Mistakes God Did Not Make: Part 3

A single sentence like “make health catching” sounds compassionate until you follow it to its logical end. Brother James takes that feel-good claim and detonates it with a Methuselah thought experiment, using simple exponential math to show how a deathless world with ongoing birth would become a population catastrophe. From there, the conversation lands on a sharper theological point: if sin is real, limits like mortality can function as restraint and mercy, not divine incompetence, and the biblical creation story presents a God who does not blunder. 

We also tackle Bible reliability head-on, especially the common accusation that Scripture is packed with superstition. Numbers 5 becomes a test case: does it belong to a unique wilderness context tied to the Exodus miracles, or should it be yanked out and mocked as primitive magic? Brother James argues that consistency matters. If you dismiss one miracle-shaped passage, you’re on track to dismiss the entire historical chain that explains how Israel went from slavery in Egypt to life in the Promised Land. 

Finally, we dig into language disputes that show up in modern Bible criticism, like the word “reins” and the claim that the Bible puts intelligence in the kidneys. By comparing Hebrew figures of speech to everyday phrases like heart, backbone, and guts, we argue that critics often demand a wooden literalism they never apply to normal English. If you care about creation versus evolution, Christian apologetics, and how faith and reason can actually share the same room, press play, then subscribe, share the episode, and leave a review with your biggest unanswered question.

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Transcript

Welcome And Series Framing

SPEAKER_00 0:00

And good day to each and every one of you. I'm Brother James, and I greet you in the name of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world. Welcome once again to the Preaching of the Cross Radio Broadcast. We are considering on today's program, as we have on the last two programs, creation versus evolution, but in a little different format or with a little different approach than perhaps you are used to. I found in my library, and I know that that may sound as though the library is a great big mess, and it's not. It's a very neat and orderly library. But uh there are about six thousand volumes in there now. And quite honestly, I pick up books over the years and bring them home and place them on the shelf in their proper place, and then uh move on with all the business at hand, and uh it may be many, many years before I get back to actually looking at those books and have an opportunity to read them. And this little booklet, I don't know where I got it, I don't know how old it is, but it's called Mistakes God Did Not Make. And when I read it, I enjoyed it so very, very much that I just uh wanted for all of you to be able to enjoy it also. And so we began, as I said, two programs ago, this will be the third program, considering the tremendous uh material that is found in this little booklet, What are mistakes God did not make?

Social Gospel And Symptom Fixes

SPEAKER_00 1:35

Briefly stated, the aims of many devout and devoted people are to abolish war, pestilence, famine, poverty, domestic disruption, and health destroying habits. Every informed Christian shares with God the desire to banish these evils, but we desire to banish these evils by stopping the cause. Any so called gospel that puts a poultice on the symptoms, but leaves the heart unregenerate defeats itself. One of the high priests of this creed of the social gospel was none other than the famous agnostic who was popular in America in the eighteen hundreds.

Health Catching And Methuselah Thought Experiment

SPEAKER_00 2:28

He reached the high watermark of social gospel and mathematical folly when he said, If I had been God, I would have made health catching instead of sickness. Now suppose that during the lifetime of Methuselah, these utopian conditions had prevailed. What sort of a funeral can you visualize for a man dying when he was nine hundred and sixty nine years old? Let's assume that he married when he was twenty one. How many descendants would there be to mourn his passing? A family of such hardy stock, if free from all the ills that social gospelers would abolish, would double oftener than every twenty years. Many records of early pioneers prove that this is a modest estimate. Why not pause long enough to register your guess as to how many descendants there would be? How many do you think? Methuselah married at twenty one, his children, then their children, then their children, then their children, and so forth. Let's suppose they married every twenty years, or at twenty, for the nine hundred and forty-nine years remaining in his life. Your guess, your guess will be wrong. To expediate the leave taking, let us in our imagination march the mourners past the coffin in ranks of one thousand. Let's say five thousand or five hundred on each side. Let them pass at the rate of two thousand ranks per hour, and keep it up for ten hours every day except Sunday. That's the day people lay aside all other activities and go to church. Some may be too old, some too young, or expecting company, let's excuse one fifth of the clan from the funeral. How long do you think it would take the four fifths to pass at one thousand to a rank, two thousand ranks per hour for six days a week? How long would it take? Well,

