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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Little-known Miracles of God's Creation

Matthew Priebe

Little-known Miracles of God’s Creation, Part 1

This is not normal for me, so bear with me as I get used to this.

Well, it's been a long time since I was here.

It has been 3 years since I last was speaking at Advent Hope.

And of course, at that point, you weren't even in this building.

So I've never actually set foot in this building in my life.

So this is actually quite interesting to see the new facilities and all that sort of thing.

How many were here for my last presentation 3 years ago?

It was a presentation that dealt with creation and evolution And the ways that the animal world reveals to us information that we never probably thought we could get from that source.

Normally when we talk about creation and evolution, we look at it from fossil records or from various different scientific studies of sedimentation rate and various different very specialized sciences like that.

But with the animals, sometimes we tend to ignore that because what can the animals tell us about the natural world and the way that creation and evolution works.

And so that's what we talked about last time.

And we looked at the animal world to find ways that they were specialized, complicated, very intricate, and the ways that those things reveal a very intelligent designer, the intelligent designer of the Bible, God who created all life on Earth in the beginning.

And how it doesn't support the ideas of evolution.

Evolution has a lot of ideas and theories that the animal world in and of itself does not in any way support when you look at the ways these animals are put together.

So that's what we talked about last time and we're going to be continuing on with that today, the sequel to that in a way, because we're going to be looking at more animals and more ways that animals are put together both physically and mentally to see how they are a living testimony of God's wonder and design.

And so what we're going to do is we're going to look at individual species and groups of animals to see what we can learn.

And we're going to be doing this all day because we're going to be having meetings in the afternoon, and we'll talk about that a little bit later.

So what I'm going to do to start out is I'm going to read from the verse in Scripture that I finished last presentation with.

This is what was the theme of last time's presentation.

It was kind of the summation of what we were talking about and it is the theme of today's as well, so that's where we're going to start.

But ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee, And the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee, Or speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee, And the fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee, who knoweth not in all these that the hand of the Lord hath wrought this, in whose hand is the soul of every living thing, and the breath of all mankind." In child guidance, we have the passage from Ellen White next to the Bible, Nature is to be our great lesson book.

You already got started with nature this morning.

We're going to continue that right now, because it's all about nature today.

So what I'm going to do now, first of all, is how many here are familiar with the term intelligent design?

That's a very important topic that everybody needs to know because it is very important in our society today, in our scientific circles.

Intelligent design is the ideas by scientists that nature is too well designed to be anything but intelligently designed.

It cannot be the result of chaos and chance and random selection.

Massive works have been done in this area that you're probably familiar with.

This has become a public school issue, intelligent design, in various places where intelligent design has been tried to be instituted.

And so intelligent design is a very important familiar concept that we as Adventists can use because the scientists doing these studies are basically giving us information that we can use to promote creationism.

It's very important to us to be able to have this information available.

But there is 1 area of intelligent design that comes up short.

When you talk to someone who supports the ideas of intelligent design and you ask that person, who is the intelligent designer?

What is the force that is responsible for this creation?

And at that point, the system tends to break down.

At that point, you'd have a blank look on the face because they do not want to answer that question.

Most intelligent design scientists will say, that's not my field, I don't have any idea, that's not something I can study, therefore I'm not going to speak to that.

And so it kind of leaves a question mark at the end of their sentences because they have no really strong answer to that that they're willing to share.

Whether they hold something privately or not, I have no idea, but publicly they will not share any answer to that question.

And so that's a missing link in their presentation, to borrow a phrase, because when we think about it, we need to be promoting who the intelligent designer is, not just the fact that it's intelligently designed.

We need to be able to say that yes, God made everything that we see around us.

God made it special and here is the evidence for that and here in the scripture in Genesis we have a record of how he did it.

And to leave that part out is only to give half the message.

We need to give the whole message in order to be able to really do our job as admonished witnesses of creation.

We can't just say it's intelligently designed.

So what I'm doing today is a little bit different than last time because last time when I talked about the animals, I was specifically using illustrations from the animal world that refute the ideas of evolution, that make evolution look pretty silly in many ways.

But today, we're not going to do that, because I feel that sometimes we get a little bit too negative.

We get a little bit too anti-evolution, because it's always easy to poke holes in evolution.

