertaining error.”
In thinking of what the Lord asked Job … “who determined (the earth’s) measurements?” some other thoughts come to mind about this whole discourse. We may be able to identify the different types of cells in a blade of grass or the different organs in the human body. We may be able to determine what purpose they serve. But that does not mean we have the power to make them serve their purposes. It doesn’t mean we deserve credit for their existence. Neither does it mean that we’ll ever figure out how to make something so complicated out of nothing.

Once in a trivia book, I read that all the weeping willow trees in North America today are descended from a few seeds that fell out of Benjamin Franklin’s broom. Just three or four seeds that he planted spread out over the entire U.S. and Canada over the last two and a half centuries. What if we could genetically trace them back even farther? What if we could get back to the very first weeping willow tree that existed in the Garden of Eden? From that point on, with all our scientific knowledge, we still couldn’t prove whether this first tree was created by the Lord Himself or evolved from a previous tree. A geologist walking into the newly created garden would see things created in their mature state; therefore he would conclude that they are much older.

We cannot pierce the mysteries of what the Lord has chosen not to reveal to us. You can’t prove God was the creator by looking at his creation; you have to trust Him that He is.
Job 38:24 “By what way is light diffused, Or the east wind scattered over the earth?”
Wind doesn’t blow, it sucks. It is a result of temperature differences - that’s the most basic Grade Eight Science. Light is something different. We don’t really know what it is. Sir Isaac Newton was the 17th Century scientist who theorized that light is a particle. He named those particles Photons. In the 19th century scientists had enough evidence from their experimentation to dispute this. They thought light was a wave. Today, there is experimental evidence to support both theories and scientists have simply resigned themselves to admit that they don’t really know what light is. It seems to be both a particle and a wave. This, like the mystery of the shower curtain, is something we have to accept. It’s the same with creation.

Job 38:34 “Can you lift up your voice to the clouds, That an abundance of water may cover you?”

Today we have public address systems with microphones, amplifiers and speakers that are capable of multiplying the sound of our voices to a much greater degree than we can normally speak. The music industry has various studio tricks to make a recorded voice sound much more full than is normal as well. One such trick is overdubbing, where a recording is made of music or singing and then re-recorded over itself a second time but slightly out of synchronization. If you are familiar with the group ABBA from the 1970’s, they used this technique and were quite popular. The story goes that their concerts could not duplicate the sound of their albums and fans were disappointed because of this.

Job 38:36 “Who has put wisdom in the mind? Or who has given understanding to the heart?”

When my wife Melissa spent a year and a half babysitting her friend’s child I watched that child learn to stand and speak it’s first words. I remember trying to describe concepts to him such as: one thing is under something else. I also remembered watching a documentary once in which people were trying to teach this concept of under to monkeys by sign language and the monkeys didn’t get it. To be able to make sense of what is at first gibberish to the point that you can think in a language is a miracle.

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Job Learns What We All Must Post Two

No one knows for sure who Job was or when he lived. There is a “Jobab” listed in Genesis 10 and 1 Chronicles 1 that lived between Peleg and Abraham. Likely he’s the same person. If so, there is much significance to the timing of God’s challenge as this is the time when knowledge was decreasing on the earth. Let’s take a look at the various questions God asks to the one He calls “mortal man” and see if they still can inspire us today:

THINGS WE THINK WE’VE FIGURED OUT

Job 39:1, 2, 5, 10, 13, 14 “Do you know the time when the wild mountain goats bear young? Or can you mark when the deer gives birth? Can you number the months that they fulfill? Or do you know the time when they bear young? “Who set the wild donkey free? Who loosed the bonds of the onager Can you bind the wild ox in the furrow with ropes? Or will he plow the valleys behind you? “The wings of the ostrich wave proudly, But are her wings and pinions like the kindly stork’s? For she leaves her eggs on the ground, And warms them in the dust;”

If you like to watch nature documentaries, or read magazine or encyclopedia articles, you can learn all kinds of things about the animal kingdom. With a little bit of searching here on the internet one could find information on the gestation period of the mountain goat, how to train a wild ox or learn about ostriches. Job 39:17 is fascinating when you consider how many birds much smaller than an ostrich can navigate by the stars, and yet why is the ostrich so foolish? “Because God deprived her of wisdom, And did not endow her with understanding.”
Chapter 39:19, 25 “Have you given the horse strength? Have you clothed his neck with thunder? At the blast of the trumpet he says, ‘Aha!’ He smells the battle from afar, The thunder of captains and shouting.”

In reading this I never thought before how all those centuries we fought wars with horses, they also had to be fearless as they went into battle just like their riders.
Job 38:39, 41 asks “Can you hunt the prey for the lion, Or satisfy the appetite of the young lions, Who provides food for the raven, When its young ones cry to God, And wander about for lack of food?”

The food chain and the circle of life is something taught early on in junior high school biology classes. Predators contribute to the health of a herd by preying on the sick and the old animals. Psalm 104:21gives us the real answer to this question. “The young lions roar after their prey, And seek their food from God.”

Job 40:15-18, 21-23 “Look now at the behemoth, which I made along with you; He eats grass like an ox. See now, his strength is in his hips, And his power is in his stomach muscles. He moves his tail like a cedar; The sinews of his thighs are tightly knit. His bones are like beams of bronze, His ribs like bars of iron. He lies under the lotus trees, In a covert of reeds and marsh. The lotus trees cover him with their shade; The willows by the brook surround him. Indeed the river may rage, Yet he is not disturbed; He is confident, though the Jordan gushes into his mouth,”

Modern commentators believe this refers to the hippopotamus, but some believe this is a reference to a dinosaur like the brontosaurus because of the “tail like a cedar” text. Leviathan is also in controversy as some think it is a large crocodile, while others think it is the Tyrannosaurus Rex. Personally I do believe these are references to the dinosaurs. It seems so obvious as to almost be self-explanatory that the old legends of fire breathing dragons in so many world cultures referred to the dinosaurs. Now here is Old Testament proof such creatures existed. A great discussion of leviathan and behemoth can be found in Jim Pinkoski’s comic book “A Creationist’s View of Dinosaurs and the Theory of Evolution” available from the Amazing Facts ministry. Go to amazingfacts.org for more.

