So what is the chief end of man? That was horribly weak. What is the chief end of man? Man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever. What's that? And is it? Is it? Is it? What is it? I always get that backwards. But the answer is the same. And the meaning of the question is the same. Memorizing the questions is part of the task. What rule has God given to direct us how we may glorify and enjoy him? The word of God. which is contained in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments are the only rule to direct us how we may glorify and enjoy Him. What rule has God given to direct us how we may glorify and enjoy Him? The Word of God, which is contained in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, is the only rule to direct us how we may glorify and enjoy Him. What do the scriptures principally teach? You'll have to have next week's handouts. Scriptures principally teach what made us to believe concerning God and what duty God requires of man. Next week, you need to know that. Okay, would somebody like to read 2 Timothy 3, 14 through 17? Got it? 2 Timothy 3? But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it, and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work. How do we know that the Bible is God's Word? How do we know that the Bible is God's Word? Because every prophecy in it will come true. Because it has made prophecies. Prophecies have been made in Scripture that have come true. That is the substantiation, right? Of course, arguably, our evidence for that is in Scripture, right? There's no historic evidence that any of that actually happened, right? Yes. The Bible claims to be God's Word, so it has that going in it. Interestingly enough, the other quote-unquote scriptures don't. The Book of Mormon doesn't anywhere in it say this is the Word of God. These are the writings of the Prophet Muhammad. It says that Muhammad's acting on Allah's behalf, but it doesn't itself claim to be infallible. Scripture does. But that is the core of it is, how do you know that the Bible is the Word of God? You can't. unless the Holy Spirit works in your heart and brings you to that understanding. Because man is sinful, man is in defiance of God's will, man is in defiance of God, and therefore man will refuse to accept the truth, even if it's shoved down his throat, even if it's repeatedly proved over and over again, because he's sinful and he's designed, he, in that sin, is bound to not recognize the truth. So, it takes the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit for us to recognize the infallible nature of the Word of God. But, it contains prophecies, prophecies which have been established to have come true. You look at books like Daniel, where he talks about the next 700 years of history, and outlines essentially every kingdom that will rise and fall across the course of the next 700 years of history, and who will conquer who, and how many kings each kingdom will have, and all of that came to pass. In very detailed fashion, you read through the prophecies of Daniel, he was very specific about where they would rise from, how long they would last, who would conquer them, over the course of 700 years. It's pretty specific information. And of course, the people who would argue against that would say, oh yeah, well, but Daniel wasn't really written in the Old Testament times, he wrote it afterward. Except that the people in the New Testament times referenced Daniel. People who wrote the New Testament times didn't write the New Testament books until after the person who wrote the Old Testament books, after the Old Testament was over. It just doesn't hold up. There's plenty of archaeological evidence to support all of the Locations that people lived, all of the places that cities were, that the people existed. Fascinating book called Oedipus and Agamemnon, which if you're interested in reading it sometime, there's a discrepancy between the current Western understanding of history and the biblical understanding of Egypt's history. talking about the things that happened in Egypt and the order of the pharaohs and the pharaohs who did this and the pharaohs who did that sort of thing. There's about a 500 year swing in there. And the basis for that argument is the legend of Oedipus, which appears in Egyptian mythology as well as the legend of Agamemnon, that is the father who has a child who is cursed to kill him, and so sends him away, and then comes back and meets him as a stranger on the road, kills him, and marries his mother. That Oedipal legend in the book basically says the reason that Western history is messed up with respect to the Bible is because the Egyptian legend came first. not after. And so if you presume that the Egyptian legend came first, then this is a copy of Egyptian rather than the Egyptian being a copy of this, and therefore all the rest of the chronology synchronizes up and makes perfect sense. So, interesting, interesting book. Velikovsky is the author of that, as well as Worlds in Collision, in which, what, 40 years before the scientists prove it, he predicted that Venus would spin backwards on its axis, and all kinds of really fascinating things like that, based on his scientific exploration of Biblical evidence of what happened, things like when the sun