Biblical Lessons about Our Trip

All right. Sometimes we do have a congregation on him, but I do have a special sermon. It's a PowerPoint sermon. It has to do with our trip that we took. This isn't some glamour trip or anything.

The lessons to be learned, also to get to know the brethren in South America. Ikhadi and I served that area, but also, of all things, dealing with archaeology. Years ago, I was able to visit the Nasca Plain in Peru. I want to give you the results of what archaeology has discovered and how it relates to the Bible. We'll be covering that as well. Okay. Here. You better turn it for me. Okay. There we go.

First time we get knobs now, so I can have lighted. So, three weeks ago, we traveled to Colombia and landed in Bogota, Colombia. We have different congregations there, and we arranged so that the majority of the brethren could come for this Bible leadership conference that we had at that time.

So, they gathered from the northern cities where we have congregations. See there? And let's go forward. Here's one of the meetings that we had with the brethren in Bogota, Colombia. I have 45 being able to come from four outlying areas for this leadership weekend. In Bogota, the capital of Colombia.

Cady and I actually lived in Bogota, Colombia for a year and a half. At the beginning of our ministry, our first daughter, Natalia, was born in Bogota before we headed out to Santiago, Chile for 22 years. But we know the brethren, and we were able to serve them for many years going forward. Let me see here. Here we see some of the young couples that we have in the area. We loved having several meals with the brethren during that Sabbath and Sunday.

They don't get to have ministers that often. We do have a pastor there, Jaime Selec, but it's just one minister for that entire area of Colombia. So it's nice to have this special. We called it a mini feast. Enjoy being with them. There's a lesson here that's important to be hands-on. Be able to see people in their circumstances, understand their culture, be able to speak their language. And so Romans 12 16 says, live happily together in a spirit of harmony and be as mindful of another's worth as you are of your own. Don't live with a lofty mindset, thinking you are too important to serve others. But be willing to do menial tasks and identify with those who are humble-minded.

Don't be smug or even think for a moment that you know it all. So humility is a key factor when you're visiting these areas. Let's continue. I'm going to go pretty fast because of all the material I need to cover. All right. So then we traveled from Bogota to Lima, Peru. It takes about three hours flight. Lima, Peru is a city of 10 million inhabitants.

It's one of the oldest cities in Latin America. We're talking about in the early 1500s where Pizarro conquered the Incas and set up Lima is one of the cities. So it's much older than any American city. Here we are with some of the brethren. And this is a pretty new congregation. We've basically had two years where they've from a group of four or five they've grown to about 22 in regular attendance but actually probably about 25 or 26 that are part of the membership.

Kati wanted me to remind you that they love their hall and keep it beautifully and they had some sunflowers. It seems like it's just a coincidence. I love sunflowers because it's one of those evidence of God's creation. Sunflower, the way it's set up, and sure enough, it just inspires me so much. Just think, if you look at a sunflower, the inner part where it has all the seeds, they're arranged mathematically according to what they call the Fibonacci spiral, which is a mathematical formula.

And they have examined and realized that it is the way that you can put the most seeds in this round area of a sunflower. And it's got the spiral, which is just exquisitely designed. Afterwards, here we have the coordinator in the Lima congregation, Luis Mora, with his wife, Nora, able to spend quite a bit of time with them. I really had met him for a number of years because this group was quite small.

But now, they've come together, and he's a successful businessman. And then on Wednesday, we visited the youth camp in Lima. So Luis took us to this new youth camp. We haven't had one for 16 years. Now we have a youth camp. And as you can see, a very beautiful area right there on the outskirts of Lima. Probably about a, well, it's about an hour away from the capital.

Beautiful area. Checked out. They're actually going to start this coming Sunday to arrive tomorrow at this youth camp. So we have to take care of our youth, and here we have new youth in the church. We're very encouraged about. And then we visited half an hour from this youth camp is the new feast site we have in Lima, Peru. This feast site is called Las Cambucinas. We have about 50 brethren in attendance.

