It la. It. It. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome. Glad everybody's here today on this second Sunday of the year. I started to say first Sunday, but it's not, Is it the second Sunday of the year? Welcome and good to see everybody. We are going to do a little singing and a little preaching, and that'll be a good time. Amen. Good. Thank you. Appreciate that, Frank. Glad somebody's good with it. Yes, why don't you know, since it is little snow outside, might be a little more snow today. Let's sing about heavenly sunlight. How's that sound? Stand together, choir. Come on. Who's singing with us today? We got. We got Luca, we got Kamale, we got Susanna. Charles, you singing your. Your, your. We just ought to have all the boys sing here. Brenda, come on. I think they'll be perfect. I got my eye on them looking at you. You know, I noticed last week some of your grandkids were singing along like they must know these songs. Yeah, or at least they were trying. Or at least they. At least they moved their mouth at the right time. Let's sing Heavenly Sunlight. What number is that? Hymn number 489. And let's sing the first and last 489. Heavenly sunlight looking in sunlight all of my journey over the mountain through the deep veil Jesus has said I'll never forsake the promise divine that never can fail Heavenly sunlight Heavenly sunlight Flooding my soul with glory divine Hallelujah Singing his praises Jesus is mine Now, I'm gonna have you stop that. Usually I play the piano, but I've been training Luca to play the piano. And I keep telling Luca, it's got to be louder. It's got to be louder. It's got to be louder. He says it's too loud, it's too loud. I said it's got to be louder because we will never sing with the piano if it's not louder. Turn it up and let's back up to the beginning, because now we started that second verse there. This is a little training conference here. There we go. Now turn it up and let's do it. We'll have a little intro, ladies and gentlemen, on the third verse. Here we go. In the bright sunlight Ever rejoicing Praising his friends to mansions above Singing his praises gladly I'm walking Walking in sunlight Sunlight of love Heavenly sunlight Heavenly sunlight Flooding my soul with glory divine Hallelujah I am rejoicing Singing his praises Jesus is mine thank you. You may now stop playing the piano and thank you. Let's have a word of prayer. Heavenly Father, thank you for the sunlight that shines from above, shines through the word of God and illumines, becomes a light to our feet and a lamp to our path. And we're grateful for this and we're grateful for the gathering as we come together today to just sing a little bit and relax and praise the Lord. We ask this in Jesus name. Amen. You may be seated, ladies and gentlemen. Thanks for being here, choir. Thanks for helping us sing a little bit. And we have just a few announcements. As you know, I was out of town last week, so we didn't have the Wednesday night program or the men's breakfast on Thursday. But we're back. I'm. I'm back. We're back, ready to go. We've got sloppy joes Wednesday night. Nice, simple January comfort food. How's that? Sloppy joes Wednesday night, 5:00 in the fellowship hall. And then we'll come back here and do the Gospel of mark at 6:00. And you know, I am predicting in 2025, we are going to complete the Gospel of Mark. How's that? We are sailing along and have a couple more chapters to go with. And it's been an interesting and a good verse by verse study. Come join us. Then we got men's breakfast Wednesday at 8:00 in the fellowship hall. Also Thursday. Yeah, I told Luca just yesterday, I tell him a lot of things. I said I need a little thing and a little mic in which you tell me when I misspoke. I said, you don't even have to tell me what. All you have to do is just say misspoke and then I can go back and think about it. Me and Joe Biden, we need this. Okay. But anyway, we moving on Thursday we're having men's breakfast and you can read. How's that? Check it out. And glad everyone's here today. We're always delighted to have guests worshiping with us. And we have a little gift that we give out to our guests. It's a coaster, a slate coaster. It will last you forever as a memento that you will never forget. And when you see it, you can pray for us as well. Has a little church, a picture of our church. And it says America's greatest tiny church, Taos. First Baptist Taos, New Mexico. And we're delighted. We got people from First Baptist Dallas. They don't claim to be America's greatest tiny church. That was the first mega church. I remember going to First Baptist Dallas when I was in college. I was so awed as WA Criswell stood up there. This is the pastor speaking from the pulpit. He would give his nice exegetical Bible based sermons. And anyway, that was one that buildings burned down now, didn't it? Yeah, sad. But anyway, rebuilding it. Nice. So anyway, that's not America's greatest tiny church. This is. And I bet at First Baptist Dallas they do not give coasters to the guests. And I bet they also don't make them introduce themselves. Yeah, in fact they probably buy into that argument that says never introduce the guests. It embarrasses them. But when you come to a place like America's greatest tiny church, you want people to know you are here, Right? So we make them introduce themselves. So from Dallas, Texas, we'll start right there. Go ahead, stand, introduce yourself to. I'm Steve Robertson. I teach at Taos and so or teach at SMU in Taos. So SMU has a campus here? Yes, outside of town a little ways. And I taught here 10 years ago and I remember coming to that, to this church then and I thought when I come back, I'm going to be sure to come back so. Excellent. Scott, the statistics teacher at SMU teaching here. How long do you get to teach here in Taos? It's a 10 day session. 10 days, 8 days. So we got here Sunday and we leave Thursday. Somebody is going to be brain fried after 10 days of statistics. Hi guys, I'm Andrew. I'm an engineering student at SMU and am studying a class called Vibrations here. And it's a lot very lo. But it's really pretty. Wish we got some more snow but I think we got more than we did in Dallas. So. Yeah, yeah. Did you say your step? Classical Vibrations. Is that a rock group from the 50s or classical. But this would be the place to study classical vibrations because we have the Taos hum. Is that part of the. Yeah. Okay. Classical vibrations. I have never. I'll have to. I'll have to look that up. Thanks for being here, Andrew. Yes. Okay. We're glad you're here. Learning classical vibrations and thanks for being here. We have in the back row some guests and we have Ed and his daughter and his son in law. Law. Did I get all that right? And Ed lives that. Well, all of them now. They're neighbors behind the fence there. So whichever one of you wants to do the introductions, go for it. I'm Robert. It's my wife Mary. My father in law, Ed. We bought a house here in 20. 