stood still for Joshua. How is that scientifically possible, for the sun to stand still? In order for the sun to stand still, the world would have to stop turning on its axis, right? How is it possible for the world to stop turning on its axis? And he speculated that God used the Venus coming in a near collision to the Earth, substantiated through archaeological evidence in various cultures around the world at that specific time, to cause the Earth to cease in its rotation because of the gravitational pull. And so he speculated because of that, that Venus would have to be spinning the other way on its axis. That is, the close gravitational pass would cause Venus to reverse its spin as the Earth continued its spin, and therefore, Venus would have to be turning the other way. And when they finally got to the point where scientifically they could demonstrate the rotation of Venus's axis, guess what? It is. It rotates counterclockwise instead of clockwise. Go figure. But this was long before they had ever demonstrated that scientifically. Yeah, the other thing is that you can go into the records of the Mayans, and the Mayans at about that time have in their records a day where the sun held on the horizon for three days. And you go into the records of the ancient Chinese, and they have a day where the sun refused to set. for three days, right, because it was standing still over the Middle East. So, yeah, so it's archaeologically established historical facts that occurred in the Old Testament are provable through archaeological exploration, not only of the Palestinian society, which could have corrupted the societies near and surrounding it, but in societies where there would have been no connection whatsoever, like the Mayans, like the society in China, that were existing cultures, but were completely outside of the scope of the history that was going on in the land of Palestine. So, does that prove that the Bible is true? No. Because if you're a skeptic, you can refuse to believe whatever evidence there happens to be. That's just a coincidence. You can demonstrate. You can't prove that the Bible is false through those or any other means. Why? Well, because we believe it's true and we just ignore all the evidence. Because it's true. It's true. There is no evidence to prove that it's false, because it's true. We believe that it's true, because there's no evidence that proves otherwise, and because of the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives. Yes? Isn't the truth of the Bible something we accept? Yes. It makes sense. It's very difficult to prove. No, it's circular logic, right? It's circular logic. The unbeliever uses the same argument to us as we use to the unbeliever. That is, well, you're just ignoring any evidence that could possibly, right? The Bible can't be true. What about evolution? Right? Doesn't evolution disprove the Bible? Because the Bible says that the earth was created in six days, and we have scientific evidence to prove that the earth is millions of years old, and that doesn't fit in with your whole biblical timeline. So therefore, the Bible is false. Right? whether the evolutionists are going to admit it or not, there is scientific evidence that some of their basic foundations are actually false, whether on purpose or not. The scientists accept on faith that the tests that they're doing to prove the age of the earth are scientific. Right? Your goal is to demonstrate that the Earth is billions of years old, then any evidence to the contrary gets thrown out of the model, and the evidence in the affirmative. So how can you argue that the Earth is not billions of years old? creationist argument is that the flood created events, the flood events would have significantly altered the geology of the Earth. Right. So if the flood event occurred, which, oh by the way, there's archeological evidence in cultures all around the world that say that there was some cataclysmic flood event in all the cultures around the world, then that would have significantly altered the archeological record, because if you cover something with 400 feet of water, it's gonna make it look different than if it's not covered with 400 feet of water. So significant change there. All their speculation about how old this layer of rock is versus that layer of rock, do you know how that works? They define species, specific species, and they say these species are indicator species. So you have a trilobite. Well, trilobites existed in this period. How do you know that? Because we've determined it through archaeological evidence. So therefore, if there's trilobites, lots of trilobites in this section of rock, that means that it's Jurassic rock. Therefore, anything that we find in this rock must be Jurassic. Well, what about, what about... Right, the reason it's Jurassic is because there are trilobites in the Jurassic and therefore this rock is Jurassic. And that's how we prove that the rock is Jurassic. Well, how do you prove that the trilobites are Jurassic? Well, we only find them in Jurassic rock. Literally, that's how they do it. And, wait a second, what if you find trilobites in rock that also have footprint impressions in it? Well, those are just, you know, mistaken identifiers. We throw that data out because there's only a few