Dr. Hugh Ross Conference Weekend // Session 2 // Ask the Animals

the talk is ask the animals and this is taken from job chapter 12 verse 7 where he says ask the beasts and they'll teach you or the birds of this in the sky and they will tell you and if you read the rest of the book of Job that basically is explaining how God created birds and mammals to serve and please us but also the teachers crucial spiritual lessons about ourselves about God and how he can come into relationship with God you know in the 21st century were the most scientifically educated and advanced generation and all humanity for the things I've noticed is that in many respects were more ignorant about science today than people were at the time of Joel because we've lost contact with these birds and mammals we and especially with the wild birds and mammals and especially with those birds and mammals that have not been damaged by human abuse and so I think that explains why we have this growing rise of atheism today people are cut off from the lessons that God intends that we would learn from the birds and the beasts of the field now the viewer here last night you'll recall that I talked about how God creates three different kinds of life I mean as a scientist I attend origin of life research conferences but all they focus on is the origin of the first bacteria the Bible speaks about three separate origins of life it does speak about the origin of life that's purely physical like bacteria but on creation day five it speaks about life that's not only physical but also so äj-- and the soullessness is not a physical component and then last of all it speaks about the third origin of life where God creates life forms that are spiritual so we have physical life life that's physical and soulish and one species that's body soul and a spirit and this talk is gonna focus on what the Bible refers to as the nefesh that's a Hebrew word that means soulish animal now and it speaks about the soullessness it's different from the soullessness you see in the Greek New Testament it's a different word nephesh and this is what its definition is it's referring to animals that God endowed with intelligence will and emotions they have a mind that's capable of freewill actions they have a relational capacity and ability to form relationships with members of their own species a strong motivation of nurture especially their young and a capacity and a desire to serve and please a higher species namely us human beings they were designed to serve and please a higher species just like we human beings were designed to serve and please a higher being so I just gives you a hint to some of the lessons we can learn as they were designed to form relationships with us we were designed to form a relationship with a higher being now Charles Darwin sharply disagreed with us and the book he wrote descent of man he said this that the difference between human and non-human Minds has simply won a degree and not of kind mainly just saying well we're just simply a little smarter than the animals but our mind our brain has mainly just an extension there's nothing distinct but the human brain or the human mind and therefore he predicted that chimpanzees would have minds that would be most similar to ours you know maybe look at the bodies of chimpanzees are the most similar to our bodies of all the nonhuman animals he said that's got to be true of the mind and on a paper title can evolution explain how Minds work these two biologists wrote the following they said like Darwin biologists have tended to assume that species with shared ancestry will have similar cognitive abilities and they're they're referring to the Darwinian model of ants Street you know how you know creatures of look alike have to have a recent common ancestor but as you read on into the research paper they say this doesn't fit what we observe about the minds of non-human animals they discovered that Ravens far surpass chimpanzees and intellectual capability for example chimpanzees will use a tool to build a break open hard nuts but all it is is they find a rock and they smash the nut with the rock what you see Ravens do Ravens will take a tool and use that tool to construct a completely different tool and use that second tool to get a food treat and they'll do that without any human training now my own dad had a pet raven when he was young and he had this big cage for his raven and he would put a lock on it but then he put these little metal shavings inside the cage and he had watched the raven picked the lock but what he noticed was the raven would only pick the lock when he was watching the raven if nobody was watching it just stayed in the cage and so my father picked up on this and what he would do is he would take one lock off and replace it with a more challenging lock and the raven would hop back into the cage it would willingly jump into the cage weight from my dad to lock the cage and then go busy picking the lock and my dad had a half a dozen locks that Raven could pick all the locks but again only did it when it was being observed and the other thing my dad known as it only did it when he was watching it was somebody else because the bird was bonded to him and then my dad actually went to the exercise of building these three-dimensional wooden block toys and putting a food treat inside kind of things we do with my children and he found out that the Raven could always solve the puzzle but again only that he was watching now this is something that Ravens can't do in the wild they can they can use a tool to recover a second tool sometimes even a third tool but that kind of sophistication only happens when they're bonded to a human being there's a lesson there for us likewise and this is something we've seen across all these birds and mammals when they have a strong emotional bond with a human being their intellectual capability goes up likewise that's true of us that we're bonded to a higher being our potential is released in a way so that's one way these animals can teach and instruct us now and another paper published just a few years ago and what was interesting at what caught my attention the title of the paper was Darwin's mistake it's like I've never seen that in the scientific literature before that was the main title the subtitle was explaining the discontinuity between human and non-human Minds and what they