Growing in Christ Bible Study Genesis to Revelation. Week 5

Genesis 13:5 - Genesis 21

Read Genesis 13:1-9. What caused Lot and Abraham to separate?

                                 What does that say to you about possessions?

                                  What does this tell you about Abraham, that he let Lot choose?

                                  Read Gen. 12:6,7. What enabled Abraham to allow Lot to choose first?

                                  How does faith enable you to live at peace in the world?

Read Gen. 13:10,11. How did Lot choose where he would live?

                               Read 2 Cor.5:7. How does this story relate to this verse?

Look at Lot's different  locations: Gen.13:12,13

                                                        14:12

                                                        19:1

                                                         19:18-21

                                                        19:30,31

                     What are some lessons you learn from studying these locations?



Read 2Peter 2:7. Will Lot be in Heaven?             What does this teach us?


Read Genesis 14:21-24 and Genesis 23:3-18. Why would Abraham not take gifts from these people?

           

  
            How does faith enable you to withstand temptations of getting wealth from questionable sources?


Read Gen. 14:18-20 and Heb. 7:1-25. Who was Melchizadek?

            How does the writer of Hebrews say he foreshadowed Christ? Give 5 ways

              1.

              2.

              3.

              4.

              5.



Note to students/teachers: Abraham, as we will study more in the next lesson is the "Father of Faith". There are several faith lessons to learn in these passages. First of all, God promised him that he would inherit all of the land of Canaan. Therefore, when Lot's possessions and Abraham's possessions got too big for the both of them to coexist, (isn't it interesting what damage possessions do to relationships, peace, etc.) Abraham, in humility and meekness could easily allow Lot to choose first. Abraham knew he would get it all in the end anyway. Isn't that awesome! We can let others be more important than us on this Earth and not insist on our rights because we have an inheritance that noone can take away. We can let other people feel more important than us because actually, God stops by my house for dinner. Can you top that?
      Lot, although I would guess a reprobate who tasted the good things of God yet chose the world and is doomed for hell, actually is in Heaven and called a just man. That goes to show you that we can't judge people because only God knows their heart. Certainly however, by following the lust of the eyes and pride of life (1John 2:15) he got drawn into the wickedness of Sodom and lost everything including his wife, his home, his possessions, his dignity, and the morality of his daughters and ended up living in a cave. He went on to sire 2 nations both of which would be exceedingly wicked and thorns in the Israelite's flesh. He is the proverbial man that gets to Heaven smelling like smoke. (1Cor.3:15)
       Another result of Abraham's faith is that he could look at riches of this world and not be tempted by them. Why? Because God promised to give him everything. He didn't need to take any tainted wealth or be indebted to anyone except God. How many Godly people have ruined their lives because of a desire for Earthly wealth? (1Tim. 6:6-10) We have riches untold waiting for us in Heaven. Let's seek those. (Matt.6:33).
         Lastly, we see the another allusion to Christ in Melchizadek. Some even think he is a Christophony or an appearance of the pre-incarnate Christ in the OT. Anyway, as seen in Hebrews, he becomes an important figure to explain the new priesthood that Christ brings into place. Imagine offering sacrifices your whole life for the forgiveness of sins and then being told you don't have to anymore. The theology of Melchizadek became important in this transition.

                                                               

Growing in Christ Bible Study Genesis to Revelation Week 4

Genesis 12 - 13:4 & 20:1-18

   Initially, prior to sin, God's plan was to reveal himself directly to mankind (Gen.3:8,9). Look at the next 2 verses (and video) and explain why God can no longer directly make Himself known.

   Habakkuk 1:13

   Ex. 33:18-20

Read Genesis 12:2 & 1Chronicles 17:21. How did God choose to reveal Himslf to the world?


Look up the following verses and tell which unbeliever(s) saw God's attributes thru the Israelites and which attribute(s) they saw:

       Gen. 21:22

       Gen. 26:28

      Gen. 30:27

      Gen. 39:3,23

      Gen. 41:38,39

     Ex. 5:2

      Ex. 7:4,5

      Ex. 8:18,19

     Ex. 10:16,17

     Ex. 14:23-25

     Ex. 18:7-12

     Deut. 4:5-8

      Josh. 2:8-11

      Josh. 4:19-24

       Josh. 5:1

      Josh. 9:9-11,24,25

      1Kings 20:28

      Ezek. 20:41 (also vs. 9,14,22 tell the problem with His plan to reveal Himself through them)


      Ezek. 36:22,23

      Dan. 2:46,47

      Dan. 6: 25-27

Read Gen.12:3, Acts 3:25,26, Heb.1:3 & John 14:9,10. What is a second way that God chose to reveal Himself to the world?

