Latest / Cumberland Trace Church of Christ (Formerly Lehman Ave Church of Christ) / VBS 2026 - "Scientific Foreknowledge" by Joey Morgan - Part 3

Transcript

VBS 2026 - "Scientific Foreknowledge" by Joey Morgan - Part 3 · Cumberland Trace Church of Christ (Formerly Lehman Ave Church of Christ)

0:01
You hear me now? Good. I also have to give a little bit of credit
0:04
to a little thing called Copilot that opened up in the corner whenever
0:08
I opened up Microsoft PowerPoint for the first time in my life. It came up
0:12
and said, do you want some help making a PowerPoint? So the words
0:16
are mine, but I got to give credit to Copilot for pretty much everything else
0:20
that you're going to see. But so there's many ways that people might
0:23
answer you when you ask about having a Bible study,
0:27
about maybe why they don't see the value in God's Word. Like,
0:31
if you just go up to somebody and say, hey, would you be interested in,
0:34
you know, having a Bible study? And you'll get all sorts of
0:38
comments from different people. Maybe they just say, you know, I just don't see
0:42
any value. I don't believe in the Bible. I don't really see a need
0:46
for me to study it with you, or anything like that. Why they think you
0:50
are silly even sometimes for believing it yourself. Sometimes you'll even have that conversation
0:54
with someone. So some are going to say it's a made-up
0:57
book. You know, you probably have heard that in your lifetime at some
1:02
point in time. They'll say the events didn't happen, you know,
1:05
as it was written. They don't believe that. That's where you
1:09
may point to some of the archaeological, you know, evidence that Bill talked about on
1:13
Sunday evening that point you in the direction of a lot of
1:17
these events did happen. You know, there's all sorts of evidence that says the
1:21
things that we've found, they all say the stuff has happened just like
1:26
what we read in the Bible. Well, then some might say, and I've
1:29
heard this one a lot, well, it's just a book written by man just
1:33
to make people act a certain way. How many of y'all have heard that in
1:37
your lifetime of talking with people?
1:40
I've heard that quite a few times as well. Well, then that's maybe
1:43
when we point to prophecy in the Bible, like what Dale had mentioned
1:47
last night, to show that the things spoken in the Bible are not
1:51
just written by man, they're God-breathed and not just from
1:55
man. The Bible told of things that were going to happen before they
1:59
happened, and then they happened. Well, a man
2:02
can't come up with that by himself, you know, just— it's, it's not going to
2:05
happen. Then they may answer and say,
2:09
well, maybe they wrote it and then after after it already had
2:13
taken place. Well, that would be impossible
2:16
in many of the situations, as we talked about last night, because it's lifetimes
2:20
that went by before the thing took place. They couldn't have,
2:24
you know, done such a thing. But then those whose hearts are still
2:28
hard after showing them all those things, they still believe it's a made-up book.
2:33
They're still going to believe that it's a book that's just written by man to
2:36
make people act a certain way, to keep us straight. Well, then maybe now we'll
2:40
get into tonight's topic, which is scientific foreknowledge in the
2:44
Bible. So this topic joins together 2 things
2:48
that I think the world believes are in conflict
2:52
with each other. I think they think it's science and the Bible,
2:56
and those 2 things are at odds, you know, with one another.
2:59
You have to— it's as if they believe you can only believe one
3:04
or you can believe the other. It's as if they don't coexist
3:07
with one another. Science is even usually looked at by a lot of people in
3:10
the world as the intellectual alternative to
3:15
God. It's the smarter way of thinking about things. It's the— if you—
3:19
science is a more intelligent way of looking at the things of the world
3:23
instead of looking at what the Bible says about things. It's the thing that really
3:27
proves that God is not real in a lot of people's minds.
3:32
As if that's the goal of what science is all about. And it
3:36
kind of reminds me, I saw this comic strip a long time ago. Of course,
3:38
this wasn't the comic strip, I had to recreate it, but it's
3:44
a comic strip where man has been trying to create, you know, man from the
3:47
dust of the ground, and they've finally done it. You know, that we finally have
3:50
done it, we've created man from the dust of the ground, and then God just
3:53
laughs and says, that's cute, create your own dust.
3:57
And that's what science ultimately, no matter what we come up
4:01
with or what we might prove, it's always going to lead us back to there's
4:06
a Creator and they can't get past that point no matter how far they try
4:10
to take it. So the Bible is primarily a book of
4:14
theology. That's what it's all about, who God is and our relationship to him.
4:18
It's not meant to be a science textbook.
4:22
However, when the Bible speaks on matters that
4:25
deal with science and the natural world, it does so
4:29
with accuracy that you would not expect based on when
4:34
it was written, who wrote it, the knowledge at the time.
4:38
It's always right there, right in line with it.
4:42
So the question that we'll start out with is,
4:45
when you read a very old book, what do you
4:49
expect it to reflect? And feel free to talk and ask questions,
4:53
throw something at me, raise your hand. It's a group
4:56
effort here. Talk amongst each other.
5:00
What'd you say? Old, old times, things that were
5:05
written in the old times. You would expect stuff to
5:09
kind of match up with the common knowledge of whatever time period it is that
5:12
you're, you know, reading that book. If I read a book written by
5:15
somebody in the 1700s that
5:19
was entitled The Best Way to Win a War, I wouldn't expect to
5:23
open up that book and read about submarines and tanks and
5:27
helicopters and, you know, all sorts of things like that. It's not going to be
5:31
there because the common knowledge at that time,
5:34
they're not going to know of those things. The ideas someone would
5:38
have on how to win a war in the 1700s compared to now are
5:42
going to be drastically different based on the new information, the new things
5:46
that are out there, everything that goes along with that. So when you read an
5:49
old book, you're going to expect them to reflect whatever is the common
5:53
knowledge by that writer at that specific time.
5:56
In fact, if you go find an old science book or even an old Guinness
6:01
Book of World Records and/or an encyclopedia,
6:04
if anybody still has any of those, you know, the big old books that you
6:08
might have had at the time whenever you were younger, see how many errors there's
6:11
probably in there now. If you go pull up a 1980s encyclopedia
6:16
and look up anything that's related in the science field, even see how many things
6:20
are different now that they have come up with something different
6:23
between 1980 and just now. So it's very different from
6:28
what we might know today. So if we read any book written
6:31
by someone that's as old as the Bible, I would expect the
6:35
scientific information that is contained within that book to be
6:40
very outdated, probably based upon the beliefs and
6:43
the information that someone might have had at the time that it was written.