discovered for example is that we humans have an innate capacity for symbolic communication but none of the non-human animals are capable of that so for example no matter how much you train a nonhuman animal they're not going to be able to read the first page of the first reading book we give to grade one students they can't do that and the experiment went on they discovered for example that no non-human animal can figure out what any of these symbols mean even if you train them they're not gonna build a figure what a stop sign is and Bill a react to a stop sign but even children that are 18 months of age configural that these symbols mean and respond to the symbols we have an innate capacity to do that and they concluded their paper with this sentence they said this symbol relational discontinuity pervades nearly every domain of cognition and this is one of the new scientific evidences for human exceptionalism you know until this paper was published the pervasive view amongst the biology researchers was that there is nothing exceptional about Hume means everything we do is manifested in non-human animals we simply exceed them by degree but this is the first paper that said no that's not true we do things that non-human animals simply are incapable of doing no matter how much they're trained and it's this symbolic capability that allows us to think abstractly and philosophically and as something we now recognize as a manifestation of the Spirit within us and this is what enables us to communicate and ask questions about what is there beyond the universe why am I here is there a God non-human animals never engage in any kind of philosophy now in addition to making a number that's just one of many examples where scientists in the last six years have now acknowledged we human beings are exceptional we have a consciousness like the non-human animals don't have we have a philosophical bent that they don't have and we have the symbolic capability but the same time they discovered that these birds and mammals are exceptional with respect to all other life-forms because that was another Darwinian presumption that the birds and mammals were simply an extension of the insects and the fish and the amphibians but we now realize that just like we're exceptional they are exceptional and they are exceptional in their ability to form emotional bonds and literally to sacrifice nephesh animals are those where the parents sacrifice to a very significant degree further offspring but something else is they notice they'll also sacrifice in order to serve as human beings now one example of this exceptionalism his studies that have been done on Terok parrots and cockatoos and you may be aware of this cockatoo his name is snowball and all you gotta do is put snowball into a search engine and up will pop dozens of video clips just showing you what this particular cockatoo can do but let me give you some background on snowball snowball was bonded to a teenage girl and then the girl went off to college and couldn't take the cockatoo with her and so the parents basically gave a cockatoo to a bird sanctuary but they said to the owners of the sanctuary you got to take our daughter's collection of CDs because the cockatoo really likes the music on these CDs and it was basic a collection of Backstreet Boys CDs and and they also explained that there's one particular CD that the bird Rudy likes and that was I'm trying to think of the song you'll probably remember it because I'm not a Backstreet Boy fan so but this just a short clip of what snowball does when he hears this particular song from the Backstreet Boys [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] okay that's snowball carrots we'll also do this and when they're bonded to a human being when they're their favorite music of the human that they're Bona to is being played they will do a dance where they put everything they physically can into the dance and so just see what cockatoos they do this amazing high stuff routine now parents can't do the high step but what they can do is do amazing things with their neck and so if I were to show you a clip of a parent I got several them I don't have time to show them to you but they can turn their neck like this and like this very rapidly they're literally putting everything they physically can into showing you how much they enjoy the music of the human they're bonded to now they've also gone into the wild because parents for example do a courtship song when they're mating but what they discovered is is that wild parrots have not been shown to dance to a beat in the wild even to the songs of their courtship displays they don't dance they only dance when they're listening to the music of a human being to whom they're emotionally bonded so even their mate when that sings a song they won't dance to that this only happens when they're bonded to a human being now people concluded that this particular cockatoo really likes the Backstreet Boys that's not what's going on this cockatoo really liked that teenage girl and basically figured out what really got her excited and enjoyed and and began to dance to that music now when I read about all this I realized I could have published this forty years ago because I had a pet parrot when I was a teenager his name was Pedro and he loved to sit on my shoulder and quickly figured out I didn't like him spotting my shirts and so I didn't have to train him what he would do is he would tug on my earlobe and that would be a signal he needed a go I'd put him on one of his perches and he'd hop back on my shoulder after that I never had a spotted shirt everybody else in the family did but not me okay and that was a time when I was really enjoying the music of Bach especially the Brandenburg Concertos and my favorite was the third Brandenburg Concerto and Pedro did the same thing as a cockatoo whenever that piece of music was played he went all out dancing to the music of the Brandenburg Concerto now for some reason he wasn't too excited about the females in her family I had two sisters and my sisters were into a particular brand of rock music and whenever they played their rock music he would go into a loud screeching tantrum until they turned it off now my mother's comment was Hugh your bird is a music snob he only likes classical music he hates rock music that's not what was going on the bird was bonded to me he was not