This morning in our series Foundation of Faith we will continue looking at the topic of the Bible and we are going to focus on the subject of scientific evidence that shows that the Bible is the Word of God. Now before we go any farther, let me say this. The reason we are taking this in-depth look at the Bible is because we are living in a day where the Bible has been altered, it has been put down, it has been moved to the status of a fairy tale or just a good story and not God’s Word that has been breathed out to us from the mouth of God!

            Before we look at the scientific evidence for the Bible, let me just share these words with you from Thomas Ice regarding how the church is moving away from the Word of God and that this is the apostasy that the Word of God tells us is coming and is here. Dr. Ice wrote,

            I will never forget what one of my church history professors told us one day in class in the late 1970s at Dallas Seminary. He said something like the following: Those of us who will follow Christ and His Word, as opposed to the rising emphasis upon religious experience, will increasingly become a smaller group until one day we will be on the outside of the American Evangelical Church looking in.

My reaction to my professor was, “No, things will never get that bad within Evangelicalism.” Well, my professor was certainly right. I believe that just such a day has arrived! Like Jude, I would have loved to write about our common salvation, but the times are pressing in on biblical believers. We must contend earnestly for the faith!

. . . Human experience rather than God’s revelation is the common denominator that links all false religions and philosophies into a common bond. This is why the products of humanistic thinking is being brought into our Evangelical church through items such as psychology and psychotherapy, self-development, quietness and meditation exercises, Yoga, social justice, health foods, and all kinds of metaphysical approaches that replace a biblical doctrine of holiness and sanctification. The gospel is taking a backseat to social programs and “do-goodism” since these metaphysical approaches seek to reform mankind instead of recognizing our sin and need for the Saviour. These kinds of trends being spearheaded by the emerging church within Evangelicalism are not making the gospel more relevant to the culture instead it is leading the way to hell by making the church no different than the world. It is also setting the stage for the accepting the antichrist. Maranatha!

- Dr. Thomas Ice, Drowning in Apostasy

            You see, I think it is extremely important that we can trust what God has said in His Word because God cannot lie and if He is an all-knowing God, which He is, then when He speaks He speaks with authority and accuracy. And that goes with what God says regarding science. Some argue that we can’t trust what the Bible says regarding science because the people back then just spoke of what they knew and what they believed and now science has shown us how wrong they were. What you will see this morning is that science has been wrong and science is catching up to what the Bible says about this universe. Yes, the Bible is not a scientific handbook, but when it speaks about scientific things, it is 100% accurate as you will see!

            Now some of you might be thinking, “Come on Joe, I already believe the Bible is the Word of God, so why do we have to spend so much time on it?” That is great that you believe the Bible is the Word of God but there are many people out there that don’t and as Peter reminds us, “But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts, and always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you, with meekness and fear.” I Peter 3:15.

            Do you see what Peter is calling for us to do here? He is calling for us to be ready to defend our faith.  That word “defense” in the Greek is APOLOGIA, (ap-ol-og-ee’-ah) and it is where we get our English words “apology” and “apologetics.”  Thus, it is a word that speaks of a formal defense in a judicial court. In other words, can you defend your faith before the court of this world, what you believe?  You see, if we are living what we say we believe, then we need to be able to share that with others, give them the reason for the hope that is in us.

How is that done?  By “sanctifying” or setting your life apart for the Lord, by consecrating yourself to His control and be ready to share your faith, be men and women of the Word!  We must be ready to defend our faith as the opportunities come our way! That is why we are spending so much time on this issue of the Bible, so we can defend our faith, so we can share why we believe it is the infallible, inerrant, authoritative Word of God! So let’s look at this scientific evidence and see what God’s Word has to say and what science has to say and we will deal with some of the criticism that some have regarding this issue. And as you will see, Science and the Bible are not at odds with each other. 

And think about this for a minute. The average life of a scientific theory is 15 years! And yet, what God has said in His Word thousands of years ago still stands today! Why is that? Because our God is omniscient or He knows everything, nothing escapes Him. Then why don’t some scientists believe what God’s Word has to say? Because they don’t want to! So let’s look at the evidence and you can judge for yourself!

