I pray and trust that you had a blessed week this past week. They say that if you end your day
thinking of a couple of positive things that you can be grateful for, that you thank God for,
that it does wonders in helping ease thoughts of negativity or bring a little bit of relief to
maybe more serious depressions or something of the sort. So tonight would be a great time if you
haven't done it yet before you close your eyes for your nightly rest. Eight hours they tell us.
Offer up a prayer of thanksgiving. End your day on that positive note. Think and you will find it.
Think about how God has made himself known to you today and how he's blessed you and recognize it.
And just say thank you. It's a great way to end the night. It's a good way to begin your sleep
because if you end on a good note you're more likely to begin on a good note. You wake up in
the morning thinking of the last thing. I want to share with you one little bit of news before we
get into our message. This has nothing to do with the news per se but last week we had inserts in
the bulletin from our health ministries talking about the benefits of sunlight, vitamin D and
energy and it makes you more alert and so on. There is also really really good evidence to say
that if you can get a little bit of sun on you in the first hour of waking up that your alertness
and and the motivation actually lasts well into the day and it helps start your your body's natural
rhythms in a healthier way that it does better than a cup of coffee. That it it's good. It's good to
do that. I also have another study I came across. This is not a new one but it was new to me because
it got emailed to me this week. This is a study from 2016 done in Sweden so still very relevant.
It was done with 29,500 and change women and what they assessed were the differences in sun exposure
as a risk factor for all cause mortality. In other words what benefit do you have compared to
other risk factors if you just get some sun? Just gets a little bit of sun.
What they found primarily were three things. So this was a long term over many years with a large
sample group 29,000 plus ladies and what they found first was that these women with active sun
exposure so that's actually being outside. Don't be locked up in a basement or just indoors with
artificial lights but get outside a little bit and it doesn't have to be long but a little bit.
Active sun exposure habits were mainly at a lower risk of cardiovascular disease and non-cancer
non-cardiovascular disease death as compared to those who avoided sun exposure. Well in the
United States the top two killers are cardiovascular disease and cancer. Top two and it's
actually not close. They're way up there especially the first one. So they found a
little bit of active sun exposure can help reduce your cardiovascular disease risk. Wouldn't that be
a good thing? I think so. Two, as a result of increased survival because what they find is that
active sun exposure helps in your longevity. You'll live longer if you have active sun exposure.
Live longer if you have active sun exposure. It's a good thing. As a result of this the relative
contribution of cancer death increased. Now that might sound like you don't want it.
What we know is that the longer you live the more at risk of developing cancer you have.
Regardless of what causes you to live longer the longer you live the higher the risk. So if more
sun means you live longer you just happen to have a higher increased risk of cancer. They did not
find a correlation though that the sun exposure brought about the cancer. Just that you lived
longer and that increased your risk. And then three and this is our last this is our last one. Three,
the point about the longevity promoting properties of sunlight is driven home strongly by this.
Non-smokers who avoided sun exposure had a life expectancy similar to smokers in the highest sun
exposure category. If you don't smoke but you avoid the sun you're in the same risk in terms of your
mortality risk as those who do smoke but they get their sun. So what they concluded is that avoidance
of sun exposure is a risk factor for death of a similar magnitude as smoking. I had no idea.
I think that's good to know. I wanted to pass that on to add a little supplement to what we were
already blessed with last week with our insert. You can have everything right but if you just
lock yourself up indoors you're putting yourself at risk. Go touch grass, go breathe the air,
go let a little bit of sun hit on your face and your arms, expose your skin a little bit to it.
Don't burn, don't do those things we know that that aren't healthy but a little bit. It'll help
it'll help your hormone balance, it'll help your energy and it helps your longevity and keeps you
out of the higher risk categories. So now we're going to get into our message that was a freebie.
If you'll indulge me in one more brief word of prayer then we will dive in. Lord God now that
we are turning our attention in a focused way on your word we thank you that you inspired the authors
and you preserved it through time so it's not only a blessing and a benefit for instruction and
encouragement to those that have lived in the past but also to us right now in the present.