2020. But we've been working overseas most recently in Saudi Arabia as teachers. We just moved back finally permanently a few months ago. So we're delighted to be here. And we work at test academy and pretty sure he's retired. We're working pretty hard. Amen. Robert. Ed and Mary. I knew it was a easy name. That's why I forgot it. We're glad. I've seen Ed walking around here for several years now and talked to him when he's out walking the dog and. And always has a big smile and is nice guy. That's why I've been inviting him to men's breakfast. I hope. Now I'm gonna. I'm gonna. I'm gonna get him there. Thanks for being here. For moving from Saudi Arabia teaching in Taos now. Is that right? Yeah. Excellent. God bless you. I think the rest of us are home folk. Why don't you stand up? We're glad to have the boys back. This is our second Sunday so they don't have to reintroduce themselves. Why don't you stand, shake someone's hand, tell them hi. Glad you're here today. Those of you online were delighted you're here as well. It. It. It. Amen. Let's take our hymnals and go to hymn number 353. I know whom I have believe. It. 353. Let's. Let's just take our hymnals and stand together and sing it together. I Know whom I have Believed. And we are going to sing. Sing verses 1 and 4 on this one. 354. I know not why God's wondrous grace to me have they known. Though I am believing in him, redeemed me as his own. But I know whom I have believed and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I've committed unto him against that day on the last. I know not when my Lord may come at night or noonday fair. Nor if I walk the vale with him for me in the air. But I know whom I have believed and am persuaded that he is able to which I committed unto him against that day. And now we go that. Hey, by the way, you know that it's. It says in the asterisk. But in case you missed it, I. Nor if I walk the veil with him, nor meet him in the air that you know. I don't know which one's going to happen. Meet him in the air. Of course, as a reference to the rapture. And walk the veil with him is to go into the veil, the valley of the shadow of death. I don't know if I'm going to die or I'm going to be swept up out of here. But I know whom I have believed in and persuaded that he is able to keep that which I've committed unto him against that day. A beautiful reminder. Hymn number 449 because he lives they call him Jesus he came to love he ran for him he lived and died to buy my pardon an empty grave is there to prove my Savior lives. That was a chorus we were singing. Is the other one in there? Try the other one. We'll just keep on singing a little bit more. Let's see where this who starts. We didn't practice this week. Can you tell? God sent his son they called him Jesus he came to the earth he land for him he lived and died to you hurt my pardon an empty grave is there to prove my Savior lives Because he lives I can face tomorrow because he lives A fear is gone Because I know he knows the future and life is worth living Just because He lives to the last and then one day I'll cross the rivers I'll fight my side of war with pain and then as death gives way to victory I'll see the light of glory and I know he wins because he wills I can face tomorrow because he lives all fear is gone Because I know he holds a future and life is to living just because he lives Amen. You may be seated. As we come into a little time of offertory before we jump into the the sermon here today and our missionaries of the month, Alan and Kara Ray, they have been our missionaries the month before and we keep them in our prayers in Thailand as they are working with Burmese refugees is their job. They work with through Overseas Missionary Fellowship which was started, you may not know by a famous missionary named Hudson Taylor. Started the Overseas Missionary Fellowship under a different name at that time but still going today. Let's have a word of prayer. Heavenly Father, thank you for the study and learning we will have today. Thank you for your watch care over us and into this time. We pray for those that have endured not only winter storms, but we do pray for those in California who are suffering the devastating effects of those fires that are taking place there. And ask your watch care there of those who are fighting those fires especially and give them wisdom and strength. We pray for the Rays and their children as they work in this refugee community in Thailand with the Burmese and ask that you give them great success in sharing the gospel there in that needy place. And as we come into the time of preaching as well, we Ask that you would. You would help us to hear, to learn, help me to communicate that which is true from the word of God. We ask this in Jesus name. Amen. Let's have just a little short time of offering. Our kids can be dismissed to the kids club. And we will then, if you'd like to give an offering now, there's a box back there. You can do it now, you can do it later. And then we'll come into our time of preaching. And if you would turn to Genesis, the third chapter we started last week, a little. A little sleuthing as we go through the Scripture on what I am calling here, dispensations, decoded. And we are looking at how the Bible lays itself out in various dispensations. And looking at that on what I have called an orthotomeo quest. An orthotomeo quest. I bet you haven't heard that word since last week, right? It's a Greek word, means to rightly divide, make a straight cut right where it needs to go in order to not make an utter confusion out of the Bible, naming and claiming things that don't belong to us because those are divided out from us. And so I am convinced that the Bible becomes such a wonderfully clear book. I don't know if you can make classical vibrations clear, but the Bible can be clear. The Bible can be used by anyone anywhere, especially if they know, hey, here's a few things you ought to know going into this. Here's a few. A few pointers. And one of those is you have to rightly divide the word. You have to take that which, for example, belongs to