1.  FUNDAMENTALS OF SCIENCE

            We might as well start with the fundamentals of science, or the basics of science. Herbert Spencer, the famous British philosopher who lived back in 1820 to 1903 made an interesting observation. He said that there were basically five fundamentals of science. They are: Time, Force, Action, Space, and Matter. So a little over 100 years ago Spencer came up with this and it still holds true today.

            But Spencer was not the first to come up with this. The Bible declared this some 3500 years ago! Who could write such a thing as this? Moses did in Genesis 1:1. Let me show you these five fundamentals of Science in the very first verse of the Bible. We are told, “In the beginning [time] God [force] created [action] the heavens [space] and the earth [matter].”

            Isn’t that interesting that in the very first verse of the Bible we can see that there is something very special, very unique about this book! Maybe you are not too impressed by this. If you are not, hang in there, I have much more to show you that will blow your mind away!

2.  ASTRONOMY

            The next thing we are going to look at is astronomy or the scientific study of the universe, especially of the motions, positions, sizes, composition, and behavior of astronomical objects.

            A. THE EARTH

            The first one we are going to be looking at is the earth. I am sure you have heard people call Christians who believe in the Bible, who believe in creation, “flat earthers” or that we believe in a flat earth! That is ridiculous and the only ones who could believe that are those that deny the Scriptures! Interestingly enough if go on the Internet and type that in you will see many sites related to this and people who today, in the twenty-first century, believe this, that the earth is flat and they are not Christian!

            In Isaiah 40:22 we are told, “It is He who sits above the circle of the earth, And its inhabitants are like grasshoppers, Who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, And spreads them out like a tent to dwell in.”  Notice that it says, “circle of the earth” and not that the earth is flat! Over 2700 years ago the prophet Isaiah wrote this!

            Now some will argue that the Bible says that the earth is flat. Let me show you where they get this from and then I will comment on it. First of all, in Isaiah 11:12 we are told, “He will set up a banner for the nations, And will assemble the outcasts of Israel, And gather together the dispersed of Judah From the four corners of the earth.” In Ezekiel 7:2 we read, “And you, son of man, thus says the Lord God to the land of Israel: ‘An end! The end has come upon the four corners of the land.’” In the New Testament we read in Revelation 7:1, “After these things I saw four angels standing at the four corners of the earth, holding the four winds of the earth, that the wind should not blow on the earth, on the sea, or on any tree.” And lastly, in Revelation 20:8 we are told, “and will go out to deceive the nations which are in the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle, whose number is as the sand of the sea.”

            Seems pretty straight forward, doesn’t it? I mean both in the Old Testament and in the New Testament we see them speak of the earth having four corners and thus, it must be flat! Even Isaiah, who said the earth was a sphere, now says it is flat. What is up with that?

Let me deal with what is spoken of in Revelation 7:1 because it will help you to understand what is going on in the other verses in the Old Testament and the New Testament! First of all don’t think that John believed that the earth was flat and thus, he spoke of the four corners of the earth.  It truly is amazing how many people believe that foolishness. Even William Barclay in his commentary on the book of Revelation comes to this faulty conclusion.  In regards to the four corners of the earth he wrote: “This vision is expressed in conceptions of the world which were conceptions for the days in which John wrote.  The earth is a square, flat earth; and at its four corners are four angels waiting to unleash the winds of destruction.” 

Now think about this for a minute. If all Scripture is breathed from the mouth of God, and it was, don’t you think the creator of the heavens and earth would know what He created, if it was round or flat?  Of course He would and thus, William Barclay and those who follow his line of reasoning have come to this faulty conclusion, John did not believe the earth was flat!

            How can I prove that?  Simple, let the Word of God speak for itself and then you tell me if God knew the earth was round and for that matter, if those that read the Scriptures would also know this truth when the rest of the world at that time did believe some bizarre concepts about the earth.  In Proverbs 8:27 we are told, “When He prepared the heavens, I was there, When He drew a circle on the face of the deep.”    The shape of the earth is a sphere, it is round, not flat and God not only told us, but He should know because He created it!