And we pray that that would be our reality. May we learn of you, may we learn more of ourselves
and may we appreciate the plan that you have for us. We pray this in your name amen.
The last time I was here I greeted you with a Shabbat Shalom, a Feliz Sabado,
right? A happy Sabbath, a Ton Sabaton, that's Greek. They say that there are about 7,000
spoken languages in the world. I'm assuming they're including some dialects but we'll just go with
about 7,000 spoken languages and about 300 writing systems. Mandarin, English, Spanish, and Arabic
make up the top 10 and Bengali is also among them. So you can just kind of look at the countries
around the world and that makes sense. Mandarin, there's a lot of people that speak Mandarin in
China and elsewhere. Lots of people speak Spanish. The countries that have Arabic as their main
language, there's many many many of them and then English in addition to those places that speak it
proper like England and otherwise like American, it's also the world language. If you happen to
do anything in business, any kind of real international travel, you can generally find
people who speak English. That's the accepted international language. I am not very good at
most languages. I do like them. I find some of them more confusing than others. I have heard
that American English is one of the hardest to learn because we just wear a hodgepodge of so
many different other languages kind of come together and then in America we have slang and
we have other things and then you go to the south and just you know forget about it.
Of the languages in the world, it seems though that aside from spoken languages, we have other
languages that we can consider. I'm thinking of Morse code. That's a language. I'm not up on my
Morse code but I believe it's a standard. I think Morse code is a standard. They don't do Morse code
in Mandarin. You know that's the same dashes and dots for their words. That's a universal language.
I think of music as a language and a universal language at that. You can express beauty and
sound and rhythm and all of what comes with music anywhere around the world, no matter what you look
like, no matter what you talk, no matter about your family background. Music is universal.
You have different flavors but the notes and what you can do with it. And then there's also math.
I've heard it mentioned that math is a universal language. We can thank the Egyptians for much of
how we do math today and then the Babylonians for adding on to it and then it goes on from there but
they kind of gave us a lot of our foundational mathematics. I was never really exceptional at
math. I did okay. I passed my grades and I did well enough on the ACT to go to college but it was
not my best. Reading, English, science. I liked those. Math I just kind of did. In large part
because I think I'm I looked at it too rationally. You know math is very fixed. One plus one equals
two and so on and then you get into the more complicated stuff. Algebra and calculus and trig
and college algebra and I just I got to a point in my education fairly early on and I decided I am
never going to do this again. That's not going to help me. I'm not going to use it. I have no
ambitions of being an engineer or an astrophysicist or anything like that but I guess I need the grade
so I'll do it and then like many many students you finish your last exam and out the back of your head
all of it just dumps out. My last math class was in 1999. I haven't had to inverse a matrix since
or find the angles on planes since. I'm sure some of it I use without even realizing it
but arithmetic now that's math I can get behind. Arithmetic you need day in day out. Pluses,
minuses, multiplication, division, sometimes some squares and cubes,
spatial relation maybe with the arithmetic and geometry but that will get you mostly through life.
It really will. I like how simple it is. I like that I don't have to really
try to plug in the x's and the y's or Greek letters that are supposed to mean something
and so on. Arithmetic one plus one equals two. Simple. I like that.
There was a book I've mentioned before in a previous sermon 1984 where the the ruling class,
part of how they controlled people, was to get them to accept a non-truth as truth and one example
in it was, what was it, two plus two equals five. I believe that's the example in the book. Two plus
two equals five and the moment they could get the population to accept an arithmetic calculation
that was incorrect as truth that was absolute dominance. They could control people, they could
manipulate, they could you could start to break down other things in society if you can get at
the most basic of understandings and fracture it apart. One plus one does still equal two. Two plus
two does still equal four and three squared is nine. It is nine. Did you know that there's math
in the Bible? And I'm not talking about prophecy. Of course there's math in prophecy. You count your
years from the time that Artaxerxes made this declaration, four word four hundred and ninety
years and who do you find? Messiah. And then you go the 2300 days and what do you find? The beginning
of the judgment. You have math in the Bible. You also have math in the Bible when it comes to humans.
