What Does the Scripture Say About the Sun and Moon - 7/30/17 AM

[Music] well good morning thank you pastor Duane and thank you pastor Jeff appreciate you all coming out we have some amazing things to think about in the next so many minutes and don't forget that tonight at 6:00 p.m. dr. Jake Hebert will be talking about the specifics of the solar eclipse which is about to come come through here in its journey across North America my background is Bible in evidence and so the message today is going to be a blend of some of both of that this morning we're going to focus on two main facts that the Bible teaches about the Sun and the moon and we'll get to that in a moment but the perspective that we need to think about today is that there is a lot in our culture that doesn't like the fact that God is God and that God is the Creator in fact for more than 150 years there's been a problem with that in many parts of world civilization in general and in education and in other fields that promote ideas that are coming our way from television from movies from books many different directions and for more than 150 years many of the churches and this church is obviously not one of those but many of the churches that have had influence in America have shied away from the creatorship of God and in doing that they have cheated God from glory he deserves and they have also cheated themselves from appreciating him as the God he really is so we'll think about that today and we'll think about how God is glorified as the Savior and apart from having him as our Savior what good is that especially when you die but having him as savior we want to appreciate all of him and part of all of God is appreciating who he is as our Creator so we'll be thinking about that today and since it was mentioned that next week dr. Tommy ice will be coming who's a personal friend of mine you really want to come here to hear what he has to say and one of the points that you know you try to jamun as much in a message like this as you can but one of the important points that the book of Genesis provides to us is that the earth is relatively young and I won't go into it now because of time but for those who have a pen handy and want to look this up there is an article that is online I see ours website which really started from a talk that dr. Tommy ice and I put together and it turned into a paper that was presented to the to the evangelical theological Society and then it became an article in I see ours website so if you want to look at that later it's wwic org slash article slash for one to four and that goes into the age of the earth viewed from Scripture okay so with that we'll go into what does scripture say about the Sun and the moon well let's start in the beginning at least in the beginning for the Sun of the Moon which would be day four of creation week and we read then God said let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to divide the day from the night and let them be for signs and seasons and for days and years and let them be for lights in the firmament of the heavens to give light on the earth and it was so so one the first things we learn about the heavenly bodies which include the Sun and the moon is that their purpose is to provide light to human beings who will be on the earth well as we've already thought about earlier in this worship service there's a lot of stars God made a lot of stars and he knows all of those stars Psalm 147 4 says he tells the number of the stars he calls them all by their names now there's a lot of stars and God knows every one of them all we can do is estimating the current estimate is 10 to the 22nd power that's a that's a 22 zeroes so if you were to think about that and if you were to look at that long number and the the comma furthest to the right marks thousands and then moving left you get millions billions trillions quadrillions quintillions sextillion x' that's not a number that our human brains can really appreciate and it's one thing to estimate the number of stars it's a whole nother thing to know exactly how many there are and know what the name is for each one of them well if we were to name one at a time one each second it would take us 300 trillion years just to name all the stars and you'd have to have a pretty good memory to know the names of all of those stars so Jeremiah indicates to us that there's a lot of stars out there and yet God knows where all those stars are and he knows all their names he made them all and he's a whole lot bigger than they are but when you look at the universe with all those stars that's a lot bigger than we are I mean I'm only 512 well let's think about the very first verse in the Bible because we learned some important things from that and a lot of you know that verse of the top line there shows it in Hebrew and it says Bereshit bara Elohim at Hashem I'm Viet Haaretz in the beginning and then you have the verb bara which means which is translate created Elohim which is the name that's translated God then you have a word that means direct object comes next the heavens and direct object comes next the earth so what we learnt we learned a lot from that first verse we learn who the creator of the heavens and the earth is it's a being who calls himself eloheem now that's interesting because that is a regular plural noun in Hebrew so the creator of the heavens and the earth is a plural being and Hebrew actually has a dual plural and