            If that is true, and it is, then what does John mean when he speaks of the four corners of the earth?  He is speaking of the entire earth from north to south and east to west. You may remember several years back the Marines had a slogan that stated, “Our Marines are stationed on the four corners of the earth.”  Obviously they did not believe that the earth was flat, but they were saying that the Marines are on duty all over this world. It is an expression that we still use, even today!

            But make no mistake about it, this phrase remains very controversial! But again, let me see if I can clear this up. The word that is translated “corners” in the Hebrew is KANAPH and it is translated in a variety of different ways. The general meaning is extremity. The Greek equivalent is GONIA and it means quadrants or angles or divisions. Think about this. It is customary to divide a map into quadrants and yet, we do not believe the earth is flat! We need to be careful that we don’t miss what the writer is saying!

            So I think you can see that Isaiah and Proverbs both clearly describe the earth as being a sphere. In fact, the Hebrew word for “circle” means something with “roundness” or “spherical.” In other words, the earth is round!

            Not only that, but in the oldest book of the Bible, the book of Job we are told, “He stretches out the north over empty space; He hangs the earth on nothing.” Now this is an amazing statement for the people of Job’s day! Job is telling us that the earth hangs upon nothing, there is nothing holding it up. Keep in mind that the Hindu people believed the earth was held up or suspended upon four elephants which stood on the back of a giant tortoise that was floating on the surface of the world’s waters! Why a tortoise? Because it moves slowly and it can float I guess!

There where others who believed that the earth was supported on the shoulders of Atlas or some strong man! For the Vedic priests, the earth was set on 12 solid pillars; its upper side was its only habitable side. The Altaic people of Northern Siberia affirm that their mighty Ulgen created the earth on the waters and placed under it three great fish to support it. And the Tartars and many of the other tribes of Eurasia believed the earth to be supported by a great bull! Man got it wrong; God got it right and spoke through Job to let us know that there is nothing observable holding up the earth! Job spoke this some 4,000 years ago!

            Now what about this “empty space” to the north? Recently scientists have discovered that an area to the north of the axis of our earth, toward the polar star, is almost empty of stars in contrast to the other directions! In fact, Mitchell Waldrop wrote this in regards to this emptiness to the north in Science magazine, “The recently announced ‘hole in space,’ a 300 million-light-year gap in the distribution of galaxies, has taken cosmologists by surprise. . . . But three very deep core samples in the Northern Hemisphere, lying in the general direction of the constellation Bootes, showed striking gaps in the red shift distribution.” (Mitchell Waldrop, “Delving the Hole In Space,” Science magazine, Nov. 27, 1981).

            Interestingly enough, this emptiness in the direction to the North of our solar system is not visible by the naked eye! How did Job know this? God knew it and spoke through Job. Science finally caught up with the Bible!

            We also see that the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics are spoken of in the Scriptures, long before man discovered them! The First Law or the Law of Conservation of Energy speaks of the fact that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Isaac Asimov put it like this, “Energy can be transferred from one place to another or transformed from one form to another, but it can be neither created nor destroyed.”  To put it simply, all the energy that exists in our universe remains constant and it can never change!

            How does this relate to us as Christians and what we believe? When God created the universe that is all there is, there is no new energy or matter that is created! And think about this. This Law was discovered in the nineteenth and twenty centuries! And yet, in Genesis 2:1 we are told, “Thus the heavens and the earth, and all the host of them, were finished.” Now we may not think too much about what is said here, but I think it speaks volumes of our God!

            The word that Moses used for “finished” in the Hebrew is in the past definite tense for this verb and it speaks of a completed action in the past and this action will never occur again! That is exactly what the First Law of Thermodynamics says or the Law of Conservation of Energy. Neither matter nor energy can be created; they can only be changed from one form to another!

            The Second Law of Thermodynamics or the Entropy Law states that all systems and elements in the universe are wearing down. They are moving from order to disorder. This is in direct opposition to the Theory of Evolution which tells us that all simple systems and elements can become increasingly more organized and complicated by random chance. The Theory of Evolution is in direct opposition to the Second Law of Thermodynamics or the Entropy Law and yet they believe both are possible because the only other explanation is that there is a God!

