Who Am I? | thebereancall.org

Who Am I?

September 6, 2023
Jay Seegert

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Jay has a passion for helping Christians strengthen their faith, while also offering a gracious challenge to the sincere skeptic.

  • Keynote Speaker and Managing Director for The Starting Point Project (TheStartingPointProject.com)
  •  International speaker and author
  • Holds degrees in both Physics and Engineering Technology (Univ. of Wisconsin-Whitewater & John Brown University)
  • Has been speaking on the Authority of Scripture for over 36 years.
  • Married 30 years (Wife: Amy)
  • Two married children: Son (Taylor), Daughter (Tori)
  • Lives in Wisconsin (USA)

Jay’s website: www.thestartingpointproject.com

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Transcript:

Well it's always an honor to be here! Sometimes I get announced as a special speaker... my wife calls me special but she doesn't mean anything good by it! [audience laughs]
So this is going to be a kind of unique talk, a custom one that I put together a while back. My own church, back in Wisconsin, they were going to go through a series... last summer I think it was... and the first week was going to be "who is Jesus" because that's the most important question for anyone to answer. The second week they wanted it to be "who am I" and they contacted me and they said would you mind doing that service for us? And I said, Yeah I could probably get up there and tell people a little bit about myself.... They said, No, no it's "who are we in general" and I said, you know what that might be an even better idea! So that's what it's about, you know, who are we because we're being redefined by society left and right which you are already aware of. I know some of you know me, some of you don't know me from a hole in the ground so I'm going to go over my background very quickly. That's me and that's a hole in the ground! [audience laughs] I just use that to warn you about my very, very dry sense of humor. I was raised in a Christian home, and you can see very clearly that that is a Christian home. I was actually led to Christ by my mom in a backyard Bible club in 1968. And I think I went bowling shortly after that and now I'm here! So that brings you up to speed, I'll give you a little bit more background. After I graduated from high school I went to a Christian university, John Brown University in Arkansas, to study mechanical engineering. Got a degree but then I became more interested in physics. They didn't have a physics major there so I left there, went back to Wisconsin where I lived and went to the University of Wisconsin White Water, to get a degree in physics. And that's when my world changed quite a bit because I went from that small Christian college where my engineering professors opened up every class in prayer, to a large state university where my physics professor did not open up every class in prayer. Maybe they forgot? [audience laughs] They were all evolutionists, some of them were atheists, and they were telling me that everything that I believed was wrong. And that made me very uncomfortable! To be surrounded by those Phd scientists who I assumed had a lot of evidence for what they believed. Found out later they didn't, that's another story. But I realized for the first time in my entire life that even though I knew WHAT I believed, I didn't know WHY. So God put it on my heart to start looking into things. So I’ve been looking into things for 38 years now, and about 17 years ago felt called into full-time ministry, founded The Starting Point Project, which…actually the talk I give tomorrow will all be about Starting Point so I’ll explain that later.

So I’ve been traveling full time now, speaking on apologetics and other topics. Along the way I was invited to be on the board of directors of Logos Research Associates.

Really quickly (I don’t normally share this), this is not BioLogos. Most of you are like, Who’s that? You don’t care. But for those of you who know BioLogos, this is not BioLogos. BioLogos is a group that’s pushing evolution within the Christian community, within churches and seminaries and all that. Not part of that group. This is kind of the opposite. This is the world’s largest consortium of scientists who are Christians and creationists.

The founding member, Dr. John Sanford, he’s from Cornell University. He’s worldwide famous for having invented the “gene gun,” inserts genes into the DNA. He was an atheist for much of his life. Very godly man, very humble, as well.

Then there’s Dr. John Baumgardner, PhD geophysicist. He just happened to build the world’s best 3D computer simulation of plate tectonics. Just brilliant, brilliant guy, but also very, very humble, very godly man.

So those two guys, myself, and three other board members. I always say as smart as these guys are (and they are brilliant), if they were here with us today, they would be the first to admit out of all six board members, I am the tallest. So pretty proud about that!

[Audience laughing]

Actually, last November we had a board meeting, and Dr. Sanford asked if I would step up and become president. So I’m president of the group now, and I’ve also lost all respect for those guys if they want me to be leading them!

[audience laughs]

But I’m just honored to be a part of the group, because these guys are doing cutting edge research, and then I get to translate it into something we call English. Some people are super smart–they’re not the best lecturers. Other people, great lecturers, but maybe they don’t know as much. There are very few that are super smart and also really good speakers, and one of them is here today and it’s not me, it’s Dr. Randy Guliuzza. He’s always been one of my favorites, because…super smart and he’s a really good speaker, so you’re going to see that when he gives his presentation later.

A quick summary: Been in full-time ministry 17 years, given over 3,000 talks, spoken in the US and in nine other countries and cool places–Russia, and Oxford and London, and I’ve spoken at the US Naval Academy four times. It might become an annual thing. I’ve spoken to West Point officers and cadets. The Grand Canyon Tours, which I’ll talk about that a little bit more later–this was from just a week or two ago at the Horseshoe Bend. It’s just beautiful. Again, I’ll get into that more later. Started a brand new podcast this year–just found out that we’ve already reached the top five percent in the world! It’s just amazing. I’m not trying to do that, but God is using it greatly. And then there’s three books that I wrote–I’ll talk about those later.

So, getting back to the talk: Who Am I? Because again, we’re being redefined by society, and our kids and grandchildren, they’re the ones who are suffering. We don’t really struggle with it ourselves, but our kids and grandchildren truly are.

So there are two approaches to answering this question of basically who we are. You have man’s wisdom, all the information man has built up over the years, and we have God’s wisdom. You probably know which one I would highly recommend.

So answering this question first: who is Jesus? Because again, that was the first week of the series at my own church. This is pretty simple, pretty straightforward, and I’ll be brief with it. Jesus is exactly who He said He was. He’s the way, the truth, the life. He’s the Messiah, the Son of God. He is God. And because Jesus is who He said He is, we are who He said we are. We’re created in the image of God. We’re His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works. We’re fellow heirs with Christ. We’re the body of Christ. We’re God’s chosen ones. We’re more than conquerors. We’re God’s temple. We’re chosen in him before the foundation of the world. We’re the light of the world, partakers of the divine nature, and we are fearfully and wonderfully made. You’ve heard all those verses before. We don’t need to stop and look each one up. This is who Scripture screams we are. It’s very, very straightforward.

