Episode Transcript
Hello and welcome to Genesis to Jesus lesson 1.
Genesis to Jesus lesson 1.
You may have some people tuning in here, and if you're tuning in for the first time, you're wondering what's going on.
Perhaps you were here last week and you're thinking, we already had lesson 1.
one. Well we had some technical difficulties last week so I'm retaping
lesson one so we won't have that time constraint. Then that way we'll be back
into lesson two this coming Sunday. Genesis to Jesus. I'm glad that you have
begun this class. If you're taking this lesson for the first time, I want to
encourage you to pay very close attention to what I have to say and try to learn all
that you can. We're going to be learning about the Bible, God's Word. And I want to give
you a little bit of my personal testimony before we get into why I'm teaching this Genesis
to Jesus today. When I was a young man, I was a Texas highway patrolman and I was really
And I was really wondering, you know, in life, I mean, I got to an age to where I began questioning what the truth was.
I don't know about you, but a lot of us here in the United States were raised in church.
Some aren't being raised in church today like they used to be, but I was raised in church.
Most people around here have had at least some exposure to going to church or hearing some
sermons on television or something at the very least.
And I was raised to be a Baptist.
I was raised to be in church every time the doors were opened.
And I began to think as I got older, now wait a minute, we have people down in Mexico, they
were raised to be Catholics.
We have people in the Middle East.
were raised to be Muslims. We have people in China that were raised to be Buddhists
and India that were raised to be Hindus. What makes my religion right and there's wrong?
What is the truth? How do I know that my religion is true? How do I know? And if I'm wrong, that
And I knew eternity was a long time to be wrong, you know?
I mean, eternity is a long time to be wrong.
And so I remember telling God one night, I said, "God, I know that you're real."
I mean, I knew there was a God.
I didn't have to really wonder about that.
And if you're honest with yourself, you know there's a God too.
I'd seen creation.
As a trooper, I worked accidents.
I mean, I investigated motor vehicle accidents.
I saw a lot of them.
And one thing I knew about accidents,
accidents always create destruction, damage, and death.
That's all they create.
Destruction, damage, and death.
Disorder, never order.
They always cause disorder, you know?
And only an intentional act can create order,
construction, and life.
Never once did I see somebody involved
in a motor vehicle accident crash their car into somebody
and the car turns over and everything
and the airbags go off and the person get out of the car
go, Oh, yeah, I feel much better now. Never happened. Not one
time. You always called the ambulance. You always called the
fire department. You always called the funeral home. When
there was an accident involved, you always called a tow truck.
When there was an accident involved, they caused disorder.
They caused destruction.
They caused damage and death.
And I knew that this world and this man did not get here by accident.
My life did not come about by accident.
The stars in the heaven, the sun, the moon, did not get here by accident.
And since I knew there was a God, that I knew He would have to reveal Himself to mankind,
I mean, why would a God create us and then abandon us and never tell us anything?
Why would He say, "Well, I'm going to create this world, this incredible universe, this
beautiful earth in these people, and I'm just going to go hide myself and not say anything
to them and not let them know why they're here, what they're supposed to be doing, where
they're going, why they have to die, what happens after death. I'm not going to
tell them anything. I knew if there was a God and I knew there was a God, but
since there was a God, I knew that God would naturally have to reveal himself
to man and answer those most important questions that I had as a young man. And
so how does God reveal himself to us? I knew there had to be some type of
authority. Some type of something that I could put my finger on and go to and
say, "Okay, here's the truth." And that brought me ultimately to the Bible, God's
Word. Yes, there are other books that religions have that claim to be holy
books, but only the Bible claims to have God as its author. Only the Bible. But I
set out to be fair, I set out to study every religion I could get my hands on.
I told God that night, I don't care what the truth is. I don't care if it's Mormon.
I don't care if it's Jehovah's Witness. I don't care if it's Muslim. I don't care
if it's Catholic. I don't care if it's Buddhism. I don't care what it is. I just
want to know the truth and then I will commit myself to that truth. I just want
to do what's right and know that when I die I'm not going to be condemned to
hell. I'm not going to perish. There's gonna be some hope for me, some reason
for living. And so I set out to study the religions that were out there. Hinduism,
you know, they claim to have some scriptures that were inspired by some
sage with magical powers, some wise man with magical powers. But Hinduism, it teaches that
people can worship a god in the way they want to worship him or her or it, and they can
worship whatever they imagine their God to be.