trilobites in that rock, and there's a lot of trilobites in this rock, so this is Jurassic rock, but this is not Jurassic rock, this is Triassic rock. Because it has footprints in it, and we know that footprints only show up in Triassic rock, therefore this is Triassic rock. Seriously, that's how they do it. They ignore any evidence to the contrary because it conflicts with their primary theory. That's the scientific principle that is used to establish the age of various rock strata. Yes? Didn't they find human footprints in the same layer as the dinosaur footprints? Yes. They threw that out, too. The conclusion was that the fossilized human footprints were put in the rock. After it softened, you see, the sinusoidal footprints were fossilized, and then at some point in the future, the rock got soft again. That's when the humans were able to walk in that same area. They weren't actually both there at the same time. Yeah, but it's a faith. It's a faith. You believe in this, and therefore because you believe in this. And the great thing is that we are unscientific because we have a belief system. Because we acknowledge that it's a belief system, we're unscientific and therefore we're insane. And creationism is insane. Right? I'm a physicist by training, and in physics, there's this thing called the second law of thermodynamics, which is? Yes. Right. The amount of entropy in the universe is always increasing. You can close a system, and in that system, alter artificially the level of entropy. What do I mean? You can make things. Entropy is the level of disorganization. It's a mathematical equation for the amount of disorganization in a system. So, you can close a system. That is, I can take a piece of wood and I can take a knife and I can cut it and shape it and form it into an object and that object is inherently more organized than the block of raw material that I started with. I have decreased the entropy. of the thing that I carved, okay? But in the process of doing that, I used my own energy and I made wood scraps. So the overall system is less organized because now instead of a tree, I have scrap and an object and instead of energy being contained within me, the energy has been expended. So the net system, the overall system has become less organized because of the energy that one portion of that system expended to make one portion more organized. That's why. Why is this important? Well, because you can't have a perfect perpetual motion machine of the third kind. You can't have a system where you get as much energy out of it as you put into it. So you can't ever have a perfectly efficient engine. For example, you will always waste heat in the process of generating motion. Anytime you try and change energy from one form into another form, chemical energy into kinetic energy, in the case of a car, you're going to lose heat in the process and that heat will create disorganization, create more disorganization, more entropy. And so, the universe is winding down, as they say. So, if you think about that principle, How do you explain the Big Bang? We go from one point in the universe where all of the energy is concentrated, which by the way, they can't explain how that point came about either. Where all the energy is concentrated in this one point, and that point is an explosion, which is just random distribution of energy in all directions. And somehow from that random distribution of energy in all directions, we get people. We get people. We get molecules. Study biology. Have you looked at the complexity of what's in a molecule of DNA? Sorry, that's not a molecule, it's a cell. You get higher level Elements, iron, plutonium, heavy metals, that sort of thing. Where did they come from? And if you listen to them talk about the Hubble Space Telescope, how it looks back to the origins of the universe, right? If you ever listen to them, they always, always, always say, we're going to be able to look back through time to the point just after the Big Bang. Because they acknowledge they can't, even in their scientific theory, account for looking back to the Big Bang. Because if they get to that point, they've reached rational absurdity. It's not possible. So, their faith All of their faith is propounded on the concept that there is an instant in time that they can't explain, that completely and totally violates one of the fundamental laws of nature, the second law of thermodynamics. And in that one instance, that law was violated. And then since then, everything has run according to plan, their plan. their explanations all make sense. Assuming you start with an absurdity, right? I'm going to divide this number by zero. And then from that point forward, I'm going to work and everything works out okay. There's a far side cartoon that I just love. There's a scientist standing at a blackboard. He's got all these kind of equations written all the way across the blackboard, back and forth and back and forth. And then in quotes, he says, and a miracle occurs, and then equals and then a picture of the earth. Right? It's as much faith as our faith. I have one foundational axiomatic principle. There is a God. An infinite eternal creator. Based on that axiomatic foundational principle, which I believe that is my faith, everything else flows