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Should be arriving at your house sometime before December.
It's the January issue.
I'm always about two months late.
Are you raising your hand already?
You can't hear me.
Well, I don't want to boom, but is that better?
Okay.
Well, I'll tell you, this is...
Reverend, if this happened on radio, spending the first 20 minutes asking all listeners, can you hear me?
Wouldn't it be nice if you just thought all of you had volume controls?
That's what you're used to with me, is having a volume control.
And this is live, which presents all the dilemmas of live thing.
I have been searching my whole life for one book that I think would make the Holocaust understandable in its immensity to anyone of any background, faith, race, religion.
And I found one just two months ago, and it's out there.
I just want you to be aware of why it's out there.
It has nothing to do with the Course, but it's a life-changing type of book.
Just wanted to make that where.
Oh, Shadows of Auschwitz.
I don't sell well.
That's a very serious flaw.
But isn't it out there?
That's the reason I'm waiving it, because there's only one book out there.
Besides mine, this is not my book.
It is a great book, and it is available outside if you want it.
That's why it's out there.
It is absolutely unique, and books go out of print very rapidly.
So I strongly, in fact, I beg you for the sake of just knowledge, and you'll see when you see it why I feel this way about it.
It's mostly pictures, but it's pictures that the Nazis themselves took.
And his commentary, he's a Christian.
He's a Christian theologian.
His commentary on every picture is what is so incredible about this book.
Harry James Cargis.
Crossroad is the publisher.
Okay, thank you.
Next, I have a question, a philosophic question, which I'm just curious.
It's a point that I have made every so often, and I would like to see if it continues to be valid.
People often ask about suffering.
Why is there so much suffering in life, unjust suffering?
And one of the reasons, or one of the ways in which I respond, is to distinguish between natural suffering and man-made or human-made suffering.
I would like you to raise your hand when you think of the greatest pain in your life, pains plural, that you've experienced, unjust pains, if you will.
I think that's the best way to put it, that you felt were terrible pain and not terribly just.
If you feel that they were induced by people or they were induced by natural thing like hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, disease, or were they induced by people hurting you or hurting someone you love?
Okay?
Therefore, if it has been, if the great majority has been one or the great majority has been another, I'd like you to raise your hand.
If the great majority, 75%, three-quarters of the pain in your life has been induced by people rather than of natural causes, please raise your hands.
That's dramatic, isn't it?
I think that that helps immediately.
It helps a lot of people who ask about the question of unjust suffering to recognize that it doesn't reflect on God.
It reflects on people.
Just when you realize how overwhelmingly, and it doesn't matter what group, this is a mixed group religiously and so on.
It doesn't matter where I have asked this question.
That is exactly the response I got.
And I was just, it's something actually which we're validating for the sake, for God's sake who gets a bad rap.
And I just thought that he would be pleased before Genesis that we gave him a good name.
All right, I thank you for that.
And now let me begin.
Now, first of all, I wear a kippah whenever I teach Torah, because to me this is not literature.
To me, this is holy.
And therefore, you'll understand.
Normal courses I don't, but for Torah, I do.
I do not approach this as great literature.
Shakespeare is great literature.
This is the Bible.
That doesn't mean, though, that I leave my brain at home and just bring my spirit or my theology to the Bible.
I read the Bible exactly as it is.
But I do regard it as more than great literature.
My task in this course with you is to show you why it's more than great literature, why it tells you about life more than any other book or series of books ever written.
I've given a course here on Deuteronomy, and I've given one on Exodus, two of the five books of Moses, the five first books of the Torah or Hebrew, and of the Hebrew Bible, and of the Bible for Jews and Christians.
The first five books begin, of course, with Genesis.
I come to teaching Genesis with fear and trepidation, to use Kierkegaard's famous terms.
I have always found it a daunting task to get through Genesis 1 and 2, let alone the whole book.
Everybody knows the story of Genesis 1, and it's much harder to teach what everybody knows than it is to teach what nobody knows.
Everything's a revelation.
You've all thought about creation.
You've all thought about the Garden of Eden.
You all know about Adam and Eve.
You all know about an apple and a serpent.
You all know about all that stuff.
What is there to say?
I have read Genesis 1 and 2, the first 10 chapters of Genesis so many times since I'm a child and in Hebrew.
I studied all of this as a child in Jewish schools called yeshivas.
And yet, so much was not clear to me after all that study.
And I wasn't prepared to ever go public with Genesis till some things got clear to me.
And some of the things that I'm about to tell you became clear to me 4 o'clock today.
My wife is here.
She is a living witness to how true that is.
I keep coming up with these revelations, or what I thought were revelations, and I'd say, now I'm not going to tell you.
You'll hear it in class.
I don't want to ruin it for you.
But it's true.
It's just really to the last minute, things were beginning to fall into place.
I didn't quite understand what is the message in all of this.
I think the message in all of it is staggering.
And I want to, I want to do today Genesis 1.
We may not even finish Genesis 1.
We may get to Genesis 2.
I'm not sure.
So your four classes on Genesis may bring us up to Genesis 4.
I'm not sure.
It's truly a matter of how it goes.
If you have questions, please jot them down so that you can ask them at the end of the class or next time.
But if I stop each time anyone has a question, A, very often I'll answer it as I go on.
B, I couldn't go on.
I know you'll have questions.
It's not possible.
It's too rich.
We are about to enter a Mahler symphony.
I mean, with themes going on in every instrument.
And you just have to listen so carefully to what is going on.
Every choice of word in Genesis 1 has something to say, as I will show you in most cases.
A few more prefaratory words.
Do I read this as a religious person?
Do I read this as a person?
Do I read this as a Jew?
Do I read this as a Western person?
The answer is I read him as all of those combined.
I can't separate myself in that manner.
But I do first enter with intellectual honesty.
I am not here with an agenda.
My agenda is not to prove to you God wrote it, because that is not my concern anyway, even theologically.
I am convinced that if there were no God, it would not have been written.
Did God dictate every single word?
I don't know.
And frankly, it doesn't really matter to me.
What matters to me is what is it that I could learn from it?
Most Jews don't know this, let alone non-Jews.
Torah, which is the five books of Moses, doesn't mean law.
It means teacher.
The purpose of biblical text is to learn, is to be taught something by it and learn.
I think the way you will understand life will be affected by how you understand Genesis 1.
Virtually every theme in life in the first two chapters of Genesis is covered.