So in the end, you can make God into anything you want him or her or again it to be, and
you can worship it or her however you choose.
You know what that is?
That's idolatry.
It's no different than just making a little figurine and taking a piece of wood and taking
you a knife and whittling it and carving it into a certain shape and saying, "Ah, that
looks like a nice God to me.
I'll worship it and I'll say that this God has this kind of powers and I'll begin to
worship this piece of wood."
All it is, is a person worshipping what they carved out of their own imagination.
I personally would rather have a piece of wood or stone, at least it's tangible.
least you can see it. But that's all it is, is man making a God in his image, and
however he chooses that God to be. Whether or not how they imagine God is
real, is true. And so I knew that could not be the truth, like Buddhism and many
the other religions, Hinduism. A lot of these religions, they believe in karma.
Almost all of the Eastern religions believe in karma, meaning that you're
going to enjoy some type of heavenly pleasure or suffer some type of
terrible consequence as the result of your good deeds or your misdeeds here on
earth. And in both cases, whether you suffer or you get rewarded
after your life is over, then you learn from the lessons of your previous life,
and then you start a new cycle of life all over again until you continue to learn all
the lessons you're supposed to learn. You finally become at one with whatever God is,
and you have all the errors removed from your life, and you completely conquer all of your
temptations, your lusts, your sins, or your whatever you want to call your misdeeds.
And I knew that couldn't be right.
I mean the world has been going on for thousands of years.
Of course the evolutionists would say millions and billions of years.
But even if you're conservative, you would say thousands of years.
And look at us.
We're not getting any better.
The world's getting worse.
People aren't learning their lessons and coming back reincarnated as better and better and
better people or species.
You know, in this reincarnation, this karma, do you know how they believe that works?
They believe that there's a soul in every one of us.
And when we die, that soul goes up, it goes somewhere, wherever it goes.
And then when it gets reintroduced back into the life cycle, the soul comes down and the
rain drops.
Enters into the ground, gets sucked up through the water because the souls are in the raindrops
and the little grass roots, for example, will suck the soul into its roots, become part
the blade of grass and then a goat will come along, a sheep, a cow, a bug, whatever, and
then eat that blade of grass.
And then when they eat the blade of grass, then that little soul that's in the water
that become part of the blade of grass then goes into the bug or the goat or the cow or
the sheep's stomach.
In this case, let's just say a cow.
If it's a bull, a male cow, then if that little soul
happens to get into the cow's semen,
then the cow has intercourse with a female cow.
Then that soul can be reborn as a calf, or as a goat,
or as a bug, or a rat, or whatever
is that happens to be eaten. So the lives get born as a cow or a bug or something all
depending on how good their previous life was and they learn their lessons and they
go back, they come back down in raindrops again, become part of the vegetation, get
eaten again and then over and over and over and that's absolutely ridiculous. I couldn't
believe anything so foolish is that but that's what they believe. You got to get
back into life somehow, right? And so I knew I couldn't believe that. I knew I
had to have something that didn't come as a result of my imagination. I didn't
want a God that I imagined that I made up. I didn't want to tell God how I
believed he's supposed to be and how I should worship him. I wanted the Creator
to tell me how he really was and how he wanted me to worship him and what there was for me
to know about him.
And so that brings me to the Bible, specifically the Old Testament that claims to have God
as its author.
Yes, there are other religions like Islam, like Mormonism, like Jehovah's Witness, but
all of those religions are based on the Jewish Old Testament. Notice I say Jewish. I mean,
a lot of people think of Christianity or they think of the Bible. I say, "Well, that's a white
man's religion. That's an American religion. That's a Western religion." Actually, it's not.
It's from the East. It's from the Middle East. It's from Israel.
and it's from the Jews. It's not a white man's religion at all. And it's God's revelation of
himself to man. And so Islam is based on the Old Testament. Christianity is based on the Old
Testament, Mormonism, Jehovah's Witness, Catholicism, all based on the Old
Testament. So if you want to understand God's revelation to man, you have to
start with the Old Testament. And so that's what we're going to do. Now when
And we're looking here at the Bible.
