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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

George Jackson

We Have Not Followed Cunning Devised Fables

Father in heaven, what a privilege to be here in your church to worship you.

We lift up Lebanon and we pray for a brighter future for those people and that many of those problems will be able to be resolved peacefully.

We pray for your Holy Spirit's presence here.

Father, if there's anyone here struggling with faith or issues of faith, may they be strengthened, and may your Holy Spirit direct us to truth, we pray in Jesus' name, amen.

I've worked around the world in many places, and so I'm a biologist at heart.

I'd like to talk a little bit about, well, I was asked to talk about faith in science.

And if you look at, as you come into 1 of the halls with the fossils, You can see, if you look at it, it's talking about life.

Everything on Earth that has ever lived, this is what the Chicago Museum is saying, is connected through and the result of evolution.

That's actually answering a question before the question is actually asked, if you notice.

That's not true, but that's what they're saying.

It's a process that's been happening since the first tiny life forms appeared some 4000000000 years ago.

Welcome to our evolving planet, I think it said.

That's presented as fact, and it's answering a question before anybody has ever asked the question.

When you go out into the world, you're faced with this theory of evolution.

This is what is said by Ellen White, 1 of our early church pioneers in Selected Messages, where she says, God has permitted a flood of light to be poured upon the world in discoveries in science and art.

But when professedly scientific men lecture and write upon these subjects from a merely human standpoint, they will assuredly come to wrong conclusions.

The greatest minds, if not guided by the word of God in their research, become bewildered in their attempts to investigate the relations of science and revelation.

The Creator and His works are beyond their comprehension, and because they cannot explain these by natural laws, Bible history is considered unreliable.

Those who doubt the reliability of the records of the Old and New Testaments will be led to go a step further and doubt the existence of God.

And then, having let go of their anchor, they are left to beat around upon the rocks of infidelity." Have you ever known anybody like that?

Have you experienced someone that's gone through this progression?

When they start having these doubts and they start questioning things, before long, you think, well, what happened to them?

It's a matter of faith, and it's like they give up hope, and it's a paradigm shift, and they take on another worldview.

Well, what did Peter say just before his death?

For we did not follow cunningly devised fables.

When we were made to know to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty.

Here Peter was saying, we saw it, we felt it, we felt him, we touched him, We witnessed him.

We haven't followed cunningly devised fables.

We have empirical evidence that Jesus was a real person and he's the God of heaven.

Why is it so important to understand where we came from?

Well, here we have it where it says, in the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.

God formed man out of the dirt, put him all together, and then breathed life.

And then the Lord planted a garden eastward in Eden, and there he put the man whom he had formed.

He created a wonderful garden home and placed man there.

And the Lord God said, it's not good that man should be alone.

I will make for him a helper comparable to him.

But first, he leaves him alone for just a little while.

Out of the ground, look at this, out of the ground, the Lord formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air.

He also used the ground and created living, other living things.

And He brought them to Adam to see what he would call them.

And whatever Adam called each living creature, that was his name.

And so Adam gave names to all the cattle and the birds of the air and every beast of the field.

But for Adam, there was not found any helper comparable to him.

So Adam's naming this, he's working with Jesus, having a great time.

That's a dog and that's a spoonbill over there.

And I probably wouldn't have called it a killer.

Well, it would have been an orca back then.

So he's naming all those things and Adam begins to notice.

You know, as I look around, so many of these things are in pairs.

I wonder why there's only 1 of me and everything else is in pairs.

So, and he took, and the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall on Adam, And he slept.

And he took 1 of his ribs and closed up the flesh in his place.

Then the rib which the Lord God had taken from man, he made into a woman, and he brought her to the man.

Adam, I've got someone I want you to meet.

Remember, Adam, how I showed you all the animals and you were naming them?

And you wondered why there was just 1 of you?

You have a partner now, especially for you 2.

Her name's Eve, and there's Adam, like, wow.

And he's so excited that the Bible actually captures his excitement.

This is now bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.

She shall be called woman because she was taken out of man.

By the way, what do you think was the pinnacle of creation?

What was created differently than everything else in creation?

I love to tell this to my students in the Middle East, because there's so many of our young ladies in the Middle East don't have a really good self image, and they're not treated very well.

It's just the way it is over there, It's sad.

But ladies, you were created in a very special way, different than all of creation.

I don't know all the full ramifications on that, but that's really interesting.

And it means you have a special place in creation.

So don't let anybody tell you that you're not worth something.

And then at the end, God creates the Sabbath and he shares it together with Adam and Eve.

The first Sabbath, God, Jesus was there with Adam and Eve.

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We Have Not Followed Cunning Devised Fables

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