Good morning. Welcome to another sultry summer day in East Texas. Let's begin with a word of prayer. Father, as we come together this morning, we ask that you would be with us throughout the course of this day as we seek to set aside your Sabbath to bring our worship to you accordingly and to learn from your word as we are going to do in this next hour. I pray for the preaching this morning as well, that it would be given with power and unction, that your Spirit would be in our midst today and apply these things to our hearts. And we pray it in Christ's name. Amen. So on the way down yesterday, I had just passed Decatur and stopped for gas. I don't even know if it was a town or not. It was a truck stop, so I stopped for gas. And as I'm getting ready to pull back onto the highway, my cell phone rings. And guess who it is? I won't say his name, but he's sitting pretty close to me. And he says, "I found these notes from a class that you did years ago on creation. How would you like to do that for Sunday school tomorrow?" And I was like, "You're talking about the one from like 20 years ago?" And he's like, "Well, eighteen. 2006." Well, technically it was February of 2006. So it was like eighteen and a half. But yes, almost twenty years ago. And those of you who were in this congregation at that time might have some vague recollection of that. But at that time, I undertook a study of biblical creation, which to the best of my recollection, because I wasn't as meticulous about doing my notes on the computer at that time, lasted for about nineteen lessons. And this is the first of them, and I do have, actually, electronic notes from that message that I posted to Sermon Audio, even though I did not have an audio recording to go with it. So we've come to this topic today and I've spoken on this a number of times in Sunday school, and in conferences, about creation and the importance of creation and the importance of Genesis. As you may know as well, that a couple of years after we did this study on creation I undertook a study of the book of Genesis and we went through that chapter by chapter over the course of almost a year and a half. So Genesis is one of those books that's near and dear to my heart, and not just the book and the history of it, but the theology of it. You'll recall in 2021, we did a short conference on Doctrines in Genesis. We only had time for six sessions in that conference, but we could have gone probably fifteen or twenty, because that's how many doctrines we find in Genesis. In fact, arguably, all the important doctrines of the Christian faith are found in the book of Genesis. And you might be saying, well, wait a minute. Isn't Genesis a history book? And the answer is yes, but the doctrines are woven through it from the very first verse. So even without opening your Bible, I bet you can recite to me the very first verse of the very first book of the Bible, the very first chapter, Genesis 1:1. "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." I've said it this way in the past. You know, those who have issues with miracles, you know, the liberals will basically try to say, "Well, we can't believe the miracles. We can't allow anything supernatural in the Bible." Okay. But if you go to the very first verse of the very first chapter of the very first book, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth" -- if you can believe that one, then anything that happens afterward is a piece of cake. Resurrection from the dead? No problem. None of the other miracles in the Bible are as difficult to believe as that very first one, that out of nothing, in the beginning, when there was nothing but God, that he created the heavens and the earth. And so that's arguably the foundational doctrine for the Christian faith. And yet, what do we end up doing with that doctrine? This really gets under my skin. Some of you know that. It has for a long time. "Oh, well, it wasn't necessarily six days. Maybe it was six billion years or, you know, who knows?" And then we take kind of an agnostic approach to what is very clearly stated for us in the first chapter of the first book and the first verse. and through the rest of chapter one, particularly, and into the beginning of chapter two, where God says that he finished all of his work, and on the seventh day, he rested. And that that, theologically, it is historical, but theologically, that becomes an important pattern for us, doesn't it? Let me ask you a quick pop quiz question. How many days do we have in the week? Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Wow, well that's a coincidence that we have seven days in the week and in the very first chapter of the Bible we have a pattern of creation that establishes seven days in a week. And what are those seven days comprised of? Yes, two parts. There are six days of work and one day of rest. And that becomes a pattern for the people of God for the entire temporal age. And that is captured for us in which commandment? The fourth commandment, which says, "Remember the Sabbath, keep it holy." What is the explanation that is appended to the fourth commandment? "For in six days God created the heavens and the earth, and on the seventh day He rested." So there's a pattern for whole of life that's captured for us from the very beginning, and then there are also, I would say, very important eschatological consequences of that pattern, because what does the writer of the Hebrews tell us about the Sabbath? We have this seventh day Sabbath that we observe in this temporal age, but what comes later? An eternal Sabbath, where the pattern of work and rest is, the pattern of work is no longer necessary, is the way that I would think it. All of our work is complete. And then