I'm sitting beside the Sabbath Trail, which is this really cool trail,
that starts and ends at the Washington Seventh Day Adventist Church,
in Washington, New Hampshire.
Which is the first Seventh Day Adventist church,
the oldest Seventh Day Adventist church.
And this is a trail that winds through the woods
for about a mile, it's got twenty-two separate stops on it,
each of which has a part in tracing the Sabbath through the Bible, through the ages.
If you ever get a chance to visit, I highly recommend it.
For our purposes, this trail is an ideal spot to continue
our look at the selfishness paradigm.
We have to wait to see a pure expression of the loving-kindness paradigm, God's paradigm.
We won't see that until heaven.
But today, even though Satan has twisted things around severely,
God, as master designer of the earth, can still be seen.
The author Ellen White, in the book Desire of Ages,
talks about how there's both good and evil in the world,
and we can see God in nature still.
Where the only thing that is, or can completely be evil,
is the hearts of those humans who decide to be wholly evil.
And here is what she says on page twenty of her book.
She says, "Now sin has marred God's perfect work,
yet that handwriting remains.
Even now, all created things declare the glory of His excellence.
There is nothing, save the selfish heart of man, that lives unto itself.
No bird that cleaves the air, nor animal that moves upon the ground,
but ministers to some other life.
There is no leaf of the forest, or lowly blade of grass but has its ministry.
Every tree and shrub and leaf pours forth that element of life
without which neither man nor animal could live.
And man and animal, in turn, minister to the life of the tree and shrub and leaf.
The flowers breathe fragrance and unfold their beauty in blessing to the world,
the sun sheds its light to gladden a thousand worlds.
The ocean, itself the source of all of our springs and fountains,
receives the streams from every land, but takes to give.
The mists ascending from its bosom fall in showers to water the earth,
that it may bring forth and bud."
So, we can even still see God in His earth.
And we can see Him, even in the soil, if you'll remember video number one.
The soil is full of micro-organisms, there are probably literally billions of them
in a handful.
And while there is war going on in our soil,
and war going on at every level all around us,
so also is there a little cooperation, a little sharing, a little passing of blessings.
We see a little bit of that paradigm -- God's paradigm.
We can see bacteria capturing nitrogen from the air to make it available to plants,
who then provide the bacteria with nutrients, and fungus in the soil,
the filaments of fungus cycle nutrients and enhance plant life.
Plants provide food to the fungus; symbiotic relationships.
So even though the tapestry of creation is tattered and faded,
we can still catch a glimpse of God's paradigm in it.
And in catching this glimpse, we can better understand that he wants us to return
to a much, much better world than the one that we now live in.
But, for now we're here, in the midst of this war between Christ and Satan,
this pitched battle, which started in heaven and will soon end, praise the Lord,
here on Earth.
And this war has been raging without pause.
And we're going to look at a couple of the skirmishes
between these paradigms we've been talking about, as recorded in the Bible.
We'll start with the temptation of Adam and Eve, in the garden of Eden,
in Genesis 3:3 and 4.
Satan cleverly offered to Adam and Eve an alternate paradigm,
disguised though it was.
To this first couple, who had everything, he offered more.
He told them that God was a liar.
And he told them that by disobeying Him, they would receive the amazing thing
He was keeping from them, and that they would become like gods,
knowing good and evil.
Well, they fell for it. And they were ashamed, they were appalled,
and they were incredibly sorrowful as a result.
God then pronounced a broad ranging curse in Genesis 3:14 through 19.
But within that curse, is something very, very interesting.
He put enmity between us and Satan.
I read this to say in part, that God gave us the ability to resist Satan,
who had just conquered us.
Our friend in Maine, Arnet Mathers, who has studied this deeply,
and he concludes that Satan didn't see that coming.
That are ability to resist him after he conquered us, was a surprise to him.
That perspective gives us a sense of just how dynamic this war was,
and is.
Next, going to the book of Job, we see Satan claiming that Job serves God
only through selfishness, and asserting that Job follows God
only because God has blessed him, and protected him.
Note that Satan is accusing God of employing the selfishness paradigm to get followers.
Wow!
God responds by saying that He will remove His protection from Job.
And eventually, Satan takes everything from Job except his life.
But even though Job regrets his being born, he does not curse God.
Satan and his paradigm were defeated, soundly,
and God restored to Job what he had lost.
But the Bible's ultimate hand to hand combat between Christ and Satan,
the ultimate clash of paradigms?
That's what we're going to look at in the next and last video in this series.
It's fascinating.
Join me.