Purified By the Word

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Living Hope SDA Church

Battles to Fight and Win

Chad Kreuzer

Fadia Kreuzer

Media, Addiction and Victory

Doubt vs Faith. How To Stand Firm and Know the Truth?

Heavenly Father, thank you that we could gather together this morning.

I pray that your Holy Spirit would rain down.

Lord, I know that right now we see the trends taking place, at least from surveys, seeing that young people, less and less are interested in spirituality and religion.

We know there's a number of reasons for that.

But Lord, I pray that you would help us to hold firm until Jesus comes.

Jesus asked that question, When the Son of Man returns, shall he find faith?

Lord, and I pray that you will find that in us and that we will be lights to help others also have the faith.

Now, this is not the primary thing we're talking about, but we did see in the research yesterday, we looked at pornography consumption, and researchers found that those who consumed it would progressively be less and less interested in spirituality, less and less interested in prayer, and we saw that this made them more likely to simply walk away from the truth, or I shouldn't say the truth, from spirituality or religion, but this makes perfect sense from a biblical standpoint.

But I also think of this, and this is not part of the presentation, but 1 of the things that can cause us to fall away is if we never share what we believe.

If we never share what we believe, it doesn't really mean very much to us, and so if you've never shared, I would challenge you to pray about it Lord give me an opportunity to be a witness give me an opportunity because when you are witnessing and trying to help others it actually builds you up it builds you up Many times you may work with people and they don't make it.

They fall away, but actually you seeking to help them, even if they fall away, we're told that we will gain warmth from the coldness of those around us.

Like, it doesn't sound like it makes a lot of sense, but it's true that as we're seeking to help others, it stirs our own soul and it warms us up.

But I want to begin by starting talking about ancient Judaism.

Now the Jewish people were, well the Bible even says it, a peculiar people, right?

And part of it was that they had some strange beliefs.

Number 1, they lived in an area of the world that was basically filled with polytheists, meaning people that believed in many different deities and gods.

And yet here was this strange group of people, the Hebrews, that were monotheists.

They believed in 1 God, and they believed in a loving, personal God that would communicate with humanity.

But they also had this very strange belief that the universe had a beginning.

That there was a time where there was no universe and then boom, the universe began.

Now this is in contradistinction to the cultures around them.

I mean, think about, we look back to the Babylonians.

Obviously, they were in captivity to Babylon for some time, you know, roughly 2, 500 years ago.

And we're told, looking at the Babylonian genesis, the story of creation from the Babylonian perspective, it is apparent that for the Babylonians, matter was eternal, meaning something about the universe always existed in many of the pagan cultures of the world through history.

And yet here was this strange group of people that believed in 1 God and that the universe actually had a beginning.

There was a time where there was nothing other than God.

And the Bible tells us in Psalms 33, 6 and 9, by the word of the Lord where the heavens made and all the host of them, by the breath of his mouth, for he spake and it was done, he commanded and it stood fast.

The Bible tells us that God spoke the world into existence.

Now remember the cultures of that time believed that the universe had some elements to it that were actually eternal, contrary to what the Bible teaches.

And then you come down to the time of Jesus, who obviously was also Jewish, and he brought this strange idea into Christianity.

The strange idea that the universe had a beginning.

And we look back to Aristotle, you know, back to roughly, you know, 384 BC to 322 BC, Aristotle basically brought down that teaching that many of the pagan groups across the world had that the universe was eternal.

And so this idea was brought down to Western culture from Aristotle until, well until the 20th century basically, where it was continued to believe by many that the universe always had this these eternal elements to it.

So the universe had some form of eternality to it.

And then Einstein, believing the same idea, he began to espouse something called the general theory of relativity.

But as he was beginning to make his mathematical equation, it actually looked like maybe it wasn't true that the universe wasn't eternal, but he couldn't accept it had to be eternal.

And so when he was doing his mathematics, he put in something, they called it like the fudge factor.

He kind of twisted the math a little bit to make it look like the universe was eternal.

And he ended up saying later in his life that that was the greatest blunder of his life.

This was the greatest blunder of his life, messing with the math.

We are, if you went to any general education as I did, you were probably taught that scientists are unbiased human beings.

