Inherit All Things

Who doesn't love a movie about a good superhero? It seems like it's endless. Back in the 40s and 50s, they started out with Superman and Batman, and then they had all of these space heroes as well. And now we just have reruns, and we also have parts where you always are having these movies that fascinate people. It strikes a chord. But I'll tell you, all of these movies about superheroes or multiverses and everything else, they don't have a leg to stand on when it comes to what God is preparing for mankind. It is so much greater than anything that man has been able to imagine. And so I'd like to share with you a bit of that vision. We start out asking the question, are we facing difficult trials or difficulties? Let's remember to keep our eyes on the goal. Remember, all of these trials and difficulties, they too will pass. They will not last in time. But those things that God is preparing, they're going to last forever. They're not things that are going to waste away. They're not going to deteriorate. They're not going to age. Next slide. God said, He who overcomes will inherit all things, and I will be His God, and they shall be my children. That's one of the greatest verses in all the Bible. That sums up God's great purpose for creating mankind. I will be His God, and they shall be my children. But they are those who will overcome, who will remain faithful to the end. Let's go to the next slide. As these Psalms proclaim, Psalm 40, verse 5, it says, Many, O Lord, my God, are Your wondrous works. They are more than can be numbered. And so it's our duty, our privilege, to be able to show some of God's wondrous works, to give us hope, to long for that coming kingdom which will end this nightmarish society that we are living in. Like Lot, righteous Lot says that he was always grieved as he saw all of these evil actions around him. And he wanted to be liberated, and he was.

Psalm 145, verse 5, David says, I will speak of the glorious honor of Your majesty and of Your wonderful works. We can never talk enough. Let's go back. It's still Psalm 145.5 that I just read.

We can never talk enough about it nor marvel and wonder at God's creation. Next slide. In Psalm 19, there are two great testimonies of God. Verses 1 through 6, it talks about the witness of nature. Let's go to Psalm 19 real quickly. I just read a little bit because here you have the twin pillars of the proofs of God's existence. Psalm 19, verses 1 through 6. I'll just start with the first few verses. It says, the heavens declare the glory of God. That's talking about the universe. You look in the night sky and you see all of these stars and galaxies created by God. They declare His glory, His power. The firmament, which is the sky, shows His handiwork. And then in verse 7, it starts about the witness of God's Word. It says, the law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul. Gary mentioned in the first message the importance of studying God's Word, the Bible, and studying how perfect His laws are that do convert the soul or the person. The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple. The statutes of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart. The commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes. The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring forever. It just goes on, talking about how you are transformed through God's Word, the application of it.

So you have nature and you have Scripture. They rhyme. Those are the two great testimonies that we have. Next. These are the key scriptures about inheriting all things. Because hardly any religion you've ever heard of mentions that the ultimate goal is to inherit everything that God has created, inheriting all things. That's not talking about a spiritual world. No, it's talking about God's creation and that one day we are going to be over that creation. What are we going to do with it? Well, we'll see.

Let's go to these other scriptures about inheriting all things. I Corinthians 2, 9-10.

Sorry. I has not seen nor ear heard the things which God has prepared for those who love Him. We can't grasp the marvel and enormity of what God has in store to provide for us.

The qualification, the condition here is that you have to love Him. You have to put Him first. Continuing on. Hebrews 1-2. God has spoken to us by His Son, whom He has appointed heir of all things. Well, again, it's talking about something that was given to Christ as an inheritance to be over. So Christ is coming to be over the earth first, but it's just not the earth. Eventually, it's going to be the entire universe that God created. He did not create it in vain. He created it to be populated and beautified.

