Transcription
Let's open to Genesis 8. We're starting a series which I like to call the brave new world. Now, think about Noah and his family. When the ramp came down and they walked out of the ark, the landscape was littered, most likely, with whatever was left of the bloated carcasses of animals that had floated, that were strewn around. The pieces of driftwood, like after a storm, and just the beginning of the budding of the trees, which, of course, the dove had brought back. So they knew that there was life, and it was okay to come out. But just think of how desolate, how quiet, how alone they were. They were just like Adam and Eve in a world that was brand new, scrubbed clean by God and ready for them to start over. That's the brave new world of Genesis 8, 9, 10, and 11. And that's what we're going to survey because under our feet lay the results of Noah's flood. Sometimes it's more than a mile deep, and it's called the sedimentary layer. Kind of like a multi-layer cake of solid rock that shows the global extent of the destruction of the lost world by the flood. And all that remains of the world that perished in the Genesis flood is underneath that upwards of a mile of rock layers under our feet. There is no city. There are no walls. There are no towers. There are no villages that remain from the lost world. They all perished when God destroyed mankind. All remains of humanity from the world that perished in the Genesis flood have been buried a mile deep. So that means the brave new world was the world that Noah stepped into when he exited the ark. And the brave new world of Noah and his sons was a fresh start for man.
So, every time you read in the newspaper about some Stone Age tool, every time you read about some caveman's artifact, and every archaeological ruin that is ever discovered on the surface of this planet, I mean, anything that's less than a mile deep isn't from more than 5,000 or so years ago. Think about that. Every time they dig up another something and claim that that tooth reveals, you know, this huge biped figure, nothing on earth survived the flood in the world that perished in the Genesis flood.
Genesis 8-11 lays the foundation for every person on this planet, every nation on this planet, every culture on this planet, every legend, every myth. All come to us from the brave new world of Noah and his sons. First of all, in Genesis 8, the first 22 verses, this chapter 8, we're going to study God's plan for the ages and his map of history. And when Noah stepped out of that boat, God made a promise to him. He says, "I, I'll never destroy the earth again with what? A flood of water." But you know what he did reveal in this book? He said, "I'm going to destroy it again with a flood of fire." And God puts between that covenant, when he promised to the earth he would never flood it again, he puts a map out because someday he has promised that there's going to be a new heaven and a new earth in which dwells righteousness. The plan of the ages and the map of history. God has a plan of the ages. He has given the first piece of it as no more global floods. The last piece of it is the new heaven and the new earth. In between, we will see the age-old war between God and Satan, between man and demons, between the seed of the woman, of which Noah was the heir, and the seed of the serpent, which soon crept up.
Genesis 8 lays the scene for all future prophetic events. Genesis 9 is the caveman descent of man chapter, because every dig across this world that comes up with bone fragments and teeth and these strange pictures that they concoct depicting ape-like creatures that they've fabricated from a bone here and a skull piece there and some leg bone there. All of those pieces that they're digging up are those people that were crushed, that were destroyed either in the flood or the descendants of Noah. There are no other ape men. And actually, we'll see in chapter nine the descent of man. Darwin talked about the ascent of man and how man ascended from the primordial soup. Actually, mankind descended from the Garden of Eden. And we will see in chapter nine where modern man came from. Where do cave dwellers, fossils, and cave drawings all fit into this? And we will learn how to track the descent of mankind from Genesis 9 as we overlay Romans 1 across those words of Genesis chapter 9.