bonded to my sisters Rudy didn't like my sisters and so he left them known by the way how he responded to their favorite music but he also let me know how he responded to my favorite music and it was an amazing bird because he would hop on my shoulder after I shaved and then he would inspect my face to see if there's a whisker I missed and if I did he would clip it off so and like many parrots he enjoyed cleaning my teeth after I had a meal you know literally go right inside of my mouth and take care of everything so but I'll tell you the thing that really endeared him to my parents is that I didn't meet my grandfather my side until I was 13 he came to visit us and he really enjoyed playing bridge I didn't know how to play bridge but he taught me and so at the time he was visiting us he and I would be partnered against my parents but the bird would sit on my shoulder and every time I won a hand a bridge he would do a victory dance on my shoulder and then sing this song and my parents comment was this is bad enough to lose to her son at bridge but his bird gloats but again this is a demonstration that these birds outperform what no normally do in the wild when they're bonded to a human being said and the stronger the emotional bond the more evident their superior performance as manifested it was a lesson there for us though more strongly were bonded to our Creator the greater our capacities and our potential is released in terms of our capacity to serve God and to serve one another now as they move on into the book of Job it shows how certain soulish animals were crucial for launching and maintaining human civilization which is seeing job 38 and 39 as God basically rebuking job's friends by saying you think he made all these accomplishments by yourself you would have gotten nowhere if I hadn't created these animals furs those of you are with us last night I made mention how just before God creates human beings he describes how he created three separate categories of land mammals the ones that are most critical for launching civilization that was actually a summary what we see in more detail in the book of Job when the book of Job a gives you a list of the ten most critical animals that God created and how we needed every one of those 10 to launch and sustain our civilization so we take credit for this amazing city we live in but the freeways the skyscrapers the automobiles the trains we need to appreciate we would have had none of that if it wasn't for God creating donkeys and horses and cows and goats and all the other animals we see mentioned in the book of Job so as we jump into job 38 and 39 it makes mention of these 10 animals the lion the Raven the goat adir the donkey the ox or the cow the ostrich the horse the hawk and the eagle and in my book hidden treasures in the book of Job I describe why each one of these 10 on the list was so critical for launching human civilization and notice it purposely gives us a mix of mammals and birds and a mix of herbivores and carnivores making clear we needed that full spectrum of these soulish animals in order to be able to successfully launch civilization each one was created with a unique soullessness to serve or pleased humans in a distinct way you know if I can take it back to Genesis 2 it talks about how God told Adam I want you to examine each of these nephesh animals and give them an appropriate name what God was doing with that I was saying I designed each one in a very different way to serve and please you I want you to find out the distinct way they serve and please you and give them an appropriate name you know I was mentioning last night how we know that the seventh creation day must be a significant period of time because there's many passages that tell us were still in God's seventh day well likewise the sixth day must be a long time period because it takes more than a few seconds to examine each of these animals and give an appropriate name but God designed to serve and please him and each one fulfills a role on launching and sustaining human civilization you know we still need these animals today they helped us launch civilization but they're also crucial for sustaining civilization and one of the things that was really fun for me to do and hidden treasures in the book job is described how God designed the goat for example to serve our needs at the beginning of human civilization and how is fulfilling a completely different role today in the 21st century and you know how goats are an animal that will eat everything you ask it to eat so for example where I live in Southern California we have a problem with a forest fires and we make these horse breaks where we basically carve a big channel down a mountain to in order to stop the fire from jumping across we used to do that with bulldozers but bulldozers leave vegetation behind now we use goats because goats will eat everything you can actually train the goat to eat vegetation in a particular swath up a mountain and of course of its a high mountain that's got near vertical slopes that's not a problem for a goat it's a problem for a bulldozer but it's not a problem for a goat and there's actually other ways that goats are fulfilling a role that we never even thought of thousands of years ago but are crucial for modern civilization and each of the ten that are mentioned challenges the evolutionary paradigm in a particular way you know there are easy ways to challenge this idea that natural process is responsible for the whole history of life and I'm just going to give you one example if you read the book I go through the others as well but two of the animals that are mentioned in that list of ten are the donkey and the horse now evolutionists will tell you that the donkey and the horse are strong evidence that Darwinism is correct because after all look how similar they are to one another note their physical appearance and you can actually take a horse and a donkey and you can mate them and get a mule now the mule won't reproduce after its own kind but if they basically make that as an argument that they must have a recent common ancestor here's the problem they're drawing that conclusion by only looking at the physical features of the donkey and the horse they're not looking at the soulish features and they're particularly not looking at how the donkey is designed to service human beings in a radically different