But a lot of time, we tend to miss the point where we need to be promoting God and promoting creation.

And so today's meeting is going to be showing ways that animals are well-designed in order to show God's power and God's creation and the way he makes animals very special.

So what we're going to do now is we're going to get into the main presentation, get off this slide show, and we will get into the main section of what we're doing.

Also going to get it onto a different setting so we can watch the videos.

So we're going to start out with a bird that you may never have seen if you haven't been to the East Coast, because the only places this bird lives in America is in the southeastern part of the United States.

And it is a water bird and it's very common along the Florida swamps and everglades and whatnot.

And it has a very distinctive lifestyle that you may not be familiar with because there's no other bird quite like it in North America.

This 1 right here is called an African darter.

It's called darter in most every other place in the world, but in America we call them anhingas.

Here's 1 who has built a very bulky stick nest in the Everglades of Florida.

And so now these birds live near water always, because that's where they get their food.

They will dive underwater and swim around and catch their fish underneath the water's surface, and that's how they find their food for living.

But something very strange about this bird.

When you think of a water bird who gets into the water, it immediately will sit there on the water's surface floating away because they're very buoyant.

But as you will see with this bird, that's not what happens.

They get under the water and they immediately sink underneath the water's surface and they are not floating on the surface at all and usually only their head and neck will be protruding above the water's surface.

And so this is a very unusual lifestyle for a water bird that we look at and go, that's a very strange looking system.

And in fact, when they get into the water, you will see that they immediately sink beneath the water's surface.

He sees a fish down under the water's surface there.

And immediately, he is underneath the water's surface without any buoyancy whatsoever.

This allows him to very easily move amongst the rocks and underwater vegetation without having to constantly fight and kick like a duck would to get underneath the water's surface where he can see his food.

And so he's very well built and very well designed to be able to swim underneath the water surface in this way.

Now, the problem with this is, the reason for this is because their feathers do not have the same water coating protection that other ducks and water birds have.

Because they do not have the same oils that they coat their feathers with that would then waterproof their feathers.

Normally a bird, when it waterproofs its feathers, makes them very water resistant, so water rolls off a duck's back.

But these birds do not have those water-resistant oils.

And so they do not have the ability to water coat their feathers.

Little-known Miracles of God’s Creation, Part 2

Yeah, so just a couple of little announcements to start out our meeting.

Like she said, those of you who want to get a hold of my previous meeting that I did here when I was here 3 years ago, Animals, Ethics, and Christianity, it's a very good place to get it because that was 1 of the first places I did it in its new expanded form and whatnot.

So Audioverse is a very good place to find that.

For those of you who are listening to this on Audioverse, who are not seeing this in person, you will want to note a couple of things.

The Ask the Animals website actually is, has hyphens in between each of the words, so it's actually A-S-K hyphen T-H-E hyphen A-N-I-M-A-L-S.

And so make sure you do that when you type it in.

That is a reference site for our ministry.

My wife and I ask the animals productions is what we have called it.

And that deals with our nature presentations as well as our animals ethics and has price lists and whatnot and information how to contact us.

And so that is a good source for those of you who want to get some of our material.

So those of you who have heard my previous presentations in past years and heard me this morning will know that I talk about animals, and I talk about animals all the time.

That is my focus and that's my area of expertise.

And a lot has changed since I was here 3 years ago for me.

I got married since then and have been traveling around with my wife and family since then.

As we go across the United States, We're traveling usually half of the year, 6 or 7 months of the year.

And each weekend we're at a different church and a different place as we go from here to there to everywhere.

I'm with my father, Dennis Priby, and he holds his meetings.

I hold these creation presentations wherever we go.

And so I'm speaking virtually every week as we go around the United States.

So this is a special stop though to be able to stay here all day and have a full day's meetings and do brand new material.

So it's something that I was looking forward to all spring and now we're going to get on with the rest of our presentation that we started this morning.

So those, I'm sure most of you are here with this morning, but we're just going to be continuing on with the animal world, showing how the animal world is a wonderful demonstration of God's creative power and all the different ways that he has made them.

Now this is another unusual animal that most people may have seen before in a nature film but maybe not heard the name.

It's not a very familiar name to most of us.

It is a type of African antelope and it is called geranuk, which is a native name from over in Africa that means giraffe-necked.

