and people all over in America. This once was a Christian nation and there were great Christian people and they weren't all highly educated people. Even the ordinary people were into the scripture and they read the scripture and they accepted it and live according to it. But today we're going just in the opposite direction. The Bible is mocked at every point and it's sort of like democracy, which is being mocked by many people. They call themselves believers in democracy. They even call themselves Democrats. But some of them and some of the Republicans are against true democracy, and they're working against it. And only a revival of God's Word can save our nation. I believe that we're headed towards socialism and that the speed is very, very fast and very quickly. And of course, under the last administration, the democratic rule of our nation, they made a lot of steps towards socialism. Socialism basically means that the state makes decisions for us. And we aren't allowed to make very many decisions for ourselves. It means that the state feels that they know, the politicians know more about what we need in every area than we know. It's a way of making us all children of the state. And that, to me, is a terrible, terrible thing. All right, at any rate, let's return to Genesis 1. Now, the biblical account of creation provides purpose and direction in life. That's what our children need. That's what we need. And if you're a Christian, that's what you receive from the scripture. But if you don't believe the Bible, then you have to create a different purpose and a different direction. So there's three points. You can see them probably in the bulletin, the outline. First, the significance of this account, the whole thing. I only read five verses. because I really don't want to address the whole thing. It's sort of an introduction to the creation. What's the significance of this creation? Well, God gives it to us to give us purpose and direction, to tell us, why are we here? And where should we be going? It gives us meaning. It answers the question, where did everything come from? Now, I suppose there are people that walk around a life and don't care where it came from. And some of them are young and some of them are old. They don't care where we came from. But mankind has struggled with that for a long, long time. And they've devised one system after another to explain where we came from. Probably the most ridiculous system is called evolution. Now, I say it's ridiculous because they believe that matter is not eternal. And they believe that energy is not eternal. Well, then where did it all come from? Where did it come from? If it's all eternal, where did it come from? They have no answer. It just appeared. It just happened, which means it says that it's meeting us. Some of them talk about the Big Bang. Well, when you had a Big Bang, you have to have something to go bang. There has to be something there. And where did it come from? The physicists tell us that energy is not eternal. I accept that. Energy in itself is not eternal. But if energy isn't eternal, where did the Big Bang come from? Where did all that stuff come from? Whatever it was that went bang. And the problem is, the difficulty is, they have to make up something. We came from somewhere. We just didn't suddenly appear. We do exist. And thankfully, they don't try to deny that like some of the people in India do. If you don't accept the scripture, you have no explanation of where everything came from. If you accept evolution, if you're that intelligent, then you just feel there's no meaning in life. They're just like animals. What meaning does an animal have? The pigs have no morals. They have no purpose in life. They live. They eat. They do all kinds of nasty things. They do all kinds of good things. They just exist, and that's the way people are without Christ. They don't want to know what the meaning of their life is. They don't know how we got here. Most of them don't think deeply enough to consider how that we have. You have all these great, brilliant scholars in America, brilliant minds that say it all came from a big bang. Energy isn't eternal. It just was there. They don't answer where it came from. They just don't offer sufficient answers. And they don't teach young people to think that deeply about it. It just was there. And suddenly, it went pop. And it began everything. And so we get the earth and everything and all life and all that. And it all came by a perfectly natural meaning. Now, if the mechanism is natural, and there's no real meaning to us, there's no meaning behind it, then that tells us that in our lives there's no meaning. We used to raise pigs and cows and we had dogs and cats on the farm and I never did talk to them about, why are you here? They have no answer. They have no voice, of course. But they have no answer. And when you get your pigs and you put them in a truck, they don't like being in the truck. Usually they squeal and complain. That doesn't make any difference. They're just pigs. And then you take them off to the market. You cut their heads off and chop them all up and cook them and eat them. That's what they're here for. But they don't believe that. They don't know what's going on. And that's the way our young people are today. They're just like a bunch of animals