We have to understand that, again, we're left with a book that has God to be its author.
And this book is split.
If you were to take your Bibles, and if you don't have a Bible, then put me on pause and
get you a Bible, and then come back after you get you a Bible.
We're going to use the index a lot in here, okay?
Let me come around to you so you can see this index better.
You see this index here, it's split up into Old Testament and the New Testament.
You see Old Testament up here, New Testament down here.
So when I'm saying, for example, turn to the book of Exodus,
I will say it's in the Old Testament.
And so then you would look in your index.
you would go down to Exodus, you would find out what page it's on, and that way it'll be quick for everybody because
it's not important for you to hear what I have to say.
It's important for you to hear what God has to say in his Word.
And so when I point to something and I'm quoting from a scripture,
"Hey, it's good for you to read it for yourself, right? Don't take my word for it. I'm not teaching you about myself.
I'm trying to teach you about God's Word."
So in the Bible we have this you know this index this table of contents. There's all kinds of different types of Bibles
But I have a study Bible again. I'm going to come around here and
In a study Bible
You have these chapters you have these verses
You have you know little notes in the middle and sometimes you have some notes down here
Only the chapters and verses, the ones recorded like this with these verses,
they are the only part of the Bible that scripture, the notes in the middle,
the notes on the bottom or the top or wherever your notes may be,
those were added by men who put them there as a study aid to help you.
But they may be incorrect.
So they're not part of God's Word.
But in fact, the Bible didn't even have chapters and verses when it was first written.
It was just a particular book.
And later, people added chapters and verses, sort of like how we add addresses.
say a person lives at 200 Washington Drive, okay, in whatever city and state
and country. So when you put that address there, it allows a person to get to
specific place in the world, a very specific place. And so with the chapters
and verses in the books, Deuteronomy chapter 28 verse 2, it allows us to go to
particular address in the Bible. Okay? And so that's all those are there for. Okay?
Now the Bible itself was written over a period of 1600 years by about 40
different men. Okay? And those men were called prophets. A lot of people say, "Oh,
"Oh, well, you know, the Bible is written by men, so it's got errors in it."
Not so.
God is the author of the Bible.
Man is the writer.
And I used this example before, and I'm going to use it again.
Let's say that I am the chief executive officer of a large company.
I'm in my office, and I buzz my secretary, and I say, "Ms. Jones, would you come in here,
please?"
She says, "Yes, Mr. Fulton."
So she comes in and I say, "Miss Jones, I need you to take a note for me and send a
letter off for me."
And she says, "Okay."
And so she takes her pen and I'm telling her, "Right, dear sirs, I regret to inform you
that due to unforeseen circumstances, I will be unable to attend a particular meeting on
such and such date.
Please allow Mr. Rogers to come fill in my stead, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah."
And I say sincerely, Richard Fulton, CEO, Fulton Financial Services or whatever it is,
okay?
I don't own Fulton Financial Services, but while we're imagining this dream big.
And so the lady says, "Yes, sir."
She goes back, she types it all out on her computer, she prints it out and then brings
it to me and I sign it.
I sign it.
Now is my signature authenticating that that letter's for me.
She then puts it in the mail and she mails it off to the intended recipients.
Now who wrote the letter?
My secretary did.
Who was the author of the letter?
I am.
Whose words were in the letter?
My words.
Her writing.
She's the one that sent it off.
She's the one that wrote it up.
she did so at my command based on my authority using my words. That is the
Bible. Okay, now if you have your Bible turn to 2nd Timothy chapter 3 verse 16.
Now 2nd Timothy is in the New Testament so look in the your table of contents in
the New Testament look down for 2nd Timothy and then turn to chapter 3 when
get there. Verse 16. 2 Timothy verse 16. I already have the notes written down, so
I'll wait for you to turn there. Again, if you're watching this on demand, you
can always hit pause and then turn there and then start it back up again. In
2 Timothy 3.16, the Bible says all scripture is given by inspiration of
of God. Now, let me remind you, Scripture is that part of the Bible that God wrote.
Okay? If the secretary would have written something in there like,
"written on such and such date," or whatever, she added some notes on the side,
those wouldn't have been my words. Those would have been her words. Okay?
