All right. Do you remember the rules? Here we go again. Oh, I thought you mean there's something planned. This person has two questions. The first one is how do we know what the sunspot activity in the 1600s was? We're taking it on a certain amount of faith because people were watching, they were looking and measuring the sunspots in much the same way that we do today, but we have to believe that they did what they said they did. But you have to do that every day, right? If somebody is measuring the sunspots today, you may ask the same question, how do we know what the sunspot activity is today? Somebody's measuring it today, so I don't have any problem with that. People were measuring sunspots from the 1500s, even maybe as far back as the late 1400s, regularly, daily measurements of the sunspots. So that's how we know Galileo got blind from doing that. The Babylonians even measured sunspots, but they were very sporadic, very spotty in their measurement. Once in a while. You haven't spoken about this, but I've always wondered why we have the model we do for the layers of the earth. No one has ever penetrated the crust. That's a very penetrating question. I know we have a magnetic field, but the Bible also talks about the waters under the earth and the springs of the great deep. The Bible doesn't talk about the magnetic field. How do we account for this as Christians, the water under the earth, and how do we account for this model of the earth? It's a model, that's right. We do have strong evidence, for example, in South Africa there's something called the Feather Fort Crater. It's an impact crater, we have impact craters all over the earth, the first one in South Africa is the second largest, the largest is in Russia, Siberia somewhere, where clearly, and maybe the very largest one is under the ocean, but clearly something has impacted, there's a big smash zone, and when we do experiments and we see how things how the earth reacts when we smash things into it. You know, like if you throw a ball into a pile of smushy something, or technical term, it goes down and it shoots up. And so it seems that what happened in South Africa and these other places, that the ground actually tore open. And so you have these layers laid out for you know, over a hundred, maybe hundreds of miles and you can see down into the earth from these layers as it was ripped open and kind of laid out like that. So that gives you some idea. And then secondly, from physics, When we do experiments, you know if you knock on something, you don't... You can learn something about what's inside that podium by knocking on it. Is it hollow? Is it solid? It's going to take some theory, a model, that if you hear a certain sound, you knock on a wall. Nose stab, nose stab, nose... Okay. I know something's there. Why? Because you've got a model and you've tested this model in the past. And so you have got very reasonable expectation that that's the way it's going to be. So what we do in physics is we put microwaves on microwave ovens. We actually put bombs in the ground and we explode, make explosions. The simplest way to do this is just get a big sledgehammer. I did this as a master's student. You get a sledgehammer and you hit the ground, and then somebody stands over there and waits to see what they hear. So the largest scale way of doing this is to put a bomb in the ground, dynamite, whatever. You first have to put it into the microwave oven, you just switch that on, and then you could... And then you have these explosions, and then you have what are called GRs, you go and place receivers, you have things that are going to listen to the noises that come out. Sound is, our understanding is just compressions and rarefactions of the air. The air is more dense, and less dense, and more dense, and less dense, and we perceive that as sound, but you can see that in the ground as well. You may not be able to hear it, but you can feel it. You can feel it. In fact, right now, if somebody next to you goes like this, right next to your face, you can feel that compression. You mustn't touch them. You can't hear that, though, because the frequency is too low for you to hear, or too high. It's beyond your range of hearing. But that's how sound is propagating through this room. We do the same in the ground, you can't hear it, although with earthquakes you can hear it. You heard that rumble for the one that we heard a few minutes ago. So what we do is we'll have instruments listening at a distance from where we know that explosion is going to be. and then based on what we hear at those different locations, you can start making the model, because it takes longer for the sound to travel through different things. If the rock is more dense, the sound travels quicker, and if it's less dense, it travels slower. And so based on the time when the sound arrives at different places, you can build up this whole picture. And it sounds really complicated, and in a sense it is, but you can easily understand it again from that ball illustration that we have. It's the same thing. We're blind, but we've got a model, we hear, you know, something hitting us in the head, boom, okay, and a few seconds later something hits us there, you can build up some kind of model of what it is that you are observing. And on the basis of that, there's very clear evidence that we have layers, and in fact that some of those layers are liquid. not necessarily liquid water, but liquid metal. Liquid iron, for instance, and nickel is the metal that we think is under there. As for the question about the waters under the earth, there's lots and lots of water under the earth. Water is one of the