Post by Les Brewer on Jul 25, 2017 23:46:24 GMT
Creation: Believe It or Not, Part 2
(For main source and audio please follow this link www.gty.org/library/sermons-library/90-209 )
Well, I'm glad tonight for a little bit of extra time because I have much on my heart that I want to say along the line of our series on origins. Last Sunday night I began to talk to you about the issue of origins and tonight I want to continue in part two on the issue of creation and the gospel. As I said last time, the issue of origins is absolutely critical to all human thinking, human behavior and human life. It is the foundation of our existence. It is the foundation of our purpose. It is the foundation of our destiny. Without a right understanding of origins there's no way to comprehend ourselves. There's no way to understand our earth, our universe or the ultimate meaning of anything.
And there are only two options when it comes to origins. The two options are: there is a Creator God, or there is not. Those are the only two options. There either is a Creator God or there is not. If there is not, then everything is an impossible, implausible, irrational result of chance. And the equation that I gave you last week is "nobody times nothing equals everything." If on the other hand there is a creative intelligence, if there is a Creator God, then creation is understandable. It is possible, it is plausible, it is rational. And even the scientists who have left their mark on the scientific world, those who think honestly and make honest confessions about origins, will tell you that there must be a creative intelligence. Even Einstein said that.
Recently the well-known scientist who teaches at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania has written a book called Darwin's Black Box. He is a scientist. He is not a Christian. But he says, in effect, guys, the jig's up. The ruse is over. There is no explanation for this universe apart from an intelligent creator. That's the only thing that makes any sense. Darwin explained the universe purely on the basis of external appearance. But the deeper science goes, the more it is forced to the conclusion of a Creator God. Behind this complex universe is an incomprehensibly intelligent and powerful eternal being who made everything. That is the only thing that makes sense. In fact, evolution in any form doesn't make sense.
Now the question is, if this universe is the product of a Creator God with an infinite amount of intelligence and power, how can we know anything about this God? How can we know who He is and how He created? Well, there's only one answer and that is we can only know about Him and how He created if He chose to tell us. That's the only way we can ever know. Has He? Yes, He has. In fact, He has revealed an entire 66 books of personal self-disclosure. And included in that revelation, in which God has revealed Himself, is very clear instruction about how He created the universe.
For example, in Psalm 19 the psalmist writes these familiar words, "The heavens are telling of the glory of God; and their expanse is declaring the work of His hands. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night reveals knowledge." In other words, day and night, everything in the universe speaks of a Creator God. "There is no speech, nor are there words; their voice is not heard." In other words, it's a silent revelation but it's a revelation that's unmistakable. Just look at the creation, look at the universe, look at the heavens and their expanse and everything that He's created in the day and in the night and it's clear. He says, "Their line has gone out through all the earth, and their utterances to the end of the world." Everyone on the globe can look out and see the creative evidence of a Creator God.
The psalmist goes on to talk about the fact that He has made the created universe “a tent for the sun, which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber; It rejoices as a strong man to run his course. Its rising is from one end of the heavens, and its circuit to the other end of them; and there is nothing hidden from its heat.” He picks that one body, that one celestial body out of the great expanse of the universe, that one celestial body that most dominates our life, the one that is closest to us in terms of a star, the one that has the greatest impact on us, the one that affects us, the sun, the unmistakable one. And he says about the sun that the sun runs its circuit from one end of heaven to the other so that nowhere in the created universe is its heat not felt. That's one of the things that science has discovered in modern times is that the sun is in orbit. We talk about the sun as the center of our solar system and everything orbiting around it, but you need to know that science has discovered that the sun itself has an orbit and this orbit goes from one end of the infinite space to the other. The sun is moving and dragging our entire solar system with it. It is not fixed any more than the things that revolve around it are fixed. So the psalmist says you can look up and you can look at the universe and look at the creation and it gives you loud testimony to the glory of God, to the majesty of His intelligence, to the massive character of His power to create all of this.
In Hebrews, chapter 1, going to the other end of the Bible, we read that God who “spoke long ago to the fathers in the prophets in many portions and in many ways, in these last days has spoken to us in His Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the world.” Hebrews 1 says that God made the world. Psalm 19 says He made the universe. Hebrews 1 says He made the world. The only way we're going to know that is if God tells us that. We are natural. God is supernatural. The natural cannot comprehend the supernatural. So on our own we can't find God, we can't discover God. We're locked in a time-space world. We can't crawl outside of it into eternity and comprehend what is incomprehensible. The only things we know about God are those things which He has told us, and that's why He gave us the Bible.