that's pronounced differently so whoever this being is he's not one he's not - he's three or more but you have to read further in the book to find out that he's Father Son and Holy Spirit you don't get that in the first verse but you do get that this being who creates the heavens and the earth in the beginning is a plural being and yet now this is a hard one for grammar teachers the verb that is used for created is singular so it's a plural being who acts in a way that has to be described as singular he's one and yet plural at the same time how about that right in the first verse of the Bible when and how was the physical matter energy stuff made that we call the heaven in the earth in the beginning and what about the action that was used to create that is that action continuing or is it completed the verb that is used there shows that the work that was used to make the heavens of the earth to call them into existence out of nothing at God's command is completed it was finished all of the physical matter and energy that exists today all goes back to when God called it into existence it's he hasn't been adding to it since then now he has added some things to his creation since day one we see that same Hebrew verb bara used in verse 21 when he creates the animals of the air and the water so giving them a the Hebrew word is nephesh we would sometimes translate his soul there is an animal person a personality or a life that animals have that rocks don't have that they are capable of dying they have a life they reproduce and if you have pets and I sure hope that you've at least shared part of your life with a pet or more than one pet you know that there is something inside that animal that is living and that was made on day five and then we see the verb are I used again on day six when God makes his most unique creation because he made that creation in his own image mankind and that is a completely new from nothing creation on day six but as far as physical stuff the things of atoms and molecules that was made on day one and that was completed on day one and it was active the Hebrew language has active verbs passive verbs and then something that's a combination of both and it the word that is used in Genesis 1:1 is an active verb in fact verbs in Hebrew can be simple or intensive or causative which one do you think created was in Genesis 1:1 now think about 10 to the 22nd stars that are made out of this original stuff that God made on day one think of the hugeness of the universe or think of the smallness of the universe going down to molecules to atoms two subatomic particles how small in detail God made everything what kind of a verb do you think would need to be used to describe that simple intensive or causative simple it was simply for God to make all of that we can't even understand it all much less imagine making it out of nothing well scripture indicates to us that the Trinity was involved in creating everything and especially that the second member of the Trinity Christ God the Son was directly involved in creating all that there is john 1 indicates that hebrews 1 and colossians 1 well we looked at the first few verses that are here on the screen but there's a couple more verses added to this which will be the main points that we'll look at in our fast-moving minutes today so i'm going to start at verse 16 and God made two great lights the greater light to rule the day we're gonna think about that for the next few minutes the greater light which is the Sun rules the day and the lesser light to rule the night that's the moon and when you think about a solar eclipse and of course the details of how a solar eclipse works will be presented tonight at 6 by dr. Hebert he's the astrophysics guy and he'll give you the details of how it all works and how to look at it and how not to hurt your eyes and those kind of things so for now I'll just say that a solar eclipse involves the Sun and the moon and when you have the Sun and the earth and the moon moves in between the two to where it shadows the light of the Sun that's a solar eclipse so to have a solar eclipse if you're on earth there need to be two things in front of you the Sun and the moon at the same time and so that's why today we're looking at the Sun and the moon and here we see and this is chapter one that they both have ruling functions that's kind of amazing now some would say well that's not literal that the Sun in the moon they don't really do any ruling well we'll come to that but God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth and to rule there that verb is again over the day and over the night and to divide the light from the darkness and God saw that it was good now if you were to take a Young's concordance or something similar and look up the Hebrew word is translated rule here and see how that verb is used throughout the rest of the Old Testament you'll find that is routinely used of human rulers who impose their will on other people or other things they are applying force to accomplish some kind of a goal they are controlling things they are limiting things they are ruling we'll come back to that now God's a multitasker wasn't that long ago when some in the scientific community who didn't believe in God and didn't think the scriptures were true and who imagined that things happen by accident said that the appendix was not needed in the human body wasn't worth anything it was a leftover from some kind of