that with no purpose in life except to have fun. Well, what's fun? Well, some of them spend their fun with getting drunk. And so they're so drunk they can't walk. They don't know which way to go. Ultimately, they know, if they think very much, if most of them don't, that drunkenness is not a way of life. It's a way to destroy life. Some of them are on dope. And it's well-named, isn't it? They get pretty dopey. But the dope doesn't give you anything in life. It draws you away from life. And they give their lives to this stuff. And they give their lives to self-gratification, just like the pigs. If you go out to the farm and you look at the pigs, they're pretty happy. They really are. There's no complaining in the pig pen. And they just eat. They'll just eat anything that's in front of them. They're not as selective as we are. We have better taste beds than they do. But they're pretty. broad in what they'll eat, and it's pretty disgusting if you watch them. Cows are a little better. They're more selective in what they'll eat. Not because they're smarter than the pigs, but because just biologically, I think that God made them that way. They won't eat pig food. They won't eat what the pigs eat. The pigs will eat what the cows will eat. You see, that's the way we are. Human beings act, if they don't have the Lord, they act like a bunch of animals. They're here to enjoy themselves. Meanwhile, they get themselves into a terrible amount of trouble. If our kids grow up and they're not a Christian at a young age, my children, they get in terrible trouble. I mean, they have the thought of the morality of the scripture and they reject it because it doesn't give them enough money or it doesn't give them enough enjoyment. or they just don't want to live that way. It's too restrictive. Worship is too hard for them because it's just not fun. It's not like going to a rock concert. It's not like going to some place where you have all that joy there. But that joy comes back and destroys you. And they don't seem to realize that. I'm thankful that I have two children, now three, now that are really born again. I have one that went out into the ways of the world and did terrible things. And I'm not saying any stories on him because he's already probably told most people his story. He was raised in the church. He knew all the Bible verses that he could. And he's a smart boy. And he knew a lot of Bible. He knew a lot of the hymns. And he'd even sung solos in church and taught Sunday school and did all kinds of things. And yet when he got out into his own life, he turned his back on the Lord and became just like the rest of the heathen. And he found he had a snake by the tail. He had a poisonous snake by the tail. I'm not going to tell you her name, but that was the first wife. And so that one ended up in divorce. He says, I'll try another one. And he went out in the same way looking for enjoyment, because he was not looking really for a family life. But he was looking, well, I guess he was. But he got a hold of another snake. And that one was more venomous than the first one, or at least as venomous as the first one. And so now he's, then they had a child together. And finally, God brought him down to nothing. He was broke, completely broke. He had no place to go. He could not afford any place. And so he finally called the church. And he called a good church, a gospel-believing church. And I thank God for that. And I didn't know what was happening. He did this down there in Texas. Texas is not the land of the free. They're just as sinful as Colorado is, or Iowa, or any of the other states. And so he got himself in tremendous trouble. And he had nothing. He had almost no income. And he went to the church. And at first, they had a little extra building in this particular congregation. And they let him stay in there. So he slept on the floor. And just ate very, very little. He had a job, I think. But it was tough going for a while. But he was glad to be out from the shackles of the devil. I mean, he understood. He came to the point where God explained to him, opened his eyes, that he was living under the shackles of the devil. And the devil had imprisoned him and destroyed his life. And he was headed for even worse things. But thankfully, God converted him. It's not knowledge that converts, although it's good to give our children knowledge. But they have to be born again. And God has to change your heart so you understand that the way of the world is the way of death. And some young people, they just won't accept that until God talks to you. I was saved when I was about seven or eight years old, I think. I don't remember the day. I just remember that I heard the preaching that you must be born again, that you're evil. And unless you repent, you're going to hell. And God worked in my life, so I believe that. And then I've been saved ever since then. Now, there are a lot of false theology in the church where I was saved, and God brought me out of all that and brought me into the Reformed faith. But it's not a matter of how smart you are. They're very, very smart people that are going to help. And they're very, very dumb people that are going to heaven. So it's not a matter of how smart you are. It's what does God want to do with you? The Arminianism says, it argues that it's how smart you