Exponential Descendants And Utopian Collapse

SPEAKER_00 4:35

if the family doubled every twenty years, there would be time for forty-seven doubles with eight years to spare. Start with two, Mr. and Mrs. Methuselah, double the number forty-seven point four times, and you get in round numbers, three hundred and ninety-three zillion descendants, not million, not billion, three hundred and ninety-three zillion descendants from one man and his wife. Now today, today, after four thousand five hundred years, give or take a century or two, all would not yet have passed the coffin. There would be forty-six thousand years left to go before Methuselah's descendants could walk by and pay their last respects. That is that is, if twice the present population of the world passed by every year, it would take forty-six thousand years for his family to give him a look. There would be enough descendants of Methuselah to fill one hundred and ninety thousand one hundred and ninety-one thousand worlds as the earth is filled. Now, if Methuselah had more than one wife, if twins were born to any of the families, if the children and grandchildren married outside the family, these figures would be too small, but there's no point in going on. If you can't see the hopelessness of any so-called gospel that promises a birth rate greater than a death rate, then you need to quit playing around with mathematics because you obviously don't know enough about it to venture out into uh intelligent conversation. If the agnostic had said he would make folly more contagious than common sense, it would have been true. But to say that he wanted to make health as easy to catch as sickness, uh he just revealed the fact that he he hadn't thought about what he was saying, and neither had his hearers. Now

Mortality As Mercy After Sin

SPEAKER_00 6:54

God didn't make any mistake. With exceedingly few exceptions, man is the least prolific of any creature. What a world of horrors it would have been if most human babies were twins. How would a God who makes no mistakes have taken care of the multiplying population if man had not sinned? Well, the prophetic scriptures tell us of the heavens made to be inhabited. Lord could have taken care of all this. Same way he took care of Methuselah's father if he wanted to. He could have translated them from earth to heaven. Many people believe that God put man on earth to prepare him for heaven, if that's true, God could have discontinued earth probation and soon as heaven was full. Or he could have discontinued the marriage relation. Certainly has a future for his saints where they neither marry nor are given in marriage, and these were the words spoken to the Sadducees who sought to trap the Lord Jesus into inconsistency. On that occasion he located the cause of most doctrinal errors when he said, Ye do err, not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God. Read the third chapter of Genesis, and you'll note that after man sinned, he was taken out of the garden, the Bible says, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat and live forever. If you want a mathematical nightmare, try to imagine a deathless world filled with multiplying sinners. God made no mistake. It is better for man to be mortal, seeking to escape sin and death than to be immortal and bored with God. Young people, hoping to carve out for themselves a career and be self made men and women, will do well to reflect that not one in a thousand achieves human greatness, and for those who do, the dust heaps of buried nations are the boundaries of human ambitions. Why not team up with God, the God who makes no mistakes? Those who are his workmanship outlast the stars? Why do frost crystals in a snowflake or on a window pane arrange themselves in such varied and beautiful designs? What good can such mysterious force accomplish? If God works such wonders with ice that seems so needless, how much more shall he beautify the lives of his obedient children? Mistakes that God did not make. One

Numbers Five And The Superstition Charge

SPEAKER_00 9:50

man said that I wonder I wonder if it is not wrong to imply that the Bible contains no mistaken superstitious notions. When I read the passage in Numbers five, verses eleven to thirty one, in which God is quoted as giving to Moses a method of determining the guilt or innocence of a woman accused of adultery. The man said a reading of this section will reveal to one acquainted with the techniques of the primitive medicine man and worker of magic elements of gross superstition. By no means would any modern Christian doctor or judge subject a woman to such an ordeal, or would he place any moral significance in the results of such a test? Moreover, what attitude can one take to the frequent statements in the Bible that the rains are the seat of intelligence? Psalm 79, 167, 262, Jeremiah 12 2, and etc. Modern science now knows that the seat of intelligence is the brain, and that the sole function of the kidneys, which uh set for, is to separate and drain off from the body certain waste fluids. Well, let's see if we can respond. First