evolutionary process back when our ancestors were something different than humans and then science finally caught up with the Bible and learned that the appendix is helpful in the immune system oh it has a function but it has more than one function because it also helps in digestion and people have had appendicitis and had to have their appendix removed they often have digestive troubles that others don't have or they get them quicker in life so God is a multitasker just like your ear your ear is used for hearing but it's also used for balance well God is that way with the Stars he uses them to divide day time from night time jesus m to service signs and for seasons and for days and free years and then of course as we just learned they have some kind of a at least the Sun of the moon have a rulership role well don't forget that the Sun is part of the heavens because the Bible when it talks about the heavens it would include the Sun in the moon Ecclesiastes tells us that the Sun rises and the Sun Goes Down and it hates that is it hurries to the place where it arose there is a predictability to what the Sun does now how is it that Sun has movement when some would say no the Sun actually stays put it's the earth that has movement we'll get to that in a minute or two but for now let's just recognize that Paul teaches us in Romans 1 that God has made the heavens and the earth and the things in them so cleverly so carefully that for us to fail to recognize God's hand is to do so without excuse the evidence is there we may ignore the evidence and that's being dishonest but we can't honestly say the evidence is not there that there is a God who's a whole lot smarter than we are a whole lot more powerful than we are and when it comes to engineering he does things that our minds have a hard time even imagining much less doing something like that God has done things that show engineering if we see something that is made as a machine to accomplish a purpose that's made by humans we say wow look at that helicopter isn't it great what it can do it can fly forward it can fly backward it can hover it can go up and can go down but guess what hummingbirds can do that and they're a whole lot smaller than a helicopter and guess what else they can reproduce they can have babies you know try to invent a helicopter that does the but okay the Sun the Sun comes out of its chamber like a bridegroom or runs its course like a like an athlete like a champion racer it rises at one end of the heavens and makes it circuit hang on to that word circuit we're gonna come back to that word in a little bit makes it circuit to the other nothing is deprived of its warmth everyone on earth believers in Jesus Christ as well as unbelievers benefit from the warmth that we receive from the Sun that God made he made the Sun and part of the purpose of the Sun was to give us warmth without it we freeze to death well now we'll come up to a controversy in some centuries ago during the lifetime of Galileo Galileo took his telescope and instead of looking out at sea to see what kind of boat was coming from across the sea he tilted it up to the sky and said wow I could see a lot more detail on the moon I can see all kinds of things a lot more close-up than I used to be able to with just my naked eyes and he studied and he used math and he noticed that there was mathematical patterns to what the planets do and what the earth does and what the moon does and he said I think the earth goes around the Sun and he wasn't the only one in his generation that thought that but he did get in trouble for thinking that and saying so in his writings because he lived in Italy and in Italy the official Church of that country had teachings that were against what Galileo was teaching they had a church tradition that the earth is stationary and the Sun goes around the earth Galileo himself a Roman Catholic was saying yeah but what I see through my telescope and what my math my mathematical analysis teaches me is that it's the other way around so here's the question who was right the inquisitors who put Galilee on trial to excommunicate him and to punish him for teaching what was against their church tradition or was Galileo right actually they both were wrong but they both were part right because the earth does have a regular predictable motion to it and as we'll see later scripture actually teaches that but they were not paying attention to the part of scripture that teaches that but his accusers were also part correct because the Sun itself does have motion so you've got the earth in motion you've got the moon in motion you've got the planets emotion you've got the Sun in motion in fact for that matter you have the Milky Way galaxy in motion and then you got galaxies or groups of galaxies that are in motion that's a lot of moving parts to keep track of you know if you don't set that up right it doesn't work God had to be very very intelligent and very powerful and very good at engineering to make this whole moving parts machinery system work one of the controversies that was that was argued about back then was Psalm 93 1 which says the earth reigns he is clothed with majesty though the Lord is clothed with strength wherewith he has girded himself the world also is established that it cannot be moved and that was part of the argument was well here we have a verse in Psalms that says the earth can't be moved so it needs to be motionless and yet Galileo said