6:47
Some of those would be outdated. So if a book is solely written by man,
6:52
a man can only write what they can know, right? I can't
6:56
come up with anything that I don't know and write it. So a man can
6:59
only write what they know. The book would only contain things within that person's knowledge
7:03
at the time of the writing. So how
7:07
we got here, the shape of the earth, why does it rain,
7:11
what causes somebody to get sick— their views on those
7:15
things over the course of time has been very different from long
7:18
time ago to today. The answer to all those questions has been drastically
7:22
different in the mindset of mankind. They've come up with
7:26
all sorts of things to answer those questions.
7:29
Their views on those things at the time it was written would be outdated
7:33
now with new information. But the Bible is different because it's not just
7:37
any old book. My hope in this study tonight, as we
7:40
look at some of the verses written long ago that contain information about
7:44
the world around us, that it's going to tell us 2 things.
7:48
The first one is the things written at the
7:51
time that they were written by the person who wrote it, added in with
7:56
their current knowledge on the subject, it doesn't make sense. That the
8:00
Bible is a book filled with only the thoughts
8:03
of mankind. It just doesn't make sense. There's no logical way
8:08
that you would come to that conclusion, that if it's a man's thoughts
8:12
written down by a man only, that this information would be in
8:15
here based upon the date of the Bible. The second
8:20
thing is the absence of some of the
8:23
things as we read these Because some of
8:27
the things that we're going to talk about, a lot of different suggestions
8:31
for the reason why or how we should go about doing
8:34
certain things are drastically different over the course of time that mankind has
8:38
come up with. And you don't see any of those in the Bible either.
8:41
It's only the things that are 100% true to
8:45
the fact, things that are 100% real within the science things.
8:50
It's not been disproven. Kind of the same with the archaeological stuff
8:53
that we talked about on Sunday night. Everything they dig up,
8:58
it just points to the Bible being true. Well, everything that science
9:02
proves over the course of time, some of those things
9:06
are already in here, and they've been here for a very long time. We're just
9:10
coming to really know about them. So those
9:13
are the 2 things that I hope to accomplish in this class. The one thing
9:16
that I'm not trying to do is this: My intention is
9:19
not to convince you that God specifically put these things in
9:23
the Bible so that we would have the answers to the scientific questions
9:28
of the world. These things that we cover are just things that God
9:32
has revealed in a way. A lot of times it's in the giving of a
9:36
law for a different reason altogether, but it's just information that we
9:40
would call science that so happens to be in the Bible that
9:44
is exactly what we believe today and what they've found out to be 100% true.
9:48
And so these things are things that science— it's not a theory
9:53
of science. There's a lot of things out there that are theories in science that
9:57
go against maybe what the Bible might say, but those are theories. We're talking
10:00
about proven things in the, in the world of science
10:04
or in the realm of science that are also in the Bible. I'm also by
10:09
no means trying to act as if there's a bunch of hidden gems in Scripture
10:11
like it's the, you know, the Da Vinci Code or something
10:15
or other where we're trying to find all sorts of stuff in here
10:19
that give us the answers to all everything that's out there in the world.
10:22
That's not what I'm intending to, to show you with this, but what I'm trying
10:25
to show you is things that are science-related
10:29
in the Bible match up with things
10:33
that we see around us in the world and the things that they know that
10:36
are true And of course, we know they're true because God said so.
10:40
So these are just things revealed by the Creator long before
10:44
they became scientific common knowledge. And it should allow your
10:48
faith in scriptures of them being God-breathed to
10:51
be increased. And because there's so many things in the Bible that when
10:55
they were written compared to when they became scientific common knowledge, it makes
10:59
no sense again that book— this book, the Bible, was written just
11:03
by man. So a study like this
11:07
is probably going to cause you to start wondering. It did me anyways.
11:10
I've actually looked at some of these things before, and it starts to make you
11:14
think as you read the Bible, what other things have we— are in here that
11:18
I just read over and maybe I didn't even realize?
11:23
There's things about this world that God mentions that maybe we just didn't even
11:26
think about before. An example of having the kind of
11:30
thoughts that I think we should have with this is Matthew Maury.
11:34
He's known as the father of oceanography. He read Psalm
11:38
8 while he was— I think he was in a hospital, if I remember
11:42
right. I can't remember exactly. There's actually a video on this, like a documentary.
11:46
But in Psalm 8, it says, beginning in verse 3, when I consider your heavens,
11:50
the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have ordained,
11:53
what is man that you are mindful of him and the son of man that
11:57
you visit him? For You have made Him a little lower than the angels,
12:00
and You have crowned Him with glory and honor. You have made Him have dominion
12:03
over the works of Your hands, and You have put all things under His
12:07
feet, all sheep and oxen, even the beasts of the field, the birds
12:11
of the air, and the fish of the sea that pass through the
12:15
paths of the seas. O Lord, O Lord, how excellent is Your
12:19
name in all the earth! So our religious man,
12:22
he read Psalm 8 and decided, you know what, the Bible says
12:26
there's paths in the seas. And in that,
12:30
if the Bible says it, if God says it, they've got to be there.
12:34
You know, this is the conclusion that he came up with. That's the kind of
12:37
faith that he had in the Scriptures, is that if the Bible says
12:40
there's paths in the seas, there must be paths in the seas. So he
12:44
sought out to discover them, and he ended up mapping the ocean currents and
12:47
found that just like there's highways on land, There are paths
12:51
and there are currents in the ocean. Now, this instance may
12:55
not be considered, again, scientific foreknowledge by some
12:58
people because someone could be
13:02
discussing paths of the sea and say, well, maybe he's talking about the
13:06
paths that, you know, fish might take, normal paths.
13:09
If you're a big fisherman, you probably know that the channel cats,
13:13
catfish, hang out in the channels and things like that. But again,
13:16
it's the terminology there is pass in the sea. Are there pass
13:20
in the sea? Yes, there's. If there weren't
13:24
pass in the seas and then we came and read the Bible and it says
13:27
that there are pass in the seas, then we would say, oh, well, now we've
13:30
got a problem. But again, it's just some scientific information that's given to us
13:34
about there being pass in the seas. And sure enough,
13:38
this man, Maury, Matthew Maury,
13:41
went looking for them, and then he found them. And I
13:46
only share this with you because it shows how Maury looked at the scripture.