Wilderness Miracles Must Stay In Context

SPEAKER_00 11:04

of all, the use of bitter water to determine the guilt or innocence of a woman suspected of marital infidelity in Numbers chapter five. I'm familiar with this portion of scripture, and I know that it is cited by agnostics to discredit all the Bible. But maybe you'll see it in a different light if you reflect that it was one of several provisions in the nature of marital law, to meet the needs of a nation when it was herded together in tents in the desert, and that it belongs in the forty year chain of miracles that made possible the moving of the Israelites from Egypt to Palestine. To wrest it from its setting is to invite misunderstanding. Never again did God open the earth and swallow men alive. Never again did a look to a serpent on a brazen pole spare one's life. Never again did manna fall from heaven. Never again did water issue forth from rocks. That was a strange and peculiar time period as matching the early days of the church age and as recorded in the book of Acts. And we must leave those incidents in their context. You remember that to prepare Moses for his great commission, God commanded him to cast a stick on the ground and it became a serpent. Shall we discredit the record because educated folk deny that dropping sticks begets serpents? Later Moses cast ashes into the air, and boils afflicted the Egyptians. You could hardly classify this with a superstition current at the turn of the nineteen hundreds, that a woman who accidentally dropped her dishcloth would have guests not otherwise expected. Blood sprinkled on door frames saved the firstborn in that night when all the firstborn of Egypt were slain. Is this comparable with a superstition that makes a fetish of the left hind foot of a rabbit, killed at midnight in a graveyard when the moon is full? I think not. In the wilderness of Shur the migrating nation found only bitter water, and at God's command Moses cast into the water a certain tree, and the water was made wholesome. If Moses so hypnotized the people that they imagined all this, as some infidels have written in their books, the spell must have fooled the cattle also, because they drank of that water without any hurt. When the people were bitten by serpents, they were healed by looking on a brazen serpent, as I mentioned. Is this to be rejected as falsehood because no physician now would prescribe brass for snake bite? So we might consider all the plagues crossing the Red Sea, quails, manna, durability of clothing, and other miracles. Logically, we accept these miracles, all of them, or reject all of them as inexcusable falsehoods. I know of no series of miracles so difficult for a sincere thinker to toss aside as those occurring in the last forty years of the life of Moses. The Israelites were in Egypt, later they were in Palestine. How did they get there? To assume that a dejected nation of slaves without arms or military training, opposed by the armed forces of a mighty nation, escaped across a sea into a well nigh waterless, foodless waste of burning sand, where left to their own devices ninety nine percent of them would have died in thirty days. And then after nearly forty years of wandering, possessing a land of walled cities defended by fierce foes, and all this without a miracle. Quite honestly, it's easier for me to believe in miracles than to believe that all that was accomplished without them. Now let's go back to the case at hand in Numbers chapter five. Even if it is taken out of its setting, and if we forget that it is recorded in the sacred book of the only God who has ever made good in human history, yet the story of God's plan to preserve decency in the camps of his chosen people in no way resembles such nonsense as the superstition that induced a baseball club to take with them a black boy to spit on the bats to ensure many hits. A strange thing indeed. On the contrary, it preserved the sanctity of the marriage relation better than the legalized wife swapping in nudist camps tolerated in this so called cultured age. Most superstitions are reckoned to work just the same with the bad people as with the good people. This chastity worked a curse for the guilty and a blessing for the innocent. Since the Bible records no case that was settled by this test, it may have worked its greatest good in preventing the misdeed. Again it was a double blessing in vindicating the innocent and assuring her motherhood. If it was a severe punishment for the guilty, it was nevertheless kindness to the nation as a whole. If you study the baffling mysteries wrapped up in plant and animal life, you may take things for granted, or if you reflect, you may find yourself forced to believe the impossible, that is impossible without a miracle working God. In the demands it makes on our faith, this story is not strikingly unlike the stories of the boils, the blood sprinkled door frames, the waters of Mera, the brazen serpent, or the leprosy of Miriam. If any one of these is superstition, then all are. It is not logical to make Moses a witch doctor one day and a great man of God another day. He could not sponsor lying records and later appear on the Mount of Transfiguration with Jesus. I believe the Bible. I leave each matter in its context, and when you think it through intelligently as these agnostics claim to be intelligent, when you think it through rationally as these atheists claim to be rational, the Bible always stands the test of honest thought.