what happens is that seventh day Sabbath, that is the pattern from the beginning of creation, basically opens up into eternity. and for the rest of eternity, then what do we do? We're no longer working, we are worshiping. So, very important reasons, and that just gives you an illustration of the importance, theologically, of this pattern that we are reading from the very first chapter in the very first book of the Bible. AUDIENCE: I go to the first verses of Genesis also and say, "In the beginning, God." From there, dialogue from theological, from the communicable attributes of God. Where did God come from? We deal with that also. Here's God and His eternality and all things flowing from Him like His hand. Yeah, there is. And as we start to think and say this carefully in scientific terms there's something called the law of causality and what does the law of causality point to? It's the law of causality that everything has a cause because what's the critic going to say who made God no the law of causality says every effect has a cause but it also implies that there has to be something that is eternal and the funny thing The funny thing is that up until the middle of the 20th century, before Big Bang cosmology came along as the new paradigm of cosmology, the general consensus was that the universe was eternal, because it was at least understood by a previous generation of scientists that something has to be eternal, that it's always been here. Well, it's not the material world that's eternal. It is God who is eternal and then by His power He creates the material world. So the material world has a beginning. We see that very first verse, in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. But the material world has a beginning as we see at the beginning of Genesis and it's also going to come to a conclusion at some point. That time, as we refer to it, is going to give way to eternity. So something has to be eternal. There has to be, in the technical jargon, there has to be a first cause. Otherwise there would be, there would still be nothing. Now, the Big Bang cosmologists, including men like Stephen Hawking, have a different way of seeing things. They have what they call self-creation, that the universe created itself out of nothing. So basically there are your choices. You have the Bible that says God created everything out of nothing, or you have the scientists who, starting from the assumption that there is no God, is driven to the belief that everything has to create itself out of nothing. So then, is it really an argument between science and religion, or is it really an argument between two different kinds of religion? So that's what we're left with. Here's the frustration for me. I don't necessarily expect the atheist to believe that God created the heavens and the earth out of nothing or that he did it in the span of six days. But why is it in the Christian church that we have been so easily misled into thinking that six days means something besides six days? And here's where I'll demonstrate that I'm not afraid of taking pot shots at anybody. I'm part of the PCA, so I can say, even as a member of the PCA, that it's very disappointing to me that the PCA does not take a clear stand on six-day creation. Now, most of you may do so, and maybe you take that for granted, and I wouldn't be surprised if most in This presbytery, because it's a conservative presbytery, also hold that view. But as a denomination, that's not the case. So what has been published by the denomination? So the question is, what has been published by the denomination? Back in the 90s, a study committee was commissioned, a creation study committee, that produced an 87-page report. in 1999, which I think it was in the following General Assembly of 2000, when it was given a floor vote, do you want us to adopt this or not? And the question was over whether the PCA takes a literal view of six-day creation. And do you know what the answer was? No, and we never have. The question was, does the PCA hold to a literal six day view of creation? So the study committee is intended to basically say, here are the different views and here's where we stand. And the answer is that it has never been part of the PCA. Now this is 1999. The PCA was founded in 1973, so at what for us is about the halfway point, it's about 25 years ago, right? The PCA said at that time, we have never taken a position of having those who are ordained in the PCA adhere to a literal six-day creation view. That's never been our position and it's not our position. And when that was sent to the floor for a vote, and it's not binding, it's just a study committee report, but the vote basically says, we either support it or we don't support it. It was overwhelmingly supported. And if I remember the numbers, it was like 83% in support and only about 17% in opposition, less than 20% of those who were commissioners at that General Assembly of the PCA 25 years ago rejected that report, which would kind of argue that they're standing on the side of six-day creation and not leaving the door open for you to believe these other potential beliefs about creation, that it was not a literal six-day event. That's where the PCA is. and apparently where it's always been. Now, the part of the PCA that you're in, that may surprise you to know that, but that's a documented event from, again, 25 years ago. So the question had nothing to do with all those other theories, it was just the literal It was basically saying that we are going to allow officers in the PCA to hold one of these alternative views that is not a literal six-day creation. And that would not be inconsistent with the Westminster standards. Yeah, I see the expression on your face. So if that's