13:49
He didn't feel like the Bible and science were battling each other out
13:53
to prove one wrong. Instead, he decided, I'm going
13:57
to look at scripture and I'm going to look in my field of science,
14:00
and I'm going to put the two together and see what I can come up
14:04
with. And he's decided they do go together, you know, the Creator
14:07
and his creation. So There's 3 things that I'm going to look at tonight.
14:11
I've got some other stuff at the end if we have time, or again,
14:13
if you all have one that you've studied before and you want to bring
14:17
it up, feel free to do so. But there's 3 of them that I picked
14:20
out specifically in our time that I want to look at where I feel
14:23
like the Scripture— Scriptures and science are not battling it
14:28
out against each other, but they go hand in hand with one another. And the
14:32
first one is circumcision. And vitamin K.
14:36
So if you want to turn over to Genesis, Genesis chapter 17,
14:40
we're going to start there where in Genesis 17:1-2,
14:44
God makes a covenant with Abram. It says in
14:48
verse 1 of Genesis 17, when Abram was 99
14:52
years old, the Lord appeared to Abram and said to him, I am Almighty God.
14:56
Walk before me and be blameless, and I will make my covenant between
15:00
me and you and I will multiply you exceedingly.
15:04
And then in verses 7 through 11, God says that
15:08
covenant is not just with Him and Abram, but also Abram's
15:12
descendants. And a sign of the covenant, that was that the male children
15:16
were to be circumcised. That was going to be the sign of this covenant that
15:19
He made with Abram. And then we get to verse 12,
15:24
which says, He who is 8 days old among you shall be circumcised.
15:28
Every male child in your generations, he who is born in your house
15:32
or bought with money from any foreigner who is not of your descendant.
15:37
So Genesis 17:12 commands that male
15:40
children be circumcised, and the key is on the 8th
15:44
day, so whenever one is 8 days old.
15:47
Now, as we read that, we may skip over the time
15:51
between a male child being born and when
15:54
he is to be circumcised, and we just may not think twice about it.
15:58
You know, we just may say, you know, that's just the day that God
16:02
picked. He just decided 8 days for whatever reason. That's what he decided
16:06
to do. Or maybe your inner Maury kicks in and
16:10
you say, I wonder why God decided to do it in 8 days.
16:13
Why did he say whenever they're 8 days old,
16:16
that's when you circumcise the male child? Is it significant
16:21
for some reason? Would the people just know why? Or— because
16:25
God didn't explain why. He didn't give a reason for the 8th day.
16:28
He just said, do it on the 8th day. So the question would be,
16:32
did the people already know the answer to that question, why to do it on
16:36
the 8th day? If it wasn't significant or important,
16:41
then why didn't God just say, as soon as you can,
16:45
within a week, at some point,
16:48
circumcise the male child. But no, he was pretty specific on
16:52
when he wanted that male child to be circumcised.
16:56
He just said the 8th day.
16:59
Now let's look at the science side of things and what we now know.
17:02
Again, it wouldn't be known at the time of where we're reading
17:06
that in Genesis chapter 17,
17:09
but has anyone in here had surgery before? Pretty good chance,
17:12
probably. It's an adult class. If you're a bad kid like
17:16
me, you probably were in the emergency room all the time, had surgery all
17:19
the time. But sometimes when you have surgery, depending upon what
17:23
it is that you are having to do, you have to do some pre-op stuff
17:27
sometimes. You got to go in, give blood, you got to, you know, they might
17:30
check out your heart and see if you're going to be, you know, stout enough
17:34
to be able to have the surgery, whatever it is. Even some tests again to
17:37
see if you might have some kind of a complication from it. One complication
17:41
of any surgery really is you might bleed to death.
17:45
I guess I would think if they're cutting you open, that's always a possibility.
17:49
I mean, probably not all the time going to happen, I wouldn't think, but it's
17:53
a possibility if you're bleeding. Well, if circumcision,
17:57
if that's a surgery, there's going to be blood with that. So that's a
18:00
possibility unless there's something to stop the bleeding whenever
18:05
you're cut. There's a chance that you might bleed to death.
18:09
Then comes learning about vitamin K. So in the early
18:13
1930s— and now I'm not sure if
18:17
I was to Google when was Genesis 17 written,
18:20
there probably is some kind of debate about that. I'm not sure what the dates
18:24
are that they give, but how many of you believe it's before 1930?
18:29
Everybody, probably, right? So I
18:33
don't think it's very hard to find somebody that wouldn't say that. So in the
18:35
early 1930s, a Danish
18:40
biochemist, Henrik Dam, discovered vitamin K while
18:44
studying cholesterol metabolism in chicks. And I
18:49
mean baby chickens, not chicks, but baby chickens.
18:53
1930s. Its name, vitamin K,
18:57
for the German word starting with K,
18:59
coagulations with a K. So it's
19:02
the coagulations vitamin. So our word coagulate
19:07
with the C means what? Anybody know what that is?
19:11
When your blood does that, it kind of gels
19:16
up, it coagulates. It's the process, it says, by which a
19:20
liquid, most commonly blood when you're talking about it, thickens into a
19:24
gel or solid state to form a clot.
19:27
So that's what the definition of coagulate is. It acts as a
19:31
crucial defense mechanism to stop bleeding after an injury and begin the
19:35
tissue repair process. So 1930s,
19:40
Henrik Dam figures out vitamin K is really the vitamin
19:44
that helps blood clot. Basically, he figured that out by working
19:49
on studying cholesterol metabolism in baby chickens.
19:53
So I'm sure people in the time of Genesis 17 was
19:58
written have cut themselves before. I mean,
20:04
we— how many of you cut yourself pretty often? I work in construction. I cut
20:07
myself almost every day, it seems like. They probably have
20:10
cut themselves as an adult and saw the blood
20:14
stop. And didn't think twice about it. Just, that's what happens, you know. If I
20:18
cut myself, as long as I do something to it, you know, put some kind
20:21
of something on it, or depends on how bad it is, blood stops.
20:25
That's what happens. They didn't know how it happened specifically,
20:28
probably. They didn't know anything about vitamin K, but they knew if
20:33
I cut myself, if I do something,
20:36
eventually it hopefully will stop bleeding by itself.