Notice the next scripture, Romans 8-17. The spirit, talking about of God, itself bears witness with our spirit that we are the children of God. And if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ. It doesn't talk about being sub-heirs, but joint heirs means that once this is given by God the Father, we're going to be part of the inheritors. Under Christ, but at the same time, the part of the God family. God is multiplying and creating. Let's go to the next Romans 18-20. Paul said, For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us. For the earnest expectation of the creation, that's the term used for universe, eagerly waits for the revealing of the sons or the children of God because of Him who subjected it in hope. So this universe right now is not populated. It's been created. It's like unfinished furniture that God is going to then let us be able to beautify, just like this earth was made beautiful. And we want to participate in that. It's a part of the creative process that God is carrying out. He wants His children to apply that creativity. Isn't that something that parents want to do with their children? See how they develop their creative abilities? Well, what if you didn't have anything physical to work on? You want your child to be a musician, but there's no instruments which he can use. In the same way, this is a material universe, and it has a purpose. Now, eventually, it is also wearing down, and eventually God will have something else in the future. But it's still calculated to be billions of years into the future, that it's all going to be functional.

Next scripture, Romans 8.31. Paul said, What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? Who's more powerful than God? God decides He's going to back us and help us and support us as it was brought out. He will not abandon us. Who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son, but delivered Him up for us all. How shall He not with Him also freely give us all things? You see how He includes Christ? He's an inheritor. But we are part of that inheritance as well.

That's something that is not understood by mankind. They think they're all going to heaven. What are they going to do there? Well, it's just going to be kind of a blissful time, but nothing creative, nothing that engages your mind, your creativity, your imagination. No, it's very different than what the Bible says. We're going to be very active.

Continuing on.

Because we're going to see what all of this means. Just in a small little sliver of giving you this grasp, the little window into the future. So we read John 1 and 3. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made. So in the beginning, no matter or energy existed. It was brought forth by the Word, commanded by God the Father to carry it out. Continuing, the Bible also speaks of a period before time existed. Paul said about this grace or unmerited favor. And, pardon, was given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time. God had already decided about this even before He brought forth the universe and created all of us. Also, Titus 1-2, it says, the hope of eternal life, which God promised before the beginning of time. So God had all of this in mind. He had a blueprint that He was going to carry out. He didn't do things haphazardly. He was not doing things just on the wing, at prayer, and not really planning things. No, He planned everything from the start. It's all being carried out. Continuing, so the beginning of the universe began with the creation of all things by God. Colossians 1, 15-17. Let's read that real quickly. Colossians 1, 15-17.

It says about Christ, He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created through Him and for Him. So this universe, it's still destined to be for Christ. It would be kind of a sad commentary after creating all these billions of galaxies and then it didn't really have a great purpose. No, God created everything with a purpose. Verse 17, and it says, and He is before all things and in Him all things consist and He is the head of the body, the church, who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in all things He may have the preeminence. He has the preeminence over all of us, but we're still going to be part of the family.

Continuing. So we read Genesis 1.1, In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. So it began by His command and hence information precedes matter. In other words, before things were created there had to be an intelligence, an all-powerful being that mentioned, commanded, and then it became so. So information is before matter and energy. Let's continue. Here we see the vastness of the universe. These are the numerous galaxies in the cosmos, photographed by the James Webb Telescope this year.

The James Webb Telescope, as I've already brought out, is a hundred times more powerful than the Hubble, which used to be the strongest. So just multiply it a hundred times. And what did the James telescope see that the Hubble couldn't go far enough when the James Webb Telescope peered into the earliest period?

The whole universe was already populated with galaxies. And everything, it wasn't something that just sort of evolved like they used to think. Now the James Webb Telescope, one of the great discoveries is that this universe just came very quickly into creation. It reminds me of some of these paleontologists, the men who studied fossils. And they mentioned that all of these fossils that they find on the ground, they don't have previous ancestors as such.

And one of the paleontologists said it was like it was planted there because it didn't have this evolving. You don't see species being slowly converting to others. No biologist, no paleontologist has ever discovered in all of the millions of fossils that are out there. One fossil that is half of a species and the other is the other half, where it's being converted. There's no such thing. But man refuses to accept that. It's the same way now here, where God said he created things with a purpose.