the case, and maybe this is getting off the subject, but are there other things that they don't believe have to be, or that we don't have to hold to being literal? You can go on the PCA, you can go search the position papers that have been published over the years on the web. I think you can just Google PCA. or just Google PCA position papers. I'm not sure that'll work, but that's where I would go. Yeah. That's the one, the creation report's the one that I've looked at for obvious reasons. Ginger? And tell me if I'm going the wrong direction with this, and where are these discussions going? I apologize. But the way I look at it, I look at individual people different than an institution. But if an institution claims to be a source of truth, And not only are they unbiblical, but they are also irrational in what they're saying. Then I'm going to just say, well, clearly they cannot be a source of truth. And this is what I say to my, you know, I've said this in groups of Mormons. It's irrational. Evolution can't happen. And we can look in our museums Right. So officially, there's an explicit rejection of evolution, but not a rejection of long ages. So the PCA study committee report says we hold to an historical Adam. There was a person, a man named Adam. Yes, that should be your response. How do you have an historical Adam if you get to that part of the first chapter in Genesis where God says let us make man in our image and after our likeness when it's happening on what's called the sixth day and the five days that concluded just previously might constitute billions of years in some other view of Genesis. So it's not a question even of Genesis chapter 1 because you're you're parsing the first chapter of Genesis and even parsing The days of creation in order to say we're going to make room for these long Indeterminate periods of time whether it's the day-age theory or the gap theory or whatever it might be that introduces billions of years of geological time Before that moment when there was a literal man named Adam standing upon the earth. I Think you're right. It is irrational even if you try to reject evolution. And I agree with you. And the the study committee report tries to justify its position by going all the way back to the church fathers and through the reformers and saying, well, you know, you've got different views. They didn't necessarily think, you know, was, you know, literal six days. And that to me, that's not determinative. I there's a part of me that says I really don't care what the church fathers say, at least not in comparison to what scripture says. and they may not have understood scripture as well as they should. I kind of think of that first millennium of church history of an outworking of many of the doctrines of the church and of theology, kind of the New Testament theology, you might say. But that doesn't mean they were all right in what they said. Peter had to be corrected by Paul on major doctrines. What did she say? That Peter had to be corrected by Paul. You say a major doctrine. It was only the doctrine of salvation. So I don't know why you might be making a big deal out of that. Yes. I think you can be wrong about a lot of things and still be saved. It's been said that we don't know, you know, if we If we describe, if Jesus describes faith as a mustard seed, then it doesn't take a whole lot of faith to be saved. You can be a child and have a very minimal understanding of theology or science or anything and still be saved if you have that seed of faith. So I wouldn't try to argue. categorically that if you believe in evolution you're not saved, but I would say that if you believe in evolution you're not biblical. And you need to come to the Presbyterian Church and we'll help you with your theology. Let me look at, it was also argued by the way in the study committee report that the The manner in which the Westminster Standards were written was not necessarily intended to bind us to a literal view, a six-day view of creation. So let's look at what the Westminster Standards actually say, and then apply a little bit of a rational test, Ginger, to see if it makes sense. Chapter 4, paragraph 1. Short paragraph. It's 922 in the back of the Trinity Psalter. 922? Yes. Chapter 4 of Creation, paragraph 1 deals with the creation of the heavens and the earth, paragraph 2 deals with the creation of man. Let's look at paragraph 1. It pleased God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost for the manifestation of the glory of His eternal power, wisdom, and goodness in the beginning to create, or make of nothing, the world and all things therein, whether visible or invisible, in the space of six days and all very good." And here's where we put on our skeptics hat and say, yeah, but what is a day, right? We'll go parse the Hebrew word yom and say, well, it could mean an age, or a certain period of time, or a long period of time. But grammatically, it's been pointed out that when you are numbering the day – first day, second day, third day, fourth day, fifth day, sixth day – then it refers to a day. Morning and evening. Just as we would understand it, the first day of a week, right, refers to a particular day. And, of course, you have both the numbering of the days in Genesis chapter 1, but what else is there that gives us a clue about how long the days were? Say it. There was morning and evening the first day. There was morning and evening the second day, and that kind of – you see the pattern already. Now, here's where I think that there's – I would argue it this way, that it's inconsistent to say that there could have been billions of years of time before Adam comes onto the scene, but we have to – we're going to plant our stake in the ground