20:40
I'm also sure anyone at that time might— would understand
20:44
if they circumcised a male, that would obviously cause them to bleed.
20:48
But my guess is they would expect, just like their own cuts,
20:52
if I circumcise this child, that bleeding will eventually, you know,
20:56
stop. So that wouldn't be a thought process in their mind
20:59
of, what is going to happen when we circumcise this child?
21:03
What if they don't— what if they don't quit bleeding? Probably not
21:07
even in their realm of thought process. They didn't need to know about vitamin
21:11
K again specifically to know blood ends up clotting.
21:15
But back to our original question, why the 8th
21:19
day? So modern medicine tells
21:22
us that through studies in the 1900s that infants
21:26
are born with low levels of vitamin K that
21:30
steadily rise naturally peak in the newborn,
21:33
guess when? Not on the first day,
21:38
not on the second day, not on the third day.
21:43
I'm gonna skip the other for time purposes, but we're gonna— on the 8th day
21:47
is when it peaks. Now you may
21:51
be like me and thinking, I've had 2 boys myself, so maybe
21:55
there's some of you in here that have had boys or You know, we just
21:58
had a grandson this last week, and on the second
22:02
day of him being in the hospital, they circumcised him and he came home.
22:05
And you'd say, well, what happened there then? That's not the 8th day. Why did
22:09
your grandson not bleed to death if he doesn't have enough vitamin K?
22:14
Well, it's because back— you must— they must have figured out something else
22:18
since the 1930s then, because in the 1940s,
22:22
due to Swedish scientists scientist Jorgen Lehmann's studies,
22:27
they began administering vitamin K to newborns to
22:30
get them to day 8 levels prior to performing circumcisions.
22:35
So if you've had someone in your family that's had it before the 8th day,
22:38
it's because they basically give them a vitamin K shot now to get them up
22:42
to the 8th day vitamin K levels before they perform that circumcision
22:47
so that the newborn's blood will clot
22:50
And all that will happen. So the question
22:54
then becomes, in Genesis 17, we can
22:58
all agree well before 1930, how do you
23:02
think Moses, who wrote this, if it's just his
23:05
thoughts and it's just a man-written book,
23:09
how do we have any kind of explanation of why did he pick
23:13
the 8th day? What would be someone's thought process
23:18
on that? Anybody have a good thing that someone might use against that of how
23:22
did he just come up with the 8th day? Was it a random coincidence that
23:26
he just decided, I'm going to pick a number? Maybe Moses' favorite number was 8.
23:29
I don't know. That would be the only thing. Yeah, that's the
23:33
only thing you can come up with. Did he spin a wheel or did they
23:37
even have a wheel? Spin a wheel with numbers and picked one?
23:41
I mean, how would he have known it? Or did God,
23:46
who created us and knows exactly how we work,
23:51
give detailed instructions because he already knew the science behind
23:54
blood and how it clots? You want to know how he knows it? Because he
23:58
created us and he knew that they
24:02
needed to wait 8 days before they performed this circumcision.
24:06
Yeah, Bill. Abraham was circumcised at 99 years old. Yeah,
24:10
he had plenty of vitamin K. Yeah, yeah.
24:16
But just like a doctor planning a surgery,
24:20
they want you to wait until the body is at the strongest point. So if
24:24
you go in for those tests and you need to do some things before surgery
24:27
or whatever it is, they're like, you gotta, you gotta get yourself ready, you know,
24:30
for this surgery because it's a big deal. You got some things you've got to
24:33
do you know, God gave this instruction
24:38
thousands of years before we understood
24:41
how blood clotting worked. Again, it's not that the people in Genesis didn't know blood
24:44
clotted. Again, I'm sure they've cut themselves,
24:48
but they didn't understand what we know now. But then
24:51
again, what we know now just backs up what God
24:56
has told us. It just doesn't make sense why,
24:59
if it wasn't an inspired book given to us by
25:03
the one who created us to have the 8th day in there. It would have
25:07
been— it would have been easier to just leave that out if it was
25:10
written by a man and just not be wrong in that case. But again,
25:15
what does— what does this show us about God too?
25:19
Does he care? Yeah, and he,
25:23
he cares about us too. Like, he created us He cares about
25:27
us even in this law that He's given to make a covenant with
25:31
people and the thing that was required. He's still making sure that
25:35
I'm not going to do something that is going to cause, you know,
25:38
harm in some bad way. He cared enough to protect in
25:42
His giving of the instruction. And to me, this also shows, and this goes
25:46
with everything we're going to cover tonight, that His wisdom comes
25:50
way before our understanding. We may not
25:55
understand, and this doesn't— outside of even scientific foreknowledge, we're coming tonight.
25:58
As you read the Bible, you're going to read some things that say that
26:02
you're going to say, well, that doesn't make sense sometimes. But his wisdom
26:07
comes before our understanding. He's wiser than us.
26:11
He's the one who created us. He knows more about
26:15
us than we would ever even begin to know. So sometimes when
26:19
you read things and you say, I don't understand why I can't do this,
26:22
or I don't understand why I have to do this,
26:26
It's the same reason why he said the 8th day, because he knows us
26:30
intimately and he knows what's best for us and he cares about us
26:35
and loves us. All those things going to play. Do you have something, Russell?
26:50
Yeah,
26:51
yeah.
26:55
And there's even— I didn't even know that they do this, which it makes sense
26:58
to me now because I'm sure there's some, uh, Jews that still,
27:02
you know, because there's a, there's a lady that Amanda used to
27:06
work with that works at Gray's and Gilbert now, and like, that's one of her
27:09
roles is the people who bring in their babies on the 8th day still because
27:13
they don't take the vitamin K shot. They wait and bring their babies in on
27:16
the 8th day and still do it. On the 8th day. But again, that,
27:18
that just blows my mind. I mean, how many times have you just read over
27:22
that on the 8th day? And, and again, as you, as you see that,
27:26
you're going to start looking at scripture differently now because you're going to start seeing
27:29
things and say, I wonder what— just like I said, the Maori guy
27:34
with the, oh, it says there's passing seas, I'm gonna go look for them and
27:37
see if I can find them. And again, I'm not saying that that's what the—
27:40
that 8th day was in there given as an instruction because God is making
27:44
a covenant with Abram.
27:48
It just so happens that that is scientific information given to us.