Male-female relations, the way we should look at our parents, the purpose of life, is there a God?
How should we treat nature?
It's all there in the first two chapters.
It's overwhelming.
So those are my preamble words.
Now, I photocopied Genesis 1 here for you.
I hope that there's enough for at least you to look over somebody's shoulder.
And obviously, next time you'll probably want to bring your own Bible.
I couldn't care less what translation you have, or of course the original, if you know Hebrew.
So I just, whatever was in the office was translated.
This is not my favorite translation.
The truth is I'm not thrilled with any translation.
But it's par for the chorus.
Translations from this are very difficult.
Okay, in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
This episode of Timeless Wisdom will continue right after this.
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The study goes on to suggest non-digestible fibers such as nuts, seeds, berries, lentils, slows the absorption of sugar, stabilizes blood sugar, and reduces chronic diseases.
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Now, back to more of Dennis Prager's timeless wisdom.
Or the heavens and the earth.
Which is more accurate because heavens are the plural in Hebrew.
And I'm going to talk about that word at some point.
Shamaiim.
Let me begin with answering the question of science versus religion.
I think that this is a stumbling block to a lot of people understanding Genesis.
I begin with the premise that there cannot be, cannot be, a controversy, an argument between science and religion.
If something is true, then religion cannot deny it, or it is a false religion.
Therefore, the whole notion that there is a problem between Genesis and science strikes me as foolish.
If a scientist says it, I think he's a foolish scientist.
If a religious person says it, I think he's a foolish religious person.
The purpose of Genesis, as I will show you, is not to teach the nature of science.
It is to teach the nature of God.
That is my first and foremost statement to you.
You will leave understanding God better.
The purpose of Genesis 1 is not to tell you how the world was created.
That is the purpose of the biology and physics books that you have at college.
And they do a good job, and as you know, they change every year.
Because the more we learn, the more we have to change the past science books.
So they are constantly exploring something that will never be fully resolved.
How did everything happen?
But I love science.
Science teaches truths about how things happened.
That is not at all the purpose of Genesis.
If God wrote it, Moses wrote it, brilliant people wrote it, whoever wrote it, it would be the furthest thing from their mind or from his mind or her mind that we would learn science from this.
It's preposterous.
That is not the task, as I will show you.
But you will learn about life.
That is what it is here to teach.
Therefore, the question, for example, did God create the world in six days literally or not, I will show you from internal evidence you cannot hold, at least that the first days were 24-hour days from internal evidence.
And maybe it was understood by who wrote it as a miracle of six days.
So what?
So what?
Do we therefore have to live by it and call fossils the works of the devil?
All we do is make God and religion seem silly then.
There is a very famous Jewish saying, the signature of God is truth.
If something is true, then by definition you must believe it.
You cannot suspend your intellect when approaching God.
It is one of the basic beliefs of my life, and I don't want it suspended when we look at Genesis.
Now, the first sentence itself is overwhelming.
It is overwhelming.
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
And by the way, there are alternate and legitimately alternate translations.
when God began to create the heavens and the earth is another alternate and legitimate reading, just for those of you who are interested in that.
It doesn't make any difference, however, to the points that I am about to make.
Let me show you how much is in this sentence.
This sentence changed human history.
Okay?
This sentence changed history.
I will explain why.
First of all, it tells us that everything came about by God.
That in and of itself is staggering.
It means, among other things, that everything has a purpose.
An intelligence created the world.
The very moment you say that God created the world, you are making an argument for purpose.
God does not do things purposelessly.
I mean, that is just something even an atheist, I'm not asking you to be a believer.
I'm asking you to take from within its own evidence.
If there is a God, all right, we'll use an if.
If there is a God and God created everything, there must be a reason for it.
You can't argue he was bored.
You can even argue he was bored.
By the way, argue he was bored, okay?
But at least then there's a reason.
God wanted to be interested in us.
But whatever there is, whatever your reason you will give, there is reason.
It is the antithesis of the atheist Weltanshaun, the atheist worldview, the atheist, non-theist, no God involved.
What is the choice to God creating the heavens and the earth?
The heavens and the earth came about by themselves.
Then there's no purpose.
There is no point.
This changed history.
There is a divine will in creation is already one of the most important things stated in Genesis 1.1.
There is a point to this universe and therefore obviously to our lives.
Okay, number one.
Number two, it implies that it is creation ex nihilol, which is Latin for from nothing.
The beginning, in the beginning God created.
God started and he didn't create from something.
God created.
How do we know that it's out of nothing?
Because of the word create.
The word create, which is in Hebrew bara, is used in the Bible only when God does it.
There is no time in the entire Bible where you say va'ivra adam and something that man or woman has created.
It is a term reserved for God because only God can create from nothing.
We can do everything else God can do.
We can order things.
We can make things, but we cannot create.
Even if we were to make life in a test tube, it's not creatio ex nihilo.
It's not creation from nothing.
So to say, well, man will then be God, no, man will not be God.
God did it from nothing.
We live at a time, by the way, where scientifically this is no longer easily scoffed at.
The Big Bang theory just got a very big bang this week, a big boost.
Apparently, apparently being called one of the great finds in cosmology, the study of the origins of the universe, is now apparently coming close to proof that there was a beginning.
That's amazing.
I remember, I've been arguing theism for years, and I remember the most famous and eloquent, I think, argument of atheists.
I would say, as a theist, that God always existed.
And the atheist would answer, matter always existed, and it would be a draw.
The universe was always here.
God was always here.
Pick your choice.
We don't have to pick that any longer.
One of them wasn't here all the time.
One of them came out of nothing.
And it's pretty dramatic that God begins with, let there be light, given the intensity of the light of the Big Bang.
Now, I am not saying that who wrote this said, let there be a Big Bang, and so on, because a thousand years from now, they will have other ways of understanding the beginning.
And I don't want to be stuck with hanging religion on science.
I'm merely here to say to you that if there was a beginning, that's a pretty powerful thing.
Robert Jastrow is a famous astronomer, actually geologist astronomer.
And he wrote an article in the New York Times magazine about 15 years ago about the Big Bang, which then became a book, a little book, called God and the Astronomers.
You must pick it up.
Jastro, J-A-S-T-R-O-W, you can read it in an hour and a half if you're a slow reader like me.
If you're a speed reader, you could do it while drinking a Pepsi.
