CREATION MOMENTS: 1.14.23

Genesis is one book. That might seem pretty obvious to many of you, and yet sometimes we have given the impression that it is two books. The first book runs from chapter one through chapter eleven. The second is from chapter twelve onward. In Genesis 12, we are introduced to Abraham – although he has been briefly mentioned in Genesis 11. Abraham is our great example of faith and righteousness, and most Christians trace the biblical life of faith back to him and, therefore, read everythingabout Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph as historical narrative. But many Christians, and even many pastors, take an allegorical approach to the first eleven chapters because they cannot face the implications of those first eleven chapters being literallytrue. As creationists, we have understandably concentrated on refuting the allegorical interpretation of the beginning of Genesis, and, consequently, a lot of our effort is aimed at those first eleven chapters. In doing so, we have neglected everything afterchapter eleven and reinforced the appearance of two books. It is my contention that Genesis is one book – a unified whole. Francis Schaeffer strongly supported this viewpoint when he said, “God… gave us religious truths in a book of history and a book that touches on the cosmos as well. What sense does it makefor God to give us true religious truths and at the same time place them in a book that is wrong when it touches history and the cosmos?” To have full confidence in the biographies of Abraham and his descendants, we need equal confidence in the unity of the whole. ----------------------------------------- According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, animals evolved from unicellular eukaryotes. Eukaryotes are cells that contain a clearly defined nucleus. This membrane enables the two stages (coding and decoding) of protein synthesis to be separated. Accordingto the encyclopaedia, this has enabled different types of cell to evolve to do different jobs. However, no mechanism seems to be available whereby the extra information needed for this variety of cells would be created. Plants and fungi are also presumed tohave evolved from such eukaryotes, but they both have semi-rigid cell walls. Animal cells do not, and it is this property that evolutionists suppose has led to the wide variety of movements and other abilities peculiar to animals. At every stage in a supposed evolutionary process there needs to be a spontaneous production of new genetic information. Yet, the only mechanisms seen are the coding and decoding of existing information. Information is copied from DNA to RNA, then transferredin order to construct proteins.< This is why the biblical account of where animals came from is so much more scientific. The Bible refers to animals reproducing after their kind. The biblical kinds of animals comprise those pools of genetic information, outside of which animals do not breed.So all the information needed for every variety of cell and organism was found in the DNA of those kinds as originally created. Information, genetic or otherwise, is not produced by random accidents – it is planned and designed. ------------------------------------------ A previous Creation Moment talked about the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs – those beautiful models of dinosaurs built in Victorian times that do not look anything like what we imagine those same dinosaurs to look like today. We discussed how this was due tothe Victorian model maker Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins not having access to complete skeletons of the dinosaurs and therefore putting the pieces together in the wrong order. This was likened to trying to do a jigsaw puzzle without the picture being on the box.We believe it is wrong to criticize men like Hawkins, who did their best with the incomplete knowledge that they had at the time. I was reminded of the problems of the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs recently when reading an article about the finding of a new tyrannosaurus fossil. Tyrannosauruses are no longer rare! Lots of fossils have been discovered, so even though none of them are complete, we can be reasonably sure that our correct opinion of how they look is more or less correct. Nevertheless, I was surprised by a recent sciencenews article about the most complete T. Rex ever found in the Southwest United States – Utah, to be exact. So complete was it that paleontologists have unearthed 75 percent of the skeleton. Seventy-five percent! That means that one bone in every four is actuallymissing. And yet this is the most complete specimen found in the SW United States. It is no wonder that mistakes are made regarding the possible shape and skeletal structure of so many dinosaurs. Humility is required by researchers so that they do not make over-inflated claims for their models. ----------------------------- “Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens, the male and his female: and of beasts that are not clean by two, the male and his female.” When you look through the Bible, there is one interesting land animal type which is missing. There is nothing to say that a pair of them got on the Ark, but we have to assume that they did so that they survived until after the Flood. Today, we just thinkof them strutting around the world, vicious killers, waiting for the opportunity to spring on their next prey. I am, of course, referring to that well-known animal kind – the cat. Yes, that’s right. The word “cat” is not mentioned anywhere in the Bible. Yet we know they exist, and, as land animals, they must have been created on Day Six. The Bible, however does mention two members of the cat kind – lions and leopards. But these animals can hybridize and are therefore part of the same kind. Therefore, the Ark would not have had a pair of lions and a pair of leopards – just a pair of cats.Whatsort of cats would have been on the Ark? They would not have been tiny domestic cats which have insufficient genetic material to be responsible for all of today’s cat species. It is more likely that the cats on the Ark were similar to the famous Saber-toothedcats found in the fossil record. Recent scientific studies on a semi-fossilized saber-toothed cat bone found in the North Sea shows that it shared