Job 41:1-4, 8-10: “Can you draw out Leviathan with a hook, Or snare his tongue with a line which you lower? Can you put a reed through his nose, Or pierce his jaw with a hook? Will he make many supplications to you? Will he speak softly to you? Will he make a covenant with you? Will you take him as a servant forever? Lay your hand on him; Remember the battle—Never do it again! Indeed, any hope of overcoming him is false; Shall one not be overwhelmed at the sight of him? No one is so fierce that he would dare stir him up. Who then is able to stand against Me?”

Job 41:11, 13, 14, 18-20: “Who has preceded Me, that I should pay him? Everything under heaven is Mine. Who can remove his outer coat? Who can approach him with a double bridle? Who can open the doors of his face, With his terrible teeth all around? His sneezings flash forth light, And his eyes are like the eyelids of the morning. Out of his mouth go burning lights; Sparks of fire shoot out. Smoke goes out of his nostrils, As from a boiling pot and burning rushes. His breath kindles coals, And a flame goes out of his mouth.”

And what happened to the dinosaurs? Psalm 74:12-14 tells us “For God is my King from of old, Working salvation in the midst of the earth. You divided the sea by Your strength; You broke the heads of the sea serpents in the waters. You broke the heads of Leviathan in pieces, And gave him as food to the people inhabiting the wilderness.

Job 38:22, 23: “Have you entered the treasury of snow, Or have you seen the treasury of hail, Which I have reserved for the time of trouble, For the day of battle and war?”

Some who read this with doubt may just write most of this discourse of as flowery poems and not literal descriptions of anything. Is there really a storeroom in Heaven filled with hail and snow? We can describe what we see in the process of water vapor changing form from liquid to solid or gas. Indeed we have seen already in chapter two that Job 36: 27-29 does describe this cycle. However, look up Ezekiel 38:22 “And I will bring him to judgment with pestilence and bloodshed; I will rain down on him, on his troops, and on the many peoples who are with him, flooding rain, great hailstones, fire, and brimstone.”

Job 38:8-11, 16 “Or who shut in the sea with doors, When it burst forth and issued from the womb; When I made the clouds its garment, And thick darkness its swaddling band; When I fixed My limit for it, And set bars and doors; When I said, ‘This far you may come, but no farther, And here your proud waves must stop!’ “Have you entered the springs of the sea? Or have you walked in search of the depths?”

We have mapped the sea floor and we do have the ability to go under water to the very bottom, but still it has been said that we know more about outer space than we do about the oceans.

Friday, November 6, 2009

Chapter four post one

JOB LEARNED WHAT WE ALL MUST

1 Timothy 6:16 “who alone has immortality, dwelling in unapproachable light, whom no man has seen or can see, to whom be honor and everlasting power. Amen.” This reference is to God the Father. What do you think of as you read it? I’m sure most people would imagine the Lord on His throne surrounded by some sort of mist or cloud that can’t be seen past. We can see He’s in there but can’t see Him, we can only hear His voice. Maybe there are flashes of colour in the background as we hear Him speak. I imagine that too. However! Would this verse not also apply to the concept of God dwelling in an intellectual light no man can approach unto?

A friend of mine once gave me an interesting factoid - apparently in ancient times, the knowledge base of a society like the Roman Empire would double every 150 years; while today our knowledge base doubles every eight years. With all the advances in technology in the last few generations we now think we dwell in a far greater intellectual light than we have before. Should we be surprised then that so many feel no need of Him today?

In the previous chapter we looked at some references to creation from Job chapter 38. We saw how the angels and the Adams from the rest of the universe watched as God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit made this world. In this chapter we’ll take a greater look at the last few chapters of the book of Job and examine the scientific statements they make. The book of Job is the very first book of the Bible ever written and tells the story of one man who suffers and how it affected his faith. Though the Lord never reprimands Job for complaining about his trials, God does not apologize for them either. (We have already briefly discussed the first 2 chapters of Job as well. If you haven’t already, I’d like to ask you to stop here, go to your Bible, and read them fully. Job’s problems ultimately are not God’s fault.) He goes on at the conclusion of the book to question this one “mortal man” about a great many things until Job sees his total and utter helplessness as a human being. What’s interesting to note is that some of those challenges God gave we have found answers to through all the progress we’ve made in the last 150 years.

Before we get to that, if our view of today’s modern age is not 100% accurate, who’s to say that what we believe about the past is? Jesus had this to say in Matthew 24:37 “But as the days of Noah were, so also will the coming of the Son of Man be.” For today’s time to be like that of the flood, they must have had technology! Could it be that the history of their increasingly bold rebellion against God was tied to a growth in technology then just as much as it is today?

This may be a hard thought for some to consider. Evolutionists and Bible critics believe the modern view that we all started as cavemen with no knowledge at all, have steadily grown over time until we have what we have now, and that this is the only time humanity has ever possessed this much knowledge. Any great achievement of a previous civilization that we can’t fathom is called a ‘mystery’. Many of these include things like the statues of Easter Island; the Nazca lines in Peru and of course the Pyramids. One of the most ridiculous and outlandish theories touted in the 1970’s to explain these mysteries was the book “Chariots of the Gods”, where space aliens are credited with the engineering achievements of ancient mankind. However the more rational theory is that the people who lived back then were smart, for a while smarter than we are.