Does it say in Gen. 12 & 13 why God chose Abraham of all the people on the Earth? 

Read Deut 7:6,7. Does this give you any insight into why or why not Abraham/ the Israelites were chosen? Give an illustration from Genesis 12 and chapter 20 that shows Abraham's unworthiness.


Read Titus 3:5,6. How do we compare to Abraham in this?



Note to teachers/students - When sin entered into the world, God's relationship with mankind changed. He is too Holy to enter into a face to face relationship anymore, but instead He revealed Himself to the world through the people of Israel (the nation born from Abraham) and later through Jesus Christ, God come to Earth. Abraham had nothing in him to merit this Grace, all he did was obey in faith when given the offer. This is how it works for us. God offers us a relationship with Him through His son Jesus Christ (the one prophesied of in Gen. 12:3), not because we were good but basically because we were bad - yet "For God so loved the World..." Our response is to say yes and follow Him.

Kid's Devotion - Risking being laughed at

1. Watch the Doug Video

2. Doug trivia - Who was the one friend of Doug's not embarrassed to be seen in a swim suit?
3. What happened to Doug at his grandma's house? How much time did he have to lose weight before the swim party? How did he do it? How much did he weigh after he lost it all? Was he anxious to swim then? Why not?
4. How many people were swimming when Doug got to the party? Why weren't they swimming? What does that tell you about people?
5. What made them all go into the pool? What does that tell you about people?
6. Read Judges 6:11-16.  http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=judges%206:11-16&version=MSG  How did Gideon view himself? How did God view him? Whose opinion mattered? Tell the story of Gideon as best as you know it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xawbxc7wezM&feature=related (If you are unfamiliar or have an extra 6 minutes)
7. Read Philippians 1:12-14. http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=phil%201:12-14&version=NLT   Where was Paul in this passage? Why was he in jail? What did his imprisonment do to the other believers?


Note to parents: In this Doug episode, we see that Doug was self conscious because of his body image. (We will go into this topic more in a later episode where Doug discovers he has a big nose) The thing I wanted to focus on though is the surprising yet true revelation that all his friends (except Bebe) had the same feelings of imperfection that they were afraid to reveal. Our kids need to learn that noone has it all together and everyone is afraid of being laughed at. What they need to learn is that God sees them as a mighty warrior. He thinks they can do anything and His view is the only one that matters. Also they need to realize that when one person stands up and risks being made fun of, it usually frees everyone else up to do the same and be real and have fun. Maybe this is why kids get drunk - so they lose their inhibitions or blame their stupidness on the drink?? Or why costume parties are so raucous - because they can hide behind a mask?? Wouldn't it be great if our kids were bold to risk being made fun of because they are confident in who God thinks they are? Wouldn't that affect how bold they/we witness for Christ too, if we weren't afraid of being made fun of!

Creation Science - A "Far Side" Look at Evolution

Far Side is my all time favorite cartoon. Gary Larson is definately a "Right Brainer" and if he isn't left handed, I'm making him an honorary one. He is an equal opportunity cynic on a lot of topics but I especially like his creation/evolution humor. I am going to show the creationist's arguments using his comics. If you are an evolutionist, please don't "x" out of here, it may help you understand better where we are coming from and we are not a lot of loonies like this first comic suggests

                                                                   Creationism Explained


  This is how much respect you get if you are a creationist. (see the documentary Expelled  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HErmp5Pzqw) We look at evolution in the same way as seen in the next cartoon

                                                        Dirk brings his family tree to school


  As we analyze "Dirk's" family tree, we start at the top - the amoeba, the most primitive life form as seen in the following comics

                                                        The most primitive form of humor



          

The problem with this starting point - the amoeba - is illustrated in these comics in several ways

#1 The simple cell is alive. How does evolution explain life? This is the Achilles heel of evolution. This is "the elephant in the room." 

 

Sure, they can make sparks go into a chamber of gasses, proposing those were the gasses in the environment in the beginning, and form some proteins which are similar to those found in DNA, but how does that become alive? In an experiment we all heard about if we took biology in school, we learned about Miller's spark chamber.  - Miller recreated an atmosphere of the primitive earth...