from it perfectly. There's no contradiction in any of the rest of my theology with science. With the observed reality of the world, with Scripture, with what Scripture teaches me about the realities of man, mankind, sin, need for salvation, everything is harmonious, based on that one axiomatic principle. They have dozens and dozens of axiomatic principles, dozens and dozens of assumptions that have been disproved over and over again, and I'm the one who's insane. because I believe in this creation thing. Right? Yes? There are people who believe in the concept that God created the Big Bang and used evolution to create man. An interesting discussion about this briefly in Presbyterian this weekend. All the observable scientific principles, which, by the way, Darwin himself said, if you don't find any transitional forms in the fossil record, my theory is wrong. You know what a transitional form is? I got a lizard, and it lays an egg, and a bird comes out. Well, that's not a transitional form. That's punctuated equilibrium. A transitional form is a bird lizard. Got a lizard. And I had a lizard, and I know I had lizards, and now I have birds, but I can't figure out how I got from lizards to birds. There's got to be some kind of creature that evolved in between the path of lizards and birds, and why don't I have a record of that creature?" And Darwin said, if you can't find those records, then I'm wrong. Yes? No, absolutely not. The evolutionists agree that Darwin was wrong. The evolutionists agree that Darwin was wrong. The one person that almost everybody in the world who's not an evolutionary scientist points to, to explain the theory of evolution, The people who are deep into believing the theory of evolution as their faith today would agree with the creationists that he was wrong. Because there are no transitional forms. The fossil record has produced no bird lizards, right? No fish that walked on land. Well, except for one or two, but very rare specific adaptations. No monkey men. So he's wrong. But we believe the output of his theory. His theory was wrong. Darwin's theory of evolution has been disproved, scientifically disproved. But we still believe in the theory of evolution. We just don't believe in Darwin's theory of evolution. The next evolution of Darwin's theory was punctuated equilibrium. Punctuated equilibrium was a lizard lays an egg and it hatches as a bird. Literally. The theory of punctuated equilibrium is the reason there are no transitional forms in the fossil record is because there weren't any transitional forms. There were just mega mutations. And these strange mega mutations took place. We don't have any explanation for them other than, hey, it was just If you randomly have a lizard lay a billion eggs, maybe one of them will hatch as a bird. No. But that was the theory. Punctuated equilibrium. That every once in a while the scale just tips. Oh, but see, don't you understand? Our little slice of history that we have record of is so small in comparison to geological time. There's billions and billions of years in the past. So we just don't have enough evidence to disprove. Our little sample that we've used doesn't account for the billions and billions of years that have happened in the past. And that's the methodology. of evolution. We demonstrate very small transitions in species. We can demonstrate selective breeding, right? Selective breeding. If you breed Cocker Spaniels with Cocker Spaniels over and over and over again, you get Cocker Spaniels, but the characteristics of a Cocker Spaniel refine because you choose the ones that are smarter instead of the ones that are dumber to breed the next generation. And so over time, Yeah, it's pretty hard to find a smart cocker spaniel to breed with. We've had cocker spaniels. Border collies. Border collies, for example, are bred for success. You can't have a registered border collie unless both of its parents have won a dog trial. That's the qualification for registry. Both of its parents have to have won a dog trial. So guess what? Registered border collies tend to be the smartest of the breed, and the breed has gotten smarter and smarter over time, and they're very, very good herd animals. Okay? Evolution. I just proved it. Over a billion years, that border collie will get so smart that it'll start to talk. That process was by interference, right? But that's just a demonstration. That's a demonstration of interference. They would argue that the world interferes, right? You get into a situation where there's not enough food. Well, the creature that is adapted to be able to specialize and get food that the other ones can't will survive. The creature that has not adapted won't survive. And that's Darwin. That's the Galapagos Island situation, where he went down there and he found that there were birds that had funny-shaped twisted beaks. How odd. They seem almost identical, the blue-footed booby and the yellow-footed booby and all that kind of thing. These very odd birds, and they had these funny twisted shaped beaks. It turned out that those beaks gave them the ability to dig a seed out of a pinecone. which the other birds couldn't do. The ones that had the warped beaks over time became the ones that survived because they had better access to food than the other