27:53
I don't think God put that in there so that we'd find it in 1930
27:56
and say and point back, but he may have. I can't speak for God.
27:59
I don't, I don't know, you know, his ways are higher than my ways.
28:02
That may very well be why it's in there, but I'm not saying that that's
28:05
why any of these things are in here. It's just scientific information you're going to
28:09
find in the Bible that doesn't disprove any anything.
28:12
So next we're going to look at the water cycle.
28:16
Now anybody know what the water cycle is? I think that there was a
28:19
song for this whenever we were in school, but I can't remember what it is,
28:23
so I'm not going to sing it. But possibly there's one, maybe somebody here knows
28:27
it, or maybe it was one of those Schoolhouse Rock things or something, I don't
28:30
know. But basically we have evaporation,
28:36
which is when water heats up and rises as individual invisible
28:40
vapor, condensation, that vapor cools,
28:43
gathers back into the water in the clouds, and then precipitation,
28:47
the water falls back to the earth as rain.
28:50
That's the cycle of water, you know, on our planet. We have it
28:55
evaporates up, gets in the clouds, clouds get heavy, rain comes
28:59
down, cycle repeats itself, you know, over and over
29:02
again. Well, what about the science of that?
29:06
Anybody know of any kind of weird ways that have been out
29:10
there for a long time of how people thought we got water?
29:14
There's all sorts of stuff out there. Google that sometime. It's very interesting,
29:18
some of the stuff. Well, 600 BC,
29:21
Thales thought rivers were fed by ocean water pushed up through
29:25
the mountains. It's almost like a reverse French
29:29
press, I guess, or something like that, where The water goes up and then it
29:33
just runs down the mountains. 350 BC,
29:36
Aristotle saw the sun evaporate water but still doubted
29:40
that it was enough to fill the rivers. You know, that evaporation just didn't make
29:43
sense, that, that little amount of condensation-y type water
29:47
vapor and all that, how does that fill up all these rivers? How does that
29:51
cause the seas to be full of water? The water has to come from somewhere
29:55
else as well. Well, Leonardo da Vinci in the 1500s began
29:58
removing the idea that water had to come from somewhere else.
30:02
And there was all sorts of stuff that I read before this about different things
30:06
dumping water out and all sorts of things. But then John Dalton in 1802
30:11
put the numbers together and proved that the water cycle is a closed loop,
30:15
like what I mentioned at the beginning. Water evaporates up
30:18
in the air, the clouds gather together, dumps back out as rain that runs
30:22
down the rivers, goes into the ocean, evaporates out, same exact
30:26
thing. Why did it take so long?
30:30
Why did it take so long to understand that this is— I mean, we all
30:33
know that that's what it is now, right? Well,
30:37
the human eye cannot see water vapor at
30:42
the level in which it's actually being vaporized and going up there.
30:45
We can't see how much water vapor is around us all the time. Now you
30:49
can feel it during the time of year right now. I worked outside all day
30:52
today and My shirt tells a different story. Lots of water vapor out
30:56
there, lots of humidity. It required also the invention of measuring tools
31:01
and advancing in accounting. We had to get some people like Roger out there,
31:05
the big numbers guys, to finally prove that there
31:09
is enough for it to be a closed-loop system,
31:12
to make sense that the rain that comes down
31:16
is enough to fill the rivers and the seas and the oceans
31:20
and all those things like that. But this is something that Scripture's already
31:24
told us long ago, long before all that— those
31:28
dates that are up there. The verses are Job 26:8,
31:33
Job 36:27-28, and then Ecclesiastes 1:7,
31:37
which I feel like is basically the water cycle. It says that
31:42
all the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full.
31:47
To the place from which the rivers come, there they return again.
31:52
So he's basically saying it's a cycle there. Of course,
31:55
that's Solomon who was given wisdom by who?
31:59
By God. It's the closest thing to the water cycle word
32:03
for word that John Dalton finally figured out and put into numbers in 1802.
32:08
Solomon telling us and wisdom God gave him that the water we have
32:12
is a closed-loop system. Because if it
32:16
wasn't— so a lot of the people at the early stages again felt
32:19
like we still have to be getting water from somewhere else. Like it doesn't make
32:23
sense that all this water comes from
32:27
just out of the sky and keeps replenishing itself and all those kinds of things.
32:32
But it really does make sense because if new water, if we
32:36
kept adding new water and it kept running down
32:40
the mountains and in the rivers and into the oceans and into
32:43
the seas, what would happen?
32:47
Yeah, we'd be covered in water, wouldn't we? It only— it makes sense
32:53
to us now, and again, it's right there in Ecclesiastes 1:7,
32:58
but for a very long time that didn't make sense to a lot of people.
33:01
And that's what I was saying at the beginning, you'll see some things that are
33:05
It doesn't make sense that they're in there based on the time in which they
33:09
were written if it was only written by man and of
33:12
the thoughts of man. And then there's also things that aren't in there, like the
33:16
weird ideas that I mentioned of all sorts of things that are possibilities
33:21
that people have come up with over time. You're not going to find those in
33:24
scriptures either. And then in Job, we see in 26:8,
33:28
it says, he binds up the water in his thick clouds, yet the clouds
33:32
are are not broken under it. Again, that's kind of that condensation part
33:36
of the water cycle. And then Job 36:27-28,
33:39
for he draws up drops of water which distill his rain
33:42
from the mist which the clouds drop down and pour
33:46
abundantly on man. So now
33:50
one could say those aren't specific enough.
33:54
One might say, even some people might say, well, Job, some of Job
33:58
is figurative and maybe you can't take some things literal.
34:02
It's lacking details. Again, that's you thinking that
34:06
the Bible is a science book. It's not meant to be a science book.
34:10
The revelation of these details weren't given for the purpose of us
34:13
understanding the water cycle. That's not the purpose of these things
34:17
given to us, but it's to show us God's wisdom and
34:21
that he is the Creator and he is the one who is in control over
34:24
everything. That's what those verses are telling us. But they're also giving us the information
34:29
that matches up with what science tells us about how our water works here
34:33
on this earth. So you can, however, look at these verses and
34:37
come away with these conclusions. They do contain information given
34:40
to us that was not fully understood by mankind at
34:45
the time of its writing. Yet now we know them to be true, which again
34:49
points to it being divinely inspired. They also do
34:53
not contain any information other than what is at the current time what
34:57
we scientifically know is true, even though again it was
35:00
written much earlier. If it was solely written by
35:04
man and his finite knowledge, it definitely would have some
35:07
of those other things in there. So this one,
35:11
the next one is several things within one thing, but I kind of titled it
35:15
hygiene and germs. There's all sorts of things about this.