and say that there was an historical Adam. It raises what obvious question? What came before Adam? And how did Adam get here? Well, that's a good question. Does it matter? I would ask the question this way, what was the nature of the creation during those, whatever it was, whether it was five days or five billion years, what was the nature of creation? What does our standard bind us to? I think the key idea here is the very last clause in the first paragraph of the fourth chapter of the Confession, what does it say? In the space of six days and all very good. And all very good. What does that imply? Perfection. I never met God's standard. Yeah, nothing bad happened before that, right? Now we reject evolution because what does evolution require? competition and death, and it's a very long, very slow, very messy process. We have to reject evolution if for no other reason than that, that you couldn't describe the creation as very good if that kind of process was taking place. But it does raise a question. If everything was very good from the beginning, and there are some billions of years in there between the beginning of the creation and the appearance of Adam, what was going on during that time? And why would it have taken so much time to get there? I don't think there's a consistent opposition, I'll put it that way. That if you start trying to split hairs and say, well, yes, there was an Adam, but he could have come billions of years after the end of creation. Why? Why would you need to do that? And that raises kind of the next important question we could ask. Why are we trying to make room for some long period of time during that span from the beginning of creation to the appearance of Adam? Why are we doing that? To accommodate the unbelievers. to accommodate unbelievers. Well that's pretty harsh. They say that in that period of time there was a war in the earth. Right, that the angels The angels ruled over the earth, and that's when Satan fell and wrecked the creation. That's the gap theory, that there's a gap between Genesis 1-1 and Genesis 1-2, and that there was kind of this angelic or spiritual war that took place at that time. What's the problem with that? There's at least one problem that should come immediately to mind. Was that all very good? Does that fit in the category of all very good? If there was some spiritual, it doesn't fit. Ginger? And if you're going to take liberties like that with creation, where would that end? And it would go on and on. Satan attacks right here. When I was a young woman, 18 years old, I worked at a public school. And I was young and serving the Lord. Two years ago. I'm sorry? Two years ago. Yeah, right. discovered in a conversation with my two bosses, the superintendent of schools and the principal, we began talking about God. And I figured out very quickly, and it just crushed me at that point, because one of them was a Sunday school teacher in the Baptist church. And the other one was a longstanding member at the Methodist church. They were very high. profile people in our community. And I discovered very quickly that they didn't believe, like you say, in a literal creation. And it went on from there. I started saying, but then what about what about do you believe that the red sea rolled back well not not exactly it was only six inches deep yeah and do you believe in the virgin birth was the last thing i asked and and the the one that taught sunday school just kind of shifted around and lowered his head and said i read somewhere it was a roman soldier and i and that is where that ends up if you they didn't believe anything was literal Yeah, so if you were Satan and you wanted to undermine the authority of God's word and the inerrancy of God's word, I don't know, maybe a good place to start would be in the first book of the Bible, right? So you begin to undermine God's word from the beginning. And the funny thing is we get to chapter three and isn't that exactly what we see? God said, you of all the trees of the garden you may freely eat, but of the tree that's in the midst of the garden you may not eat of it, for in the day you eat of it you shall surely die, clear enough. And the serpent comes along and says, did God really say you shall not eat of any of the trees in the garden? It's the same thing. We are looking for ways to undermine our confidence in what the word of God says. I think it's a huge problem. I think it throws the door open to all kinds of theological compromise, which is why it's disappointing to me that the PCA doesn't take a stronger stand on six-day creation and claims that it's doing that. It's kind of putting itself or trying to put itself in the stream of the church fathers and the reformers and taking that kind of, well, it might or it might not. And that's not a very good – not a very safe thing to do, especially when the Scripture is so clear. I want to read a portion from chapter 1 of the Confession. Paragraph 9. The first chapter in the Confession is of the Scripture. Paragraph 9 says this. The infallible rule of interpretation of Scripture is the Scripture itself, and therefore when there is a question about the true and full sense of any Scripture, which is not manifold but one – one interpretation It must be searched and known by other places that speak more clearly. So just hypothetically, if we were not clear about creation, whether it was six literal days or not, we see it mentioned in different places. Creation is mentioned generally many times. But if we were looking for that passage of scripture that gives us the fullest understanding of exactly how long it took, where would we go to find that? No, right where we're at. First chapter of Genesis, right? Because he's, well, yeah. And then