Amazing! - Cadet Sunday 2023
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1 Early in the morning Joshua and all the Israelites set out from Shittim and went to the Jordan, where they camped before crossing over. 2 After three days the officers went throughout the camp, 3 giving orders to the people: “When you see the ark of the covenant of the Lord your God, and the Levitical priests carrying it, you are to move out from your positions and follow it. 4 Then you will know which way to go, since you have never been this way before. But keep a distance of about two thousand cubits between you and the ark; do not go near it.” 5 Joshua told the people, “Consecrate yourselves, for tomorrow the Lord will do amazing things among you.” 6 Joshua said to the priests, “Take up the ark of the covenant and pass on ahead of the people.” So they took it up and went ahead of them. 7 And the Lord said to Joshua, “Today I will begin to exalt you in the eyes of all Israel, so they may know that I am with you as I was with Moses. 8 Tell the priests who carry the ark of the covenant: ‘When you reach the edge of the Jordan’s waters, go and stand in the river.’ ”
14 So when the people broke camp to cross the Jordan, the priests carrying the ark of the covenant went ahead of them. 15 Now the Jordan is at flood stage all during harvest. Yet as soon as the priests who carried the ark reached the Jordan and their feet touched the water’s edge, 16 the water from upstream stopped flowing. It piled up in a heap a great distance away, at a town called Adam in the vicinity of Zarethan, while the water flowing down to the Sea of the Arabah (that is, the Dead Sea) was completely cut off. So the people crossed over opposite Jericho. 17 The priests who carried the ark of the covenant of the Lord stopped in the middle of the Jordan and stood on dry ground, while all Israel passed by until the whole nation had completed the crossing on dry ground.
5 Joshua told the people, “Consecrate yourselves, for tomorrow the Lord will do amazing things among you.”
I want you to know that I am going to say something important about this verse but it’s going to take me a little while to get there....
I want to begin this morning with this word AMAZING!
I would love to hear from all of us this morning the kinds of things that you would describe as AMAZING. Amazing....the dictionary defines that word this way:
“causing great surprise or wonder. astonishing”
We’d be here a long time if I asked everyone to share something that they though was amazing…so let me share some things that I find amazing....
[before I became a pastor I was an engineer....I like making things and I like figuring out how things work..... So for about 5 years I worked for the car company called Ford and built electronic parts for Ford cars and trucks. RAP MODULE..... RAP Module circuit board Use LEGO illustration to show how amazing it is that a car actually gets built .....
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the average car has 30,000 parts.... now, how many parts do you think are in a real place....say a Boeing 747 jumbo jet.....????? 6,000,000!! .... every one of them were made somewhere, in some building, many of them required all kinds of raw materials in order to make them....and all of this began with an idea is someone’s head!]
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[another thing that I find absolutely amazing is seeing a baby being born into the world… I mean it is pretty amzing to see an actual baby being born, I saw all three of my children being born! and its amazing....but it’s also a little bit gross..... all of a sudden there’s a whole new person in the world.... now let me tell you something crazy amazing..... our bodies are made up of lots of different parts too....a heart, lungs, fingers, legs, bones, tissues....but all those parts of made up of even smaller parts, parts called cells....and these tiny, tiny parts fit together and work together to form these bigger parts..... do you know how many cells are in the human body? 100 trillion!!!
That’s all the parts in a jumbo jet times 17 billion!
And these cells themselves are also amazing [CELL picture]. They are like very sophisticated machines....filled with moving parts. Each cell has its own communication system, and its own transportation network. Cells need to take in nutrients, they need to stay healthy, they need to reproduce, they need to resist infections.....
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100 trillion of these little machines in your body and mine....actively working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year so that you can think, breath, eat, run, talk, sing, draw.....
And you know what??? Just like this airplane didn’t exist two days ago.... in fact, before it existed it was just an idea in Tiger’s head....
Well the Bible teaches us that before human being’s ever existed they were just an idea in the mind of God!
Two big burst of innovation in history of humankind..... the birth of humankind..... homoerectus 2M years ago..... but in last 40,000 years the first big bang of cultural revolution, higher cognative capability, agriculture, cities, language, art.....just appeared in the historical record....no way to explain language that
DNA
So, when we hear all of those amazing things about God and about creation, no wonder we find amazing verses in the Bible that tell us why we should worship the Lord!
1 Shout for joy to the Lord, all the earth. 2 Worship the Lord with gladness; come before him with joyful songs. 3 Know that the Lord is God. It is he who made us, and we are his; we are his people, the sheep of his pasture.
[Have Matthew Herfst read his “Bible braggin”]
26 Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”
[Have Isaiah read his “bible braggin’”]
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Another thing that I find amazing..... Darwin’s theory of evolution....
Modern science is telling us so much of what many people believe about evolution is simply not true
Joshua story -
Jordan river today
Jordan river - flood season (100yrs ago)
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The New Bible Commentary 3:1–4:24 Crossing the Jordan
At this critical moment God rewarded Joshua’s faith, promising that when the priests stood in the Jordan he would mark out Joshua as he had Moses. Joshua prefigures Christ who leads his church out of the wilderness of this world to cross the river of death in their pilgrimage to the heavenly city.
The New Bible Commentary 3:1–4:24 Crossing the Jordan
The narrative now focuses both on the perfect obedience of the people—everything proceeded exactly according to the earlier instructions—and on the astonishing character of the event. The text goes out of its way to stress that the crossing occurred in April at first harvest (see 5:10–11), when the river was overflowing. In line with other intended parallels between Moses and Joshua, the crossing occurred at the same season of the year as Israel crossed the Red Sea.
25 Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; 26 and whoever lives by believing in me will never die. Do you believe this?”
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