And the book, the book, his thesis was great, and at the end of the book, he says, well, physicists and astronomers are now climbing the final peak of knowledge of the origins of the universe.
And as they finally get to the top, they look around and they find that there's a band of theologians who have been sitting there the whole time.
Jastro is an agnostic geologist.
And that's what he wrote.
That the higher astronomers climb a mountain, the more they're likely to find theology.
That is what is happening because in the beginning, God created the world.
And creation means from nothing.
Therefore, it is used rarely and only with regard to God.
Number three, the first sentence tells us something that people today, this moment, need to hear terribly.
This episode of Timeless Wisdom will continue right after this.
Hi, this is pharmacist Ray Solano with your Healthy Choices update sponsored by Prescription Dispensing Labs Pharmacy.
For decades, caloric restriction and fasting have been the gold standard for longevity.
But a recent study published in Aging Cell reveals that eating freely without restriction may prove just as effective.
Unrestricted eating may be okay, but choose nutritious and satisfying foods.
The study goes on to suggest non-digestible fibers such as nuts, seeds, berries, lentils, slows the absorption of sugar, stabilizes blood sugar, and reduces chronic diseases.
However, nearly doubling our protein intake and lower carbohydrates shorten lifestyle.
Conclusion, choose those nutritious, satisfying foods this season, but leave out the sugar.
The pharmacists at PD Labs are now offering a free 15-minute nutritional consult as a gift to our listeners.
Call 888-909-0110 and ask for the 15-minute console.
Check out our website, pdlabsrx.com, for our holiday offer.
Remember, you have a choice in healthcare.
Now, back to more of Dennis Prager's Timeless Wisdom.
That God created nature.
God is not part of nature.
There is no more important inference to be drawn from this at this time in history.
One of the reasons I deeply believe in the Torah is because it has something to say to every generation that is deeply needed.
And in this case, this is deeply needed.
There are people today who hold that God is in nature or nature is God.
And I don't only mean simple worship of trees, though sometimes it even devolves into that.
Just an argument.
Nature is divine and God is in nature.
Or as New Age would put it, God is in every one of us.
That is not true.
God is outside of us.
That's what's here.
God precedes us.
It's humbling, but God does precede us.
You are not God.
You are in God's image, something we will talk about because it's in the first chapters.
But we are not God and we are not gods.
God is outside of us.
He created the heavens and the earth.
The importance of God being above nature, I will talk about a little later.
Let me make one obvious point, which has always disturbed me about people saying that nature is God or equating nature with God.
Nature is amoral.
Nature has no morality.
Nature's only law is survival of the fittest.
There's no commandment to animals, love your neighbor as yourself.
The commandment to animals is eat your neighbor before you are eaten.
And I don't blame them.
I'm not anti-animal for making that point.
I'm being realistic.
A safari opened my eyes to this.
Should all take a safari.
If any of you romanticize nature, please go to Africa.
Spend a couple of weeks as I did in Kenyan, Tanzania, and watch the way animals live, not in the zoo or at home with your cats and dogs that you pet and love, but how they live in real life.
They spend most of their day trying to avoid being eaten and trying to find who is smaller than them that they could eat.
That's nature.
Hitler used nature for survival of the fittest.
Hitler said that should be our law, and we Aryans will show we are the fittest.
The Jews are the least fit, and we will eat them.
We will devour them.
It's no coincidence the Jews were called by Nazis vermin, equated to animals.
That's what you do.
It's what one animal does to another, eradicates it if necessary.
So this identification of God with nature is terribly amoral.
God is above nature.
God created nature.
And you will see in the entire first chapter, repeated, God tells nature what to do.
Nature has no will of its own.
Next.
It was really a separate point, but I tied it in.
God commands.
Nature has no independent will of its own.
Fifth, I believe it is, God's existence is taken for granted.
One of the extraordinary revolutions caused by Genesis 1 is its complete rejection, obliteration, of all ancient ways of looking at the gods.
They had what were called theogeny.
Genie, as in Genesis, as in cosmogony, is the Latin for beginning.
What's theogeny?
The beginning of a god.
All the ancient stories of creation had theogeny.
They asked what superficial atheists, as opposed to profound atheists, asked today.
Well, where did God come from?
That's exactly what the pagans asked.
Where did the gods come from?
So in all parallel creation myths, you have the creation of the gods.
You don't have the gods creating first.
You have the gods being created first.
How did they come about?
And look at the simplicity of the first sentence of the Hebrew Bible.
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
God was there.
It's just a given.
There is no beginning to God.
Let me read to you from one of the scholars who's written on ancient cosmogenies.
His name is Bernhard Jakobson.
Excuse me, Bernhard Anderson.
Jakobson was another one who wrote on it.
Bernard Anderson.
Although the Bible takes for granted the contours of ancient cosmology, in other words, it understood how other people wrote their cosmogonies, beginnings of the world, and it utilized some of the language.
It has demythologized the ancient understanding of existence.
The Hebrew Bible contains no theogeny, no myth which traces the creation to a primordial battle between divine powers.
No ritual which enabled men to repeat the mythological drama and thereby ensure the supremacy of the national God.
Mythological allusions have been torn out of their ancient context of polytheism and nature religion and have acquired a completely new meaning within the historical syntax of Israel's faith.
My friends, I have a lot of faith in my ability to explain things, but I truly believe that I fail to communicate to you how Genesis 1 changed history.
How this notion of a God who created the world above nature, invisible, non-pagan, monotheistic, changed all of history.
Genesis 1-1 changed things more than anything you can imagine.
Anything.
More than the French Revolution, more than the American Revolution.
It made subsequent thinking about life possible.
I will show you why later, but please understand the revolution.
Remember this sentence, no matter how you look at biblical origins, this sentence is probably 3,000 years old.
That's incredible.
That's incredible.
You know what people were doing 3,000 years ago?
I mean, do you know how primitive the conception of the world was?
And then somebody came along and said, in the beginning, an invisible, unknowable, untouchable God who had no birth created the world.
Give me a break.
Would have been the reaction of any pagan.
It is too wild.
It is so unbelievably abstract.
And how did he do it?
The pagan will come over to this Jew and say, oh, really?
And how did this God do it?
He just said, let it happen.
Oh, come on.
He didn't make it out of clay.
He didn't make it from a turtle.
What are you talking about?
He just said, let there be light.
It's too abstract, but that's exactly its greatness.
