Tag: Creation Moments

A Flood of Flood Legends

Please enjoy this video from Creation Moments. May God bless you and yours. Carl

Self-Esteem and Forgiveness

We hear a lot about “self-esteem” today. The “self-esteem movement,” made up of some religious teachers and psychologists, seeks to make people feel better about themselves without making any reference to sin or the need for forgiveness. Some religious teachers have even said that Christianity should stop talking about sin. Because the movement is associated with psychology, many mistakenly believe that the claims of the “self-esteem movement” have a scientific basis. They do not.

Consider the Pharisee who prayed, “God, I thank you that I am not like other men…” From the world’s standpoint, he had no trouble with self-esteem. On the other hand, the world would say that the sinner who prayed, “God be merciful to me, a sinner…” had a serious self-esteem problem. In Jesus’ analysis, however, the Pharisee’s self-righteousness – his “good self-image” – was what kept him from God. It was the sinner’s knowledge of his self-worthlessness, and humble repentance, that brought him the peace of God in a personal relationship with his Maker.

From this vantage point, it is easy to see that the cult of self-esteem promotes self-righteousness. Adding Christ to self-esteem still produces self-righteousness.

Christians and all people need to be encouraged to focus on Christ! The Christian who lives a daily life of repentance in the full knowledge that Christ has redeemed him, making full atonement and peace with God, will have no “self-esteem problem.”

Luke 18:13
“And the publican, standing afar off, would not lift up so much as [his] eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner.”

Prayer: Forgive me, dear Lord, for those times when I have thanklessly felt sorry for myself or let my pride come between us. Fill me with the joy and peace that only You can provide through the forgiveness of my sins. Amen.

Photo: Man crying in a support group, Envato.

Source: Creation Moments

Seeing Eye Fish

There’s an old saying that people seldom remember how rapidly the job was done, but they do appreciate good workmanship. However, the staggering variety and number of things created by God did not limit the elegance of His fine workman-ship.

The relationship between the snapping shrimp and a fish called the goby is a good example of the Creator’s attention to the finest detail. The snapping shrimp has very poor eyesight, while the goby has excellent eyesight. Both share the same burrow, which is dug by the shrimp and guarded by the goby.

The shrimp uses the goby as a blind person uses a Seeing Eye dog. Whenever the shrimp is outside its burrow, it always keeps one antenna on the goby. The shrimp stays hidden inside the burrow if the goby should temporarily swim away. When danger approaches, the goby signals and disappears inside the burrow. The shrimp is right behind him.

Neither the goby nor the shrimp can survive without each other, so pairs are established for life when both goby and shrimp are very young. In order for this system to work, both goby and shrimp reproductive systems, which differ greatly, are synchronized so that shrimp and goby youngsters are ready to pair at the same time.

This astonishing relationship shows us how our Creator’s standards of excellence bring His love to every corner of the creation.

Prayer: Dear Father in heaven, as Your Word says, You have done all things very well. I thank You for the comfort of knowing that nothing in the creation is too unimportant for Your loving attention. In Jesus’ Name. Amen.

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REF: Yanagisawa, Y. 1990. Strange seabed fellows. Natural History, Aug. p. 46. Photo: Gobi and shrimp – by Steve Childs CCA By 2.0

© 2023 Creation Moments. All rights reserved.

God: Natural or Supernatural

From Creation Moments:

Genesis 1:31
“And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.”

C.S. Lewis suggested that those who deny the supernatural can still believe in a god of sorts. He said:

The great interlocking event called Nature might be such as to produce at some stage a great cosmic consciousness, an indwelling ‘God’ arising from the whole process as human mind arises (according to the Naturalists) from human organisms…. What Naturalism cannot accept is the idea of a God who stands outside Nature and made it.

One Christian evolutionist has maintained that Christians who are scientists do not mention God in their research papers, because there is a long-standing tradition against partiality in science. It follows that his scientific research does not start from God, and does not start from the Bible.

While he maintains this as a virtue, it suggests to his readers that nature is all that there is; there is nothing outside of science that science cannot, or will not one day be able, to explain. Yet he believes in God, and is a member of a Bible-believing church. This gives the impression that faith is a bolt-on. It is not part of reality. Therefore, the god who is implied is not the supernatural God of the Bible, despite the claims of such people that this is the God in whom they believe. Instead, the impression is given that nature is all that there is, so God must be a natural god arising out of creation.

This is why the first few words of the Bible are so important. “In the beginning, God created…” gives the correct context for everything else that we read in the 66 books.

Prayer: You put everything in place, Lord God. You created it all from nothing. We praise You that only in You can everything be understood in its place. Amen.