First Timothy 3, 2 Timothy 3, I'm sorry, says familiar, familiar words to us. "All Scripture is inspired by God," 2 Timothy 3:16. "All Scripture is inspired by God." God breathed it out, so that it is His Word. Second Peter 1, "Know this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture is a matter of one's own interpretation, for no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God." The only source of knowledge we have about God is the Bible and the external evidence of God in creation. We can know about God by creation; we cannot know God except through Scripture. We can know that He created, as we look at the creation around us. It's reasonable to assume there was a Creator. But we cannot know how He created unless He reveals it to us. So we can know some things through what theologians call natural revelation. But in order to really know God, and how He created, and how He operates, and how He saves, we have to have special revelation, which is the Bible, and the Bible alone.
Now with that in mind, go back to Genesis, chapter 1. When God began the Bible as His self-revelation, He began at the beginning. He began with an account of origins. He began by telling how He created the universe. Verse 1 of Genesis 1 says, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." And then He goes on into chapter 2 and verse 4 with a description of precisely and exactly how He created the universe. Now this is where Genesis begins. But it doesn't end there. Genesis is a book of origins. To show you how important Genesis is, let me tell you the range of origins that are found in the revelation of this one book.
Now the word genesis, by the way, means origins, beginnings. And in the book of Genesis you find many beginnings, many origins. First of all, and we just noted that, you find the origin of the universe. Genesis 1:1 is unique in all literature, all science, and all philosophy. Every other system of cosmogony explaining the universe, whether in ancient religious myths or modern scientific models, starts with eternal matter, or eternal energy in some form. Only the book of Genesis starts with eternal God. Genesis then is the book of the origin of the universe.
Secondly, in Genesis we find the origin of order and complexity. Man's universal observation of his world is that it is, it is an orderly world. It functions on fixed rules and it is profoundly complex. Order and complexity never arise spontaneously. They are always generated by a prior cause programmed to produce order and complexity simultaneously. And in the book of Genesis we meet God, who programmed order and complexity into His universe. We also find in Genesis the origin of the solar system. In the midst of this vast, limitless universe, God created a solar system. The Earth, as well as the sun, and moon, the planets, all the stars of heaven, were brought into existence by the Creator and we're told that He created them all.
Fourthly, the book of Genesis tells us about the origin of the atmosphere and the hydrosphere. The earth is uniquely equipped with a great body of liquid water and an extensive blanket of oxygen-nitrogen gaseous mixture, both of which are necessary for life. These have never shown up on any other celestial bodies or any other planets and are accounted for only by special creation by God to provide an environment for human life.
We also find in Genesis the origin of life, the marvels of the reproductive process. The almost infinite complexity programmed into the genetic system of plants and animals are inexplicable apart from special creation by a great, supernatural, powerful intelligence.
Sixthly and certainly centrally, Genesis tells us about the origin of man. Man is the most highly organized and complex entity in the universe. Man is the supreme illustration of order and complexity. He possesses not only innumerable, intricate, physical, chemical structures in the marvelous capacities of life and reproduction, but beyond that sort of physical part of man, there is a nature which can contemplate abstract entities of beauty, and love, and worship, and which is capable of understanding and thinking about its own meaning. It is self-awareness that singularly identifies and separates man from the rest of the created order. The true record of man's creation is given only in Genesis.
In Genesis you also find the origin of marriage. The remarkable universal and stable institution of marriage and the home, a monogamous, patriarchal, social culture is defined and described in Genesis as having been ordained by the Creator. And polygamy, and infanticide, and matriarchy, and promiscuity, and divorce, and abortion, and homosexuality, and all the corruptions developed later after the Fall, corrupting God's initial order.
You also find in the book of Genesis the origin of evil. The origin of physical and moral evil in the universe is explained in Genesis as a kind of temporary intrusion into God's perfect world, allowed by God as a concession to the principle of human freedom and responsibility and also to manifest Himself as Redeemer of sinners as well as Creator. You find, number nine, in the book of Genesis the origin of judgment on evil. All the forms of God's wrath are set in motion and illustrated in Genesis.
Also, number ten, in the book of Genesis you find the origin of salvation by grace through God's mercy and a substitute. That's all in Genesis and it starts to show as God is merciful to Adam and Eve and doesn't kill them, even though they deserved to die for their sin. And then God develops a system of animal sacrifice which pictures a substitute who will take the place of sinners, which is an act of mercy and grace on God's part. The plan of redemption leading to Christ is even referred to when the book of Genesis talks about the seed of the woman, that being the seed planted by God in Mary; the Messiah, the Savior.