a common ancestor with all other cat species. This DNA research is compelling. Descent and variation happen withina kind, but not from creatures of other kinds – exactly what we expect when we assume the Bible to be true. ------------------------- “Jerusalem, Jerusalem! Hark how the angels sing. Hosannah in the highest, Hosannah to your King!” The Bible says that at the consummation of this age, and reconciliation of all its evil, we can look forward to a spectacularly glorious “New Jerusalem” – a new Holy City (Revelation 21:2, Ezekiel 48:35) wondrously illumined by the presence of the Lord Himself “forever and ever” (Revelation 22:5). Jerusalem was once the capital city of King David, six miles up the road from his birthplace in Bethlehem. And it will be transformed into the holy and heavenly capital kingdom city of our Lord Jesus Christ, also bornin Bethlehem. Jesus is “Alpha and Omega, the first and the last”, both Creator and Consummator of all things (Revelation 1:11). He is the Living Word, true from beginning to end. And the Bible, the written word, is true from Genesis to Revelation! But evolution-based thinking has tried to discredit the Bible – in addition to many other consequences of its false suppositions – through so-called “higher criticism”. Higher criticism in theological circles is really just a more sophisticated form of skepticismand unbelief which grew to prominence in the late 19^th century after the publishing of Darwin’s hypothesis. Not only was evolution eagerly made into the framework for biological and other sciences, but it became the framework for social sciences, and for religion. Jewish religion, “monotheism”, was said to have “evolved” from a more primitive “polytheism” and wasfurther evolving on its way eventually to the “God is dead theology” of the 1960s. The “God is dead” idea has continued to this day in globalist humanist circles. All things are evolving; it is the-way-of-things, they say. That is why we should get ready fora change from nationalist to globalist economics, government, and religion. ---------------------- And God said, Behold, I have given you every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. Presumably, before the fall into sin, we didn't have any bad cholesterol, or at least it didn't do any damage in our bloodstream. The so-called bad cholesterol is low-density-lipoprotein. It's called bad because it tends to cause our arteries to clog unlesscountered by the so-called good cholesterol&# or high-density-lipoprotein. Based on earlier research, scientists wanted to test the idea that substances in orange juice could improve levels of good cholesterol. Volunteers had their cholesterol levels checked on a regular basis during the test period. After six weeks of a low cholesteroldiet, they were to drink one glass of orange juice every day for four weeks. The result was a 5 percent increase in the good cholesterol. Then they drank two glasses of orange juice per day for four weeks. The result was another 7 percent increase in goodcholesterol. Then they were directed to drink three glasses per day. The result was a 27 percent overall improvement. Surprisingly, researchers found that five weeks after they stopped the three glasses-a-day portion of the experiment, their good cholesterolremained high. We can be thankful that, in His perfect foreknowledge, God created some foods that counter the effects of sin on us. We can be even more thankful that His plan to save us from our sins was in place even before there was sin. ----------------------- God’s Architecture Wins Again If you live in a temperate climate, you have probably heard your home pop and crack on cold days. Those sounds are caused by the different materials that make up your house contracting at different rates as the temperature falls. At some point, the growingtensions are released, and you hear the result. If you live in a warm climate that is subject to hurricanes, you know that a building is likely to fail at the point where different parts of the house, like the roof and wall, meet together. Buildings are made up of a large number of things, each of which acts differently under the same conditions. That makes for weak points in any structure. British architects have looked at the structure of living things to find an answer to this problem. Theynoted that skeletons can work well under conditions that would cause many other building materials to fail. One researcher noted that a skeleton is more efficient than any man-made structure. One architects suggestion was to build structures like walls andbridges out of artificial bone that is formed to the needs of the structure. We should not be surprised that, once again, man is looking to the living world for solutions to his problems. The living world, like everything else, was designed by our all-wise God Who does all things well. ---------------------------- Music and Language Are Linked Evolutionists often claim that language and music evolved independently of each other. However, new research along several lines is showing that there is a close connection between music and language. Researchers have been studying the effect of music on verbal comprehension. Electrical activity within the brain was tracked, using electrodes attached to the scalps of volunteers. They found that those volunteers who had just heard the trilling of flutes,for example, identified the word bird,a split second faster than those who had not heard the music. This effect is called priming. When volunteers heard a church anthem, they more quickly identified the word devotion, than those who did not. The study showedthat these effects were consistent, whether the words had concrete meanings, were cultural references, or were abstract concepts. Other research has shown that when a region of the brain called Broca's area is damaged, both recognition of harmonic chords aswell as language are impaired, also suggesting a connection between language and music.Both music and language are gifts of God. As the Psalmist noted, the songs he sang were placed into his mouth by God. Genesis tells us that Adam and Eve could talk the daythey were created. While music isn't mentioned, we see that within a couple of generations, they were making musical instruments and must therefore have played music. -----------------------------------