Bible scholars don’t normally have much to say one way or the other because their focus is not on this aspect of history. But think about it, God made Adam and Eve perfect. That should mean as we previously discussed that they had perfect memories (they didn’t need to write things down) and much higher mental abilities than we have today. Since the first ten generations lived into the 900’s, they were healthier and stronger than we are, their brains must have matched their bodies then. Think also about how much time they had then to study the world around them. It took ten more generations for the lifespan to get down to Abraham’s 175. Moses was seven generations after that and he lived to be 120. We don’t have confirmation of 70 year lifespans until the time of David as shown by Psalm 90:10 “The days of our lives are seventy years; And if by reason of strength they are eighty years, Yet their boast is only labor and sorrow; For it is soon cut off, and we fly away.” As we saw a decline in physical power and strength, there must have been a corresponding decline in mental ability as well. (On a side note, do you know the main reason for the decline in lifespan? God’s original diet is listed as fruits, nuts and grains in Genesis 1:29. In Genesis 3:18 vegetables were added after sin. With this their perfect bodies did not decay for nine centuries. It was after the flood that they were allowed to eat meat, see Genesis 9:3. Meat eating is what caused this great decline in lifespan.)

This is the view Rene Noorbergen takes in “Secrets of the Lost Races”, written in part to respond to Chariots of the Gods. On pages 10-14 he compares the Bible’s list of the pre-flood leaders, known as the Patriarchs, with that of ancient Egyptian and Babylonian history, identifying them to be the same. Page 11 says “Upon comparing the list of the prehistoric Chaldean kings with the pre-Flood patriarchs, we find a fascinating parallel that again supports our basic premise.” He then goes on to elaborate on the similar meanings of the various names given in both accounts. Page 19 also takes China’s history into account, “The Chinese have set 2250 B.C. as the beginning for their history, while traditional Bible chronology estimates 2248 B.C. as the year for the Flood occurrence.”

Noorbergen gives his book’s basic premise on pages 3-4: “According to the Genesis account, the antediluvian people were highly knowledgeable, being the first to develop agriculture, animal husbandry, construction, architecture, political organization, metal-working, the abstract arts, mathematics, chronology and astronomy. What’s more, while the Genesis record tells us that there were altogether only ten generations of antediluvians, they developed the majority, if not all, of the basic elements of civilization by the sixth generation. Now if the antediluvians, beginning with the raw earth, were able to master the arts of civilization in the first six generations their existence, we may well wonder to what degree they further developed and refined those arts in the remaining four prior to the Deluge.”

He then continues on page 21 with: “Is it possible that the few human survivors of the Flood, whether the leader was called Noah, Nu-u, or Nuwah, depending on the tradition, were not so primitive after all? Can we assume that they carried with them sufficient knowledge of the antediluvian era to enable them to give a rapid start to the new civilization that sprang up … in the years immediately following the Flood?”

Page 124 gives a description of a model airplane found in an ancient Egyptian tomb. This finding is also discussed and pictured in “Unlocking the Mysteries of Creation, Premiere Edition, by Dennis R. Petersen, page 225. On pages 94-95 Noorbergen tells of an ancient map, the “Piri Reis chart of 1513”, which was drawn “from a composite of twenty older maps”, eight of which “were from the time of … Alexander the Great”. It “showed South America and Africa in correct relative longitude” when our modern map makers took “another two hundred years” to establish this as true. The map also “accurately showed the coastline of Queen Maud Land in Antarctica – even though the map was drawn in 1513, and the southern continent’s existence was not verified until 1819!” A picture of this map is in Unlocking the Mysteries of Creation, page 211. (This book like the other creation textbook I mentioned in the last chapter. It contains a great many things that are obviously true and gives a great many challenges to evolution. Unfortunately, the author clearly has the same earth centred, 14th century understanding of the events of day four of creation week as is shown by his statements on page 22.)

This information comes from chapter three of “Secrets of the Lost Races”, called “Following in the Tracks of Ancient Explorers”. There Noorbergen describes ancient records and evidence of post-Flood world exploration from several cultures. On page 99 we read: “In Genesis 10:25 we meet a descendant of Noah called Peleg who was given his name because ‘in his day was the earth divided’. The usual interpretation of this passage is that it refers to the division of nations; however, it could also mean division as in ‘allotment, marking off an area, a measurement.’ A more accurate translation of this historical passage could read, ‘Peleg, in his day was the earth measured, or surveyed.’”

I had previously heard two other interpretations of this verse. That the story following in chapter 11 of the Tower of Babel, when God confused the languages of the people to scatter them all over the earth, took place in Peleg’s time. And that the continents were originally one even after the flood and that this was the time in which they broke up into the geography we have today. Likely all these interpretations are correct.

In the same chapter Noorbergen discusses the story of Chinese world exploration with a focus on the “Shan Hai King”, a Chinese story from 2208 B.C. This “treatise on geography … for several hundred years … was regarded as a scientific work … but during the third century B.C., when many Chinese records were reevaluated and condensed, it was discovered that {it} did not correspond to any lands known at the time … {and} was reclassified as myth (page 103).” Rene shows on pages 103 and 104 that this work describes North America.

He also discusses “petroglyphs” ancient rock carvings found all over the world, one of which he mentions at Writing-on-Stone provincial park near Milk River, Alberta. That happens to be only a three and a half hour drive from my home, so after reading about them my wife and I went there and took the tour. I remember the very first set of carvings the tour guide took us to. When she asked us what we thought it was, two pictures came to both our minds. One was shaped very much like the animals in the famous cave paintings in France, which Rene discusses elsewhere in his book. The other was shaped like a brontosaurus. And all the information at the displays in the Visitor’s Centre clearly told how the Siksika First Nations, (formerly known as the Blackfoot Indian tribe) were not the ones who carved these stone pictures. They regarded them as sacred but had no idea who did carve them or how old they were.