It is in the book of Genesis that we find the origin of language. You know, one of the things that evolutionists gag on all the time, and I was reading it in Newsweek this week, is how you go from apes to man not just making some physical transition, but developing language. How you go from grunting and making unintelligible noises to human speech. Newsweek was trying to present an article to answer that and it was just bizarre and pointless and unbelievable. The gulf between the mindless, instinctive chattering of animals and the intelligent, abstract, symbolic communication of man is absolutely and completely unbridgeable by any evolutionary process. And the book of Genesis not only accounts for the origin of language in general—that is, God is a communicating God and He created someone in His own image who thereby could communicate—but Genesis also tells us not only how man was given by God the ability to communicate but how so many languages occurred from the judgment of God at the Tower of Babel. That's in Genesis, too.
You find in Genesis, number 12, the origin of government, the development of organized systems of human government for the maintenance of orderly social structures through systems of law and punishment. You find in Genesis the origin of culture. You find here such things as urbanization, the development of metallurgy, music, agriculture, animal husbandry, writing, education, navigation, textiles and ceramics. All of that starts in the book of Genesis. You find in Genesis the origin of nations and that is related, of course, again to the Tower of Babel, as God takes one race and scatters them all over the world. That is the only source you'll ever find of how we have so many different peoples scattered all over the earth with different languages and cultures.
You find in the book of Genesis the origin of religion. Both the true religion and false religions appear, first of all, in the book of Genesis; organized systems of worship and conduct. The origin of man's unique characteristic, of man's own consciousness and his ability to comprehend a God and to structure a system of response to the God he believes exists. That all appears in Genesis.
You find also significantly, number 16 in my list, the origin of the chosen people, Israel, who were the conduit for God's revelation to all of the world. It was Israel that was God's people, through whom He gave His revelation and through whom His saving covenant came, in Genesis 12, to Abraham.
Now when you talk about origins you're going to have to go back to Genesis. This is a book of origins. And let me put it again on the line where I put it last Lord's Day. Either you believe Genesis or you don't. It's that simple. Either you believe what Genesis says about all of those origins or you don't. And that would include either you believe the creation account in Genesis 1 and 2 or you don't. And if you don't believe the Genesis account, then I just, I have to tell you, you have no hope of coming to the truth. You're not going to discover it. Unconverted scientists aren't going to discover it. You either believe Genesis or you don't.
And what is really intolerable is to say you believe the Bible but not just the Genesis creation account. You believe Genesis, you believe about the origin of sin, you believe chapter 3 on maybe. Or maybe you're not sure about that because you don't really believe there was an actual Adam and an actual Eve. You've got a small problem because Jesus said, "As in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive," and there was a real Christ, so you can be sure there was a real Adam. But just in case you don't believe in a real Adam, maybe you don't sign on until chapter 6, maybe you just believe the Flood. Well, maybe you don't believe that, maybe you believe when the Tower of Babel is described later on in chapter 11, or maybe you don't believe that. Maybe you don't check in until Abraham shows up in chapter 12. Pretty ridiculous, isn't it? Who are you to be sitting in judgment on Scripture?
You know, I'm never going to get caught in the trap of trying to prove to you that Genesis is true by science. I'm just going to proclaim to you what Genesis says and let science bow its knee to that explanation. As you will see, it will do that. All you can know about how God created is what He said. That's all you can know. And if you don't believe what He said about creation, what kind of precedent have you established for the rest of the Bible?
And what about the end? Do you know how all of redemptive history ends? You know how the whole story of humanity ends? It ends, according to 2 Peter, when the Lord uncreates the universe; I like to use that word. The elements melt with fervent heat. There's some kind of a, literally an implosion, as the nuclear structure, the atomic structure of the universe, literally is totally turned against its existence, and takes it right back out of existence when He uncreates, when the elements melt as with a fervent heat in that kind of nuclear holocaust that ends human history.
And immediately after that it says in Revelation that He creates a—what? A new heaven and a new earth. Let me ask you this, do you believe He can do that? Or is that going to be another umpteen billion years of evolutionary process to get the new heaven and the new earth cranked up? Is it going to take billions of years to evolve the new heaven and the new earth, or do you really believe God might be able to do that just by fiat, just by making the statement and calling it into existence? If you believe that, then what's your problem in Genesis? If God can wipe the entire universe out in a split second, if He can dissolve the whole thing, if He can send it reeling in the time of the tribulation, and refurbish it during the time of the kingdom, and then totally uncreate it at the end of the thousand years, if He can do all of that, then I don't know why you have a problem with Him creating it all in six days. You see, the implications of rejecting the account of Genesis are profound.