major elements that is spewed out of volcanoes. For instance, I have no problem with that. There may not be as much today as there was at the time of the flood. But, because the fact is the great deep birth goes forth, right? There may be more land before the flood than there is today, etc. But there's still plenty of water under the earth. Deep. You know, he's just trying to convince you to study physics because all he does is play games. But remember, theology is the queen of the sciences. How does a person know the difference between God trying them and God punishing them? That's a very good question. God never punishes a child. We use the word punish, we'll say a parent punishes a child, but it's very important, I think, in the Bible to distinguish between discipline and punishment. God's punishment is what he does to those outside of Christ. God's discipline, as it's spelled out in Proverbs and in Hebrews chapter 12, is God's chastening of a child. Now, afflictions are in one sense a chastening because they're all designed to improve us. But not all chasings are directly God dealing with a particular thing in our life. So if God is chasing you for a particular sin, a bit of prayerful examination and counsel will enable you to determine if this is a consequence of God's chasing you for a particular sin. And that's where we ought to begin. Any serious trial, that's the first question we're going to ask. And I think that's what Jones is all about, is that you call up to the elders when you're seriously ill, and you confess your sin, you call up to the elders, you go into a process of self-examination, and interaction with them, and if you determine then that this illness is in fact a chastening for particular sin, you confess that sin, God will forgive you and heal you. And so Paul says in Corinthians that some were sick and some were dead because they were abusing the Lord's table. And it's very easy to determine that I'm abusing the Lord's table. That's not why I'm languishing on my bed. I also just remember that not all affliction is chastening for particular sins, as in Job's case, they're simply refining, they're for God's glory, any number of things that he's doing, they might be for the encouragement of the church, might be for the conversion. One of the really fun things that's going to be in heaven is the stories. And we're going to just be, and we'll never be rushed, And we'll meet these people and we'll find out how these different events, and somehow along the way we were one of the rings in the pond, all led to conversion or to a wonderful thing happening in somebody's life, and we're going to see how our lives are so intertwined. And it'll be somebody that said, you know, when you lost your mother in that accident, and the way you responded, God used that in my life to bring me to him. And you won't find out about it until heaven. I just found out the way that I preached up in New Brunswick, my, it must have been 20 years ago, and the one lady was converted, who now married and has her own family and her parents are here. That's great and I praise God for that. We're going to have all these kinds of stories in heaven that have come from God's work in our lives for all kinds of interesting purposes. Job 40.15, God says, Now behold the beam of which I made, as I made thee. It's a very important testimony. What God is saying is, I made the Leviathan and I made you. And He made us providentially, but we are created in our mother's wombs by God's providence. And so the same Creator that sustains and procreated through Leviathan, is the one who does that in our lives. And is there only one Leviathan? I think the Leviathan was a, what do you say, a species or whatever of dinosaur or sea monster. I need to go back and look at the Hebrew. I think Leviathan is probably one of those forms that simply could be used for a group. As you can imagine, I've received a lot of particular questions. Well, what about this and what about that? on both the third commandment and the fourth. And if I get to that, I may get to some of them. But I guess just in answer to a lot of those, when you're seeking to be obedient to God, I'm not going to come up with an exhaustive list. I think if you go back, and again, that's why I suggested to you to read the larger catechism, because it gives you the scripture references, and you're going to have to work through those, but you just have to give very careful consideration to the basic premises of those two commandments. Is what I am saying, is the language that I'm using, and the expression of even my body language and everything, is it honoring to God? or is it not? I think that's the main thing. With regard to the Lord's Day, is this contributing to the glory of God and my growth in grace and my spiritual well-being, or is it a distraction from it on the Lord's Day? We'll get to some of these things, but here's one in particular that I thought was good on the third commandment. What is your opinion on calling pastors reverend Isn't God the only one to be revered without the improper use of a holy name? I'll give you my opinion on this. I personally do not like to be called reverend, because I do think that God is to be revered. I don't want to be too dogmatic in the sense that I think that the minister of the gospel who proclaims the word of God can have a derivative, in a sense a derivative of that, but I prefer to be called pastor. And so that's something that changed because just the convention was kind of, you put in the bulletin, the Reverend Brent Bradley, and sometimes that will be put in by other people. But for both Pastor Warhurst and myself, we prefer, if