Genesis 1:26-31

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Genesis 1:26-31; 2:1-3

“And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. 27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him, male and female created he them. 28 And God blessed them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. 29 And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. 30 And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, have I given every green herb for meat: and it was so. 31 And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.”

Introduction

[Audio version: https://resources.ccphilly.org/detail.asp?TopicID=&Teaching=WED516]

“We have come to Genesis chapter 1, verse 26, “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion” “Let us” masculine plural, “make” singular plural noun, trouble in the grammar there, trying to communicate, “Let us make man in our imagine and after our likeness,” the trinity, no doubt [or to me, the triunity of God, no doubt]. I’ve talked to Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem who said that’s God speaking to the angels, but we’re not made in their image and likeness. Psalm 8 says in the fall, we’ve been made a little lower than that angels, and in our original creation we were higher than the angels [now that may be an accurate speculation, or it may not be, seems to Scripturally add up, but is secondary in that there’s room for interpretation]. Now, man wants to do anything he can to take us, and make us a little higher than the monkeys instead of a little lower than the angels. [What makes man exponentially higher than the monkeys is not in physiology, but in brainpower, power of thought, logic and ability to reason, due to the human spirit God places into every human brain after conception, once the brain develops within the womb.] And I don’t know about you, but I’d much rather be a little lower than the angels, I’d rather the missing link be up than down, as I look around in this world. Just looking at some things this week, 1922, Nebraska, they found a tooth, I’m going to tell you the whole tooth, nothing but the tooth, the tooth and nothing but the tooth, then we’re going to look at the truth and the whole truth and nothing but the truth. So, through mythology, called science, they’ve connected this tooth with a mythological jawbone, to a mythological head, to a mythological body, with features. By the time the news reached London, the Nebraska Mom was part of the picture, and the Nebraska Kids, and it was our “missing link.” Of course not long after that geologist Harold Cook found an identical tooth in Nebraska, but this tooth was a tooth was attached to a skull, which was attached to the rest of the skeleton of the pig. So the Nebraska Pig made a monkey out of the evolutionists. Well they’re always looking for something, so they come up with Homo Erectus, Ecanthrupis Erectus, the Java Man, discovered in an island in the East Dutch Indies in Java. And what they discovered there was a skullcap, a little piece of the top of a skull, a femur from the thigh bone, and a three teeth, I’m telling you the tooth and nothing but the tooth here again. They didn’t tell us that the femur was found 50 foot away and a year later. And they downplayed the fact that they also found in the same area two complete large brained skulls called the Wajak skulls, but it was Sir Arthur Keith who was an evolutionist who wrote a 342 page report, and said that the two large brained skulls demonstrate beyond any doubt the Java man has played no part in human evolution. Now, the interesting things is, of course, Time Magazine, 1994, telling us the tooth, the whole tooth and nothing but the tooth, said the Java man is an important part of the evolutionary story [you can never believe the supposed science writers in a news magazine like Time, who are not scientists themselves, but only glorified science “reporters.”] Java man, the little skull cap and bone from somewhere else and three teeth, not looking at the two complete large brained skulls that were there in the area. A professor at Harvard still thinks it should be taught as part of evolutionary theory today [year 2006]. The Piltdown man, 1912, here they found a jaw and teeth, this is the tooth the whole tooth and nothing but the tooth, I’m telling you. What they didn’t tell anybody, it was a jaw and teeth of an ape, they took and filed down the jaw, and filed down the teeth to make them look different. Those who examine it said the file marks were visible on the jaw and on the teeth, and it wasn’t until 1953 it was formally declared a fake, 1912 to 1953, taught in the schools, the Piltdown man. Peking man, Canadian physician, his name was Davidson Black, he was about to run out of money as he’s digging in China, 1927, and he found one tooth, I’m telling you the tooth, the whole tooth, and nothing but the tooth here. Through that one tooth the Rockefeller Foundation sent him more money to fund the digs. As he dug further, he found skulls and all of the back of the skulls were flattened. And then he found tools laying there. He died of a heart attack at 49 years old, and other scientists from Chicago went all the way to China, and when they got there they said ‘I can’t believe we’ve come all the way around the world to look a monkey skulls.’ Because the tools they found were not tools used to by these flat-skulled ancestors, the tools they found were tools that were used on the skulls of the monkeys, because in China monkey brains are a delicacy, the rest of the monkey is tough, but it was the tool they had broken open the back of the skull of these monkeys, so they could scoop the brains out, you’ve watched Indiana Jones, you’ve seen that there [Mmm, gross], sorry if that’s in your memory. That’s the Peking man.