Israel and leave it for Israel, that which belongs to the body of Christ, and put that in the body of Christ. And to do even that basic, you have to know things like, well, there was law and there is grace. There was an Edenic dispensation. Edenic, as in they lived in the Garden of Eden. That's what we started out with last week. And we are going to continue there this week in that. And we will continue this little ortho tomao quest. But before we do, let me get over here. There we go. I put on your bulletin today a picture of this fine fellow, Simon Greenleaf. He died in 1853. How many of you know who Simon Greenleaf is? That's what I thought. Simon Greenleaf was a professor of law at Harvard University. He was a believer, and he believed that the Bible was true, that it was accurate. And he took a lawyer's perspective into determining the truth. Of the Word. There's been a number of people that have done this down through the years, but perhaps none of them have been more legally qualified than Simon Greenleaf, again, Harvard law professor. He took the gospels, he wrote a book just before he died, actually wrote a book. The, the book has, you know, how they did in the 1850s. The name goes on from here to next Sunday. It's one of those really long. But the Gospels examined is the short title, the Gospels Examined. And he goes into just the four Gospels and he examines the evidence that's given from a judicial perspective saying, would this be allowed in a court of law? And going through that, his final conclusion was if we used the evidence from the Gospels that it would legally withstand the scrutiny of being allowed into a court of law and it would be sufficient evidence to prove the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Now you and I, I think we don't believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ because there's some legal validity to the claims that are given there. Of course we would. We're not surprised by his, his discovery there. But what I like about him. And actually on the first of each one of these sermons, I'm going to introduce you to someone who's only slightly related to the sermon. How's that this guy's slightly related to the sermon? Because we're on a sleuthing expedition. We're trying to discover is the word of God accurate, can the Word of God be used and how do we use the Word of God and how can we trust the Word of God? So Simon Greenleaf is our, our inspiration for that today. Last week I talked to you about the first dispensation, which I called the Edenic dispensation. Often it's called the dispensation of innocence. I'm going to go with the dispensation of Eden because the spectacular fact about it is where they were and when the dispensation ended. The spectacular fact was they're not there anymore. They're outside of the Garden of Eden. So this dispensation within the garden, last week we talked about the blessings that were in that garden dispensation, how they were able to talk with God, walk with God in the cool of the day, have a, a face to face relationship with God. We have not had that since today. I want to talk about the consequences of the fall and I want to talk about that is the consequences of being outside of Eden and a couple of the lies or deceptions that Satan brought that still exist and are perhaps foundational even to the wiles or the schemes of the devil, as we're warned about by the apostle Paul. And we will take a little look. Here's a picture for you from. I should have learned how to say his name because I'm not familiar with that artist Masaccio. Let's go with that. Sounds Italian, doesn't it? I'll have a pizza with a little moustachio. And he did this in 1525, by the way. This is not how he did this. I gave you the unrestored version. In the early 1800s, one of the pastors of the church that it was hanging in decided, we need some fig leaves. And so they put the fig leaves in. Since then, in 1980, I believe they restored it. And. And it actually has great color now, but it also doesn't have fig leaves. And I thought, well, you know, this is church. You leave the fig leaves. So there. There we go. But it's. It's a famous picture on the expulsion of the garden. And one of the reasons it is so famous is the expressions on their face. Now Adam has his face covered in shame, and Eve has that look of. I don't know, a look of horror, a look of being completely distraught. And I think it does convey pretty well. Hey, now we have really got a problem here outside of the Garden of Eden. As they are leaving the Garden of Eden, you can't see the rest of the picture. It's on a pillar in one of these churches. There's an angel up there, one of the cherubs, of which there were multiple cherubim in the scripture, but one of the angels there guiding them outside of the garden. And that would be where, of course, they were going to have to. Have to stay and have to. To. To live. Now, I want to consider this, the introduction. We often call it the curse. Adam and Eve, of course, ate from the forbidden tree and they entered into the time, which, of course, again today we call it the curse. Living under the curse. There are a couple of consequences of living under the curse. One is we no longer have access to the Tree of Life. That is the thing that we need. Without the Tree of Life, eventually we are going to die. You got it. And mankind, of course, has been on a pursuit of the Tree of Life or the Fountain of Youth, or whatever it may be to try to come to overcome this problem. We're going to talk today about some of the means at which we're trying to overcome this problem in humanitarian sense, in which we've tried to overcome this. But we are left without the tree of life. The second thing that we are left with is we are left without a direct communication with God. We used to. Well, maybe I should put this the other way. God used to come sit down and talk with man, say, hey, here's an animal. What would you like to name it? There was a communion that went through there and that is gone. Now. I want to propose to you, I proposed this before, but I want to go ahead and propose it to you again that when mankind left the garden, Adam and Eve left the garden. I think this one won't startle you. I think they looked exactly the same. Adam was recognizable, had the same facial features, the same physical features. Nothing changed about Adam physically when he left the garden. Right. Okay, so he ended up with some fig leaves. That was the only thing that. And that was not a, you know, that wasn't part and