no it's not motionless but actually if they'd done their homework better and looked at Psalm 93 one more carefully they would find that the the word that is used there does not mean absolute motionlessness in fact the Hebrew word mote often appears in contexts that are talking about whether something was being pulled away or pulled off course as opposed to staying on course so think of a train trains need to stay on course when they fall off the tracks that's really bad you got railroads that have accomplished so much in the history of America but it's only when they stay on track that they accomplished a lot and the same is true of beasts of burden that plow fields if you if you put two ox together two oxen and you yoke them and they're supposed to plow a straight line if they somehow get pulled off course that's not good so in fact the word for yoke that is used in the Old Testament is based on the same route as this verb that is in Psalm 93 1 so whole idea is like a train that stays on the track the earth is not yanked off course it is in that sense that it is not moved that is it's not yanked of course and that's because God has set it up to obey the circuit that he has programmed it for so we come back to this concept that the Sun will rule the day and the moon will rule the night and for that matter you have other words that are similar that talk about ordinances or Dominion which your words that have to do with ruling that appear in the book of Job talking about what goes on in the heavens there is nothing random about what happens to the evidence the heavens so don't think of the heavens as something where there is a explosion called a big bang that all these things just randomly are bumping around and exploding and and nothing is it's all out of control that's not what is going on and that's not what happened in the past the the Sun does rule but how does it rule well let me come back to this word rule the whole idea rule means force is involved if there's no enforcement of something it's a suggestion it's advice many years of my professional life have been spent in courtrooms now it's not because I'm a bad person it keeps getting in trouble and I always have to go to court it's because that a lot of my professional life has been as a trial lawyer and part has been as a part-time judge and there's a difference between rules which are enforced or suggestions but God has used force with the Sun and with the moon we'll get to that I'll start with the easier example the Sun governs the sunlight that we need the the Sun is designed by God to provide us with enough sunlight to accomplish what he wants to happen on earth using sunlight which includes light to see by but also includes light that is used to power the photosynthesis of green plants so that they produce carbohydrates that can be eaten by plant eaters such as cattle and then of course some of us like to eat steak Omaha steak you kind of go together and you don't get steak unless you have grass and you don't get grass if you don't have sunlight not only that but the sunlight that is controlled by the Sun makes the difference in whether or not you have a golden rod and you see the golden rod there with some monarch butterflies or whether or not you have any grasses such as the little blue stem well by controlling the sunlight the Sun is indirectly controlling all of the animals that require the plants that grow from the sunlight for their diets and depend on them and that would include not only the plant the animals that eat the plants but also the animals that eat the animals that eat the plants and the animals the animals that eat the animals eat plants right that makes sense so that would include your animals who all depend on plants without which plants they don't exist that would include the Western Meadowlark Nebraska's state bird there's your formula your simple formula for the usual form of photosynthesis that takes place and you'll notice you got to have carbon dioxide and carbon dioxide is not bad carbon dioxide is is talked about as if it's some kind of a villain you see that often in the news or at least I'd say in the fake news but we need carbon dioxide without carbon dioxide the plants can't do what they do they need the water they need carbon dioxide and they need the sunlight to power the photosynthesis that takes place in the chloroplasts of green plants and the products of that are oxygen that we need to breathe and not only molecular oxygen but also various types of carbohydrates which we and other animals need to power our lives so we don't get breathable oxygen unless the Sun which powers photosynthesis does its part the Sun is very much regulating life on earth it is controlling what lives or what doesn't live depending on how God programmed it to shine sunlight but now we'll move to a little bit more unusual example of rulership and that's how does the moon rule the moon rules primarily through gravitational pull on the earth and in particular the BET the best example that I can think of this is the tides without the moon's gravitational pull on the earth which is a physical pull it's not like the earth can get away from that okay this isn't an option you know the earth can't if it had a personality say oh I don't want to be pulled by gravity today it's not going to happen there's no option the the pull will happen this is the application of physical force this is a true rulership situation and