we're going to have the title, we prefer to be called pastor and not use the term reverend. Why is she called her husband's reverend, though? So the word that Paul uses of respecting husbands is the same word that he uses of reverencing Christ. That was my only... But no, I don't expect a wife to call her husband's reverend. Pastor Chrysler, you're often mistaken for Kenneth Brennan. I get his mail, I get his phone calls, I got a paycheck of his. I returned it, of course. Is it sinful for a woman to lay down her life for a man? Of course not. It's noble to lay down your life for a friend, Jesus says. Of course not. I think maybe behind this is a question that our society has actually answered pretty well definitively. We now ask our women, we haven't drafted them yet, but we do invite our women to serve us in the military and lay down their lives. for a nation, and that's a great perversion of God's order. Someone has said, when a nation sends its women to defend the nation, there's not left much to defend, and that may well have been the mind of the one asking. I'm going to try to be brief with some of these, so I'll hand the mic off in just a moment. Mr. Trice, does former concupiscence nullify further eligibility? Why or why not? Please explain your answer. Yes, I am, there's a very clear answer to this, but let me put it to you this way. Remember, I spoke about particularly the sin of pornography as doing great damage, particularly to men, but women as well. Pornography trains a man or a woman in a very perverted form of sex. It's selfish sex. It's not a form of giving. It's a form of taking. It's lust and it's ultimate manifestation. And that's very hard to unlearn. Take that view of sex into marriage. It's very hard to unlearn that. It's very hard for a sex act to become an expression of love and giving to someone else. Ladies, you will very likely, many of you face this question. This guy who wants to marry me has been honest. He's had a past with pornography. And in some cases it's been a very ingrained past. What do you do? Your dad, of course, has a lot to say about this, but what should you think about that? Well, I would say you never, under any circumstances, except for something called the gospel, which removes the never. You need to recognize that that man can have true victory over that sin. And it can be in his past. And he can unlearn lessons that that sin has taught. And he can grow in godliness. And all that is possible because of the forgiving and transforming grace of God. So I don't say never. I would never say never under those circumstances. But I would say this rather dogmatically in that particular case. with help from your dad, in particular, that this is a mortified sin. Don't marry a pornhead. This needs to be in the past for you to enter into marriage. Dr. Williams, is time travel possible? Time can speed up and slow down, but can it be reversed? Time is something that's created. I think you probably don't mean time can speed up and slow down. Maybe you meant that we can speed up and slow down light, so the speed of light can change. My area of research is really nonlinear dynamics, that's why I have my finger in different parts in earthquakes and in neurophysics and in military movements and things like that. It's nonlinear dynamics, nonlinear systems, that's the term. And on the basis of that, I have problems with the idea of time travel being possible and theological issues. You may be familiar with something called the butterfly effect. And that's the idea that a butterfly flapping its wings off the coast of Africa causes a hurricane in Florida. because the equations that were used to describe that, equations which are similar to those that I showed you for those model simulations this morning, you saw those pictures, that's not real, that's all something that was created by the mind of some physicists on the computer, they didn't draw it, they got these equations which made sense, we need this and we need that, we need this in the equation and changes like that, and you put it together and then you solve the equations, and you let the equations go. You follow whatever they produce, you don't know what they're going to produce, you follow what they're going to produce, and it produces those pictures that you saw. And then you compare it to reality, and if it fits, you say, oh, that was pretty good, and you keep trying. and the butterfly effect has taught us only in the past 40 or 50 years that there are some equations which are non-linear equations and what that means in practice is a non-linear system would be like a door you go to the door and you push it just as somebody does you push it to open the door with a certain force and it swings open with a certain speed if you push it twice as hard A linear door system would open twice as fast if you push it three times as hard, and a non-linear system would open three times as fast. A non-linear system is one in which the results are sometimes quite unexpected. It keeps following that path and suddenly you push it six times as fast and it hits you in the head. very unexpectedly. Hurricanes are like that. Tornadoes, climate and weather is like that. That's why it's so difficult for them and actually impossible and hilarious for anybody to actually say seriously that they're going to predict climate after the year 3000. It's unthinkable for me, just because we see the equations don't work. Another thing we learn from this is that everything affects everything else. We are all connected in some small way. Everything you do is affecting everybody else. maybe in ways that are impossible to imagine, but there is no small