are. You make the choice, and you have to convince yourself that the Bible is true. And then God gives you this choice. And if you make the right choice, then you go to heaven. If you make the wrong choice, you go to hell. And there's many, many, many choices in life in Arminianism, because as many times as you hear the gospel, you have to make the choice. And the Bible says that's not right. Because the people that aren't saved, it's like talking to a brick wall. They don't understand what you're saying. I mean, they don't believe it's true. They like what they're doing. They think it's good. They think it's fine. They think that the Bible is a life of bondage. But you know, they're the ones that are in bondage. God at a very young age for me, I'm thankful to him that he brought me out of unbelief. Then it was a long time. walking through the halls of Arminianism before I realized and saw in the Scripture of my God working in my heart the truth. But if you don't have the Lord, if you don't accept the record in the Scripture in the beginning, there's a beginning. There's a beginning. And almost everybody believes there's some kind of a beginning. But they wrap it up in their human explanation so that the beginning is not the same thing as what God says in the Bible. But in the beginning, God created. They don't like the idea of God creating. And they reject that. And that's a rebellion against God. And it'll send them to hell. And there are all kinds of brilliant people, not so brilliant people, but millions, all kinds of people, men and women and young people, cannot accept that God began it all, because if God began it, then we are responsible to God to continue in the way, in the work that he did. And they don't want to do that. Where did everything come from? God. How did it come? God created it. Why am I here? Well, if you accept this, what the Bible starts with, then you say, I'm here to serve God. It's not that clearly stated, but you say that God's the one that made it, and we have enough common sense to know that if we're living in somebody's home, that they own the place and they have the right to tell us what to do. And even if we don't like it, when I was a little boy, I'm sure I was rebellious. My brother was famous for his rebellion in our family. He liked to be spanked. And when my dad spanked him, he laughed. Guess what that made my dad do? You're right. He got spanked. Every day. And when he laughed, he just got one or two more stripes. And he still laughed. And to this day, he's laughing at God. But by God's grace, I thought it was better to obey than to get spanked. I mean, isn't that a very simple thing? It's better to obey rather than get punished. And it's that way with God. It's better to obey the Lord. God's the father of everything. And if we don't obey him, we get punished. And if we do obey him, we don't get everything we want. I know in our family, I didn't get everything I wanted, but I didn't get the one thing I didn't want. I didn't want to be spanked. And so I was the good little boy. My father really disliked me because of that. But every night, what'd he do? Every night he'd come home. He wouldn't do his chores, whatever that was. And he would maybe sass my father, or maybe he'd do something else. daring my dad to discipline him. He got it. He got it. It seems to me like it was every night. I suppose it wasn't that much. But he was really stubborn. And you see lives. If you know people, your neighbors and your friends and your relatives, I mean, they just look at God in the eye and laugh at him and say, beat me. And he does. And then they get angry at God. But it's their own fault. If they'd only obey, they'd get blessings, not the beatings. My father, my brother, never learned that. To this day, he's not a believer in Christ. And he's about ready to answer for it. He spent his whole life apart from God. Now he's at the end of his life, and what does he have? Only death. Nothing. It's hopeless for him. Nothing. And I think in his heart of hearts, he knows that there's a hell, but I don't know that for sure. Believing in the creation by God gives us meaning, what things mean, it gives us purpose, it answers the question, why am I here? What am I supposed to do? I'm here because God put me here, and I'm supposed to do what he says. And how should I live? Well, it tells us about the reality of our sin, ultimately, and that sin is everywhere, and that God gives us the Bible. So this book here, we start with it. This is the promise of everything that we need to know. Are there things in the Bible that we probably could do without? Yes, probably so. But God thought those were useful to us. If you've ever read the Old Testament, I mean, there's stories and stories and stories and stories of people, some of whom are godly and some of whom are not godly. And you see example after example of example of how to live or how not to live. That's what that's for. Some of them are powerful and brilliant, like David, and some of them aren't so smart. I don't know which ones those were, but I guess Abel is one of those. Cain and Abel. Abel was not the smartest. He wasn't the brightest light on the block. But he was sufficiently bright, he was sufficiently good that he believed and trusted in God. That's one of the great things about the Bible. It