            Again, this was not discovered until the nineteenth and twenty centuries! But listen to what God tells us in His Word about things wearing down, moving from order to disorder, the Entropy Law! In Isaiah 51:6 we are told, “Lift up your eyes to the heavens, And look on the earth beneath. For the heavens will vanish away like smoke, The earth will grow old like a garment, And those who dwell in it will die in like manner; But My salvation will be forever, And My righteousness will not be abolished.” In other words, this universe is wearing down, it is moving from order when it was created to disorder when it will be abolished or dissolved!

In Psalm 102:26 we are told, “They will perish, but You will endure; Yes, they will all grow old like a garment; Like a cloak You will change them, And they will be changed.” The Psalmist is speaking of the heavens and the earth here and he is saying that they are growing old, they will not last forever! We see Paul quote this in Hebrews 1:11-12 where we are told, “They will perish, but You remain; And they will all grow old like a garment; Like a cloak You will fold them up, And they will be changed. But You are the same, And Your years will not fail.”

And look at our own bodies and I will speak for myself here. I am quickly moving from order to disorder. Things are wearing down, I am wearing down and don’t laugh because so are you! I think that as we get older we understand this fact. I mean, just wake up in the morning and notice what has happened. Your hair went from order to disorder, if you have hair! You see, when Adam and Eve were created they were perfect. These two Laws did not come into effect until after sin entered the world. So man is not evolving, getting better, but moving from order, perfection to disorder and decay! That is the Entropy Law and God told us about it long before man discovered it!

And when you look at these two Laws, it just shows that the evolutionary theory can’t hold water! You see, the First Law of Thermodynamics tell us that all matter and energy had to be created at some point in the past, it could not create itself. All the Big Bang theory tells us is that all matter was condensed into a very small space and exploded and this is what we have today. Folk’s where did that matter come from? Who knows, at least they don’t. We know that God created all this and God did not create the heavens and the earth with a big bang, He spoke it forth!  And think about it. If the Big Bang theory was true how can Christians believe it when the Bible tells us that God created the sun on the fourth day of creation? That makes no sense if you believe in the Big Bang theory!

The Second Law of Thermodynamics tells us that things are wearing down and that means that if something is wearing down it had to be created at some point in time for that to happen. Buy a car, put it out in the sun, the snow, the cold, and throw some salt on it and what you will see happening is that rust will begin to eat away at it. That is the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the Entropy Law; everything is wearing down, moving from order to disorder, falling apart, except God! You see, that is exactly what God said He did, He created the heavens and the earth and once sin entered this world, those Laws came into play!

            B.  THE UNIVERSE

            Let’s take a few minutes and look at the universe and how big it is and what God has to say about it. First of all, how big is our universe? That is a great question and listen carefully to what Brent Tully wrote for Nova regarding this. He wrote,

. . . The most distant galaxies we can now see are 10 or 12 billion light-years away. We could never see a galaxy that is farther away in light travel time than the universe is old - an estimated 14 billion or so years. Thus, we are surrounded by a “horizon” that we cannot look beyond - a horizon set by the distance that light can travel over the age of the universe.

This horizon describes the visible universe - a region some 28 billion light years in diameter. But what are the horizons of a civilization that inhabits the most distant galaxies we see? And what about galaxies at the limits of their vision? There is every reason to think that the universe extends a long way beyond the part of the universe we can see. In fact, a variety of observations suggest that our visible patch may be a small fraction - maybe an infinitely small fraction - of the whole universe. . . .

- Brent Tully, How Big is the Universe?, 11/11/00

            In other words, we can’t really know how big it is because if the universe is only 14 billion years old and light travels at 186,000 miles per second, we can’t go beyond 14 billion light years because that is all the time we have for light to travel that far! First of all that can only be true if the speed of light was a constant and when God created the heavens and the earth did He place these stars and galaxies already that far out and the light was already present upon the earth? Could be! And he thinks the universe is far bigger than we could ever imagine! Maybe bigger than he could but God created it and He measures it with the span of His hand!

            Also, which is interesting to me, scientists today are telling us that the universe is expanding. Does the Bible speak of this? I believe that it does. In Isaiah 40:22 we are told, “It is He who sits above the circle of the earth, And its inhabitants are like grasshoppers, Who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, And spreads them out like a tent to dwell in.” As you read this it seems to be saying that our universe is expanding since its creation because God is stretching it out, He is the one who is causing it to expand!