Number six or seven, whatever number I'm up to.
Bereshit in the beginning means God created something else, which is incredible for 3,000 years ago.
It's incredible for anything prior to Albert Einstein.
God created time.
There was no time, because prior to the beginning is nothing, including no time.
How do you think that sat with the ancient pagans?
It doesn't sit well with you.
You understand no time?
What happened 10 minutes before the beginning?
Wasn't it 10 minutes to the beginning?
Right?
That's how the mind would think.
But that's not how it works.
There was no time.
Einstein has shown this.
God created time in the beginning.
He's outside of time.
God is not only outside of nature.
God is outside of time.
This is an incredible God.
That's part of the reason, by the way, that you could begin to grasp how God could look at the world.
God is outside of this confine.
And that is what makes one, I think, even rationally hold that there must be something beyond this life.
This is one variant of the possibilities.
And God has other things in mind which we cannot grasp.
Next, God is monotheistic.
It says, in the beginning, Elohim created.
Elohim is plural.
It is plural, however, just like the word in Hebrew, water is plural.
There is no singular for water in Hebrew.
It's myim.
There's no word my.
It's just the way it is.
An analogy to English is fish.
The fish swim or the fish swims.
You can have it either way.
So too in Hebrew.
This is not meant to disagree with my friends here who have a Christological reading of this.
It's merely to say that the evidence doesn't support a plural reading of the word Elohim for a very simple reason.
With one exception that I'll come to.
It always uses the singular verb.
Elohim creates.
If it were plural, it would be Elohim create.
And here, Bara is the singular.
Elohim is also one of the two major words in Genesis and the Torah generally for God.
The other one is Adonai or Jehovah in the literal origin.
The second name, Jehovah, comes in in chapter 2, which leads a lot of biblical critics to hold that those are two different documents, the Elohim document, or E document, and the Jehovah document, the J document.
I have no desire to get into the documentary hypothesis.
It doesn't interest me particularly.
The reason it doesn't interest me particularly is because I read the Bible to learn from it, not to figure out who wrote what.
So I appreciate that there were those who will find that fascinating.
I don't.
But what is clear is Elohim is the God of the world, and Jehovah is the personal God.
The God of nature or the world is in chapter 1.
God gets personal in chapter 2, and so you then have God Jehovah speaking, the personal God.
Those are two separate understandings.
God is one, but God has many facets.
One of them is the universal facet, the natural facet of creating the world.
The other one is the personal.
Next revolution in chapter, in verse 1.
This is all verse 1.
No pre-existing matter.
God didn't make the world from anything.
He didn't form it from something.
I had mentioned that in Ex Nihilo, out of nothing.
But you must understand this as well, because all pagan mythologies had God forming the world out of something.
This one doesn't.
He makes the something and then forms it.
And finally, the other revolution here is the utterly and totally universalist nature of Genesis 1.
meaning it isn't jewish it is i will be parochial for a moment it is a source of great pride to me that the jewish bible is so universal in its origin It isn't here to tell you about Jews.
It isn't here to tell you about Judaism.
It is here to tell you about the God of everyone.
This is as valid in Japan, in Africa, in America, as in Israel, that in the beginning God created the world.
There is nothing whatsoever nationalist.
There is nothing religious, in other words, specifically in a religion.
It's very religious that God created the world.
But not of a specific religion.
It is a very powerful statement.
It isn't the Jews' God who created the world.
It is the God of the world who created the world.
And we will see if we get that far that God wanted it to be that way.
He wanted to be everybody's God and be obeyed as everybody's God.
The idea that he had to reveal his will to one group came later from the internal evidences I read it.
It's why I have always called the Jewish people an ad hoc movement with a temporary assignment.
And when fulfilled, theoretically at least, it can go out of business.
It was formed for a task.
The task will be fulfilled, and then we would end in a very different world.
But God's original intent was totally universalist.
It's the God of the world, the God who created everything.
That is Genesis 1.1.
The revolution inherent in that statement, which is why everybody knows it.
Why it is so deeply part of the Judeo-Christian, Muslim, and Western cultures.
It is so deeply embedded in it.
People have tried to fight it.
Nature created itself.
The world created itself.
There is no God.
There is no supervisor.
And so on.
But this is their battle against Genesis 1.1.
The task, as I said, is to tell you the nature of God, not the nature of science.
And so keep that in mind as we continue.
I'm not going to go over every sentence.
I'm picking out specific ones.
1.3.
God said, let there be light, and there was light.
That great?
That's it.
I always had this vision as a kid of, you know, did God say it with effort?
Did he yell it?
Did he whisper it?
Did he think it?
Did it take any effort at all to say, oh, let there be light?
Let there be light.
Or was it, you know, let there be light?
It is so extraordinary.
The simplicity here is staggering.
He wills it, and it happens.
Again, the only way you could begin to appreciate what a revolution this all is, is to read ancient mythologies.
What the whole rest of the world, not just the ancient Middle East, everywhere, Japan, Africa, the Americas, anywhere you wish.
Read every beginning.
The beginning was physical.
Just the universal God willing something is a staggering change.
God wills it, and it happens.
Let there be light.
Now, by the way, it's a very interesting thing, which I am sure 25, 50, 100, 200 years ago was a great source of scoffing by atheists.
I remember hearing it as a kid.
How could there be light?
The sun wasn't even invented yet.
The stars weren't even created yet.
That's pretty interesting, isn't it?
Now, you got to admit, whether it was men or God who wrote this, they had to be pretty well aware of that question.
One thing most people grant is that whoever wrote it wasn't stupid.
Whoever wrote it also would have realized, how was there light before stars?
Before the sun?
It's a good question.
I don't have an answer to that, but you have to admit that that's quite something.
It's pretty impressive, isn't there?
That's a pretty risky thing to write, because it would have seemed to anybody pre-Big Bang as pretty weird.
Where did it come from?
Well, there's no answer that I know.
I find that very compelling for, I won't say God writing every word, but I will say for a divine element of wisdom here that transcends the norm.
Because it's a very obvious question that not all of you might have thought of.
Where did the light come from?
Nothing that makes light had been created.
1.4.
God saw it was good.
This also knocked out a lot of ancient cosmologies.
Because in ancient creation things, it was miserable.
Everybody was fighting everybody.
The gods were killing each other to see who would win.
They were battling major sea monsters and big giant turtles.
And there was a tremendous amount of sex and cruelty.