Are you aware of that? If you have your Bible turn to our scripture reading but go a little bit
before that. We are in Genesis chapter two and we are picking up where we left off in our sermon
series from the beginning to the end and today it is anthropology arithmetic. The study of humans
anthropology. The languages, the behaviors, the how they live, how they build, how they dress,
just the study of humanity, anthropology and arithmetic. We are going to learn about God's
original math plan if you will for mankind today and we're going to touch a little on how some of
those equations like 1984 are being adjusted and telling you a different solution. Let's begin with
the first one we come to Genesis chapter two and verse seven. Leading up to that is it's just simply
a brief historical record where Moses penned that these are the generations of the heaven and the
earth when they were created. He repeats that and he kind of tells you that at that time there were
certain plants not there because rain hadn't fallen and man hadn't come about yet. That's it.
And then we get to our verse. Then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed
into his nostrils the breath of life and the man became a living creature. If you're reading from
the King James that would be a living soul. If you have another translation it might say living being
or something like that. Living being, living creature, that's the more accurate translation.
There's been some confusion with the soul but did you notice the arithmetic in this verse?
In a very personal anthropomorphic way God is being described like he's relatable to us in this
context. He's present. He's on this earth that up until now he has just spoken into existence
and he's kneeling down in the dust. He's moving about it. He's about to do something with it.
The dirt and the dust are about to be his medium for not speaking into existence but crafting
into existence. He formed the man of dust from the ground. That's very personal and that gives us our
first part of the equation. The dust. Elsewhere in the Bible Job is an example we're told that when
you die your body returns back to the dust. From dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return.
We're familiar with that. So our first part of this equation in our study of humanity is that
there is a physicalness to you and I. The dust, the earth, there's physicality to humanity that
we shouldn't overlook and it's very important. There are times throughout history where the
physical nature of who we are or about our world has been looked at as purely negative. The Greeks
were very good at doing this. They believe that you didn't have to preserve the physical or look
at it with any kind of care and not really reverence but importance about the physical world.
You could use and abuse the resources and of the person at will with zero repercussions in the big
scheme of things. That's why they were a really debaucherous society. 1st Corinthians gives us a
clue to that. Use the body however you will. It doesn't matter. But God is telling us in this
passage that our physicality is important because with his own hands he shaped the forms that we
still have. The human form hasn't changed over the thousands of years. The arms, the legs, the feet,
the uprightness and so on. So part one to our equation is our physicalness, our form.
Then God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. You can imagine if you will
a potter with his clay shaping the body there on the dirt and in only the way that God can.
He can take dust and earthly particles and actually make it look really human and like it's alive but
it's still just kind of there. But it's inanimate. It needs something and our second part to this
equation is that breath of life. You have the dirt plus God's breath, the only giver of life.
You need it. You and I need to breathe. We need that spark of life that can only come from he who
exists without another source of life. He is that source. You have to have it. The Bible regularly
talks about our life as being represented by the breath in the nostrils. The breath in the nostrils
is how the Hebrews talked about being alive and are your arteries working, your blood pumping,
is digestion going on. All of that is kind of represented by the existence of God's breath
in your nostrils. So you are also alive. But then our final is what we become. So you have one,
the dust from the ground plus two, the breath of life from God equals three, a living being.
We could dig deep into what it means to be a living being as humans. You can't divorce your
physicality from being a living being. You can't do it. You have to be physical. We do not exist
as purely metaphysical or spiritual beings. You have to have that breath. You have to have the
air that we can't see but we can feel and we inhale and we exhale. You have to have that. You
take that away. It's not a good day but you're also not only that. To be a living being also
means that you have a mind, an intellect, you have a will, you have a conscience, you dream.