way from the horse so what we notice about the donkey it actually says this in job 39 there's a whole paragraph on the donkey and basically says if you own a donkey and you lose it and it winds up wandering off in the wild don't worry about your donkey it can move from being domesticated to being feral seamlessly and that's true of donkeys if for some reason they get loose and they get separated from their human owner they're very easily adapted to living in the wild again but you also see in job 39 a says if your donkeys been living in the wild for three or four months and you meet your donkey it'll bond back to hear a horse won't do that if a horse goes feral it will probably die for some reason the horse is able to survive going from domestication to living in the wild it will not read bond with you but a donkey will in fact a donkey can do that repeatedly so you don't really have to worry about you're a donkey the other thing that says about donkeys is that they're highly motivated to keep you away from danger which is why we use donkeys to take people down the Grand Canyon now they're very sure-footed and they're gonna do everything they can to make sure you don't fall down that Canyon and if there's a snake in front they're gonna back up they keep you away from danger and they're very good at that which is why we humans have never used donkeys to ride into battle as soon as the donkey sees the arrows coming its way it heads in the opposite direction now that's contrasted with a horse the horse is different the horse is not motivated to keep you away from danger and fact what it says in job 39 the horse loves danger it loves risk and can't wait to take you into battle it gets excited when it hears the battle horn and wants to charge you off into battle however once it takes you into battle it will do everything it can to protect you and so horses in fact my grandfather he was a Calvary men in the Boer War and the for World War one and he had several horses I said several times the horse sacrificed its life to save his life horses will do that but they'll take you into the riskiest of circumstances but they'll do everything they can to sacrifice themselves to keep you safe from harm and the horse is the ideal transportation animal can you think of where we would have been in terms of civilization without horses the problem with donkeys is your feet drags on the ground and the problem with camels are so high up in the air that if you fall off that camel you're gonna do yourself serious injury the horse is just the right size just the right weight that's perfect as a human transportation animal it can take your gear etc and so that was the transportation system until just a hundred and fifty years ago and also notice horses come in a wide range of different sizes that we can use for different transportation capabilities now the book of Job begins with this statement about the animals ask the beasts and they'll teach you or the birds of the air and they will tell you and what I've been noticing is at the beginning of the 20th century the number of human beings in the world that identify themselves as agnostics or atheists was way less than 1% you know the figure is today it's about 15% and it's rising quite radically however the rise of atheism agnosticism is directly proportional to the rise of urbanization today 60% of the world's population lives in large cities and every atheist that I've publicly debated has been an urbanite and I've been to Africa three times and into the rural part Sabathia I've yet to meet an atheists than any of my visits to rural Africa now I do see them in cities like Johannesburg but not in rural Africa I've noticed the same thing here in America when you get into the rural parts of the country where people have contact with these birds and animals people believe in God they may not believe in Jesus Christ but they believe in God and so yeah we are seeing this rise of atheism but it's not because we're getting better educated in science it's because we're getting more and more cut off from contact with the birds and mammals I'll just give you a hint about the second service that heavens declare the glory of God this just came out a few months ago two months ago in the journal Science for the first time in human history less than half the world's population has seen the Milky Way I mean if you live in a big city the lights are just too bright for you to see the Milky Way well if you're not able to see the Milky Way the heavens aren't declaring what they were declaring thousands of years ago and hey I've been in Shanghai Shanghai on a clear night you can't see a single star the heavens are declaring nothing no in fact we had some Chinese students visiting and they looked up at the sky in Los Angeles and they said what's that object there we said that's the moon and we said you mean you've never seen the moon so yeah we've seen the moon but only when it's directly overhead once you get down a little bit the air pollution is so intense they can't even see the moon so when it says the heavens declare the glory of God you got to get outside the city before you can see it just like it is with these animals so it's an urban rather rural areas that atheism has thrives now I want to review for you here some of the lessons we can learn from these soulish animals spiritual lessons one we've already reviewed they were created to serve and please and bond to a higher being a lot of what I've put in my book is making a point that these are animals that will emotionally bond to members of their own species but they also really like to bond to human beings and they've done experiments about you know taking a dog and a cat dogs and cats will bond to one another but only when they're both bonded to a human being they won't bond to one another if there isn't a human connection and we've had dogs and cats in our home it takes time for though that dog and the cat to bond to one another and it only happens that they a strong bond with a human being both of them do created a servant please a higher being and likewise we were created to serve and please a higher being and their full potential has reached only when bonded to a higher being and likewise our full potential has only reached when we're bonded to a higher being now some obvious pushback from this is you know we they were designed to approach us but