God says, let there be light, and so it was good.
Can you get simpler?
Can you get more beautiful than that?
He liked what he did.
I like that, by the way.
Isn't that touching?
If we're supposed to learn from God, clearly one thing you might want to pick up is what real humility is about.
You're allowed to say your work is good if it's good.
If you want to imitate God, don't go around saying of something good you've done, nah.
That's fake.
That's false humility.
Real humility acknowledges what you've done.
I think I've always been touched by that.
God looks at what he did.
Yeah, that was a good job.
Isn't that something he saw it was good?
And to teach us, too, there is goodness inherent in this world even though there's so much evil.
It's why 75% of you said more than 75% of your pain came from people.
Didn't come from God.
God created a good world.
We screw it up.
It's a famous theological term to screw up.
from the latin screwum tremendum this episode of timeless wisdom will continue right after this Now.
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Back to more of Dennis Prager's Timeless Wisdom.
Now, very interesting thing coming up here.
We're still now in Genesis 1:3.
Then God said, let there be light and there was light.
Okay?
God saw the light that was good, divided the light from the dark.
God called the light day and the dark, it called night.
So the evening and the morning were the first day.
Now, this is the answer and answer, I believe, to creationists who wish to posit 24-hour days as God's creation of the universe.
That there were six 24-hour time periods because there was day and night before the sun.
But it's the sun that gives us days and nights of 24 hours altogether.
No sun, no day.
We're talking about a day and an evening of totally different conceptions.
It's a divine day or evening.
It's a metaphor, if you will.
It's a period.
It's an eon.
I don't know what it is.
But it can't be a day.
Even if you are a literalist, I'll grant literalism to Bible literalists.
You still can't have a day here because there is no sun.
So the very use of the term day doesn't mean obviously the day as we know it.
Because the day as we know it is dependent entirely upon there being a sun.
That's how we measure our units.
So that's why I am troubled by creationists because they're battling the correct battle with the wrong weapons.
It is a correct battle to battle the atheist who says everything came about on its own.
I joined that battle.
But to oppose it with ideas that I think are foreign to the text itself, just to go to the other extreme from the secular extreme, I personally cannot support.
So I find myself, and I might as well handle this right now, in the middle.
On the one hand, you have those who believe everything came about by evolution without God, and on the other extreme is the creationists.
No evolution and everything as written.
I have no problem with evolution.
I have a problem with evolution with God.
The notion that everything came about on its own strikes me as absurd.
Just absurd.
That it just happened on its own.
And by the way, according to one of the great paleontologists of our time, Stephen Jay Gould, who is an agnostic or an atheist, the Harvard paleontologist who writes on evolution, he has recently said that he believes that if time went backwards and we started all over under the same conditions, life wouldn't have arisen as it did.
It's a fluke.
It's too much of a fluke.
So there is no inevitability, even in evolution.
Even the evolutionists will have to say it's a quirk between quirk and instrumentality and intelligence.
I'll take intelligence over quirk as having created intelligence.
But please understand that we do have a day before we have the sun.
Now the second day is very interesting.
Second day nothing gets created.
I find that a very interesting thing that may be new to many of you.
Look at the second day is 6 to 8.
Then God said, let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters.
One of the things I love about this is how you get these English words which mean nothing.
Anybody use firmament in the last month?
Wow, look at the firmament.
Oh, God.
What's a firmament?
Look, the truth is the people working on this don't have a real answer because the Hebrew is not really translatable.
The Hebrew is Rakia.
And I remember, it drove me crazy when I first learned this, like in second grade.
The teacher acted like everybody knew what Rakia was.
Like, you know, like you'd all know what firmament is.
Oh, well, of course, there's a Rakia up there.
And it didn't make sense.
But now I will try to explain to you what probably didn't make sense in Sunday school or Hebrew school or for that matter, yeshiva, if you went.
The ancient mind understood the universe as this.
Now you have to enter their mind.
It's obviously not the way you see it.
The universe is divided into three sections.
Waters above, waters below, the waters of our land, as it were.
And in the middle is what we would call space or atmosphere.
Okay?
So the beginning, what God did was apparently in this understanding was to separate the waters.
The word for heaven or sky or heavens in Hebrew is the word for waters or water with a shin in front of it.
The word for water is mayin.
The word for sky is shamayin.
So obviously, that's why it comes from this.
It comes from this.
This is where we first encounter the word for the heavens or for the sky.
So what you have is the notion in the word, it would be as if the word were hawaters, would be our word for heavens, hawaters.
So the hawaters were separated.
That made room.
Then how did it rain?
It punctured the firmament or the rakiah.
There would be holes.
That's how the ancient mind would understand it.
Okay?
Therefore, that's what God did.
God was not creating a thing on the second day.
Spent the whole second day just making some order out of the beginning.
That is what is being taught here.
God is, and by the way, there's another proof that there was no creation.
It's the only day where God didn't say it.
Anybody you know, what did God create on the second day?
I'd be shocked if anybody you know would be able to answer.
The answer is nothing.
God didn't create a thing on the second day or the second period, which would be more clear.
What he did was create the order of the separating of the waters, which obviously meant a lot more to people then.
Now you'll say, well, this proves God didn't write it.
Or this proves that it's just primitive literature or ancient literature.
Let me tell you something.
It had to be understandable to the people 3,000 years ago.
Or nobody would have passed it down.
Of course the Torah had to speak in a language that was related to by the people of the time.
It's just natural it had to be done.
To me, the miracle is that the Bible speaks to me in 1992 and to ancestors 3,000 years ago.
That's what's incredible to me.
But that there will be stuff that they would have related to better, I relate better to let there be light.
You don't think the ancient people, ancient Jews, thought, this is weird, light before the sun and the stars?
But now we relate to that terrifically.
Big bang, great glows prior to this.
But you've got to give the ancients something for them to relate to too, because they were all wondering, gee, how did the waters get separated?
That was their big wonderment.
Here's your answer.
Day number three.
So there was nothing good, right?
God didn't look around and say, gee, I made a good separation.
Okay, that was the one day of the creation process when God did not say, what a terrific thing.
Day number three, Genesis 9 to 13.
What happens here is God gathers the waters to make for a dry area.
He calls the water sea, calls the dry area earth, and that he saw was good.
But we're not done on the third day because now with the land and the sea, God can ask the earth, tells the earth, to sprout vegetation, seed-bearing plants and fruit trees-bearing fruit.