if we compare Exodus 20, the fourth commandment with Genesis chapter one, I mean, Genesis chapter one gives us the fuller explanation. He just says in the fourth commandment, four and six days, God created the heavens and the earth and rested on the seventh day. Well, that's found in the very first book, the very first chapter. There's no place else in scripture we can go to get a clearer explanation of creation. Now as I was teaching through this portion of the Confession a couple of years ago, something interesting occurred to me. I taught through Chapter 4 and then went to Chapter 5. Chapter 4 is of creation, Chapter 5 is of providence, and Chapter 5 describes God as working through second causes. So paragraph two of chapter five says this, although in relation to the foreknowledge and decree of God, that's chapter three, the first cause, capital C, all things come to pass immutably and infallibly, yet by the same providence, he ordered them to fall out according to the nature of second causes, either necessarily, freely, or contingently. So here's the contrast. First cause, second cause. At the beginning there was nothing. So the first cause has to create something. And once that something is created, now we have the miracle of the creation, and then second causes start to come into play. But the creation has to happen first. And if I were to try to explain it, what I think we do, Briefly, it's that we are trying to take the idea of second causes and push them into first causes. So God works through providence, through second causes, through what has been made, but he has to make it first, and not just the stuff, but everything that governs the nature of the stuff, right? What's the age-old question about which came first, the chicken or the egg? Well, what's the answer? No. What came first? The hen and the rooster. Because if you don't have a hen and a rooster, it doesn't matter whether you have an egg or not. Right? He created them male and female so that what? So that hens would lay eggs, roosters would fertilize the eggs, and then you would have chicks and the next generation of chickens. Those are the second causes, but he has to create the hen and the rooster first. Those are the first causes. And I think we try to take this idea of second causes, and evolution is in that category, and we try to say, well, let's push this back into the creation narrative. And things get really confused at that point. I think our confession is very clear. I think the scripture is very clear. I don't think there's really any good argument, but the funny thing is if you put a bunch of theologians together on a committee, they can come up with a very complex plausibility structure that if you really try to parse it, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Why are we making so much difficulty out of this? I taught a class on apologetics about a year after I moved to Colorado. And one of the things that we talked about was creation. We talked about scientific naturalism. We talked about evolutionism. And I made a point in each of those messages to describe them in a way where it ends with ISM. This was part of the theme of this conference, that these things, when you have an ISM, evolutionism, or Darwinism, or naturalism, or materialism, those are understood as worldviews. It's not just an idea, it's a worldview. And so if we talk about Darwinism, we have to recognize that it has a set of assumptions built into it about the nature of reality, we can ask whether those are accurate or not, whether they agree with reality or not, they don't, but when they don't and you still hang on to that view, you can't be called a scientist, you're engaged in the promotion of some kind of a religious system of belief. Now when we do that, Here's Christianity, and here's any of those others. Take any one you want. We'll say, I'll take a geological one that's called uniformitarianism. Uniformitarianism is the idea from the early, late 18th, early 19th century, where the geologists are saying this. When we look at the world today, what we see are very slow processes. We have slow processes of sedimentation, slow processes of erosion, Therefore, everything about the past history of geology has to, listen, must, there's a moral imperative tied up in that, must be understood in terms of the slow processes that we observe today. That's where uniformitarianism came from. And so in the early 19th century, the geology paradigm moved in the direction of an old earth. hundreds of millions of years old, because this slow process of erosion, or this slow process of sedimentation, when we project it backward, it takes hundreds of millions of years to produce what we see today. That's the idea. Well, catastrophism is rejected. And that's what you notice about those kinds of beliefs. In order to have this belief in uniformitarianism, we have to reject catastrophism. So that really opened the door a few decades before Darwin published The Origin of Species for this belief about long ages to start working into the church. And so the gap theory and the day age theory of how we interpret Genesis chapter one, that actually started, that came into being several decades before The Origin of Species. And then as soon as the Origin of Species was published in 1859, that decade of the 1860s, you're starting to see this idea of theistic evolution. So all of that's infiltrating our belief in the church and how we understand scripture and how we interpret scripture. Now, I don't think it's a coincidence. I see you playing with your watch. That means I'm almost out of time. I don't think it's a coincidence that there was something happening in theological circles that had a strong bearing on the direction that things