Answers In Genesis - Sunday School - Week 20

, let's go ahead and open with a word of prayer. As God's blessing on our time. Father, You are so good to us and You're so generous in that you have revealed yourself to us. We have your word where we can learn about you and, and we can come before you.

With, some knowledge about you and, and about our relationship with you. And Lord, I ask that you would open up our, our minds, help us to have understanding. By your spirit, may we see the things that we need to see this morning and, and be able to go forth with, a greater understanding of you and, and who you are and of what you've done for us. And so Lord, just ask for your blessing in Jesus' name.

Amen. This morning, we're going to be getting into, the age of the Earth. How old is the earth? What does the Bible tell us about that?

And we'll be looking at, of course, The difference of opinion, we'll be contrasting it with the difference of opinion that's, that's in our world today. And so that's the topic of our discussion. We have a, a short review this morning, then we're beginning into what God's word says and then applying it. Romans 5:12.

Says that That the death and disease, came into the world through one man. That's by one man sin entered into the world and death by sin. And so death came because of the sin of man and so one of the things that, that we look at with what the Bible has to say is Where does death come from? Death is a, is a clue as to the age of the earth and so on.

That's one of those things that we look at. another thing we've looked at in the past is, This quote that says, all researchers agree on certain basic facts. We know, for example, that humans evolved from ancestors we share with other living primates such as chimpanzees and apes. And this position.

is presented to delegitimize disagreement. Whenever a, a statement like this here says all researchers, that means that, that they're, They're already putting up a roadblock to anyone disagreeing with what they have to say. Because of course, if you disagree, then you're going against everyone. And so it's, it's a way of doing that.

It's, it's when a theory evolves into a proven fact. By consensus, it's, it's as if you put everybody in a room and they vote on what's true and what's not true. And Had that, if that was the case. That that if that was a valid way of, of finding truth.

Then we would still believe that the That the sun is what revolves around the Earth. Because that's what most people believed back in, in that day. And so, consensus becomes the primary driver of truth, at least it has in our world today. And, I think that, that it's valid for us to ask some serious questions about that.

Now, going into the track record, what is the track record of Of, of the people who take the evolutionary point of view. There's been some things that have been discovered that they have used to try to bolster their position. and so the track record though, as we have looked at is, is, is quite a bit checkered. There was the Java man that was discovered, turned out to be two different creatures that they had put together.

the Piltdown man ended up being a hoax. The the Nebraska man ended up being a pig because you see what's happening is they're finding one or two bones and they're building a whole creature out of it. And, there was the Ramipithecus, which turned out to be an, an ape. And then the dating of these things were all incorrect as well because they're, dating on what they hope it to be, not rather than what it really is.

There were the Neanderthals who Were found in a, in what's called the Neander Valley and They originally were con constructed to look ape-like, but that was because they misconstructed the bones. and then what they also later found was that these were actually people. and they had cert the qualities of people. They used jewelry.

They had musical instruments. They did cave paintings. They were capable of speech and they even buried their dead. So, The, the, again, it's, it's, it's something that was constructed to look a certain way and then it turned out they were just building on hopes.

The burial sites that they have That this one Like I'm having trouble reading everything here. Martin Lubenau, he wrote that he says most anthropologists recognize burial as being very human and a very religious thing. It's an act of, of religion, but the strongest evidence Neanderthals were fully human and of our species is that at 4 sites, Neanderthals and modern humans were buried together. so there's, they were human, they were just, people that, that had their own unique physical structures, maybe in their face or whatever, like your neighbor, that looks a little weird.

Then there's Lucy, in the, I practiced this yesterday, Australopithecines. she was discovered in 1974 and There was about 40% of, of the full skeletal structure or the fossil of it that was found, claimed to be 3.5 million years ago that it existed. And that it walked upright. But it actually You can see on the left there, what, what they actually found.

There were no feet attached, no feet in the skeletal structure. So they just, arbitrarily added feet that look like ours. And drew her to look like that. But in fact, there's no similarity in appearance to humans.

The, the long arms that were there are identical to chimpanzees in, in relationship, as far as percentage to the total height of the, of the body. the jaws are similar to chimpanzees. The upper leg bone is similar to chimpanzees. The legs are very ape-like.

