Join us as Bob Enyart presents a riveting sermon filled with insights from the Bible’s early chapters and personal anecdotes that challenge the modern worldview. Discover the biblical explanation for humanity’s capacity for both creation and destruction, as well as the promise of redemption through faith. This episode provides not just a theological debate but a comprehensive look at the historical and spiritual narratives that have shaped religious thought for millennia.
Greetings to the brightest audience in many of you have heard of his book is the plot bible overview which gives an overview of the entire bible and this little sermon touches on that of course the plot goes much more in depth on that overview but this sermon just kind of gets us into that the overview of the bible so often as christians we debate the theological details without first becoming experts on the plot of the entire Bible. And it’s a bit silly now to try to debate the details when you don’t have a good idea of the overview. How could you possibly understand the details if you don’t first understand the high level overview? With that said, we’re going to jump right into it. This is Bob and your overview of the Bible.
SPEAKER 02 :
We are Denver Bible church. And we carry this book around with us. It’s pretty heavy, pretty thick. But sometimes we get so focused on the details, we forget to think about the whole story of the Bible. So I thought today I’d like to tell the story of the Bible. It begins with God creating the heavens and the earth. And now, 6,000 or so years after that time, there is a growing movement of scientists who are finding just the most extraordinary proofs that the universe could not have always been here, that life could not develop by chance, that there must be a powerful, eternal creator who made us. But what’s interesting is while these scientists are finding these extraordinary evidences and arguments, Evidence for God was just as powerful from the first moment of creation on. It’s not as though before there was the science of microbiology, before we knew DNA, we didn’t really know there was a creator. And now we do. The evidence has always been there. All you have to do is open your eyes and realize that God created an extraordinary universe, a beautiful world, and he made us in the most awesome way. And so we are, as the Bible says, created in God’s image and likeness. But there’s a big battle when you look at our world, the battle between good and evil. And we wonder why is there this battle between good and evil? Why is there so much sin or wickedness or hate in the world? And there are two different perspectives or worldviews that cause people to form different political parties and to fight with one another. And the one worldview is that people are basically good. And the other is that people are basically sinful. And we go through the story, start in chapters one and two, that God created the earth, the universe, and mankind. But then by chapter three already, we see that Adam and Eve succumbed to temptation and rebelled against God. And as a result, sin and death entered the human race so that we are ever since that day in the Garden of Eden. And so we know that man is not basically good. We are basically sinful. And we need to be constrained by our parents, by institutions like the family, church, and government to constrain people so that they will behave well. Otherwise, our behavior gets worse and worse when the boundaries are lifted and men are able to do what they want to do. We went on a hike yesterday in Boulder. There were six of us, Mark and Susan’s two sons, Stephen and Jonathan, and I took our three youngest boys, Zachary, Michael, and Dominic. We wanted to go to Bear Peak. And that’s quite a hike, and they say it take about four and a half to five and a half hours. Well, we have these three little boys with us, and I was the slowest one of the bunch, and it was five hours going in, and we haven’t arrived there yet. So we thought, you know what, we better turn around and head out. Well, we’re about four hours going in, and there was a group of guys catching up to us from ages 30s to 60s. I think it was five guys. And just as they’re about to turn the corner to come into our view right near us, I hear the one guy saying, one of the older guys, he said, what we need is for our officials in Washington to do the will of the people. And then he comes right into view, and I say to the whole group, I say, that would be absolutely terrible, wouldn’t it? The guy says, huh? If our officials did the will of the people? And with that, I inserted myself in their conversation, and we walked for an hour and had the most wonderful talk. And I said, well, the will of the people is fickle, and people are selfish and bitter and envious, and they’ll gladly take money from their neighbor’s paycheck to pay for benefits that they could enjoy. And the guy in the back of their line, you know, single file on the trail, the guy said, boy, this is going to be interesting. And it turned out that the most outspoken one of their group is the man who is the founder of the Rocky Mountain Skeptic Society. And I’ve had some of their members on my show over the years. So after we got into a tremendous discussion about people not being good, and it was obvious that he was a liberal, but a number of the few guys in the group were agreeing with me. And that was pretty neat. And at one point, that guy who founded the society said to me something like, who are you? Reminded me of Princess Bride, you know, the Spaniard talking to Wesley or And I said, I’m Bob Enyart. And he said, you’re Bob Enyart. We’ve been on your show. And so we had this wonderful conversation, but it was effective because the people in the group could hear that, wow, these ideas this guy is saying, they don’t sound common, but they