Notes of a Preacher

Taras Banshchikov

Notes of a Preacher

Introduction

This book is offered to everyone who desires to learn more about God, the Bible, and the Christian life. It touches on certain areas of science and their relationship to the biblical texts. The author’s purpose was to show the reader that there is no contradiction between the Bible and the scientific disciplines, but rather evidence of their agreement and consistency with one another. This book does not deal with religiosity, church doctrines, or denominational differences. Those who study the Bible in preparation for the ministry of preaching will also find much that is useful concerning common errors in the interpretation of Holy Scripture. The Bible does not need to be interpreted according to human speculation; it explains itself very well. The Bible must be studied carefully and understood deeply. All Scripture quotations are taken from the Russian Synodal Translation of the Bible.

The Bible is not a fairy tale, nor is it a collection of legends and fantastic stories. The Bible is a historical book written by witnesses to the events described within its pages. Its testimony is confirmed by discoveries in archaeology and astronomy, and it records historical events in which God intervened in the lives of individuals, nations, and civilizations.

This book can be a meaningful gift both to Christians and to those who are seeking God, the Savior of their souls, and eternity with Him. I wish you an enjoyable and rewarding reading!

When reading the Bible, there are several rules to keep in mind. First, the Bible was written from the testimony of witnesses to the events described in it. Second, in order to study any subject or event described in the Bible, one must find at least two or more passages of Scripture concerning that subject in order to gain a full understanding of what is written. One should not reason from a single passage of the Bible or draw conclusions based on that passage alone. The Bible explains itself. Fourth, the Bible speaks about three central themes: God, man, and the relationship between God and man.

Preface

Thanks to discoveries in physics, chemistry, astronomy, materials science, and medicine, the quality of our lives continues to improve. Science and men and women of science, with their inquisitive minds, seek to understand the world that God created in six days, and that is a wonderful thing. But envy, pride, and arrogance can make every achievement useless—vain. Faith in God is intended to transform man’s sinful nature and lead him to become an upright, righteous person. Faith in the God of the Bible is not meant to hinder the progress of science; it is meant to bring a person into a state of gentleness, responsibility, self-control, compassion, mercy, and so on... Faith in the God of the Bible does not contradict scientific inquiry. On the contrary, modern scientific discoveries confirm what was written in the ancient texts of the Bible. The Bible is an ancient historical document that speaks not only about humanity’s past, but also about its future. The Bible also concerns matters of sociology and civil law, addressing the relationship between God and man, relationships among people, and the relationship of people to the state.

"Religion must be logical, and science must be ethical."

Imagine this: you want to pass on to future generations a message of great importance—one that could still be understood a hundred years from now, or even ten thousand years from now. In what style would you write your message? What images would you use? What scenes from your world would remain unchanged even after thousands of years? 1—Light and darkness, day and night. 2—The picture of the starry sky, apart from the seven stars or planets nearest to the Earth. All the other stars remain relatively constant in the night sky. 3—The basic human needs required to sustain life: the need for food, the need for shelter, and the need for clothing.

And this is the kind of language in which the Bible is written. Over the course of four thousand years, out of approximately seventy languages, only two have come down to our time without change. These are Hebrew and Mandarin Chinese, while all other languages have changed in one way or another over the centuries. And under such changing conditions, imagine that you want to tell future generations how everything began.

At the very beginning of my Christian journey, I encountered contradictions in biblical interpretations. I began reading books written by Christian authors and discovered that there seemed to be as many opinions about biblical texts as there were authors, while their conclusions simply contradicted one another. I could not help asking myself: Where, then, is the opinion of the Author of the Bible? The One who composed the biblical texts—the 39 books of the Old Testament and the 27 books of the New Testament—did He really write them in such an ambiguous way?

When we take the Bible into our hands, no one requires us to become critics of what is written. The Author of these texts possesses limitless age and experience in every discipline of every science that has existed in the past, exists in the present, or will exist in the future. A critic measures a work according to his own knowledge and understanding within a particular field of science or culture. But how can you, as a critic, evaluate the Author of the Bible, who created the very things you are studying? I mean the universe, with all its forces governing the interaction of matter and all its physical laws—and you, the “critic,” as well.