The brain size overlaps chimpanzees, and the hands are similar to pig pygmy chimpanzee. And the feet were actually long and curved rather than human like ours. And so, The, the reality is, again, trying to To find the missing link, trying to find that, that creature that can support the theory of evolution and ends up to not be real. Or to be really.

A missing link, but it is actually an extinct species. Of an ape. the extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists in the trade secrets of paleontology. The evolutionary tree that adorns our textbooks have data only as at the tips and the nodes of their branches.

The rest is inference, however reasonable, but not evidence of fossils. And the, the, the problem with the theory of evolution is There's the tree that's been, many of you may have seen it. It's, it is basically a, a way of trying to describe how from single, a single creature, all the rest of, of life on the world. In animal life, comes to exist.

All comes from, from that single creature and so it branches out into all these things except there's no linkage, there's only, guesses. there's only the extrapolation of imagination, to get a linkage between what is way out here on the tips of the branches and what is actually at the root of the tree and that's all they have. And the idea of textbooks and objectivity. james Pertoff or Perloff wrote in his book that A Tornado in a Junkyard, that most textbooks avoid showing comprehensive tables of the discovered human fossils.

To do so would expose the contradiction, that, that there is no connection. Between human beings and with the rest of the animal world. In evolution and objectivity, Philip Johnson. In his, book, Darwin, Darwinism on Trial.

wrote this, the fossils provide much more discouragement than support for Darwinian, for Darwinism. I'm sorry. I'm not reading well here, when they are examined objectively, but objective examination has rarely been the object of Darwinist paleontology. And that's too bad because science really is supposed to be objective.

Science is supposed to work hard to find the truth. But when the truth That you want to find is, is a The thing that you to support your funding, to support your acceptance, truth always gets shaded. Truth is what gets sacrificed, many times. The Darwin, the Darwinist approach has consistently been to find some supporting fossil evidence, claim it as proof revolution, and then ignore the difficulties.

And so that's where, much of the scientific community is left. And there is, there are a lot in the, a lot of people in the scientific community, by the way, who, who realized this, who understand it, and, who have a lot of trouble with it. But they don't have something else to go to, so they stay with us until they have a better, a better choice, a better option for origins of life. A better option other than what the Bible says.

they want something that's, that's not biblical. Henry Morris, In his book, Many infallible proofs. Writes this, two widespread and very harmful misconceptions about the relation of science and the Bible are prevalent. One, very common among skeptics and unbelievers, is that the Bible is an antiquated religious book filled with scientific fallacies and mistakes, reflecting the naive cosmology of the Near East.

The other misconception is a widely held, is widely held by professing Christian people, namely that the Bible is a book of true religion, dealing solely with spiritual Subjects And that where it seems to touch on matters of objective science and history, it must be interpreted. Spiritually or allegorically rather than literally. The watchword of this school of thought is the Bible is not a book of science. But a religion.

And Henry Morris wrote this in 1974. Seeing, looking at, at the world of academia. And really also at the church and, and how the, the church was dealing with the arguments that academia was throwing at it and how the church was compromising its, it's beliefs, especially about the Bible. And so the church beginning to or was already very far along and going in the direction of, of, say, well, the the Bible is just for spiritual., things, it's not really for science and for, for finding, hard truth in our physical world.

And Henry Morris is pushing back on that. Henry, Henry Morris was himself a scientist and he started, or at least is one of the people that started the Institute of Creation Research down in San Diego and actually was very good. God used him to awaken the church. Two things and to help the church come back to literal interpretation of what the Bible has to say, particularly in the 1st 11 chapters of the Book of Genesis, that are so critical.

All right. millions of years, why we shouldn't accept. Millions of years. we have a, a couple of videos this morning we're gonna watch.

they're real short, but they're gonna be talking about particular things that have to do with the age of the Earth. So it just in the review of what he said, had to say, The reasons to question millions of years and why we really shouldn't accept it is in Genesis 15 and 11, we have Really clear, clearly what, what God is saying. Genesis 1, you have the world made in a week. in 5 and 11, you have the, chronogenealogies which we're gonna be looking at a little bit later.

Which give the dates, really, or at least the time periods of when people are born and so on. So, so we get a sense of how long it's been. In Exodus 20, we have the 10 commandments being given and the, the commandment that has to do with the Sabbath day. clearly states that in 6 days, God made the world.