sound true. And What do I know about politics? Well, I know that man is basically sinful. I know that because I’ve read it in the Bible, and then when I opened my eyes, I said to them, have you ever read a history book? Look at the Roman Empire in the Encyclopedia Britannica. The chapters go from one war to the next, and one assassination to the next, one rebellion, one civil war to the next. That’s the history of the Roman Empire. Have you ever read a newspaper? It’s filled with crime and hatred and divorce, bitterness, theft. So yeah, we see goodness in the human race, but it’s tragic wickedness that defines, characterizes the human existence. And so because we know the Bible, we could be more well-informed on the matters that are important to people, and we could get credibility when we meet someone, even if it’s only for two or three minutes. And so we spent an hour, and some of the guys said, hey, where can we find a good church? We live in Boulder. We’re from Chicago. And so, of course, I invited them here and suggested a couple churches in Boulder. But it was a wonderful time of witnessing. So the fall, Adam and Eve sinned. And that began a hatred among men, not only toward God, but toward one another. And that hatred was so intense that even brother would murder brother. Men would turn on their own wives. Children would despise their parents. Parents would selfishly destroy their children, raising them in the flesh and in godlessness. And as a result of that, for about 1600 years, the world became increasingly wicked until God looked down on the earth and said it was filled with evil continually. and violence from one end to another, and God decided to destroy mankind and begin again with one family, Noah and his three sons and their four wives, Noah’s wife and his three daughter-in-laws. And so that’s the story of the Bible through about the first 1600 years. So the Bible makes this claim that there was a global flood, and now here we are, you know five thousand years later about and we look at the continents and the continents are covered every continent is covered on average with a mile to a mile and a half deep of sedimentary layers how does that happen and there’s an amazing consistency in those sedimentary layers and we see that in those rocks that were laid down by water sedimentary layers we find billions of dead things now How could that have come to pass? Well, I have an idea how. It’s written in the Bible. There was a global flood. There was a global flood, and the world screams the evidence that that’s true. How else do the continents get covered with a mile and a half deep of sedimentary layers deposited by water with billions of fossils in them? How? And of those billions of fossils, 95% of them are sea fossils. Very few, about half of 1% are vertebrates and mammals. But most of them are sea fossils. And there are hundreds of millions of clams. And clams, when they die, what happens to them? They open up. And then other animals eat the clams and they fall to the bottom of the sea. Most of these sea fossils, these clams, are closed. What does that tell us? That they were alive when they were all buried rapidly in the same event at the same time. So thousands of years later, we could look at the earth and see that the story of the Bible is true. Then after the flood, in a short time, you only had eight people, but it’s amazing, you could do the math, how quickly you could have thousands of people as those three sons and their wives began to have children, and they had children, and soon there were thousands, and men began to live in the Mesopotamian Valley between the Tigris and the Euphrates River, and there was the the kingdom of Babel was started by Nimrod, and they built the Tower of Babel, and they were in rebellion against God, and God decided to confuse their languages. And so he did that, and suddenly the different families, they all spoke different languages. And it was horrifying, as it would be to us right now in this room, if all of a sudden, as I’m speaking, I started fluent and perfect Mandarin. And no one had any idea what I was saying. Does anybody here speak Mandarin? I don’t know. Anybody? No. And then you turn to your neighbor and you said, , and your neighbor doesn’t know what you’re talking about. And you find out that everybody’s speaking a different language. That would be horrifying. And so the people with the different languages left and sort of ran from each other. And they went in different directions and began to settle the globe and so historians and archaeologists and anthropologists they mostly are godless and they like to study the history of the human race and figure out well where did these ancient languages come from it must take tens of thousands of years to evolve from grunts and groans into sophisticated written languages with complex verb tenses and moods and how does that happen And what they find is no record of those developing languages, but the sudden appearance of complex language in recent human history. And that matches, and it affirms what we read in the Bible, that these languages were given to men by God. So then we have, after the Tower of Babel, we have a man born in Ur of the Chaldees, Abram. And Abram, a descendant of Shem, of Noah. Noah’s son Shem, just a few generations to Abram, who became Abraham. And in the city of Ur, in today’s southern Iraq, there’s this massive ziggurat. And it’s a huge city. It’s been excavated just in the last hundred years. And you could learn all about it in an archaeological textbook. But the ziggurat in the center was their temple where they worship their pagan gods. And there was a massive room in the center of the ziggurat. And what they found out, now this is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, or one of the oldest cities known to man. That’s where Abraham was