“Secrets of the Lost Races” has greatly elaborated on my understanding of early world history. Though they likely did explore the earth, and built many of the great mystery monuments in those first five generations after the flood, by the time of Abraham five generations further on, we have an example of technology in his day. In Genesis 22:6 “he took the fire in his hand”. The way they traveled with fire back then was to coil up a very long rope, light one end and put it in a container. It would slowly burn over the course of days and could be taken out anytime it was needed to ignite a new fire. They didn’t even have flints, what we gave up when matches and lighters were invented! It’s clear that no matter what else may have been known or discovered in those first few generations after the Flood, as the people settled down in their respective regions of the earth and created the cultures we have today; it was all lost by Abraham’s time.

Monday, November 2, 2009

Bible Proof There's Life on Other Planets post three

One of the biggest reasons for the confusion people have when they contrast science and the Bible is because the creation story in Genesis 1 seems to suggest an earth centered view. You have to know how to read it. It is simply told from the point of reference of someone standing on this new planet like a reporter might have covered it for CNN. Job 38:4-7 has the creation from the point of view of the Angels and others watching in heaven. “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell Me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements? Surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? To what were its foundations fastened? Or who laid its cornerstone, When the morning stars (note: these are the angels) sang together, And all the sons of God (these are the Adam type leaders) shouted for joy?”

We looked at Genesis 1:1-3 in the previous chapter, let’s look at it again for some further clarification. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.” That does not mean that the earth was an empty rock and actually has been here for 4 billion years and that the Lord simply added an atmosphere and ocean. To be without form means it did not exist.

Today most people just can’t wrap their heads around such an idea because they have been so completely indoctrinated with evolution. A lot of people try to blend the two conflicting ideas on our origins. You will hear things like “maybe they weren’t seven of our days, maybe they represent longer time periods”. Theories like this come from a desire to make sense of what we can’t make sense of. To blend creation and evolution in this way always ends up making creation serve evolution because people just can’t believe the Lord can cause something to exist where there was nothing before. Even the big bang theory is based on this same false premise that matter can neither be created nor destroyed. (We can now destroy small amounts of uranium or plutonium can’t we?) The observations scientists have made of an expanding universe led them to conclude that all the matter in the universe was once concentrated in one place and exploded in this bang. Some scientists have now abandoned the theory because they realized someone would have to have been there to set off the explosion, i.e. God. It’s entirely possible the universe is 28 billion years old just like scientists have estimated based on their observations. If so, then each and every solar system within the universe was created by God Himself in a process of seven literal days. The Father, Son and Spirit spoke together and where there was once nothing, behold new planets came into existence complete with eco-systems and first parents for every species. This is the only way to blend the truths of the bible with what we can clearly see in our telescopes that neither downgrades God nor goes against known fact.
What makes God “God” is three things that simply cannot be explained and have to be accepted. 1. He is all-seeing, all-knowing, 2. He has always been and always will be, and 3. He has the power of creation, of life and death. He can cause matter to come into existence simply by speaking.

God does not have to serve man’s limited ability to comprehend Him. “He works in mysterious ways”, is a common catch-phrase. Often the reason His ways are mysterious to us is because we are not willing to surrender our preconceived notions. As Peter said in Acts 11:17 when the Lord worked in a way beyond his understanding, “who was I that I could withstand God?” The science minded person may think this cannot be accepted, but yet science has to do this all the time. A good example is the history of our study of light, which will be discussed in the next chapter. For now, take the example of the simple act of having a shower. When you turn on the water, by all known laws of physics (motion, heat, and air pressure) the shower curtain should push out from the bathtub. Yet it sucks in to the tub every time. We can’t explain it. Do we ignore this fact and repeat a lie over and over telling everyone to believe that the shower curtain does push out or do we surrender to a truth beyond our ability to comprehend because it is plain and obvious? God can only help us when we surrender to the truth that He is God.

We have already looked at one spiritual proof of the Lord’s creative power. If you will repent of your sins and accept Jesus’ death on the cross in your place, the Holy Spirit will bring Him into your heart and make you into a new person. From that point on, He wants you to live out the new life He has in store for you. In Galatians 2:20 we read, “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.” We get a second spiritual proof from the creation week. THINK ABOUT IT! The calendar has days, marked by the rotation of the earth; months, marked by the phases of the moon; and years, marked by the earth’s orbit around the sun. There is no astronomical reason for the week! The seven literal days of creation are where we got our week form. The Lord’s final act in that week was to mark it off with an anniversary as described in Genesis 2:1, 2 “Thus the heavens and the earth, and all the host of them, were finished. And on the seventh day God ended His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done.”

God made the Seventh day of the week Holy as a memorial of creation. The best way to prove creation is in fact to give Sabbath keeping a try and honour Him on His Holy day. He blessed the day. He is there in a special way each week from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday, the original Bible Sabbath. There’s a connection there you’ll make with Him when as a born-again believer with a living faith you keep His day His way. Once you see just how much Jesus has done for you and you experience His love anew through the Sabbath, you will know the truth beyond all doubt. No evolutionary science will ever sway you again. Genesis 2:1, 2 is a declaration that creation is finished as well. In other words, Earth is the last planet the Lord made. (This also gives us the only possible explanation for Satan’s rebellion. It’s been said sin can never really be explained; to have lived for eons of time in peace and harmony and then to want something more? It does make no sense. However, after all that time seeing new wonders continually unfold as creation grew and grew, maybe when God said it was done, they said to themselves, “that’s it?”)

This understanding then clearly explains what really happened on day 4 in the creation account. ‘Then God said, “Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs and seasons, and for days and years; “and let them be for lights in the firmament of the heavens to give light on the earth”; and it was so. Then God made two great lights: the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night. He made the stars also. God set them in the firmament of the heavens to give light on the earth, and to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. So the evening and the morning were the fourth day.” Genesis 1:14-19.

