Audio recording Sermon manuscript: Over the centuries there have been a lot of different ideas about what an ideal human existence might be like. The Egyptians had their views. The Greeks had their views. So on and so forth. There is also a certain view of what our existence as human beings should be in our own time and place. An important component of our own views that we should mention right off the bat is that we don’t really care about those ancient views because we have advanced far beyond them. The ancient people were primitive and stupid. We are advanced and brilliant. So unless you want to be primitive and stupid, you had better think like all modern people think. We are essentially taught that there is only one right way to think about how we should exist as human beings. Let’s speak a little bit about the content of this modern view. Perhaps its most important idea is that we are masters of our own destinies. We are competent, and we have been empowered. We have invented marvelous machines, marvelous drugs, marvelous systems of government, marvelous financial tools, and so on. All of these marvelous things allow us to shoot for the stars—literally. One day we might discover some wormhole in space-time that will allow us to colonize other planets. We have the potential to dominate. The only thing that can stop us is if we quit trying. But all of this dominating doesn’t come without a cost. It’s not very popular to talk about these costs. It hurts the narrative. But you can judge for yourselves whether our belief in ourselves hasn’t come back to bite us. This miserable plague that has afflicted our planet for the last 18 months seems to have been cooked up in a virology lab in Wuhan. Scientists from around the world thought it would be a good idea to engage in some “gain of function” research. What “gain of function” means is that they take normal viruses that have appeared in nature and they see if they can somehow soup them up and make them more contagious and lethal. Why? Who knows? Another important example of the price we’ve had to pay is with more immediate ways of destroying ourselves. Surprisingly we have managed to refrain from baking whole cities at a time with our thermo-nuclear bombs. We’ve had the technology available for 76 years. We’ve had the bombs on hand, ready to go, ready to mutually annihilate one another, for about 60 years. I wonder if some day there might be someone who believes that he has the potential to dominate, and he will stop at nothing until he has brought it about. Perhaps it’s better to rule over a wasteland than be a small fry, lost in the shuffle of history. A few years ago a massive machine called the Large Hadron Collider was brought online in Switzerland. This machine smashes together atoms and parts of atoms at tremendous speeds, just to see what might happen. The theoreticians said that what might happen is that they’d create a black hole. The possibility was ever-so-remote, but just maybe. The problem with a black hole, though, is that they don’t get smaller. They suck into themselves whatever might be around them. They are very mysterious, unimaginably powerful things. A black hole in Switzerland would crush this planet in short order. As Christians who confess what the Bible teaches, we believe that this world is going to end. To be sure, it is God who is going to bring that about. It seems fitting to me, though, that the way that God might do that is by us destroying ourselves. In mankind’s relentless pursuit for the dominion and the power and the glory, perhaps one of these experiments is going to blow up in our own face. Perhaps they already are. So if this is the modern view of how we should exist as human beings, what is the Bible’s view? Our Old Testament lesson gives us some insight into that question. This reading is from Genesis chapter two. Here Moses is speaking about life in the Garden of Eden prior to the fall into sin. God created Adam. He made trees gr