parcel of who he was. You could paint those out of there, whatever it was. So physically he was the same. I would even say emotionally he's the same. Other than of course, the effects that come from some traumatic event that have a lasting effect. Emotionally, he's the same. He has added now shame, which he didn't have, and the artist here has put shame on their will. Remember, they were both naked and not ashamed was where we left off last week. And now they, you know, I was ashamed and I hid myself because I was naked. I was ashamed in my. So emotionally he's added some things, but they're only the thing that are added by virtue of his experience. Now, many theologians, and I actually disagree with this and this is what I want to propose to you. Many theologians believe that his very nature was changed. Now. He was cursed in all ways. He became totally depraved or radically corrupt. There was was no way that he could communicate with God. Even if God would, would offer communication. He could not hear it, he could not receive it. He would never do anything except that which was self serving. In other words, let's go ahead and call it sinful. That was his way and that his nature changed. Now I disagree with that. I think that he is the very same person, but he is now separated from God. His problem now is not that his nature changed. His problem now is that his location has changed. And you know, there are some things I went, many of you know, I went to Branson this week to do some work for our annual conference. This over Labor Day weekend. And after I got, after I left, 30 miles away, Shelly said, Did you go to the Five and Dime? I said, No, I didn't go to the Five and Dime. Remember how I wanted you to buy her something there? She saw something the last time she was there that she did not buy and she wants it. And I was already 30 minutes away. I didn't have a nature problem. I had a location problem. Hallie now has no gift from the Five and die. If anyone's going to the Five and Dime and Branson, call me first, okay? But nonetheless, I hope she's not listening today online. But it's a location problem. You and I, the greatest problem with the curse, the fall that we live under, is we're not in the Garden of Eden anymore. If we lived in the Garden of Eden, our problems would be solved, right? We could just go up to God. We could eat from the tree of Life, we could have things fixed. But we're not in the Garden of Eden. And so it is a location problem that we have some of the effects of that problem or the greatest effect of that problem is we are separated from God and we can't fix the separation. We need someone to come from the outside, like God, and fix this problem that we have. And we will see that again later. So this affects all of humanity. Honestly, you know, sometimes, and I wish I had more time, this is going to be one of those statements that will bring up more questions than answers. But sometimes we'll say to a person, well, the reason that I wouldn't say it this way, I'm more of a gracious person. The reason you're going to spend eternity in hell is because I know what you did last summer. It has to do with your particular sin. Listen, whether you are the worst sinner that ever lived or you are pure as the driven snow, as I'm sure most people here are, doesn't matter. You're still separated from the tree of Life. You're separated from being able to have a communion with God. Something's got to fix the location problem that we are in. So the consequences of the fall are the location problem. But Satan came along and this is where we're. We're going to now actually get into the scripture. Go to Genesis, chapter three. And in verse one, it tells us how, of course, this began to happen. As it says now, the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field. Let me stop right there just a moment. When we think of serpent, I probably even have it here on the next picture. Let's see when we. Yeah, there we go. A picture of Satan tempting Eve. And we have the serpent wrapped around the Tree there. And he looks. That serpent looks like a vicious, vicious thing, right? And the serpent, we. We picture. Every picture that you can find out there has the serpent as a snake. I. I think this is another thing. You can go on this later. I think that probably is completely a flawed view of what it was. The. The actual Hebrew word is Nahash. Nahash. Nahash is a word that means the shining thing, remember? Later we come up with a name given through the scripture, a name that we attribute to Satan, and that is Lucifer. Of course, Lucifer is the shining one loose the light. So here is the Nahash, the shining thing that we interpret as a serpent, whatever it is. I'm just going to say it probably wasn't like if I. If I walked up into a garden in that thing, I think I'd get the EBGB's right? Especially if it's talking to me, I'm going to turn and run. I think it probably. It's a very different thing. I would not even be surprised. I can't prove this in a court of law, but I would not even be surprised if Adam and Eve and this shining thing had not had conversations before that. Good conversations even. I'll. I'll tell you how weird I even am. You're gonna. You guys are gonna go away saying he's from Taos. I would not be surprised if people and animals didn't talk to each other in. In the. In the Garden of Eden. I may be wrong with that. I'm not going to stake anything on it, but I saw it in a Disney movie once, and so it must be true. There was a perfect communion that took place. And whatever kind of communication it was, I think it was probably better than the communication you and I even have with our little dog. You know, that sometimes communicates very well. And other times we're like, what do you want? So there's this communion, this communication that takes place. I think maybe they had discussed before. And so back to chapter three, verse one. The serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. He said unto the woman, yea, hath God said, let's just stop right there. I want to say this is the chief deception. He's going to come in in a moment to two lies. But this is the deception that he introduces into it. It's a deception that takes place in her own mind. He's trying to stir it up. He's subtle in the way. He doesn't just come out blunt and say, God's a liar. But he plants the seed in there. Could it be that God is self serving? Could it be that God has not shared the full story? That you don't have the complete truth? Yea, hath God said. I