35:19
Today, nearly everyone understands that tiny organisms
35:22
called germs spread disease. I mean, we understand that.
35:26
We wash our hands, we disinfect surfaces, we cover our coughs,
35:30
we isolate sick people because modern science has
35:34
proven these practices help to stop different illnesses.
35:38
Seems common to us, right? We understand that.
35:42
But it took a very long time for us to come to that understanding.
35:45
As mankind. What is remarkable is that the Bible
35:50
instructed God's people to practice many of these things, many of
35:53
these same health measures that we now say that that's common
35:58
knowledge, you know, everybody knows that, but thousands of
36:02
years before anybody even knew germs existed, you know, there's no microscopes,
36:06
none of that kind of stuff, lots of times before that. So the Bible never
36:10
uses terms like germs, disinfect,
36:13
etc. Instead, it's just simply God giving
36:17
commandments to protect his people.
36:21
They're not going to understand it at the time that he's telling
36:24
them in the full scope of how maybe we might understand it today,
36:29
but that's what he's doing with this. So many see commandments of
36:32
God as coming from an angry man in the sky, you know, forcing them to
36:36
do things that you know, that they maybe want to do or keeping them from
36:40
doing things. But ultimately, again,
36:43
he's just there watching out for us, telling us what's best.
36:47
Maybe the Israelites felt that way about some of
36:51
these things because they don't know what we know now. Maybe whenever these commandments that
36:55
I'm going to read off to you, maybe whenever they heard these, they're probably thinking,
36:58
this is the dumbest thing I've ever heard, that we've got to do this.
37:03
But now we know it makes perfect sense, some of
37:06
the things that he asked. So looking back again, we can see that some of
37:09
these commands were far ahead of the medical knowledge of the ancient world.
37:13
So what some people believed about disease. So for
37:17
most of history, no one knew germs existed.
37:22
Sickness was blamed on angry spirits. A big one was
37:25
bad air, curses, astrology,
37:29
Superstition, cures, these cures that mankind
37:33
has come up with over the course of time often made people worse, whether it
37:36
was the bloodletting, animal waste sometimes was used
37:41
as medication, mud packed on open wounds,
37:45
even Egypt, Greece, and Rome had little idea
37:49
really about how that disease actually spread
37:53
as it comes to it. Even the idea that
37:57
invisible living organisms caused disease was completely
38:01
unknown. Again, they didn't have microscopes, they didn't have those kinds of things like we
38:05
have now. And with the Bible, again,
38:09
not being a science textbook, it doesn't come out and say, do these
38:13
things because there's germs and little organisms out there that's going
38:17
to get you. But God has given Israel several laws that promoted cleanliness,
38:21
and then prevented the spread of disease. And one of those was washing after
38:26
contact with disease. And I'm only going to read the first 8 verses of Leviticus
38:30
15. I feel like you're going to get the point because it's over and over
38:33
again kind of saying the same thing. And it says in Leviticus 15,
38:37
beginning in verse 1, and the Lord spoke to Moses and Aaron, saying,
38:40
speak to the children of Israel and say to them, when any man has a
38:44
discharge from his body, his discharge is unclean. And this
38:48
shall be his uncleanness in his regard to his discharge, whether his body runs with
38:53
his discharge or his body is stopped up by his discharge. It is his uncleanness.
38:57
Every bed is unclean on which he who has the discharge lies,
39:01
and everything which he sits on shall be unclean. And whoever touches his bed
39:05
shall wash his clothes and bathe in water and be unclean until evening.
39:09
He who sits on anything in which he has had the discharge shall
39:14
sit shall wash his clothes and bathe in water and
39:17
be unclean until evening. And he who touches the body of him who has
39:22
the discharge shall wash his clothes and bathe in water and be unclean until
39:25
evening. If he who has the discharge spits on him who is clean, then he
39:30
shall wash his clothes and bathe in water and be unclean until evening. Again,
39:33
it goes on and on. You can continue reading there. The entire chapter
39:36
repeatedly instructed people, wash yourselves.
39:41
And wash your clothes after coming in contact with bodily
39:44
discharge or someone considered unclean or someone who is sick
39:48
or someone who is, you know, has some sort of disease, whatever it is.
39:52
And again, that seems pretty basic to us, right? If you're around somebody
39:56
and they're sick, stay away from them.
40:00
If you come in contact with somebody that's sick, wash yourself.
40:05
Pretty basic to us.
40:07
I've always thought about 2 scenes as I was going over this. I thought
40:11
about 2 different scenes of some shows that one of them I watched pretty regularly,
40:15
one of them has been since I was a kid whenever I watched it,
40:17
but there's a scene from Everybody Loves Raymond. I don't know if anybody watches
40:20
that show, but the title of this episode is The
40:24
Sneeze, and it starts out at the very beginning. He's in the airport and this
40:27
guy here is washing his hands,
40:30
and then he's about to sneeze and he just turned around and just violently sneezes
40:34
all over Ray Barone. Just, I mean, goes crazy. And then Ray is
40:38
like freaked out. As soon as that guy walks out, he's over like basically scrubbing
40:42
his face. And of course he thinks he's sick then the whole entire episode,
40:45
and he actually does, I think, end up being sick at the end.
40:48
But that's today. If I was to walk around
40:52
and get sneezed on by somebody, it would gross me out because now
40:56
I'm thinking I'm gonna be sick, whatever that person has. It's on
41:00
me now, I'm gonna be sick. And then there's Ace Ventura 2,
41:04
I think it's Pet Detective, where it's a show. He's out there
41:07
in the— I don't remember what the name of the tribe was, but it was
41:11
a show of respect if you spit on each other. So then they
41:15
sit there and spit all over each other, and they come out of the tent,
41:17
they're just covered in spit. And again, neither one of
41:21
these are a true thing that happened, they're TV shows, but it is kind
41:25
of showing you Like us today, we understand
41:30
I don't need to be around somebody who's going to make me sick and spit
41:34
on me. And, you know, there's germs out there, there's things like that, versus someone
41:38
in a tribe or something like that that doesn't know those things. They might have
41:42
the idea of it's a very nice thing for us to spit on each other,
41:44
it's a show of friendship, not knowing that they're spreading germs
41:49
of whatever somebody might have. Yes.