The last little part of it, starting in verse 20 of Genesis 9, if you want to flip over to there, will be our fourth look. The first look is God's plan of the ages and his covenant in chapter 8. The second stop will be caveman and the descent of man in chapter 9 through verse 19. But starting in verse 20, we're going to look at Canaan. It's a very interesting part of the Bible and the curse of sin. Because Noah stumbled, Ham, his son, sins, and Canaan gets cursed. That's interesting. What's going on? What was this curse that fell on Canaan? And why did they all, that is the Canaanites, need to be exterminated? And what does the present greatest conflict on this planet, the most volatile, the most dangerous conflict on this planet, and it gets worse every day, is the deep and abiding hatred of the Muslim religion for God, for Jews, and for Christians? What is that all about? And what does that have to do with the required extermination of the area of Palestine of these Canaanites? Well, is the present Arab Muslim hostility a part of Satan's long war on God? The last few verses in Genesis 9 explain the curse of sin to us.
Chapter 10 is going to be interesting because across the face of our world, we see ethnic rivalries, genocide, ancient hatreds, religions, regional warfare, nationalism is rising from the Balkans to the Orient. Terrorists try to get their concessions and gain independence in all parts of the world, from the Basque country to Northern Ireland to the current Palestinian problems. How did this all start? Chapter 10 of Genesis lays down the ultimate genealogy. You know how the Mormons have their big genealogical center so that you can go and baptize some folks and get them into that unfortunate and false religion? The whole genealogical thing is fascinating. But the accurate genealogy of the world is chapter 10, because every single person, their forebears, their forefathers, their families are listed right here. And if you truly know genealogy, you can trace back every tribe, every kingdom on this planet back to chapter 10 of Genesis as we look at genealogies and when God laid down the table of the nations.
And finally, chapter 11 is fascinating. The first nine verses talk about Babel, the Tower of Babel and the Tower of Babel's astrology. And I call this section the signpost to God, because over our head will be those bright dots of light we call stars. And what's amazing is many people in our world live by the stars. I mean, you go to QT and get and go, and you can get your little tube with your astrological forecast, and you go to a Chinese restaurant and you can get your fortune, and you can look in almost every paper in the country, there's an astrology section. And if your sign says you shouldn't do this, and you're devoted to the occult enough to even believe any of that stuff, you follow it, and people live by the stars falsely. And God always condemns it and says that it's occultic. But though God condemns all such activity as occultic, do the stars trace an ancient, even a divine pathway to God? We'll see that in Genesis 11:1-9, as God himself describes the fact that it is he who named the 12 constellations by their name. Actually, it says that in the Bible. The soothsayers and astrologers did not think that up. They perverted it, just like everything else. God named the 12 signs of the zodiac. It says in Job 38, "And he calls them his signposts which point to him."
Well, we're a part of the brave new world of Noah and his sons. And as we look around this planet, we find that there is no remnant of mankind that can be verified that predates the world that perished, the new Genesis flood. What I mean is this: there's no remaining building of any civilization. There's no pottery. There's no fragment. There's no tool. There's no giant living tree. There's no ancient fragment of writing. There's nothing on the planet that's older than 4,600 years. And that's from the scientists, because listen to this: all scientific study leads to the conclusion that something wiped out surface life on this planet about 5,000 years ago. Ten, they say, but five, probably. We live in this brave new world that was founded by Noah after the world that perished in the Genesis flood. And in this world, it is well known that the oldest living things on the earth are trees. Trees. Many of the giant Sequoia trees that populate our west coast of our country are known to be over 3,000 years old. And except for an unusual catastrophe, these trees are immune to disease. That's why if you want to spend a lot of money, you make something out of redwood, because they don't easily get eaten by termites. And those trees, when they're standing, unless they're struck by lightning or a forest fire destroys their living layer of bark, they will live indefinitely. They are among living things on earth, immortal appearing.