According to the 14th century view, which most people think is what the Bible says; the rest of the universe was created solely for the benefit of earth. This of course makes no room for other planets, nor does it make room for all that we’ve seen so far. How could Satan’s fall and the war in Heaven have happened if he was only two days older than Adam and Eve? The Lord did create the sun and the moon and the planets in our solar system on day 4 because they were created for our benefit. That does not mean this is when He created the whole rest of His dominion though. It just means He made it possible for us to see what‘s out there. Those lights were put into the firmament, which is our atmosphere. In reference to the stars, which are light-years away, it simply says He made them “also”. There is no indication then that He actually did make them the same day.

A few verses sum up our discussion. 1 Corinthians 4:9, “For I think that God has displayed us, the apostles, last, as men condemned to death; for we have been made a spectacle to the world, both to angels and to men.” Ephesians 3:10 “to the intent that now the manifold wisdom of God might be made known by the church to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places,” The word “spectacle” could be replaced with “reality show” couldn’t it? A very short time after Paul wrote these words the spectacle came to its fullest meaning as Christians were fed to the lions in the Roman Coliseum. Yet Paul obviously understood that there was more going on than could be seen with human eyes. The progress of the gospel was not just for the benefit of the people of this world, it was also for everyone else watching us from far away in space.

Our final proof there is life on other planets comes from the parable in Luke 15:4-6. It is normally understood as applying to individual persons that Jesus came to save, but can it not, in light of this study, also apply to our one isolated little world? “What man of you, having a hundred sheep, if he loses one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness, and go after the one which is lost until he finds it? “And when he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing. “And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbours, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep which was lost!’ Jesus sought you out and is rejoicing now with the angels that you have turned from your sins and come to Him. He has also sought out the whole world. When He returns, takes us to Heaven and then after the millennium establishes His kingdom on earth (more on this to come), this parable will be completely fulfilled. Our lost planet will once again be in its rightful place in God’s universe.

We have seen so far that the two conflicting worldviews from the 21st and 14th centuries both contain some errors and some similarities to the real truth. Science has questioned God, and just like other prophetic references to His foreknowledge that this would happen, He also has some answers you may be surprised to see. They are in the last four chapters of the book of Job. We will look at them next.

Sunday, October 25, 2009

Chapter three post two

The next logical question then is “why can’t we communicate with them“? Isaiah 59:1, 2, and Hebrews 10:12 answer this very important thought. “Behold, the Lord’s hand is not shortened, That it cannot save; Nor His ear heavy, That it cannot hear. But your iniquities have separated you from your God; And your sins have hidden His face from you, So that He will not hear.” “But this Man, after He had offered one sacrifice for sins forever, sat down at the right hand of God,” (This “right hand of God” is another reference to the throne room, or Sanctuary.) We are isolated here because of sin. Jesus had to die to save us from sin, but only once and only here. He did not have to go to any other planet and die for anyone there. So there is therefore no other world in rebellion against the Lord. All the rest of creation is at peace with God.

This brings up a very important point. They were there. Romans 6:23 says, “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord”. Since death is the penalty for sin, and there is no sin in the rest of the universe, these beings have lived through countless eons of time and have watched every moment of human history unfold. They haven’t just had the privilege of seeing things from our point of view; they have also watched God as He worked to save this world.

Think about the full realities of this point. For however many years these ‘people’ have lived, they never once have had to experience any pain or suffering at all. Before this world began, they never knew what it was like to be lied to, or stole from. Yet now they have seen every murder, every broken home, every wrong thing that’s ever happened in this world.

In Job chapters 1 and 2 Satan came as earth’s representative because he did in fact steal this planet from Adam and Eve as is told in Genesis 3:1-7. Just as Adam is called a son of God, Lucifer (Satan’s original name) is referred to as “son of the morning” in Isaiah 14:12. Therefore he was once the highest angel, next in line to the Lord Himself. This reference along with Ezekiel 28:12-17 and Revelation 12:3-9 are the three most notable descriptions in the Bible of the devil. Ezekiel 28:15 says “You were perfect in your ways from the day you were created, Till iniquity was found in you.” Lucifer at some point traded away the perfection God had originally given him and became Satan. Why did he do this? Isaiah 14:13 gives us the answer. “For you have said in your heart: ‘I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God; I will also sit on the mount of the congregation On the farthest sides of the north”. This desire for pride and self-exaltation lead to war in Heaven. Lucifer became Satan when he desired a place higher than he already had. The only place left was that of the Lord Himself. According to Revelation 12:4, 9 Satan took a full one-third of the angels with him as they were cast down to this earth.

Yet here he is in Job chapters 1 and 2 still in Heaven! He still had some level of access to the rest of the universe and was not fully cast down at this point. There must have been some questions raised in the minds of those who live on the other planets when Lucifer started this rebellion. God had to take time to answer them, which is what world history is really all about. We can give a reasonable guess as to what those questions were simply by examining the kinds of questions people here ask today. “Does He really love us?” “Is He really fair?” “Why does His law say if you’re not in complete submission to Him, you must die?” “How can I be expected to live up to God’s law anyway?” “Is the Lord right in demanding our worship and adoration, or is He just on some sort of ego-trip?” One more very important question as well “If You are going to let the people of earth whom You save join the fellowship of these other planets Lord, how can we be sure they can be trusted?” This is of course not the question we ask, but it must be the question the rest of the universe is asking about us.

All these questions and whatever others there may have been are getting their answers in a living demonstration as world history plays out. In fact, when you study it out completely, the earth is one big giant experiment to test if there is any possible way to run the universe other than God’s. The Lord is really the one on trial. Not only did Adam and Eve fall, but in every generation their children have carried on the family business. Yet the Lord has been continually offering mercy and kindness, even to those who don’t care about Him. All of world history from the fall of our first parents (highlighted by the story of Cain and Abel) to the flood can be summed up in one sentence: God gave the rest of the universe a demonstration of just how bad things would get elsewhere if sin were allowed to run rampant. The rest of the Old Testament time period can also be described with one simple statement: The Lord gave man a chance to recover through obedience. The Ten Commandments are God’s Law. Violating them is what 1 John 3:4 says is sin. In Exodus 24:3 “all the people answered with one voice and said, ‘All the words which the Lord has said we will do.’” However they were trying in their own strength. Their history showed just how futile it is for any of us to try to make ourselves good enough for God.