“So God Created Man In His Own Image”

I like this man here in Genesis, the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, right here. “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him, male and female created he them.” (verses 26-27) What an interesting picture. We’re told in Ephesians, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings, in heavenly places in Christ, according as he has chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy, and without blame before him in love.” Before the foundation of the world, we were chosen in him. So, after these six days of creation, into the sixth day, when everything is set up that man would have dominion over, now we hear God not saying “Let the earth bring forth,” now his hand is personally involved. It’s almost as though there’s a sigh, there’s a deep breath here. And God says ‘Now, we’re ready, we’re ready, it’s all set up, now, what was in our heart before the foundation of the world, now, let’s make man in our image, in our likeness, to have dominion over all of these other things that we made.’ “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him, male and female created he them.” (verse 27) Interesting, we have the third time in the chapter the word bara is used, “created,” so man is both made and created, it tells us. Something about man differs, God created in the beginning the heavens and the earth, then he makes out of that substance, minerals, earth, water, he makes the plants, he forms them out of what’s already been created from nothing. It isn’t until he gets to the animal kingdom that he then creates from nothing again a consciousness, a living soul, the second act of creation from nothing. [Comment: and this would be the placing of the “human spirit,” what the Bible calls “the spirit of man,” or “the spirit in man,” the apostle Paul talked of in 1^st Corinthians 2:9-13 and Solomon talked about in Ecclesiastes 3:18-21 and 9:6-7.] He forms the body from the earth, then creates the consciousness. It’s as he gets to man, a third act of creation takes place, where man is a physical frame, with the most complex remarkable physical frame with the most remarkable capacities, such an integrated systems, incredible, with a consciousness. But there’s something of man above the animal kingdom that is in the very image and the likeness of God, the third act of creation, man is alive spiritually. [And again, that would be “the spirit of man,” or the “spirit in man,” giving mankind, humans, mental computing capacities waay beyond that of ordinary animals brains.] Man is different from the animal kingdom. It says in chapter 2, verse 7, “And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” that’s plural, by the way, “the breath of lives,” we’ll come to that next week, “the breath of lives.” And man became, not evolved, it’s emphatic there. Man became, the grammar tells us that when God breathed into his nostrils, “he became,” a living being. Jesus talking about marriage says ‘Haven’t you read that from the beginning,’ not a Gap Theory, not Theistic Days of Evolution, from the beginning, God made them male and female. [Now interesting here, Pastor Joe, while his senior pastor, Pastor Chuck Smith is still alive, is going against what Pastor Chuck Smith believes, which is the Gap Theory. Also, theistic evolution, is not blind evolution at all, but the intelligent evolving of all life on earth brought on by God through the flipping of genetic gene switches, evolving all life from early cells to what we have on earth now, through all the geologic time periods, Eons, Epochs, and Periods, containing all of the various successive biotas, each one in perfect biological balance and harmony, as a Master Geneticist. I covered all that in the previous chapter, on Genesis 1:1-31 chapter of this series. Calvary Chapels, as I pointed out, are semi-autonomous, which means that there can be differences in interpretation in what could be termed “the gray areas” of Scripture. In the essentials of salvation, the Gospel of Jesus Christ, they are all in total agreement. Pastor Joe is taking the literalist, young earth--dinosaurs walked with man--anti-Gap Theory, anti-Theistic Evolution interpretation for Genesis 1:1-31. There is nothing wrong with that, but I do find it interesting that he is in total disagreement with his own Senior Pastor. But that’s ok, within the semi-autonomous structure of the Calvary Chapels. What’s important to realize, is that all of these secondary interpretational differences will be straightened out and the actual truths in these areas will become known when we as resurrected, immortal beings attend the Wedding Feast of the Lamb, prophecied in Revelation 19:7-9. What can we learn from this disagreement in belief right within the Calvary Chapels? Just this, in the secondary areas of interpretation, believe what you personally prove to be true, but respect others for their right to do the same, while remaining united in the essentials of salvation.] Man becomes, in an instant, he’s an animate frame, designed, the body, and God grants a consciousness to Adam, and then in some other creative act, he’s above all of the other of God’s creation, man is to take dominion of it. He is God-conscious, he is self-conscious, he is free from instinct. He’s not following migratory patterns, he has emotional capacities that the beasts of the earth do not have. He can appreciate beauty. We’re going to find out as we look at this, the flowers, the colours, must have been remarkable. You read some of the fossils, the size of the ferns, the size of the flowers, the things that filled Eden, and you wonder, the beauty, the smells, taste, sound. You know, cows aren’t eating grass saying ‘Oh, this tastes so good, I’d like to have a little bit of lemon-garlic sauce on this.’ You know, he’s given man all of these other capacities. Man, able to be educated, not just trained like an animal in a side-show, written language, man grasping concepts of truth and error, eternity. [There is an interesting booklet that was put out by the now defunct Worldwide Church of God which covered this subject about the incredible difference between animal brain and intelligence and the exponentially higher levels of intelligence of the human mind (see https://www.hwalibrary.com/cgi-bin/get/hwa.cgi?action=getbklet&InfoID=1319656895 ). While some of the doctrinal beliefs will not square with orthodox Christianity, the scientific observations, and the Scriptural references about the “spirit in man” are accurate, showing what gives mankind the powers no animal has, and that is, that mankind, on a lower level, has creative abilities just like God, unlike any animal. I recommend reading it in the pdf version, which pulls up the original booklet.] Eternity, meaning, frustration when we’re unable to figure something out or pull something together or solve something, only man.