Note the following interesting observation, and I'm reading from an article from Science magazine. It says, "The most intriguing and unanswered question regarding the longevity of conifers has to do with the Sequoia gigantea trees, which is some way of saying the Sequoia giants. I don't know why they always have to talk in Latin for us because we don't understand Latin, but they always do in scientific journals, which some believe may enjoy perpetual life." This scientist, by the name of Edmund Schulman, says, "In the absence of any gross destruction, they appear immune to all predators." And this is what his article said in Science magazine: "Does that mean that shortly preceding 4,000 years ago?" And then he puts this little aside, "And if John Muir, remember the original naturalist John Muir, who protected the stands of trees, if his count of rings was correct, then shortly preceding 4,000 years ago, all the living Sequoias were wiped out by a catastrophe." Now, this scientist doesn't tell us what the catastrophe was. What's interesting is when you get to Yellowstone National Park, you see the Sequoias that used to be on this planet. They're bigger and they're more numerous than we can even imagine. And those redwood trees are jammed through solid rock, and they're vertically through hundreds of horizontal layers of sediment, and they're standing with the sediment. Millions of years, I might add, if you're an evolutionary person, millions of years of sediment are holding up giant Sequoia trees. Now I ask you, how'd that thing last for millions of years standing up? Of course, we know it's the flood. They don't. But could it be that God has left a marker that points to the world that perished in the Genesis flood? Could it be because there's no living member of the nearly immortal Sequoia trees that dates past the flood of Noah? Could it be that all living things merely date back to the brave new world of Noah and his sons? Is that a marker from God?
Consider the advance in the study of ancient trees. All findings that come out even this decade only further the proof of a recently settled brave new world. The Dendrochronological Laboratory, that means a place they study the age of trees in Arizona at the University of Arizona, recently discovered a stand of trees that were actually older than the Sequoias. And of course, these trees are in the White Mountains of California, and they're a group of trees called bristlecone pines. Now, listen to what the University of Arizona says, also not known to be a real Institute of Creation Research advocate, you know. Listen to what they say: "Only recently have we learned that certain stunted pine trees of arid highlands, not the mammoth trees of rainy forests, may now be called the oldest living things on Earth." They cut borings into these delicate ancient trees and they did core samples, and through microscopic study of growth rings that they bored in, it revealed to these scientists at the University of Arizona that a bristlecone pine tree that was found last summer surpasses the oldest known Sequoia by centuries. Why? This little tree hugging the side of a mountain at 10,000 feet elevation was found to be 4,600 rings old. I mean, they bored in. It's just it's not very big. And it has 4,600 concentric growth rings. Here's the conclusion: "Many of the neighbors of this bristlecone pine were found to be nearly as old. We have now," the scientists said, "dated 17 bristlecone pines older than 4,000 years, but none on Earth older than 4,600 years." That begs the question, what happened 5,000 years ago that wiped out these immortal, no known adversary living things that endlessly live unless they're burned or, I might add, flooded out.
So now think with me. Since these bristlecones, as well as Sequoias and other ancient trees, are still living, it is pertinent to ask why the oldest living things apparently had time to develop only one generation since they acquired their present stand. There is no record of a tree or anything being older than the reasonable date for the flood of Noah. Only God's brave new world records the dawn of God's fresh start for mankind. And the only accurate historical record you can find of the past you're holding in your hands tonight. Only one. And I want to explain what I mean by that, and then we'll read from it. Only God's word records the dawn of the brave new world we're living in. If you look at the book you hold in your hands, you should marvel at the remarkable antiquity of the Bible. There's no other book on earth like the Bible. This book records what is seldom appreciated by most people. Let me give you a brief history lesson, and I try and steer away from it, but I have trouble. That was my major in school in all fields, both in undergrad, masters, and doctoral work. I always loved history and worked in it. But let me condense down all of history to three little paragraphs. The Greek writer Herodotus, who