want to say, you know again, in, in the New Testament scripture when Paul warns us that we ought to be aware of the wiles of the devil. This is the, you know, the mo of the devil. I think it always goes back to here. He, he inserts in our minds a question about what has God said? What really is the word of God and the will of God, of the revelation of God. So it comes here. Yea, hath God said. And from this, this immediate deception is going to bring two lies in a moment. Let's continue reading in verse one. Yea, hath God said, ye shall not eat out of every tree of the garden. And the woman said unto the serpent, we may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden, but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden. God hath said, you shall not eat of it, neither shall you touch it, lest ye die. Now we won't get into the intricacies, but God had basically said that. God had said, you shall not eat of it. In the day that you eat of it, you shall surely die. That the Hebrew, by the way, you shall surely die is. We sometimes misunderstand it because they didn't die that day. We know and yet surely die is hey, on that day, death sets in, the process starts and you shall surely die. How many of you know that, save for the hope of the rapture, you're dying. Did you know that Charles and I. Not as much because hair is an expression of death, right? Dead things leaving your body. I don't know if ours already left our body or what, trying to come back. But anyway, you know, we're all terminal. It's coming somewhere along the way. And it's because, hey, we're separated from the thing that provides life, the tree of life. You shall surely die. Now she did add to it there. You neither shall ye touch it. We don't have at least any recording that God said it. He could have because we don't know absolutely everything God said. But she maybe in an abundance of caution says, hey, don't eat of it. If we're not going to eat of it, don't touch it. It's kind of like the old time Baptist, right? Don't dance because dancing leads to kissing, kissing leads to gambling. Okay, so an abundance of caution that is given there. That she goes with end of verse three. Let's go ahead and read four and five, and then we'll pick up on a couple of those things. In verse four, the serpent said unto the woman, ye shall not surely die. That's an absolute contradiction. She. She. He. He started the. The thought. Maybe I'm misunderstanding or maybe God's a little crooked in there some. She gets that. He gets that going and then he just comes with. With lie number one, ye shall not surely die. Verse 5. For God know that in the day you eat thereof, that your eyes shall be opened and ye shall be as gods. That's lie number two. Knowing good and evil. Two lies. I'm going to take them in backwards order. We're going to work from the bottom up. Ye shall be as gods and ye shall not die. So he's got one. Deception hath God said two lies? Lie number one is, or in the order that we're going to take it anyway, is ye shall be as gods. Here is a picture from Salvador Dali, 1960, and it is entitled the Birth of Divinity. I have no clue what it means. I don't think there is meaning to Salvador Dali paintings. But here it is. The birth as he pictures it. The birth of divinity. I don't know. It gives me the idea of sort of mystical. It gives me the idea of sort of coming out from the earth. It gives me the idea of, let's say, flawed a little bit because the face is. It's no Mona Lisa. Wouldn't you agree with me? And so maybe planting the idea that, hey, God is. He's. He's part of us, he's part of the earth, he's part of the universe. And he's not as. He's not made up like you think he is. He's not quite as good as you think he is. I don't know if that's what Salvador Dali intended on that or not. But let's. Let's pick in that chapter three, verse five, where the serpent again says, God knows that in the day you eat thereof, that your eyes shall be opened. Now, if you have your Bible open, I want you to actually put your eyes on the words of Genesis, chapter three, verse five. That next little phrase, ye shall be. Look at yours and see what it says. You'll be just like God. You'll be as gods. There's. There's the. The two. What'd you say? Like God. Okay, so you've got. I'm going to put that into two categories. Like God, you shall be like God. Or King James, you shall be. I better read it as God's plural. Like God singular or as God's plural. Okay. You would. You would probably agree. Yeah, that's not exactly the same thing. Maybe you could say the essence of it is somewhat the same thing. I'm going to argue that even the essence is a little bit different. If you take it, you shall be like God and you shall be as gods. Now, first of all, and I mentioned this a little bit last week, the word Elohim, the Hebrew word Elohim is a plural word. So to. It's. It's. It's a little bit on the translator here interpretation. What do I do with this plural word? King James translators decided to go with, let's make this plural. It's a plural word. Let's go plural. Now, we should say that if you go all the way back to Genesis, chapter one, verse one, it says in the beginning, what God. Singular, capital G, Singular. God created the heavens and the earth. That was the same word, Elohim. I guess you could argue in the beginning, God's created the heavens and the earth, and God's said, let there be light. Now, we never do that. And the reason is because we go beyond third grade Hebrew or third grade grammar. How's that? Third grade grammar says it's plural. It must be plural. That's what you do. It's plural. It's more than one. Advanced grammar, when you get into Hebrew, especially advanced grammar says, wait a minute. This is a. This is an irregular noun. Something is not normal about this. We have irregular nouns all the time. Do y'all teach English or anything like this? No, no English. Okay. Well, there are irregular nouns, verbs in English, you know, we do different things with them. This is one of those that. Hey, yeah, third grade, you can say, boom, there it is. It's kind of like statistics, I would imagine. There's elementary statistics and advanced statistics. You probably teach the advanced kind, right? Oh, both. Here's my favorite elementary statistic. I love this one. There's a 50% chance that you are going to die today. That is absolutely true, isn't it? Yeah. You're either going to die or you're not going to die. Therefore, there's a 50% chance that you're going to die today. 50% chance that you're going to live today. 