“Male And Female Created He Them”--“Be Fruitful, And Multiply”

He creates man in his image, and his likeness, and it says “male and female created he them.” as we get to chapter 2 that is broadened and we get a little bit of a deeper picture of that. “And God blessed them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” (verse 28) So as he makes them, they understand language. I have some questions as I look at this, did Adam have a belly button? Sorry, I’m allowed to wonder. It seems that the second that he was conscious, because he was created in God’s image and likeness, he had the intellectual capacities to understand language. You know a child takes one to three years, by observation, by watching parents, to learn an idiomatic language. Watches his mom and dad put a spoon of ice cream and go ‘Mmmm,’ mom and dad puts a lemon in ‘Eew,’ just a baby learns a language by observation. There’s something again in the DNA called the P-factor, and a baby can learn a language. Again, at 15, 16, the P-factor is shot, that’s when we’re teaching our kids languages in high school, when their P-factor is shot. This human being, Adam and Eve, the first day they existed, evidently know a language, to understand it, to communicate. It says “And God blessed them and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish” King James, the Hebrew is “fill the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” (verse 28) God’s first commandment relative to intimacy, relative to dominion, relative to a purity in human involvement and affection and love, something that’s been so denigrated and spoiled. Just unbelievable, just looking at what God does. “And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.” (verse 29) So, no carnivores in the first days, fruit. But I guarantee you, you didn’t miss nothing. The way that fruit was, when you took a bite of one of those grapes or peaches, you didn’t watch a cow walking by and say ‘You know, that’s great, but I could go for a T-bone,’ none of that was happening, there was perfection in this. “And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, have I given every green herb for meat: and it was so.” (verse 30) so the lions, the wolves, they were not carnivorous in the beginning, before the Fall. We have that picture from Isaiah, of the Kingdom Age, when they lie down together, the sucking calf and the wolf, the lion and the lamb and so forth, lying down together. It says the lion will eat straw like an ox. Here, none of the carnivores, “have I given every green herb for meat: and it was so. And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.” (verses 30c-31) Notice this please, “every thing,” there was no thing that he didn’t see, he saw every thing that he had made, and behold it was, King James, “very good,” literally “exceedingly good.” “and the evening and the morning were the sixth day.” And when we come to the sixth day there’s an interesting play with definitive articles there, by the way, that sets aside the sixth day, there are some interesting things in the grammar. Everything he saw was exceedingly good.

Genesis 2:1-3

“Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. 2 And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. 3 And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made.”

