Better is a poor and a wise child than an old and foolish king, who will no more be admonished. (KJV)

Better a poor and wise youth Than an old and foolish king who will be admonished no more. (NKJV)

Perhaps the one thing that will be the root cause of more people spending eternity in the torment of Hell, and is inexcusable, is ignorance. A lack of knowledge of God's word! Try running through a red stop light some day and then try to tell the police officer that you did not know that it was wrong. You will not only get the ticket he intended to give you, he may even try to get your license suspended. Ignorance of the law is NO excuse.

Of all the people who profess to be Christians, how much time per week do you feel they average in study of the Bible or related information? 20 hours? 10? 4? Or perhaps just the 3-4 hours spent in church services. If faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God (Romans 10:17), it seems to me that we could not accumulate a lot of faith simply by listening to a couple of sermons and a couple of Bible lessons per week. And without faith it is impossible to please Him. (Hebrews 11: 6) And what possible excuse will we give when we stand before God? Not too many people realize just how many admonitions for us to study are in the Bible. When asked for an example of such, most people will quickly give you 2 Timothy 2:15. This may be one of the most straight forward commands, but the Bible is filled with other such admonitions and pleadings.

Read Deuteronomy 6: 6-9. Acts 17:30 tells us that God winked at ignorance in times past but now commandeth all men, everywhere to repent. Matthew 11: 29 says: "Take my yoke upon you, and LEARN of me:...". 2 Peter 1: 5 tells us to add to our faith (which already requires some knowledge) virtue, and to virtue, KNOWLEDGE. And of course that will add to our faith. Every thing we do must be done in faith and that requires knowledge of God's word.

And brethren, we, especially here in America, are without excuse. We have access to Bibles, and if you are reading this, you must have a computer. Did you realize for instance, that our church website has well over 3000 links to valuable biblical information, with links to many sermons, links to religious journals, articles, etc. And there are many more sites with almost unlimited information concerning God's word. I don't know where I first heard it, but my favorite saying is "You cannot obey God, if you don't know what He says!" Let us all work diligently while it is still day, for the night cometh when no man shall work.

Another excuse seems to be, "I just can't find time to read the Bible enough." Somehow, I just can't believe that such an excuse will cut it when we stand before God. Our priorities are just in the wrong place. How much time do we spend hunting, fishing, watching television, reading the newspaper, napping, plus perhaps a thousand other such items. Are all of those more important than studying God's word? The only way to assure oneself of adhering to a routine is to make one. Set aside an allotted time each day for study and for prayer. Then do it. If you are like me, I prefer to rise in the mornings to spend time in prayer and study before other activity sets in which can distract.

The debate continues. Extremes are evident. Politics divide. The panic button is being pushed. Who shall we believe? Is there not a middle ground somewhere? Books have been written on the pollution of our planet and our atmosphere. A movie has been made to warn people of the impending danger of such pollutions. A former vice-president of our nation has been awarded the Nobel Prize for his efforts to warn us of global warning if we continue to destroy the purity of the very air that we breathe. Yet, there are reputable scientists and meteorologists who strongly disagree with several of his arguments and conclusions. They explain that we are in a cycle of weather changes that has been going on for centuries. And here I sit as a novice and endeavoring to understand matters that are often too great for my finite mind. I live in the area of our nation where the drought is the most severe. Our water supply is diminishing rapidly. I have witnessed the failure of so many of the crops planted by our farmers. The cattlemen are having great difficulty in finding food for their stock because the pastures have burned up due to the lack of moisture. I watched on the television the powerful fires that scorched the land and burned the houses in California. Tragedies caused by natural occurrences and man made. Could we not understand that such might be possible as we consider the reasons for changes in our weather? I know that as humans we do pollute our environment. We all have witnessed this fact. It is good that we are becoming more aware of this problem.

