113: Nature, Part 3

This is the third of a multi-part series where Denver addresses how many of the things found in nature point to Christ. Transcript Question: "You addressed this in your lectures. Let’s say for argument’s sake I believed you. What can or should a university student do? I can’t drop out because I would have to immediately have to pay back student loans. Do I just keep attending school and trust that everything works out? Or let’s say I’m in high school. Would you recommend young people even go to college? Should young people who want to be lawyers just quash their dreams because everything is going to hell? That’s my general problem with gloom and doom prophecy, it stagnates individual growth and development. People isolate themselves from the rest of the world, spend a bunch of money on guns and emergency supplies, and generally waste their lives living in fear. Is there a balanced approach to watching out for that dastardly thief in the night?” Answer: I would say, finish high school. I would say, go to law school. One of the first things on the agenda that Christ will destroy–it’s not the lawyers, it’s the bankers and the insurance companies. They’re all evil. [Audience laughter.] Your student loans won’t need to be repaid because there will be nothing left of the institutions who hope to collect on them. You don’t live your life in contemplation of the fearful return of the Lord. You live your life in a grateful celebration for everything God has done and given to us. As I was flying here, we were taking off just as the first rays of the sun were creeping up in the east, and there was this brilliant scarlet ribbon on the horizon. My wife pointed it out to me. (I was sitting in an aisle and the only thing I got to see was the cart they bring with treats.) As I looked across at the sunrise, it was spectacular. Where I live in Utah we have this Wasatch Front. These are jagged granite cliffs that go upward. The top of one of the ski resorts is 11,000 feet. We live at about 4,000 feet. When the sun sets as you are in the valley, you see the sun go down in the west but in the east, on the mountains, you see the sunlight creep up, and creep up the mountain until finally just the very top peaks remain with light. What happens is that the light, as it goes up the mountain in its nightly retreat, because of the refraction of the atmosphere it tends to shift to the blue and to the purple. Every night those mountains–it’s particularly spectacular when there’s snow up there because the hues of the sunlight refraction become very colorful up there. I happen to like impressionist art, and my favorite impressionist is Monet. We have a couple of Monet–well, they are forgeries. They were given to me as a fee, we didn’t have to pay for them. They are actual Monet paintings right down to the brush strokes reproduced, and they’re beautiful. Every night as the sun sets, God does something on the mountains that is never the same, always beautiful, and greater in beauty and splendor than anything Monet ever put on canvas. We ought to love life, and we ought to love one another, and we ought to pursue our education. We shouldn’t bunker down with guns and ammo, fearfully waiting for a direful end to things. Of all people, Christians should have the most hope, the most optimism, the most vitality, and greatest amount of joy in life. We ought to celebrate every day. Question: “Having studied evolutionary biology in college, I came to appreciate the vast amounts of evidence for this scientific theory.” [I will pause there. Read ​Darwin’s Black Box​.] Recent anthropological data, Gobekli Tepe, is pushing the origins of civilization far beyond 4,000 B.C. It is an increasingly tenuous position to accept a strictly literal interpretation of Genesis in regards to creation and chronology, especially among the younger millennial generation that I am a part of. Having also had a few mystical experiences that lead me to accept Jesus as Lord, I feel somewhat torn. Whatever I do it seems like I’m rejecting truth. Whether I consider ignoring physical scientific evidence or effectively dismissing parts of the Bible, both are not satisfying solutions to me. Is there a way to make secular data fit into the Christians metaphysics?” Answer: Yes, there is. I’m going to go ahead and answer this fellow, for what it’s worth. The problem with biblical literalism is not necessarily that what is in the Bible is untrue but it may be that what is in the Bible is speaking using a vernacular that mankind is unacquainted with. For example, the work of the creation is referred to generally as “a day”. There is no reason to believe that calling it a day in the language of scripture has reference to anything other than a discrete event. It would be more accurate to say that there were labors that were performed during the incremental progression of the creation which took however long, and when the labor was completed