It’s going to tell us in chapter 2, verse 1, “Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.” that would be the stellar hosts, the angelic hosts, everything is exceedingly good. That tells me that Satan has not fallen yet, Lucifer. God’s not saying everything’s good, but look out for this guy. When we read about him in Ezekiel chapter 28, it describes him in Eden in his unfallen state. For the Millennium to begin, Satan has to be bound, there can be no rest, God is going to rest here and hallow the Seventh day, there can be no rest when Satan is loose, he has to be bound before the Millennial Kingdom can be established (cf. Revelation 20:1-3), for there to be that rest. There would be no resting here if the Fall took place, Romans tells us sin entered the picture through Adam, not ages previous to that. And Satan, no doubt, envious, in my mind at least, over Adam. Adam was created in God’s image and likeness. Adam was the apple of God’s eye, Adam and Eve, higher than the angels, higher than the cherubim, higher than Lucifer, Adam and Eve. And that’s why he said, I believe out of envy and pride, “I will be like the Most High,” because Adam was, ‘I’ll sit on the congregation on the sides of the north, I’ll do this, I’ll do that.’ And as soon as he falls, his target is you and I. What he goes after is mankind. He stands no chance defeating the Creator, any more than a tomato plant. Please, understand that. There is a leash on him. Do I understand all of that? No, and I don’t pretend to. It serves God’s purposes. But on this seventh day, everything God made was “exceedingly good, and God rested.” Now by the way, in verses 29 and 30 I know it says that before the Fall, we only ate vegetables [now here is an example of implying way too much literal meaning to a few set of verses. See my comment at the end of this sermon to help explain where I am coming from]. Because every time somebody in the church gets cancer, gets sick, I have people standing in line saying ‘Look, this is what the Bible says, if you go on the Eden diet, if you tell that person with cancer to go on the Eden diet, and eat only vegetables, they’ll get better.’ And I say there’s a few problems. First of all, all of our vegetables are Fallen, our bodies are Fallen, we’re not in Eden. When the LORD established the Passover he commanded them to eat lamb. I mean, we have some problems here. Then I’ll tell you this too, prayer, so essential. I mean, I think we should try to take care of ourselves, you know. I’m not a health food nut, I’m just a nut. But I think we should try to take care of ourselves, I think we should eat wisely, you don’t want to McDonald-size yourself to death, you see that stuff, you have a brain. But the truth is, we’ve seen people in our church eat at McDonalds and get better. We’ve seen people here go on macrobiotic diets and the Lord takes them home. When it’s time to go, that’s God’s sovereignty. The most important thing to do is to pray, he added 15 years to Hezekiah’s life, it is to seek God’s will then, and say ‘Lord, you are sovereign, you understand all of the DNA, you understand all of the enzymes, you understand all of the cells, you understand all of their communication, you understand what needs to happen.’ So that Eden diet, you know it tells us in Romans 8 that the creation itself is subject to vanity, and that creation is groaning and travailing, waiting for the manifestation of the sons of God, the very creation. What was creation like? If they’ve seen cattails, reeds that are fossilized, that they estimate 60-foot tall, how big were Redwoods before the Fall? That’s a lot of fun to think about that. [The fossil record he’s talking about, those fossils have been accurately dated to pre-Adamic times, probably dating from the Carboniferous Period (359 million years ago to 299 million years ago) through the Mesozoic era (which was from 252 million years ago to 66 million years ago). See my comment at the end of this sermon transcript.] How beautiful was Eden, what was really going on there? All that God made was exceedingly good. Now man’s in the middle of that. It tells us in chapter 2, verse 1, “Thus the heavens” plural “and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.” floral, plant, animal, stellar heavens and angelic heavens. “And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.” (verse 2) Now Isaiah tells us this, just so we’re not confused about God resting on the 7^th Day, ‘Hast thou not known, hast thou not heard, the Everlasting God, the LORD, creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary. There is no searching of his understanding. He giveth power to the faint, to them that have no might he increaseth strength.’ (Isaiah 40:28-29) So he rests on the seventh day, the Hebrew is “he ceased from his labour,” not because he was tired, not because he was saying ‘Man, I’ve been waiting for the weekend, this has been a rough week.’ It’s not that kind of rest, he has ceased from his labours, because it was all exceedingly good, and it was complete. “And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made.” (verses 2-3) “created and made,” man was created and made. Now, this is not a forced legal Sabbath, this is a blessing. Jesus will tell us that the Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath. You know, in research, we’ve discovered that every seven days the immune system kind of takes a day off, it dips. So, I think resting one day out of seven is a great idea, if you can do it, I don’t get to do it. [Comment: Calvary Chapels are Sunday-observing, and they actively teach and believe that the early New Testament Church, within a very short period of time after Acts chapter 2, the Day of Pentecost, when the Church was born, switched over to Sunday observance. But historically, this just is not true, as both Messianic Jews and Jews alike know from their knowledge of 1^st century history (see https://unityinchrist.com/history2/earlychurch1.htm). This brings us to the other big question, which is, Has the observance of the literal Seventh Day Sabbath been abrogated in New Testament Scripture? (for an interesting article exploring this question, see http://www.unityinchrist.com/wwcofg/Has%20the%20Sabbath%20Been%20Abrogated.htm)] Sunday’s not the Sabbath, Sunday is the first day of the week, the resurrection day, Sabbath is sundown Friday, when you can see three stars in the sky, till sundown Saturday, when three stars appear in the sky, that’s the Sabbath. And I’ve been in Israel with friends that live in Ramat, outside of Jerusalem, Orthodox Jews, and it’s wonderful, I’ve spent a Sabbath with them, they put the crock pot on, that gets everything going, they shut everything else off, you don’t answer the phone on the Sabbath, they don’t put the television on. I’ve sat on their front porch with them, drinking a soda, eating chips, look at Jerusalem, talk about God the whole day, with a father and a mother and a son and a daughter, it is really quite remarkable, quite remarkable. It was something that God made for man, because this is the first full day of man’s existence. What was that like? The first full day that man existed was this day, with God, in Eden. And God had given him these capacities. Psalm 139 tells us this, I want you to think about some of these things this evening. Psalm 139 says “For thou hast possessed my reins,” my traits, my idiosyncrasies, “Thou hast covered me in my mother’s womb,” ‘to weave, he’s woven us together,’ “I will praise thee, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made, marvelous are thy works, and that my soul knoweth right well. My substance was not hid from thee when I was made in secret, curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. How precious are thy thoughts for me, O God, how great is the sum of them. If I should count them, they are more in number than the sand. When I awake I am still with thee.” In another place it tells us ‘His thoughts towards us are good continually, only.’ He puts man in Eden, and gives man the capacity to enjoy or experience his environment, above the beasts of the field, he puts man in there. And the Bible tells us specifically that it was Jesus, all things were made by him, nothing was made without him, he created and sustains everything. Jesus Christ in his heart towards us, gives us the capacity, the instrumentation, you have instruments, you have mechanisms, those mechanisms were premeditated, they could not have evolved, you have capacities, because we were in the heart of God, it says before the worlds were formed, he’s given to us, as man realizes his first full day of existence, it’s a day of fellowship with God, in paradise, in Eden. That’s what man was made for. The Bible uses terms we call anthropomorphisms, that means “anthro” “man” “morphisms” terms that deal with human life that we try to make, morph onto God, God tells us that he’s our Shepherd and we’re his flock of sheep. Well, you’re not real impressed with that, you don’t want to be dumb sheep, but take it from me, we are. If you understood the shepherd half of that equation, from watching shepherds, or being a shepherd, you would be incredibly impressed with the fact that God was taking that role in our lives. And I love that, because I know the shepherd’s never dependent on the IQ of the sheep. I rest in that. He says he’s our father, and we’re his children, that’s an anthropomorphism, he creates that to try to describe to us how great his love is, and how sacrificial his love is towards us. Or that he’s the Groom and we’re the Bride, not even a husband and a wife, that cools a little bit. Bride and groom, that’s a hot relationship, to try to tell us about his love.