50% chance that you're going to get a speeding ticket on your way home. Do you ever use that bad joke in your statistics class? Whatever it takes. Okay, back to the sermon now, here. I bet Dr. Jeffress doesn't talk to you during the middle of the sermons, does he? I didn't think so. Okay, back to. Back to the sermon here. You shall be as God. As gods. Yeah, the word can go either. Either way. I really do think that in an advanced understanding of Hebrew, you really do need the plural lowercase G, G, O, D, s. You shall be as gods. Part of what goes in there is. There is the. The ye. First of all, it's the. It's the plural. You, y'all. Ye shall be as gods. Now, it's definitely a plural pronoun here. We're getting the advanced grammar class today. It's definitely a plural pronoun. Ye. You can tell that in the King James because ye is always more than one person. In. In modern English, you can't tell you. Does that mean you, or does that mean you? You? You have to dig a little deeper to find out. But this is definitely a plural. So Ye shall be as God is you. Collective humanity will be God as God. Now, there's a sense in which. Okay, maybe that's what he's saying, a humanitarian kind of socialist, humanitarian kind of idea. Ye shall be as God. But there's nothing in the context, nothing else in the scripture that gives us much verification of that. And so I think we have to take the ye as gods. There's this little rule in Hebrew grammar. I call it the ye plus rule. Ye plus. What does it go with? If it goes with a plural, it's talking about every single individual in the group. If it's. If it goes with a singular, it's talking about the collective group. I'll give you an example that is often misunderstood. Ye are the body of Christ. Ye are the body of Christ. We always take that to say, I, I am the body of Christ, but, excuse me, temple of God. Ye are the temple of God, not the body of Christ is what Paul said. Actually, what the Bible says is that ye. The. The local church, that's the temple of God. So the ye plus rule comes in very handy. Here it is. Ye shall be as gods. Ye, you, you, each one of you. In other words, we can all become God. Now, think about it. Have you ever met anyone? In fact, maybe this is just a human trait and you've never not met anyone. But have you ever met anyone who transfers their sin and guilt upon you or their temptations upon you? You know, because you really want that Diet Coke. They really must want that Diet Coke. Transferring that on to other people. I wonder if the devil here is not just transferring his idea. Because what does Satan want? We find out in the book of Isaiah. He wants God's place. That's what he wants. So he transfers that and says, oh, here's the problem with God. Now, Satan had already fallen at this point. The problem with God is he doesn't want you to be like him. And so he doesn't want you to take from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil because you would become like him as in God's status. Now there's a sense in which we're already like him, right? Because in the image of God created he them, right, male and female, that we're created in the image of God. So we're already, to use the other translation, we're already like God in one sense. But the lie that Satan builds built upon this temptation of questioning the word of God is you shall be like gods. And he comes with this particular temptation. Now this has come out, this lie. You shall be as gods, I think has come out many times in the human experience. I suppose the easiest example to go to is Mormonism. Mormonism certainly has the idea that you can become like God is, and as God is man. I always mix that up and I said I was going to get it right this week. As man is God once was. As God is, man may become. Did you catch that? That's to say God used to be a man and he became a God. You're a man and you can become a God. And there's, there is within Mormonism this doctrine of, of a journey towards God. But it's not only in Mormonism. You can find it in Hindu concepts that kind of have this divine merger that takes place between you and God. And there is a, a journey towards godness that is seen over and over. You see it in a, in a new age sense, in, in the divine spark in the God, the wood that is within you. And the little God, you know, the big God and the little gods, all these kind of things that come into this in, in Eastern mysticism and their ideas of divinity. It's a lie which comes up over and over. But not just in, in, let's say religious ideas. You shall be as gods. This almost a temptation that he delivers to Eve. Hey, you know, did God really say this? He didn't say it because you could be as gods. Isn't that what you'd like? I mean, hey, only $29.95. But wait, there's more. And he, he begins to deliver this sort of thought in her mind and Humanity takes it. You get outside the religious realm, you shall be as gods. It's seen in things like secular humanism, by the way, and I've mentioned this once or twice as well. But there is a difference between humanism and secular humanism. Humanism goes back to the Renaissance, and it was the idea that we are made in the image of God and we ought to be the best human that we can be. And it's a. It's kind of an achievement kind of thing, but never taking the God status. But secular humanism says, I don't even need God. I can achieve whatever it is I want. I still remember taking Nathan into. I don't know if it was his second or third grade class when he was a boy. And on the wall up there, it said, you can do anything you want to do. Which is kind of nice in one sense, but I still remember kneeling down to him and saying, see what that says? You can do anything you want to do. And he said, yeah. I said, try flying across this room, Dad, I can't do that. Exactly. You can't necessarily do anything you want to do. You're grounded in reality. You have to sort of deal with the facts, acts the way they are, and it's a bummer sometimes. Now there's. There's. Obviously we can make achievements. We can talk ourselves in it. We can. We can lift ourselves up, we can go places, but there is a limit to what we are able to do. Secular humanism really says, hey, I don't need God. I can be anything that I want to be on my own. I can do it on my own. I can overcome whatever problems I might face all on my own. Secular is the part that matters. There. Humanism and life becomes the ultimate end of all. Now there's another thing that in. We see, I think, more and more and probably will continue