To be a living being are all of those things that happen up here and it's not only physical,
meaning that it's not only firing synapses, but there is also, because we're made in his image,
a spiritual nature to what we don't see, to what we think, to what we feel, our morality.
All of what makes up the mind of humanity is very much a real part of our being a living being.
You can't divorce the one from the other. We're all together. Humans have tried to do this.
We've come up with a couple of different ways of undoing this equation. Two main ones. One would be
monism, meaning that you are only one thing. You're not comprised of separate different
elements that come together as one, but you're only one. You're either only spiritual or you're
only physical or you're only whatever the case may be. It's usually only physical. You're only
physical and by perfecting your physical self, then you're perfecting who you are.
That's where you get into, well, it doesn't matter about my physicality. I'm just going to die and
I'm going to go back to the worms. It's rather nihilistic, so I'm going to abuse myself and off
you go. Or a more ascetic way of doing things. I'm going to isolate myself physically from all of
the other temptations around the world. I'm only going to drink water. I'm not going to listen to
anything corrupting. No music, no nothing because I need to really get my physical self perfect. I'm
going to be great at exercise and I'm going to be great at everything else because if I
physically am perfect and I don't have to see the doctor or a dentist, then I'm good.
Another part of it is dualism. This is the one that seems to have really grabbed hold and this
is the idea that you have a spiritual self encapsulated by a physical self, but they're
separate from each other. The one doesn't affect the other. From Egypt to Greece to Rome to modern
day kind of understandings about that, that dualism, just the two. You can die and then maybe
you go into a reincarnation cycle or your soul goes back, your spiritual self goes back to heaven
or you know we have, we hear about this. That's dualism. Neither one of those are correct.
Because what we see in our equation is that we are physical. We know that we have
a mind that we can't quite really map even with our best technologies, the emotions, the dreams,
the morality. You can't map that. You can't really see it, but it's very much there.
And we are made in God's image. We are spiritual creatures. We have a spiritual element to us.
Even the most hardened atheist looks for something spiritual to fill that need in his life or her life.
We're all of that combined.
And I would encourage you that if you are considering your anthropology that you would take
your creator's word as it says and don't make it something else. You are physical, dirt. You are
breath, life, and that means you become something more than both of those on their own. Intellect,
will, morality, etc. Let's look at our second equation. After we look through and we're skipping
many, many, many verses. The rivers that flowed, the stones that were present, the fact that God
took the man, at this point only one human on earth, put him in the Garden of Eden to work it
and keep it. That's why in landscaping I always said I was carrying a stone, a stone, a stone,
carrying on the tradition of the longest career that ever has been.
God says in verse 18, the Lord God said it is not good that the man should be alone. I will make him
a helper fit for him or comparable to him. You might think this doesn't sound very much like
an equation because it's written in the negative. That throws us off a little bit.
This would be like saying one plus zero, one plus zero equals zero. That's the equation that God is
saying. Man plus being alone, one plus zero equals not good. That's a negative, a zero, a null outcome.
We're social creatures. God is a social God and we are made in His image. Three members, the Godhead,
a whole array of heavenly hosts, other created beings. Then God makes man in His image and
clearly there's something personal about it. He wants that interaction. There's a social fabric
to who we are. You can't escape. You can't escape. We know you can't escape. We also know that it's
still not good that man should be alone because if you're in prison and you break the rules and
you're put in solitary confinement, we have laws that say you can't do that for a certain period
or longer than a certain period of time. It hurts the psyche. It makes people very depressed and
so on. Whether people follow those laws or not, that's on them, but we know this for a reality.