doesn't take brilliance to be a Christian. It takes God saving us. It takes God's working in our minds and in our hearts. You're not a born-again believer because you're smarter than other people. Then you may be. We may have a whole room full of geniuses here. And I mean, multiple geniuses. You could be smarter than Einstein or anybody else. But it's not smart. It's not smarts that make the difference. It's what did God do in your life? Did God change your mind? And when he changes your mind, then you turn to him and you seek to live for him. So the alternatives to believing the orderliness and creation and God and everything is evolution. And evolution says there's no purpose in life. How are young people living? I mean, most of them in America. And it's not just young people or adults. What do they live for? They live for themselves and for their own enjoyment, for their own pleasure. And so what do they do? They do whatever in their mind gives them pleasure. And they get their lives destroyed and ruined. Evolution is meaningless. It tells you there's no purpose in life. They marshal all their evidence and everything, and they put it before our young people. And our young people are just like the fish. When you go fishing, you put a worm. We used to fish with worms. I don't know if that's still done. But we'd put a worm on a hook, and a little fish, he'd come along and bite on the hook. And then he'd be caught. We'd eat him. And the devil's hook, the thing that looks good to people today, is evolution. And it's a lie. It's not true. How did the soul come to be? Well, I think they don't believe there is a soul. Men and women are just like animals. And so consequently, those who believe that act that way. Animals, they don't have anybody that's their judge. I remember the cows and the pigs and the chickens and all what they did in the farm. There was no morality there. It was just who was ever toughest. And it was a terrible confusion. of just the sexual pleasures of a few in the barnyard, especially among the chickens. The big rooster, he would beat everybody up, and he'd have all the girls. I mean, it's just like in our society. You have a lot of that going on. But there's no meaning in that life, and there's no significance. Evolution is not the explanation. I remember once hearing a debate between engineers matter, is matter eternal? And some of them said yes, and some of them said no. Well, how do they know it's eternal? How, you know, things, how they know that matter, isn't that far removed from reality? We're all made out of matter. We're all made out of stuff, and that stuff, is that stuff eternal? Well, if it is, then there's no beginning, and then there's no meaning in life. It's not going anywhere. It has no purpose in life. And that's what our young people today accept and live by. So the alternative to creation is confusion. You can either believe in creation or confusion. Can you get by in life without believing in creation? Absolutely. You can even have a certain degree of happiness and a large degree of success. If Trump is not a Christian, he's a smart man, he has a lot of good things about him, and he's made a lot of money and whatever, but if he isn't saved by the blood of Jesus, he's going to hell. And all the riches that he has when he dies are just going to go on to somebody else. He started to build his empire around him. He's got some good children. They seem to be brilliant people and smart people. And they've got a lot of money. But money doesn't give you the fullness of life. It may to him in the short term. But when you die, how much money are you going to take with you into the grave? It's nothing. All of his money means nothing. Once he's dead, he's gone. If he's not a believer, he's going to hell. And he's given me no reason to believe that he is a believer. He's a smart man. I believe he's a smart man, and he has a lot of good ideas. But he's going to go to hell. And the life that he's going through is far worse than anything he can imagine now. The Bible tells us what hell's going to be like. It's not fun and games in hell, although the ungodly believe it is. You know, they're not afraid of dying. If I die, most of them believe I'm just gone. It's just like putting out a light. It's not like putting out a light. You have an eternal soul. How do I know that from the Bible? And your eternal soul, if you're not going to go to heaven and be with the Lord forever, then you're going to go to hell. And that's a real place. And we need to teach our children about hell. They need to hear that this is, if you're not saved, you're going to be responsible for everything you do. And so you should cry out to the Lord. but only God will change their minds. That's the frustrating part of it. No matter how smart you are, no matter how persistent you are with your children, and you should be smart, and you should be persistent, but if they don't believe in Jesus Christ, they're going to hell, and we can't make them save, only God, and so we need to pray very much for God's work. Well, one of the things these five verses teach us, or at least, They rest on this doctrine, the doctrine of inerrancy. Inerrancy is a doctrine that means the Bible makes no mistakes, it has no errors. Liberals have tried for over 2,000 years, or however many years