To begin with, as a reader of the biblical texts, you need to determine your own attitude toward the Author of the Bible. Who is He to you? An Author whom you weigh on the scales of your own perception and understanding, or a Teacher who knows and understands far more than anyone who has ever lived or is now living on planet Earth? If you are a critic, then the Bible is no more to you than a literary and historical book—the writings of ancient authors. But if the Author is your Teacher, then the Bible becomes your textbook—not to be confused with the Talmud. Your attitude toward the Author of the Bible will ultimately change your entire life and your perception of the world in which you live, whatever that world may be. Yet no one has ever remained indifferent to the biblical texts.

I will cite only three passages from the Bible—there are many more—in which God speaks concerning His Book.

“...and it was appointed through angels by the hand of a mediator. Now a mediator does not mediate for one only, but God is one.” (Galatians 3:19–20)

“God, who at various times and in various ways spoke in time past to the fathers by the prophets.” (Hebrews 1:1)

“...knowing this first, that no prophecy of Scripture is of any private interpretation, for prophecy never came by the will of man, but holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit.” (2 Peter 1:20–21)

On the basis of these passages, I see that God is one, while we human beings are many; and that the prophets wrote their books under God’s direction, books that were later included in the collection of canonical writings. The Bible is also called Holy Scripture or the Word of God, which is exactly what it is. Approximately forty prophets and writers, living in different periods of history, took part in writing the Bible. Holy Scripture was written over a period of about 1,500 years, or perhaps even longer—from approximately 1800 BC to AD 350. The Old and New Testaments. The Bible is not the wisdom of elders, nor is it philosophical speculation; it is the Word of God. Seen in this light, the Bible is not merely a collection of prophetic books, but one unified Book written by one Author.

Attitude Toward the Biblical Texts

How did Jesus regard the Holy Scriptures? For us as Christians, Jesus is the example and the standard of what it means to walk with God and before God. Here are several statements of Jesus recorded in the New Testament.

“If He called them gods, to whom the word of God came—and the Scripture cannot be broken” (John 10:35). For Jesus, the biblical texts were and remain indisputable—an axiom: “The Scripture cannot be broken.”

“Jesus answered and said to them, ‘You are mistaken, not knowing the Scriptures nor the power of God...’” (Matthew 22:29). Jesus also taught that the biblical texts and their Author are inseparably connected.

“And beginning at Moses and all the Prophets, He expounded to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself” (Luke 24:27). He taught His disciples that He, Jesus, is the fulfillment of all the prophecies recorded in the biblical texts.

The Bible, the sacred texts, Scripture—all of these refer to the same Book—speaks of three fundamental truths: 1) God, 2) man, and 3) the relationship between God and man.

Everything written in the Bible concerns either God, human nature, or the relationship between the Creator and His creation.

Jesus regarded the Holy Scriptures as the infallible, unbreakable Word from God. Holy Scripture presents, in historical terms, the acts of God on Earth among mankind. And all Scripture points to one Person—Jesus the Messiah, the descendant of King David and of Abraham, the patriarch of the entire people of Israel, for whom the Law, the Writings, and the Prophets were given.

In the Law of Moses there is this commandment:

“One witness shall not rise against a man concerning any iniquity or any sin that he commits; by the mouth of two or three witnesses the matter shall be established” (Deuteronomy 19:15). Likewise: “...by the mouth of two or three witnesses every word shall be established” (2 Corinthians 13:1).

Let us take this as a foundation for understanding and studying the biblical texts. What does this mean? In order to reason about any subject found in the Bible, we should base our conclusions on no fewer than two or three passages of Scripture that relate to the subject being studied. No conclusions should be drawn on the basis of a single passage of the Bible.

“Religion must be logical, and science must be ethical.”

All the texts in this book grew out of my sermons about God and from my own study of the biblical texts. If something here agrees with the writings of other authors, it simply means that we are reading and studying the same source of our knowledge—the Bible, Holy Scripture. I also considered it important to share Craig F. Pitts’s revelation expressed in the poem “The Ink of Eternity.”

I offer you my spiritual treasures, which I myself received from my Creator and Keeper.

Chapter 1

The Beginning of Creation and Astronomy

The account in the first chapter of Genesis is presented not from an overall view of the entire protoplanetary system, but from the place where the Earth was being formed.