The next phase of human history is in the life, death and resurrection of Christ. This is simply put as: God does for us what we cannot do for ourselves. From the New Testament we can see a progressive decline in the place Satan has in the universe. Cross reference Luke 10:18 with Revelation 12:12 and you will see that Satan has now lost his place and is confined to this world. “And He said to them, “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven.” “Therefore rejoice, O heavens, and you who dwell in them! Woe to the inhabitants of the earth and the sea! For the devil has come down to you, having great wrath, because he knows that he has a short time.” When you think about it, the devil spent at least 4000 years telling everyone who would listen that he was the real victim, yet Jesus, who is God the Son, came and proved every one of the devil’s charges to be false.

Philippians 2:5-8 “Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who, being in the form of God, did not consider it robbery to be equal with God, but made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant, and coming in the likeness of men. And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross.” Jesus “humbled Himself”, though He should not have had to, He did. His example shows the humility of God, that He keeps His own law and that He really does love us to go to such great lengths to save us. After putting his own Creator on the cross, Lucifer lost all credibility with the rest of the universe. The planet He stole was now bought back by Jesus.
When Jesus went back to Heaven, they were ready to receive Him. He returned in triumph to make everything ready for when He would come back to earth and rescue us. Jesus can now judge us fairly, because He knows what it’s like to live the way we do. Human history now entered its fourth phase as the results of Jesus achievement were to be shared across the entire world and also demonstrated in the lives of those who received Him as their Saviour. The angels and the beings on the other planets have watched the progress His followers have made over the last 20 centuries in fulfilling His calling.

They will also watch in triumph as God works through His people in this fifth phase of history, what the Bible calls “the last days” to bring this entire controversy to its rightful conclusion. This is the time period we live in today. It’s the one where people are running to and fro with an increase of knowledge which began a little over 150 years ago. It’s the one with man trying desperately to create a heaven on earth for himself and take back his place among the stars while the Lord is working at the same time to make people ready His way, with the full and complete truths of the Bible restored in their lives. As mentioned in the last chapter and one of the most important points of this whole book, the dark ages were a spiritual as well as an intellectual darkness. That which most people today think the Bible says is only what they were told the Bible says by the influence the dark ages had on western civilization. Jesus spoke in Matthew 7:21-23 of a great many people alive at His Second Coming that He will say He didn’t know even though they thought they were His people. Why is that? Because when given a chance to fully recover from the darkness they turned it down. More on this will be discussed in another chapter.

Though the discussion here has been of the entire world on the grandest possible scale, each and every human life is also a repeat of this same controversy. Psalm 91:11 says, “For He shall give His angels charge over you, To keep you in all your ways.” This “charge” does not mean “control”; it instead means “responsibility”. Just like in the old cartoons, when someone has to make a moral decision there was a good angel on one shoulder and a bad angel on the other, each whispering advice. God sends His angels to influence and protect us, while Satan is using his angels to lead us astray in any way possible. The interest the angels and the beings of the other planets have is just as much in your life and mine as it is in everyone else’s.

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Chapter Three Post One Bible Proof There's Life on Other Planets

Welcome to "SCIENCE, THE BIBLE AND LIFE ON OTHER PLANETS" the contents of a book examining issues between faith and our modern values. Each chapter will be divided into 3 or 4 posts of about a page and a half each. May all who read this be challenged to think in new ways and experience personal growth because of it. Sincerely, Les Miller "Mr. Les"The blog will be divided into 10 chapters, each one sub-divided into 3 or 4 posts, about a page and a half each.

The contents are as follows:
TRANSLUCITE
SCIENCE FICTION AND THE MEANING OF OUR MODERN AGE
BIBLE PROOF THERE’S LIFE ON OTHER PLANETS
JOB LEARNED WHAT WE ALL MUST
OF COURSE THEY LANDED ON THE MOON
WHY HAVEN’T THEY GONE BACK?
THE (NOT SO) SECRET KEYS THAT UNLOCK THE REAL TRUTH
JOHN 3:16 IN DEPTH
MR. SPIELBERG HAVE I GOT A SCRIPT FOR YOU
EPILOGUE “THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE

Chapter three BIBLE PROOF THERE’S LIFE ON OTHER PLANETS

Alberta, Canada is well known as an important source of dinosaur bones. Dinosaur Provincial Park, where many specimens have been discovered, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The town of Drumheller plays host to the “Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology”. A half hour’s drive north from there the “Big Valley Creation Science Museum” exists in the town of Big Valley. My wife and I happened to visit this museum the day before its grand opening a few years ago. The displays were very professional. Some of which presented quite reasonable challenges to the theory of evolution while others gave highly compelling evidence of the Genesis account of early world history. We purchased a few books that also made their case for creation the same way.

“In the Beginning - Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood (7th Edition)” by Walt Brown Ph.D., Director of The Center for Scientific Creation, was one of those books. It’s actually very sad to say, but even if he is completely right with all the rest of his theories (and I’m not a scientist so I can’t say for sure) Mr. Brown totally invalidates himself with two sections dealing with the issues of life on other planets and the age of the universe. He might as well be trying to prove the world is flat after all. The modern non-biblical world view is so ingrained into today’s youth; his opinions on these topics will have no credibility in their eyes (see “In the Beginning” pages 232-235 and 247-248).

Ultimately no one can really prove creation or evolution. Rocks and flowers prove one or the other if that’s what you want them to. Most people take a similar approach to the Bible by reading their pre-conceived notions into it rather than a careful study to let it speak for itself. Pastor George Vandeman was speaker /director of the “It Is Written” television show from the 1950’s to the early 1990’s. He therefore witnessed the transition from the previous generation’s mindset influenced by the Bible, into that of the Baby Boomers and beyond. On page 5 of “Planet in Rebellion”, Pastor Vandeman writes “For who of us is not aware that during a few short decades the planet that was once our universe has dwindled into a planet that can never again be completely isolated from its stellar neighbors”.