            You can’t see this happening with the naked eye and yet God has told us that He is doing this. Do we have to see it to believe it? If you have to please understand that this was not discovered until the 1920’s as astronomers saw with the telescope that virtually all clusters of galaxies appear to be moving away from all other clusters or that the universe is expanding! Now do you believe it?

Now here is another so-called problem! In Isaiah 34:4 we are told, “All the host of heaven shall be dissolved, And the heavens shall be rolled up like a scroll; All their host shall fall down As the leaf falls from the vine, And as fruit falling from a fig tree.” This verse is speaking of the coming judgment of God upon a Christ rejecting world and the creation of a new heavens and a new earth. But in doing so it talks about the heavens being rolled up like a scroll and that seems to indicate that the universe is flat. Great, first we had to deal with a flat earth and clear that up but now the Bible tells us the universe is flat. That can’t be right, or can it? How can we be in a flat universe?

Brent Tully makes this interesting observation, something that we did not know until the recent past. He wrote, 

It turns out that the basic inflation picture satisfies a number of observed facts about the universe. One fact is particularly interesting because the better our observations become the more tightly they agree with a prediction of the inflation model. This is that the universe should be “flat” - no overall curvature of space. Spectacularly convincing evidence - recent measurements of irregularities in the microwave background radiation - supports this proposition.

- Brent Tully, How Big is the Universe?, 11/11/00

            So the Bible is right, the universe is flat and God is going to roll it up like a scroll is rolled up! Once again man has caught up with God!

            God said that He has created the heavens and the earth and not in millions of years but in 6 literally days and only some 6,000 years ago! Is there proof of this? You bet there is. And we will only look at a few things here but I want you to see why we believe the earth is just 6,000 years old, because God has said it and the evidence supports what God has said.

First of all look at the moon; it is slowly moving away from the earth at a rate of about an inch and a half every year! Great, where am I going to use that, on Jeopardy? Think about this. If the earth was 6,000 years old, that means 6,000 years ago the moon would have been about 800 feet closer to the earth. Now as large as that may seem, it is not much when you consider that the moon is a quarter of a million miles away! But, if the earth is four billion years old as evolutionists like to tell us, there is a big problem.

You see, in just 1.4 billion years the moon would have been touching the earth! So what do they say about this? They say the moon is not that old, not as old as the universe! That does not make sense and it is not science!

            I will give you one more example to show you that the earth is young and there are more, many more. Spiral galaxies slowly rotate but the inner regions of the spiral rotate faster than the outer region. The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy. What this means is that over time these spiral galaxies become more and more twisted as the spiral becomes tighter. Only after a few hundred million years the galaxy would be wound so tightly that the spiral structure would no longer be recognizable. We don’t see that with our galaxy or others that are suppose to be billions of years old! The earth is young, created by God!

            Let’s talk about the sun for a minute because there are those who mock Bible believing Christians because of what the Bible says about the sun. Let me clear that up for you! In Psalm 19:4-6 we are told, “Their line has gone out through all the earth, And their words to the end of the world. In them He has set a tabernacle for the sun, Which is like a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, And rejoices like a strong man to run its race. Its rising is from one end of heaven, And its circuit to the other end; And there is nothing hidden from its heat.”

Think about this one for a minute. The sun has an orbit? That is foolishness. We know that the earth rotates around the sun and not the other way around, or does it? You see, for hundreds of years scientists scoffed at these verses thinking that the Sun was stationary in the universe. It was discovered in recent years that the sun is in fact moving through space at 600,000 miles per hour. Its circuit is so big that it would take approximately 200 million years to complete one orbit. Amazing what God has told us in His Word!

But what about those verses that speak of the sun rising and the sun setting, we know that is not true because again, it is the earth that is rotating and moving. Folk’s, that is an expression and if you doubt that, watch the weather tonight and see what time the sun will rise and what time the sun will set. They do not believe that the sun is doing the moving here, but that the earth is rotating and thus, it is an expression that they use and we use and the Bible uses!