decision that you make. That's why the Bible tells us to take every thought captive unto the obedience of the Lord Jesus Christ, because we will be judged for every thought. Jesus suffered the penalty of our sinful thoughts. That's what was required on the cross. So everything we do affects others. And I'm speaking about physics here. I mean literally as well that When I move, let's talk about gravity. When I said that you're attracted to somebody next to you, we can measure that attraction. Dr. Piper and I are attracted to one another more than I am attracted to anybody in the front row, in a purely gravitational sense. We can measure that. But what that means is, if I walk away from Dr. Piper, there is a small, a minuscule force change that his body will actually not perceive, but it's there. We could measure it with more sensitive instruments than our senses are capable of measuring. And that seems like a small thing, certainly in terms of our macro-scale movements, it is a small thing, and yet, on that micro-scale, we've learnt in non-linear dynamical theory and practice, those small changes, that one little atom change that is not there or that is there, can change the course of that hurricane, which can change the course of your life. I remember when I was in college, and this is what's so remarkable about this, is that it tells us that in order for anybody to be God, you have to be an infinite. We have to have an infinite God. And in terms of time, an eternal. The Greeks actually knew this. They thought about some of these things in different contexts and that's what they concluded. There has to be an infinite eternal being. But they didn't come to the right conclusions entirely. So we are affecting everything. And I remember when I was in university, I was in a youth group on the campus ministry there and we were having this big debate. God cares about the big things but He doesn't sweat the small things. That was the debate. They were saying, well God really cares about who you marry but whether or not you wear black shoes or whether you tie your laces or not, God doesn't care. That's entirely up to you. Of course that's wrong, we know that that's wrong from scripture, because even the very hair, right, the hair is numbered. God is, his providence and his decree governs all things. Even that small atom, which seems unimportant, can have repercussions forever. And so, this business about time, I know this is a long way to get around this, but is time travel possible? I'm just going to grapple with that, because time is a creative thing. If time travel is possible, that means something is time traveling. Something that is bound in time and space is time-travelling. And that thing that is now time-travelling is going to affect everything else. And I guess you see them grappling with this in some of the movies. They say, oh, you can't go back. If you change something, then you won't exist in the future. And that's kind of what they're grappling with. You're changing everything. So if time-travel is possible, can we change God's providence. So theologically, and from the non-linear dynamical aspect of things, I just think that there are problems with that. See how much fun Heaven's going to be? You're going to want all your atoms dead to everybody too. Did you create that earthquake down there in the state of Sacramento? Did you sledgehammer your TNT? It woke me up. I want to talk about pornography. Some of you here have never, at this point in your experience, perhaps been faced with the temptation. I can almost guarantee you that this next week you will be. Because that's how Satan operates. I have never in my life had any computer solicitation to pornography until the first time I preached against it. The very next week I got this crazy solicitation on my computer screen. So guard your hearts and minds and beware. because the dragon is a whiny one. And he knows exactly, he's had demons, they've been taking notes this week too. He has no omniscience, but he's had people here, spirits here. He knows what you have been studying. And it's often that's where he is going to attack you, is exactly in the things that you've been studying. God gave man dominion over all creatures, right? No. God gave man dominion over the creation. Because the follow up is, so what about Leviathan? Well, God obviously tells us here that he did not give men in those days dominion over Leviathan. If Leviathan lived in our days, then we could take one of our fancy missiles and take him out. But he didn't live in our day, and so obviously the text itself answers the question. Dominion is not an all-comprehensive. Only God has all-comprehensive dominion. That will cost. Yesterday, you heard me refer to Dr. Jones Sr. This will be free, but talk about Satan's, Satan's not everywhere. He's not omnipresent, but Dr. Jones Sr. used to say that Satan's not omnipresent, but he's awfully spry. Okay, so he moves around pretty quick. Okay, I'm going to move on again, taking a more general one. This has to do with I think it's important to answer, you say we should always want to go to church, but what if I fell flat on my face spiritually in a way where I am so ashamed I can't stand the idea of presenting myself to the Lord? This is really an excellent question because it is the experience of every one of us in the flesh. You see, this was David's experience also, in the sense, if you think of Psalm 32, his penitential psalm. He says that he tried to cover his sin for a period of time. He fled from God and he said as long as he did that, God's hand was heavy upon him and it just became oppressive. You see, this is the flesh and