However the discoveries of science did not threaten his faith at all. “But nothing, I believe, will help us get our bearings and settle our confusion than to look through our giant telescopes to the stars fixed in the planned precision of their unfailing orbits – and discover who is back of it all” (page 12). His position that there is in fact life on other planets is illustrated by quoting Isaiah 45:18 “For thus says the Lord, Who created the heavens, Who is God, Who formed the earth and made it, Who has established it, Who did not create it in vain, Who formed it to be inhabited: “I am the Lord, and there is no other.” He then adds “Therefore if this world were not the abode of life, its creation would have been in vain – useless. Would it not naturally follow that if such be true of this little speck of cosmic dust, then much if not all of God’s creation would likewise be in vain if not put to some intelligent use” (page 22)?

As we saw from Hebrews 1:1-3, God made all that we can see “out there”. Did He make it all for the benefit of planet earth on day four of creation? If so, why bother to put mountains on the moon or a red spot on Jupiter since we didn’t find them until Galileo? Why have galaxies billions of light years away if we can’t even see them with the naked eye? What about life out there then? Isaiah 40:15 says “Behold, the nations are as a drop in a bucket, And are counted as the small dust on the scales; Look, He lifts up the isles as a very little thing.” If the 226 nations of earth are a drop in the bucket (this is where that phrase came from), then there are obviously millions of planets with inhabited, developed societies on them throughout the universe.
In Nehemiah 9:6 the “host” of heaven worships God. These are beings, not inanimate objects. “You alone are the Lord; You have made heaven, The heaven of heavens, with all their host, The earth and everything on it, The seas and all that is in them, And You preserve them all. The host of heaven worships You.” “Host” is an old English word for large group of people. Elsewhere the Bible says He is the Lord of “hosts”, as in more than one group.

One particular large group is mentioned in Daniel chapter 7. This is a vision the Lord gave the prophet Daniel of world history from his time forward. After the rise and fall of the Persian, Greek, and Roman Empires and their transition into “Christendom”, the nations of Europe under the domination of the church; the vision finishes with a special emphasis on heaven’s point of view. Daniel is shown the actual throne room where God the Father and Jesus begin the first phase of Their judgement of planet earth. Elsewhere in the Bible this room is referred to as the “Temple in Heaven”, or the “Sanctuary”. We will examine this judgement and what it means for us more closely in “The (Not So) Secret Keys That Unlock the Real Truth”.

For now let’s look at verses 9 and 10 “I watched till thrones were put in place, And the Ancient of Days was seated; His garment was white as snow, And the hair of His head was like pure wool. His throne was a fiery flame, Its wheels a burning fire; A fiery stream issued And came forth from before Him. A thousand thousands ministered to Him; Ten thousand times ten thousand stood before Him. The court was seated, And the books were opened.”

What is ten thousand times ten thousand? 100 million! The largest stadium in this world is in the Czech Republic and holds almost 250,000 people. Yet this one room holds 400 times more. Now, in many countries on earth, there is a regular army and then there is an elite inner guard charged solely with protecting the Head of State. Are these 100 million angels the sum total of all the angels out there? Likely this is not the case because the text also said “thousands of thousands”.

The text in Nehemiah cross references well with what Paul called the “third heaven” in 2 Corinthians 12:2. (This is one point where I disagree with Mormonism. They have some strange belief based on this verse that makes no sense.) The three levels of heaven are: 1. the blue sky; 2. what we now call outer space, which is where the hosts live; and 3. the holy city, New Jerusalem, where God’s throne is now and in which He receives worship. This is one reason some people can find the Bible confusing as sometimes when the Bible says “heaven(s)” it is only talking about our blue sky. Revelation 21:1 for instance, is not talking about the rest of the universe, its just talking about our atmosphere. “Now I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away. Also there was no more sea.” The Lord knew that pollution would be an issue in our time. He promises that when He makes the earth anew, He will give us a clean atmosphere again. (Not that we shouldn’t take care of the world the best we can now, of course. But the thought that we actually will destroy this earth through pollution is a lie.)

One of the most striking texts in the Bible is a multi-level prophecy that has recently been fulfilled once more. From Obadiah verse 4 we can draw the conclusion that our Heavenly Father knew the conflict in science and religion would take place with two differing views of Heaven as a hot button issue. In it He says “Though you ascend as high as the eagle, And though you set your nest among the stars, From there I will bring you down,” says the Lord.” Though began by the Soviet Union with Sputnik in 1957 and continued today by many nations including Japan, China, Canada and the European Union, the nation with the eagle as its symbol claims to have won the space race as the United States was the one country that has landed men on the moon. The U.S. has also lead out in the development of the International Space Station. Obadiah 4 promises we will see Jesus come back to this world from the same realm of physical space that this permanent resting place, or “nest” for mankind has been established in.

The fact that there is life out there is proven most clearly by cross-referencing a few texts. A sort of heavenly convention is discussed in Job 1:6, 7 and again in chapter two, but we’ll only look at this first reference. Notice the phrase “sons of God” “Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan also came among them. And the Lord said to Satan, ‘From where do you come?’ So Satan answered the Lord and said, ‘From going to and fro on the earth, and from walking back and forth on it.’” In Luke 3:38 Adam is listed as a son of God “… the son of Enos, the son of Seth, the son of Adam, the son of God. “ The other sons of God at this meeting then are the Adam type beings, the first created ones, or the leaders of the other planets. Evidently the Lord holds meetings with representatives of all the other planets on a regular basis as Satan returns quickly to discuss Job again in the next chapter.