is known as the father of history. Yet his writings, this is the most revered historian of the ancient world, Herodotus. His writings are contemporary with Nehemiah's. Do you know anything about the Bible? Nehemiah was at the end of the Old Testament. Nehemiah was a contemporary of Malachi. Yet the oldest historian that's respected on the planet was a contemporary of Nehemiah and Malachi, Herodotus. And they were the last of the Old Testament writers, not the first. This Bible predates any written history on the planet. But nobody wants it because they don't like what it says. Even though there has never ever been a historical mistake found in the Bible. Now, the Book of Mormon is replete with historical mistakes. The Vedas and all of the writings of the Hindus are filled with anachronisms and scientific total error. The writings of all the other great religions, all of them are just either they don't touch on anything historical, or everything they touch on is absolutely wrong. Every historic reference in this book has been found to be true, right down to the names of the leaders of ancient cities that they never heard of those people or of their titles until they excavated the city, and then they found it written in 3,000-year-old stone chiseled in, which nobody could have fabricated. This book is amazing. The writings of Homer. You ever heard of Homer? You know the Iliad and the Odyssey and all that stuff. Homer is a mixture of mythology and history. The line of demarcation between the history and the mythology is quite nebulous. You can't tell which part is true and which part is just part of his Greek mythology. But Homer dates from the same period as the sober histories of Samuel. You know Samuel, David and Samuel, that's when David was killing Goliath. Homer was spinning his mythologies of the Iliad and the Odyssey. And yet Homer is revered as an ancient writer. Let me conclude the third paragraph with this: The Bible records a detailed and accurate history that goes as far back as 42 centuries ago. That is 1,200 years before Homer. 1,200 years before not not Herodotus. We're talking about the earliest known writer of the ancient world is this Homer Iliadys guy, and the scriptures predate the earliest known writings by 1,200 years. So God gives us a record going back 42 centuries ago, and I don't mean his record goes back to creation, but I mean started to be written 4200 years ago, and that is the world of Abraham and beyond. Abraham was at least 1,000 to 1,200 years before Homer. And in the entire world, the result is there's no book like this book. God's word recording the dawn of the brave new world of Noah and his sons stands alone. The sacred books of the ancient records of every nation fade into dim tradition. They are nothing but sheer mythology. In fact, the books even written up to a few hundred years before Christ are just gobblygook. There's no historic threads in them. But all those dim when we look at the amazing scriptures of God, who incorporate huge amounts of sober history stretching back from the time of Nehemiah to the time of Samuel, to the time of Abraham, and back further even to the time of Job, when Job witnessed dinosaurs walking on the planet and great ice sheets recede, heating from the ice ages and the glaciers. Well, no other writing of such antiquity is at all comparable as a book of history to the Bible. And what we're going to read in just a moment is not mythology and it's not speculation. It is a divinely inspired and recorded history of the brave new world, which isn't very old, and in which you and I find ourselves. We're going to read from 15 through 19 of Genesis chapter 8. And then we're going to pray, and then I'm going to survey five chapters.
"And God spoke to Noah." That's the Bible. God, the eternal infinite Spirit who inhabits all the universe, who has revealed himself in this book. God spoke to Noah, saying, "Go out of the ark, you and your wife and your sons and your sons' wives with you. And bring with you out every living thing of all flesh that is with you, birds and cattle and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth, so that they may abound on the earth and be fruitful and multiply on the earth." So Noah went out, and his sons, and his wife, and his sons' wives with him. Every animal, every creeping thing, every bird, and whatever creeps on the earth, according to their families, went out of the ark. It's hard to read that verse without remembering that everything that went into the ark came out safely. God keeps those who are in the ark.
Let's bow together. Father in heaven, open our hearts as we look at a wonderful part of your word that is so thrilling. It's so encouraging. It so strengthens our faith that you are the God who has revealed what we, your people, need to know. Help us to treasure your word this week. Open our hearts to understand some great things tonight. In the name of Jesus, we pray. Amen.