And so they're all excited. Again, 15 years ago, basically, there was a breakup, and this is just starting to get organized. People coming back together after long laps. The lesson is the importance of visiting the brethren to see how they are. In Acts 15, 36, it says, Then after some days, Paul said to Barnabas, let us now go back and visit our brethren in every city where we have preached the word of the Lord and see how they are doing.

Certain things, you just have to be there. You can't do it over the phone or any other type of electronic means. You have to be there. You have to live in their situation. And of course, these areas are quite poor, and the governments are always very unstable. They overthrew the president about two years ago. They elected him more of a socialist, and he was actually kind of a Marxist president, and made a mess of the economy, tried to take over politically, and the Congress actually threw him out.

Now they've had about two other presidents in the meantime, so you can imagine what kind of stability that gives. Okay, so now we continue to our next trip, which is from Lima, Peru to La Paz, Bolivia. It took about an hour and a half because they're very close, Peru and Bolivia. We were up in the Andean Mountains. The international airport in La Paz is 13,325 feet above sea level. That's twice the altitude of Denver. And if you've been to Denver, you know how high Denver is.

Well, here it's 13,000 feet. No international airport in the world is higher. And so, of course, you have to really take it easy at first. And they traditionally give you a little bit of coca tea with coca leaves, just like it would be a tea, and it lowers your blood pressure. It helps you to moderate. I think God in His wisdom put these plants, herbs. Unfortunately, now they're making cocaine out of these things. Can I tell you a quick joke? All right. So when Cady and I were there in Bolivia years ago, the Bolivian brethren said, Oh, we got to take you down into the jungle area.

Now, from 13,000 feet all the way to the jungle. And so we went, and that was the most hair-raising road we'd ever seen. It's actually called the Road of Death. And Cady was crying because he thought, my little babies, I'm never going to see them again. But anyways, we finally made it toward the bottom. And guess what? They had a whole lot of coca fields where they had the plants, the coca plants. Then they had a truck that was loading all the leaves to be able to take them back because they use them all the time.

The miners chew on it because it seems to anesthetize pain and everything else. But of all things, there was this truck full of coca leaves, and then you had a line of Indians buying the coca leaves. And so my companion there looked and said, look, there is the original coca-cola because cola means line. So there's the first line of coca you have. All right, that wasn't too good. But anyways, we make the coca-cola, which is the Bolivian version of it. So we continue here, and La Paz is a city of a million people.

And of all things, from the airport, you have to go down into what looks like a big crater because La Paz is at the bottom, not at the top. And so you see here how you actually have to be going down, winding. And so one day when I was there, I said, why is La Paz the capital? And so many people live in this place, which every time it pours, I mean, they have just all this water going down.

You see shoes, you see all kinds of things going down the street, because anytime they have a storm, it's just like a funnel going all the way down. Somebody said, well, what happened was people used to live in the higher altitudes, and then they discovered gold down in this basin. And so then they said, well, we got to go where the gold is, and that's how La Paz was established. One nice thing they have done, because believe me, when you are down in that crater, and you have to get up to the airport, there's just one road, and it's just winding all the way up to find you get up to the 13,000 feet level.

And of course, traffic is horrible, because there's only one road that goes all the way up. But in 2014, an Australian company, I mean, not Australian, Austria, an Austrian company offered to build for a moderate price a skyways that go for the top of La Paz all the way down. And they act like subway stations. Everybody takes them. Nobody wants to take those buses. And those buses, once they go down, if their brakes goes, there's no way you can stop them.

And so, we took five of those different skyway lines on Sunday to see all of La Paz from the air. And I mean, it is just packed with houses. All the way from the top of the hill, all the way down to the hill. And some people just have to walk all these hundreds of yards just to get to their home.

And then, all you have is stairs, because you just have one little winding road, but you've got hundreds of houses, and they're all just perched on the sides of these mountains. On the Sabbath, we met with the Bolivian brethren. They're quite well-educated, including an architect, a teacher, and a university student. We also visited a dear couple who are shut-ins.