to see more and more. And this is the idea you can become as gods is transhumanism doing things that change our neurons and genes and all the things that you and I probably don't understand fully well, but literally becoming, let's just say, the Six Million Dollar Man. Okay, I got an old enough crowd here that you all will get that. Except. Is it Andrew? Okay, Google it. And you know, we can become the Six Million Dollar Man. We can, you know, get these powers by. By a transhumanism in. In growing ways. It's a. It's another idea. Hey, you don't really need God. You shall be as gods. So here we are, separated from God, and yet the problem is we don't recognize. Hey, my problem is a location problem. I need to reconnect with God. I can't get back in there. I need to look to him and ask for him to come take care of my problems. We find the solution in saying, oh, I'll just be as gods. I'll be as one of the gods myself and move there. Now, the second thing that comes is actually in verse four when he says, the serpent says again, the second lie. Ye shall not surely die. And this concept, of course, not only is it again a clear contradiction. It is a clear contradiction with what God has said in Genesis, chapter 2, verse 17. But it overcomes the consequences. Okay, yeah, eat the tree. But there's really. There's no price to pay for it. God's fibbing with you. You shall not surely die. You shall be able to overcome it. Here's a picture of the tree. Temptation and the Fall by William Blake in 1808. And one of the things I liked about Blake's picture on this was that he's got. I had to make it fit on the screen. I had to do. Cut some things out. But this is the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil here. But a couple of things I want you to notice. One is, can you tell what that is right there? It's a thorn. A thorn. He's. This is. It's a picture. It's an impossible picture. It didn't happen in the Bible, but it's a picture of Adam really looking up. Notice kind of again, the horror on his face. He's looking up and saying, oh, what have I done? Because now the tree of knowledge of Good and evil has thorns on it. It's a post curse, kind of. Whoa. Now I got the tree. But look at it now. Not only that, but you can especially see this if you back up and see the entire picture, but the. All the leaves are drooping. It's the. The tree of knowledge, of good and evil itself is dying. So here they get into it and find out, oh, wait, this is not quite as good as I. I said. Satan said, you shall not surely die. And boom, immediately, I see, you shall surely die. It's happening. It's. It's happening all around me. So there's that deception. Now this, the deception, excuse me, has God said. And then the lie. You're not going to die. You begin to question God's word, then you really don't have anything to go on other than your thoughts, your feelings, your intellect, your experiences. You know, hey, I Don't think. I don't think it's really going to happen. I don't think it's really going to lie. Yeah. You know, one of my favorite things is, especially with young people, they. They use the word feel a lot. Have you noticed that? And so I always catch them with it just because it's fun, you know, it's like, I feel that. What year did Columbus sail the ocean blue? Oh, I feel like it was 1492. I always say, I don't care what you feel. What year did he do it? Who cares what you feel about it? So without the word of God, we really have nothing. Other than. This is sort of how I feel. That's how I feel about it. We don't have any revelation that is given to us now. Here's Adam outside, and he's dealt with it. But we try to overcome the obvious, don't we? And death is one of those things. There's that old saying of the poet. Why do we waste our breath inventing dainty names for death? We do it all the time, though, don't we? We're trying to say, oh, you shall not surely die. There's a number of philosophies, religious philosophies, secular philosophies that we have used for this lie. You shall not surely die. One of them is hedonism. Hedonism is the philosophy of life that says, I guess you could say, eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you shall die. Now that the, the, the. The reason that is a viewpoint of you shall not surely die. It doesn't take away death, but it takes away the. Any meaning of death, any permanency of death. Hey, doesn't matter. It's just that time's going to be up and I'm going to have to go. But I just as well do it. There's no consequences to life whatsoever. You shall not surely die. Just live as if there's no consequences. Hedonism, universalism is a. It's a more religious idea rather than a secular idea. But universalism is an idea that, oh, tries to overcome. You shall not surely die. Universalism is the idea that says, hey, in the end, God's going to take care of us all. It doesn't really matter what you do with the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Doesn't really matter what you do with the gift. Gift of God by grace, through faith. Everybody's going to get it, you know, we all come out the same in the end. That idea of universalism, reincarnation is another you shall not surely die. Reincarnation is the idea that you. It only appeared like you died, but you didn't really. You actually came back as a Baptist preacher or some other low life, you know, that here's the. Here's the struggle. And reincarnation is the idea. I just keep getting more and more chances and I keep working my way up, you know, in. In the realm of things until I finally reach again a non death status. Spiritism is another religious idea that you shall not surely die because it. It takes away the. The separation of death or the immediacy of death, the permanency of death. And it just puts into a little bit different mode that rather than being here physically, I am here spiritually. You know, the Ghost of Christmas Past or whatever I may be that I live on in this sort of spirit, an ongoing interaction that even takes place with the dead. Now, you know, I don't want to bring anybody grief on this early in the year. I usually save that for later in the year to bring you grief, you know, but we have this sort of. This idea still today that our loved ones are, you know, watching over heaven, looking over the banister of heaven, and they're, they're. They're sending their presence in a bluebird and all of the. The concepts of. They are still daily interacting with our life. Really part of death is there is a separation. I remember my great aunt. We were talking yesterday, Luke and I, about whether you're supposed to say aunt or aunt. Now. He was 50. 