this is Satan speaking to us. The flesh and Satan, when we fall, and we do, and we will, says, don't you dare go to God. He'll have nothing to How dare you present yourself before the Lord? You see, the gospel is just the opposite. Come unto me all you who are weak and heavy laden with guilt and with sin and with aversion because of our shame. Come unto me and I will give rest. Where else are you going to find pardon? Where else are you going to find release except to go into the house of the Lord? We try to emphasize this and we celebrate the Lord's Supper twice a month, once in the morning and once in the evening. We emphasize because sometimes, how dare you come to the Lord's table, you sinner? Well, guess what? The Lord's table is for sinners, not for confessing and repenting sinners. If you're deeply aware of your sin and how it's made a breach between you and the Lord, you should be running to Him. Not from him. And David, in the penitential song, says, when I confess my sin, you forgave me. He didn't want to go into the house of the Lord. It was a dread to him, I'm certain. And yet he confesses his sins, forsakes them. Oh, what blessedness for the man whose sin is forgiven, whose transgression is pardoned. So this is a good question, and I understand that. I understand experientially. I think everybody here, if they're honest, understands that experientially. And the point is, and I tried to make that point also, there are a lot of things that I didn't get to say, but we should, always want to go into the house of the Lord. It should be our chief delight to be present. It is not always the case. But you see, God has given us his spirit whereby we are able to govern our spirits. And we can, even in the midst of our emotions. Remember, emotions follow our understanding and our volition. They follow. If you're waiting If you're waiting to delight in the Lord, you may wait a very long time. If you call the Sabbath delight, holy to the Lord, and honorable, and do honor it, that is, with your mind and your will you are affirming what God says, because you know it's true, and by your will you act upon it, then you'll delight yourself in the Lord. So that's what I'd say to you. I understand. I understand your shame. I understand your hesitation. But isn't this exactly what Jesus said? He says, come. You who are sinners, you come. That's what I tell you. You may not feel like it emotionally. You do it and you confess your sins and you look to the Lord for forgiveness and he will grant it and you will then go away praising the God who has blessed you with the free and full pardon for the sake of Christ. Shifting gears, would you say that young men who are not brave enough to dance should be dubbed wimps? Of course, and I should probably confess that I am still growing in my masculinity in this area. Can there be a, yes? And I haven't grown at all. Can there be a difference between a woman showing interest so as to not discourage the man, or is that also considered taking initiative? Great question. So ladies, I haven't intended to say you should be a sphinx as a gentleman takes initiative to indicate his interest to you, that you should be Spock in female form. No. You have to be responsive. And the more interested you are in that fellow, the more, shall we say, immediately responsive you'll be, right? Be affirming. If you are inclined to reciprocate his interest, be affirming of his initiatives. Now stop flirting. responding femininely. How does a woman submit to her husband if he becomes abusive or violent? What is the biblical response to this? Call an elder, call the police, not necessarily in that order. Physical violence is a crime and the police should be involved if there's physical abuse. But your elders should know, of course, as well, and God forbid, if any of you in ways are in that position recognize that you may well I feel very torn about that. And you would join many an abused wife who has actually covered for her husband. And that's not to his good. That's not what he needs. It's a very sober question. One more. How would you respectfully correct your husband if he is in error? And I think the question contains the answer. You should correct. Ladies, you're his helper. That doesn't just mean clean socks in his drawer. That's why you have a mind and soul and are his equal in so many ways, not positionally in the marriage, but as a human being. And you ought to help him in part by showing him where he's falling short. But that needs to be done in a way that is acknowledging of his authority. And you figured that out already in other authority relationships, right? How do you correct a teacher? Well, you do that respectfully. How do you correct a parent? You're getting to the age where you can see sins in your parents. Can you say something to them about that? Yes, you can. But you've got to know the way to do so respectfully. I don't have a cheat sheet for you to do that. You find your way in showing respect as you biblically confirm. I'm glad you brought up WIMPs because a WIMP is actually a particle in physics. I've never heard of a nerd in the context of physics. But in the classroom. At one place, seriously, a weakly interacting massive particle. And with regards to this business about abuse, it can actually go the other way. I have a family member, a very strong macho man, whose wife would beat him up. she used things, she wasn't using her fists, and he had been taught not to strike a woman, and he would just put his arms up and try to get out of the area, but this can happen too, so you need to be aware of that. Dead serious, is it possible for light to attain a negative speed? I've