Okay, we return to the book of Genesis. We're up to chapter 9. The ark has landed, and now we're talking, so please stand with me as we read Genesis chapter 9, verses 1 through 19. Genesis 9 verses 1 through 19. And God blessed Noah and his sons and said unto them, be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth. And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth and upon every fowl of the air. upon all that moveth on the earth and unto all the fishes of the sea into your hand are they delivered every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you even as the green herb have i given you all things but flesh with the life thereof which is the blood thereof shall ye not eat And surely your blood of your lives will I require, at the hand of every beast will I require it, and at the hand of man, at the hand of every man's brother will I require the life of man. Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed. For in the image of God made he man. And you, be ye fruitful and multiply, bring forth abundantly in the earth, and multiply therein. And God spake unto Noah, and said to his sons with him, saying, And I, behold, I establish my covenant with you and with your seed after you, and with every living creature that is with you, of the fowl, of the cattle, and of every beast of the earth with you, from all that go out of the ark to every beast of the earth. And I will establish my covenant with you. Neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of a flood. Neither shall there any more be a flood to destroy the earth. And God said, This is the token of the covenant which I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you for perpetual generations. I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth. and it shall come to pass when I bring a cloud over the earth that the bow shall be seen in the cloud. And I will remember my covenant which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh and the water shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh. And the bow shall be in the cloud and I will look upon it that I may remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth. And God said unto Noah, this is the token of the covenant which I have established between me and all flesh that is upon the earth. And the sons of Noah that went forth of the ark were Shem and Ham and Japheth. And Ham is the father of Canaan. These are the three sons of Noah. And of them was the whole earth overspread." All right, let's pray. Father, we do thank you for your blessings and just the rejoicing of the coming off the ark and the beauty of the rainbow that you gave. And it's not just a sight, but it's a promise from you that you would remember your promise to not destroy the world by flood again, and that they were to go and replenish the earth. Father, may we look forward to all your promises and the soon return of your son, Jesus Christ. In Jesus' name we pray, amen. Okay, so there's a lot of things in chapter nine, and God repeats his covenant with Adam. Remember Adam, he told him that he was to go, he and Eve, and they were to go and fill the earth, be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth. Well, now after all the destruction of the flood, there's just Noah and his family left, eight people, but he's told them the same thing, same covenant, they're to go and replenish the earth. to be fruitful. And he's changed it now. Now he's given them permission. But first he gave them to eat of all the fruit of the ground, right? You could eat all the fruits and vegetables and everything you wanted. Now he's put animals on man's diet. And he's also put the fear of man in the animals. Well, if we're gonna eat them, it's a good thing for them to have some fear so they can have a reasonable chance. If they were all perfectly tame, that would just be too easy. That'd be like, you know, killing your pets. But while they're afraid of man, most animals now naturally have a fear of man. Even if they've never really been around man, they have a fear of man. That's why the dodo birds, you've heard of the dodos, right? okay that was an island out in the indian ocean we call it mauritius now it's kind of a city state kind of like singapore and it's there and that was the island of the dodos and it was a very popular place for sailors to stop because it had these dodo birds which were just big flightless pigeons well pretty easy to catch right they don't fly they hadn't had man around they were fairly easy to get close to and so the man with our not great foresight and wisdom, wiped them out completely. So they lost a food source there. God has added capital punishment. That's an important thing. He's given the rainbow as a sign of a covenant between God and man. And then later, we're gonna get that today, but the curse of Canaan, it's not the curse of Ham, that's been misremembered, it's the curse of Canaan. And then Abraham finally passes away after 350 years after the flood at the age of 950. So Genesis chapter nine, and God blessed Noah, his sons and said unto them, be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth. Well, apparently Noah is beyond childbearing age. They don't have any more children, but he already has his three sons with him. And so they and their wives can populate the earth. the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth." Animals naturally are afraid of us. We can tame them or domesticate them. I saw a video the other day of a lady who was feeding a chipmunk And he would come down from the fence and come and she was giving him almonds and things like that. Except one day she fed another chipmunk and he got really mad at her. He