I want to very quickly go through just a few parts of the scriptures. Look at Isaiah 49 with me. And all of these parts are looking at Genesis. But Isaiah, excuse me, 46 and verse 9, back in the Old Testament prophet of Isaiah 46:9, because God's plan of the ages is a map of history. And God tells us that he is the God who has mapped out history, and that we don't need to be worrying, and we don't need to be fretting, and we don't need to be always wondering what's going on as everything gyrates around us, and nations come and go, and lethal weapons proliferate, and rogue nations get off into their biological and chemical and nuclear arsenals. This is what God says. Isaiah 46:9. And I hope you have it all starred and highlighted and marked and arrowed like I do. "Remember the former things of old. For I am God, and there is no other. I am God, and there is none like me." What makes you unique, God? What is distinctly different about you? Verse 10, he says, "Declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times things that are not yet done, saying, 'My counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure.'" You know what God says? I'm God because I can tell you what's going to happen in the future. I can tell you right down to the donkey that's going to be tied up by the door that my son's going to ride on that nobody else ever sat on. And I can tell you about it a hundred years or a thousand or 1500 years before it happens. And it will happen just as I say. And that is God's claim to who he is, because he says, "I alone declare the future, and I am God."
What does that mean? Well, it means that no man or angel or demon can predict scientific events or historical events or specific events and personages that will appear scores or even hundreds of years in the future. Only God can do this. Why? Ephesians 1:11: "God works all things after the counsel of his own will." So God, in his word, the Holy Scriptures, and only there, prophesies a future. In fact, you're in Isaiah, turn back to Isaiah 40 for just a minute and listen to God's bold statement. Isaiah 40 and verse 15: God says, "Behold, the nations are as a drop in a bucket." You ever heard that expression, "a drop in the bucket"? There are so many biblical phrases. "He has feet of clay," "the handwriting on the wall," you know, all these. They're from the Bible because God has revealed that he is great. "And are counted as the small dust on the scales." God says, you know, when you come up and you go blow off the scales and get that dust off the scales, he says, that's what all of humanity and all the nations and all of their newest proliferated missiles and everything else are just there is dust. He said they're like dust on the scale. "Look, he lifts up the isles as a very little thing, and Lebanon is not sufficient to burn." You know, if God's going to make a campfire, all the forests of Lebanon, he says, wouldn't even start his fire. I mean, he is so great and so marvelous.
Well, God has determined the history of the nations. Daniel 4:17 says, "The Most High ruleth in the kingdoms of men, and he gives it to whoever he wills, and nations have frequently been the subject of biblical prophecies." In fact, Daniel 2 gives the sequence of empires. God says, "This is going to be the road map of history." And he lays out all of the great world empires to the end of the world. Let anybody else try and do that and even come close. And it's remarkably a foreview of world history that God laid out.
One more thing we'll see in this section of Genesis 8 when we go through it next time is the miracle of Israel, because the continued existence of the Jews after all the centuries of their dispersal is most unique in all of human history. And it's a mute and it's an eloquent testimony that God said, "I place my love on those people, and I placed my name on those people, and those people are going to be my witness in this world." And if you touch Israel, God says, "You're sticking your finger in my eye." You want something painful? Let someone stick their finger in your eye. God says, "You touch Israel, you're poking me in the eye." What's amazing is not only did Israel become great like God promised, and God promised they would be great 1,200 years before they were great when he told Abraham that, and under David and Solomon, they were the greatest of all. In fact, Solomon was the wealthiest king on this planet. Nobody exceeded him in riches or wealth or wisdom. But not only that, but the nations who have been kind and befriended the Jews, notably the United States, and to a lesser degree England and France and a few others, have indeed been blessed. And let me remind you that the reason America continues to coast along is because we have a continued, though tacit and very tenuous, kindness toward Israel. The nations that have not been kind to Israel, those that have persecuted the Jews, as in Egypt, are gone. Ancient Egypt, Babylon, dust. Assyria, gone. Rome, fallen. Spain, Nazi Germany, annihilated. Russia's time is coming. But every nation that has harmed Israel has eventually gone down to defeat and humiliation. Now, what other nation? I mean, can you say that about, you know, the Bugaloosa people of Africa? No way. Can you say that about some tribe of the South Pacific? No way. They've come and gone. You touch Israel, you poke God.