been very exercised by this question because I don't know, but I have problems with that because the light itself is a property of, it's related to matter. This is something we know from the physics. Right. That equals MC squares squared relates light to matter, the speed of light. So if if light just doing the math in your head, e over m square root of e of m. could then also be presumably negative, so you could be talking about negative matter or anti-matter or negative energy. We don't quite know what this means. I know you hear about this in the media and so on, but I'm one of those who doesn't feel comfortable with that. I think people maybe are going out on a limb and just trying to invent something. But then also it has other physical consequences, because light, the speed of light, which is what you're talking about, is made up of two other so-called constants of nature. The permeability of free space, that's that magnetic property of matter that I told you about, although the vacuum isn't matter, there's no matter there, yet it does have a magnetic and electric property, it has to be in order for light to propagate through it, as we understand things at present. It also has a permittivity of free space, so the speed of light squared is actually, if you've got a pen and you want to write it down, if you're one of those kind of physics nerds, speed of light squared is equal to one over the permittivity times the permeability. Okay? So, if the speed of light is itself, if that itself could be a negative quantity, then that means either one of those other two. This is one of the kind of questions, you know, that the six-year-old asks, a brilliant question, because I don't know what the answer is. I don't know if it's so way out there that I should be laughing or crying. Look around the room, there's only one person here older than I am. If you ask her her age, then you'll know mine. How would you put someone who grew up in a church but then fell away? I ask because recently my uncle who grew up in a church made a comment on Facebook saying how free he felt that he wished others would join him and come out of the dark ages and put their hateful religious fallacies on the shelf. Is there a good way to approach him? How do you approach evangelizing someone who confesses Christianity but is clearly engaged in serious sin and does not and does not confess six-day creation. We've got two different issues there. Let's look at the broader issue. Those who are apostatizing from the church. The Bible tells us it's going to happen. John's quite frank about it in 1 John. One thing to note is that they'll often have theological problems, but always underlying that, at least in my past experience, it's been moral problems. And then they have to rationalize their sin, and so they will come up with theological problems and objections. There's no one way to evangelize anybody. Try to get into a dialogue if you're close with him, not on Facebook. Facebook is not a place to have any kind of serious discussions with anybody, particularly about spiritual and theological things. We really are tending to forget the lessons from Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman. The media does affect the message, or the medium, if you're talking about one, always. And we're not paying a bit of attention to what electronic media is doing to communication, and then particularly to theological. I refuse to participate in any of these chat rooms or theological discussions online, simply because I think it's not a proper medium to do that. So I wouldn't have that discussion. If I get a serious question on Facebook, I say, here's my email, write me, we'll get in touch, and we can talk. So you just try to enter into dialogue with them if they are willing to do so. Above all, you pray for them by name. I think one of the great lacks today in our evangelism is our prayerlessness individually and in the failure of the churches to have prayer meetings. And in those prayer meetings we should be praying for the lost and not just generically but by name. The greatest thing we do for any lost person is pray for them by name. And I encourage people. I'm trying to get better about this. My wife and I and our family worship in my private prayers and pray for two couples, one across the street and one next door by name. That's going to have to be the first step if anything else will develop in terms of our interaction with them and the gospel. So get a couple of people that you know, an uncle or somebody else, and start praying for them regularly by name. that God will grant them conviction if they're backslidden or that he will convert them. And don't be intimidated if it's someone that you think is really smart and they've got all of these philosophical objections to the faith because we know that they have a conscience and we know all we have to do is appeal to it. Now they might say, well, I don't believe you. And I don't believe that. It doesn't matter what they say. The Bible tells you they have a conscience. And just as you go to the doctor and you've got a problem and he's pushing around, does it hurt here? We can do that with the conscience. And we don't have to answer even be able to answer all of their objections, we can impress the conscience because God teaches us that they have a conscience and it can be awakened. As to the one who is living in serious sin, one of the best places to go is 1 Corinthians chapter 6. Those who practice such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God. A confession of faith and deliberate living in sin are not compatible. And if that is what you're doing, then you have no