the end the moon is pulling on the earth in different ways depending on where the moon is in relationship to the earth and the Sun and that makes a difference what happens with the tides and without the tides a lot of bad things would happen so we need the tides now let me think about how the rulership of the earth and the rulership of well the earth by the Sun and the moon does not mean that the Sun has a personality does not mean that the moon has a personality you know there are different people groups over the history of the human race that have worshiped the Sun and we the moon and imagine them to have personalities that's not what I'm saying this is a different kind of rulership it's a rulership that is similar to what is called a governor that's put on a delivery truck many years ago almost four decades ago when I had a lot more hair and considerably less weight I was entrusted with one of these vehicles the roads are safer today because I don't drive one of these vehicles so don't be fearful but one of the things I was told when I was introduced to how you use this vehicle to deliver soft drinks was they have a governor on the truck it is put on the engine and it limits how fast you can go and so I don't remember if he was set at 50 miles an hour 55 my guess is it was 50 but a lot of delivery truck drivers would drive faster than that if the truck allowed them to and there were a couple guys on the force who knew how to disable the governors and that's not a good thing if they had an accident the insurance company would have denied coverage because the governor wasn't doing its job and they insurance coverage was dependent upon whether or not the governor was there but a speed limiting governor can save lives and it's called a governor because it rules the speed of the truck it puts limits on how fast that truck can go no matter how fast the driver wants it to go but the device that is put on the engine is not alive it doesn't have a personality it is the genius of the engineer who devised the speed limiting gadget that's the person who deserves to be appreciated for making this gadget that can rule a truck that is zooming down an interstate highway and that is like what God has done with the Sun and with the moon he has given them a mechanical governorship and it's very complicated man automatically speaking but it works and it produces the periodic tides just like a speed limiting governor regulates the behavior of a truck well let's think about some of the life forms that are dependent upon the tides working what about wasters well oysters when they are what's called seed and are floating through the water and they land on something hard and it could be old oyster shells or it could be shredded car tires or busted up concrete but if it's something hard they will attach to it and then they will grow but now that they're attached to it how do they get their food the food needs to come to them now if there's no tides to wash the water back and forth with all the little food particles that they need and they as filter feeders take in the water pull out the food particles that they need and then the rest of the water goes washing out to the other side of the oyster without this movement of the water that is back and forth back and forth very dependable they would not live though also there are birds migratory birds that depend on the tides in New Jersey some of the little shore birds that migrate from Latin America say the Caribbean up to Canada in the spring they're making these long migratory flights and they don't do it all in one day and they have to take little stops along the way but they don't stop at convenient stores along the way they stop at places where they can get some quick energy rich nutrition and then get back on their journey and they stop in New Jersey at just the right time based on the lunar cycle based on the tides when the horseshoe crabs come in to the seat up to the seashore to bury their eggs and the next generation of horseshoe crabs come up and they put all their eggs on the sand and some of them get eaten by these birds and the others that don't get eaten eventually the tides will wash them out to sea at the right time and they become the next generation of horseshoe crabs timing is everything if the timing is wrong when the birds stopped in New Jersey there's no horseshoe crabs eggs for them to eat so they depend on that because they have this long journey there's many things in nature that depend on the tides which ultimately are based on the lunar cycle and we'll look at one example of that right now and that is red crabs on Christmas Island which is an island in the Indian Ocean it's to the west of Australia but politically it belongs to Australia a little bit south of Indonesia it was discovered a long time ago by someone on Christmas Day so it got named Christmas Island well the red crabs which live on the land in the forests they they do their mating on this seashore by the ocean tide waters and so they part of their land part of their life cycle depends on the ocean tides and part of their life cycle depends on what they can eat on land but the tides of course being regulated by the moon ultimately and it would means that these crabs need the moon to regulate the tides for their life cycle to work and when they and once a year they have their migration to the seashore the ones that are old enough mature enough to reproduce and when they do