The Five Senses

The Eye

And he gives us the capacity to enjoy that, to enjoy redemption, but more than just enjoy redemption, to enjoy our environment that he’s made and he’s placed us in. The mind of man, one of the researchers I was reading from Princeton said, a human being, their mind is a computer, he says you have a computer, you are not a computer, you have a computer. You have this piece of meat in your head, made of proteins. It doesn’t necessarily come as a Democrat or a Republican or liking chocolate or vanilla or strawberry, that’s the mind, and they don’t understand all of that. And he said, the mind is the computer, it’s not you, it’s the machine, you’re bigger than that, you’re around that, you’re part of that. But that God has given us these capacities relative to our environment, relative to redemption, that he hasn’t given to any of the animal kingdom, that relate to that. When you look into someone’s eyes, now I’m going to talk a little bit about the eye. But the eye is something that is very strange, very remarkable. It does two things, it takes in, and it reflects. It does both. In Proverbs it talks about the whorish woman, and it says she has taken him with her eyes. When you look into somebody else’s eyes, you can see worry, you can see love, you can see joy. They’re not understanding everything about the eye, there’s a remarkable capacity for the human eye to reflect something that’s inside. [Comment: a good friend of mine, he’s passed on to be with the Lord now, but he was an eye doctor, and he told me that a good eye doctor could see if his patient had some other disease, like venereal disease, or diabetes, and such things, the symptoms for many diseases show up in the eyes.] That’s why, when someone passes away, and I was with my dad when he passed, that eye was blank, and immediately you see, this is empty, it’s just a frame, the spirit that had been looking out of that eye at me, is gone, vacated. They eye reflects. I don’t know about you, but it does me good, I go to other churches, sometimes to speak, and I’ll go to another country. When I was in Hungary last summer, just sit down with these old Babushkas, they’re like 160 years old, they’ve got these black dresses on, black bandanas, and I couldn’t understand a word they’re saying, except in their eyes, the smile, shaking the head. I’ve been at the Garden Tomb many times in Jerusalem, Gordon’s Tomb, and it’s very remarkable to go there and there’d be a group of Koreans singing, and I don’t know a word they’re saying, or a group of Germans, or a group of Indian, or a group of Africans, and you walk up to them, and try to talk, and you both laugh, but both of your and their eyes are sparkling, and it’s ‘Ya, he’s not here, he’s risen.’ The eye has a remarkable capacity to do that, it reflects something. What was it like to look into the eyes of Jesus? I wonder. The eye does more than that, the eye is, it’s a radio receiver [all light is in the spectrum of radio waves], it’s involved, let me tell you about this thing that evolved, ok. The pupil of your eye is 35 percent protein, it’s the highest concentration of protein in your body, it’s made of crystalline albullum, which are the only two clear proteins in the body, and the only place you find them is in the pupil. What a coincidence, that that evolved like that. Now the pupil has four anchors on it, and depending on what it sees, it pulls and flattens out the lens, it loosens it and the lens gets thicker. It’s self-cleaning, self-maintaining. Now it takes some wear, after 40 some years, sometimes the capillary, the blood flow, then you need these [glasses], these help my pupils now. But the pupil responds to light. Long waves, short waves, it’s a radio receiver, it receives radio waves, and when light hits something your eye, the waves that reflect off of that, it takes the photons off of those light waves, and it puts them into the rods and cones in the back of your eye, between 110 and 130 million of them. They say there’s over 10 million cones right in the middle of the back of your eye, and they see colour. And they can see several thousand hues of colour. You can look at the wood on that pole right there, you see all different shades just of brown. And when that’s brighter light, the pupil is small, it squeezes during the day, and you see all those colours. At night there’s a hundred million rods around that, those hundred million rods are monochromatic, they only see black and white, but they can see a billion different hues from white to black, and when you go out in the dark, the pupil relaxes, opens way up, and what little light there is hits your rods that are around the cones, and you can see a star, 50 million light-years away. You can see a candle 5 miles away on a clear night. [In World War II, on Liberty ships, or any naval vessel, sailors were not allowed to smoke on deck, out in the open, because an enemy, especially submarine lookouts, could see the hot end of a cigarette well over 5 miles away.] You know, when you walk into a movie theater it’s dark, you’re going from cones to rods, it takes awhile to adjust, if you know what I’m talking about. Then when you come out of a dark movie theater, your eyes slender down again, back from rods to cones, you’re adjusting in the process of those things. The miracle is, they don’t know how it works, the rods and cones receive those photons, then they translate into electrons, and they shoot them through the largest nerve in your head, the optic nerve, they go into your brain, and that’s where their understanding of what happens becomes very fuzzy. The picture doesn’t, but the understanding does. The researcher named Wilder Penfield in Canada has worked on it years ago, but what happens is, those images you see in your brain, the eye is just a radio receiver [receiving radio waves at the frequency of ordinary visible light], they don’t know how you see. Because all those electrons come up into the brain, they’re finding, at ten million per second, firing at your brain, and it sprays a picture on a screen in your brain, in front of your consciousness. Imagine that. The eye’s the radio receiver, it doesn’t see, the sight takes place in the brain, vision is in the eyes, sight is in the brain. And they don’t know how it works, and it comes up on a screen in there. Now here’s the amazing thing, we don’t see things how they are, we see them as they should be. If you’re on the beach with somebody, and you have a camera and you take a picture of them, now a camera gives you a picture of things as they are. So if somebody’s laying there, they got their feet crossed in a lounge chair, and you take a picture from the feet up, the picture comes out with a great big giant foot, and a little head at the other end. That’s how things were. Your consciousness adjusts that picture, because you know that it shouldn’t look that way. So without you trying, your consciousness is able to take that, and change it, and adjust it, it’s dimensions, so somebody looks normal when you look past their feet to their head to try to talk to them. [I gotta try that, and see if it’s true 😊] It corrects the picture. That’s where you go on vacation, and you take pictures of stuff, and come back and look at them, they never look like they did on vacation. Ever notice that? You take a picture of this wonderful thing, and look at it, it looks like ‘What in the world? these strange little things.’ Because when you’re there your mind makes the adjustments, and you appreciate the beauty of the colour, the dimensions, the depth, God has done all of it. And a camera just tells the truth about the way it is. Of course, this is all by evolution. But all of that information was in the sperm and in the egg, enough information to form the pupil, the cornea, a hundred and thirty million rods and cones, the ability to take photons out of electromagnetic waves, translate them into electrons, send them up through a nerve, spray them up on a screen inside the brain, divide the colours back up, bringing the image up in the brain, before the consciousness. [Comment: the physical makeup of the eye in no way disproves the Gap Theory, which allows for specific creations of God throughout the various eons, epochs and periods of geologic time as found in the geologic record, after each E.L.E., extinction level event which has occurred in our geologic past. Nor does it disprove the fact that God could have created all the various balanced biota filled with all those lifeforms found in the fossil record, during all of those same geologic eons, epochs and periods by way of “theistic evolution,” i.e. the intelligent flipping of genetic “gene switches,” guiding the design of highly complex lifeforms, from beginning to end, right up to mankind. In all three methods, whichever one God used, it was God himself who was involved in the creation process, not blind evolution. We just don’t know for sure which method he used, but regardless of the method he used, it is not a denial of God and that he did it. The point that Pastor Joe is trying to make is this, that blind evolution is totally impossible. Any of the three methods God could have used for creation is still totally possible. I am neither a denier of science and the geologic record, nor am I denier of God and that he created it all. Since this website is intended to be used as a spiritual blessing to the whole Body of Christ, comments like this, that explain differing points of interpretation others may have, have to be made in comments like this. It is not intended to disparage Calvary Chapel’s or anyone else’s beliefs on the subject who are a part of the Body of Christ. I have the greatest love and respect for Pastor Joe Focht.] Sometimes, we use that miracle to look at pornography, to look at things it was never intended for. That ability to intake the environment that God has put around us, to look into the eyes of someone we love, and see reflected in, not just, you’re seeing them, but you’re seeing a reflection in their eyes of their emotions, it’s a remarkable capacity we have. Now, more amazing than that, is, that’s confusing enough to scientists [those scientists that want to believe in blind evolution, that is]. There’s a memory bank, there’s a library that’s attached to all of that. So through a chemical synthesis, those pictures are stored, I guess it’s digitally, I’m not sure, they’re stored in your brain, so that I can sit here looking at you, teaching this study, and I can think of these chipmunks outside my window this afternoon as I was studying. These chipmunks usually drive me crazy, they’ve dug undo my porch outside my window where I study, and I put a bunch of cereal out there today, and there’s like a mom and a dad and a bunch of little Albert, and Alvin and the whole crew’s there. And just, I sit there and look at the colours, I watched them today, and I thought, Lord, and they sit there and look back at me. They stood up, and they know I’m behind the window, so they’re not real worried. If I come out the back door, they’re gone. But through some chemical synthesis, I have this thing in my head. And I can lay in bed at night, and see the face of my youngest daughter, when I pray for her. I can see the face of my son, I can call it up, I can see the faces of my kids, I can see the faces of people in this church with cancer, they’re suffering. It’s stored chemically, but as I’m laying in a dark room with my eyes shut, it can get sprayed up on a screen so I can see them, and pray for them. What a remarkable, remarkable thing. The amazing thing is I can feed that whole system, I can fuel the whole system with steak sandwiches [laughter], if we get to digest it, we get everything we need for all that stuff to work. That’s one of the mouths that my brain partakes of the environment with.