would go. Yeah, ultimately. Ultimately, it's, you know, it's self-worship. You know, you either worship God or you worship yourself. What I'm referring to, though, is theological liberalism. What was happening by the early 20th century in America? Theological liberalism was becoming a thing. And what was the way of viewing the Bible? Higher criticism of Germany. Yes, and we're starting to say, well, there's truth in the Bible and it's got some good spiritual stuff in there, but we don't have to believe the what? The history. Especially the miracles. So we start rejecting the miracles, we start rejecting the history of Scripture, like the crossing of the Red Sea, the flood of Noah, Jonah going into the belly of the fish, and so forth. Because, you know, those are just fairy tales, right? I mean, it's just mythology. We had a lot of men in the time of the revolution and afterwards that had a lot of influence. I also think Thomas Jefferson and his Bible, he took and did away, he cut out everything that had to do with supernaturalism. He did away with all of it. You had men like John Adams. It was universalism, right? And there's others, but those two men would say they were Christian, they're theistic in their thinking, and what Jefferson did. That influences a lot of people. Oh yeah, yeah. So, you know, early 19th century, we refer to the early 19th century, the second Great Awakening, But then we also had what in the 19th century that is very notable in terms of religion? The emergence of the cults in the 19th century. So you have liberalism, you have a cultism that is starting to gain traction, you have a new geological paradigm, then you're going to have a new biological paradigm in the 19th century. By the end of the 19th century, early 20th century, theological liberalism is sweeping through the American churches. So there's more than one problem here. It's not just that we have new ideas emerging from science. The nature of science is that it's always going to be producing new ideas. There's nothing inherently wrong with that as long as we don't become dogmatic about those things because Scientific theories change, and they change because we are learning, we're gaining new knowledge. Old theories are falsified and replaced by new ones. But theology doesn't work that way. It's either true or it's not true. And whatever science may be saying at any point in time, you know, maybe there's something there that's that's compatible with Christianity. I'm not going to say that we are anti-science, but I have also said it this way, that I'm not anti-science, but I'm anti-naturalism. Naturalism is a religion that begins with the rejection of God and says that everything we see has to be explained by natural law. We have to reject that. Ginger. It seems like that if we in the church are using one definition of science and everything coming through the televisions and the schools that's talking about a completely hijacked definition of science, which is political and is religion, isn't our job to expose that and to have it fully removed? I would say yes, that we have to recognize what's happening Notice how distortion almost always begins with the hijacking of language. So to recognize it and then expose it and refute it. So there's obviously an apologetical undertone to this whole discussion this morning that God said that in the beginning he created the heavens and the earth out of nothing and that He created everything in six days, and at the end of that six days it was all very good. And not very good by our standard, that's reflecting the biblical language that God Himself uses, the benediction that He pronounces over His creation, that He looked at what He had made and He said it was all not just good, but very good. In the sense that it couldn't have been better, there was no defect in that creation at the end of creation. That's how things started. That gives me a presuppositional place apologetic in that it's a truth. It's a truth unchanged and unchanging. That's the word of God. That's what he's revealed to us. It doesn't change. I don't care what time it is. And we can not throw signs out the door, but we've got an absolute. And most people that I've talked to, they don't have an absolute in their life. That's where we are today. So we have completely distorted language, we've distorted the idea of truth. The philosophical word there is epistemology. How do we know what we know? And if you begin with the belief that you can't really know anything, then epistemology is dead. And if there's no knowledge, there's no morality, so morality and ethics are dead. Then there's another term, teleology, purpose. Purpose is gone. There can't be any purpose to something that happened just by accident, by random, with no no design or purpose behind it, right? It puts you at the bottom of the barrel, philosophically, if you go down that road. It's a dead end. God created them male and female. Well, now we've got people saying, what is male but? What is a woman? Yeah, you know, I'm not a biologist. So, you know, the irony of the questioning of Katonji Jackson-Brown, or was it Brown-Jackson, I can't remember, during the Senate confirmation hearings when she was asked, what is a woman? And she said, well, I don't know. I'm not a biologist. Well, she is a woman. And the whole point of her being nominated to the Supreme Court was what? She was a woman. That was the point. You know, the president made that very clear that he was going to nominate a woman for that open position. But yeah, we're at the point where if we can't even discern between what is a male and female, then we really are at that point that the Bible describes as not being able to tell your left hand from your right