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Chapter two final post

People today have the same needs their ancestors have had since the beginning and are simply trying to meet them in other ways. This happens not only through fiction, but also in real life. We talked already about the meaning of the atomic bomb. There is actually much more meaning that can be drawn out of our modern age. Think about what the Lord took away from Adam and Eve on the day they sinned and then think about all we have achieved. Let’s look at Genesis 3:16-24 first:

To the woman He said: “I will greatly multiply your sorrow and your conception; In pain you shall bring forth children; Your desire shall be for your husband, And he shall rule over you.” Then to Adam He said, “Because you have heeded the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree of which I commanded you, saying, ‘You shall not eat of it’: “Cursed is the ground for your sake; In toil you shall eat of it All the days of your life. Both thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you, And you shall eat the herb of the field. In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread Till you return to the ground, For out of it you were taken; For dust you are, And to dust you shall return.”

And Adam called his wife’s name Eve, because she was the mother of all living. Also for Adam and his wife the Lord God made tunics of skin, and clothed them. Then the Lord God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of Us, to know good and evil. And now, lest he put out his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever”— therefore the Lord God sent him out of the garden of Eden to till the ground from which he was taken. So He drove out the man; and He placed cherubim at the east of the garden of Eden, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way to the tree of life.

Advances in agriculture have given us pesticides and herbicides to rid us of thorns and thistles as much as possible. For centuries various societies used slaves to compensate for the toil put upon us. Today much of what slaves used to do we do using machines. Death and pain were to be constant reminders of our sin. We would even be born through great pain to our mothers. How much of this do we believe we have overcome through advances in medicine?

The Garden of Eden was a perfect world, they didn’t need clothes because as Genesis 2:25 says “they were … not ashamed”. This means in a spiritual sense when they had an unbroken connection with God, being naked was not wrong for them. It also means in a very practical way that the world they lived in had a balanced temperature (on a side note, what does that say about global warming?). After they were cast out, the world changed into the four seasons we now have. We can’t control the weather outside, though some scientists think we may someday, but we can control the weather inside with furnaces and air conditioning units.

Inside the Garden was a special tree called the tree of life, the fruit of which gave us immortality. Now at the most popular tourist destination in the entire world, Walt Disney World Resort in Florida, U.S.A., there is an attraction called the “Animal Kingdom”. In it stands a man made “tree of life”. Through Einstein, Hahn and Mietner we now know how to turn matter into energy. Creation is the reverse, turning energy into matter. Since the Lord created life and not just inanimate objects, we are trying to do the same through cloning and genetically modified organisms. Genesis 1:26 has God creating humanity “in His image”. With robotics and artificial intelligence we believe we will soon create beings in our own image, something which is very common in science fiction.

Adam and Eve were created perfect. Whatever that means exactly, it likely includes better mental abilities than we have today. They probably did not need to use written language. Since our memories are so poor, we have compensated by the use of modern media and created an impressive record of history today, through video, print and audio. From Genesis 11:1-9 the story is told of the Tower of Babel, where all the languages and cultures of this world originate. They were then plunged into darkness in the sense that they lost contact with each other. The whole earth has now been explored and everyone knows about everyone else. This same media system has grown from local outlets to ones that cover the globe.

Every society throughout history has always been ruled by an elite few. Usually they claimed some sort of divine right to be exalted above the common people. With the American Revolution and the rise of democracy, “power to the people” is now a vital part of Western civilization. However the Lord allowed the previous systems to exist because we do need someone like us to look up to. We need to be part of something bigger than ourselves. When in democratic societies the clergy and nobility were no longer venerated, people turned to the likes of Hollywood, the music industry and the world of professional sports to have someone to look up to. Within the last few years there has been a worldwide cultural revolution through what is now called “user generated content” on websites like Youtube and various social networking sites like Facebook. Bulletin boards and blogs are everywhere. Finally instead of waiting for someone else to tell us what to think, we all get to have our say.

Combine all this with the fact that we now have ventured beyond our world into the great heaven above and you can sum it all up in one thought. Mankind was once isolated from the rest of the universe by the Lord Himself, now we believe we have fully recovered from all the restrictions He placed upon us and are ready to take our place in the universe back for ourselves.

What possible purpose could God have had in mind when He allowed us to do all this through the last 500 years of growth? Well we think we’ve recovered, but are we really perfect yet? No. Though many may disagree, I believe the intellectual, cultural and political freedoms we have today were the result of the spiritual freedom that came to the world again when Martin Luther realized “The just shall live by faith.”, Romans 1:17. Jesus said in John 12:31, 32 “Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be cast out. And I, if I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all peoples to Myself.” By looking to Him we won’t need any other heroes. Acts 16:31, last part, says “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved, you and your household.”

Knowledge has increased but has wisdom? Jesus said in Luke 18:8 “Nevertheless, when the Son of Man comes, will He really find faith on the earth?” The modern mindset, being inspired by the principles of the French Revolution has now almost completely restored all that those revolutionaries tried to achieve in France from 1789-1799. The time of trouble to come will in part be shown to repeat the anarchy that came about as a direct result of setting aside God’s word. Trying to achieve intellectual, cultural and political freedoms without the first and most important freedom of being free from sin in Christ will be a failure.

It is a principle that for everything God does, Satan has a counterfeit. The devil will attempt to distort and change anything God does in every way he possibly can. I remember many years ago talking about the meaning of our modern age with my wife, Melissa. She gave me a great take on what purpose the devil must have today too. His message to us is “don’t you want to stay, don’t you want to believe you really can do achieve heaven on earth in your own power and strength after all?”

In the storyline of the original “The Day the Earth Stood Still” an alien came to visit us with an important message. Since we had discovered atomic weapons and were now experimenting with rockets; we were a threat to the rest of the universe, who all live in harmony. Is this not also another parallel to what is really happening today? Are there really beings out there watching us? What does the Bible really say about life on other planets? We will visit this question and more next.