they they just start swarming across the island and it takes them five to seven days to get from where they are in the forest to the shore and hopefully they won't get hit by a train some of them either like to watch golfers play golf or they just think that's a good shortcut the local government put up these little barriers to try to keep them grading in the proper direction although as you can see there's a few of them that are trying to get over the wall but sometimes they have to close the roads and you can see the little child they're sitting there with just this swarm of crabs and then you can also see the the very young crabs that get washed up from the shore later which looks like a you know big red tide those are crabs well the red crab mothers they release their fertilized eggs into the ocean water and it's kind of tricky for them to do that because they have to say cling to a rock so that they don't get washed out to sea but at the same times they have to shake their bodies to dump this dupatta group of fertilized eggs that they dumped into the sea which they're dumping by the thousands and they do that when the strongest high tide is turning in other words they're doing this based on the phases of the Moon the moon is actually ruling their reproductive cycle and then those little eggs when they hit the salt water they they hatch they live as larvae for about a month and then they return based on the tides later as little land crabs that crawl their way toward the forest and then when they get big enough they will repeat what their parents did that is the Moon ruling in this case a crustacean well let's think about fish for a minute because jobe tells us that the fish of the sea do provide a documented record of really of what God has done in them the verb there this translated declare has the idea of documenting detail and the Pacific salmon is an amazing fish it is hatched in the fresh water and it lives in fresh water for a while and then eventually when it gets to the right stage of its life they swim downstream they enter into the salt water of the ocean they live in the ocean depending on what variety they are or maybe two years maybe five years but eventually there's some kind of an alarm clock that goes off in them that God has designed that says it's time to go back home and reproduce the next generation of Pacific salmon and when they do they have to go from salt water back into fresh water which if you understand osmosis that's a real trick because depending on whether the water outside you is either less salty than the water inside you the water outside you will either try to collapse you or try to explode you as the salt concentration inside you tries to even out with the what the level of salinity is and the water outside you so God had to design them so that they could withstand both pressures depending on which part of their life cycle it was and so they have a very complicated life cycle it's not the kind of thing that could happen by accident because if you die before you have a chance to reproduce that doesn't help and if your whole population does that while they're trying to accidentally evolve into something that would succeed it just doesn't work the more you understand about the life cycle of the salmon the more you need to be appreciative of God's great cleverness his intelligence he is just amazing well one of the things that he's designed into these little salmon is an awareness of how dark it is in the water that they're in and so they want to go downstream in a on a dark night because if they go downstream on a dark night then the Predators who are fish hungry at nighttime and who wouldn't mind going into the stream water and eating a bunch of fish well if they got eaten before they got to go to the ocean that doesn't help the salmon population and so they have photo sensors that are built into their bodies that recognize when it is a moonless night and statistically most of the salmon that go downstream they do it as a group they do it on a moonless night there are also some times when there's been a very strong storm that stirred up the water and made it muddy and so they interpret that as oh it's a dark night and they'll use that to go downstream but statistically that's a much less likelihood that they will use muddy water from a storm to go down stream than they would just depend on the moon so the moon cycle helps them to know when to go downstream now of course one of the things that humans have been told to do is to be good stewards of God's creation and just as you have many who have ranches who raise cattle for beef or who have dairy farms I grew up in dairy farm country as a boy and so a lot of my neighbors had dairy farms and they were using animals in that way too so that we could all have milk and cheese and butter well you also have fish farms where guess you could call them fish ranches but anyway there are these floating platforms that have cages in them and inside the cages are either the salmon or in this case steelhead trout which is cousin to a salmon and I say cousin because trout and salmon are known to hybridize so they're part of the same creative kind that was made on day five they share the same family history anyway there's there's certainly a lot of money to be made in successful fish farming and by the way fish farming if you're talking about inland is is not it's not a new idea we see in the Song of Solomon that