What about all the stars in the sky? In 150 A. D. Ptolemy counted 1,056 stars and he claimed that the number could not exceed 3,000! And yet, in Jeremiah 31:37 and 33:22 we are told, “Thus says the Lord: ‘If heaven above can be measured, And the foundations of the earth searched out beneath, I will also cast off all the seed of Israel For all that they have done, says the Lord.’ . . . ‘As the host of heaven cannot be numbered, nor the sand of the sea measured, so will I multiply the descendants of David My servant and the Levites who minister to Me.’”

We see two important points here. First of all the heavens can’t be measured. Yes, there have been guesses and yet, as we have seen, the universe is expanding and we don’t know how far it goes out there, some 12 to 14 billion light years or more, probably much more than that! Secondly, the Lord says that we will not be able to count the host of heaven, we will not be able to count the stars, they can’t be numbered!

            In regards to how many stars are out there, and there is more than 1,056 or even 3,000, Fraser Cain writes,            

It’s a great big Universe out there, with a huge numbers of stars. But how many stars are there, exactly? How many stars are there in the Universe? Of course it’s a difficult question to answer, because the Universe is a vast place and our telescopes can’t reach every corner to count the number of stars. But we can make some rough estimates.

Almost all the stars in the Universe are collected together into galaxies. They can be small dwarf galaxies, with just 10 million or so stars, or they can be monstrous irregular galaxies with 10 trillion stars or more. Our own Milky Way galaxy seems to contain about 200 billion stars; and we’re actually about average number of stars.

So an average galaxy contains between 10¹¹ and 10¹² stars. In other words, galaxies, on average have between 100 billion and 1 trillion numbers of stars.

Now, how many galaxies are there? Astronomers estimate that there are approximately 100 billion to 1 trillion galaxies in the Universe. So if you multiply those two numbers together, you get between 10²² and 10²⁴ stars in the Universe. How many stars? There are between 10 sextillion and 1 septillion stars in the Universe. That’s a large number of stars. [No kidding!]

- Fraser Cain, How Many Stars?, January 28, 2009

            So God is right, we will not be able to measure the universe or the number or stars. Yes, we have made estimates, but the exact number, the exact distance of the universe, forget about it! But let me also say this, God knows and He knows every star by name! And those numbers of stars are beyond our imagination, we can’t even count that high in our lifetime let alone number them and name them, but as I have said, God has done that very thing! How big is your God?

            Another thing about the stars, In Job 38:31a the Lord said, “Can you bind the cluster of the Pleiades . . .” According to Clark, “modern astronomy has discovered the fact that the stars of this cluster are actually bound together as if by chains. If their speed could be multiplied a billion times, they would appear like a swarm of bees in a great circle and held in their circuits by unseen forces.” How did man know this? Only by God who created these stars! You can’t bind the cluster of Pleiades, but God has!

            Also, that verse goes on to say, “. . . Or loose the belt of Orion?” Job 38:31b. The stars in the belt of Orion are free agents that are not gravitationally bound! And, interestingly enough, the three stars that comprise Orion’s belt appear to be closer together than the outer stars in the constellation, but are actually farther apart! The reason they appear closer together is because of the 2-D plane we see them in. Who is holding them together and can you loose them? God is the one that holds the whole universe together and no one can change that and no one can loose the belt of Orion!

3.  OCEANOGRAPHY

            We are now going to look at oceanography because again, what man did not know for many years, God did and spoke it forth in His Word! Solomon, long ago wrote in Ecclesiastes 1:7, “All the rivers run into the sea, Yet the sea is not full; To the place from which the rivers come, There they return again.” How true that statement is. Let me give you one example. The Mississippi River, with an average flow rate, when running at an average rate of flow, dumps approximately 6,052,500 gallons of water into the Gulf of Mexico every second. Can you imagine that, over 6 million gallons of water per second! And keep in mind that this is the water that is dumped into the oceans from just one river!

            What happened to all that water? Where does it go? Once again the Bible tells us in Ecclesiastes 11:3a we are told, “If the clouds are full of rain, They empty themselves upon the earth . . .” And in Amos 9:6b we are told, “. . . Who calls for the waters of the sea, And pours them out on the face of the earth - The Lord is His name.” In other words, it is that water cycle and this was not fully understood until the 16^th and 17^th centuries! That means more than 2,000 years before this was discovered, God told us about it! The water that goes into the sea is evaporated and then it comes down again upon the land and it goes into the sea once again!