And they've been in the church for decades, very faithful people. So, after being there, we returned to Lima, Peru, and then took a flight over here to Los Angeles. But there is another lesson to be learned in Peru. How one of the footprints of Genesis was apparently left in the sands of time in Nazca, Peru. Nazca is a small town, and also the valley of Nazca. I just ask, has anybody been to the Nazca lines?

Nope. All right. So, it's about 300 miles south of Lima. I visited back in the 1990s, and I took a plane, which took me around the Nazca Valley, and I was able to see all the figures that were on the ground.

These are like little ditches, because the soil is dark, and then as you dig maybe a foot, you find this white type of sediment. So, they made the lines out of these white sediments. There are now over 700 figures on this valley, of which about 300 were discovered through artificial intelligence. This has just been maybe in a year or two that they've discovered 300 new figures. Now, back in the 1990s, I went to the museum there, and heard a talk by the archaeologist and mathematician Maria Reiki. She had an assistant, Jadwinga Pasencluix, that I think I met.

And again, it's very vague, because I'm talking about 30-35 years ago, I don't even recall exactly, but I know at that time there was an assistant with her, looked very much like this lady. Now, Maria Reiki was the one that was there for 40 years, protecting these lines, because these lines are approximately about 2,000 years old. And it's just because it is so dry, and the Humboldt current that goes from the north to the equator keeps that area from getting rain. And so these lines have been there for some 2,000 years.

Now, the best way to see these lines is by airplane, that you can rent, as I did, to go over it. But, you can also see the lines from the surrounding mountains. So this idea that, why did they build it if they can't see? Well, they got mountains around.

And of course, some lines have faded, but they can still be seen from the air. And what surprised me, because I went back to Chile, and I remember reading in a magazine, one of these science magazines, about this Jadwega, who wrote an article on the Nazca Line, saying, I have discovered the purpose for these Nazca Lines. The puzzle has been solved. And that's what I want to share with you, because it has to do with the Bible, in the first couple of chapters of the book of Genesis. She's not a religious person, she's a scientist, but she came to that conclusion after 12 years of research, not only looking carefully at all these figures in the sand, but also the ceramics of the Nazca people. She saw the same type of symbols. And so, she concluded the Nazca Lines were geoglyphs, which means writing in the soil, in the surface. They're geoglyphs. In other words, it's a language in figures that narrated the history of the Nazca people, just like in a school textbook, but drawn on the ground. For millennia, Nazca is one of the driest places on earth, and the lines have survived. She said these drawings follow the narratives of the first chapters of the book of Genesis. What follows is the best that can be determined at this time about this topic. And so, there are some main figures, which you see the darker slide there. It has all of these figures. And a lot of these figures, when I was there at the museum, I bought this rock with many of the figures. These are the Nazca lines.

And I'm going to have Ray or Gary or anybody else. The heat! The heat! There you go, please. Don't touch the rock because you can maybe mess it up. But as we go through the figures, you can see some of these rocks and these figures.

Now, here are some of the same figures that are on the rock. As you're hovering in a plane, these are the figures. They're highlighted in the planes of Nazca. Now, some are just huge. Like the middle in the center is a hummingbird. That hummingbird is the same length of a football field. Over a hundred yards. And look how carefully it was. It's all made with geometry. And they would use a pole and then use rope to be able to measure everything. Now, just one of those figures is amazing. But when you have hundreds, you know they're trying to tell you a story. This isn't a hobby in a hot desert to be out there excavating these lines.

The figures are dug from the dark surface of the soil that yields to a wider color beneath. And what they figured is we can write this history of our people in such a way that we can take people up in the mountains, especially children, and teach them about our history by showing each symbol, which is a story, about their origins, which has to do with the same eight or nine, actually up to eleven chapters in Genesis. This is what this archaeologist discovered.