often they run away from us isn't that true when you go out and see wild animals as soon as they see you they run away from you that's because they've been conditioned by human abuse because of human abuse when they see us they run away from us but one thing I did when I was in my 20s I took a vacation purposely all by myself and went in to a part of British Columbia where the Rangers told me no human being has been there in over 50 years there was no roads there was no trails had to bushwhack my way in but I wanted to do an experiment I set up my pup tent and just watched what what happened to the birds and mammals in the vicinity first thing I notice is it kind of surrounded my pup tent by about a 30-yard distance and they were just watching when I woke up in the morning they're inside the tent showing you that animals birds and mammals that not suffered abuse by human beings have a strong desire to reach out to us and make contact with us I was telling your pastors yesterday now over lunch how my cousin in British Columbia he was out in the Georges Strait in a one-man rowboat and suddenly this 50-foot grey whale came right up beside his boat and he thought he was gonna get capsized but he noticed the whale very gently moved herself really close to his boat and got to the point where it was touching the boat then he reached out and started stroking the whale and the whale just sat there as he was stroking the whale and suddenly the whale died and was gone five minutes later thatwill came back with his calf and pushed the calf up right by the boat so the calf could also be stroked by my cousin totally wild animals it also explains why we almost wiped out the whales with the whaling industry they're drawn to us human beings and so instead of running away from us and not getting killed they would run towards the whaling boats and they would get killed we almost wiped em out likewise for the passenger pigeons they're now extinct but the passenger pigeons were especially motivated to come to human beings and so hunters were wiping a moat and they rested would just flock right towards the hunters that's how we wiped them all out human abuse can do that but it shows you these animals were designed by God to come to us likewise we were designed by her creator to come to a higher being as they were designed to come to a higher species we were designed to come to a higher being but what gets in the way our sin just like sin and human abuse causes these animals run away from us instead of towards us it's their sin that causes us to run away from God and stirred it towards or it's more common to simply pretend he doesn't exist and so we need to appreciate that lesson and this is something you see extensively in the book of Job that our relationships can be damaged by sin and we examine how that works with the birds and mammals it tells us a that must be happening within us with respect to God you can read a lot more about this in hidden treasures in the book of Job and people are asking me because you know we did a Q&A session last night and a lot of people a lot of questions every one of our scientists that reasons to bleed maintains a Facebook and a Twitter page and we don't use Facebook and Twitter to tell you about our personal lives it's basically there to alert you about the latest scientific discoveries that give us more proof for the Christian faith but we also answer your questions so if you don't get a chance to get your question asked this weekend you can take advantage and hey don't worry about memorizing that stuff all you need to do is put in Hugh Ross face book and it'll pop right up and you can ask your questions same thing with Twitter but let me close with this the book of Job ends with five chapters on these soulish animals but as it moves into chapters 39 and 40 it says look at the behemoth and the Leviathan the two most difficult to tame nefesh creatures and basically it's making the point that some animals like the goat are very easy to tame other animals like the lion are difficult to tame and the same thing is true of as human beings some of us are easy to tame some of us are difficult to tame and God makes the point that we human beings have been able to tame all of the nephesh animals even the most difficult for the nephesh animals and names too as the most challenging to tame of all and those to rank is the most difficult to this very day one of them being the behemoth which is the hippopotamus the second one being the Leviathan which is the Nile crocodile or what would be like our elliegator here and I've been to Florida to one of these alligator parts I got to see a tame alligator but what the trainer told me was I was handling that alligator from the time it came out of its egg and I would handle that elliegator for at least an hour a day and I dare not miss a day you miss a day at aiming will go away and it was only able to emotionally bond to that one trainer nobody else by far the most challenging animal attain the hippos are almost as difficult a team you can only tame them if you raise them from the time that they're born it happens when the mother dies in childbirth any human takes over the raising of a baby hippo then it will bond to you but otherwise that won't happen and basically talks about a danger it is these animals but the book of Job ends by saying you've been able to tame all these nephesh animals even the crocodile and even the hippopotamus but there is one form of life you're not able to tame you're not able to bring humility to a proud human art as it takes a higher beam to tame the hippopotamus and the crocodile that takes a higher being to tame a human being and the book of Job ends where God says job came to me for the humility he needed the rest of you did not so I'm gonna ask my servant Joe to pray for you that you'll learn this lesson from the crocodile this lesson from the hippopotamus and humble yourself before me and receive what you need in order to come into a relationship with me thank you [Applause]

Channel: Grace Church St. Louis

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Keywords: gracestl, gracechurchsaintlouis, saint, louis, st, st., stl, hugh, ross, science, animals, Jesus, ron, tucker, grace, church, astronphysics, physics, astronomy, message

Id: xlZicpouE8w

Length: 37min 56sec (2276 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 11 2017