Chapter nine, for just a moment of Genesis. Let's get back there to finish up. Chapter 8, we're going to look at the covenants and promises of God and the road map of history. That'll be a great time next time. But after that, the next week after that, we're going to look at the descent of man and caveman. You know, the subject of human origins has been so distorted for over 100 years by evolutionism. All the displays in museums, all the pictures in magazines, and even most textbooks and schools have persuaded people that we have an animal ancestry. But the world believes that our animal ancestry leads back through these intermediate stages of ape-like creatures that were our ancestors. And most notably, there's this long list of these near relatives of ours, of which one you've heard of, and still is in the books, the Neanderthal man. I like this article from a recent issue of a science magazine, by no means Christian nor creationist. The Nature magazine said this: "The Neanderthal man was evidently a normal human. No ape, no monkey, no evolution, who was the victim of his own decision to move too far north at the wrong time. And the absence of sunlight and proper vitamins caused him to stoop and slump and walk and be deformed." You know, this picture of the Neanderthal man from Nature magazine fits well with the concept of the post-flood man struggling to live in this new world. The glacial period which followed the flood was brought on by the total climactic conditions that changed by the flood. Although a global mild subtropical climate had been everywhere. I mean, the biggest coal fields in the world are in Antarctica. Some of the most lush vegetation in the world is under Siberia today. Those mammoths that we looked at a few weeks ago, those things need hundreds of pounds of lush vegetation every day to live on, and they were up by the North Pole. So there was this tropical climate all over the world. But the greenhouse effect of the world that perished was utterly changed by the flood. When the canopy of water was precipitated to flood, the present, and this is what the scientists call it, latitudinal and continental extremes of temperature became established. Snow began to fall. Great continental ice caps developed, and the glaciers pushed south, and the resulting glacial epoch persisted for centuries in the northern latitudes. And that's why at the same time there were warmer climates and great civilizations that developed in the lower latitudes. That's why in history, the great early civilizations fan out from the area around the ark, and the northern European civilizations are later because the recession and the receding of the glaciers had to occur before they could move north.
Well, we'll see that because only God's word explains the brave new world of Noah and his sons. In two chapters in the Bible, Genesis 10 and 11, give the divine record of the so-called Paleolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic ages of archaeology. The world of Abraham was already into the so-called Bronze Age. And we know that these are all conjectural, these ages that they put up. They're just to sell museum space. And they're only based on evolutionary assumptions, because even today there are primitive tribes alive. They have Paleolithic, that's Old Stone Age tools. I mean, they're out there. Read the National Geographic. They're chronicling them. At least they tell the truth about that. Not about these bird dinosaurs. They lie about that. But at least they tell the truth about the Stone Age cultures that use crude stone implements and tools at the very same time that we enjoy the electronic, cellular, digital, terabyte age that we live in.
In our study of the lost world, we saw that man had a high degree of culture and technology before the flood. But after Noah and his family left the ark, they were armed only with what they had learned and retained in their minds and whatever they were able to carry on to the ark. So at the beginning of the brave new world, they were forced to make use of stone and wooden implements. And that lasted until they could finally find the veins of metallic ores they knew were out there in the rocks of the newly formed lands of the world. And I'm sure that caves were often their first resort for shelter until they could find the time and the supplies to build something else. And so the Neolithic cultures and the Paleolithic cultures of early man, when rightly interpreted, are merely a commentary on how hard it was to survive in those small tribes of people after the flood.
Well, chapter 9, verse 20 is the next message, our fourth stop in this series. And we're going to look at what happened with Noah when he got drunk. What happened with Ham when he looked with sinful intent at his father? And why did God curse Canaan? And above all that, what is going on there? What was the curse? And why did God exterminate Canaan? Chapter 10, when we go through there, we're going to look at the races and we're going to look at the fact that the Bible clearly teaches that all present races and nations and tribes and languages have been derived from Noah's three sons and their three daughter-in-laws and a few thousand years since the flood. And the development of the present world population from this beginning is very reasonable and very conservative. You just take an analytical program and program in three couples who could live 500 to 600 years and who could beget children and see how big and how fast the population could mushroom in a world that had very little disease. They had very little problem with any type of great catastrophe because it was just fresh from the flood. And you'll see that it's very possible that everything could be here in 5,000 years.