But what I wrote in that, in the body of my letter, is my words.
So the scripture is the body of the letter, so to speak, of the Bible.
And the Bible says in 2 Timothy 3, 16, "All scripture is given by inspiration of God."
Now, there's different kinds of spiration, if you will.
There is inspiration, there is respiration, there is ex-piration, okay?
And so when you expire, you breathe out and you don't breathe back in again, okay?
You die, that's expiration.
When you respire, respiration, that's breathing in and out, in and out, over and over again.
When you inspire, then you are breathing in too. Breathing in too. Literally breathing in.
Okay? And so all scriptures given by inspiration, it means it's from the breath of God.
The letter that the secretary wrote up, where did those words come from? They come from my breath.
I spoke them. The air in my lungs went over my vocal folds. They vibrated, created sounds.
She heard them. She wrote them down.
So it's her handwriting, but the words literally came directly from the breath of my mouth.
That is what this means in the Greek. The word inspiration literally means God breathed.
Okay, it's from the breath of God. And so all scripture is the Word of God
itself.
And it says here, "It is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction and righteousness."
Turn to 2 Peter now. That's also in the New Testament
2nd Peter chapter 1
2nd Peter chapter 1 this is going to be verse 20 and 21
2nd Peter
chapter 1
verse 20 and 21
Again, people say all the Bible was written by man and that's man's opinion and everything
The Bible has something to say about that too.
Okay, if that secretary mails that letter off, whose opinion is that?
Whose thoughts are those?
Are they her thoughts because she wrote it because she typed it out on the typewriter?
No, they're my thoughts.
They're from my heart.
Okay.
And so in 2nd Peter, chapter 1, verse 20 through 21, the Bible says this,
Knowing this first that no prophecy of the scripture is
Of any private interpretation. It means it's not anybody's personal opinion the Bible nowhere in the Bible
Do you have anybody's personal opinion?
It says for the prophecy that is the scripture that's been prophesied
Came not in old time by the will of man. In other words man didn't say I know what I'm gonna do
I'm just gonna write a Bible
Or I want to write some prophecy here. That's not how it came about says it came not by the will of man
But holy men that means special men of God
Spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost the Holy Ghost means the Spirit of God himself
moved on those men and
Told them what to say what to write just as I told my secretary what to write
The wonderful thing about God's Word is it never changes as a law enforcement officer
which I've been doing now for over 30 years been in law enforcement and
There's one thing about the law
It's always changing you you have to go for updates all the time
To know how the law changed from the previous year and sometimes if you've been doing it for a long time
You may be acting on a on what you remember the law to be
15 20 years ago and the laws completely different because man changes the wonderful thing about God's Word is
The Word never changes because God never changes
He gave us his truth and because it's true at truth never changes. You can always depend on it. Okay, you never need an update
Psalm 119
Verse 89 Psalm 119 that's about in the middle of your Bible
If they ever tell you to turn the book of Psalms
You pretty much go to the middle of your Bible and just open it up
You'll be somewhere close to the book of Psalms and in Psalm 119
verse 89
Again, that's in the Old Testament. The Bible says forever Oh Lord
Your word is settled in heaven. Oh, isn't that wonderful forever? Oh Lord
Your word is settled in heaven. Oh, I'm so glad I have an unchanging book
I can rely on now again God used prophets these special men
to
Write his words down in the Bible. Take your Bible, please and turn to Isaiah chapter 30
Isaiah is in the Old Testament
Isaiah chapter 30
And I'm going to turn there to Isaiah chapter 30. If you're in Psalms, you just go to the right and
You'll run into the book of Isaiah Isaiah chapter 30
This is a really neat verse here and this is where God is speaking to one of the prophets Isaiah was a prophet
And so listen to what God told Isaiah in Isaiah chapter 30 verse 8.
He told Isaiah, "Now go, write it before them in a table," not a table you eat at, like a table of stone.
He says, "And note it in a book, that it may be for the time to come forever and ever."
You see what God is doing with His Word when He's speaking to Isaiah?
He tells Isaiah, "Here's the message I have for you, Isaiah, and here's what I want you to do with this message that I've been giving you.