Reins And Kidneys As Figurative Speech

SPEAKER_00 17:39

Now in discussing the biblical use of the word reigns, which some want to make kidneys, let me remind you let me remind you have you overlooked the thousands of places in the Bible where the word heart is used for the seat of the affections? Or the score of places where the neck is used as though it were the seat of stubborn disloyalty? There are many words, bowels of mercy. Why heart in the dictionary is defined as the seat of the affections. Stiff necked is defined in the dictionary as stubborn. So far as I have observed, all authorities accept these words as legitimate and accurate figures of speech. Why do you not take exception with them? Why must you attack the use of the word reigns and that word only? In the Bible, which uses hundreds of words figuratively, why not make an exception of the word reigns and decide that David believed he did his thinking with his kidneys? So far as I've examined, every authority that has studied the Hebrew language says that reigns is a legitimate figure of speech and proper in the passage. However, the kidneys are most fitting symbols of the department of discrimination in the human mind. Now, before you criticize the Bible for using the word, wouldn't it be well to learn something about the word or the organ to which the word refers? I know of no organs in the human body so wholly given over to the task of determining what stays in the blood as building material and equipment, and what is rejected. In fact, if they, if the kidneys fail in this function, illness or death will follow. Continuing the figure of speech, the nominal church today is sick with uremic poisoning. There's been too much indifference in selecting the building materials of Christian character. If you'll observe the literary garbage that some professing Christians read, and the unbelievably filthy shows they watch, and the trash they pay to see in the movie house, some of which shock the heathen mind. You may agree with me that the spiritual department of discrimination is not working. You know, of course, that cultured Americans speak of a man having or lacking a backbone. We say that man has no backbone. That fellow's really got a backbone. No kid, I want to meet the man who doesn't have a backbone. Isn't it amazing? People will use and accept language from their friends and in their day-to-day speech, and then condemn the Word of God for using such language, and then in the next breath they'll say, Well, the Bible's too hard to understand. It doesn't speak in the language of the people. Such people are just Bible rejecting truth hating hypocrites. That's as plain as I know how to say it.

Modern Idioms And Selective Bible Criticism

SPEAKER_00 21:05

Now of late there's a word that has come into the English language. It's a four-letter word. And and the word is guts. That word used to mean intestines, but it soon became, or over time it became, a word for courage. We say that man really has guts. Well most men do. In fact, you couldn't live long without guts. And yet here is a fellow who says, you know, it really takes guts to criticize the Bible like you did with that reins and kidneys thing. Isn't that sad? Isn't it sad that people who think they're so intelligent are just so stupid? Would it not be more or less rash for some man three thousand years from now to decide that we were so ignorant? That we believe our courage depended on the volume of our entrails or the prominence of our vertebrae. That'd be a sad thing, wouldn't it? A man three thousand years picks up a book written in nineteen ninety-one and says, Look at here, they thought this man was courageous because he had guts. Weren't they stupid? It's the same business. I assume that you're seeking truth.

Faith With Reasons And Closing Affirmation

SPEAKER_00 22:32

I want truth. I don't want to blindly follow the Bible if it's not true. I don't want to foolishly put my trust in a book that's full of falsehood. But I'm telling you, I I've been I've spent more of my life now as a born-again Christian than I spent as a lost man. And throughout those decades of living the Christian life, I have not only listened to the objections of Bible critics, I've read their books, I've read their materials, I have examined their arguments against the Bible, and quite honestly, you can say I'm prejudiced, but I don't believe I am. You can say that I'm not willing to consider difference of opinion, but I believe that I am. I just haven't met any objection to the Word of God that has been able to stand the test of honest consideration and rational thought. Sure, faith factors in, but not blind faith. Not faith in nothing, faith in something substantial, the living words of the living God that abide forever. My friend, God doesn't make any mistakes. He didn't make any when he created the heavens and the earth, and he didn't make any when he gave us the Bible.