refused to take it. He wouldn't even take it. He was like, nope. She stuck it in his mouth and he wouldn't take it. He was pouting because she had fed another chipmunk. He was jealous. Every beast of the earth, every fowl of the air, and all that moveth upon the earth, and all the fishes of the sea, into your hand are they delivered." Well, I find that funny, even domesticated animals like cows, okay? It's funny if you've ever been out in the field with a bunch of cows. I mean, the first time I had this experience, I was out dove hunting, we were out hunting and walking through a field, and every time I'd take a step, I'd hear crunch behind me, take another step, and then I'd crunch, and I'd stop, the sound would stop, I'd turn around, and there was a dozen or two cows just falling to see what, you know, I might've had something to eat, you never know, they were just following along, but as soon as I'd stop, they'd stop, And all you got to do is turn around and they'll all run off. I mean, every one of them outweighs you two or three times. It's not like they really have much to fear from you, but they do. Still, they're afraid of man. I find that interesting. In the original The Jungle Book, that Rudyard Kipling wrote, not the Disney movie, or the remake especially, but in the book, I find it interesting because the animals have the fear of man. You've got the boy out there, and of course the big villain is Shere Khan the tiger. And so when Shere Khan, very different in the Disney movie, but in the book, Shere Khan comes to get him. Of course, he's pretty helpless in front of a tiger, but he stares him down. He stares the tiger down and he wins, because the tiger has that fear of man. He's showing that man is dominant over the animals. So Mowgli was actually able to stare down Shere Khan. Well, the animals do generally flee from us. Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you. It's like, okay, so it's okay if you want to eat a steak. Bible doesn't say you have to be a vegetarian or a vegan or whatever. And I think some of these extreme animal activists, I think they've lived in the city too long. Because some of them get upset saying that they think that you have to kill sheep to get their wool. They think it's cruel and awful. Some of them even thought you had to kill cows to get their milk. I tell you what, I hope they don't have to live on a dairy farm. They'll never survive. They're not going to make it if you have to kill the cow to get the milk. Some of these people haven't been out in the country too long. So he's given us meat to eat. So if you want to enjoy a good steak, that's perfectly fine. People say, I say, well, you know, I'm a secondhand vegetarian, right? I eat cows, cows eat grass. I'm a vegetarian. They just pre-processed it for me, made it better. And I'm sure glad I don't have to survive on grass, because I don't have four stomachs like the cow does. It's amazing, they can take grass and turn it into T-bone steaks. That's impressive. And people are still trying to do it. We're trying to make synthetic meat and whatever. That hasn't really worked out too well so far. but flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat?" Ah, because God has said that without the shedding of blood, there's no remission of sin, that the life is in the blood. It's the blood that determines life or not. So when you sacrifice an animal or when you're going to eat an animal, the first thing you do is you drain the blood. That's generally our practice, what we do anyway, but that's what the Jews, if you go and you buy at a kosher, you go to a kosher deli or whatever, there's been a rabbi there that approved the slaughter of all the animals to make sure it was good. I know, used to take Will to the ranger game sometimes, and we found seats we liked. We found some cheap seats way up in the top deck, up there right behind home plate, but I liked the view. It was right behind home plate. I always said I could call balls and strikes from there. But of course, from what I've seen, everybody in the stadium thinks they can call balls and strikes from wherever they are. They think they can see better than the umpire. But it was a nice view. You could really see what was going on. But right outside was a kosher hot dog stand. They had some really good hot dogs. And there was a kosher hot dog stand out of that. So that was the place to sit if you wanted that. But the blood is significant. That's what God says the life is. We used to define death as when your heart stopped, right? Because when the heart is stopped, the body begins to decay very quickly because the blood goes bad. Okay. But now we have redefined it because of medical technology, things like ventilators and heart lung machines and all that kind of stuff. We can actually keep hearts beating and blood circulating and things like that. And so they've come to a new definition called brain death. Okay. Well, the real reason for that is so they can do transplants. Because once the blood is not circulating, the body parts are useless. I've mentioned before, I read a book by a surgeon, and he did transplants and this and that. And so there was a young man that had come in, I think it was a head injury from a motorcycle accident, something like that. And so that's who they usually look to for transplants, because he was young and healthy. but it had a lot of brain damage. But they didn't, no one signed a consent, and he hadn't signed a consent to donate organs, so they couldn't do anything as long as he was alive. So they waited, but they were ready. They brought in, for a transplant, they bring in two teams of surgeons, one to take the transplant and one