I want you to write it in a table, in a tablet, like what we would say today."
He says, "Put in a book," He says, "that it may be for the time to come forever and ever."
In other words, I'm giving you this message, not just for you Isaiah, not just for the
people of your day, for the people over the next hundred years and the next generation,
the next generation forever.
Record my word and document it so that someone named Richard Fulton can read it and someone,
whoever you are, is listening today can read it and know and understand that I love man
enough to reveal myself to Him, to her, and let them know who I really am and what I'm like,
so you can know the truth about your Creator. That's the God who loves you.
God's Word is perfect. Psalm 33 verse 4. If you're Isaiah, just turn back to your left again. You'll
run back into Psalms. Psalm 33. Turn a few books back to your left. You'll see
Proverbs. Psalm is to the left of Proverbs. The 33rd Psalm. Everyone should
be there by now. In verse 4, the Bible says, "For the Word of the Lord is right,
and all his works are done in truth. The Word of the Lord is right, and all his
works are done in truth. Man, we have a Bible that we can rely on. It's true. It's
true. External evidence, archaeology, history, geology, science, they all
confirm the Word of God even though other people deny they do. They all
confirm God's Word and we'll go more into that in a future lesson. But
there's also internal evidence too about the Bible. Now I told you before and
we're about to sum this up for today, but I told you before that the Bible is
written over a period of 1600 years by about 40 different men. Now men don't live
to be 1600 years old. In the Bible, the people who the prophets God used, they might have lived to
be 100, but 1600 years time frame that you know was spread out when these books were written,
because the Bible again Old Testament, New Testament, you're actually looking at a collection
of 66 books in the Bible, you see. And those 66 books compile the one book, the Bible. The Bible
is more like a library than it is a book. It contains a collection of books. And the people
who wrote these 66 books were scattered out over time. God did it on purpose. So that there would
would be a progressive revelation.
So over this time here, God progressively revealed more and more and more information.
Now I want to give you an example of what God did, the internal evidence of the Bible.
It's absolutely amazing.
Back in the old days, nobody knew what a car was, right?
I mean, they had a horse, they had chariots, a wagon, but a self-propelled automobile,
nobody had a clue what it was.
But let's say that one of these 40 prophets, the very first one, let's say he wrote about
an engine.
Now he didn't know what a car was, but he wrote describing an engine.
And it sounded weird to the people back then when he wrote about it,
but he wrote about something that describes something like an
internal combustion engine.
Okay.
The crankshaft and all that good stuff.
He writes about an engine and then someone else comes along, uh, 200 years later,
they write about transmission, okay?
And then someone else comes along
and they write about a frame, okay?
And then someone else comes along
and they write about wheels and tires
and then someone else comes along a few hundred years later
and they write about auto body parts, you know,
the actual body of the car.
And then finally, at the very end, when the book is summed up,
somebody comes along, puts all of these parts together.
And they write about a 2022 Hyundai Tucson limited trim level with a particular vehicle
identification number that sets it apart from every other vehicle that would ever be made
or ever had been made. You know a vehicle identification number is like a fingerprint
sets it apart from every other car. And they write about this vehicle.
And they explain how all these parts, even though these people didn't know what a car was back then,
how all these parts fit together. And now look, they form an automobile with a particular VIN number.
And then here's the neatest thing. Let's say that you could take
the last part of the Bible.
Use it like a flashlight.
And when you shine the flashlight on this car,
here's the light illuminating out.
You shine the flashlight on this car.
And suddenly, you can see a shadow of the car.
in every single book in the Old Testament.
You take this part away, all you see is parts.
But you begin reading these books with the understanding of this, and suddenly it illuminates
And you can see that all of these cars were hidden there from the very beginning
With the exact same vehicle identification number as this and you suddenly realize they were talking about
This car all along and the only way to see those cars
Is to see it
this direction
There's light shows on it and it appears and they've been there the whole time and
And if you had something like that, then you would know these men had no way of doing that,
that they were latent, like a fingerprint.
Man, when I was in law enforcement and I would get a stolen vehicle or something and I would,
there would be fingerprints in that car.
I couldn't see them.
They were called latent fingerprints.