And so man has had to eat crow. Astronomers have had to eat crow because now they can't explain how this vast universe with all of these galaxies just came so quickly into formation, as if they were just planted there. And that's what happens. Let's continue. This is an illustration of the Milky Way galaxy. And our solar system is off to the side.

We have the Milky Way galaxy. It's a spiral galaxy. It's like a pinwheel. It's perfectly shaped. It goes around. And we are in one of the safe zones where we can see the vastness of the universe. It's a very clear sky that we can see things. None of those things should be taken for granted. There's a lot of places where basically it's either so dark you can't see anything or it's too lighted that everything is blurred with light.

Continuing, here's our Milky Way galaxy up close. Now, we're not by ourselves. There are approximately 30 more galaxies that are close by. Let's see the next slide. We are also a part of the local group of stars and galaxies. There are 30 galaxies with the closest solar system to us being Alpha Centauri. So, yes, here it's talking about solar systems. And the closest one is Alpha Centauri. That's the next solar system over. And it is 4.5 light years away. How long would it take a rocket to get there?

40,000 years to get to the next solar system. I think God did that because if he had any that were too close, he'd have humans conquering the thing. We'd really have a problem. So, he made sure humans were not going to be able to get that close to it, thankfully. Next slide. Here we have the different planets in our solar system with its gas giants that protect the inner planets.

So, there is a purpose here because these are like round shields that attract any type of asteroids. And these large gas giants attract and so it takes away from possible collisions with the Earth. Let's go on. Here's a biblical scripture that should be remembered. Job 26 verse 7. The Bible correctly predicted that our Earth hangs from nothing. Let's look at it quickly. Job 26 verse 7. God revealed to Job that the Earth is not mounted on something, that it is held there by gravity.

Job 26 verse 7. It says, He stretches out the North over empty space. He hangs the Earth on nothing. That's exactly what is discovered today. Let's look at some of these galaxies. This is the Derby galaxy because it looks like a hat. Next one, another type of spiral galaxy. Very well balanced with the inner galaxies. Pretty strong light emitted by them. Let's look at another one.

This galaxy, actually there are two of them and there are 114 million light years from us, but they look like eyes. Look at this next one. It's called the Eye of God. It was photographed. Looks like a beautiful eye. God has fun combining colors. Let's go to the next one. This is called the Ant Nebula. It resembles the body of an ant. Let's look at the next one. This is called the Hourglass Nebula. Nebula means gas filled. 8,000 light years away. Let's go to the next one. Here's one called Starry Night. The effect on a star, so named because it reminded astronomers of the Van Gogh painting, Starry Night. It is a halo of light around a star in the Milky Way galaxy. Let's go up north with the Eskimo Nebula, so named because it looks like a face surrounded by a furry hood. The hood, in fact, is a ring of comet-shaped objects flying away from a dying star. This Eskimo Nebula is 5,000 light years away from the Earth. Let's look at another one. This is called the Perfect Storm, a small region in the Swan Nebula 5,500 light years away, described as a bubbly ocean of hydrogen and small amounts of oxygen, sulfur, and other elements. Each one has a different color. Of course, sulfur is known for being yellow. That's where you get the color. So how fast did Christ travel after he was resurrected from the dead? After his resurrection, Christ traveled in an instant past all our solar system to the third heaven. It just took him a moment to cross the entire universe and be at the right-hand side of God the Father. So Christ can travel at the speed of thought. One day we are, too. Notice the next one. Okay, so here's another supernova in the Magellan nebulous area, relatively close to the Earth. How would you like to hot rod through some of these gaseous places? Won't that be fun? Okay, so now let's take a journey through outer space and see how similar and proportionate they are between outer space and inner space. One is the solar system and constellations. The other things are atoms and molecules. You see here the same design. So we begin showing here what it looks like in this little forest. So we're looking at the leaves of a small tree. A bit higher than a man. So we're looking just at kind of a bush. This is three feet from the ground. Ten to the zero power. Just one meter. Next one. Now we are ten meters. Ten to the first. Here we're thirty feet. We just multiplied by ten. And we're going to continue multiplying by ten. And notice the proportion of everything. It continues with beauty, with symmetry, with harmony. Now we can see a number of trees. The next one, ten to the second power. Now we talk about a hundred meters away. We can see the forest and even buildings at a hundred feet. Or a hundred meters. That's a little over three hundred feet. Next we see one kilometer away. Ten to the third power. This is where a plane would fly. And we see now, this is a nice planned area. This is actually in Florida.