Well, what does man say about who we are? There’s a lot of examples–here’s just one. Stephen Hawking–he was arguably the world’s leading theoretical physicist, died a few years ago of ALS. Brilliant, brilliant scientist, though! This is what he said: “The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies. We are so insignificant that I can’t believe the whole universe exists for our benefit. We are each free to believe what we want, and it is my view that the simplest explanation is there is no god. No one created the universe, and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realization: there is probably no heaven and no afterlife either. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe, and for that, I am extremely grateful.”

I could do an entire series just on this quote. I’m just going to pull out two things right now.

He “appreciates the grand design.” Do you see an issue with that? How do you have a design if you don’t have a designer? He was an atheist. He didn’t believe in a designer.

And then he’s “extremely grateful” to whom or what? To particles for banging together a certain way so that he could be here today, so that his particles could appreciate all the other particles? That makes no sense! Brilliant, brilliant scientist, but it doesn’t make any sense, because if the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. He did not fear God, and so that’s a problem. You can have all those facts in your head, but that doesn’t help at that point.

Here’s another theoretical physicist, Lawrence Krauss. He’s still around today. Brilliant scientist. He said, “Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. You’re all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded. The only way for them to get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode. So forget Jesus–the stars died so you could be here today.”

I would not want to be in his shoes when he faces his Creator. Very, very sad. I pray for the guy all the time. Brilliant scientist, but he’s got a faulty starting point, and we’ll be talking about that more tomorrow.

But why can’t we take the best of both worlds and put the two together–man’s wisdom and God’s wisdom? This is where most people are today, even, in my opinion, most Christians. They take whatever they hear from the secular society, the documentaries, YouTube scientists, school, universities, that’s just, I mean, that’s just truth, right? It’s science. You can’t argue with that. And you take that and you go to God’s Word to figure out what He really meant. And so you put the two together.

Well, what happens when we do that? Well, typically Scripture takes a backseat, and often the blinds are pulled down because you don’t want people to know that you take the Bible too seriously. Maybe once in a while there’s something encouraging that you want to pull it out for that, but otherwise you just kind of keep it hush-hush. So it takes a backseat.

How did such a low view of Scripture happen? It has to do with a very, very powerful Hebrew word, and it’s pronounced “yeahbut.” The English translation is, “Yeah, but….”

[audience laughs]

It’s not a Hebrew word, I made it up. I don’t know Hebrew. I’m still working on English! But this is what happens: people say, “Well, the Bible tells us this and that….” “Yeah, but I just heard this documentary about the Big Bang or about evolution or about this and whatever….” It’s always, “Yeah, but I know better.” That’s what–we do that all the time.

So let’s see how that works: you go back to the very beginning, the Garden of Eden. God creates everything and it’s perfect. What is one of the first major things that occurs? Satan gets in there and messes with Eve, and he said, “Did God really say…? Did He really say that you can’t eat of any tree in that garden?” Guess what? He didn’t say that! God said, “You can eat of any tree in that garden except for one.” So Satan misquoted God, twisted His words, took it out of context, and got Eve to doubt God’s Word.

His plan has not changed at all today. He’s doing the same thing. All skeptics do not believe that the Bible’s the inspired Word of God. But many Christians today also doubt much of God’s Word because they think they know better. This happens over and over and over. Jesus said this–He said, “For if ye believe Moses, you would have believed Me, for he wrote of Me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe My words?” Well, what were Moses’s writings? Well, he wrote the first five books of the Bible, including the Book of Genesis! And pretty much every major doctrine we have today is founded in the Book of Genesis. For example, we have the doctrine of sin. What is that? Well, God creates Adam and Eve, and they are perfect, but they disobey God. They think they know better. That’s what sin is: it’s disobedience to God. Again, it’s rooted in the Book of Genesis. We have death–there’s death all around us today. Where did that come from? Well, God created Adam and Eve in that garden. They were perfect, but they sinned and disobeyed God, and the consequence of their sin was that it brought death and a curse and corruption to God’s perfect creation. Goes back to Genesis.

Then we have marriage. Marriage is one man and one woman. That is highly controversial all over the world even in many churches, even in maybe some Christians churches. Well, where did that come from? Well, God, again, in Genesis creates Adam and Eve in that garden. He said, “It’s going to be a male and a female for life.” Goes back to Genesis. Then God created clothing, and notice you’re all wearing clothes today? That’s a good thing. It’s kind of weird, but did you ever wonder, like, why you put clothes on? Sometimes it’s colder out, you want to be a little warmer. But when it is just perfectly nice out, why put clothes on? Because God created Adam and Eve in that garden. They were perfect, but they sinned, disobeyed God, brought death and curse in His perfect creation, and clothing was just a temporary covering for their sin–goes back to Genesis. Then we have work–why do we work? Because God created Adam and Eve in that garden. He says, “Adam, I want you to till the ground, work the earth.” Now, it got a lot harder for him once he sinned, but it was actually ordained by God right from the beginning. It’s a good thing! And we have Jesus–Jesus is referred to as being the last Adam. If the first Adam wasn’t real, that didn’t really happen that way, we know better now, what does that say about the last Adam? And then most importantly, the gospel message–what is the gospel message? Jesus Christ came and He died on a cross and rose again the third day. Why? Because Adam–God created Adam and Eve in that garden. They were perfect, but they sinned, disobeyed God, that brought death and a curse into His perfect creation and the shed blood of Jesus Christ is the only permanent solution for that problem. The gospel message starts back in Genesis. If we have problems with Genesis, not literal, didn’t really happen, it’s just mythology, we have problems with pretty much everything we believe as Christians. In fact, if Genesis is not literal history with a literal “very good” creation and a literal Adam and Eve, then sin did not literally enter the world through their actions and you and I don’t literally need to be saved. I hope you can start to see that this is kind of an important topic. It’s not a side thing that some science people are into or whatever. No, this is important for every single Christian. And again, Psalm:11:3 says, “If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?” If you’re saying, “We’re not quite sure about the Genesis stuff. It may not have happened that way because of all that we’ve learned, why are you so hung up on the Jesus stuff?” If God couldn’t create in six days, how did Jesus rise again after three days? “No, science has proven He didn’t create in six days. That’s impossible.” Well, it’s also proven you don’t come back from the dead. So when the Bible says that, that can’t really mean that, because we know better. “Yeah, but…” right? You see that all the time, over and over and over.