ones. There's a whole species of this bird that theoretically came from the same foundational birds. Some of them have warped beaks, and other ones have curved beaks. The curved beak ones have the ability to open up clamshells to get food out. So that was where Darwin's theory came from, was down in the Galapagos Islands, exploring the Galapagos Islands, finding all these unique adapted species. And therefore, that's proof that over time, all species adapt, all species evolve, and Lizards become chickens, chickens become apes, apes become men. Men are just an adaptation. So, there's no disharmony with that, and creationism, right? Why couldn't those birds have been created? Creationists would not dispute microevolution. There's microevolution, there's macroevolution. Microevolution is adaptation within a specific pool because of conditions. But there's a huge difference between a bird's beak being more warped than another bird's beak and a bird having a lizard. Huge difference, yes. The genetic code has to radically change in order for one to produce another. At the face of it, punctuated equilibrium is ludicrous, and it didn't last for very long. And there's all sorts of other alternative theories now. as well as all sorts of alternative other theories for how the universe came into being without anything to come from. The concept is now there's brains, B-R-A-N-E, new scientific terminology for multiple universes. You see, there's multiple universes, and this is just one of those multiple universes, and this multiple universe only came into existence because of a collision between two alternative universes, And that's how the Big Bang happened. It was a collusion between two alternative universes. And where did the alternative universes come from? At some point there had to be an origin, and at some point of origin, you had to have something that existed before it. Scientific theory does not allow for something to come from nothing. It's not possible. You can't have zero on one side of the equation and something on the other side of the equation. It doesn't work. So if you follow any argument to its logical conclusion, you have to be able to point to something that existed before that point. What existed before the point of creation? Scientifically, you have to acknowledge that there is an eternal, and they refuse to do it. And at the point where you acknowledge that there is an eternal, you have to acknowledge God, which is why they refuse to do it. You can't go back. You can go back through your infinity of expanding and collapsing universes, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It either always existed, All of the universe always existed, or it was created. Those are your two possibilities. Yeah, Big Bang Theory, who lit the match? And if that This thing always existed. What did it have to be like? It's infinite. It always has to exist. It's eternal. Unchangeable. What are we talking about? Now, scientists would say, that's ludicrous. I just arrived at it by discussing your conclusions, reducing them to their fundamental concepts, and then demonstrating that they pointed to, and that's ludicrous. You believe in that. And your belief is that it's not true. That's your fundamental belief, is that I'm wrong. Fundamentally believe that I'm wrong, that there isn't a God, and therefore, All of the rest of this has to exist in the way that you describe it, even though it fundamentally doesn't work. And so your entire effort is to demonstrate that I'm wrong. And all of the leaps in judgment, all of the gaps that you assume will be filled by someone else in the future, that's fantastic. If you argue with a person who is an evolutionist, and you point to a giant flaw in their theory, We just haven't figured that out yet. It's not wrong. Even though all of the scientific evidence that we've established to this point says this isn't possible, it's just the limitations of our knowledge. And so they're looking for the Higgs boson. They're looking for the next thing that will fill in the gap in the theory. Because if the theory is right, one of these has to exist. And then they find it, and it doesn't explain the theory. So there's got to be something else behind it that Right? Yes. The root of every lie is the truth. If you trace the lie or a series of lies backward, backward, backward, backward, you're eventually going to hit the truth if you can trace it back that far. And Satan knows the truth. He knows what's true. He knows there's a God. He knows he created the world. And there are only so many lies he can tell people, but he can't trace it back to an alternate truth, because there is no alternate truth. So he can only convince people so far. The single biggest lie of evolutionism is that it's not a faith. That's the single biggest lie of evolutionism versus creationism, is that it's not a set of beliefs. And therefore, it can be taught in the schools, because to teach creationism is teaching religion, but teaching evolution is teaching science. So my logical system says there is a God, and that God gave us an instruction manual, created us and gave us an instruction manual. What is that instruction manual? Scripture. So what is the chief end of man? Man's chief end is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. What