then that labor was called “a day”. There is nothing to suggest that the labor of the first day was exactly the same amount of time as the labor of the second day, nor is there anything to suggest that the labor of the third day was equal in time to either the first or the second, and so on. How many eons of time were required in order for God, through the process that we see in nature, to form the earth, was the first day. However long it took, through seismic, volcanic, and other activities to cause the dry land to appear was labor that took however long it took. In the vernacular of scripture events above are reckoned by the movement of the earth. The earth is moving in two ways. It is circling the sun on a tilt. Twice a year that tilt aligns so that we have an equinox, which means that there’s exactly twelve hours of sunlight and twelve hours of darkness on that one day, twice a year. Then there are solstices, when in the north the days are the longest because it’s leaning towards the sun, and when it gets to the other side it’s leaning away, and at that moment the nights are very long because in the north you’re leaning away from the sun. As it makes this movement in one direction it’s also wobbling at the poles. The earth is not perfectly stable on its axis. It wobbles. It takes 25,900 years roughly for it to complete one circle at the pole. In the ancient vernacular, because of that wobble we have a changing pole star. It happens at this moment to be Polaris, but if you go back several thousand years we have a different pole star. That pole star changes. We also have, around the ecliptic, a group of constellations that everyone on earth can see. It doesn’t matter if you’re in the southern hemisphere or if you’re in the northern hemisphere. There are a group of constellations everyone on earth can continually see. There are twelve of them. All twelve of them had a story behind them in the beginning. All twelve of them have symbols that represent Christ. That’s for another day. When the pole star changes, which happens about seven times every 25,900 years, anciently that change was called “A New Heaven”. Likewise there is a different constellation that appears at sunrise on the vernal equinox, and that constellation tells you what age you’re in. Star fields overlap and sometimes there are gaps. Right now we are in an overlap between–Christ said, “I will make you fishers of men,” and the constellation for that age was and still is Pisces: two fish. One fish caught in the net is endlessly circling the equator, but another fish, and it’s much smaller, this other fish is headed to the north, where you will find God. That constellation is going to be replaced by the One who is coming. We call him Aquarius. We also call him The Waterman. He is pouring out; a new age will come. If you go back far enough, what he is pouring out is two streams. One stream is water, which gives life, and one stream is fire. He who is coming in the great day of the Lord is coming for “the great (the water) and dreadful (the fire) day of the Lord”, to pour something out. Well, it just so happens that the star fields of these two overlap. If you date the return of the Lord by the star field of Aquarius at its earliest star, then the first sign of the times of refreshing would have been about in the 1840s, when Joseph Smith was saying that Christ appeared to him and gave him a message to preach. We have not yet fully exited the star field of Pisces. Now, all of that is to make this comment: When there’s a new pole star that’s called a New Heaven. When there’s a new constellation on the horizon at the vernal equinox, that’s called a New Earth. There will be a New Heaven and there will be a New Earth when Christ returns. All of these are given, as Christ said in Genesis 1:14, for signs and for seasons, and everything testifies of Him. There’s a lot of scientific proof to challenge traditional interpretations, but there’s a lot of material in the Bible that is simply misunderstood in traditions. This earth is pretty old, and how long it existed before it was considered sufficiently complete for man to occupy is not to be measured in days, it’s to be measured in epics of time referred to generically as a day, meaning a period, meaning an agenda. Stephanie: Alright. This one came in this morning. Question: “Why doesn’t God talk about science in Scriptures? I have learned about symbolic things in my chemistry, microbiology, and astronomy classes that denote there is a God, but I’ve always wondered why the laws of nature and scientific ideas are never discussed.” Answer: So, we’re gonna break this one up. First thing I would say is, I don’t know, I tend to think that science ​is God. Now I know scien​tists don’t think that, and they’re looking for ways to disconnect science and God. But I happen to believe that if there was no God, there would be no science, ​and they wouldn’t have jobs​. A​nd so, to me,...