hand. No ability to discern or differentiate, and that's where that kind of philosophy leaves us. We can't make any meaningful distinctions about anything if we go down that road. I think I was going to mention that this apologetics class that I taught some years ago, we were bringing the class to a conclusion. Someone raised the point, he says, you know, he's an engineer, and he works with engineers, and he says, you know, you're making a big deal out of six-day creation, but most of the people I work with don't believe in six-day creation. It's not an essential doctrine, so we have to, you know, we have to talk about the essential things first, right, the gospel, and then we can, you know, at some point, I guess, work our way back around to the question of creation versus evolution, or young earth versus long ages. And it's been 12 years now. I've had time to think about that, and I've decided it's wrong, that it's not a non-essential doctrine. Because it's not actually the doctrine of creation that they're questioning. It's whether the word of God is true. That's correct. I'll put it this way, because I think this is what's really at stake. This is their religion. This is their idol. Are we going to try to present Christianity to them while they hold on to their idol of evolution, or are we going to go after the idol and say, no, this is false? We have to tear down the idol, I think, before we can be an effective witness of what scripture says in the gospel. Yes. There's another thing at play, though. Whenever somebody says to you, oh, we can't talk about this, we have to talk about that, It's also a power play, and who owns the conversation, and what right do they have to say they're going to determine what's going to be talked about, and you have to stay put. Oh, yeah. Don't get me started on that one. That's basically saying, yeah, you have uncovered somebody's idol already, right, at that point. Since Bill asked me to do this, I will at least refer to the notes from that session many years ago. This really was a defense of the first verse of Genesis. So here's some points that God created everything out of nothing in six literal days. And here's where I feel like a teacher correcting somebody's paper. I'm looking at that and saying, well, I wouldn't necessarily put it exactly that way because there was some things that were created out of nothing and there were other things that were created from what had been made. but that the Bible unambiguously and repeatedly affirms six-day creation. The Bible refers to the scope of human knowledge and experience going back to the beginning, which is an obvious reference to Genesis 1.1. That creation was completed and pronounced good before Adam's disobedience brought sin and death into the world. Very important. That is a total rejection of any idea of evolution or theistic evolution. Here's another one. We find this to be somewhat tedious at points in Scripture, but the genealogical records that are given to us in Scripture go all the way back to what? All the way back to Adam, as if he was a real person. Who knew? And in addition to the genealogies, there are many references to the earliest men as real people. They were not some kind of proto-humans, if we introduce the idea of theistic evolution. The creation account in Genesis is foundational from a doctrinal standpoint. If you don't believe the first chapter of Genesis, then the real question is why should you believe any of it? It undermines the inerrancy of Scripture and the authority of Scripture to speak about these things. And also the biblical account of creation points to Christ and foreshadows his redemptive work. And where's the parallel that we find in the New Testament that sounds like an echo of Genesis 1. Yes, he was with God from the beginning. Nothing was created that was not created. I'm like you. I've got bits and pieces of it, but not as clearly as the whole thing, but basically that Christ was in the beginning with God at the creation, and everything was created through Him. And where do we get kind of a hint of that in the first chapter of Genesis? This is one of those points that's debated by the theologians. What does it make man in our image? Earlier. Oh, way back. The criticism is, well, how can you mark the days of the week when the sun wasn't created until the fourth day? Well, light appeared on the first day. I won't say it was created. The phenomenon of light was created, I can say that, but who is that eternal light that John is referring to in his gospel so often? The light of the world. Jesus is the light of the world. I don't think it's really that difficult to figure out. So there are very good and necessary reasons why we have to affirm six-day creation, and once we move away from that and start introducing the world's ideas, we first need to recognize that we are engaging in something called syncretism, we're mixing basically another religion with Christianity. And this is where the battle is. So we need to stand our ground and fight that battle as we have opportunity. Our time is up, let's pray. Father, we thank you that we've had some time this morning to think about these things to affirm our Confidence in the word of God from the very first verse, and ask that you would help us receive what you have said by faith, even where we do not understand all that you have done in this marvelous creation of yours. Help us to keep our eyes focused on the one who was with you at the beginning of creation, Christ, who redeems us from sin and has ransomed us from the penalty of eternal judgment. Help us now as we begin to turn our attention to worship that we worship you in spirit and in truth. And I pray these things in Christ's name, amen.