And I would take dust and I would take this fingerprint dust, this powder and I would
dust the vehicle for prints and maybe it was on a rearview mirror or something and I'd
get dust on that rearview mirror and suddenly there would be a fingerprint appear and guess
whose fingerprint would be there?
The suspect I was investigating, right?
The print was there the whole time.
I didn't put the print there.
I didn't even know if there was a print there.
There was powder applied and the powder revealed the print.
I could not say.
The New Testament is like that fingerprint powder to the Old Testament.
The New Testament cannot exist without the Old Testament.
You can't have a car without the body parts.
The Old Testament, on the other hand, has no knowledge of the car without the New Testament.
It puts them together.
And it's so arranged like this over the 1600 years by 40 different men, many who didn't
even know each other.
And nobody could see the fingerprints of the car.
And it could read the VIN number until the powder was applied.
And there it was.
The whole time it was there.
That's what we're going to see when we study God's Word.
Perhaps you're like me, oh there's been so many people.
They said, "Oh I know what I'm going to do.
I'm going to set out and I'm going to read the Bible all the way through."
And so they start out in Genesis and it starts out pretty easy.
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth and then it goes on and okay this
is pretty interesting.
you know, and the next thing you know, it gets into people's big long names that you
can't pronounce and the children's names that they had you can't pronounce and all these
walls that don't seem to make a whole lot of sense to us. And suddenly it's like we
get really bogged down. And I did anyway, when I first started out to read the Bible,
I stopped. I just got too bogged down with a bunch of big words that I didn't understand.
And maybe that's your experience too.
But we're going to study the Bible the way it was intended to be studied.
We're not going to get all caught up with the carpet and the interior and the computer
microchips or whatever in the car.
We're going to study the main components of the car, the main message of the Bible.
We're going to keep it simple and go A to B, B to C, C to D until we finally get to
the end.
And we're going to link all the parts of the Bible together for you, making it simple and
easy for you to understand.
The Bible is an amazing book and I'm very grateful for it.
When I grew up, I thought I understood the Bible really well.
I told you before I was raised in church.
Let me tell you what happened to me.
Picture this as an empty box.
I would go to church and I would hear a sermon
or I would go to Sunday school.
And it was like they took a puzzle piece
and they dropped it in my box.
And every time I went to church,
there'd be another sermon, another Sunday school lesson,
another puzzle piece dropped inside my box.
And after going to church for 18, 20 years,
I had a pretty good amount of puzzle pieces in there.
I'd walk around, my box was kind of heavy, my religious box, I would shake it.
I could hear the pieces inside, it felt substantial.
I thought, "I've got a good religion here," until it got challenged.
And I really didn't know what the Bible was really about.
I mean, I thought I did, but suddenly I didn't even know if it was true, if it was real.
And I was confused.
And a lot of people are like that.
They have questions.
They've been dying to get answered their whole life, and no one's ever answered it for them.
I had the big box of puzzle pieces.
You know what the problem was?
Nobody ever put the puzzle together for me.
They never put the puzzle together.
And if you have, all you have in religion is a big jigsaw puzzle with a bunch of pieces.
You don't know what the picture is.
You don't know what God's message is to you.
than that, a lot of the pieces that were put in my box, they didn't belong there. They
weren't true. It was false doctrine, bad teaching. Some of the pieces were missing because they
were never taught to me. And so you have a lot of people, most people, they have a box
of puzzle pieces without all the pieces and with some pieces that don't even belong there.
And so if you started trying to cram those pieces together, you would see, you would
not have the proper picture that God wanted you to see, you wouldn't have the
message you were supposed to have. So what we're going to do over the next six
months or so, however long it takes us to do this this class, we're going to take
God's Word and we're gonna go step by step by step to the Bible. Taking the
parts like puzzle pieces and snapping them in place one by one by one until
they get down to the end and take that final puzzle piece and put it in place
and give you the full color vivid picture that God wants you to see in His
Word the Bible. So I hope you'll continue to come lesson after lesson,
Listen, peace after peace until that puzzle is finally solved in your heart.
And I ask it in Jesus name.
Lord, thank you for those who came today.
Thank you for those who watched this lesson.
God be with them and help them continue to come, Father.
And teach your word through me, I pray, making it clear until they see your message from
your word.
In Jesus' wonderful name, Amen.