born. And he grew up where everybody worshiped these pagan idols. And in excavating the city, they found out that the center room in the ziggurat had a concave roof. It was ever so slightly concave. And why would that be? It wasn’t flat. The ceiling? The ceiling inside. It was slightly concave. And they realized that that feature was not structural. It wasn’t like an arch. the structure was was up and above the ceiling the ceiling was just superficial and they made it concave for the same reason we might do that today in a large room because if they made it perfectly flat it would feel like the ceiling was gonna fall in on the people it would be uncomfortable so they made it in a way with then optical illusion that you walk into this big room and you feel comfortable now how could it be Perhaps the first major city ever built in the human race in our history could have that level of sophistication with their architecture. How do they do that? How do they do that with their first big building? There are not tens of thousands of years of civilization and archeology before Ur of the Chaldees to where this skill could have been developed. The story of the Bible explains it, that there was a civilization of men before the flood, 1600 years of history from Adam, millions upon millions of human beings building cities, as we know, we read in Genesis, and they learned about agriculture and metallurgy and music and finance and architecture. They took these skills and they survived with Noah and his sons on the ark. They lived for hundreds of years after they departed, after the flood, and they brought that knowledge with them. So men started, as they accrued enough numbers to build cities, with the knowledge of how to build extraordinary cities. And when we read about their finance, their contracts, their banking, Their social structure, it was extraordinarily sophisticated. And so what we see in the history of the world is that the story of the Bible is affirmed time and time again. So God said to Abraham and Ur of the Chaldees to leave. He wanted him to go to the land of the Canaanites, the land of Canaan, the promised land. And God, because Abraham believed in God, the true God, And God was so thankful to have a man who would trust the creator and not the creatures in the creation. So God called Abraham and he gave him a covenant of grace. He said to Abraham, look now toward heaven and count the stars if you are able to number them. And back in the ancient world, there was a thought that there was maybe You know, maybe 1,000 stars or so. As late as 150 A.D., there’s an astronomer, Ptolemy, Claudius Ptolemy, and he created a catalog of all the stars, and he numbered them 1,022. 1,022 stars. Now, that could be numbered. We read in Psalm 147, verse 4, that God counts the number of the stars. He calls them all by name. But in Jeremiah 33, 22, the host of heaven cannot be numbered, nor the sand of the sea, so will I multiply the descendants of David. To us, we can’t count the stars or the grains of sand on the sea. There are too many. We could make some rough estimate. But back in the, today, if you have perfect conditions for the unaided eye at night, you can see about 10,000 stars if you go all around the world, northern hemisphere, southern hemisphere, and you count every star possible. But the Bible said that the stars were innumerable as are the grains of sand on the seashores because God knew because he made them. He made each one. He could count them. He could give us the exact number. We estimate. We say in our galaxy, the Milky Way, there are about 100 million stars. And we think there are about 100 million galaxies in the universe, each one with many millions of stars. So we don’t know. We think there’s 10 to the 20th stars. But that’s a modern understanding we read in the Bible from thousands of years ago. Abraham lived 4,000 years ago. God saying… Abraham, I will make your descendants as the stars in the heaven like the sand on the seashore. Innumerable. And Abraham believed God and it was accounted to him for righteousness. Now that is a statement of salvation in the Bible. The Apostle Paul loves that statement of salvation. Why does he zero right in on that statement? Because Abraham didn’t have to do any good works. All he had to do was believe. What is it that he believed? In the cross and the resurrection? No, he didn’t believe that. God didn’t tell him that. God said, Abraham, I will give you many descendants. Abraham believed God and God accounted that to him for righteousness. That’s what salvation is. Salvation is trusting God, having a relationship with God, knowing God. For us, it’s believing and trusting in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. That’s what salvation is. because that’s what God has revealed to us. When Jesus told his disciples that he was going to be crucified and be raised from the dead, they didn’t believe him. The gospels tell us repeatedly, they said, no, far be it, no. It says they didn’t believe it and they didn’t understand it. And then Jesus said, I’m going to be crucified and raised from the dead, but don’t tell anyone, he said. And then he told them, go and preach the gospel. And he sent out the 12 to go and preach the gospel. And what were they preaching? They didn’t believe in the death and resurrection of Christ, that it was coming. They didn’t believe that. But they were preaching the gospel. They were preaching what had been revealed by the prophets and Moses to Israel, that they were to keep God’s law and prepare the way for the kingdom. That’s what they were preaching. Well, God gave this covenant of circumcision to Abraham, and it was a covenant with no works. Just believe, and you are saved. And God did this extraordinary thing. In Genesis 15, he put Abraham to sleep, into a deep sleep, and then God basically entered into