reason to think you are a Christian. You might be a backslidden Christian, but you have no reason to think you are a Christian, and if you persist in this behavior and do not repent, You are a Christian and you cannot have your sin and go to heaven because again John says that Christ came to destroy sin and to deliver us from sin. I am unwilling to say that a person who doesn't confess in six-day creation is not a Christian. I know lots of sincere, godly Christians that are not six-day creationists. As I said, there are natural sins of fallibility and there are deliberate sins. The person who says, I know the Bible teaches six-day creation, but I refuse to believe it, that's a person who then is blaspheming, taking God's name in vain, and deliberately sinning. But the one who says, I do not think that Genesis 1 teaches a chronological, ordinary day creation in six days, and they have their reasons for that, even though they might be very weak reasons, But if they sincerely think that that's what the Bible is leading them to, the same way a person believes in autonomous free will, and that God doesn't elect those whom he saves, they're not unconverted, they've got sins of fallibility. And so it depends as you're dealing with a person in terms of their relationship to Christ, are they saying, I don't care what the Bible says, I know the Bible says that God created, but I can't hold to that. That would hurt my career, or I just don't want to believe that. That person is in serious problem. But the one who thinks that the Bible teaches their position and not my position, well then I love them in Christ and pray for them that God will give us a chance to continue to talk about these things. But I would accept them as a brother or sister in Christ. I want to piggyback on that for some of the particular questions, which I'm not going to get to today, obviously. With regard to the third and fourth commandment, I think the same thing is true. You need to study the scriptures and be convinced. If you see the scriptures clearly teach that a particular type of speech or reference or something like that is forbidden in scripture, then to continue to pursue that is sinful. Same thing with regard to practices on the Lord's Day, if you're wrestling with it. In other words, I'm not going to be your conscience. God is going to be your conscience. My purpose in doing these things is that sin does disrupt relationships. God has given us commandments with regard to the use of His name and the use of His day. We ought always to be growing in that. Your views are going to change as you go along. There are some things about which I was totally unaware. I didn't even know. It was just ignorance. Then over time the Lord brought conviction. The Lord is very gracious. He doesn't dump everything on us like I did this week. Basically, it's a process. We deal with one thing and then come on another. It's a process of things. I'm just going to piggyback on what Dr. Piper said about six-day creation. There's a difference between error and fallacious presuppositions or interpretation. and then rebellion, and that's what you need to be dealing with in some of these particulars. But be serious about it. Don't just, I don't care. This question, then going back to the second commandment, in regard to the second commandment, should Christians strive to destroy all pictures of Jesus, like nativity scenes, stained glass paintings, movies, etc., are Christians who attend church should stain glass of Jesus' nativity scenes or other images guilty of breaking the second commandment? Two questions, really. And to the first one, I'd say no. The reason is because it's a matter of jurisdiction. You don't have authority to destroy somebody else's property, whatever it may be. You may have strong convictions against it, but God has not put you in a position where you have legitimate authority to do that. Should we be praying for reformation? I think we should be. The other thing is, what I see in scripture is that you don't impose these things in a coercive way, even with regard to my particular desire to see the law of God embraced by the civil magistrate. I do not believe I do not believe that that type of thing should be opposed on an unwilling population by a civil magistrate. I think they become nursing mothers, as it were. But what I see, and I'm trying to remember, Where is it in Ephesus where they burned their magic books? That wasn't the magistrate coming in burning their books uh... they were converted and they came to see the uh... the evil uh... of uh... of their practices and they did it themselves and i think that's i think that's kind of a model that we see for the gospel coming and changing people's hearts as if they no longer desire the things they desire to turn from idols to serve uh... the living the living god and i i think that do i think that uh... that churches with stained glass of Jesus and so on and so forth are breaking the second commandment? Yes. That's my take on things. I think from what you've heard, I think they are. But again, is it because of rebellion or is it because of ignorance and not thought about it, or is it because they're sincerely trying to honor the Lord and they're just doing so in a way that I think is contrary to Scripture. So, I'm sorry if that sounds muddled, but I think that's where we have to be at this point in time. Is pinning clothespins to people a form of flirting? Obviously it is if it's all the same person that you're pinning. I got into a relationship at a fairly young age. As of now, the other person and I are still in that relationship. While we have never been physical, we became very