And let's go to ten to the fourth power. And now we see this is part of a city. So you see, everything gets bigger and bigger as we extend outward. Ten kilometers away. Now we're going to go ten to the fifth. We're going to multiply that by ten times a hundred kilometers. Now we see it is the state of Florida in the Panhandle area. What we're looking at. And then multiplying by ten, ten to the sixth, we're one thousand kilometers away. So this would be similar to what a space shuttle would be able to see from space. Now let's go ten times more. Ten thousand kilometers. Now we're in outer space and can see the northern hemisphere and part of South America here.

Multiply by ten, ten to the eighth, a hundred thousand kilometers away. Now the Earth is a bit farther than a view from the Moon. We just multiplied to the eighth time. We're already farther than the Moon.

Multiply by ten more, we're a million kilometers away. We can barely see the Earth in the backdrop of all the stars and galaxies.

We can just barely see the Moon's orbit in white.

Let's go ten more times. Now we're in ten million kilometers away. We see part of the Earth's orbit in blue. Just a tiny little dot. Ten to the eleventh. We can see the orbits of Venus, Earth, and Mars. Now come to the foreground, these two planets. Ten to the twelfth, one billion kilometers away. Now the orbits of Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars can be seen. Ten to the thirteenth, ten billion kilometers. At this altitude, we see the entire solar system and the orbits of the planets. So just like inner space has the nucleus made out of protons and neutrons, well, we have the Sun. And then we've got all of the planets in their orbits. See, everything is harmonious. They're not chaotic. They all have their own orbit, their own spiral. They have a purpose. Ten to the fourteenth power. The solar system begins to look very small. Just multiply it by ten, and now you can barely see just the solar system there. Ten times more, a trillion kilometers away. The Sun now is a small star in the middle of thousands of stars.

The universe is so large. We've only gone ten to the fifteenth power. Let's go ten to the sixteenth. This is what's considered one light year because the distances are so far away that one light year is what a beam of light traveling for a year would be the distance of one light year. The Sun is tiny. Now, ten to the seventeenth, ten light years away, you can't even see the Sun anymore.

Ten to the eighteenth power, one hundred light years. We see that we are between the arms of a galactic spiral. So you see on either side are these spiral arms. And we're protected by them, and we're in more of a dark area, which is far more stable. So we're very thankful for that, or else we'd have all kinds of things crashing into us. Ten to the nineteenth power, one thousand light years away. At this distance, we see one of the arms of the Milky Way galaxy. So now we can see the actual arm. Ten to the twentieth power, ten thousand light years away. Now we see billions of stars of the Milky Way. In other words, even our own Milky Way with a spiral, now it's too diffuse. You just see all the other approximately two hundred billion stars that we have in the Milky Way. Let's go to the twenty-first power. Now we're reaching the periphery of the Milky Way. Actually seeing now just part of the Milky Way. Ten to the twenty-second power. At a million light years, at this tremendous distance, we see the entire Milky Way galaxy. And the closest galaxy to us is called the Andromeda galaxy. See the one at the bottom there? That's like flat. So just picture there are about two hundred billion galaxies in the universe. See, these are two. God has a lot of real estate out there. Ten to the twenty-third power. Ten million light years away, now the Milky Way becomes just another small galaxy. And so we've reached basically now the end of what is the Milky Way galaxy. The next one over you don't even see it. So now let's go back to our original picture of just ten meters. Ten to the first. As we saw it there in Florida. But now, instead of going outward, we're going inward. And notice the symmetry. Everything. Ten to the first. This is about thirty feet. No, three. Ten to the first. That's thirty feet.