It is a truth. You cannot be all alone and have a good life the way that God intends it. We know this
in recent application. In April of 2020, March of 2020, when everyone was sent home and told to stay
in their houses and you couldn't go out and socialize and you couldn't go talk to grandma or
grandpa in the nursing home, you couldn't bury your dead, you couldn't have marriages, you couldn't
all of that. Even if you did go to the couple of places that were open like Walmart, weren't you
supposed to stay apart from each other and cover up your face? All of that speaks to the social
nature that humans are. Communication broke down. Kids weren't learning how to speak at the proper
rate. Education on our youth, they believe that this is going to take much longer to write itself
than the months or the year to two years that it impacted them.
Rates of, I have to think, what do they call it, rates of deaths of despair
rose significantly during and shortly after that time. People became anxious and tense and can we
trust one another? I can't hear what you're saying. I don't even know who you are because I've only got
your eyes to go on. All of that as social creatures creates an edge. It creates something in our psyche
that is not healthy. Some people, many people might have had good intentions with what they
were doing or suggesting, but the reality is that as social creatures, God has said it is not good
that they should be alone and any time that we have tried to forcefully separate, it doesn't end
well. That's why people who really struggle with depression really kind of get in on themselves and
the more they just isolate and get in on themselves, the worse the depression gets, not the better.
That's why as a punishment, I might take my kids and put them in timeout, but only for a handful of
minutes because then they need to be reunited with the family. We need those social aspects and it's
baked into our spirituality. You cannot have the most fulfilling spiritual experience as a Christian
on your own. You are saved one-on-one between you and God, but we are the body of Christ.
The body has many components. The body has many parts. The body necessitates those parts
being attached to one another. You take a finger and you separate it from the body and you set it
off over there. What happens to the finger? It dies and then it decays and it's good for nothing.
You can take a separated finger from an accident, put it on ice, get to a doctor who knows what
they're doing and what can they do? Reattach it. When the finger that's been separated by one means
or another is reattached back to the body, is that a good thing? Can you save the finger?
Can it retain its function and its purpose? Absolutely.
And that's true for any body parts. My kids seem to be doing well without tonsils, but we're not
talking about them. You are a social creature. Humans are that and it impacts you not just in
your personal life, but your spiritual life. In Hebrews it talks about there are some of those who
don't come and meet and worship together with the congregation and the writer says don't be like them.
Don't neglect the gathering of yourselves one to another. Throughout the New Testament church,
what were they doing? Coming together, worshiping together, eating together,
staying up so late at night together that kids are falling out of windows. But together,
one of the first things that the enemy tries to do to fracture that is to start separating one
from another. Many different tools at the disposal force physical separation, gossip,
slander, unhealthy prejudging someone because you don't like their shoes that day or that they sat
in your pew. The enemy has different ways of interrupting that social fabric of ours that
ingrained a part of our being and setting us against one another or telling us that we're
better on our own. The United States is a immensely hyper individualistic society.
And it's not been good. It's not been good. So in this equation rather than what God is saying one
plus zero equals zero, that's what God has said the equation is. It really is one plus any other
number equals good. So in this equation, God is saying that one plus zero equals zero.
Another number equals good. You need more added to you than just you. It's good for you. It's for your
benefit. For Adam who was alone, God wanted him to find this out for himself. I don't know why. I have
a thought. But God wanted Adam to find this out for himself. So he gave him a task to do. And in
the task of naming the animals, Adam noticed that every animal had a pair. A male and a female. One
went with the other. You never found one all by itself and you never found two exactly like one
another. But they were same in kind but different in purpose or makeup if you will. Two dogs, two
elephants, two platypies, platypuses. Everything had a pair and I can imagine, I can picture in my
mind Adam doing this. Oh you're this animal and you're that and oh that's funny. Long neck, long
legs. Wow. This is your name. This is that name. And after you go through, I don't know, 50 or 100
or 200 of them and you're giving names to all of them, maybe he just started looking around.