Here’s a quote from another atheist. I think this quote is very disturbing, but I also think it’s very logical. This is what he said: “Christianity has fought, still fights, and will continue to fight science to the desperate end over evolution.” Quick sidenote: Christianity is not fighting science whatsoever. There’s never a problem between science and the Bible, just between some scientist’s opinions and the Bible. So we’re not fighting science, but this is how he couched it in his quote here. Goes on to say, “Because evolution destroys utterly and finally the very reason Jesus’s earthly life was supposedly made necessary. Destroy Adam and Eve and their original sin, in the rubble you will find the sorry remains of the son of God. If Jesus was not the redeemer who died for our sins, and this is what evolution means, then Christianity is nothing.” And I think that’s true! If evolution, as they are teaching it in the school systems, if that’s true, then Christianity is not true. If evolution is true, there wasn’t an original, perfect creation with an Adam and Eve who ticked God off, got kicked out of the garden, and God says, “Oh, great, now I guess I gotta send my Son to die for their sins.” That did not happen if evolution is true. Now, many people put the two together, even Christians put the two together. I have so many people come up to me at my table: “I got…you want to hear my theory?” I already know what it is! “God used evolution!” And they’re so excited, and they’re sincere. They think they solved the problem. You take the best of both worlds. Whatever the scientists come up with, we can accept that, because it’s science! We don’t have to doubt that! We’ll just say, “That’s how God did it!” But you’re taking a very poor scientific idea, evolution, putting it into Scripture, and now you really do have errors and contradictions in God’s Word. So it’s not a good solution. That will be a whole other series of talks.

Back to the quote from Jesus, you know, if we’re going to reject Moses, why would we believe Jesus’s words? Because Moses wrote all about Jesus in Genesis. Well, what about Jesus? What are His words? Well, one thing He said is, “Behold I am coming soon,” meaning quickly. That’s what Jesus claimed, but we’re gonna be doubting Him, right? And today people are doubting the return of Christ. This is taken from another talk that I give, but if you go back to 2 Peter 3, this is almost 2000 years ago, Peter is talking about the last days, the end times, and we probably all here today believe that we are in the end times. So Peter 2000 years ago is talking about our time today. And he’s talking about those who are doubting the return of Christ. Now he says there are two things, and back up…two things that… are causing people to doubt the return of Christ. Two things. Now, you’d think that they would be spiritual things, since it has to do with them not believing in the return of Christ. That’s not what Peter says. Here are the two things that Peter says are causing the skeptics of our day to doubt the return of Christ: they are rejecting the Genesis creation account, and they are rejecting the Genesis flood. When I first read that, it was like, That’s cool! Because I like talking about creation and the flood, but I never asked, like, But why are those two things? They seem pretty disconnected from the return of Christ. And then I looked at it further and it was like, it makes perfect sense! By rejecting the Genesis creation account, they’re rejecting God as the Creator. He’s the ultimate authority. They don’t want that. They don’t want anyone telling them what to do, so they reject the creation account. By rejecting the flood, what was that? That was God’s judgment on sin! All these skeptics, they’re not bad people, they’re not sinners, they don’t need judgment. So they reject God’s judgment. What’s the return of Christ? It’s another judgment! Peter says, “By fire the second time, not by water.” So they’re going to reject that too, because they don’t see God as the ultimate authority. They reject His judgment, so they’re going to reject the return of Christ as well. And today, every single secular scientist rejects the Genesis creation account and they reject the Genesis flood. Sadly, many Christians reject the Genesis creation account and the flood.

Oh, they’ll say, God’s the Creator and all that, but He didn’t do it the way Genesis says because we know better now. Moses was just, those are just stories back then, because they barely even had writing, right? And they would never have understood the truth, so God had Moses make up these stories that He never really meant, but He knew we’d eventually have modern scientists to tell us He meant something completely different. I think that demeans the character of God. I think God says what He means and means what He says, but fascinating. So again, it’s all the “Yeah, but…” “I know Scripture says this, yeah, but I know this about the Big Bang,” and whatever it might be.

Now here’s some more wisdom from a very surprising source. This is Richard Dawkins, arguably the worlds’s leading atheist. He wrote the book The God Delusion. Very outspoken evolutionist, very intelligent scientist. I just found out that he’s starting to suffer from Alzheimers, which made me very sad. I like Richard Dawkins. I think he’s always been pretty transparent, and he says what he thinks, and I’ve appreciated that about his atheism. Now he’s going into mental decline, so I’m praying for him more and more that God somehow gets a hold of him, even if it’s on his deathbed.

But anyway, he’s probably arguably the world’s leading atheist today. And here’s the context of the quote I’m gonna give you–he is talking about Christians who do this compromise, the Christians who bring in evolution– “Oh, we can accept evolution, yeah! That’s how God did it!” This is what Richard Dawkins the atheist thinks about people who do that–he said, “Oh but of course the story of Adam and Eve was only ever symbolic, wasn’t it? Symbolic? So in order to impress himself, Jesus had himself tortured and executed in vicarious punishment for a symbolic sin committed by a nonexistent individual? As I said, barking mad as well as viciously unpleasant. It seems to me an odd proposition that we should adhere to some parts of the Bible story, but not to others. After all, when it comes to important moral questions, by what standards do we cherrypick the Bible? Why bother with the Bible at all if we have the ability to pick and choose from it what is right and wrong?”