And let's go on to the next one. We already did that one. Now we're going backwards. Ten to the minus first. So now this is ten centimeters away. From the one meter, we're going ten centimeters. We can see the entire leaf now. It's not just a bush. Ten minus two. One centimeter. At this distance, we can see the structure of the leaf and the limits of our vision. We really can't see much closer with just our own eyes to this. Ten to the minus three. One millimeter. We begin to see cellular structures. See those green little squares? Those are all cells. Ten to the minus fourth. A hundred micrometers. The cells can now be seen pretty clearly. Ten minus five. Ten micrometers. We start our trip inside the cell. So now we're going to focus on just one cell here in a moment. Ten minus six. One micrometer. If you're looking at a microscope, this is what you'd see. You see the nucleus of the cell. And then you go inside the nucleus. Ten minus seven. One thousand angstroms. You can see the chromosomes. This is the DNA information. This is the instruction that the nucleus has to be able to reproduce itself. And also all the other operations that are needed. Like the instruction manual. Ten minus eight. One hundred angstroms. In this micro-universe, the DNA helix is visible. So now you've basically reduced the chromosomes to its DNA helix structure. Ten minus nine angstroms. Now you see the nucleotides can be studied. So these are the rungs of the DNA double helix that you see.

And the rungs on it. I think the nucleotides are the rungs of the DNA helix. Now we tend to the minus tenth. This basically appears now as a cloud of electrons. These are carbon atoms that form our world. Notice the resemblance of the microcosmos and the macrocosmos. So now you see just like the universe with all the stars and things. Well here we are focusing on like one solar system. Ten minus the eleventh. It's called ten picometers. In this miniature world we can observe the electrons orbiting the atoms. So just now instead of having the sun and the planets, now you have the electrons rotating, going orbiting around each atom. Ten to the twelfth. Now we see just this kind of an empty space between the different atoms. Continuing on. Now we're getting into fen-to-meters. It's so tiny. We can see the nucleus of the carbon atom. Now ten to the fourteenth. We can see the protons and neutrons at this stage. Again, everything is orderly. Everything has been planned out. The forces have to be there to maintain each one of those protons and the neutrons. All together, at the right force, if it was a little less or a little more, nothing would work. Everything would fall apart. Ten to the minus fifteenth. One centimeter. Here we are in the field of scientific imagination, face to face, with the interior of a proton. So we can't really go much farther than this. Ten to the sixteenth. These are the quark particles, and there is nowhere else to go. We're at the limits of the current scientific knowledge and the limits of matter. And so God has promised we are going to inherit all of this. That He will send Jesus Christ to convert this earth into a peaceful paradise. And the people of the great civilizations, like the Mayan civilizations, they never knew Jesus Christ. They never got a chance to read the Bible. They had no idea about God's plan. They lived and died like ignorant people. The people of great civilizations will be resurrected at the second resurrection after the thousand year period and have a chance to know the way of salvation. They're not lost. They have a specific resurrection awaiting them, which is filled with hope, mercy, and love. Continuing, it tells us in Luke, chapter 133, And of His kingdom there will be no end. It will ever be expanding. Some day it is likely the planets of the universe will be beautified in a manner as the earth will during the millennium. This is the best we understand.

And so, last slide. God says, He who overcomes. What does He have to overcome? His own human nature, the attraction of this world with its wrong and false values, and Satan the devil. He who overcomes shall inherit all things, and I will be His God, and they shall be my children. Men and women shall share in that inheritance. What a promise! Let's keep division and faith.