rule has God given us by which we may glorify and enjoy Him? The Word of God, which is contained in the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, is the only rule given us to direct us how we may glorify and enjoy Him. I ask the question, I work really hard on memorizing the answers and I don't memorize the questions. What rule has God given to direct us how we may glorify and enjoy him? The word of God, which is contained in the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, is the only rule to direct us how we may glorify and enjoy him. Next week, we'll talk about what does it tell us to do. So, what is man's purpose? Man's purpose is to glorify and enjoy God forever. How do we know how to do it? Read the Bible. Next week, it's Bible sick. It's amazing. We were talking last week about this whole language thing, right? Chief end of man. What do you mean chief end? What is man's chief end? What is chief end? And I asked my daughter, what is, what do you, what does it mean when it says man's chief end? There's a chief. And, uh, right. So we had a discussion about Chief end equals purpose. Purpose. What is your primary purpose? What is your goal? What are you working toward? And have that discussion. What is man's purpose? To glorify God and enjoy Him forever. To enjoy Him forever. The Reformed Presbyterian Church does not have a position on Evolution. Surprising. We don't. This came up yesterday actually in Stephen's exams. Poor Stephen. It acknowledges the possibility of two interpretations of the passages in Genesis. One interpretation is the literal day theory. One interpretation is the day age, or framework theory, that the passages in Genesis describe periods of time during which these things happened. Undefined. I don't, all too personally, the day-age theory. I find it to be scientifically ludicrous, and it has one foundational difficulty to overcome, which I have not ever been satisfied with the answer of, which is, if you subscribe to the day-age theory, how do you deal with the fact that creatures died before sin? If you believe that God created man, if you believe in creation, and you believe in The day-age theory is his methodology of creation. How do you deal with death before sin? Death is part of the curse. Now, the day-age theorists, the day-age creationists, would argue that the death of creatures is not as important because they didn't have souls, and when it's talking about death, he's only talking about man's death as entering the world. But the Reformed Presbyterian Church has not taken an official position on that. I think a lot of that is due to the period from the 60s to today being filled with turmoil over the scientific evidence behind this issue. And there's still a lot of confusion in society, as evidenced by the fact that most people believe that the theory of evolution that is taught in schools today was propounded by Darwin. But it's not. The theory that they teach in schools today is not Darwin's theory of evolution. It's a completely different theory of evolution. And yet people still attribute it primarily to Darwin as being his theory. The church has. The church has said, this is not something that we're going to divide over. Both sides within the church would say that creation is true, that the existence of man, that the existence of the earth, the existence of the universe, is due to the creative act of God. And so, they've decided that it's not something that we're going to tear apart synod over, because there are men who feel strongly enough about their position of evolutionary creationism, that they would actually leave the denomination on the basis of wanting to hold to that position. And Synod said, that's not a battle that we're going to divide ever. There's a lot of very well-respected men who hold to the framework theory. And primarily the framework theory says that it's more literary license that's being exercised in Genesis than specific scientific evidence. Because it says that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, and yet we know that the sun doesn't actually rise and set. the sun stands still and the earth rotates. So, if the Bible was scientifically accurate, it would say that the earth has rotated through 180 degrees and therefore night has become day. So, since we know that that's not the case, then we know that this is poetic language. So... Does that person talk about sunsets and sunrises? Yeah, apparently not. You'd have to ask them. Well, he does. He quite freely uses the term sunset and sunrise. But he recognizes when he's doing that, that he's not being scientific. He's being poetic. So it's OK to use sunset and sunrise. You just can't be trying to be scientific while you do it. Yeah, we don't need to go much further down that argument of absurdity. But one of the questions that came up in Stephen's exam was, is it following a divisive course to teach one or the other. That is, elders of the denomination are required, as a part of being an elder, to answer affirmatively to a query which binds them to not follow a divisive course in the course of their teaching. And so the question is, would teaching a theory or a position as a doctrinal position on creation and understanding it to be a literal day and or a day age