The Amazing Ear, Hearing

Auditory system, you know your ears are tuned to resonance, they’re finding out all kinds of things about ears, which I know you’re interested in, you have to be because you’re here. Your ears actually love harmony, your ears disapprove of dissonance. It’s a very interesting thing, scratching on a chalkboard, everybody goes…that’s because you have your cochlear, you have your ear dum, and they function, mechanically, but there’s a resonance. We can sit in this room, but there’s a resonance, we can sit in this room with thousands of people, we can sing, it’s an interesting thing, when we sing with everybody around us, most of us then can sing in key. Because we have time to resonate with everybody else. Because if we were here alone, you wouldn’t want to listen to some us, you know. Some of us I can tell have a problem no matter how many people are here, we’re gonna wait till you get to heaven. Some people can sing alone and sound great. At John Hopkins they’ve traced in the DNA that pitch is genetic. I guess that’s why in the Bible there were families of singers and players, but they’ve discovered that in families, pitch is genetic. Now perfect pitch can almost be a curse, when Robie was here the other week, we’re over in the hotel, and he would run out of the hotel because the buzz from the neon lights in the hallway drove him out of his mind. He’s close to the edge anyway [laughter]. But the average human, there’s a resonance that God chooses to, you can sit in a restaurant, and talking to someone, listening to them, you’re hearing noises and dishes clang, you understand that, it’s dividing all of that, you hear sirens in the background, and all of a sudden you can hear a familiar voice in the room ‘Hey Joe,’ and one ear drum, one mechanism is dividing all of that, and it does the same thing, it turns it into electrons and shoots it into the brain, and brings it up there in a way that your brain understands it. You can be in a party, I watched my wife do this, lots of noise, people in the house talking, and one of the kids, one of the babies upstairs on the third floor goes ‘Ehh,’ ‘Did you hear that!?’ ‘No, I didn’t hear that, what are you talking about?’ Just she can divide that out of all of those other sounds [mommy ears], through the auditory nerve, making all of those things happen. Now isn’t it interesting, the ear likes music, there’s certain things, God gave them for our enjoyment, certainly for redemption, to hear his Word, but for more than that.