the covenant with Abraham while Abraham was asleep. Now, why did God put him to sleep first? because when you’re asleep you can’t do anything You’re not obligated or responsible for entering into any agreement when you’re asleep. So God was demonstrating that the covenant of grace is not based on works. It’s not based on anything that we can do to maintain it. If you believe God, you are sealed and you are justified and God will do everything to save you. Then 14 years later, God entered into a second covenant with Abraham. It’s in Genesis 17, and it’s a covenant of circumcision. Abraham was 99 years old, and God said, now I want you to circumcise yourself and your children and your servants. Circumcise yourself and your foreskin. Now ask yourself this question. When Abraham complied with that covenant, was he asleep? He was wide awake, maybe as awake as he had ever been in his life. And that covenant of circumcision was a work of the flesh. You can’t get more descriptive of the works of the flesh than circumcising someone. That is a work of the flesh, a cutting off of the flesh, which is a synonym of the Mosaic Law. Our flesh, our tendency to sin, The law says do not steal, do not covet, do not murder. And so the law is an effort to cut off our flesh. And that’s what the covenant of circumcision was. So God gave to Abraham two covenants. so that as Paul writes in Genesis 4, he could be the father of two groups, both of Israel of the circumcision who live by the law and circumcision, and of those in the body who live without the law and with no works. Paul says in Romans 4 there, he says, “…to him who does not work but believes…” God justifies that man to him who does not work. Up until that point in the Bible, men were told you need to keep the law. You need to keep the law. They asked Jesus, what must I do to inherit eternal life? And he said, keep the commandments. Do not murder, do not steal, do not commit adultery. And Paul writes, if you want to be justified, do not do good works. What do you mean? Don’t do good works? Well, they come later. They come as a symptom of the salvation you have in Christ. But to him who does not work but believes, his faith is accounted for righteousness. That was Abraham when God entered into the covenant of grace when he was asleep. And then 14 years later, the covenant of circumcision and law. And so Paul writes there are two groups, Israel and the body. Abraham is the father of both. He’s the father of those under the law through being circumcised. And he’s the father of those under grace through being justified before he was circumcised. So then as we go through the Bible, we see that the whole remainder of the Old Testament develops the nation of Israel. Israel and God continually expands on their covenant of circumcision. He brings Israel into Egypt, and while they are there, they grow and multiply. They go in with 70 people. They come out with maybe a million and a half, two million people. And as they leave Egypt, God sends the 10 plagues and parts the Red Sea, and Moses leads them out of Egypt into the Promised Land. And within three months, God gives to Moses the Ten Commandments and then the entire Mosaic Covenant of hundreds of laws and rules and regulations. And what we find out is that the generation that received all those laws, were they righteous and holy before God? No, they hated God because the law leads to wrath. And righteousness cannot come by the law. And the day that law was given, 3,000 were killed. 3,000 were killed the day Moses brought the Ten Commandments down Mount Sinai. God gave one law in the garden. Effectively, do not partake of the law. That’s what the one law was. Don’t partake of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. They broke that law. Then he gave the Ten Commandments. They broke those ten. Then he gave hundreds of ordinances and they broke them all. So that as the law was multiplied, sin became exceedingly wicked. The more laws God gave, the more wicked his people became. And Paul writes that to the Romans. He said the law was given so that sin might become exceedingly sinful. How clear Paul says it and how resistant many denominations are to understand that. That righteousness cannot come by the law. And so Israel’s relationship with God was to demonstrate to us that there are two methods for being righteous. One, trying to live by a set of rules. The other, living by a relationship with God. Which of these two are more likely to produce righteousness in our lives? The set of rules is likely to turn us against one another and against God because they give passion to our evil desires. Paul says, now in the body of Christ, we are no longer under the law. We’ve been delivered from the law to live a relationship with God. And it’s extraordinary, the difference. And this is the actual story of the Bible. The story. So you get through as the Old Testament continues until the time of Christ. You have Israel hating the God who delivered them. And it doesn’t take generations for them to forget. They hate him while he’s delivering them. And the laws that are given, they hate him all the more. And they don’t produce righteousness. And so it culminates when Jesus Christ comes to earth.
SPEAKER 01 :
Stop the tape. Stop the tape. Hey, we are out of time. If you want the rest of this sermon, head to kgov.com. That’s K-G-O-V.com. Kgov.com.
Join us as Bob Enyart presents a riveting sermon filled with insights from the Bible’s early chapters and personal anecdotes that challenge the modern worldview. Discover the biblical explanation for humanity’s capacity for both creation and destruction, as well as the promise of redemption through faith. This episode provides not just a theological debate but a comprehensive look at the historical and spiritual narratives that have shaped religious thought for millennia.