King Solomon when he was thinking on in romantic terms about his sweetheart he complimented her beauty he said that her neck was like a tower of ivory and that your eyes are like this dish poule of Heshbon I guess that was romantic are your eyes like fish pools well anyway that was considered romantic in King Solomon's time and that illustrates the fact that people would have an enclosure some kind of a tank on land or a hole that they dug fill it with water and put fish stock in there and raise fish that way but fish farming nowadays is not done on land it's actually done in ocean water and so you'll have these cages or net pens that are out there floating and have boardwalks attached so that the humans can can walk along the net cages and check on the fish and and then they have a way of feeding them very exciting Enterprise my wife and I went up to Maine and saw salmon farm a few years back but the first successful salmon farm cages in the first salmon fishing farm in the world traces back to a family operation in 1970s off the coast of Norway and that family operation is turned into a billion-dollar company called marine harvest and five million meals of seafood per day result from their operations around the world well in the process of them trying to raise salmon and get them to the most marketable condition so that they could make the most money the most profit they stumbled into something that actually illustrates how the main rules okay now in this cartoon here you have a psychiatrist fish talking to a patient fish and the patient fish is saying you have to help me doctor I've lost my appetite and my scales are changing colors and I have this sudden urge to drop everything swim up a river spawn and die well he's he's uh changing based on the changing daylight hours in the year because God has designed the salmon to recognize when the winter daylight which when you have more hours of daylight particularly in the northern latitudes when those hours start to shrink the that difference in in daylight hours versus night darkness is recognized by the fish and it triggers programs within the fish to stop growing bigger and heavier which means you sell better in the market and to convert into reproductive mode and once they start converting into reproductive mode they stop eating their flesh doesn't taste quite as good and you know so the the ideal time to harvest them if you're a fish farmer is just before they shift into reproductive mode okay so a grad student is doing research on fish and he's visiting one of their net pen operations and the net pet operation has installed artificial lighting for the safety of the employees so that they don't fall into the salt water and have a problem the artificial lighting is interpreted by the fish how do you think they think it's still summer when it's turning into autumn because the artificial lighting to them is Oh midnight Sun again and so they keep growing bigger and bigger and bigger instead of shifting into reproductive mode well that was to the advantage of the fish farm owners anyway it's an example of how the moon is regulating the life cycle of the salmon so the moon is ruling well let's return to the thought that the earth is moving which was a controversy in Galileo's lifetime or at least in some parts of Europe it was in other parts it wasn't but what about this idea of the circuit of the earth well we have isaiah 40:22 and it says he who dwells above the circle of the earth and then it talks about God stretching out the heavens and in the word circle there many have thought oh that's talking about the roundness of the earth the circle of the earth the roundness of the earth you know the earth is not flat it's round the problem with that is there's two problems one is the usual words for roundness and the Hebrew language does have works for that that's not what this word is the other problem is this word kook and it's related words are translated in a lot of other places in Scripture that have nothing to do with roundness but they does seem that circuit does match and we'll see that here in just second job 22 uses the same word when it says that God walks the circuit of the heavens it's the same word that's in isaiah 40:22 so the heavens have a circuit there they're moving and we see in 1st Samuel that a related word is translated dancing what does dancing have to do with roundness but dancing is kind of like a circuit and then we see in Leviticus 23 related Hebrew words that are translated feast or celebrate a feast again celebrate a feast and then again celebrate so the concept here is that there's something that involves celebrate that that is relevant to celebrating a feast or it might be translated dancing or it might be translated circuit and that is what isaiah 40:22 is talking about is that there is a choreography and so the kind of dance that is taking place in the heavens is not like the kind of dancing that was done when I was a teenager because when I was a teenager he stood in one place you shook your body in a bunch of different directions he tried to do it with energy and enthusiasm but not fall over but that was about it so you only had that you only had to make sure that you didn't fall over a couple years back I tried out to participate in a Scandinavian dance club and they have a lot of moving parts and it's very tricky and it's mathematical and well I'll just admit it they said why don't you stand on the