While not trying to diminish the need to clean up our polluted land, water and air, I want to mention another ‘global warming’ that the world in general has no interest in whatsoever. We go about our everyday activities without considering the fact that there is coming a time when this life will come to end. We buy and sell and get gain without fully realizing that life is like a vapor that last only for a short time (See James 4:13-17). Many are the persons, who like the scoffers mentioned by Peter, reason that since there was a yesterday there will also be a tomorrow and things will continue as they have since the beginning of time. But read very carefully the words of the apostle Peter in 2 Peter 3:5-7:“For this they willfully forget: that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of water and in the water, by which the world that then existed perished, being flooded with water. But the heavens and the earth which are now preserved for fire until the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men. And then Peter continues, “But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night, in which the heavens will pass away with a great noise, and the elements will melt with fervent heat; both the earth and the works that are in it will be burned up. Therefore, since all these things will be dissolved, what manner of persons ought you to be in holy conduct and godliness, looking for and hasting the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be dissolved, being on fire, and the elements will melt with fervent heat?” (Vs 10-12).

Sin is the pollution of the soul. And unless a person has this stain removed from his/her soul by the cleansing blood of the Lamb and our Savior Jesus Christ (Revelation 1:5), he/she will suffer the inevitable consequence of such terrible fate. Now this is the ‘global warming’ that we should be prepared for by “denying ungodliness and worldly lusts” and living “soberly, righteously, and godly in the present age, looking for the blessed hope and glorious appearing of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ” (Titus 2:12, 13)

"The entire hominid collection known today would barely cover a billiard table, ... the collection is so tantalizingly incomplete, and the specimens themselves often so fragmented and inconclusive, that more can be said about what is missing than about what is present. ...but ever since Darwin's work inspired the notion that fossils linking modern man and extinct ancestor would provide the most convincing proof of human evolution, preconceptions have led evidence by the nose in the study of fossil man." (John Reader (photo-journalist and author of "Missing Links"), "Whatever happened to Zinjanthropus?" New Scientist, 26 March 1981, p. 802)

Since I retired in 1997, I have spent more time reading the Holy Bible and related works I suspect than I probably did all my life previously. That is not said to be boastful, but rather, I hang my head in shame that I did not study with such gusto at least 50 years before that. But for the last two or three years I have put an enormous amount of time into the study of evolution and also of Islam. I don't profess to be an authority on either but I'm glad that I have studied the subjects. It has reinforced my faith in the Holy Bible strongly. I have recently read a good deal of early church writings and I want to share a few quotes from Augustine (354-430AD) It shows that we had some deep thinking men who fought false teachings then.

"They are deceived, too, by those highly mendacious documents which profess to give the history of many thousand years, though, reckoning by the sacred writings, we find that not 6000 years have yet passed."

"And therefore God created only one single man, not, certainly, that he might to be a solitary, bereft of all society , but that by this means the unity of society and the bond of concord might be more effectually commended to him, men being bound together not only by similarity of nature, but by family affection. And indeed He did not even create woman that was to be given him as his wife as he created the man, but created her out of the man, that the whole human race might derive from one man."

"For though God formed man of the dust of the earth, yet the earth itself, and every earthly material, is absolutely created out of nothing: and man’s soul, too, God created out of nothing, and joined to the body, when He made man."

"A five million-year-old piece of bone that was thought to be a collarbone of a humanlike creature is actually part of a dolphin rib, ...He [Dr. T. White] puts the incident on par with two other embarrassing [sic] faux pas by fossil hunters: Hesperopithecus, the fossil pig's tooth that was cited as evidence of very early man in North America, and Eoanthropus or 'Piltdown Man,' the jaw of an orangutan and the skull of a modern human that were claimed to be the 'earliest Englishman'.

"The problem with a lot of anthropologists is that they want so much to find a hominid that any scrap of bone becomes a hominid bone."

Dr. Tim White (anthropologist, University of California, Berkeley). As quoted by Ian Anderson "Hominoid collarbone exposed as dolphin's rib", in New Scientist, 28 April 1983, p. 199