The obvious question is, how do you get vegetation prior to the sun?
Okay, this is one of the biblical critics or skeptics' greatest questions.
Uh-huh.
You see?
Now, first of all, whenever I argue with anybody, I try to assess their intelligence.
It's one of the things that you try to do.
You would think that those who attack the Bible on this ground would at least acknowledge that the people who wrote it also knew sun was important to growing things because they saw, gee, very little grows in caves.
I bet they knew that 3,000 years ago, that things don't grow in caves.
So obviously they knew too.
They planted things.
They had trees.
They had olive trees.
And none of them were indoors.
Everything they grew were outdoors.
So they too knew you needed sun.
So obviously, whoever wrote this would understand that too.
So asking a question that presupposes I really caught them in an internal inconsistency implies that they didn't know that there was a theoretical inconsistency.
The point is, however, that it doesn't say what the point is that I see it is.
God creates on the third day the possibility of vegetation.
The seeds, as it were, are planted.
First, you need the earth to be able to sprout these things.
The other, that's number one.
Number two, remember what is being told here, not science.
What is being taught here is the nature of God.
The most important thing in Genesis 1 is to kill mythology, to kill polytheism, to kill paganism.
That's the intent.
When you read it that way, everything becomes clearer.
If you read it for science, you're finished.
If you read it to combat polytheism, it's all clear.
God says, let nature produce these things.
As Nachum Sarna, who was author of this wonderful work in the Jewish Publication Society commentary on the Torah, he's the one who did Genesis.
He's a professor at Branheis University, biblical scholar.
And he wrote, this meant no room for fertility cults.
Fertility cults worshipped the ground, worshipped nature.
If they only did the right thing, then the goddesses or the nature goddesses will give us fruit.
No, what are you talking about?
It comes from the earth.
I said it that way on the third day.
Fertility, schmertility.
Remember, that is what is being done here.
Judaism loathes superstition.
Doesn't mean Jews loathe superstition.
Very important little poof.
That's what you will get after I give you the sun.
First, I give you the seeds, then I'm going to give you the sun, and the stuff's going to come out.
God saw that was good.
He liked his work on the third day.
Just wish to announce that.
Day number four is verse 14 to 19.
Interesting the way we have here, verse number 14 harkens back to verse 1.
Let there be lights.
First, there was let there be light.
So it's obvious that they knew that the first light wasn't sunlight or starlight because it's a different term.
Here it's the lights, the things that give light.
The first one was just light.
Let there be lights.
You will love this next point, which is not mine.
I don't remember whose it was, but I loved it when I read it.
You will notice that the sun and the moon and the stars aren't mentioned.
This is God's way of dumping on all of them.
They are not even worthy of a mention in the creation story.
Let's have some lights.
Thank you.
The sun, the moon.
You know why?
Because the sun, the moon, and the stars were all worshipped.
That's why.
Remember, if you read Genesis 1 as a battle against superstition, paganism, polytheism, it's all understandable then.
Not as a geological tale.
And the fact that we don't live in a polytheistic world, unless you get really involved with some left-wing environmental groups, that it is a reason for it.
This is the reason for it.
People worship the sun.
People worship the moon.
And the stars, of course, were seen as signs for dictating your life.
They weren't even worthy of a mention.
That was astrology.
I'm not here to knock astrology.
I think it's a lot of fun.
But they don't determine life.
God does.
They may have characteristics otherwise.
The Talmud later is ambivalent on the issue, and I couldn't care less.
As I say, I get a kick out of it, and I'm open to anything.
But if you truly believe that the stars determine as opposed to God, that's idol worship in Judaism.
But they're not even mentioned.
It's just time to set the lights up, and that was it.
So that's what happens on the fourth day.
God says, let there be lights, and there were lights.
And here is the best part.
Just in case you're still worshiping those lights, God tells you what he put them up there for.
He actually insults them.
They're not even there to give you all the things you expect from them.
Why?
Look at 1.14.
Look at 14.
Why should they be there?
Look at their big role.
To divide the day from the night and to be signs for seasons for days and years.
Isn't that amazing?
That's all they are.
You know what a dethroning of that is?
It's almost like saying, let there be a president so that he can clean the White House floor.
I can't even think of an appropriate simile for our life today.
This is a total debunking of ancient mythology.
The lights are there just to let you know what day it is, what season it is, and so on.
And by the way, this is another proof, in my opinion.
This is a second proof of there couldn't have been days before day number four.
Because this is where the, only now they become signs for days, years.
There were no years, there were no seasons, and there were no days prior to day number four.
It says it.
Just read it.
It says it.
I give you the lights.
Now you will have seasons, years, and days.
So the next time you hear six 24-hour days, you just got to say, come on, don't you know Genesis 1.14?
They weren't invented yet days, years, and seasons.
They start over here in day number four.
And God saw it was good, liked his work on the fourth day.
Fifth day, verse 20.
God tells the water to have living beings come out of it.
Again, it is totally God, God telling nature what to do.
I repeat, nature has no will of its own.
None.
God tells it what to do.
It's critical, and we are losing this insight in our ultra-modern age, where nature is regarded as its own entity unto itself.
It is simply the handiwork of this God.
Living beings come out of the water, and vegetation comes out of the earth.
Now, here is an interesting thing in 21.
So God created great sea creatures and every living thing that moves, with which the waters abounded according to the kind, every winged bird according to its kind.
God saw it was good.
This is the first use of the word creation since Genesis 1.1.
Isn't that interesting?
And I think there's a deliberate reason here.
It was because whoever wrote this knew that there would be evolutionists in the late 19th and 20th centuries.
And therefore, just to annoy them, the notion of creation ex nihilo, that's what creation is about, is thrown in for living beings.
Everything else came about through whatever means it came about.
But here is a specific statement.
Now when we're talking about living beings, the Creator comes back.
Don't think living beings just happened to come about.
I create them.
And the atheist paleontologist will agree on one ground.
They did seem to come about by accident.
That's why I quoted Stephen Jay Gould.
They didn't seem to come about inevitably by nature.
They did.
One British astronomer is so convinced that life could not have taken place on its own in the limited time the earth had that his conclusion, and he's one of the illustrious British astronomers, is that extraterrestrials dropped seeds on earth.
Now, between that and God, I opt for God on pure notions of rationality.