Maybe he looked behind him. Maybe he wanted to wander and kind of look behind bushes or see if
a tree was hiding something. Maybe he started calling out Marco. Maybe he wanted to find who
would respond with Polo. Here I am. But the man didn't find his other half. He didn't find who was
supposed to be his complement. He didn't find the other part of the equation that he discovered he
was missing. God had already said that it wasn't good for him to be alone and now God fixes that
broken equation. In verses 21 and 22, the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man while
he slept. He took one of the ribs, closed up its place with flesh. From the rib, the Lord God made
into a woman. That's the same word as like building a house. God is a builder in this. He's fashioning
this woman for him and brought her to the man. You were looking for your other half. You were
looking for someone like you but not exactly like you. Here you go. God brought that missing part of
the equation to the man and the man immediately recognized this at last as bone of my bones and
flesh of my flesh. She shall be called a woman because she was taken out of man. Even in the names
you have that super close relationship between the sexes. You need it. So in other words, the equation
is M plus F equals capital F. Male plus female equals family. The core social structure for
humanity. Male plus female equals family. You have to have it. It's been, it's been, you can read so
many different types of takes on what it is to have someone, a helper fit for him or a helper complement
to him. When we look at men and women, we know that they're not exactly the same. We know this.
It doesn't take long. We know that men, broadly speaking, and that's how we're talking, in broad
terms, men are more oriented to spatial relations. They're more interested in mechanical things.
Their minds tend to be just much more logical in just how they go and they're just like, oh,
that makes sense. ABC. That's what I'm going to do. We also know the faults of men. We also know
that the greater tendency towards the mechanics means that they sometimes often miss the softer
parts to life. You get so caught up in just the machines and fixing and doing and building and
conquering, you forget to actually settle down and have a life sometimes.
Men get so focused on the logical that we often hurt others not thinking about the empathy part,
that compassionate part. Sometimes we're so caught up in just being strong that we forget
to protect. We hurt men are just wired that way. At times men don't talk as much. We don't share
as much of our feelings. We prefer a lot of alone time and the list can go on what men are like.
Women on the other hand, well, we need women. I need my wife to balance me out. She's perfect at it.
She brings an energy to our marriage. I appreciate she is so much more empathetic to what other
people are feeling and kind of going through. She surprises me. Are you sure? They don't seem
that way to me. I have to take her word at it. She has and ladies, I think you're going to know
what I mean and men you're going to know this too. There's a female sixth sense.
How many of our ladies here have known something but you couldn't quite express that you know what
you know about a person? I don't have that. My wife has it in spades and I've talked to many other
ladies that can say the same thing. I can't really tell you but I know about so and so.
We need that. We need women with their more nurturing side to be the child bearers because
little kids need the nurturing. Remove moms out of that equation. Men can kind of do it.
Dads can kind of do it. Not like a mom. Absolutely not like a mom.
You remove a dad from the equation and kids moms do it and there are
heroic mothers that have raised their kids on their own. You remove a dad from it. Our society
tells you what fatherless homes turn into on a broad scale. Increased crime, increased depression,
a fracture in the home, less trust, etc. That's just born out by data. Dads add to the family unit
something that moms at their best efforts can do but it's not like a dad. It's just not.
And then of course we have to look at if God had just led another Adam to Adam,
our family tree would have been really short.
There's also just a basic necessity for different but complementary on the biological level. We
know what I'm talking about. You have to have men and women for the continuation of humanity.
You can't do a different equation and have a continuation of humanity. Not going to happen.
I find that this equation,
more so than the breaking down of our social aspect,
this equation is most under attack. In who men are as men and women are as women
and one cannot be the other or vice versa. No matter how hard you try,
you cannot. You might gain the appearance of a man who is a woman.
You cannot. You might gain the appearance of one. We're really good at some of our surgeries.
You might gain the appearance of one but you can't be one. It is anthropologically incorrect
to suggest anything other than a binary.
It's teleologically incorrect. That's the philosophy of being
to suggest that men can be women or women can be men. You can't.
And on a broad scale, it's under attack and it has not been good.
For longer, the equation of man male plus female equals family has been under attack.