            Did you know that there are paths in the sea? There are, not because I said so but God did. In Psalm 8:8b we are told, “. . . And the fish of the sea That pass through the paths of the seas.” Did you know that this was discovered by a man who had this verse read to him! Matthew Fontaine Maury, a United States Navy officer was one of the people who charted the oceans currents. Not the first but one of the ones that used the Bible to prove what he believed.

            Some say as he was recovering from an illness and his son read to him from Psalm 8 and he saw that the Scriptures spoke of the seas having a path. The only problem with that, from what I gather, is that his son would have been around 2 years old at the time! Others say it was his nurse that read to him from the Bible. Whatever the case, it was the Word of God that showed him that there were paths in the sea and he sought to find them. Listen to what Trevor Major wrote of this man who lived from 1806 to 1873, Matthew Fontaine Maury, who has been called the father of oceanography. We are told,

. . . Throughout all this success, Maury never forgot his belief in Scripture. Physical Geography is filled with references to the Bible. He could not help but be fascinated by passages that mention the sea, such as Psalm 8:8, Psalm 107:23-24, and Ecclesiastes 1:7. Whoever studies the sea, Maury contended, “must look upon it as a part of that exquisite machinery by which the harmonies of nature are preserved, and then will begin to perceive the developments of order and the evidences of design” (1859, p. 57).

Maury knew full well that these views clashed with those of his colleagues. Before five thousand people at the founding of the University of the South in 1860, he proclaimed the following:

“I have been blamed by men of science, both in this country and in England, for quoting the Bible in confirmation of the doctrines of physical geography. The Bible, they say, was not written for scientific purposes, and is therefore no authority in matters of science. I beg pardon! The Bible is authority for everything it touches. What would you think of an historian who should refuse to consult historical records of the Bible, because the Bible was not written for the purposes of history? The Bible is true and science is true.” (As quoted in Lewis, 1927, p. 99, emp. in orig.). . . .

               - Trevor Major, M.Sc., M.A., Matthew Fontaine Maury

            Maury took God at His Word and found that the Word of God was fully accurate, completely accurate. He gave a defense for what he believed in, he did not compromise his faith but stood strong in what he believed, the Scriptures to be the authoritative, infallible, inerrant Word of God! May we do the same!

            The Bible also speaks very clearly on the hydrological cycle or the water-vapor cycle. In Job 36:27-29 we are told, “For He draws up drops of water, Which distill as rain from the mist, Which the clouds drop down And pour abundantly on man. 

Indeed, can anyone understand the spreading of clouds, The thunder from His canopy?” It is interesting because both the Hebrew and English definition of the word “distill” speak of it as follows, this word distill speaks of having small moisture droplets of steam or vapor condensate and collect into water drops large enough to become heavy and to fall! In fact, what we see here in Job is the complete hydrological cycle of evaporation, cloud formation and precipitation! The hydrological cycle was first “discovered” by two “great” scientists named Perrault and Marriotte in the 1700’s. Yet it was described in the Bible thousands of years before that.

Think about this. Go to the past and look at what they believed. Remember that in ancient times, most religious scripture taught that lightning bolts were missiles thrown in anger by any number of gods. In China, Taoist scripture regarded the rainbow as a deadly rain dragon. God said that the rainbow was as sign to us that He would not destroy the earth with a flood and He has been faithful with that promise!

In Confucius scripture, the goddess of lightning, Tien Mu, flashed light on her intended victims to enable Lei Kung, the god of thunder to launch his deadly bolts with precision! And since rain is so necessary to life, ancient people wondered what caused it in hopes of increasing its delivery. Some tried to stab holes in the clouds with spears. The Vedas (Hindu scripture) advised to tie a frog with its mouth open to a particular tree and say a specific set of words in order to cause the rain to fall. Now the Bible also talks about rain, lightning and storms, as we have seen, but it contains none of the superstitious ideas found in other religious writings. The Bible taught that earth’s weather followed rules and cycles.