The Book of Genesis, chapter one:

“1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. 2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. 3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. 4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. 5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.”

What is written in these lines of the Bible appears as though the author were standing at the very place where the Earth was to be. The description that follows of the creation of the Solar System proceeds from this same perspective—not from somewhere outside, where the entire Solar System together with our star could be seen, but from the point where our planet was coming into existence. The conclusion is that God, through visions or dreams, showed Adam how He created the Earth and everything upon it. The first chapter of Genesis was written neither by Moses nor even by Noah, who survived the worldwide Flood. The account of the creation of the Earth was written by the first man on Earth—Adam.

This raises a question: Why did the Sun and the stars “appear” only on the fourth day, when plants were created on the third day of creation, even though vegetation cannot grow without light?

The creation of our Solar System did not occur spontaneously. It was created by our Creator for the third planet from its star. From the very beginning, the Creator “calibrated” our star so that it would be suitable for life on Earth.

It was not made a red dwarf, with flares capable of destroying all life on the planet. An excerpt from a world encyclopedia states:

“Because red dwarfs are relatively dim, an effective Earth-like orbit would have to lie close to the star. But a planet located too close to its star becomes permanently turned toward it with the same side. This phenomenon is known as tidal locking. It can cause extreme temperature differences between the two hemispheres—the night side and the day side—because the day side remains constantly warm and may become extremely hot, while temperatures on the night side may approach absolute zero. A dense atmosphere, however, could provide some transfer of heat to the dark hemisphere, but this, in turn, could produce powerful hurricanes along the boundary between the illuminated and unilluminated sides.”

In Genesis chapter 1, verse 4, it is written: “...and God saw the light, that it was good.” The meaning of these words is not that God had been dwelling in darkness, saw the light of a star for the first time, and felt pleased by it. The meaning is that when the Creator ignited our star, He gave it the proper amount and composition of matter—from hydrogen to iron, 26 elements—so that it would be good for life on Earth. Hallelujah to Him for this! He “calibrated” the Sun for His own design.

Now let us turn to the answer to the question. On the fourth day of creation, the accretion disk—the cloud and dust surrounding the star—had dispersed enough for the Sun, the Moon, and the other stars to become visible. Light had been present from the first day of creation, but because of the density of the accretion disk around the star during the first three days, the light was not direct but diffused. For plants, what matters is that there is light, whether direct or diffused. In the formation of a new star, the cloud of gas usually rotates as well, eventually taking the shape of a disk. The young star forms at the center, while the disk surrounding it becomes the basis for the formation of planets. The disk undergoes a number of dramatic changes: much of it is “blown” out into space by radiation from the young star, but often a certain amount of gas and dust remains to form a planetary system. This is how our Solar System came into being. During the formation of our Solar System, there was a great deal of water vapor.

“...and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters” (Genesis 1:2).

The apostle Peter, who had no telescopes with which to observe the stars, writes in his epistle in 2 Peter 3:5 that “by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water.”

The light from the star had been present from the first day of creation. Whether it was direct or diffused was not the main issue; what mattered was that the light was there.

Red dwarfs are many times more active than the Sun, while the stellar wind of such stars is not much weaker than that of our own Sun. Extremely powerful stellar flares in a red-dwarf system can be destructive to any possible life on a planet.

A planet’s magnetic field could partly solve this problem by acting as a barrier against radiation, but tidally locked planets, in most cases, may not have such a field, because the absence of planetary rotation also means the absence of rotation within the core.

At the same time, the star must not be too large, so that its brightness and stellar wind do not “blow away and burn off” the atmosphere.

Peter was an ordinary fisherman from a small village. Yet he understood the formation of planetary systems because every Sabbath he went to the synagogue and heard the Book of Genesis read aloud. Peter was a follower of Christ, with an open heart, led by the Holy Spirit—something I also wish for today’s “scientists.” Astronomical observations and discoveries do not in any way refute what is written in the Bible. On the contrary, they confirm and establish the truth of the sacred texts.

In December 2020, 400 astronomers and astrophysicists from around the world gathered in Paris to discuss the remarkable results of studies of the universe carried out by the infrared telescope “ISO.” It had been launched by the European Space Agency in 1995.