And so it's very obvious why they get that called that, because they have a very long neck, much longer than most antelopes of similar size.

They're not a very large antelope, they're actually quite small.

This guy right here is surrounded by absolutely no food.

He can't eat any of that, that's not his food.

Even though a lot of antelopes do eat grass out in the African savannas, this guy is not actually going to do any of that.

He's going to be looking for leaves on trees to eat.

He goes around the bushes and eats all the lower leaves off of the bushes and that's where he gets his food source.

Now this is plenty of trees around there, that's great.

But there are, of course, other antelopes, which are out there eating the grass and the leaves and whatnot.

And pretty soon, everybody's kind of competing for the same bit of leaf.

And pretty soon, you're running out of leaves from the lower branches of trees.

At that point, most of the other antelopes will just put their head down and start eating the grass, it's no big deal.

But this guy can only eat leaves and so if the leaves run out, he's going to be in trouble.

So at this point, his special gift kicks in because once the leaves are gone from the lower reaches of the trees, he does something no other antelope can do and that is stand up.

So here he is standing up, bracing himself against the tree trunk, reaching leaves higher than any other antelope of his size can reach, extra long neck, extra long reach of his whole body is able to reach into the upper branches of these trees and get stuff that most other antelopes cannot get.

Now you notice here, he is a single long rod from his feet all the way up through his hips, through his torso, and up to his neck to the top of his crown.

And so not only can he stand up here and nibble on the leaves with perfect balance as he's there braced against the tree trunk, but once the leaves near the tree trunk are used up and only the leaves out at the outer branches are available, at that point, no problem.

He just simply walks away and starts eating the branches out farther.

He has such perfect balance that he can balance himself like a ballerina on his tiptoes and work his way around the outside of the tree, work his way to the outer branches, and they're able to get all the leaves that they want going about and getting the branches that nobody else can reach.

So it's an amazingly well-built animal who's able to do this.

No other animal has this particular skill.

And so again, another example of the ways that God has made an animal very different and very special and unique so that it fits into its particular habitat niche and is able to do so in a way that is quite unusual from other creatures.

1 other odd little thing that has nothing to do with what we've been talking about, but these guys never drink any water and so they never need to go find a water hole.

They simply are able to get all the moisture they need from the plants, leaves that they're able to extract the moisture from.

And so another interesting animal that most people haven't heard of or known much about if they have seen it in a nature program.

Now, first of all, here is a couple of penguins from the Southern Hemisphere.

They are a very familiar animal to us because we've seen lots of documentaries on them, lots of nature programs, lots of movies made about penguins.

It seems like penguins are extremely popular animals.

In their little tuxedos, they seem to be quite adorable as they waddle across the icy landscape.

And so we're very familiar with the penguins in the world.

They only live in the southern half of the world.

They're only found in the southern hemisphere, even though not all of them live in ice and snowy conditions.

Some of them live in quite warm conditions, but they're all found south of the equator.

But up north, we have a completely different bird.

Up north, we have a completely different bird that is very similar to the penguins of the southern hemisphere.

They're quite different in a number of ways, but they're basically the equivalent of penguins.

They live in the north, in the Arctic Ocean, and they are the puffins.

Now there are 3 species of puffins found around the coasts of North America, Europe and Asia and they are found in rocky coastal areas and they swim in the water and they waddle along the land just like a penguin does and they are brightly colored in black and white and a lot of facial colors and whatnot.

And so these 3 kinds are found way north, much farther than we are.

A few will come down the coastlines and breed along Northern California during the summertime, but mostly you have to go north and see them much closer to the Arctic.

They live in a rocky area where they can then land on the shoreline and they will then dig a burrow into the soft dirt and they will work their way down until they've dug a burrow 3 to 9 feet deep.

At the end of this burrow, they will lay their eggs and that's where they will hatch out their chicks and they will always come in and feed their chicks in these burrows.

And so they're always tied to the shoreline and the sea because their food is in the ocean and their young will be raised on the shoreline.

Now you notice that these guys have webbed feet, and this allows them to swim very easily, and just like a duck swimming through the water, they're able to propel them.

They have the webbed feet that allow them to kick their way through the water very efficiently.

And so both are built very similarly in terms of being able to swim around underneath the water's surface.