But whether you opt for his or God, please understand that anybody who studies this stuff has to acknowledge, I don't mean this stuff, the Torah, I mean science, the very profound unlikelihood of life developing as we know it.
That's why we have in verse 21, God creates living beings again.
And he looked around and he saw it was good.
And day number six, from verses 24 to 31.
The earth brought forth the land animals now and the tanim, which came about from the waters.
Tanin is a giant sea serpent, which they would have been totally familiar with and was a profoundly worshipped thing, so they threw in the word just to get it out of the way.
You know what?
Even the Tanimim God created.
After all, it's very odd.
Why would God enumerate one fish?
It would be odd, right?
I mean, what if it was halibut?
And God created the universe and halibut.
So you would say, how come halibut?
Right?
To which the Jewish answer is, why not?
But that, I'm not going to leave you with the Jewish answer.
The answer here is that there was a specific desire to knock out the notion that these tanimim, these great sea monsters, were anything but God's creation too.
That's the reason that they are listed.
But now, one of the all-time great verses of the Bible.
Verse 26.
Then God said, let us make man in our image according to our likeness.
Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.
Let us make man in our image is one of the most important statements ever made, biblical or not.
Okay, I'm going to devote some time to this.
Why?
What does it teach?
What is so important?
First of all, who's God talking to?
This is one of the theologians' all-time favorite verses.
Who is God talking to?
For many Christians, it is a clear implication of the triune God.
For the rabbis, they had a poetic way of looking at it, that God, when he came to create the human being, did so in humility and didn't say, I'm going to make man.
Instead, he said, let us, as the royal we, and whom did he speak to?
Malafeha Sharait, the angels who serve him.
Well, those of you who know me at all can only imagine how I reacted to that when I was a kid.
What you see today is basically what I was at seven, just seven.
And I sat in class, and I'll never forget when the rabbi said, God said it to the angels, I almost choked.
I can't buy that stuff.
It's poetic, but I can't buy it.
God said to the angels.
And until a few years ago, I simply didn't know what the sentence meant.
And I'm willing to live with that.
I much prefer to say I don't know than buy what's called in Yiddish Abba Meisa, which is an old wives' tale in Yiddish.
I just can't buy that stuff.
God looked and said to the angels, listen, let's make man.
I finally heard a rabbi, as it turns out it was an Orthodox rabbi, who gave another explanation that I am now told others have had too, but I just had never heard it, which makes absolute sense to me.
Who could God possibly have been speaking to?
First of all, there's no mention of angels.
Until now.
So you just have to make that up.
But there is mention of other creatures that God could have said it to.
Who?
The animals.
And boy, talk about lights.
All the lights in this brain went on when I heard that explanation.
That makes perfect sense.
God's created all the animals on this day and now says to them, let's make man in our image.
My friends, nothing I could ever say to people is as important as this understanding of the human being.
We are created in God's image and we are created in animals' image.
This is one of the deepest Jewish understandings of the human being.
It is one of the great understandings that has kept this particular Jew sane.
Because the understanding that I am part animal and part God keeps me sane.
I know what I need to aspire to, God.
But I also know that I have to make peace with the fact that I'm also an animal.
And therefore I have both things.
I am given with this understanding peace with my nature and yet something to aspire to.
I'm not only animal.
I'm half animal.
My task is to become holy.
Holy is what God is.
Animals are not created in anybody's image.
We are in their image and God's image.
And if you walk around understanding you're half animal and half God, it's wonderful.
You know who you are.
You know what there is to try to be.
Number two.
Let us make man in our image means that we are created in God's image.
That is why we are different in worth than animals.
It's that reason and that reason alone why you should save a stranger before the dog you love when both are drowning.
There is no secular reason to save a person whom you don't love before the dog that you do love.
And since we live in a secular age, most people are voting for their dog because they haven't been raised with Genesis 1.26 that we are created in God's image.
The animals are not created in God's image.
They were created.
We saw their description.
They just came out of the earth and came out of water.
They're part of nature.
We're not.
We're half part of nature, but we're half divine.
They're not.
We are sacred.
They are not.
And to prove that point, the very same verse that says that we are created in God's image tells us that we are to have dominion over the animals and the earth.
It scores, it makes the point that much more sharply.
We are higher than animals.
We are not another animal.
Whenever I hear a person say people and other animals, I know I've met a secular person.
It's a giveaway.
I remember in the 60s that famous 60s button, war is not healthy for children and other living things.
It was a sign of the times that children and other living things were equated.
We are not another living thing.
Broccoli is.
Even sea otters, may they live and be well and lie on their back and be cute, are also not just another living thing.
They are another living thing, excuse me.
We are not.
We are in God's image.
We are sacred.
Animals are not sacred.
Number three, because we are created in God's image, every human being is infinitely valuable.
It doesn't say white people are in God's image, or black people are in God's image, or Jews are in God's image.
The human being is in God's image.
It's so radical and revolutionary.
The human being, period.
This verse 126 should have undermined slavery.
I would love to have known the answer to the question to a religious slave master, what do you say to 126?
Because all of his answers would have been crap.
It is too painful that a religious person could have kept a slave in light of this extraordinary statement that every human being is created in God's image.
Period.
The human being.
And it's beautiful.
There is no hint of a race or religion of Adam or Eve.
No hint.
Thank God.
Because if there were just a hint, boy would it be used.
Maybe, you know, the Muslims believe that the earth that God created, I think it's in the Quran, was red, black, and white.
That was the Quran's way of saying that there is no one color better than another one.
But of course that comes 6, about 2,600 years.
No, about 2,000 years later.
600.
My math is a joke.
1,600 to 1,600, correct?
So far I'm there, and this was about 2,000 years.
But it is an extraordinarily, extraordinarily important idea that we are created in God's image.
It makes every one of us infinitely valuable.
The animals are not in God's image.
If you lose your dog, you get another one.
But if you lose your child, you don't get another one.
It's a big difference.
And I love our dogs.
I know what to love a dog is like.
You can still love your dog and understand that they're replaceable.
They're not exactly replaceable.
I understand.
They have their own little quirks.
But by and large, you can get another one.
Can you imagine anybody saying about a person, oh, you lost your brother?
Yeah, you got another sibling.
Tell your parents to make a new one.
It doesn't work like that.
You lose a friend.
Well, you got another friend.
My friend died.
Oh, you're going to get another one?
Imagine somebody reacting that way.
The infinite preciousness.