And so, God is God, and that's God speaking to Moses. God is speaking it Himself. We have Noah's flood that, that, really is, a primary responsible, has primary responsibility for the geological, things that we see today, all over the world. Jesus, view in Mark chapter 10, the, the question on divorce.

Remember we talked about that. that, that's, that's a, Jesus himself saying that in the beginning, referring to man and woman being created, that they were created in the beginning. the fifth thing was the biblical origin of death. the 6th thing is that science can't prove.

millions of years, and that radiometric dating is not foolproof. Whoops. All right. But what about radio metric dating?

Let's look, we're gonna look at another video. it's not a type of courtship for nerds. That's how my mind works, when I see the radiometric dating, words play, play games with my mind. So anyway, it's not that.

But let's look at, at the, the next video that has to do specifically with these dating. Methods So the assumptions of radiometric dating have to do with the starting conditions of the parent-daughter of ratio, that the, all the daughter atoms come from the parent atoms and the rate of decay has always been constant. Those are big assumptions that, that are made in order to come up with millions of years. And That that's why it's, it shouldn't be.

viewed as being, as an ironclad argument, for the age of, of the earth. An example, some of the, there, there have been tests done. One of them is the lava dome in, at Mount Saint Helens crater. It was observed to form and cool in 1984.

Some of you remember when Mount Saint Helens blew up. It was analyzed in 1996. It, it contains so much arg argon 40, the daughter atoms, that it had a calculated age of 350,000 years. Now some of you, as I said, can remember that happening.

You're not 350,000 years old, right? Another one Was, In New Zealand on the size of Mount Noongawahoe. I, I practiced this one yesterday several times too. known to be less than 50 years old.

Yet it yielded radiometric ages of up to 3.5 million years. so we see that, that It's, it's not reliable. On the top of Grand Canyons, the same basalt flow was tested using 3 different dating methods. The ages calculated were 916 million years, 1.143 billion years, and 2.6 billion years.

That's a pretty big spread. again, so what, why should we then, sacrifice what we read in scripture for something as, as unreliable as this. It, it makes no sense, that, that we should, that we should feel compelled to give in to what they say. So then moving to other things, he, he brought up historical evidence and the, and the writings of, of historians through, throughout the centuries do give us clues about the age of the Earth.

Excuse me. So what about this and what evidence does the Bible give us for the age of the earth? There was a man named Usher. Archbishop James Usher, who, figured that the Earth was created October 3, 4004 BC.

Now that's pretty specific, but he had a lot of time to do calculations and so he worked things back. This is his real picture, and he was a very highly respected man in his time. he's highly educated., and he was a historian who devoted his life to defending the Christian faith. He meticulously researched the secular accounts of history and found that the Bible correlated with them.

Usher dedicated several years of his life compiling history of the world from creation to AD 70. There are some Bibles that you can get, at least I used to carry years ago, the old Schofield reference Bible, and at the top of the pages, it would give ushers dates for for the events that were happening on that page. his, his work was very highly regarded and respected. He was a well-respected scholar, theologian, ordained as a priest in the Anglican Church at age 20.

He earned his doctorate at 26. He was a meticulous researcher and one of history's most famous historians. In one of his greatest works was the Annals of the World, and he is buried in Westminster Abbey. And so that's James Usher who did the research and that's, his calculations did go back to creation being what we would call 4004 BC.

We'll be looking at that a little bit more in a, in a bit. this was it on the slide when you first came in. What is the purpose of a birth certificate or a death certificate? What about genealogy?

And, and are all genealogies the same? Well, a birth certificate gives proof of age, right? gives your name. What you're given to, what your nationality is, who your parents are.

It tells, tell us where you came from. And so that's what a birth certificate does, a death certificate course signifies when you died and usually the manner of your death. and then genealogies, is, is a working back of, of, where A person actually comes from and you can do, of course, tracing of your family history. in some cases, a long ways back, depending on your family and how many records there are.

But even that can be done today for people who are living today. The genealogies that we have in the Bible are really just the same thing. a recording of a, of a person's birth, how old the, the fathers and as we look at the chrono genealogies, which is where a lot of the information comes. From and.

And so I'd like us to look at, how much time do we have? Not much. We'll look at real quickly in Genesis chapter 5. And we can get a sense.

again, it, how this worked. Genesis 5:1, he says, this is the book of the generations of Adam. In the day when God created man, he made him in the likeness of God. He created them male and female, and he blessed them and named them man in the day that they were created.

