<TITLE>07. Par 28-32</TITLE>L-28 Now, he's tried many achievements. He's tried to achieve this through science, and every time that he moves through science he only destroys himself. Every time that science makes something, he destroys himself: gunpowder, and atomic energy, and--and nuclear weapons, and automobiles, and all these things. Yet temporarily it helps him. But in the long run it destroys himself, because he--it's something that he has achieved while he's in God's workshop trying to make something, pervert what God has made, and put it into his own ideas, and make it up.

L-29 Now, as I said about this city, as this great beautiful city here... If this city was just... It would be prettier than it was at the first place, if up and down the streets went the people of God with their hands in the air praising God for their home and everything. Wouldn't Phoenix be a garden spot of the earth? But instead of that, like all other cities, it's lying, stealing, cheating, gambling, smoking, drinking, carousing, adultery. And it's become a stink before God. See?
So you see, what a man tries to achieve, he just makes a mess out of it. He cannot save himself. And he tries by education. He's took that route to see if he couldn't educate people into a saving knowledge of Christ, or saving knowledge for himself, or to do something through his education.

L-30 I was reading the other day in--in "Life" magazine where they had... I believe many of you read the article where they'd done everything now towards putting different elements together, or accumulations, until they can almost make life. And they said they would make it. They can't do that. Life is creation. So only one is a Creator, and that is God. See? They'll never be able to make life, but he's trying to do that. Wonder what kind of a species it would be if he could make it, if it'd be after the intelligence of a man. So you see, he--he can't do that. It's just not for him to do it. He's failed with education; he's failed with science. He knows that he come from somewhere, but he wants to find his way back.

L-31 Adam really expressed that, the first man on earth. After finding that he had fallen from grace, he tried to take his own intelligence and make a way back to God without an atonement. He tried to go back to God without making an atonement, something to pay for his sins. After the penalty of God was death, he tried to go back without a death atonement.
And men are still trying to do that, trying to make a religion without an atonement in it. Adam made himself a covering out of fig leaves with no blood shed for this covering, and God refused it. And He has refused it then, and He always will refuse it, because without the shedding of blood there's no remission of sins. He just can't get back because the penalty is death, and something has to die to pay that penalty. So it can only be substitutionary, or we're all in death if there wasn't a substitute for us to hold on to. And man, in doing this, realized that--that he needs something to hold on to, something that he can put his hands on, something he can say, "This is it. I've got it. I know it's it."

L-32 So Adam, to hold on to something made a fig leaf to cover his and his wife's nakedness. But he found out that that what he had in his hand did not work. On down through the ages we could count man if we only had time. Let's take two or three of them anyhow.
Let's take Nimrod. Nimrod thought the same thing. After the flood he was conscious that there was a God Who would judge the wicked, for they had just come out of that flood. And he knew that it was sin that caused God to destroy the world. Therefore, knowing that sin again would make God do the same thing, he tried to achieve something to make a tower, that men could run up in heaven if it got bad here on earth, and live in heaven; and then come back down on earth, and sin, and go back up into heaven again.


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