Centuries later, scientists began to discern the “rules for the rain” that Job talked about. Rainfall is part of a process called the ‘water cycle’, and here’s how the cycle works. The sun evaporates water from the ocean. That water vapor rises and becomes clouds. The water in the clouds falls back to earth as rain, collecting in streams and rivers and making its way back to the ocean. This process then repeats itself over and over again. Galileo ‘discovered’ this cycle hundreds of years ago. In fact, even today scientists are only beginning to fully understand God’s “decrees or rules for the rain.” But the process we now know as the “Hydrologic Cycle” was being described by the authors of the Bible thousands of years ago. Good luck or an all-knowing God!

            Did you know that there is weight to wind? There is! So when someone says you are full of hot air, that means what you are saying is heavy man! No, sorry but what can I say. I guess, turn to Job 28:24-26 and I will show you what I mean. We are told, “For He looks to the ends of the earth, And sees under the whole heavens, To establish a weight for the wind, And apportion the waters by measure. When He made a law for the rain, And a path for the thunderbolt.”

Did you realize that the fact that air has weight was proven scientifically only about 300 years ago? Imagine that, only 300 years ago! Is this important? You bet it is. You see, the relative weights of air and water are needed for the efficient functioning of the world’s hydrologic cycle, which in turn sustains life on the earth. You see, God knew this, He created the heavens and the earth and He has told us long before we discovered it! It was not random chance happenings that all this is working out. There is a God who created the heavens and the earth, end of story!

In Jonah 2:5-6 we are told, “The waters surrounded me, even to my soul; The deep closed around me; Weeds were wrapped around my head. I went down to the moorings of the mountains; The earth with its bars closed behind me forever; Yet You have brought up my life from the pit, O Lord, my God.” Did you know that there were mountains in the sea? There are and God told us long before we ever found this out for ourselves! In fact, Jonah had a first hand look I guess as he went down in the belly of that great fish!

Now, only in the last century have we discovered that there are towering mountains and deep trenches in the depths of the sea. The oceans cover an area of about 140 million square miles (362 million sq km), or nearly 71% of the Earth’s surface. The oceans go to an average depth of 12,200 feet (3,720 m) and their deepest point is 36,198 feet (11,033 m) in the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific. The ocean ridges form a great mountain range, almost 40,000 miles (64,000 km) long, that weaves its way through all the major oceans. It is the largest single feature on Earth. And the highest Mountain is Mauna Kea, Hawaii, which rises 33,474 feet (10,203 m) from its base on the ocean floor; only 13,680 feet (4,170 m) are above sea level. Once again God told us this long before we figured it out! The oceans do have mountains!

            We can go on but I hope you can see that when the Bible speaks on matters of science, it is 100% accurate. If there is something that seems to be a discrepancy, it is because we are either misunderstanding what has been said or it is the way we are looking at the issue. Again, science has to keep correcting itself, God does not! We are going to look at next time the advanced medical knowledge that is found in the Scriptures. And keep in mind that the Bible is not a book on medicine or medical knowledge but when it speaks in these areas it does so with 100% accuracy as you will see!

            As I close this morning I hope I have shown you that we can trust the Scriptures when it speaks on science. That we do not need to be embarrassed but should speak with boldness and confidence in what the Scriptures are telling us. Let me leave you with these words and I pray you are ready to give a defense for what you believe. That you can stand up for your faith and those that are challenging your faith, you can share with them the evidence you have for what you believe and to challenge them to give you the evidence for what they believe!

            Robert Ingram wrote, “Science is a marvelous tool given by God to discover the secrets of the cosmos and to elicit praise from men. When science is rightly studied within the context of the faith it is an ally, not an enemy.”

            May we not forget that! Yes, the Bible is not a science book, and yet, it is scientifically accurate as we have seen and there is even more out there, but I think you get the point. As far as I can see, there are no scientific statements that contradict the Bible, at least ones that are based in science and not faith, like evolution. There is no evidence for it and we will touch on this next time. And keep in mind that these verses we have looked at in the Bible were written hundreds, thousands of years before man discovered these things! What an awesome God we have if we would only trust in Him and His Word that He has given to us! As Paul said, “For the word of God is living and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. And there is no creature hidden from His sight, but all things are naked and open to the eyes of Him to whom we must give account.” Hebrews 4:11-12.