The Nazca lines cover miles of the Valley of Nazca. It is calculated that they're over 2,000 years old. Can you imagine a Nazca teacher taking children to the top of the mountain and going over the figures as a memory device to teach them about their history? This is what this researcher stumbled across because she's seen it in other civilizations. They have the same type of narratives. In the Spanish book, which is translated the Rulers of the Lost Worlds, Jadwiga, this lady, wrote the following. She was interviewed. In this book, in a magazine called Muinte de Santé, which is a science magazine, which means very interesting, I read the account of how Jadwiga apparently deciphered what these lines meant. As the interviewer wrote, the most famous, according to our interviewee, talking about Jadwiga, is the Nazca text. In other words, there's a text written through these symbols. With this message, our forgotten predecessors come to inform us about their scientific discoveries and their dogmas of faith. Thus concludes Jadwiga and gives us the Nazca text. This is how she interpreted it through all these figures, which is none other than the story of Genesis, conceived by, quote, divine inspiration. So she knew this was something that originally was inspired by God. In anti-Diluvian times, which means before the flood, and faithfully transmitted through infinite generations, she goes on to say, quote, God created the universe within a circle expanding toward infinity. What does the Bible say? In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Same thing. After forging the birth of the stellar world, talking about the earth and all the others, the Almighty concerned himself with creating life. So this is on earth. First, he formed the plant cell that gave rise to plants, which is the first part of Genesis. It doesn't start with animal life. It starts with plant life.

Then, an organic being, the symbolic outline of a fish, in other words, marine animals, that's what God says he created next, from which animals and man would emerge. They had their own Bible, which means this is the same story that they took with them. And this all goes back to the time of Noah and the truths that were given to the people all the way to the Tower of Babel, when the confusion of the languages led all these people to spread across the earth. And here we have a little footprint that was not erased in the sands of time.

She goes on to say, they developed their civilization in three different eras. First, that of the pre-flood kingdoms and empires. So they talked about civilization that before the flood, just like Genesis talks about. Then the Bible was written, in other words, to start a recording what happened. The second begins with the great cataclysm, which is the flood, which destroyed civilizations and gave rise to a very long period of insecurity and terrible suffering for the few survivors.

In other words, Noah and his family start again in a devastated world. What continues is her interpretation, which follows the Bible pretty closely. But it might not be, this is what I write, but it might not be the last word on it. We will have to wait and see, but it points to a common origin of mankind. So let's go over the figures for a moment.

First of all, these are the key figures that Jadwinga saw. She begins with the figure, let me go here, number one. Let me go back just for a moment, because this is the Nazca Plain and these are the figures. They start basically in the north and they angle downward. Can you see the spiral in the map? It's a dark spot. That's like, okay, this is the beginning of creation. So these spirals are out of nothing the universe was created. As she begins with figure number one, God created the universe symbolized by an expanding circle toward infinity. That's pretty much a good description of a universe today.

It is expanding towards an infinity. And then the second figure, God next created plants and marine life, the fish. So here you have next to this spiral, you have fish, you have plants that were created here on the earth. And very interesting, the next one, as you're going down southward, you see these figures. You see what apparently is a type of lizard or snake that can walk. It has a tree which she says is the tree of life, which is seen throughout the world. She correctly interprets the tree as a tree of life. And others have interpreted another figure.

There's another figure which is another tree which they call the tree of knowledge. So these are the two trees. She doesn't know what a walking serpent means. She has a hard time saying, why is this serpent here in the garden where the tree of life is? Well, we do at Satan, the serpent that had the legs removed from. Man sinned, and then you have these hands which are just like anguish. Terrible. Something terrible happens. Sin entered. You have then the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. And what kept man from going back to the Garden of Eden? It's this figure that is a multi-headed flying creature.

It is more likely the winged carobim plays to protect the Garden of Eden and scare off possible intruders. See, all of this is the memory of mankind. There was a time when things were beautiful, the garden, and then all of a sudden they got a guard here. You can't go back into it. And then, after man is expelled, he becomes corrupted. And what's next after that corruption? We have what they call the monkey figure, which isn't a monkey figure, because it is climbing stairs into a boat-like arc. So this is Noah, as interpreted in the Bible, but here it just gives you this image.