they've been around, to prove that the Bible is full of mistakes and errors. And you can get books demonstrating how many mistakes and errors there are in the Bible. But the believers have answered all those books with other books that go with the system one thing after another to demonstrate and explain. We live in a wonderful day in the history of Christianity because we have a lot of archaeological evidence from the Bible, from archaeology. And we know that these cities in the Bible did exist. They're not just the imaginations and the creations of the Bible writers. These ancient cities that they talk about in the Bible, they exist. And they exist in the areas that the Bible puts them. I mean, that's amazing. I remember in my lifetime, they discovered the city of Ebla. It's on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, somewhere where old Phoenicia ought to be. And it was a city that no one ever knew. They thought they just found all the large cities in the ancient world. And it is just not true. They found Ebla. It's a large city. They had a huge, huge library from 2,500 BC to 2,000 BC. It's one of the oldest ruins we found. Well, I mean, it's marvelous. It's a full library. They recorded everything in writing. Of course, it's Babylonian, and so it's a little difficult. Babylonian with a certain other influence, because it was not absolute clear. I'm not going to go into all that. But at any rate, it explains how everything they bought, they wrote it down. I mean, they were careful in their records Every interview they had with somebody, the kings would write it down and put it in the library. So they had this huge library of clay tablets from 22 to 2,500 BC. You don't imagine. Liberalism believes that all our knowledge has to be from 2,000 BC and on. And then they find ebla. Wow. And it has all these things. Abraham was a little bit closer to 2000 than he was closer to 2500. At least that's what the records say or what we're told. And so this could be very much in the time of Abraham. And what it tells us, the liberals, you can get the book still, the liberals don't believe that there were people that could come from the area of Babylon into the area of Israel the way Abraham, they believe that's just a myth. But we've got records of people that traveled there and they had large caravans and went with their trade from back and forth between the two areas. I mean, this is an amazing discovery. I don't know if the TV or anything put on it anything about Ebla, but that was an amazing discovery. So we don't believe the Bible because of Ebbwa. We maybe can't validate everything. And people all down through the ages, long before there was the science of archaeology, they believed the Bible because God instructed their hearts. And it's a wonderful thing when you have some of this confirmation stuff. But we believe the Bible like they believe the Bible because of the work of God in our hearts. It's God that instructs us in the reality and truth of the Bible. When you read the Bible, it speaks to your life. You don't hear a voice, but you hear an amen in your heart and your life. God says that I'm wicked, and that's true. And he gives me his laws in the Bible. And he says, live this way and you'll please me. And I do them because I believe it pleases God. But it also makes for a better life. The Bible says you shouldn't lie. Now, what I found in life is almost everybody lies. They lie, businessmen, politicians, your friends, your family. And the Bible tells us not to lie. So it's our duty before God to please him and be people that don't lie, even if it's going to be to our own hurt. We don't lie. We don't murder. Now, in our society, that's part of our society that we don't murder. But in the ancient world, it was part of the society that you do murder. If you had a person and you didn't like him, and for some reason or other he was bad to you, you just went out and killed him. You see that with Cain and Abel. You see it all through the Bible, people murdering other people. And God says you shouldn't murder. So in our society, in a Christian society, we are told you don't murder. You get right by the law. You have laws in the land. And the Bible gives a bunch of laws, and initially our Society built fundamentally on the Bible. Now we're getting quite a bit away from that, from the Bible and the whole idea that the heart of the law should be biblical law. But we still have a lot of it there. We don't murder. We try not to steal. And the Bible points out to us that stealing is wrong. And so we believe as church, and we try to teach it to our children, you don't steal. And sometimes when things get tough, I know I was tempted early in my life to steal. It was easy to do. I could go into the local grocery store, and if I was careful and saw the owner turn his back, I could get some candy. And I did that for a while. And then finally, God talked to me and made me a Christian. And I realized that was evil, even if I got by with it. It was not getting by with it that was good, as I thought. But that was evil. And so we try to live our lives according to the Bible. We don't believe the Bible is inerrant, because the Bible says so. But the Bible, incidentally, in today's world, evangelicalism, and I came out of evangelicalism in the Baptist church, and there are