50. I've always been an ant person. I don't know about you. Should we vote on it here? How many of you are ant people? Anti? Yeah, I've never been anti. Unless I'm getting the pretzels. Do we have aunt people here? The problem I have with aunt is it sounds fake. Sophisticate. You can't say it without sounding kind of nasally. Aunt. And yet you're supposed to sound sort of sophisticated when you talk about, you know, your Aunt Susie. Anyway, pardon those of you from Aunt country. What was I talking about? Your great aunt. My great aunt. Thank you. She wrote a book on poetry, and I read the book and I've got the book somewhere. And she wrote a book about her grandfather that probably would have been, I don't know, my great great grandfather or something. And in fact, she was a professor at. Is there a school in Fayetteville? University of. What's that? University of Oregon University. Yeah, she was a professor of English there. And so. So she might have been my aunt. But anyway, she wrote a poem about her grandfather, and it went something like, I think of my grandfather as he lies, stately silence in his casket. It was about his death, about the funeral. And I remember the closing of it as she talked about, you know, kind of the peaceful look on his face and whatnot. But she said the closing was. And altogether closed to us. Closed to us. And spiritism overcomes that. Grandpa's not altogether close to us. You haven't surely died. You're just. You're now in the presence of the whispering willows, you know, whatever it may be. And I get that I'm mixing that a little, obviously, as we go into the next one, which is animism. Animism is that you become one with nature. You become part of it. So, you know, Grandpa's out there where he's. He's in the trees and the leaves and the. The physical things. He is inhabiting those things. And again, it's this trying to overcome. You shall not surely die. And we bought into this, or we want to buy into this so much that we come up with these things to get this. Annihilation is annihilationism is another one of these. Annihilationism, a little bit like hedonism. It does believe in death, and it does believe in a separation of death, but it doesn't believe in any of the consequences, the ongoing consequences of death, which I think are clearly presented in the scripture. So ye shall not surely die. It's part of this lie that Satan brings up, and that has become a part of the consequences of the fall that we. The world that we live in. And so as we think about being you and I outside of the Garden of Eden, if we were inside of the Garden of Eden, we got a whole different ball game, right? But we're not inside the Garden of Eden. I think this is important to understand at the beginning of decoding dispensations. Most of us know we're not living in the Garden of Eden, right? We can. We can pick that up pretty quick. This is no paradise. And if, if, if you're, if you question it, you know, turn on the news or something, you'll see real quick, oh, this is not a world of. This is not an Edenic world we live in. Catching that which is so obvious will help you in decoding the future ones. Because there's some of the other dispensations you might. You might think, ah, we're still living under that, but just the same, we're not living under that. Now the good news now close here. But the. The good news with the. The Edenic dispensation, that this is the one that things are going to come full circle and God is going to bring back the blessings of the Edenic dispensation. When you read about the new heaven and the new Earth and the new Jerusalem, one of the things that's in the new. The. The new Jerusalem is the tree of life on either sides of the river there, you may remember. And it's for the healing of the nations. There is life again in the Edenic dispensation. We'll talk about it at the end of this. But in that. Excuse me, in the dispensation, the final dispensation, the eternal dispensation that's yet to come, there is a communion with God. There is no separation. Everything is taken. There's no more tear, no more crying, no more pain, no more death. The old order of things has passed away. And we come back really full circle, back to this Garden of Eden in the blessings of it. So there we were in Eden. Now we're not out. Now we're not in Eden. Now we're outside of Eden. And catching that division, being able to divide, that makes all the difference in the world in being able then to discern where we're going in the scripture as we'll look at in coming weeks. So my message to you today is, this ain't eating. There we go with that. Let me lead us in a word of prayer. Heavenly Father, thank you for the word of God that gives us not only such revelation, but some instruction on how to handle it rightly dividing the word of Truth that gives us also an insight into the world in which we live, separated from paradise, unable to get in really, in a complete ruin because we're stuck here where we are so much needing a Savior from the outside. And yet as we continue to read the Word of God, we see that there is a helper that has come from the outside and that he has come and offered salvation through the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ, by grace, through faith, not of works, lest anyone should boast. And so we come rejoicing and knowing that truth which we haven't preached about today, but is so clear in the Scripture nonetheless. And as we go from this place, we ask that you would be gracious to us not only as you have been gracious to us spiritually, but you would be gracious to us in the. In the things of. Of just the everyday things of life as well. Our relationships, our safety, our walk with you, our walk with others, that it would be a week of blessing. As we serve the Lord with gladness, we ask this in Jesus name. Amen. Thanks for being here today. Glad each one of you were here. I a beautiful January morning and look forward to seeing you throughout the year. And next week we'll go into the next dispensation. How's that? We'll keep decoding and working on that. Wednesday night, Sloppy Joe's, 5:00 and Bible study at 6:00. And all the good things that take place. Thanks for being here. Those of you online, we're glad you're here as well. You are dismissed. God bless you. Here. Sa it. It's it. Yeah. It that there. Because we have. Oh, wow. Congrats. It so you know, when you sa thank you, everybody. Back to Eden.