And listen to me, because what I'm going to say is very important. It is not necessary to reject the six-day creation. It is not necessary. We have yielded up territory to evolution without cause. Science knows nothing. Science proves nothing that contradicts a six-day creation, nothing. In fact science, as it keeps advancing, makes its own claims to evolution ridiculous, more ridiculous all the time. You know—and having a perspective on this is very important—we've caved in to the scientists too long and it's time to stop. If you want to do some reading on this, get Philip Johnson's book Darwin on Trial; it just devastates the scientific perspectives. Christian people literally accepting the scientific descriptions of origins, and come out of an evolutionary bias as if somehow they've been proven, and somehow the Bible is going to have to give at that point, because a six-day creation is not scientifically possible; that is just not true. But the results are staggering.
Master's College, for example, is a member of the Christian College Coalition. It's a coalition of Christian colleges across America, of which there are about 110 colleges. Of the 110 Christian colleges in the coalition, six that we know of believe in the creation account in Genesis; six out of 110 Christian colleges. That's a small, small fraction. And most Christian leaders and most Christian educators have allowed the teachings of evolution to one degree or another to be added to the Bible; they sort of stuff evolution in between the verses in Genesis. Most Christian leaders have accepted the fact that the universe is billions of years old.
Yet clearly, from the words of Scripture, God created the universe in six literal days. And Christian leaders can't deny that that's what it says because that's what it says. You can translate it any way you want, it all comes out. The word yom means day and you have six of them. But they believe somehow that scientists have proved that the age of the earth must be billions and billions and billions of years old. So they believe you've got to go back to Genesis and fix it. And in so doing they have allowed the authority of the Bible to be undermined, right? It's serious stuff. If the words of the Bible means six days, and you conclude, but so-called science says that's not true, then science is right and the Bible is wrong. Now if you can't trust the words of Genesis, when do you start trusting the Bible? It's a sad indictment of the church, isn't it? And the humanists even use the compromising of the Christian leaders to further their cause to undermine Christianity. And what we have is a kind of Christianity today that loses its absolutes in Genesis 1. That's sad.
Christian leaders might not sign on, of course, to humanistic evolution. They would say, "Yes, there's a God and somehow God's involved in the evolutionary process." That's called theistic evolution, sometimes called progressive creationism, a term developed by Russell Mixter in the science department of Wheaton College a number of years ago. But they would say, "No, there is a God and God is, sort of injects Himself at points at theistic evolution." Says, "God launched it and started it." Progressive creationism says, "He jumps in along the way but it still took millions and millions and billions of years for it to happen." These people call themselves believers in God. They probably would say they believe the Scripture. But they don't want to allow for a six-day creation. This poses immense problems, immense problems.
Here's one of them, I'm not going to give you all, but here's one, just strikes me as a serious problem. If man is created at the end of the evolutionary process, whether it's a naturalistic evolutionary process, or it's a theistic evolutionary process launched by God, which some Christians think they have to affirm in order to pay homage to science, or if it's a progressive creationist view where God injects Himself along the way, the problem you've got is evolution is a process—listen carefully—evolution is a process by nature of death. It's a process known as the survival of—what?—the fittest. It's a process of violence. It's a process of bloodshed. It's a process of suffering. It's a process of disease. It's a process of death as the order rises higher and higher and higher until it gets to man.
Now here's a serious problem. You don't have man until billions of years and when man appears he is perfect and he is sinless and there's no such thing as death. Death doesn't even come into the picture until man does—what?—sins. How can you have death before the Fall? You don't even have a cursed earth. The whole of the Genesis record is stood on its head. If there's been all kinds of death in this billions of years of evolutionary processing, then what did sin do to the world that hadn't already been done? And how could God, who looked over this whole evolutionary deal when it finally reached its completion in man and said He saw it and He looked at it and He said it is good? How could God say that? You see then, the sin of Adam and the curse of death is meaningless, because there's been death for millennia and for billions of years; just convolutes all of the biblical record. Because what you have in Genesis is a perfect world until man is confronted by the serpent, and falls into sin, and God curses the universe and then comes death, and disease, and suffering, and violence, and bloodshed, and not before. Evolution makes no sense in that perspective.