The 1 big difference is that puffins can fly.

They have wings that are kind of stubby and kind of short, but they're able to power their way through the air.

They have to flap them really quickly, but they're able to actually fly very well, no problem whatsoever, which is quite different than a penguin, which has no ability to fly whatsoever.

The penguins are the masters of the underwater ocean areas, swimming underneath the water like no other bird in the world.

They have a very large horny bill, which they use to catch fish and in the, under, underneath the water.

And just like that, the puffins have a large horny bill, which serves the same function, catching fish underneath the water's surface.

And so when they're ready to fly out from the shoreline, they're going to take off, head out to sea, and when they get far enough out there, they land on the water surface and dive underneath.

They are a very buoyant bird, unlike a penguin which dives underneath the water and is quickly underneath because they are so heavy and dense.

These guys are very buoyant, almost like a duck, which is going to pop up to the surface very quickly.

And so they're going to have to need to power their way underneath.

And so to do that, of course, they have their webbed feet, which will help force them underneath the water.

So they have to constantly force themselves to stay underneath the water surface.

Red in Tooth and Claw. Who Created the Predators?

Just as a side note that some people might be wondering, all of the pictures you've seen today with the exception of maybe half a dozen were taken by either myself or my wife and of those about 85% were taken by my wife.

So when you see these beautiful pictures on the screen, thank her for it, because she's the photographic artist of our partnership.

And so the content, you know, I work on and put together, and she supplies pictures for most of them.

And this was not true of our last presentation when I was here 3 years ago because I was just getting started and I wasn't even married yet and I'd gotten a lot of pictures off the internet and whatnot to supply the various specific animals that I needed.

But since then, since we've been traveling together around the country, I've been able to put together these presentations using only our own pictures because that's a lot more useful to us and more effective in being able to choose your own pictures from your own supplies.

We have an archive of just huge amounts of animal pictures that we have gathered for all of our presentation needs.

So I just thought you might be interested to know where these pictures are being taken.

Now what we're going to be doing is a little bit different than the previous presentations this morning, this afternoon.

We did some creation science presentations up till now.

Now we're gonna be looking at the Bible and Spirit of Prophecy and nature to see what we can learn from it in a little bit more of a sermon format than what we were doing up till this point.

Also, like I mentioned this morning, This is a first.

This is the first time I have ever presented this particular meeting.

I have been actually working on it, refining it, polishing it for the last 2 years, assembling the pictures for it, getting it ready to go.

And so now it's finally ready for presentation.

And so you're the first audience ever to hear it on the face of the earth.

And so now I will go out hopefully to AudioVerse and be able to be widespread available as well.

So this is now a little bit different because you notice I don't use notes too much with my other presentations.

And so I pretty much have that sort of thing memorized.

This is the first time I've given it, so I'm going to be sticking a lot closer to my notes than I did with the other ones.

So I hope you'll forgive me that little bit.

But I will be needing to stay a little bit more attached than before when I was able to wander around more freely.

All right, so let's get started as we finish up our last meeting for today and I will try and get you out of here as soon as after sundown as possible, but I may go a couple minutes after because you did ask some questions, so we'll just, it was your own fault, so I'm not going to be responsible for that.

So you're not allowed to leave right at sundown and go off and party.

Did God create them or are they the products of Satan's foul designs?

Wouldn't it be better off, wouldn't we be better off without them by getting rid of them whenever possible?

In this presentation, we will examine the evidence to try to make sense of this very difficult topic.

To start, we must be clear that there is very little inspiration that sheds light in this area.

There are hints and ideas, but few unmistakable statements.

That doesn't mean that we should ignore this topic because it is very much something that automatically everybody puts their own idea on, even if they don't have very much information.

Everybody makes their mind up about them, even though they don't really think about it too deeply.

The trouble with most people's opinions is that they are made on the basis of cultural biases, personal prejudices, or usually contradictory divisions of nature into good animals and bad animals.

Now I'm going to be addressing this from the point of view of a naturalist.

Being a general naturalist has many advantages because it provides a look at the big picture that sometimes a specialist may miss.

Now we're going to start with some foundations that underlie all else.

Now I hold the following basic and critical premises.

In the beginning, God made all life on earth in 6 days, resting on the seventh day.

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Little-known Miracles of God's Creation

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