When Adam had lived 130 years, He became father of a son in his own likeness according to his image and named him Seth. Now, as you will remember from the, the chapter before, Seth is not the first son, but Seth is gonna be the one that the rest of this genealogy is going to be going through. So Seth was born when Adam was 130 years old. Then the days of Adam after he became father of Seth were 800 years, and he had other sons and daughters.

So all the days that Adam lived were 930 years and he died. Seth lived 105 years and became the father of Anosh. Then Seth lived 807 years after he became the father of a notion, he had other sons and daughters. So all the days of Seth were 912 years and he died.

Anos lived 90 years and became the father of Kan. When Enosh lived 815 years after he became the father of Canaan and he had other sons and daughters. So all the days of Enosh were 905 years and he died. And it goes on in that manner of these descendants of Adam and then Seth.

So, We have here a time frame, time references, years, and it goes all that way. down to Noah. And then in chapter 11, in verse 10, it starts again. With Noah and his descendants, and it goes down through Shem, because the line that, that, of genealogy that, that the Bible is going to trace.

And we'll, we'll see this also in Luke, but, the, this line of genealogy is gonna be tracing to the Messiah, to the one who will come to rescue the world. And so, The father's age is given at the son's birth. These genealogies can be called chronogenealogies. Since they give the time frame for the each relationship.

And that is in contrast with the genealogies given in First Chronicles and also in Luke, where the, the time frames aren't given. It's just the names. The names of the fathers, the sons, and then, and so on. And so, there we just have a list of names, whereas with the chrono genealogies, We have the the, the how old the father was when the son was born and so therefore we can track back with time.

Do I sound thirsty? One of the things, That comes out in reading about this though is that that can pop up cause we can, we can look at this and say, OK, we can trace times. But then there are skeptics. He'll say, but that can't be real because look how old these ages are.

In fact, if you look at the 1st 4, Adam, Seth, and Ocean, Kan. all are over, live over 900 years. And so skeptics point to these ages as obvious flaws in the Bible. And there's something we should ask ourselves.

Is there any reason, from the text to assume that these men did not live to the ages recorded? And, you look at it, because, because it's just stating it as a matter of fact. this is it. It's not trying to defend it.

It's not trying to, say anything about it being unusual. It's just stating it as if It was 60 years and you have 900 years. How could that be? And really, as I was thinking about this, the only, this is commonly how people reject.

information that's given to them. Well, I've never seen it, so it can't be true. It's how they see it. So if I say that I've never met anyone over 900 years old, so therefore, no one could have lived over 900 years.

That's how a person would have to reject what it says because it's just saying it as a point of fact. And as we get past the flood, And we see again the ages in the chrono genealogies, what we're gonna be, be looking at, we see a, a dramatic tapering off or, or coming down of the, of the length of life. It, it gets much shorter. Some have said that the long ages of the pre-flood patriarchs resulted from lunar months being incorrectly counted as years.

this is one explanation some people have given. However, not everyone in that chronic genealogy lived 900 years. Some of them were much shorter lives. And so if that were true, then these two characters, Mahalel and Enoch, would have been 5 years old when they became Christ when they became fathers rather.

So how were these long life spans possible? The best explanations. Seem to be the original perfect condition of God's creation. If mankind was created perfectly without any genetic mistakes or diseases, then there is no reason that they could not have lived much longer than we do today.

Geneticists call the accumulation of genetic mutations and diseases the genetic load. Because our genes are subject to 6000 years of decay, since the fall and God's curse on the universe, we live much shorter lifespans. There are also various environmental factors that could have an impact on that. after the flood, we see the lifespans drop, drop off to 600 for Shem, then to 400.

And then less than 200 and down to around 100 by the time of Joseph. This is just a diagram of that, of that particular thing. We're up to the time of the flood, it seemed to be for the most part, pretty high up there with a couple of exceptions that we already talked about. But then, you have Shem and then it just drops way down and, and it's very reasonable to assume, to believe.

That after the flood, the environment was much different in the world. And what those differences are, we really just speculate right now, but that is a very Reasonable, conclusion to come to. How are these long life spans possible? Human beings would have lived forever if it weren't for the fall.