The Sense Of Smell, The Nose

Smell, God puts flowers in Eden, with C0-2, H-2-0, water, light, and minerals, he comes up with a system that produces flowers that has ionones that spit out ionones that have these smells, and the ionones come inside and rest in your nose, and your nose then sends electrons through a nerve system in your brain where you register smells, you have a picture of certain smells, and it’s relative to smell. If I say to you, you know my wife loves roses, and when we buy roses, there’s the smell test before we buy one, ‘Oh, smell that, smell that.’ God, his thoughts towards us are as many as the sand of the sea, and good continually only, he gives us the capacity to interact with our environment, and he made the environment lovely for our enjoyment. Same thing, going to the brain, and there’s a memory place there, where all of that is stored. What is he saying to us with all of that? She loves gardenias, she doesn’t have a green thumb, you know, she kills anything she touches, but she loves to smell flowers, and she loves gardenias, and I know what they smell like, and we can talk about it, and in our memory, you don’t smell it in your memory, but there’s a very interesting thing, I’ve talked to some World War II vets who went and saw the Private Ryan movie, I didn’t see it [there’s nothing wrong with watching war history movies, accurate history will be taught in the Millennium], they saw it, and they said the battle scenes in the beginning, ‘I could actually smell the battle again,’ so impressed on their mind and their heart. Isn’t that an interesting thing? Smell is very connected to memory, we don’t know why. If you go into an Aunt’s house, you go somewhere and you smell moth balls, all of a sudden certain things come back in your mind, you had that Aunt that had moth balls everywhere in her house, it very much strikes up our memory, smell. Touch, now when I say that, you want to think of one thing, shopping, touch.

The Senses Of Touch & Taste

Touch, When I get up here, I stepped over from this side, and I kind of lost my balance for a second, that’s all part of the touch system, that at a speed we can’t even realize, the nerves in the muscles in my foot sensed, they’re so sensitive they can’t even measure it, that I had more pressure on one side of my foot than I was supposed to, shot that message to the brain, which shot back to the muscle, and said ‘If you don’t lean the other way you’re gonna fall off the stage, and then you’re ears are going to hear everybody laughing at you in the sanctuary, and then your memory is going to be damaged.’ And it all happened real fast. That’s part of touch, your ability to stand. The amount of nervous communication that takes place for you to run or jump or stand without falling over is something they’re just discovering, it’s almost immeasurable, almost immeasurable. And let alone what something warm feels like. I love to touch my kids, my older son, he always has his hair almost shaved, I love to just rub my hand, and I think he likes it [laughter], he’s 24, you know, but he just, I like the way that feels [sermon given in 2006, so he’s 41 now, boy how time flies]. You know the amount of touch necessary for a ballet dancer to do a pirouette is almost immeasurable, it’s all touch. Taste, what is that all about? Isn’t it interesting, now he’s given us the capacity of taste. Now there’s a whole thing that takes place when, when you eat if you just take a piece of candy or even piece of bread and just put it on your tongue, the PH on the tongue is about 7, just slightly alkaline, it’s not bad enough to do any damage in your mouth, but it immediately starts to break down basic sugars, and those will go from your tongue, to your liver, to your brain, some real fast stuff, but you taste. You taste sour, you taste when something’s burnt, you taste when something’s sweet. Imagine when God told him ‘You can eat of any of the fruit in the Garden,’ what those tastes must have been like. Then you know, you get it down in your stomach and the acid level there is unbelievable, there are acids in your stomach if you put them on the floor they’d eat through the carpet. You got a whole system there that just, we can’t talk much about it, you might get queasy if I start telling you what it looks like and what’s happening down there. And then all of a sudden a signal tells your brain, ok, everything’s mush, it’s broken down as far as acid’s going to take it, your duodenum opens up, you shoot it down to your small intestine where the vilia there, and the PH there is 8 or 9, extremely alkaline, knocks down the acid and you start to absorb everything, this all evolved, all of this evolved of course. You can even hear it, sometimes I’ll hear somebody sitting up near the front, Errroa [laughter], they’ve come from up at the diner up there at the other end, I can hear that duodenum open up, and I think ‘Oh, their duodenum just opened up shooting down into the more alkaline part of their digestive system.’ But taste, cows, monkeys, they don’t care about salt, pepper, garlic, cayenne, God has actually made eating [for humans] enjoyable. You can see, if you look around the room, it’s a little bit of a problem [laughter]. Because he knew it was necessary to fuel the machine, so that we might walk with him and serve him, so that our eyes might behold the things he wants us to behold, so that our mouths might speak the things he wants us to say, that we have balance and touch so that we could reach out on his behalf and help someone, and serve someone.