I would pay good money to go on a speaking tour with Richard saying, “Hey, Richard, tell everyone that thing you said!” He gets it better than many Christians do. The two don’t go together well at all, and it leads to a problem that today two-thirds or more probably, 70-80 percent, who knows, of Christian youth end up walking away from their faith before they leave college. And I give talks on this–it’s not that college is so awful. College is just exposing problems that have been developing over the years. But there are so many issues, and here’s a real life story: I’ve spoken at a really large men’s conference where they get, just in that location, 5,000 men just at that location, plus another 5-plus remotely. Massive conference, and it’s actually a pretty decent conference. I’ve been there for many, many years, but got kicked out a few years ago because they’re not comfortable with the creation message. Only one person complained, and…anyway. So I was talking to one of the pastors from the church, and they probably have like, 25 pastors. This is a very large church. I was in there to talk to him about something, and before we got started, he, this pastor, brought up to me that their youth pastors were struggling, because they noticed that a lot of their youth were walking away from the faith. So the pastor that I was talking to looked at me and said, “You know, how can we help them?” And I looked at him and my answer was, “You can’t.” And his jaw dropped like, that’s not what he was expecting from me, and we have a really good relationship, so I smiled when I said that. But I said, “Here’s why you can’t help them: because you don’t know what you believe.” And I said that very respectfully, but it was very true, because at that church they do not take a stance on Genesis. They just kind of go, “Yeah, God’s the Creator and all that, but we don’t know how or when He created it. It doesn’t even really matter. There are good people on all sides, and it’s just being divisive if you even want to talk about it.” So I said, “Think about this: let’s say you want to help your youth, so you bring in some expert, and this is a generic person. I don’t know who this is, it’s just representing someone who’s this expert that the church would bring in to maybe help the youth. And this guy is not only a Bible scholar, he’s a scientist, a sharp guy. And he’s going to address the youth. So he gets there and he says, ‘Hey, I have studied this for 25 plus years, and I know Scripture forwards and backwards. And I’m a PhD scientist, and I’m here to tell you that Genesis may or may not just be poetry. There’s really good arguments on both sides, good people, smart people on both sides. That one we’re just not quite sure of. God may or may not have created everything in six literal days. I know the Bible seems to say that, but again, with the radiometric dating and all that, you know, there’s just again, arguments on both sides. So we’re not really positive on that one. God may or may not have used the Big Bang. The Bible doesn’t really talk about a Big Bang so much, but I mean, the scientists have pretty much proven it, so it could probably fit in there. I mean, someone had to start the Big Bang, right? So maybe God used the Big Bang. Life may or may not have originated from nonliving chemicals. The Bible doesn’t seem to indicate that, but it doesn’t really give us a lot of specifics, and the scientists are making great advances of how life might have formed 3.8 billion years ago from dead chemicals, the Miller-Urey experiment, and animals may or may not have evolved from a common ancestor. I mean, the Bible doesn’t really indicate that, however, there’s just so much evidence from biology and all the fossil record. We may or may not have evolved from an apelike creature. Again, the Bible says that God created Adam from the dust of the earth, but again, it might just be poetic, because, I mean, you go to the museums, they’ve got apemen and, again, all the fossils and things. There may or may not have been an actual Adam and Eve, I know the Bible does mention them. It might be figurative, just not quite sure about that one. There may or may not have been an actual, literal, original sin, because if there wasn’t an actual Adam and Eve, there couldn’t have been this original sin. It might just be a concept to describe, you know, sin in general. There may or may not have been an actual flood, because, I mean, the geologists, they…there’s no evidence whatsoever for a flood. So when you’re reading a flood, it’s just either a story, or maybe it was just a local flood in those areas. Just not quite sure about that. Again, may have just been local. So again, good luck, hope that helps at university.’”

And the students are like, “Just how is that supposed to help me?” Maybe this, maybe not. Maybe this, maybe not. Maybe…we don’t know. Well, if you as an expert can’t figure it out, what are the youth supposed to do? I guess it doesn’t really matter. Well, then why are you so hung up on the Jesus stuff? And eventually they give the Jesus stuff up too, because life is pulling at them in all different types of directions, and they’re feeling guilty about it. Well, you get rid of the Bible, get rid of your guilt. So that’s what’s happening in many, many of our churches.

So we’re going to do an interesting exercise next, and it’s not one of these kinds of exercises. This is not photoshop, this is a real person, she really does that, it just blows me away. This is not a physical exercise. You should not pull a muscle, and I’m serious, when we do this, don’t think too hard. Don’t pull a muscle. I’m going to read a passage up on the screen, so you can just read in your mind along with it. But seriously, relax. Don’t overthink it, don’t pull a muscle in your brain, just follow along as I read this.

“A newspaper is better than a magazine. A seashore is a better place than the street. At first it’s better to run than to walk. You may have to try several times, it takes some skill, but it’s easy to learn. Even young children can enjoy it. Once successful, complications are minimal. Birds seldom get too close. Rain however, soaks in very fast. Too many people doing the same thing can also cause problems. One needs lots of room. If there are no complications, it can be very peaceful. A rock will serve as an anchor. If things break loose from it, however, you will not get a second chance.”

Now you’re all thinking, What in the world was that? You understood every single sentence, they just don’t cohere. They just… We’re gonna try it again! Seriously! I’m gonna read the exact same thing one more time, but this time, I want you to all picture that: a kite! Picture a kite and let’s reread this: “A newspaper is better than a magazine. A seashore is a better place than the street. At first it’s better to run than to walk. You may have to try several times, it takes some skill, but it’s easy to learn. Even young children can enjoy it. Once successful, complications are minimal. Birds seldom get too close. Rain however, soaks in very fast. Too many people doing the same thing can also cause problems. One needs lots of room. If there are no complications, it can be very peaceful. A rock will serve as an anchor. If things break loose from it, however, you will not get a second chance.”

I love…you can only do this once, but I love this exercise! I was taken through this exercise years ago and thought, “That is so cool! I have to fit it into a talk someday,” and this is the one! But then I thought, “I have to have some spiritual application,” so God also helped, because anything that I ever say that’s cool, it came from God. So guess what? The Bible is our kite. The Bible helps us make sense of the crazy world that is around us. It is our rock, it is our anchor. Scripture says He is a rock. His work is perfect. It also says which hope we have as an anchor for the soul, both sure and steadfast. Because the world we’re living in today is upside down, and you all know the world has been getting worse morally slowly, over time, but a few years ago, the wheels fell off. Everyone knows that it is absolutely crazy. There is no shortage of issues that we are facing today. And it’s not that any one of these is too difficult. It’s that there are too many of them. You remember the old entertainer on the stage–he would try to keep all the plates spinning around? That’s what we’re doing today: we’re trying to fix this one, work on this one…oh, what about this one? You run over there…we’re just going crazy. They have overwhelmed the system. They have driven us crazy, and even Christians are overwhelmed and they’re too worried about all of these things.

Here’s a very, very, very important point about these things: these issues aren’t wrong because they’re problematic. We’re not saying, “Oh, they’re causing problems–oh, we’re gonna say they’re wrong!” No, they’re problematic because they are wrong. They go against God’s created order.