sidelines with a camera and take pictures of us and that way people won't get hurt anyway I have a lot of respect for choreography it's not easy and yet God has put choreography in the heavens now some have been so amazed and we should be amazed by what goes on in the heavens we should be amazed by how the Sun benefits us we should be amazed by how the moon benefits us but that doesn't mean that we worship or thank the Sun or the moon no we worship and thank the God who designed the Sun and the moon to rule as they do and to benefit us as they do as well as to benefit all the animals in the plants so rather than sinfully and idolatrous ly worshipping the Sun of the Moon we should be thanking God and appreciating him and recognizing his glory in what he has done Romans 1 says that unsaved mankind exchanges the truth of God for a lie and worshiped and serves created things rather than the Creator who is forever praised the Big Bang fable is that kind of lie it's with first Timothy 6:20 calls science falsely so called in other words fake science that's what the Big Bang fable is it's saying that what's out there in heavens is just a materi realistic explosion there wasn't an intelligent being who set everything up and choreographed it and makes it work all the moving parts real knowledge about the scripture about the cosmos comes from Scripture and we see that we need to start with God's written word if we want to understand what's going on in the creation around us including the Sun and the moon we also should be reminded when we think of the heavens of how huge creation is the universe is huge and we're very little inside it and we have amazing value and each one of us when we look at the stars or the Sun of the moon we should also appreciate the fact that God did not make us stars what if he made me a star well I sure wouldn't be talking to you but don't say he couldn't have done that because look at those stars he did it to them he could have done it to you but he chose to make each one of us exactly the individual person that each one of us is and we don't want to cheat God out of glory he deserves by failing to appreciate him as the very personal creator he is who gave us the family history that we have the exact ancestor we have put us into place and at the time that he wanted us to live and to live for him we really need to appreciate God as our personal creation he didn't have to make us as a creature in his own image but he chose to and he did there are no accidents when it comes to our created lives or anything else in creation God appointed the moon for seasons the Sun knows it's going down God has designed it it's all choreographed Psalm 19 tells us that the heavens declare the glory of God but the second half of Psalm 19 directs us to his written word and tells us that the law of the Lord is perfect converting the soul literally returning the soul God gave us a soul we wander away like sheep you know you think of panels Messiah all we like sheep have gone astray is that how the music goes no it's all we like sheep have gone astray you can picture a sheep getting in trouble straying away from the Shepherd and that's what we all have done and we need to be returned to the Shepherd of our souls the testimony of the Lord is sure it makes wise the simple well doctor jake has told you about some of the resources that we have out there in the resource table and I see my time is up so I'll just mention we've got some good resources out there some of them have some really good pictures a lot of good information I especially recommend this DVD series on astronomy what you aren't being told about astronomy by Spike thesaurus people of all walks of life appreciate his series and they are loaded with information he used to be an evolutionist atheist working for NASA that was his career he is now a Bible believing creationist and he's got a good sense of humor a lot of good astronomy resources out there as well and I know that we don't we've run out of time so I all I can say is we we do have under construction a Discovery Center for science in Earth history it's an exciting part of I see ours ministry go on our website and learn about that every week we have to park in a different parking lot because of all the construction going on but it's an exciting time for us but let's close with personal application Psalm 8 when I consider the heavens the works of your fingers the moon and the stars which you have ordained what is man that you are mindful of him and the son of man that you visit him we should be thankful for all of creation especially our own created lives and the greatest thing we can do is belong to God and give him the honor that he deserves and of course that starts with trusting Christ as personal Saviour for our individual sins and trusting him to give us that eternal life that is a free gift to all who would come to him let me say a word prayer lord thank you for being so smart so powerful so glorious so careful that you have choreographed the heavens you've done so to display your glory you've done so to benefit us and other living things on this planet help us to appreciate you you are so big and yet you love us so much thank you for being you in Jesus name Amen

Channel: Indian Hills Community Church

Views: 3,873

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Id: 7tx-OI6ngFY

Length: 55min 45sec (3345 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 04 2017