 

 in a laboratory and shot electricity through it to simulate the effects of lightening. Before long he found that amino acids, the building blocks of life, had been created. Carl Sagan called this the single most significant step in convincing many scientists that life is likely to be abundant in the cosmos. However there were numbers of problems with this experiment.

  problems
  1. Miller used ammonia, methane, and Hydrogen because he knew that if you have nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and oxygen they won't react. However from 1980 on, NASA scientists have shown that the primitive Earth never had any methane, ammonia, or hydrogen. Instead it was composed of water, carbon dioxide, and Nitrogen and the experiment won't work with those.
  2. It never produced life. One can find much protein in a butcher shop or graveyard, but no life
  3. It demonstrated involvement of an intelligent being on multiple levels - the choice of a complex apparatus, the choice of chemicals used, the use of an electrode, the choice of a heating and cooling procedure by Miller was actually going against what he was trying to prove, that it happened randomly.
  4. The chamber also produced substances toxic to life
  5. The amino acids on the DNA strand are "right handed" and the amino acids produced were "left handed"

If Darwinists are to keep the Creator out of the picture, they have to provide a naturalistic explanation for the origin of life, which despite all their efforts they haven't been able to do. Nor have they been able to come up with a single possibility which remotely makes sense and there is no prospect that they will. The origin of life is the Achilles heel of evolution." *

#2 The simple cell is not all that simple. As the "thick membraned" husband illustrates, the cell membrane is composed of two molecules of lipids coated by a protein molecule on each side and polarized in such a way that it allows certain substances in and keeps others out. And if the cell so desires it can pick up certain chemicals it wants and transport them in against a gradient using energy obtained from a bean shaped organism inside the cell called a mitochondria. Also inside the cell is a packaging plant called the Golgi Complex where carbohydrates and proteins, which are synthesized in the cell, are placed in rows and bead off when needed. The nucleus is another portion of the cell where protein synthesis takes place in complex processes called transcription and translation not to mention replication and division thru meiosis and mitosis, all of these processes so complex that scientists who discover how these work are receiving Nobel prizes.  Back in the late 1800's they believed in a process called "spontaneous generation". Life was felt to develop spontaneously. In decaying meat, maggots would develop. Years later  Francisco Redi did an experiment  which showed if flys weren't allowed to interact with the meat, maggots didn't develop. Then Pasteur showed that air contains microorganisms that can multiply in water giving the illusion of spontaneous generation of life. Darwin didn't think it would be very difficult to create life from non-life because the gap between the two didn't seem that great to him. In 1905 Ernst Haeckel described living cells as being merely homogeneous globules of plasm.

 

 In those days they didn't have any way of seeing the complexity that exists within the membrane of the cell.

 

 Early investigators considered cells as bags of enzymes. Life was little more than the correct mixture of ingredients - get the mixture right and life was inevitable.

#3 The cell divides asexually.

 

 A flaw in Dirk's family tree is the whole mating of males and females. When did that start? What would happen if male evolution exceeded female evolution. Not only would male evolution have to be occuring, but female also at the same rate, otherwise one branch would die off.

The next problem with Dirk's family tree is that it progresses from "simple" to more complex.

 This is a huge flaw in evolution as we know from the law of entropy that everything in our universe goes from order to disorder unless acted on by an outside force. Common sense tells us this as our rooms don't get neater, our cars don't tune themselves up, our houses and bodies need repair, ad infinitum. Check out this comic

Oops. It's crooked. I wonder how that happened. Anyway, why is this comic even funny? (Maybe you think it isn't) I think it demonstrates the tension that evolutionists must feel. Here we have an evolving species all the way up to the super male and then devolving to the guy at the corner bus stop. Which is it? Did we start out at the top and slowly deteriorate or did we start at the bottom and continually get better? How does evolution say we moved up the ladder while everything around us tells us we should be moving toward disorder. Evolution says two processes in particular guided it. First of all mutations. 

                                                            Nuts, Another mouth to feed!

 

                                     

                                             As illustrated by the comics, mutations are not a good thing. If they were, why do we shield gonads from xrays? Why don't we encourage consanguinity? And why are we worried about  the harmful radiation effects of holes in the (b)ozone layer?

                                              
                                                   
There are no good mutations. None! Yet evolution uses this as one of their bedrocks for advancing a species. And then there is natural selection.  A creationist would be a fool to not believe in natural selection where certain traits are advantageous to survival and therefore are passed on to future generations thus improving the species.


                                                  

                                           (the spamalopes remained calm but wary)

(scientists who could safely visit the Wakendas)

 

Notice I said improvement within the species. Natural selection tells how organisms survive, not how they arrive. A polar bear becomes more suited than a black bear to survive in the polar icecap because of it's white fur but it doesn't change into a wolf or big foot.

 

 If so, we should see transitional forms all around us today - missing links.

 

 

 We should see them in the fossil record but we don't. There have been a number of hoaxes out there that have been peddled as missing links only to be proven false. And there are a number of artists' renderings based on preconceived evolutionary biases that vary from humanoid to orangutang like depending on what sketch artist draws them.