Quick sidenote: highlighting climate change here–some of these issues fall into a slightly different category. It is not proper to say that climate change is right or wrong. Climate change–you might want to write this down–climate change is climate change. The climate has always been changing, it always will. Our understanding of it or response to it might be wrong, and I think it is, don’t get me going–that’s a whole other talk, I’m not going to address that right now. But climate change is climate change, so I don’t want anyone to think that I was up here saying climate change itself is wrong. No, it’s just climate change, so that was a quick sidenote. I give talks on that.

But here is another critical point: anytime someone brings up one of these issues, it should never, ever be your philosophy versus theirs. Who are we that the whole world should care what we think? Someone brings one of these issues up, you should say, “Interesting topic. Let me see what God’s Word says about that.” And if they have a problem with what we’re sharing, it’s not with us, it’s with God’s Word. And someday they will be accountable to that. It’s just up to us to very, very graciously help them understand why there are so many problems with these issues. It’s not God’s created order when you try to go outside that and use something that wasn’t intended for, you’re going to have issues. So we don’t have to tell people, “You’re an awful person, because you do something I would never do.” We just say, “Let me help you with this. It sounds like you’re struggling with this somewhat. Let me explain why there’s a general struggle.” We don’t run around and put bandaids on people to stop these behaviors. We introduce them to Jesus Christ. And when their lives are transformed, they connect the dots and they realize, “Oh, this behavior I’m doing, I probably shouldn’t.” It’s like, “Yeah, you shouldn’t. Good news is, God can help you now because you have a relationship with Jesus Christ!” So our starting point should be Scripture. Whatever comes up, we say, “What does Scripture say?” rather than us debating things philosophically.

So why does any of this matter that we’re talking about? It’s because origin determines purpose. Very simple principle. The origin of something determines its purpose. If I showed you this piece of equipment, most of you would probably not know what its purpose was. But if you knew who the manufacturer was, they could tell you why they made it, what its purpose is. It’s called a proximity probe. It measures the vibrational movements of large industrial equipment. I worked on those, [my] first job out of college. But the point is the origin of that piece of equipment determines what its purpose is. Well, your origin determines your purpose. If you really believe the universe came about through a Big Bang, then there’s no purpose for your life because there’s no purpose to the Big Bang. The scientist who drafted this originally did so to try to explain things apart from God.

There’s one really fascinating thing about the Big Bang, and that is it doesn’t explain the origin of the universe. Seriously. It doesn’t kick in until you have pretty much everything you need–the matter and energy, the Big Bang is just a description of how that expanded and formed the universe. It doesn’t create the universe. That’s a whole other series of talks that I give. But the scientists who drafted this say, “No, we don’t need God!” So when Christians say, “Well, God used the Big Bang!” they’re saying, “You don’t understand this thing. This explains everything apart from God.” It doesn’t, but the secular scientists drafted it to do so, and they admit there’s no purpose, it’s just something that happened. Well, if you’re part of that universe, there’s no purpose for your life either. And here’s an interesting quote from Dr. William Provine–he was from Cornell University, an atheist. He passed away a few years ago. He said, “Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear [and I must say that these are basically Darwin’s views]: There are no gods, no purposeful forces of any kind. No life after death. When I die, I’m absolutely certain I’m going to be completely dead. That’s just all. That’s going to be the end of me. There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will for humans either.” Very, very depressing, but very consistent with an atheistic worldview, and he was an atheist.

Now here’s, again, another quote. This is Stephen Hawking, I mentioned him before. He was the world’s leading theoretical physicist, again an atheist. He had to address this issue–how do you get something out of nothing? In fact, ultimately, how do you get everything out of nothing? If there’s no God, how did this universe and everything get here? This was his answer: “Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.” Most people do not want to debate the world’s leading theoretical physicist.

Let’s for the time being forget about how brilliant he was, and let’s just think about what he said. I’m going to reword this slightly: “Because there is something, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.” Wait a minute–if you have something, you don’t have nothing! And what was the something he mentioned? The law of gravity. What is the law of gravity? It’s not a physical thing that you can weigh and paint and bend, it’s a description of how the universe operates. But you can’t have a description of how the universe operates unless you have a universe to describe. But if you have a universe to describe, you are not creating it from nothing because it already exists!

So here’s an example of a statement from a truly brilliant scientist that makes no sense. Even other atheists called him out on that. It doesn’t make any sense.

So the Big Bang equals no purpose. On the other hand, if you think the universe was designed, there would be purpose for it. And if you’re part of that universe, there’s a purpose for your life as well.

Psalm:139:14, everyone knows that: “I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” So we’ll talk about this very, very briefly. But again, this is when people say, “Yeah, but the scientists have proven evolution, so it’s not like we’re really designed by God.” And again, that’s the general pushback. Well again, Jesus said if you don’t believe Moses’ writings, if he wrote that in Genesis, why would we believe Jesus?

Well, again, important point: who is Jesus? Long before Jesus was Savior, He was Creator. John 1, Colossians 1, Hebrews 1–“For Him, by Him, through Him, all things were created.” So if you were going to take Jesus seriously as your Savior, you need to take Him just as seriously as your Creator as well. Very, very important.

So let’s take a look at His creation. A typical human adult has up to about maybe a hundred trillion cells in their body, and each one of those cells is more complex than the space shuttle. And if you went into the nucleus of just one cell, you could take a cell from the tip of your finger, go into the nucleus, and pull out the DNA, it’s about 6 feet long. Super, super thin to fit in the nucleus there, but about six feet long. Now, if you magnified the nucleus, which is about ten microns, magnify it so it becomes the size of a basketball, that six foot strand of DNA is now 27 miles long. So picture holding a basketball, that’s the nucleus of your cell, and you pull out that DNA, 27 miles, and then get it all back in there and get it just right–not gonna happen. But that’s in every one of the cells in your body.

If you took out not just the DNA from one cell, but if you took out the DNA from every single cell in your body and then strung them together end to end…you’d be dead, so don’t do that.

[audience laughs]

But if you did, and you wanted to go for a walk from one end of your DNA to the other end, so you’ve got the DNA laying in front of you and you’re just gonna go for a walk–and we typically walk maybe about three and a half miles per hour–so how long would that take you? Four minutes? An hour and a half? How about 14 days? No, how about 3,706,339 years to get to the end of your own DNA? That’s in your bodies right now. It’s in there. That’s a long, long way. Your DNA would stretch from the earth to the sun–that’s 93 million miles! But it wouldn’t reach that distance just once–1,222 times! That’s all in your body in the right place right where it needs to be.