to put it in the patient. So they had the other patient ready, You know, they were hoping to get a lot of parts out of this. And so they were in, this doctor was standing right there. And he said that the moment, that second they declared him dead, the team rushed in to see what parts they could salvage. He said, not a thing, except the corneas, corneas of his eyes, they were able to use that. But the rest, no, because when he was dead, when his heart was stopped, his blood wasn't circulating, the parts were no good, very quickly went away. So they have redefined this brain death thing where they can keep you going in your body parts vital. And so, well, they declare there's no brain activity going on. Only problem with that is that can restart. Okay. And so I don't like it. I don't think that's God's way. I think God said the life is in the blood. And, you know, Jesus Christ, The way they proved he was dead on the cross, they poked a spear in his side. What came out? Blood and water. That was a dead man, because his blood had already separated. He had other fluids or water. It was not blood that could sustain life anymore. So every time we eat an animal, we need to drain the blood. And fortunately, even if you like your steaks rare, and it's a little pink when you cut into it, it's not blood. They've drained the blood already. They've already did that in the slaughterhouse. They ran them through, knocked them on the head, hung them up by their back legs and slit their throat. They've drained the blood long ago. That's just in the tissue of the meat. So we're not eating the blood. But God was picky about the blood because the blood is important. Now, lots of pagan rituals use the blood. Satan likes the blood. There are even in our world today, there are people so corrupted by Satan that they like to drink blood. And it's more common in our culture than you would think, just judging by how many people dress as a goth, you know, black, everything, it's a mad, that's what goth celebrates, it's dead. And some of those have probably participated in practices, because I've read of people that practice in drinking blood and this and that. One man was trying to resist his urge. He had such strong urges. When he said his urges were really strong, he would just go get him a raw piece of steak and eat that, eat it raw to try to satisfy his blood lust. It's just blood lust. It's just evil. It's what Satan likes. It's in the pagan rituals and all these things. But God said, pour the blood out on the ground, because the life is in the blood. Because the sacrifices point to Jesus Christ. And Jesus Christ was on the cross. And he poured out his blood on the ground as a payment for our sins. So he establishes here, okay, you can eat the animals now, but not with the blood. And surely your blood of your lives will I require at the hand of every beast will I require." What? If an animal kills a human, guess what? You kill the animal. They used to do that all the time. That was just normal because if you say, well, they've got a taste for human flesh. We don't want that. You know, if a bear attacks and kills a person, it's not the bear's fault. It's not a moral thing. I mean, you know, maybe you got between the mama bear and her cubs, you know, but still you, you find that bear and you kill it. there was a shark now there's very few deaths by shark attack in the world like one a year something like you know but uh so they were going to kill the shark find that shark and kill it fine that'd be the hard part but catch that shark and kill it and guess what the animal activist came out and said it was wrong it was violating the shark's rights to kill him, that it was man's fault because we were in his environment, in his territory. We were in the water and that's his territory. So we shouldn't have been there. Well, what about the guy that gets eaten by a bear? Is that his territory? Can we not have the land either? Well, guess what? God gave us dominion over what? The land and the sea. It's not that. And he said that man's blood would he require at the hand of the animal. So if an animal kills a person, We need to kill that particular, not all the animals, that particular animal. You don't have to go around and kill everything that might be dangerous, although I'm rather glad the dinosaurs have been killed off, and a few things that are hard to deal with. What is it? Some of these people, it was in California, they were reintroducing, what was it this time? Mountain lions and this and that it's like is that a very good idea It's kind of California's kind of densely populated with people and with farms and things like that, you know but but he says that if an animal kills a person he requires its life and At the hand of man at the hand of every man's brother. Well, I require the life of man That's capital punishment The Bible speaks on it Now, when you get into the law, there's other things that have capital punishment as well. But here, the number one thing is if a man kills another man, a person kills another person. Why? Because God thinks that we should get revenge? No, because a person's life is so valuable. We do not have the right to take it. And if someone violates that, they deserve the highest penalty. It goes on and says, whoso shed man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed. For in the image of God made he man. Okay, so a person, it's not like killing a cow. Now, PETA and some of those, they get it backwards. They get all incensed about killing cows. That's not like killing a human. But killing a human, why is that a crime? Why is that so serious? Because man is made in the image of God. God has made us