41:58
Huh? Well, it could be a lot of different things. It's basically
42:02
just— yeah, so like a
42:06
sore, sore that's open, or it could be just any sort of, any sort of
42:10
fluid essentially that's coming from you that shouldn't be type of
42:13
thing. And like a leper would have a lot of discharges all over
42:17
his body. Or their body, huh?
42:21
Oh no, I know what you talk about. Yeah, I got you.
42:27
So again, I'm sure most understood this as a religious
42:31
ritual whenever they were given the command. They're like, God's just asking
42:35
us to do this for whatever reason. He wants to make me
42:39
do this. Again, that's what some people's thought process
42:42
is about God sometimes, and it doesn't make sense. But it's also a greater
42:46
teaching, really what God is doing about being clean and unclean in His presence is
42:51
what He's teaching throughout this. But it's also on top of that, giving us
42:55
information about you need to be clean. Like,
42:58
if you're around someone who's sick, you need to clean yourself and also stay away
43:02
from them and those kinds of things like that. So we now understand God is
43:05
speaking truth even about health in these verses. And again, if it was just
43:09
a religious ritual, He would
43:13
have told them to do anything. If it was just a religious ritual, He could
43:16
have said, you know, and I don't mean this in a bad way,
43:20
hop on one foot or do whatever, you know, it's— but He's given them specific
43:24
information to protect them about cleanliness, and on top
43:28
of that, it's a teaching about being clean and unclean in His presence. So today
43:32
we know washing removes bacteria, viruses, and then also
43:36
other harmful organisms. Again, go in any bathroom that deals
43:40
with food, etc., and you're going to see employees must wash their hands.
43:44
I don't think they do it, but they're supposed to wash their hands
43:48
before they go deal with your food. And then although the Israelites might not know
43:52
under how the washing worked and what it was actually removing
43:55
was germs and all those kinds of things, following God's instructions would
44:00
have helped reduce the spread of disease.
44:04
One of the more remarkable practices is the quarantine.
44:08
In Leviticus 13, God instructs priests to isolate anyone showing
44:11
symptoms of infectious skin diseases. So,
44:15
like leprosy was mainly what we're talking about here. And in verse 3,
44:19
we see that the person was examined. In Leviticus 13, verse 3,
44:23
it says, the priest shall examine the sore on the skin of the body,
44:26
and if the hair on the sore has turned white and the sore appears to
44:29
be deeper than the skin of his body, it is a leprous sore. And the
44:33
priest shall examine him and pronounce him unclean. So that's the first thing,
44:36
you have to examine somebody. In verse 4, they're separated from the community
44:40
for 7 days. Verse 5, after 7 days they were
44:44
examined again. If that disease had spread, they were to remain isolated, and if not,
44:48
then they could return. They were considered, you know, not to have leprosy.
44:52
Well, today hospitals use that exact same principle.
44:57
I think in 2020, I think we maybe learned it a little bit all too
45:00
well. About quarantine. When someone has a contagious
45:05
illness, they're isolated. What's the purpose behind
45:09
that? It's to protect everybody else, right? That's the whole purpose behind
45:13
it. Again, seems common to us. I can sit here and say that in
45:17
front of you and you're like, this is a no-brainer,
45:20
but that's only because it's common to
45:24
us now. It's not common at the time in which this
45:28
was written. So then we
45:32
have handling dead bodies. I might be about out of time, but we'll,
45:35
we'll get through this. Numbers 19:11-12 required anyone
45:39
who touched a dead body to undergo cleansing before returning to their normal
45:42
life. It says, he who touches the dead body of anyone shall be unclean
45:46
7 days. He shall purify himself with the water on the
45:49
3rd day and on the 7th day. Then he will be clean. But if he
45:52
does not purify himself on the 3rd day and on the 7th day, he will
45:57
not be clean. Again, modern medicine recognizes that dead bodies, especially during epidemics
46:01
and things like that, can carry harmful bacteria and infectious diseases.
46:05
Again, the Israelites simply obeyed God's command without understanding
46:09
microbiology like we understand today.
46:13
The disposal of human waste, probably one of the
46:17
most impressive health laws found in Deuteronomy 23:9-13. When the army
46:20
goes out against your enemies, Keep yourself from every wicked thing.
46:24
And if there is any man among you who becomes unclean by some occurrence in
46:28
the night, then he shall go outside the camp. He shall not come inside the
46:32
camp. But it shall be when evening comes that he shall wash with water,
46:36
and when the sun sets he may come into the camp. Also you shall have
46:39
a place outside the camp where you may go out, and you shall have an
46:43
implement among your equipment. And when you sit down outside, you shall dig with
46:47
it and turn and cover your refuse or cover, you know,
46:50
your waste. So God instructed Israel to place outside
46:55
the camp for human waste to bury it. The Israelites followed God's
46:59
command, but today we understand why. Again, to them, they might have
47:02
said, why, why do I have to do this? Doesn't make any sense.
47:07
But human waste can spread cholera,
47:11
dysentery, typhoid, hepatitis,
47:15
parasites. And throughout history,
47:19
there's no telling how much poor sanitation— how many people have been killed
47:23
by poor sanitation. Probably millions of people.
47:28
I've even seen older videos. Now they're starting to put some like older videos of
47:31
New York City and stuff. They've like added the color and stuff to
47:35
it and all that kind of stuff where you can watch those. And I've seen
47:38
where people are just throwing it out their windows out into the streets.
47:41
Like that's just what they're doing with it. So that, that's in
47:44
our country, and we just celebrated, you know,
47:47
250 years. Of course, New York City's been there maybe a little longer than that,
47:51
but tons of pandemics throughout history were
47:54
spread by poor sanitation practices. In 1846,
47:58
the London cholera pandemic killed 16,000 people, you know,
48:02
at that time. But the Bible instructed proper sanitation
48:06
over 3,000 years before modern public health
48:10
discovered how important that it truly is. So dealing
48:14
with all these things, science eventually discovered—
48:18
for centuries, again, doctors still do not, didn't understand
48:22
disease transmission. 1847, Ignaz— your
48:27
guess is as good as mine— Semmelweis required
48:32
doctors to wash their hands. And then deaths dropped sharply.