Now, let’s say we did want to go that far. We can’t walk, it’s going to slow. Let’s say you went the speed of a rocket, over 3100 miles per hour. That’s the speed the Apollo astronauts went when they went to the moon. I did another calculation–this is almost as fast as my wife drives!

[audience laughs]

She laughs because she’s a better driver than me, but…

So you’re going the speed of a rocket. How long would that take you? Tenth of a second? A millionth of a second? How about 4,180 years going the speed of a rocket to get to the end of your own DNA? We have to stop messing around. That’s too slow. How about Star Wars speed, the speed of light? Absolutely impossible–we cannot travel at the speed of light, but let’s humor ourselves. You’re going 186,000 miles per second. Every second you’re going 186,000 miles. How long would it take to get to the end of your own DNA? Seven full days, 24 hours a day, for seven days going the speed of light, and you’d finally reach the end of your own DNA. “But that just happened by accident.” That’s pretty much what we teach.

So going back to Genesis: “Then God said, Let us make man in our image. So God created man in His own image, male and female.” So, you know, we’ve got Genesis in the Garden of Eden, but no, the scientists, yeah, but they’ve proven human evolution. They’ve got all the apemen and the fossils and all that, so you can’t take Genesis seriously. Again, Richard Dawkins, a quote: “It’s absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid, or insane, or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that.” Very intimidating, dogmatic statement from, again, a pretty intelligent scientist. So when our children and grandchildren are sitting in school or the university and they hear this over and over, what are they gonna do? Raise their hand and say, “I don’t really believe in evolution”? No, they’re gonna keep pretty quiet, slouch down in their seat, and a lot of them end up walking away from their faith because they don’t know how to respond. They don’t have a proper view of the authority of God’s Word because we as parents don’t always do the best job of training them the way they should be trained. That’s a whole other talk.

So again, we know what Genesis says. But people say, “Yeah, but I know better because the apemen, you just can’t argue! I mean, this is real science! You go to the museum, they’ve got the skeletons all lined up. You just can’t argue with that. The Bible can be interpreted all sorts of ways, right?”

Well, let’s just take a really short period of time and look at this from a very high level. Classic example: Nebraska Man, Hesperopithecus haroldcookii. That’s just apeman from the Western world, and that was discovered by a guy named Harold Cook, so they give these big elaborate names to make it sound more scientific, but the common name was Nebraska Man because they found the evidence in…Wyoming, right?

[audience laughs]

No, it’s in Nebraska. So this is what they told us Nebraska Man looked like: everything you would want in an apeman. I mean, very brutish face, long hair, he’s got a stone age tool like a club there, and he has a wife by him, apparently making a fire, and behind her there, it’s a little bit harder to see, but there are domesticated animals. You’ve got horses there and then some camels up in the corner. They were able to figure out a lot about Nebraska Man, that’s pretty impressive! So what was, you know, all the evidence? Because they must have had quite a bit to figure out all those details right? It was just one bone. How would you take just one bone and figure out tall he was, did he have a brutish face, how long his hair, did he know about stone age tools, fire, domesticated animals…you wouldn’t know any of that. And it was just a tooth! So you’re taking one tooth and doing that, and not only was it just a tooth, it was a tooth from a pig! And many of you know this–so a single pig’s tooth, they made an entire apeman out of it. That was down in Glenrose, Texas. I had never been to the Creation Evidence Museum down there, but I know the guy who runs it, and I thought, “I gotta pop by.” And so I stopped in and he said, “Hey, do you know about Nebraska Man?” I said, “Yeah, Hesperopithecus haroldcookii.” He goes, “Oh, yeah, you do know him.” He goes, “You know, they found additional teeth, and that’s how they found out that the one tooth they had was from a pig.” I said, “Yeah.” He goes, “Would you like to hold one of those teeth in your hand?” I said, “That’d be cool!” So here’s–he’s got it on display there, which is kind of cool to see. That’s one of the other–they found…they determined it’s just a pig’s tooth. So again, they took that one tooth and made an entire apeman because they wanted it to be an apeman.

Then we have Piltdown Man, Eoanthropus dawsoni. That’s what they say Piltdown Man looked like. What was the evidence? Some bones from a human skull and bones from an ape jaw that the discoverer kind of put them together, and the world’s leading experts couldn’t tell that he actually filed the teeth down to make them look more human and discolored the bones to make them look older, and it was in textbooks for over 40 years! You know, but it was pretty much a hoax and a fraud. And again, there’s a lot more that could be said about that.

A little more current example, we could look at Lucy, Australopithecus afarensis, just a Southern ape from the far region of Africa. Everyone’s heard of Lucy. Take a look at Lucy’s eyes in particular: whites of the eyes. Chimps and apes don’t have whites of their eyes. Why would they put whites of the eyes on Lucy? Because they wanted her to look more human. They even pose her in the museums like she’s deep in thought, thinking about things. Again, they’re trying to get their narrative across. Well, they didn’t find the eyes. They could never know that.

A little humor break here: I love the Far Side, you guys probably do too. “Rocking the anthropological world, a second Lucy is discovered in southern Uganda.” That’s my kind of humor.

So back to Lucy again, some more detail: it was discovered in 1974 by Donald Johanson. And what about that name Lucy? We’ve all heard the name Lucy, like, why did they pick Lucy? Well, in the camp where they were digging and they found the initial bones, they were listening to music by The Beatles, specifically Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. So that’s how that one got the name. Little bit of free trivia–won’t charge you for that one! But here are the other details: “Found about 20 percent of the skeleton, claimed it was 3 and half million years old, and that it walked upright.” So that’s what they claim, and this is what they have it looking like in the museum for the time we have. It looks pretty much just like a chimpanzee, except it’s standing more upright like a human and…look at the feet. The feet look a lot more like human feet than chimpanzee feet. Why did they put human feet on Lucy? When they found the original bones, they didn’t have the foot bones. So why would you put human feet on the skeleton when you don’t have the bones, when the rest of it looks like a chimpanzee? Because about a thousand miles away in rock that was lower that they claimed to be older, they found footprints that looked just like human footprints. Well, if humans were leaving those tracks, then Lucy is not on her way to evolving into a human, they already exist. So they said, “Ah, Lucy or her relatives must have left those tracks.” So they put human-like feet on Lucy. Well, since they found the first set of bones, they found many others. They found the foot bones and they’re long and curved just like a chimpanzee. But most of the museums don’t get updated because, well, it costs money to do that, and you don’t want to ruin your narrative. It would be a bad thing if you had to do all those changes. And there are many, many, many, many more.