special, different than the animals. We're different. An animal, oh, amazing creatures. They have incredible abilities. If you don't believe that, just watch a cat. I mean, cats are amazing. You know, they can stand flat footed and jump on top of the six foot counter and watch them chasing the bug. They're quick, they're fast. Watch a dog mess with them a little bit and they'll bop him in the nose about six times before he can even turn around. Okay, I mean, they are fast and agile and incredible creatures, but they're not people. People are made different than animals. We're made in the image of God. What does that mean? Well, in the first place, it means that we have the capacity to fellowship with God. It means we have a moral sense, right and wrong. Animals don't have morals. See, and Thomas says your dog is candy right and slap wrong. He knows what you don't like. You don't want him to do what he'll get punished for, what he'll get treated for. Our Doberman was in the house for a little while last night, and the girls were making cookies. And she sure thought she wanted one of those cookies. So she was trying to be such a good little dog, she laid down on her little rug and just didn't bother anybody, was really good, thought, if I'm really, really good, I'll get a treat. Well, I think she got some Cheerios, but she didn't get a cookie. OK. But she's not doing it because it's morally right. I remember the golden retriever, he ate everything. And I'd go put, sometimes I'd get the little sugar ants, when they started getting in the house, I'd put ant bait around the house. And they'll come eat that, take it back to the nest, and that'll solve the problem for a little while. But he thought that stuff tasted really good. So I put some of that out and he'd just start licking it up, you know, wherever he could and I'd get on him and this and that. And so he finally got the idea, okay, I'm not supposed to do that. So he'd be there and so I told him, no, okay. He was just sitting there. He wasn't touching it, this and that. And as soon as I stepped around the corner where I wasn't inside anymore, slurp, slurp, slurp, slurp, and I'd step back. What? I'm not doing anything. Slurp, slurp, slurp, slurp. You know, if I wasn't looking, It was fine because he had no moral sense. He didn't have the, oh, that's wrong. I shouldn't do that. Not even the, you know, sometimes we're just overcome by temptation. You know, we know we shouldn't do something, but we give into the temptation, which we shouldn't. We don't have to for saved, but we do. He didn't, he wasn't struggling with it. Believe me, he wasn't putting up a fight. He was just waiting until I wasn't looking. If I wasn't looking, he had no guilt whatsoever. So they don't have that capacity, but a human does. We're made in the image of God, and we know right from wrong, and we can do right. And only God can give life, and man does not have the right to take it. Well, what about capital punishment? Thou shalt not kill, right? So we shouldn't do capital punishment. Recently, the trial, that Brian Coburg trial, Oregon, he's the one that murdered, he was a graduate student in criminology, and he murdered four college students at a nearby campus. I mean, just took a big knife and murdered them. Just flat out, premeditated, went in, murdered them. He took a plea deal because, and the plea deal was, not much, they just took capital punishment off the table. They said, if you'll plead guilty, we won't try for the death penalty. And he took it because they tried it. They went to trial and his lawyers and this and that, but they saw there just wasn't much. I mean, his DNA was found on the knife sheath that was under the body and, you know, it was just a pretty open and shut case. And so he took that. So would it be wrong for us to take his life? No, it says by man shall his blood be shed. Now, it's not something for individuals to do, vigilantism, that's not, but it's right for governments to do, it's their responsibility. And the Bible explains it much more clearly during the time of Moses, when he gives the law from God and they explain all that, but basically by other people, but it needs to be done by an official, a government authority to do that. Now, when the government doesn't do that, people tend to turn to vigilantism. Did you hear about the car that ran through a crowd in East L.A.? I believe East L.A. is a heavy minority district. I don't know much about it. I've been in L.A., but I didn't spend much time in East L.A. Apparently this guy had been removed by the police from some store. I don't know what the background was, but he was upset about it, and so he just hopped in the car and drove through a crowd, killing people, okay? Well, when he did run into that, when the car came to a stop, people standing around, because he hit street vendors and pedestrians, and he hit a bunch of people, they pulled him out of the car, drug him out, started beating him, and some guy shot him. Okay, now that's wrong. And I assume they arrested the guy that shot him. I don't really know, but people aren't gonna take that kind of thing. We need to make sure our government is taking proper justice, or the people will tend to take it in their own hands, and that is much worse. We've had times in our country before where vigilantism broke out. We don't want to see that. That's lawlessness and this and that. But it is, but capital punishment is right. We need to be careful. God says, you know, two or three witnesses and all that kind of stuff. But capital punishment is right. Not because we want revenge on that person. It's right because we're protecting the lives of the innocent. We're showing