Okay, what did man have to do? Well, some had to preserve themselves from the corruption before the flood came. And they think it's a monkey because of the spiral. But that spiral is again talking about man was created. He didn't evolve from that circle, which means God created man, and man had to go inside this arc to preserve life. She recognizes mankind degenerates and God punishes him with a worldwide flood.

She correctly interprets this so-called monkey, not as a monkey, but as a man entering an arc, and animals carried aboard. Yet she mistakes it as an arc bringing life to the earth, which is not part of the Genesis, but actually it's a later narration.

See, because as you go from the inner spiral all the way from the Garden of Eden with a serpent and then the anguished hands, and then we reach the time when God is going to punish mankind and you have a being entering the arc.

And then all kinds of animals are included there to the right, which were preserved. Now again, this is the best. I just thought it's just incredible how all of these figures fit in line, and they are in a diagonal about this original story.

Okay, let's continue here. These are some of the final figures. She believes that the spider is the signature of the Nazca creators because you find it in a ceramic pottery as well. The spider was sort of their image, just like in the U.S. you have the American eagle. Well, they had the spider as their symbol. And after the flood, then kingdoms are set up. So here are some other figures now that you see a king and a queen appear, which again in the Bible is Nimrod and his wife Semiramis, according to a lot of history. And of course, this goes back to the Sumerian culture. So Nimrod was a name. We just meant the powerful one. But we go back into time, the original tyrants that rise up. And after that comes the Tower of Babel and the confusion of the tongues, where the origins of history in different languages were taken to the ends of the earth. So all these people had a common knowledge of what happened to them. Some wrote it in books. Other wrote oral traditions. Here they found a way to conveniently narrate their history in such a way that today we can go back there and look at these figures.

I find it fascinating that in this part of the world, people like the Mayans with their sacred book called the Popovu, which was translated into Spanish by some of the missionaries as they came across Mayans. Some of them could also learn Spanish. So they wrote the Chronicle. I have that book in the first chapter. We came from the east. And man lived in this beautiful garden. And he got corrupted. And then we ended up with a flood. And then we had to rebuild our lives. And here we come. So it's the same type of narrative that you see in the Nazca plain.

The Nazca people apparently would record their origins which fit the biblical record. This is a lesson to remember that the Bible is a book about true history and not about myths. So let's just go real quickly here as we start wrapping this up in Genesis 11. People had a lot of this in common. It talks about in Genesis 10 verse 8. It says, It was a mighty hunter, should say, against the Lord because it meant he defied God. Therefore it said like Nimrod, the mighty hunter before the Lord. And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, Eric, Akkad, and Kalna in the land of Shinar. Well, we know these became centers of paganism. And then it goes on to say in Genesis 11 verse 1, Now the whole earth had one language and one speech because they were all descendants of Noah and his family. They all spoke one language. And it came to pass as they journeyed from the east that they found a plain in the land of Shinar, and they dwelt there. Then they said to one another, Come, let us make bricks and bake them thoroughly. They had brick for stone and they had asphalt for mortar. And they said, Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower whose top is in the heavens. Let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth. In other words, they were interested in packing everybody, controlling everybody. And the Lord said indeed that people are one and they all have one language. And this is what they began to do. Now nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them. Science will multiply. And so here we have the indication, Come, let us go down. And they confuse their language that they may not understand one another's speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth and they seized building the city. Therefore its name is called Babel because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth. And from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth. The Nazca people are part of that group that were scattered. But it seems like they left a record of that original history of man. And so it helps us understand that the Bible is not full of myths. It is accurate and you have the testimony of so many of these nations in their own tongues, in their own culture, that still had the original teachings. So I hope that's inspiring for you. We had a wonderful trip and we look forward to sharing more of these wonderful truths with you in the future.