Many, many, many years ago, it was proposed that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.
That started the inevitable trend towards a fracturing of God's original equation.
Because one men and women are not perfectly identical in all things at all times. Men need
women. Women need men. You take one of those away because the other way is true. Men. You can't say
a man needs a woman like a fish needs a bicycle. That also doesn't work. Then you have the
redefinition of marriage in recent years. That also breaks apart God's equation.
And it does break down the family. And if we're looking at continuing the species,
it also breaks that down. That's not to say that people can't love and that's not to say that we
are unkind and that's not to say any of those other things. I'm just simply looking at God's
design for humanity. God's equations in our lives are not just about the definition of
humanity. God's equations in our anthropology. Because if we are to understand who we are in
the big picture of things, we have to see how God our creator made us and designed us with that
purpose in mind. And that purpose is to be a combination of the physical, the spiritual,
the mental, and the breath, the life. God's equation he intended. He designed us to be
social creatures. Even into eternity, we're all gathering together like a great multitude on the
sea of glass. That's social. God says, I want to be with them. I'm going to dwell in their midst
and be their God and they will be my people. That's social. Can't break it apart. They will
come together from new moon to new moon, from Sabbath to Sabbath to worship God, Isaiah says.
That's a social worship. God intended us to be that way in our anthropology arithmetic.
And then God also purposefully designed male and female to complement each other. Not one superior
or one inferior, but equal and different. And we need the differences and the equal. We need it all.
The moment we start to break apart any of these equations, you're going to end up with a failing
grade in the anthropology arithmetic test. Something's going to go wrong. Something's
going to get messed up and God's original intention and design is not going to be realized.
I don't have the answer for all the other many reasons or studies or philosophies about us and
what makes us up. But when I look at these three sections of Genesis chapter two, these five verses,
four verses, I can't help but walk away with not an overly complicated calculus equation or even
inverting a matrix that takes forever to do. This is simple arithmetic. This is one plus one equals
two. And God knew all along what he had in mind. And it was perfect. In its original design,
in its original fabrication, in its original purpose. At the end of the sixth day, after
mankind had been made with all of this built into us in his image, God didn't just say it is good.
What did he say, my friends? It is very good. Our anthropology arithmetic
is at the heart of God and not just saying good, but very good.
And I would encourage each one of you to thank God for those truths, to defend them where you can
and to praise him that he knows best. I believe and the Bible tells us that even though we won't be
marrying and giving in marriage, Jesus says when we get to heaven, the rest of it stays the same.
Men and women will be there. Our social fabric remains. Our composition of physical, spiritual,
and breath is still there. From beginning to end, our anthropology arithmetic stays the same.
Our anthropology arithmetic stays the same. I would encourage you all to praise God that that is true.
Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you for your word. We thank you that you knew what you were
doing when you fashioned us. And I pray that you would forgive us where we try to break apart
what you intended as a very good and what you declared as such. I pray that where we stumble and
fall, where we fracture our families, where husbands and wives are unkind or cruel to one another,
where we don't respect one another or love as you have loved us, I pray that you would forgive us
and put that bond back together. Lord, I pray where we have abused our bodies different than you intended.
Overworking, not enough sleep, gluttony in its various forms, substance abuse in its various forms.
Lord, I pray that you would forgive us and set us again on a right path. And Lord, where either by
our own choosing or by what is forced upon us, when we have separated one from another,
Lord, I pray that you would bring us back together. I pray that we would be called your sons and
daughters saints of Jesus, united by, in, and through the Holy Spirit. Lord, I am so grateful
that Jesus Christ saw fit to become one of us, to unite humanity with heaven, not just for those
years he was here, but for eternity. I am grateful that you know us in and out and you are compassionate
towards our needs. And Lord, we praise your name for all of us. May we not forget it, but may we be
true and faithful to your intent and purpose. Lord, we pray all of these things in Jesus Christ's name.
Amen.