Author: Paul A. Bartz

Ref: Lewis, C.S. (1947), Miracles, (New York: Macmillan Collins), p12. Image: Adobe Stock photos, licensed to author.

© 2022 Creation Moments.  All rights reserved.

The Origin of Racism

Acts 17:26a
“And He has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth. . . .”

Does God approve of inter‑racial marriage? To answer this question, we must look at the concept of race. The Bible teaches that we are all descended from the man Adam. Scripture also states, we are all of one blood; Scripture never even uses the idea of race.

The descendants of Ham, who were cursed, were the Canaanites. Yet when Rahab, a Canaanite, came to faith in the true God, she not only was welcomed to marry a believer, but God included her in the line leading to Christ.  The idea of different races, as distinct from different religions, was not much of an issue until 1859 when Charles Darwin published his famous book, On the Origin of Species.  Darwin was a product of Victorian times and extremely racist in his views, always referring to colored peoples as “savages.”  Among the book’s purported scientific claims for evolution was the claim that there are different races because some groups are more evolved than others. As this idea became accepted both in and out of the Church, racism became institutionalized. Today we know that typically the genetic differences between you and anyone else is only 0.2 percent. Scientifically, there is only one human race, as Scripture clearly teaches. The Church can only combat racism by proclaiming the truth that all people on earth are one flesh, descended from one, real Adam, whose blood we share. It can also proclaim the Gospel, that all believers are spiritual descendants of the Second Adam, the Lord Jesus Christ, who has redeemed us and made us new creatures.

Prayer: Help me, Father, love all people as Your Son did when He died for them. Amen.

Author: Paul A. Bartz

Ref:  Ken Ham, Inter-racial marriage: is it biblical?, Creation 21(3) June-August, 1999. Photo: Pixabay (PD)

© 2022 Creation Moments.  All rights reserved.

Relax

Genesis 6:3
“And the LORD said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years.”

Before the Flood people were living hundreds of years. As man grew more evil, God declared that man’s lifespan would be reduced to 120 years. Modern biology has learned that we do indeed have built-in timers in each of our cells that limit the number of times they can divide. When enough cells can no longer divide, we die. We can even do things to speed up the timers.

The timers are called telomeres. However, every time a cell divides, a small part of each telomere is lost. When these telomeres are worn down to nothing, the cell no longer divides and soon dies. Researchers studied 58 healthy women between the ages of 20 and 50. All the women had children, but 39 of them had a child that was seriously chronically ill. Stress levels were measured through questionnaires while blood samples provided information about their cell health. Among other things, scientists checked for levels of an enzyme that maintains the health of telomeres. The mothers who saw their stress levels as high proved to have much shorter telomeres than those who reported little stress. They reported that cells from stressed women had telomeres that were as short as unstressed women ten years older.

Scripture tells us to cast all our cares on the Lord. Among the many blessings of doing so are healthy telomeres.

Prayer: Father, I cast all my cares on You. You have loved me through Your Son, Jesus Christ. I trust Your love. Amen.

Author: Paul A. Bartz

Ref: Science News, 12/4: 2004, p. 355, C. Brownlee, “Stressed to Death.” Photo: Human chromosomes (grey) capped by telomeres (white). Courtesy of U.S. Department of Energy Human Genome Program. (PD)

Source: Creation Moments

The Value of Music

Genesis 4:21
“And his brother’s name was Jubal: he was the father of all such as handle the harp and organ.”

The Bible tells us that the earliest generations of human beings were making music. By the time the eighth generation of man came along, Jubal, a member of that generation was able to make his living providing musical instruments. On the evolutionary side of things, however, musical ability would seem to provide no survival advantage. Yet, the human brain devotes considerable resources to the processing of music.

Our love of music is wired into our brain. Each of our sense organs is important to our enjoyment of music. And each of these organs is linked to its own part of the brain which is responsible for how we experience the music. Parts of the brain are reserved for memory which stores the music. Other parts of the brain are dedicated to trying to understand the entire piece of music, referencing back to parts of the music stored in the memory. Even more interesting is that one need not hear music to activate the various parts of the brain devoted to music. Positron-emission tomography reveals that a person only needs to imagine music for these portions of the brain to become active.

The ability to make or appreciate music offers us no apparent survival value, and therefore, according to evolutionary theory, should not have developed. Yet, our brains, and indeed, all our senses, are designed to make and appreciate music. The obvious message here is that evolution had nothing to do with the formation of human beings. Rather, we were created by God Who loves music, and wants us to praise Him with music.

Prayer: Father, I thank You for the gift of music and the ability to appreciate it. Amen.

Author: Paul A. Bartz

Ref: Science Frontiers, No. 141, 5-6/02, “Why Music?”  Photo: Courtesy of Pixabay. (PD)

Source: Creation Moments