See, death came because of sin, and so, It, it's reasonable to think that, that God, God made the human body to, to last a long time. And even with the curse of death at the beginning, at those that, those beginning Years, they could have lived a very long time. Ultimately, we believe God's word that God has the wisdom and power to create men who lived for nearly 1000 years after the fall. That they, it is possible because of the way they're created.

This is a, a diagram. Of, of actually how it looks when you stack up their, their lifespans with each other and and how they're relating to each other and it's a very remarkable, thing to think about because in the way we live. Our interaction with our ancestry goes back. At the most, 2 generations.

Maybe 3, maybe we'll have a great grandparent for a short time. I, I had a great grandmother. I think she died when I was 2. So I really don't remember her.

And so sometimes we'll have that great grandparent. For the most part, it's just a grandparent. That, that we have a relationship with. But you can see the overlap of life spans and, and what a remarkable thing that must have been at that time.

And so we have a, a chronology, you can see it from this chart. how old each one was. And in fact, we gave out a handout last week. That had this information on it of, of being able to chart out how old each father was when they had a, had a child and then adding those, those up and we see the flood occurring according to those, those ages at the year 1656.

It's if you start The week of creation in year one. Some say the genealogies contain gaps. However, the possibility of gaps is irrelevant to the year of Adam's creation, even if many generations existed between two consecutive patriarchs on this chart, the time between their births is fixed by Genesis, no matter how many generations might be missing. For example, Enoch was born 105 years after Seth's birth.

The writer or compiler of this information had a careful, systematic, and mathematical way of linking the chronology into one continuous family record. In contrast to other genealogies in the Bible. And so, So that we, the, the way it's written there in Genesis is so definite and so clear that, that the really the reasonable thing to do is to accept it for what it says. And that there are no gaps because you have the father, the son, and then that son becomes a father and he has a son, and, and his age is given in each case.

So imagine Noah speaking with Lame. Nelaic is Noah's father, in case you didn't remember, and he would say, Dad, can you tell me again about the times you talked to Adam? About the Garden of Eden. That's mind-boggling, isn't it?

That you could ask your father a question like that. I know some of us think our fathers are really old, but, But this is how it, it actually Looks, you have Lamick. Already alive when Adam dies. probably in his early twenties or so.

I haven't calculated it out, but still alive. At, at Adam's passing, or Abraham saying to Shem, who is his ancestor, Tell me, how did you and your brothers, Ham and Japheth and your father, Noah build the ark? What an amazing historical resource that would be. So we see here.

Abraham. Being born well before Shem died and, and they lived in the same region. So there's no reason to think they didn't have that conversation because the flood would be a great curiosity and the, and the ark and, and all of that. Getting back to James Usher, is he the only one that, that ever did this dating?

No, actually, there's been, been, many others. Here's just a list of names. And these are listed in order of The longest period of time that they came back, came up with. for, the, the beginning, of, going back to the beginning, so you have the oldest or the longest period being at 5500 years.

And then going down and, and. Some of these men I've heard of, most of them I have not, but You get down, you see Usher there, you see another one there at 4000. Years, These are before Christ, by the way, 4000 years before Christ. And then going down to as low as 38, 36.

So around a 1700 year difference, but not very much. This is, we're talking still relatively small difference and we're, we're also talking about a very young Earth still. We also have the Hebrew calendar. I, I think, to me, this is really interesting, but since the Middle Ages, the Anno Mundi designation from the Latin, which means the beginning of the world, is what they've used in the Hebrew calendar.

In the Hebrew calendar, the current year right now is, Anno Mundi 5776. So it's the Hebrew calendar, the, the, the Orthodox Jews will, will do believe. That the that creation was 5,776 years ago. that's their, their belief.

And. We're about halfway through that year. Now, here's, here's then the contrast. According to the biblical chronologies, approximately 6000 years is how old the earth is.

According to evolutionary theory, We're talking billions of years just for the Earth and 13 billion years for the whole universe. it's Gonna be hard to reconcile. All right. As we've talked about many times, it is important to understand That the lenses through which we view the world impacts what we think about it.

When we consider the age of the Earth. everyone looks at the same evidence and interprets it based on different starting assumptions. And that's, that's our human reality, isn't it? it's, we're gonna have starting assumptions.

We have to have starting assumptions. And we're all gonna come to different opinions. One, just a simple Exercise to see how people can, can come to different assumptions. Take it to a whole different observable event.

you can have 5 different sports writers. Watch an NFL game and see a particular play and then be asked the next day about that particular play and get 5 different opinions as to why that happened. Why? Because they have their own assumptions.