now, inerrancy used to mean what it means in the Reformed faith. There are no mistakes in the Bible in history or in doctrine. And then now, in at least the church I came out of, I don't know how many did do this, but I know there's those in that church, it might be through the whole church, that they divide between inerrancy and infallibility. They used to be the same meaning, but inerrancy has to do with whether or not there are errors in history, and infallibility has to do with whether or not there are errors in doctrine. And so you can believe that the Bible is infallible But errant. Or you can twist it around. I've seen both things done. But they don't stick to the total doctrine of inerrancy. But we believe the Bible and what it tells us historically is true, no matter how ridiculous it might be. People make fun of the story of Noah and the boat that he built. Now they think they've found it. I don't care if they find it or not. They made a model of it, and you can go and visit it in Missouri somewhere. And that's good. We know from the book. Every society, almost, that's in existence has a story of the flood. Did you know that? They have mankind in some way or other saved. Not all of them by a boat. It's very unique. There's a lot of interesting stories. It's right, it's there. Almost every society believes that there was a boat, and there was a flood, and that mankind was saved, most of them, by the god or gods. But the only one that has a boat that floats is the Bible. The Mesopotamia, the Babylonian story, has a Noah. His name's not Noah, but it has another name. And he built a boat. But if you built that boat today, it wouldn't float. But the Bible, the boat floats. You'd expect that, wouldn't you? But the unbelievers, they don't believe the Bible's true. But we know that. We know that it floats. There's a story in the Bible that talks about the tower that people built, the Tower of Babel. And the Tower of Babel is another one of those stories that the liberals ridiculed. But not so long ago I read an article, I can't remember where it was, where it talked about pyramids all over the earth, all over the world from very early times. Basically the same structure and the same technology to build them. How did all those all over the earth get that idea of the pyramids? Well, the liberals said that was because there were spacemen. I mean, this was actually someone's explanation. That's because a spaceman came down, and they told him how to do it, and then they went all over the earth in different societies and different times and taught him how to build a pyramid. And so that's how they all came, because it's really pretty, I guess it's pretty advanced technology for the ancient peoples, unless you believe the ancient peoples. If you're a liberal, you believe they're like monkeys. They're one step away from monkeys, and monkeys can't build pyramids. But men were not monkeys. We were created in the image of God. And God instructed the men, the people that build the Tower of Babel, how to build the tower. And it makes good sense to me that there's a story of towers, of pyramids, all over the world, long before they had them in Egypt. They're all over the world. That's what you'd expect. They have a common source in the world. There's all society in the Bible. All society comes from one society. That's the one that God traces in the Bible. And of course, the liberals can't accept that. You can't accept that all society came from just that one society. That's just nonsense. And then they give you all these stuff. I remember when they were digging up the proofs of the first man-like creatures. And where was that? Uganda, Uganda or someplace like that in northern Africa. And they'd go over there and they dug up this creature. And they took the skeletons and made them into little monkeys. And so they said, this is the first. That's not the first man. And then a few years later after they did that and they gave those people the Nobel Prize and all this honor and whatever, for being really brilliant and finding this. Then it turned it all out to be a hoax. It doesn't have to be a hoax, but it just happened. It's sort of strange that it was a hoax. But the Bible stories aren't hoaxes. These are historical records from the ancient world. So we have these three stories. The creation, the story of the creation is very similar to the story of ancient Sumer. And we don't know how old Sumer was, but it was the oldest ancient Near Eastern civilization that we know of. And their account of the creation is repeated and by the Babylonians. And I've got a document that I brought that traces out the similarities. But it's close enough that you can see the creation story in the Babylonian story. There's the same kinds of things. And some of the ridiculous things that the Bible liberals made fun of, like the Bible says that the sun, there was light before there were the light bearers in the creation account. There was light before there were light bearers. And of course, the liberals pointed out how ridiculous that is. How can you have light without light bearers? The Babylonian story says the same thing. We have light before there were light bearers because light doesn't depend upon the things of the creation. It depends upon God. And if God created light, he created light. And