that we value human life the most highly. It's the highest possible crime. It deserves the highest possible punishment, right? That's the highest punishment that man can get, is the death penalty. Now, some people were saying when Koburg took the plea deal, they were saying, oh no, he's crazy to take that plea deal. Now he's gonna be thrown in general population in a max security prison and he's gonna suffer all kinds of abuses and this and that, be there for life. When if he would have gotten the death penalty, he'd be on death row for 20 or 30 years where he gets three catered meals a day and a cell to himself and protection. And they were claiming that he'd have been better off on death row. That tells me there's something wrong with death row. Okay. If we're given that time, it needs to be the deterrent, but we give the highest punishment to the highest crime. That's the intent there. It's because life is so precious. We're protecting life. And I do firmly believe that the death penalty is a deterrent. I read one woman that used to be a probation officer. She said she didn't used to believe in capital punishment until, that it was a deterrent, until some of her parolees that she was dealing with, they'd robbed a bank or something. And she was dealing with that. And this guy robbed a bank without a gun. And she's like, why would you rob a bank without a gun? He's like, because if you rob a bank with a gun, you can get the death penalty. If somebody got shot in the fracas or something like that, he's like, I didn't want that. So to him, it was a deterrent. The death penalty was something he actually feared. And if we, it's such a small, they say, well, if it's not a deterrent now, it's because we hardly ever implement it. There's so few people that ever get convicted of a capital crime that gets the death penalty, and then you go through appeals for 20 or 30 years before you actually execute it. But it's right. God said, if you shed man's blood, now he's got exceptions in there. The Bible makes a distinction between manslaughter, if you accidentally, versus intentional. It's only murder if it was intentional. We call it manslaughter. It's in our code, this and that and so forth. So that's not the problem. And you be fruitful and multiply and bring forth abundantly in the earth and multiply therein. So the earth, whole world, eight people, got a lot of work to do. Got to fill that earth, rebuild everything and go on. And God spake unto Noah and to his sons with him, saying, And I, behold, I establish my covenant with you, and with your seed after you, and with every living creature that is with you, of the fowl, of the cattle, of every beast of the earth with you, for all that go out of the ark to every beast of the earth." Well, that's pretty much all of them. and I will establish my covenant with you. Neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of a flood, neither shall there any more be a flood to destroy the earth." Again, another sign that this was a worldwide catastrophe. This was no local flood because we've seen a lot of floods a few weeks ago in South Texas. Well, it flooded down there and this and that. God didn't say there would never be a flood. He said he would never destroy the entire earth with a flood. So it was a world-covering flood that he did not repeat. And God said, this is the token or the sign of the covenant which I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you. God's covenant extends to the animal world as well. for perpetual generations. So not just Noah's generation or his son's generation, all the way down to the end of the world. I do set my bow in the cloud and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth. Okay, well, that's where his bow, we call it a rainbow that comes with the rain. how appropriate right because it's a covenant between god and the earth and where do you put it between heaven and earth right there in the sky perfect place you can see um and it's the sign of this kind i mean it's incredible i mean i love rainbows i think they're really cool i know um the first time i covered this 20 years ago um I thought, well, here's a little science experiment you can do. And so we had one of those old-fashioned overhead projectors, and had that overhead projector so you could have a good light and this and that. So I filled up a jar, a clear plastic jar with water, and you put it on there and shine it at the screen, and it'll make a rainbow. You see on the screen, it makes a rainbow and this and that. So I thought, OK, I did pretty well. I demonstrated that that worked out, and this and that. And then guess what? Right about that time, it started just raining like crazy. One of those thunderstorms popped up in this and that. So we finished up, and everybody was kind of hanging around in the building for the rain to quit before everybody walked out to their cars. So we were kind of standing around visiting. And so I went on outside. I thought, there might be a rainbow. And I walked outside, and there was this huge, beautiful rainbow. just right out there in the West, right across the sky. And this, and then I'm like, everybody come out here. That makes my demo look kind of puny. Okay, but there's God's demo. I thought God gave us his demo with this big, beautiful, you see, and in, you can see this big, beautiful rainbow across the end there. And so God really put his touch on that one. And it shall come to pass when I bring a cloud over the earth. Okay, well, you've just been through this incredible storm. Cloud comes over, you might be like, ooh, here we go again. He said, no, the bow shall be seen in the cloud. So the rainbow is amazing. Although