God Has Given Us A Sixth Sense

And he has given us a capacity beyond all of that, a sixth sense, ESP, not ESPN. What is that? You’ve been with someone or been in a circumstance where something’s happened somewhere else, and you say ‘You know, I have a terrible feeling, we should go back home, I just know in my heart something’s wrong.’ [That’s the “spirit in man,” within each of our minds, and this human spirit has the capacity to intertwine and interact between lovers and married couples, and family members. The apostle Paul spoke of that in one of his Epistles.] What is that about? Again, I remember, two days before 9/11 having a dream, recurring all night long, seeing stuff falling out of the sky, people running and screaming, I got up the next morning and said ‘No more Chinese food before I go to bed.’ I didn’t know what that was all about. And of course you see that [in your dreams] then a day later, and you think ‘Lord, what was that all about?’ Is it a warp in time? How is it that we sense his presence? [that is via the interconnection between our human spirits and his Holy Spirit, interacting together] How is it that when you come to Christ and you get saved, you know that your sins are forgiven, and there is a burden lifted off of your life? Was that with taste, touch, smell, sight? When somebody says ‘How do you know you’re saved?’ and you says ‘Well I don’t know, I just know that I know that I know that I know.’ ‘Eye hath not seen, ear hath not heard, neither has it entered the heart of man the things that God hath prepared for those who love him.’ We have a remarkable capacity, the Bible says ‘Taste and see that the Lord is good,’ that’s not with the buds, that is with something else, that we are changed into his image and likeness, from glory to glory, as we behold him, that’s not with the human eye. It tells us that the Lord will speak to us (cf. John 14:13-17, 26 & 16:7-8,13), that if we seek him early you’ll find him. I have the conviction that before the Fall, that was the greatest capacity of man, to experience the presence of God, to hear his voice, to know his presence, to walk in the cool of the day with the Creator, the Redeemer. And I believe that as you and I are filled with the Spirit, and we walk with Christ, we enjoy some very remarkable capacities, his grace will be there to give us what we need. I also believe if we’re willfully in sin, we hamper that. Repentance restores it. But I believe we have a greater capacity than all of those other senses, we talked about sight, they’re remarkable, but there’s a remarkable capacity we have, which is a sixth sense, the spiritual capacity. Discernment the Bible calls it sometimes, that the pseusicos, the soulish man does not discern, the pneumaticus, the spiritual man discerns all things (cf. Romans 8:1-17 & 1^st Corinthians 2:9-13). Man, a mistake? Let me tell you something, you have two hungers, one is for food, and the other one is for meaning, for God, for Truth, for purpose. Man thirsts for something, the Latin’s called it the void of the soul, the empty God-shaped void that is in every human being. We have a remarkable capacity, it was there the day he created us, he breathed into man’s nostrils the breath of life, and he became at that instant, with all the capacities, everything functioning, full-steam. We are the object of his love and his desire. He knew the Fall would come, and he knew that one day his darling Son would come to this world and hang on the cross for us, and he knew that we needed eyes to read and ears to hear, he knew we needed this understanding capacity so that when he said ‘Just taste and see, isn’t the Lord good?’ that we would understand what that meant. And I think, what an affront, Piltdown man, Peking man, the tooth and the whole tooth and nothing but the tooth.

In closing

How remarkable to look at a human being. How could the eye ever have evolved? It needed the muscles, it needed the right chemicals, it needed the crystalline albullum, needed the right concentration, it needed the rods, it needed the cones, it needed a system that could take photons and change them into electrons, it needed a place that we don’t even understand yet, to spray an image up on a screen in your mind. How could that evolve, somebody tell me. If you’re here and you think that evolved, you need to be locked up somewhere. Next week we’ll move into Eden, into the Garden, we’ll have a look around, we’ll see the environment in greater detail that the Lord placed man into, the rivers flowing there. We’ll look at the first marriage, which is a model. So, great time for husbands and wives to sit and look at what marriage was like before the Fall, because the only thing, the only institution that’s come to us out of Paradise is marriage. The only thing we have institutionalized from the other side is marriage, and it’s between Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve, we’re going to look at that, it’s sacred [applause]. So I encourage you to read ahead. I’m sorry if you guys come here and I’m boring you to death, and I’m sitting up here like an idiot having all the fun by myself, but I can’t help it, this just amazes me, and every time I come back to it I see things I never saw before, and I’m just amazed at what God has done. Look around, look around this room, will you look at that, what a wonderful thing. Before you leave tonight, walk up to somebody you know and just look at them eye to eye, and you’re going to see more than just seeing. My wife always does that to me, ‘What’s wrong?’ ‘Well you looked at me like,’ she has that gift of interpretation, ‘Stop that! Please don’t dissect me by my looks,’ she just has the gift of interpreting looks or something. There’s a reality to that, so. She says ‘You want to go shopping?’ I say ‘Yeah,’ ‘What’s wrong?’ ‘I don’t know, don’t I look excited?’ Let’s stand and pray together. [transcript of an connective expository sermon on Genesis 1:26-31 and Genesis 2:1-3, given by Pastor Joe Focht, Calvary Chapel of Philadelphia, 13500 Philmont Avenue, Philadelphia, PA 19116]