emotionally attached. I'm having doubts about that. I'd like to just comment on the basic inevitability of the two things coming together. That's the way you're made. You're not made to be emotionally involved, emotionally intimate without becoming physically intimate. I think Doug Wilson said it's like trying to unroll only one side of the carpet. You're going to unroll everything. Which is why, ladies and gentlemen, in those just friendships that you are pretending to have with each other, be careful of otherwise very wholesome things like praying together. or studying the scriptures just one-on-one, that creates emotional intimacy. Those are wonderful things, but they aren't to be done between men and women unless there is a context for pursuing a romantic relationship in an orderly way. I plan on joining the military and go on active duty. Would it be wise to put off marriage? That's a great question. I was making reference to World War II, you remember, and I think I would. I can't give counsel without knowing the circumstances more than it's on here. But let me just make this observation. The time of war, joining the military, is very much a different thing than the time peace, or what do we have right now, relative peace, I guess you'd say. So I was particularly ending my comment about those marriages that would happen right before someone shipped to the South Pacific, and who knows whether he would come back. There were men dying every day. That is where I was raising a question of wisdom, not about serving an active duty in a blanket way. Your comment about the state that we're in now, somebody has described it, I think, very accurately, a perpetual war in pursuit of perpetual peace. What in your opinion is the most compelling evidence against evolution? One could obviously talk about things like the existence today of dinosaurs. There are living creatures that one would easily call dinosaurs. There are the existence of creatures like the coelacanth found off the coast of Africa which was supposed to have died out millions of years ago. It's unchanged. So those are examples, but probably for myself, those things don't move me as much, although I might use them in conversation with somebody, as something called genetic entropy. It's the fact that human beings are not becoming genetically superior, but we're becoming genetically degenerate as time goes by. So the human genome is not improving, it's devolving and we can actually measure it within generations. We talk about diseases that get passed on and so on, from generation to generation, these problems that we have within the DNA when those particles smash through them and damage them, sometimes those changes are permanent and they're passed on to your offspring. Those kind of effects, the change in the genetic material, that's the coating which produces the babies and so on, have never been shown to be an improvement. At the very best they tend to be neutral, but the vast majority of them are negative. So whenever there's a genetic change in a human being because of something like that, it's not an improvement. which tells me that we don't have enough, and people can calculate this fairly quickly, we don't have enough time. The world couldn't, human beings couldn't be hundreds of millions of years old. We would be genetically totally messed up. But for myself, personally, the most compelling evidence against evolution is once again theological. It's that, and this is what I struggled with, I was a theistic evolutionist going into college. And I believed it, until my paleontology professor actually told me, we don't really know this, when I asked him about the age of a fossil, this is just on the basis of our best guesses. He gave me permission, if you like, to question my teachers, and that was mind-blowing to me. Scripture tells us that death is a bad thing. Death is the final enemy. And no matter how hard I tried as a theistic evolutionist, I couldn't find any way to squeeze out of the fact that death had to be a good and a positive thing and proceed the existence of Adam and Eve, which would mean that the Bible is not only wrong, but terribly wrong about one of the most important doctrines without which the coming of Jesus Christ would be meaningless. So, if you want that, I don't know if you can have Christ. You've learned a lot this week, particularly in the study of the commandments, and just to add on to what Pastor just said, you've got to go back and change everybody tomorrow, and understand that as you come to greater understandings of truth, particularly in these areas of worship and images and the Lord's Day or dating, God brings us all along at different paces, and so don't go back and use a nuclear method, but have conversations. Don't go back and condemn either parents or churches or friends, but try to pray and get into conversations and keep all ways in mind as a matter of respect. I want to thank you all. You have great questions. It shows you're paying attention. So applause to you all for being so attentive. Yes, very good. We applaud you very much. But the other thing is, remember that this is also intergenerational. We didn't decline overnight, and so we're not going to recover overnight either. But just for your encouragement, People do come along, and what happens is as we grow together, we grow in like-mindedness. There comes a critical mass in our congregations where, just because of the like-mindedness, folks who come in with different views are more prepared to consider as they see it borne out, not only in the practice of a congregation, but in the blessings that come to that congregation as well. Thank you.