That's built into their mind as they're looking at that play and they're analyzing what went on. That's how we are as human beings. And that's why we need outside resource material to confront our assumptions and either throw our assumptions out or validate the assumptions that we have. There is no way we're gonna get.

Outside resource material from science. It can't happen because no one was there to see it. But if we can. Look at what God has said, and if we have confidence in what God has said, I think we can come to good understanding.

And that's, that affects how we look at the world. We want to be careful not to get too caught up though in the scientific arguments. And failed to point to the truths of God's word and the gospel. Because the point of this whole thing is not to be more scientific than everybody else.

The point of this is to, first of all, affirm our faith in what God has said. And second of all, to help others come to faith in Jesus Christ because the whole point of all of this. Jesus Christ, which is the point that John makes in his, in the beginning of his gospel, when he says, in the beginning, In the beginning, he points to the Creator, the Word, who became flesh and dwelt among us. And the whole thing about that is taking people from the beginning into the human condition to what God has done about it.

And that's where we need to be making sure that we are focusing our attention on. It is God's word that sheds light upon scientific discovery. By bringing us to the Creator. The one who made all that stuff that we are discovering.

I have mentioned before that one of my favorite, in fact, my favorite book is, is Knowing God by Jerrett Packer. He says something in his chapter, God incarnate, that really sticks with me and I wish to Get into that if I can find it here in my notes. He says it is no wonder at the beginning of his chapter that thoughtful people find the gospel of Jesus Christ hard to believe. You have the atonement for one thing, which is death on the cross for the sins of the world.

That's hard to believe. You have a resurrection. Can someone really come back from the dead? You have the virgin birth, which is a biological impossibility.

You have gospel miracles. You have a man who walks on water, who feeds 5000 people with just a few loaves of bread and a couple of fish. You have the healings and, and so on. All these miracles, that the, the gospels tell us about.

So it's no wonder that people find the gospel of Jesus Christ hard to believe. But here's what he goes on to say, the really staggering Christian claim. Out of all those things is that Jesus of Nazareth was God made man. That the second person of the Godhead became the 2nd man, determining human destiny, the 2nd representative head of the race, and that he took humanity without loss of deity.

Once the incarnation is grasped as reality, these other difficulties dissolve. The incarnation is in itself an unfathomable mystery, but it makes sense of everything else that the New Testament contains. You see, When we can accept That God became a man. If we can get to that point.

The rest of everything makes sense because if God is a man, All of those miraculous, impossible things become possible. In fact, they not only become possible, they become, they become likely. It probably did happen like it, it is told us because he's God. And God does things way different than we do things.

He has the power to do those things. And so, The, the fact that if we can accept that God became a man, Then we can accept all of those miracles. And, and I see a correlation here with accepting the idea. Of, of the Genesis account being literally true, accepting the literal interpretation there, because God has the power to do that.

And if we can see, see God as being an all-powerful and very active God, very personally involved, Then it's, it makes sense. And it fits that the account that's given to us in Genesis. It is true, that it is literally true. So what is more mind-boggling?

God taking the form of a man in order to rescue us. Or that God made the whole thing in 6 days. If you think about it, I think it's a bigger stretch of the mind. That God would become one of us.

That's, that's mind-blowing. Yet we tend to accept it so easily as Christians. And we celebrate it every year. We don't celebrate.

The beginning of the world, we celebrate the more significant thing, which is God's intervening into the affairs of mankind and rescuing mankind, making a plan of rescue. If God would go to this extent of such a personal rescue, why would he not also tell us plainly how this all began? All right, let's close in prayer. You, oh God are the creator of all things.

And it's before you that we live, that we move, that we have our being. It's before you, Father. That our lives are open to and that you see us, us. And you have been personal to us.

And Father, it is you that called us out of darkness into light to give us understanding. You're very generous to us and And so in gratitude, we come before you, thanking you for Your word. for its trustworthiness and for what it tells us. And thank you for not leaving us alone, to just wander around to try to figure it out for ourselves or leaving us alone to face the consequences.

Of who we are. But God, you have rescued us. And as we celebrate this even more later today and in our, our worship, May our hearts be filled with the goodness of your grace. And be filled even with a longing for more and more of you.

Thank you for, for all that you mean to us. Amen.