48:35
So this is in 1847, they still weren't washing their hands. I think if I
48:39
remember right, I think it was my son was telling me that it was even
48:41
a sign of a good surgeon the bloodier his apron
48:45
was because it meant he had performed more surgery. Like didn't even
48:49
wash their, you know, aprons or anything like that for a very long time.
48:54
So even his colleagues were mocking him for washing his hands in 1847.
48:59
Before surgeries. Louis Pasteur in the 1860s,
49:03
he was a French scientist. He developed the germ theory of disease,
49:07
demonstrated that tiny microorganisms cause many illnesses. And again,
49:11
that completely changed medicine to how we know it now.
49:15
And then Joseph Lister in 1867 was a British surgeon who
49:19
applied Pasteur's theories or discoveries to surgery and began
49:23
sterilizing instruments and cleaning wounds with antiseptics
49:28
and things like that, and death rates from surgery fell dramatically.
49:32
Again, today those practices are used worldwide.
49:36
We don't think anything about them, but that's totally different than the people
49:40
in Leviticus and the people in the age of that. That's a totally different
49:44
realm of dates. It's totally different. So the timeline is around
49:51
1445 BC, or again, whatever date you want to throw at that, Moses records
49:54
laws on washing, quarantine, sanitation, all those
49:58
things. And then we get to 1847 when we finally
50:02
start saying, maybe we should wash our hands, and maybe
50:07
we should, you know, do something with our waste, or maybe
50:10
we should kind of stay away from people that are sick and quarantine people and
50:14
things like that. You know, it's quite an age gap. There between those.
50:19
How do— again, the question comes to, how do we explain
50:23
what Moses wrote with such accuracy? How do we explain that
50:27
he came up with these things if it's just a book written by man?
50:32
Was he just writing what he felt would be a good
50:36
idea on all these issues, and it just so happens that he was right
50:40
on all these issues? Or Again, was it the
50:44
Creator of the universe who gave these instructions to Moses,
50:49
who knows how we work, who knows the things that are best
50:53
for us? And that's the reason why we have these written like this.
50:57
Again, it's— they weren't— they were written in there as laws
51:03
to keep people clean and unclean, but they're also
51:08
Now we see the benefits of it as we read over them now today,
51:11
knowing what we know now that maybe we didn't know there.
51:16
Someone might say, why doesn't
51:21
God just give us the specifics? You know, instead of just
51:25
do this and don't do that, why not say circumcise
51:30
the babies on the 8th day because of vitamin K? Why didn't
51:33
He put that in there? Or why not expel it— spell out to us exactly
51:37
how the water cycle works? Or why not simply announce, you know what,
51:41
there's little germs out there, you can't see them, you don't understand it,
51:45
but they're out there, so wash your hands and do these things.
51:49
Goes back to my introduction. The purpose of the
51:53
Bible is to teach people about God and salvation,
51:57
not to help us figure out the world's details.
52:00
I'm giving you this information because it's scientific information that we now know to be
52:05
true, and it just so happens that it's in the Bible.
52:08
Again, I don't know that God gave us the day 8 for the specifics
52:12
so that today we'd understand. It's a faith-building
52:17
thing if we go back and now know, hey, it said it here in this.
52:21
I don't, I don't know. I can't speak for God. I don't know why he
52:25
says things that he says. I'm not on his level. But all I do know
52:28
is everywhere where a scientific thing is mentioned in the Bible,
52:33
anything that is a proven scientific fact, there's nothing that's
52:37
refuted. There's nothing in the Bible that has been proven—
52:42
that science has proven it to be wrong. And there's nothing in there
52:46
that could be proven wrong by science. Now there's theories out there,
52:49
that's a whole different thing. There's lots of theories out there by science that aren't
52:52
proven things, it's just the thoughts of people that may not match up with what's
52:56
in your Bible, but there's nothing that is proven by science that
53:00
is outside of what you have in your Bible that would say that
53:04
this is the smoking gun that proves that God is not
53:08
real, that this is just a book written by man.
53:12
None of that stuff is out there. But what we do see, that is,
53:16
whenever the Bible touches subjects involving the natural world
53:20
It is consistently accurate all the
53:23
time. Sometimes we don't see the accuracy until
53:28
many years later, many years later, which should again tell
53:31
us— see, I'm behind on a click. I knew I was going to do it.
53:35
His wisdom comes before our understanding. And this class
53:39
was about scientific foreknowledge, but I want you to leave with
53:43
that in your mind, that that goes with every verse.
53:46
That goes with everything that's in the Bible. So whenever you
53:50
read something and you just say, I don't understand this,
53:54
his wisdom comes before our understanding. So anybody have any comments
53:58
or questions yet? Yeah, I just didn't want you to move on from
54:02
the germs and the waste. God took it
54:06
a step further, and it's kind of sprinkled throughout the Old Testament, but basically
54:10
the recipe for antibacterial soap is in there. Ashes run
54:14
through water, hyssop, and cedarwood. And like the oil from the cedarwood has
54:18
some sort of antibacterial— yeah. So he didn't just say
54:22
like stay away from them and like run yourself under water. There's literally
54:26
like a chemical makeup here. And then who knows when Dial
54:30
came up with like, hey, this will work. Yeah. And there's—
54:34
I, I've got this up here too, like if y'all wanted to take— there's,
54:37
there's way more than this too, like The life being in the blood, Leviticus 17:11.
54:42
Of course, like everything, that's like they can take our blood now and
54:45
tell you every single thing about you. Like everything about us is in our blood.
54:49
The round earth or a sphere, of course you could go to Job
54:53
where it says it hangs on nothing. That's one of those things that some people
54:55
debate about. Again, it's— again, it's just scientific information though.
54:59
It depends on how you're looking at scientific foreknowledge. I see it as scientific
55:03
information in the Bible that we see now is true.
55:06
The vastness of the stars, which they talked about how they're in the,
55:10
in the skit of how they're innumerable, that we now
55:13
know that now, like you, you can't count them all. That's why he said don't,
55:17
don't go by the telescope. I think we all believe
55:21
details matter, but God is in the details.
55:24
Yeah, he's there. Yeah. Try to outwit him or
55:28
outthink him. Yeah. You got to go create your own dust.
55:32
Well, thank you for your time. Thank you.