theory and your understanding of it be divisive in light of the fact that the church has not taken a position. The church has not said that one is right or the other is right. It's a tough question. Right? So how do you think he answered? You know, Stephen, how do you think he answered? It wouldn't be divisive to do it. Okay. Yes. I think in and of itself, in my opinion, it wouldn't, in order for it to be divisive, it would have to be something that the church has taken a position on. the church has openly said, we don't have a strong position on this, then you would be free to come forward and say, this is what I believe about it. Whereas if the church takes the position on, say, psalmody, and you say, I don't believe in psalmody, and you start teaching that psalmody is hogwash, that's divisive because you're going against what the church has already said is their position. Teaching directly against the teaching of the church would be divisive, right? What if you're teaching This is right, and to not believe it is wrong. And the church doesn't say that. To teach the literal belief, the literal six-day creation, and say, if you don't believe this, then you're wrong, would be teaching something teaching a position that the church doesn't hold. Wouldn't it? Well, Stephen's response was what I thought was a pretty good one. I will teach what the Word of God says. I will teach what the Word of God says. How could that be divisive? He was unanimously sustained in his exam, even by the person who was pressing very hard on the question. I would think it would probably be divisive to push very hard on a person who was holding to evolutionary creationism, to convict him of his sin, when that's not a position that the Church has taken a stand on. But I don't think it's divisive to teach your perspective as being right in your understanding from the evidence of Scripture. And so I would agree with Stephen that teaching a literal six day is not divisive. Teaching a literal six day and then spending the other half of the sermon saying that you are going to fall into sin if you don't hold to it might be considered divisive. But that's a pastoral matter more than it is a doctrinal matter. I find, for the most part, people who are really, really, really caught up in the theory of evolution and the importance of holding to the theory of evolution as scientific are people who are not scientists. You find that to be the case? It's the guy on the street who doesn't really understand anything that gets upset at challenging the theory of evolution. Because that's what he's been taught, and he hasn't done scientific research to determine whether it's true or not. But if you challenge that, then you're challenging the whole foundation of his education, which is, I accept whatever it is that I'm taught about science because I don't know it. I haven't done it myself. One of the major issues that we have in the modern world is that science is so complex that nobody can grasp all of it, and so you have to believe in this concept of peer review. And peer review is that all the people that do this review the research, and if they agree that it's okay, then they allow it to be published. And then that becomes fact. If it's in a peer-reviewed journal, it must be right. And so all of the research on things like global warming and evolution and all the other things that are going on in society today are published in peer-reviewed journals, and therefore they can be taught as fact. But the reality of it is that the person who's teaching it, 99.99999% of the time doesn't really understand it at all, and doesn't even know what the paper says, but only knows what somebody said the paper said. And that's pretty much the basis of the science that we teach in our schools and universities these days. Yeah, like listening to a sermon in Latin. The guy who knows a little bit of Latin is the one who explains to you afterwards that he must have been talking about Jesus, because he said, el fil, and the potter, so God was in that sermon too, and therefore that sermon was about God and Jesus. Right? Well, science would argue that there are no absolutes, including science, that everything is a theory. Right. Well, that's why theory of evolution is still called a theory, because it hasn't been proved. It's it's the best theory that's out there. Right. Just like the theory of relativity, it's the best theory that's out there, except that they don't agree it is anymore. OK. Let's look to the Lord together in prayer. Father in heaven, we thank you for the beauty of your word. We thank you for the fact that you have given to us to clear up the confusion and to give us a foundation upon which to rest. We thank you for your infinite goodness, for your infinite existence, for your omniscience and omnipresence, the fact that, Lord, you are in and above all things. And Lord, because of that, your nature has caused you to be with us, to care for us, to watch over us, and Lord, to send us the blessing of forgiveness through the work of your Son. We ask, Lord, that you would be with us throughout this week and be with us as we study the third question of the Shorter Catechism this week. Give us wisdom and give us skill in our memorization. We ask these things in Christ's name. Amen.