That's why murder is so evil.
And that's why murder will be mentioned in the beginning of Genesis.
The only crime.
Because it's so evil, you've destroyed uniqueness.
And number four, equality.
We are all created in God's image.
That means we are identically equal.
It is irrelevant what group we come from or are in or join.
Let me read to you from Sarna an image on the revolutionary element of being created that every human being is created in God's image in Genesis.
The words here used here to convey these ideas can better be understood in the light of a phenomenon registered in both Mesopotamia and Egypt, whereby the ruling monarch is described as the image or the likeness of God, of a God.
You see who, you understand?
The Bible is using the language that people knew then.
But it's totally changing it.
In Mesopotamia, we find the following salutations.
Quote, the father of my lord the king is the very image of Bel.
That's one of the gods.
And the king, my lord, is the very image of Bel.
The king, lord of the lands, is the image of Shamash.
O king of the inhabited world, these are all different salutations in Mesopotamia.
O king of the inhabited world, you are the image of Marduk.
In Egypt, the same concept is expressed through the name Tutnichamen.
You've all heard of Tutankhamun, right?
Which means the living image of the God Amun.
And in the designation of Thutmose IV as the likeness of Rey.
Without doubt, the terminology employed in Genesis is derived from regal vocabulary, which serves to elevate the king above the ordinary run of men.
In the Bible, this idea has become democratized.
All human beings are created in the image of God.
Each person bears the stamp of royalty.
Isn't that powerful?
Only kings were in the image of gods in the ancient world.
And here comes an ancient world document to say, every one of us is in the image of God.
I get the chills when I think of what a revolution that was.
Now, this 126 is so important.
And I will end with 126 so that we'll have time for your questions.
126 has and it's not a non-sequitur after we're told we are created in god's image it just to send home the point as i said earlier more sharply that we are greater and sacred that more sacred not more sacred we are sacred and greater than animals we are to have dominion we're to dominate the natural world
This bothers.
Some modern people say, you see, look at the Biblical tradition, look at what it did to Judgeo-christian Western world.
It told people that they can lord over nature.
But no, we are partners with nature, we are one with nature.
And then you get even more extreme, we are a cancer on nature, as the head of earth first said.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is stating categorically.
You may reject it, but you can't change it.
It was a categorical statement that god created the world for our use.
The reason for all of these things was for the ultimate in creation, you and me.
That is why god created the world, for us to use it, not abuse it.
Use and abuse are very different.
We have no problem with drug use.
We have problem with drug abuse.
You may use, you must use the world because you are created in the divine image and you will make use of it properly, but that is the only reason it is there.
When we talk about the flood, that's what i'll show you.
I remember asking this this this time.
The rabbi came through and, about third grade, I said, rabbi, why did god destroy the animals in the flood?
They didn't sin.
Good question though, and he and he gave a better answer than the question.
Even he said, because if we're not going to have people around, why have animals now?
This will rub some people today terribly, the wrong way.
You mean the only reason for porpoises, the only reason for the great Burundian gorilla, is for our sake yep, and the proof is they don't do anything.
this kills people it just kills them to hear it they don't build anything every animal today lives exactly like its great grandfather did they don't do a damn thing they eat they have sex they roll they play they lick and drop dead and then the next one does the same thing
i love them i they relax me incredibly i give money to save species but that's it that's it they do not wonder why they are there they couldn't care less
we build we are in god's image we make we build we think we create we can be good dog can't be good if dogs could be good then dogs should have been put up with hit with these nazis at the nuremberg trials because of all the german shepherds that we used to to eat prisoners genitals The use of dogs in Auschwitz is notorious.
The same dog that you love at Auschwitz ate people alive.
Do I have anything against that dog?
No.
He's not evil.
A dog can't be evil any more than a hammer can be evil that's used to smash your brain.
The wielder is evil.
But the same with good.
They can't be good either.
We can be good.
We can be evil.
We can create.
That's what God wanted in the world.
We alone do that.
That's why 126 is so critical.
We alone are in God's image.
And we alone are to rule the world.
The world was created for us.
One of the lovely things I learned from the Talmud when I was a child is every person should walk around saying, Bishvili Nivraha Olam.
For me, the world was created.
It's actually been very effective with Jews, that attitude.
A lot of Jews do believe the world was created for them.
This is my old theory about why Jews would complain far more than Catholics or Protestants if the grapefruit weren't quite ripe in a test of the three groups in any given room.
For me, this grapefruit was created.
It actually, I am convinced in all seriousness, that it's been imbibed very well in Jewish life.
But every human is to see the world that way.
Which means, of course, of course you don't abuse it.
If the world was created for you, why would you abuse it?
It's also created for your children.
So if I abuse it, they don't have it to enjoy.
That is a good, good argument for environmental groups.
But it strikes it's a little too anthropocentric for them.
When I make these arguments on radio, they call me up and say, oh, you have an anthropocentric view of the world, a man-centered, a human-centered view.
They're right.
I do.
I do.
And it's from 126.
There's another reason, though, that this is so critical to dominate the world.
Remember the battle of Genesis 1.
It's against superstition and paganism.
To the pagans, nature ruled them.
And so that's why they worship nature.
Please, I will do something for you, nature, if you give me fruit, if you give me rain.
This opened the way to finding a cure for cancer.
It is no coincidence that the world influenced by this, the Western world, became the world that developed overwhelmingly what we know as modern medicine.
Because in order to develop medicine, you must first understand that you must conquer nature.
If nature is dominant, you can't stop it.
You can only voodooize it.
You can stab little pins in things and hope that it'll work.
You can do incantations.
You can bring sacrifices.
You can say the right prayers to the right nature god or goddess.
Because nature's in control.
God made it, and we're in control of it.
And if we ruin it, we'll suffer.
When we abuse it, we will suffer.
When we use it, we will benefit.
But that is why this is so critical.
And today there is a movement to see nature in the driver's seat and not the human being.
But this was the war.
It was the war against nature gods and against nature as being a god.
You might not have thought that there is so much in the first chapter of Genesis.
So I have good news.
There's more.
But I can't, I won't get to it now.
There is I have so much more to share with you, but it is just an overwhelming task.
These were some of the critical elements to get through.
Next time we will talk about the second recapitulation, and others will say the second story of the creation, which involves extremely complex subjects.
And I ask you to read it in advance, chapter 2, with a different way in which God created people.