                                                      Archaeologists discover Lucy         

Even a fossil like "Lucy" which for a number of years has been a mainstay of human evolution has of late by numbers of scholars declared to be nothing but an extinct chimpanzee.

So, what's the big deal about evolution? Why don't we just accept it and go on? After all, believing in Creationism isn't part of the Roman's Road or an essential for salvation. It isn't in the Apostles Creed. Well, here are some of the reasons we need to reject evolution.

#1 It is incompatible with the teachings of the Bible, therefore if you subscribe to evolution it will weaken your view of the Bible and God...
                           

                                                 

... and evolutionists would love to see that happen. Here are some ways it is contrary to scripture

A. "After its kind" is used 10 times in Genesis one meaning the species are fixed. There is no interbreeding and species did not move from one type to another like evolution declares

                                    (OK, it's not Far Side but this is the next best thing)        

B. After day 6 God ended His work. If evolution is still taking place, God has really never rested.

C. God announced His world to be "very good". Is the grinding struggle of existence where only the strong survive and the rest are killed over millions of years - really "very good"?

                                                                Aaah... Life!!

                                                                 Metamorphesis

                                                        Alright... Let's keep moving along.
                                                               Nothing to see here.

 Actually people reject Christianity because of all the suffering in the world and how could a "good" God allow it. The question is why would there be any "good" in an evolutionary survival of the fittest world?

D. Romans 5:12 says, "thru one man's sin death entered into the world..." The theory of evolution is dependent on millions of years of death prior to Adam.

E. Jesus taught the Genesis record of creation in the gospels. (Matt. 19:4-6 and Mark 10:6-9)

F. Evolutionists teach life began in the sea but the Bible says it began on land. (Gen. 1:11)

                                                        Another great moment in evolution

G. Evolutionists say fish and marine animals began long before fruit trees, and insects came before birds. Genesis teaches the opposite. Evolution teaches fish evolved hundreds of millions of years before birds and the Bible says they came at the same time.

H. Evolution teaches man came from apes and the Bible teaches he came from the dust of the Earth.

                                                  " So, Mr. Darwin. Have you come to any
                                                               conclusions yet?"

                                                    As Thag worked feverishly to start a fire,
                                                  a Cro-Magnon man simply stepped up
                                                         and gave Theena a light.

                                                   " I've got your grades here, though I'm
                                                    afraid not all of you are moving up."

                                               

The problem is,

 if you follow the crowd and say, "The Bible isn't meant to be taken literally in scientific matters", we know where we are going. We find ourselves, for no good reason, on a slippery slope wondering where else is it not to be taken literally - miracles? the trinity? the virgin birth? the resurrection? 

#2. Evolution/Darwinism leads to a whole view of life which is antithetical to being a Christian. William Provine of Cornell University writes, "If Darwinism is true then there are 5 inescapable implications:

 there's no evidence for God; there's no life after death;

 there's no absolute foundation for right and wrong

 there's no ultimate meaning in life

 people really don't have free will."

 I would add another; man is no different from the animals.

                                                  "Fair's fair, Larry. We drew straws
                                                                  and you lost."

                                            

   Why are these cartoons even funny? Because you know in your hearts this isn't true. Don't be bullied into believing this lame theory where something comes from nothing, non-life brings forth life, non-intelligence gives rise to intelligence, information arises from non-information,

 material comes from non-material, and order comes from disorder. Where did something like Math come from?

                           

"We could easily conceive of a universe that is wholly haphazard or chaotic, described by no underlying mathematics at all. Instead we observe a universe with a deep and beautiful underlying mathematical structure that appears to be universal in space and time.Also that humans are able to perceive and understand this structure is quite surprising. One might argue that evolution would produce organisms with enough intelligence to flee from tigers or avoid falling off cliffs but why are human beings unique in their ability to understand quantum mechanics or molecular biology. These abilities did not confer any reproductive benefit on hunter-gatherers foraging for fruit and fending off predators." (Eugene Wigner) "A rational God gave us our rational cognitive faculties to understand the rational universe He created." (Neil Shenvi)

                         And where did language come from which is necessary to understand math?

 Marc Hauser in his Mystery of Language Evolution writes, "In the last 40 years there has been an explosion of research on the problem of evolution of language and along with the richness of ideas comes a poverty of evidence with essentially no explanation of how and why our linguistic computations and representations evolved."

 If science wants to come up with a theory on life excluding God, at least come up with one that isn't so insulting to our intelligence. Don't succumb to peer pressure...

 Have a backbone and say, "I don't believe it. I believe the Biblical account."

*Reason For Faith by Lee Stroebel pg 155