We could summarize the whole thing this way: every apeman you have ever seen or ever will see falls into one of three categories: it was either really just an apelike creature that they tried to make look more human–that would be like Lucy–or it would be something that was fully human that they tried to make look more apelike–Neanderthal Man. The latest I heard, I think Europeans and Asians have from 1-3 percent Neanderthal DNA in them, meaning in the past, they were intermarrying and having offspring. Well, you can only do that if they were human. But they want Neanderthal man to look much more apelike that we’ve evolved from Neanderthal man.

Third category is a mix of bones–sometimes accidental, sometimes on purpose as a fraud where they take some ape bones, some human bones, and say, “Oh, we found it on the same skeleton so it kind of looks like an ape, kind of looks like a human.” Every single one in the past has been in those categories, and every new one that comes up will be in one of those categories.

You’ve also heard that, you know, we’re 98 percent identical in our DNA, chimps and humans. Total myth. They basically cheated when they were coming up with that number. It’s much, much lower, probably closer to 80 percent. Could it be even lower? That’s a whole other talk.

Newsweek cover a number of years ago said, “The Search for Adam and Eve.” They were not looking for the biblical Adam and Eve, they were looking conceptually for this first couple in a sense that we have all descended from, and I’ll get to that, because they believe that the real Adam and Eve from the Bible, that’s just complete myth. So here’s their standard model on the origin of mankind. They think that chimps and humans both evolved from a common ancestor about 6 million years ago. They do not believe we evolved from chimpanzees, so don’t try to argue against that. They believe there was a common ancestor that broke off and it branched off into apes and other things, and then chimpanzees and the others went off into hominoids in the modern man. So you’ve got chimps today and humans having evolved from a common ancestor 6 million years ago. That’s what they teach. So why are they talking about Adam and Eve here? Because most secular scientists are convinced we have all come from one male and one female. That might sound familiar. Why would a secular scientist say that? They don’t want to support the Bible at all. This is why: genetically, males are the only ones who have a Y chromosome. So by studying the Y chromosome, people around the planet, it seems to them like it’s all come from one copy that got passed on. So they said, “Yeah, it looks like we came from one male. Oh, but there were other males around, but they kind of died off and didn’t pass on their genetics. Just one did.” They’re kind of covering their tracks that way. And females are the only ones that appear to pass on the mitochondrial DNA. Most of the DNA is in the nucleus. There’s little loops of DNA in the mitochondria, the powerhouse of the cell. Females pass that on. So by studying mitochondrial DNA, females are on the planet, it looks like they all got it from a single copy. So they’re like, “Oh!” But they’re saying, “But it’s not the biblical Adam and Eve because this male and female, they didn’t even live together at the same time. Thousands of… tens of thousands of years apart.” It could actually work genetically, I’ll skip that, but they’re saying it can’t be the biblical Adam and Eve because they didn’t even live at the same time.

Breaking news: genetic Adam and Eve did not live too far apart in time. Secular source says, “Y Chromosome Adam and Mitochrondrial Eve [this is the first couple] were thought to have lived tens of thousands of years apart. Now two major studies suggest that they may have lived around the same time after all.” Who woulda thunk?

[audience laughs]

Well, again, if you know the Bible, you woulda thunk that, because God created Adam and Eve on day 6. They were created the same day. Yes, they were created at the same time. This is also fascinating. A population bottleneck: that’s where you got a population and something happens where most of them die out, and you have a smaller population to restart with. Breaking news: when humans faced extinction. “Humans may have come close to extinction about 70,000 years ago according to the latest genetic research.” That’s the title of an article, secular source. Okay, don’t get hung up on the 70,000 year number. Just put it in context. They think we’ve been evolving for 6 million years. Seventy thousand years ago, that’s pretty recent! So they’re saying recently, almost everyone went extinct, but a small group survived to repopulate the earth. Again, it's just sounding so familiar again!

This is kind of how it works: we have an original population, different colored dots representing a variety of genetic information out there. Then a catastrophic event occurs and wipes most of them out, and we just have a smaller variety here, the reds and the blues. And then they’re going to repopulate going forward, and it has a smaller variety. It’s going to take a while before that picks up again. Why would they say that? Because this is what’s happening: when they looked at the genetics of people all over the planet, they expected it to be really widespread–we’ve been evolving for 6 million years, it should have gotten really wide, but it’s really narrow, like hmm! Oh, they say, “We know what happened! It did get wide! But then something happened to wipe almost all of them out. A small group survived to repopulate the earth recently, so it hasn’t had time to spread out again.” So they’re trying to cover their tracks to not support the biblical narrative.

Again, here is a quote from Why Evolution Is True, Jerry Coyne out of the University of Chicago: “It’s theorized based on genetic evidence that a few tens of thousands of years ago, the population of homosapiens was reduced for a period to a few thousand or tens of thousands of people. Such a bottleneck would explain the extremely low level of genetic diversity found within our species.”

So let me give you an update–they also said, “Now an abrupt population bottleneck specific to human males has been inferred 5-7,000 years before present.” So they’re looking at everyone, and then now they were focusing just on males, and when they look at the male genetics, it seems like this bottleneck, this catastrophe happened closer to 5,000 years ago. That’s sounding familiar too, and here’s a bonus: that was genetics of people. Then they decided, “Let’s take a look at the genetics of animals.” And this is what they found: a straightforward hypothesis is that almost all existing animal species have arrived from mitochondrial uniformity. That’s that bottleneck catastrophic event within the last one to several hundred thousand years. Let me summarize so I don’t lose you: They believe humans almost went extinct recently. Animals almost went extinct recently. Animals and humans reemerged at the same time! Why does that sound familiar? Again, you go back to Scripture, there was a flood close to four and a half thousand years ago where you had Noah and his wife, “Joan of Ark…”

[audience laughs]

…then you had their three sons, and their wives. Eight people on that ark, six of which repopulated the earth, and you had two of each kind of animal, seven of some. We all started over about four and a half thousand years ago. What they’re finding in genetics is backing up what the Bible said all along. Even though the Bible is God’s first shot at writing a book, I think He did a pretty good job! And we need to be very patient with the scientists and wait for them to catch up with what God’s been telling us all along.

