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Last week we looked at the four successive views of heaven in the Bible: Paradise; Hades; the Intermediate Heaven; the New Heaven and New Earth. We looked at a few surprising aspects of the intermediate heaven where all the believers in Christ today are after the point of death. Let’s consider again our theme verse for this series… Colossians 3:1-4:  “If then you have been raised up with Christ, keep seeking the things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Set your mind on the things above, not on the things that are on earth. For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, Who is our life, is revealed, then you also will be revealed with Him in glory.”

This morning let’s ‘set our minds’ on the wonder of the New Heaven and New Earth. If there is ever a time when you have visualized heaven as a place of familiar faces and human form and the splendor of beautiful structures and the radiance of the Throne of God, the New Heaven and New Earth are probably the closest fulfillment of those thoughts. The idea of what’s in heaven being brought to the face of the earth and both transformed in the process is not new, it is what lays at the heart of the most famous prayer… “Our Father Who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name, Thy kingdom come (Ultimately referring to the final fulfillment) Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven…” The prayer that Jesus gave to the disciples appeals to God for a great harmonizing of His will in both places, ultimately fulfilled when… at the time of the . . .

Science frequently moves from one position to another. As soon as a statement is made, defining some property of matter, or some finding has been established as certain, a revision appears in which the former statements have to be scrapped or modified. Many scientists have had to retreat from what they originally thought and 'swallow their words'. A few examples follow, drawn from the pronouncements of qualified experts, past and present:

If a vehicle travels faster than 30 mph the air will be sucked from the interior and suffocate the passengers. The universe is expanding/collapsing/neither expanding or collapsing. Stars are always being 'born'. The Grand Canyon was formed slowly over millions of years. Fossil beds contain millions of transitional forms. The moon was captured as it passed Earth a long time ago. A huge amount of human DNA is useless junk. An exclusive diet of meat is not good for you. Gem stones take millions of years to form. Oil takes about the same time. There are only about 5000 stars in the universe.

It has often been said, by scientists, that Neanderthals were one of the 'missing links' between primates and modern humans, and many textbooks pictured them as primitive ape-like humans, but as more evidence has coming to light this view has had to be revised. A recent book 'Neanderthals and Modern Humans' by Clive Finlayson points out that . . .

For Christ died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God.
He was put to death in the body but made alive by the Spirit
1 Peter 3:18

John Muir, famous explorer and naturalist,  tells an amazing story in his book, Travels in Alaska of the Thlinkit and Sitka tribes, two tribes that readily accepted the preaching of the gospel in Alaska in 1879. He writes:

The Thlinkit tribes give a hearty welcome to Christian missionaries. In particular they are quick to accept the doctrine of the atonement, because they themselves practice it.... As an example of their own doctrine of atonement they told Mr. Young and me one evening that 20 or 30 years ago there was a bitter war between their own and the Sitka tribe, great fighters, and pretty evenly matched. After fighting all summer, fighting now under cover, now in the open, watching for every chance for a shot, none of the women dared venture to the salmon streams or berry fields to procure their winter stock of food. At this crisis one of the Stickeen chiefs came out of his block-house fort into an open space midway between their fortified camps, and shouted that he wished to speak to the leader of the Sitkas.

When the Sitka chief appeared, he said: "My people are hungry. They dare not go to the salmon streams or berry fields for winter supplies, and if this war goes on much longer most of my people will die of hunger. We have fought long enough; let us . . .

A heading to an article in the New Scientist magazine reads, 'dNA shows how different we are.? It went on to say, ?Humans and their closest relatives, chimpanzees, may be more different than geneticists have realized.?

The evidence comes from studies by the International Chimpanzee Chromosome 22 Consortium, (as reported in Nature, vol. 429, page 382) To begin with the article described the similarities: ?A comparison of the chimpanzee's chromosome 22 and its counterpart, human chromosome 21, shows that just 1.44% of the chromosome's 33.3 million DNA bases are different.? Only 1.44% is not much, so where are the differences?

The study revealed ?nearly 68,000 insertions or deletions of DNA, most of which were only a few bases long.? ?Because each gene contains hundreds or thousands of bases, even these differences are enough to alter more than 80% of the proteins produced by those genes.?

80% is a lot of difference.

Evolutionists work from the worldview that . . .