The telescope showed that approximately half of all stars have planets, and that throughout space—in every part of it—there is a great deal of water vapor. “The universe is literally bathing in water,” one participant at the Paris conference observed with amazement.

It is commonly believed that at the beginning of its formation, the Earth resembled a smoking sphere covered with numerous volcanoes, while streams of glowing molten lava flowed everywhere. But this is not a complete picture of what was taking place in those distant days.

Many objects have been discovered in our Solar System—asteroids, moons of other planets, and even planets themselves—that consist partly or almost entirely of water. This indicates that the accretion disk from which our future Solar System formed contained a large amount of water vapor. During its formation, the Earth resembled a huge “ball of mud” covered with water. Heavier elements and compounds moved toward the center, forming the planet’s core. Under the forces of gravity and pressure, the core began to heat up, and the increasing pressure pushed the denser portions of the “mud” upward through the water, forming dry land. In this way, a great number of cavities formed within our planet and were filled with the same water. During the Flood, it was this water that covered the entire surface of the Earth, destroying all the flora and fauna upon it.

“Then God said, ‘Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.’ [And it was so.] Thus God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament. And it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. [And God saw that it was good.] So the evening and the morning were the second day.

Then God said, ‘Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.’ And it was so. [And the waters under the heavens were gathered together into their places, and the dry land appeared.] And God called the dry land Earth, and the gathering together of the waters He called Seas. And God saw that it was good. Then God said, ‘Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb that yields seed [according to its kind and likeness], and the fruit tree that yields fruit according to its kind, whose seed is in itself, on the earth.’ And it was so. And the earth brought forth grass, the herb that yields seed according to its kind [and likeness], and the [fruit] tree that yields fruit, whose seed is in itself according to its kind [on the earth]. And God saw that it was good. So the evening and the morning were the third day” (Genesis 1:6–13).

The water was beneath the atmosphere—the ocean—and above the atmosphere, beyond the “Kármán line,” more than one hundred kilometers above the Earth, creating a greenhouse effect. Therefore, the temperature was essentially the same across the entire planet, with only slight differences at the poles and on mountain peaks. The variation was approximately ±15 degrees. The high level of moisture on the ground and in the air created ideal conditions for all the plant life that had been created.

Amber is the fossilized resin of trees. Besides small insects, amber also contains bubbles of gas. This is the atmosphere of those times. Its composition contained from 25% to 40% oxygen. And it is no wonder that under such greenhouse conditions vegetation was extremely abundant, much like that of the equatorial regions today. And there is something else: when God first created the animals, they were not carnivorous. All of them fed on vegetation—the lion as well as the dinosaurs (dragons). All this vegetation had to be continually renewed.

“And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven [to give light upon the earth, and] to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: and let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth. And it was so. And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night, and the stars. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, and to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the fourth day. And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creatures that have life, and let birds fly above the earth across the firmament of heaven. [And it was so.] And God created great fish and every living creature that moves, which the waters brought forth according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth. And the evening and the morning were the fifth day. And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature according to its kind: cattle, creeping things, and beasts of the earth according to their kinds. And it was so. And God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds, cattle according to their kind, and everything that creeps on the earth according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. And God said, Let Us make man in Our image, [and] according to Our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, [and over the beasts,] and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. And God blessed them, and God said to them, Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea [and over the beasts], and over the birds of the air, [and over every living thing, and over all the earth,] and over every living creature that moves on the earth. And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb that yields seed which is on the face of all the earth, and every tree whose fruit yields seed; to you it shall be for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to every [creeping thing] that creeps on the earth, in which there is life, I have given every green herb for food. And it was so. And God saw everything that He had made, and behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day” (Genesis 1:14–31).

An amazing fact: when God created the animals, He spoke—He gave instructions as to how they were to be made. But when He created man, nowhere in Scripture does it say that He spoke. He was occupied with creating His own reflection. God fashioned His own image and likeness with His own hands. “Like an Artist, He saw Himself and shaped what He saw.” Every person ever born on Earth is His unique creation. (Psalm 139:13)

“...and every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no man to till the ground; but a mist went up from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground” (Genesis 2:5–6).