So with that flood thing about four and a half thousand years ago, really quickly, I do Grand Canyon tours, and we do not do them to talk all about the canyon. We do talk about the canyon, and we show it could only have been formed by a catastrophic flood just like the Bible says. But our tours are all focused on the authority of God’s Word, and I do a lot of teaching on how do we know God exists? How do we know the Bible’s the inspired Word of God? How do you mentor your children and grandchildren? How do you reach out graciously to a skeptic? How do we know the creation account is true? How do we know there was a flood? So we do a lot of teaching, and the Grand Canyon’s probably the best spot on earth to talk about the flood. So I’m going to show you very quickly our little short video promo so that you know what the trips are like. They’re very, very family friendly. We are not hiking down to the bottom, we’re not doing whitewater rafting. Very family friendly. We stay in hotels, eat good food, but this is the promo. I might have to back up with volume.

Promo: Welcome to the Grand Canyon! We’ve all seen pictures, come and see the real thing! Jay Seegert here with the Starting Point Project to invite you to come along on one of our Grand Canyon tours where you will be on the top rim of the canyon looking down, and you’ll also get to be on the Colorado River. And all throughout our trip we share scientific evidences that there really was a worldwide flood just like we learn from Genesis 6-8. We know there was worldwide flood action, but not always the same way you see here. We want to take you from being in a position where you are praying and hoping that no one asks you about this flood story and Noah’s Ark and all that, to a point where you’re thinking, Please, please ask me!

Woman: Just learning about the creation theory and being able to really be equipped to defend that theory…

Man: A chance to learn a little bit more about just what God’s done in the past and His beautiful world that He created.

[Music]

Man: The only explanation for the canyon is really catastrophic water action.

Man: Easy to understand, but yet profound.

Woman: It helps me to articulate what I believe so much better.

Jay: You’ll be so excited about the authority of God’s Word, that it can be trusted from cover to cover so that you can be more emboldened when you’re graciously sharing the gospel message with those around you. The problem isn’t the evidence, because facts don’t speak for themselves.

[Music]
Man: What was your favorite part?

Child: The dinosaur tracks.

Man: Dinosaur tracks? Yeah, that’s pretty cool.

Woman: It’s unbelievable!

Woman: You have to see it in person.

Jay: It is an amazing place to visit, and we want to go on this journey with you. So get ahold of us to learn about the details of our trips which you can find at thestartingpointproject.com.

[Music]

Jay: So you get a little general idea what the trips are like. We have a brochure out on the table if you’re interested. We do have room on one trip left–I’m doing five tours this year. There’s one that still has room on it. That’s in October. So if you’re interested in more details, grab a brochure. You can talk to me after my session.

So with that, we’ve got to wind down this talk. Who Am I? Origins: Reality and Relevance. The reality is you are fearfully and wonderfully made in the image of God created to do good works. The relevance has to do with the “Yeah, but…” Now, the “yeah, but” has been very negative this entire presentation. We’re going to turn it around a bit. Every single one of you, including myself, at some point is going to be face-to-face with God, in a sense. And God could look at you and say, “You do not deserve to come into heaven.” This is where you say, “Yeah, but You sent Your Son to die on a cross to pay for my sins, and I have accepted that free gift.” And God says, “Enter into all eternity.” So you take the “yeah, but” and you turn it around in a good way. And this is the point of the whole talk: the world is trying to define who we are, and we can’t give up that ground. And it shouldn’t be our opinion versus someone else’s. We should always just say, “Hold on a second, let me share with you what God has to say about that.” And we want, again, to do it in a very, very caring and loving way. And God will use you tremendously.

The bad news is the world’s getting worse and it’s probably gonna just keep getting worse. The worse news is you can’t fix it. The good news is God’s not asking you to fix it, He’s asking you to share the gospel message with those around you, and the worse things get, the easier it is to share the only hope that exists, which is Jesus Christ.

So anyway, I’ve gone 50 million miles an hour. I hope that’s somewhat encouraging. Our resources, really quick, everything we have is on our table or online. And I used to hate going to this portion, but almost everything we have now is free. We have 34 video sessions. We’ve made them all streamable. We don’t carry DVDs anymore. They’re all online, all of them free. We’ve started doing podcasts this year in February. Those are all free. Every week a new one is released on Apple and Spotify. I write a monthly newsletter that comes out once a month. You can sign up at our table. It’s free. Or go on our website and sign up. I write a question of the month article, put it in the newsletter, they’re also archived on the website, there’s a bunch of those, those are all free. I’ve done some livestream broadcasts in the past, those are archived for free on our website. I also wrote a little pocket guide that you can put in your pocket or in your Bible. I have a five-part series on the inspiration of the Bible, a video series, and I cover four major categories of evidence. These cards have the four major categories with one example of evidence in each of those categories. So when you meet someone who says, “Oh, the Bible’s just made up,” and this and that, full of errors and contradictions, disproved by science, missing portions and all that, you could say, “Well, I actually believe it is what it claims to be: the inspired Word of God,” and this will help you with some of those evidences.

So all those things are free. The only thing that we sell are the books that are out, because, you know, it costs us something to produce them and ship them and publish them and all that. But you can get all three, actually–I don’t know if it’s even on the sign-out–you can all three for $30. And I don’t even talk about this anymore, but we don’t charge anything. Thirty-eight years I’ve been speaking, haven’t charged a penny. We have monthly supporters. If God puts it on your heart to become a monthly supporter, we’ll give you the books for free. So then we don’t have anything to sell you at that point! And then the Grand Canyon tours is out there as well. So we’re not doing Q and A, but you can always get a hold of us through the website thestartingpointproject.com. So come to the end of my time.

I’m gonna close my portion in just a quick word of prayer, and then Rob will come up again.

Dear heavenly Father, we just thank You so much for this time that we’ve had to take a look ultimately at the authority of Your Word. Thank You for giving it to us. I thank You for each person in attendance here at this conference and watching virtually, and I pray that You would be giving them even this week an opportunity to share the gospel with a lost and dying world. We pray all these things in Jesus’ name, amen.

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