You know we're taught a lot of things when we're children like scientists are unbiased and many of us were also taught that Santa Claus was real and we were taught a lot of things that are just simply not true.

Are scientists all unbiased human beings simply looking for the truth?

And if anybody thinks they're unbiased and have no bias, they're the most biased human being that exists.

We all should acknowledge that everything about life is presupposed as a former experience.

Now we should hopefully within science actually be able to open our minds and be open to the data.

But the fact is data changes all the time.

I mean, we look back through COVID, we were told in the beginning by Fauci that, and I'm not debating any of this, it's just Fauci initially said masks do not work.

Then he said masks do work and that we should all wear them and then even 2 or 3 masks would be superior.

And then finally it came out in a Cochran Review which is probably the highest standard of medical reviews that there is that exists, the Cochrane Review.

It is an international body of scientists and researchers looking at it, and they finally came to the conclusion in the end, it looks like masks were not beneficial at all, and secondarily, they even said the N95 mask didn't seem to make a benefit.

Now my point in saying that isn't to put anybody down, is to simply say that science changes over and over and over.

The perspectives of science change over and over and over, but the idea is that whatever we know about science today is truth, but it could change tomorrow.

That is what we actually see, and that's why the idea that science is this unchanging, and they would even say, no, no, no, science is always getting us closer to the truth, but when you go back and forth and back and forth, Science is a, it is to a degree, a faith-based initiative.

Because number 1, you're trusting the scientist did the work accurately.

Number 2, you're trusting he was not biased.

They even did, they did research not too long ago where they took the exact same data.

So all they had was numbers, but they didn't come to a conclusion.

And they gave that data set to multiple mathematicians to actually quantify, basically, does A cause B?

And so then they give it to multiple scientists to find out.

Another group said, no, the data shows that A does not cause B.

And a third group, and that was another about 25%, and another 25% said there's not enough data to know whether A causes B.

This is the exact same research, exact same information, But the information was given to multiple mathematicians in the field of science.

And they all came to different conclusions.

So who looks at the data also can conclude what the data tells us at the end of the research.

Now, I'm not putting down scientists for saying this.

It's just that humans are humans and humans have opinion.

And if you don't believe that, well, you need to study a little further because this is what scientists are discovering.

And so, but back to our point here, Edwin Hubble, he pointed his massive 100-inch telescope out into the cosmos and they noticed something fascinating.

They noticed that certain stellar bodies in the heavens would have a red shift coming off of them, which seemed to indicate that they were either further or closer to the person who was looking at them and they also seem to give evidence through something called the Doppler effect that that things would give off a redshift depending on their position and their movement.

So things that were further away might have more or less depending on where they were in the sky or in space, rather, I should say.

And they came to the conclusion because of this that the universe actually was expanding, expanding instead of in a steady state.

And so what ended up happening was this gave, if the universe was expanding, like if you had a videotape and something was going out, and then you were to put the videotape in reverse, that same thing that's going out, if you put it in reverse, it would look like it was going back, right?

And if you did that long enough, things that were moving in this, if the universe has 2 directions that are coming together, if you put it in reverse, sooner or later the universe would get to a central point, and that point would get smaller and smaller and smaller until it disappeared.

And so scientists have now come to the conclusion, like Stephen Hawking, He says almost everyone now believes that the universe and time itself had a beginning at the Big Bang.

He says almost every scientist believed that the universe had a beginning in time itself, right?

And looking at, this is Robert Jastrow, PhD agnostic astrophysicist, he says a sound explanation may exist for the explosive birth of our universe, but if it does, science cannot find out what the explanation is.

The scientist's pursuit of the past ends in the moment of creation.

He says we have no idea how the universe could have begun.

Now we used to believe, not we, but you know Christians believed the Bible, but secular scientists and many people from the Western world believed that the universe had no beginning but now they came to the conclusion well it had to have had a beginning but we have no idea how that could have happened and he goes on to say for the scientist who has lived by notice his these are his words this is a this is an agnostic this is not a Christian creation is saying this he says for the scientist who has lived by his, what's that next word?

Now, do scientists have faith, yes or no?

And he says, for the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, even to believe that reason makes sense and that we can trust in reason, takes some faith.

Series

Battles to Fight and Win

Doubt vs Faith. How To Stand Firm and Know the Truth?

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

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