Finally, I want to stop with 11:1-9. And what I want to say there is, could it be that God directed that revelations about him be engraved upon the only indestructible system that the ancient world knew about, namely the starry heavens? And could it be that those groupings of stars that were familiar to the people who had no television to blank out their ability to think with, and they would just gaze at the stars at night? Could it be that those constellations, who marched month by month across the heavens and then would return again in the same patterns the following year, did God present to someone that those star groups and movements could be utilized as a divine panoramic record of the plan of salvation? And does it say that in the Bible? And here's the last verse, and we'll stop in Job 38. Okay, turn to Job. Let's go to the middle of the Bible, Psalms, and back up one to Job 38. And this is very interesting. Verse 32. By the way, the book of Job mentions five of the 12 signs of the zodiac, the constellations, by name. Job mentions five of them. Job is the earliest book of the Bible, the setting of the book of Job, other than the creation account and the genealogical records. Job goes right back there, right after the flood, right after Noah. He was an early descendant of Noah. And so he's right back there at the beginning. And he knew five of the 12 just like that and mentions them by name. Look at verse 32 of Job 38. "Can you bring out Mazaroth?" That's interesting. If you have a marginal note like my Bible has, it's just a normal Bible. It says literally, "the constellations." That's literally the 12 of the zodiac. That's what Mazaroth means. The key biblical reference to the constellations being the signposts of God could be this verse right here. We know the word "Maser" means the 12 signs of the zodiac and their associated constellations. And every conservative scholar that has ever commented on the book of Job, and every commentary that's ever been written by an evangelical or conservative, agree that that word means the zodiac. I mean, it's nice to come to a part of the Bible you don't have everybody disagreeing on. Everybody agrees that when it says, "Can you bring out Mazaroth in its season?" or "Can you," and here's one of them, "or can you guide the Great Bear with its cubs?" It's one of the 12. Who's talking, by the way? Is it one of the comforters of Job? Is it Job? Is it the devil? No. The Lord starts speaking in verse 1 of chapter 38. God names the zodiac. Well, it could be from the context. It could be strongly implied that the bringing forth of the 12 constellations of the zodiac is something that God had ordained.
Well, let me ask you this. Have you ever thought about the fact that God's plan for the ages has been written? We should trust him with our future. Have you ever thought about the fact that the descent of man is a warning of what happens with those who don't keep God in their mind? Have you ever wondered about why God cursed the sin of Canaan so heavily? Have you ever pondered the fact that the table of nations shows that the earth and our present population and the present nations and the present tribes are less than 50 centuries old? Have you ever thought about the fact that astrology and the zodiac were previously the signposts God put across the skies to give a revelation of his salvation? Let's ask God to open our hearts to behold wonderful things from his word. Let's bow together.
We thank you, O Lord, for giving us these chapters in your book. Every word of God is pure. All scripture is profitable. And I pray that we would mine out the profit for the instruction and righteousness that we need to live in the day we live. We know that all truth is given to us that we might grow in Christlikeness and that we might go with the compassion of Christ to win a lost and dying world. We know that your will is that none perish, that all be saved. And we know that for us, your will is that we be spirit-filled and sanctified. May we seek to speak for you. And I would pray even tonight within this room are the key members of your team that can speak to neighbors and relatives and friends and schoolmates and work friends and bring them to hear the good news of salvation. How wonderful it would be if many turn to you, Lord Jesus. What great rejoicing there could be if we see a great harvest of those who need to know that you died in their place and need to receive that new heart you promised. We pray that you'd bless us as we serve and follow you. In the name of Jesus, we pray. Amen.
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