later, he created things that would sustain that and have light bearers. I mean, if you don't believe the scripture, then you don't believe that. But if you do believe the Bible, you've got the explanation. God made the world. He made it in the order that he has it in the Bible. OK, so we come to this not because it proves to us that the Bible is the Word of God. We believe that not because of evidence. We believe it because of God's internal witness to us. But it helps a little bit to add to that the evidence that we have from around us. If the evidence turns out to be false, it doesn't bother us, it's false. We don't build our faith on that. But we have a lot of evidence on a lot of things. These three main things, you know, the creation, the flood, and Babel, Those things are all over the world. They have stories. How did all these nations, even some very primitive nations, get the ideas of the flood, the creation of the flood, and Babel? How'd they get those ideas? Where'd that come from? OK, well, if you don't believe the Bible, you can say the Martians did it, because that's what the liberals' story meant. All right, we believe the Bible. We believe it because we, by the internal witness of the Spirit of God, he convinced us in our hearts that the Bible is the Word of God. We're glad that there's now more and more supporting evidence. But if there were no supporting evidence, we'd still believe it just as much. Now one of the things that I think is one that can illustrate this, remember Abraham, Abraham was, God talked to Abraham. And God said, Abraham, Abraham. And Abraham said, who are you, Lord? And he says, I am your creator. How did Abraham know who was talking to him? It's because God opened his heart. And that's what God does to us. When we read the Bible and you study it, God talks to you and changes your life. And he gives you hope and he gives you encouragement. He tells you you're not just an insignificant little thing in the history of the world. He tells you that you're very, very important, so important that Jesus Christ died for you. The Son of God died that you could be saved. And that's a wonderful thing. How can you be more important than for Jesus to give his life for you? You have riches in heaven. We don't need riches on this earth. And that's why the Christians and believers down through the ages, I mean, we're always glad when we have money and when we have good things. And Solomon wasn't angry at God for giving him all the good stuff that he had, but his faith didn't depend upon God rewarding him heavily with riches, and neither does ours. If we have to work hard, God wants us to work hard. And we realize that everything's in the hand of God. The Arminian can't really rest in the hands of God. I mean, they do it. I hear a lot of talk about it. And I was in an Arminian church for many years, and they talked about resting in the hands of God. But how can you rest in the hands of God that doesn't know what's going to go on and what's going to happen or doesn't control it? If he knows and he doesn't control it, then he's at the mercy of whatever is in control. Is it just accident that things happen? The Bible, that's one of the things that brought me to the Reformed faith is that the Bible says, no, God does everything. God predestinates everything. And he manages and controls it all. And I can't see why he's doing things, but I know he's got a purpose. And I know that to the best of my ability, I need to serve him. And if I don't, he'll spank me like my father did. My physical father spanked me. Can you believe the nerve? of my father and spanking me. In fact, that he was my stepfather. That made it even worse. That's what my brother felt, at least. He wasn't my real father. He only paid the bills. It doesn't make any sense not to submit to your father. He's bigger than I am. He's stronger than I am. He's in the position of authority, and I'm not. I can't leave the house and survive. I never had a thought about running away from home, because I knew The pig trough was at home. My mother was the cook, and we came home, and she fed us. Everything was at home. I wouldn't leave. My stepfather, he was my stepfather. He was a good father. He was concerned about me. I realized from a very early age that he's concerned about me enough warn me about what's wrong and teach me what's right. And my younger brother took him a few more years to learn that. But eventually, he did learn it. He had to go into the army and find out that a big brother watches. And he learned discipline in the army. Or no, it was the Air Force. He was a flyboy. OK. The creation. It's fundamental to our life as human beings. to understand and accept God's story, God's account of the creation. May God bless you. Let's pray. Oh, Lord God, we thank you for the depths and the glory of the scripture. There are many, many men and women long before us a great ability who you convinced that they should be your children. You can change their hearts as you change ours. Why you wanted me, I don't know. But I thank you for it, O Lord God. I thank you for being with me all these many years, for making the scripture alive and lively and meaningful in my life. I pray, O God, you bless this church. Help us, we pray, that we walk according to your word. We pray it in Jesus' name. Amen.