rainbow pictures are used a lot, apparently a lot of people that draw them have not paid attention to a real rainbow, which amazes me because people that draw stuff are artists, right? And then the first thing you learn in art is your color wheel. But they put the colors in the wrong order. Sometimes exactly backwards. That's a little more excusable. But sometimes they're mixed up. It's like, what? No, they're always the same. Because the way light works. Isaac Newton and his prism. discovered how you could split light now the color split and he named the colors of the rainbow and it's always red on the outside unless you're looking at the double rainbow which is backwards it's exactly opposite if you're doing that top row you know in Angela's picture here oops There. You can't really see it because it's faded. It's not really bright. But the lower rainbow is in this red, orange, yellow order. This outer one is in the reverse order because it's the reflection of it. It's the opposite. So it's red, orange, yellow, green. Blue, indigo, and violet. Some people criticize Newton saying he just wanted it to come out seven, so he invented indigo in there. You could have just called it all violet. It's a spectrum. How do you say where one color stops and the next one ends? Is it blue and indigo? Is it just indigo? Is it just blue? That's a judgment call. But this is the way he split it. And the way I remember that, oh, that's wrong. That's terrible. It must have spell-checked me. It spellchecks me and does stuff like that. Okay. It's Roy G. Biv. Okay. Red, orange, yellow, green in the middle, blue, indigo, violet. Roy G. Biv. So if you ever want to remember the colors of the rainbow, just remember Roy G. Biv. It'd be better if it spelled Isaac Newton, but, you know, that's as close as we could come. and I will remember my covenant." That's the important part, right? You want God to see that rainbow and remember, hey God, better stop this rain soon, you know, you promised you wouldn't wipe out the whole earth again. He said, I will remember my covenant, which is between me and you and every living creature and all flesh and the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh. And the bow shall be in the cloud and I will look upon it and I may remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth." Guess what? We still have rainbows today, right? I mean, no, it was about 4,000 years ago and we're still having rainbows because God's covenants is permanent. And God said unto Noah, This is the token of the covenant which I have established between me and all flesh that is upon the earth. And the sons of Noah went forth of the ark, where Shem and Ham and Japheth. And Ham is the father of Canaan." Now remember that, we'll cover that next time, but we're all descended from these three, right? Then the three sons left, where everybody on earth is descended from these three. Shem, the Jewish people are part of that. That's where we get the term Semite. Semitic, like anti-Semitism, which we have way too much of these days. Okay, Shem was from that. Ham, there's lots of different people in this and that, but Ham also, the African people, and I forget the Indian, and there's a bunch of the peoples are from Ham. And then most of us Western European sorts are from Japheth. Okay, so he's our father through that, but we're all, What? There's not different races. We're all descended through Noah, through one of these three sons. Seems kind of a shame to have a whole war over which brother we're descended from. That's not very different. How can you just say that these people are more highly evolved than these people and there's all the horrors that have been done in the name of that? It's like, no, that's just Uncle Shem or Uncle Ham's descendants. so it's passing from noah to his three sons so it's changing so there's the noahic covenant repeat of abraham of the adamic covenant and then now it's going to be through these three sons and we see how they do post-flood so god did promise that so we've we've had capital punishment we've had promise not to flood the earth again. We've had this covenant with Abraham and his descendants. And so now the earth moves on and it goes on again and life goes on. We move along according to God's plan. So when God makes a covenant, he keeps it. When he makes a promise, he made a promise with that rainbow. It's there to remind us of God's promise every time. And then it's like, you know, even the floods we had in South Texas, you wouldn't look at the rainbow and say, oh my God, how could you let this happen? You look at the rainbow and say, I remember your promise that you won't destroy everything again. We will recover from this, we will come back again and we can do that. And just as sure is this promise about Jesus Christ. There's many more promises in scripture about Jesus Christ and his return. And he's promised us that Jesus Christ will come and said, if I go prepare a place for you, I will come back for you. And he will, he will come back for us if we're his. So he's given us what we call the great commission to go and make you disciples of all the world, teaching them all things whatsoever I have instructed you." That's our job. We continue with that so that more and more will be ready for the day when He comes, because we don't know when it's coming. It could be very soon. We hope so. We look forward to it. We hope it's soon, but we need to move on and do our work until that day comes. It's not time to go sit on a mountain somewhere and wait. We've got work to do. We need to be busy doing it. Blessed is that servant that the master finds busy doing his business. All right, let's stand.