You know, I, Christians will get out there, you know, and they'll say, "Boy, we're against abortion, and we're against homosexuality, and we're against Jack Kevorkian because he's murdering people, and we're against euthanasia, and we're against genocide and, you know, we're against the moral evils of our society, etc., etc., etc.” Why are we against those things? Can you tell me why? Why are we against those things? Give me one reason. Here it is, because they're forbidden in Scripture. Is that not true? The only reason we're against abortion is because God's against it. How do we know that? Because it's in the Word of God. The reason we're against homosexuality, adultery, etc., etc., is because of the Bible. You see, we stand on the Scripture. But the problem is we don't want to stand on the Scripture in Genesis. So we equivocate on whether or not the Bible is an authority at all. What do you think the watching world thinks about our commitment to Scripture? Pretty selective, isn't it? And again, I say such capitulation to evolution is completely unnecessary. Nothing requires evolution. In fact, evolution cannot happen. It can't happen.
Let me tell you why. Now again I want to give a disclaimer. I'm not a scientist and I've got to tell you, I work really hard to try to understand this stuff. I'm going to do my best to make it comprehensible to you. I read a couple of books by a man named Dr. A. E. Wilder-Smith, who has a whole long list of letters after his name. He's a scientist. Now, just to tell you how far I've gone in this reading, I read his book from cover to cover called, The Scientific Alternative to Neo-Darwinian Evolutionary Theory. Now this is a very technical book and I don't recommend that you go try to find it because you'll not really enjoy reading it. You just have to kind of do it, just an exercise that you're sort of forced to do if you're going to do what I'm going to do. But let me distill it to you, the thesis of the book. A. E. Wilder-Smith in this book demonstrates the absurdity of evolution on the basis of one great reality and that one great reality is the encoded information in the DNA of living organisms. Did you get that? Every living organism has in it DNA. DNA is genetic material and on that genetic material in every living thing is a code and that is an operative code. And that living organism, whether you're talking about a cell or whether you're talking about a large man and everything in between, all of that operation of every living thing is dependent on that encoded information. And listen to this, every different living thing has a completely different code.
Darwin had no clue about that. There was no genetic study when he wrote his Origin of Species. He didn't know anything about DNA. He didn't know anything about chromosomes. He didn't know anything about genetics. It didn't exist as a science. He was just describing what he thought he was seeing. It was all according to appearance and nothing more. If Darwin had been alive today and try to sell his deal today, it never would fly; he wouldn't even believe it. He barely believed his own view. He certainly wouldn't have believed it in a day like ours when we have this incredible ability to go with electron microscope into the DNA and see the coded information in living organisms. The entire realm of genetics, Wilder-Smith points out, is all about information, storage and retrieval; was totally unknown to Darwin. Every living thing, if you're talking about before these flowers were cut, they were living things, this one is blue, this one is pink, and this one is orange, etc., because there's information, there's information in the DNA in the genetics that causes that to happen. That's a code of information in every living thing.
It has been discovered in recent years that the genetic programs of say, higher biological organisms, consist of about one thousand million bits of information. One thousand million bits of information in one living organism; and that information that is encoded in that living organism determines the nature, the growth, the development and the death of billions of cells in that living organism. Now who, frankly, in his right mind could ever believe that such supremely complex machines, which is what living organisms are, storing and retrieving the precise information to service a thousand million cells, diagnose defects, and repair them, and reproduce, all developed at random by chance out of nothing? It's absolutely idiotic.
The big issue, the issue that is bringing down evolution, is the study of the origin of information; it's called information theory. Where did the information come from? Where did the code come from? A monkey has a monkey code, and the DNA, and the chromosomes, and the genetics just keep making the monkey behave like a monkey. There's no code in there to turn the monkey into a man. There's no such thing as jumping out of your species.
Well they got all excited in science. Wilder-Smith talks about this, as do some other writers I read, when they got into polymers and they were looking at some things, saying, "Well, maybe those polymers are the transitional things, they look a little unusual, they're a little out of the normal. Maybe they were the transitions." And the longer they studied those, the more they realized those were just elements of the encoded information doing repair work because there was some reason to repair. That's why it was a little unusual because it was repairing damage to that living organism. And after all, polymers weren't transitional forms at all; they were just encoded information in the DNA that you didn't see until there was a need to repair something. It's incredible.
Where did this genetic information come from? Where did it come from? It couldn't evolve out of nowhere. It's too precise. Wilder-Smith says this, "Darwin's so-called gradualism postulated, in the last analysis, all forms of biology were derived from a single, simple cell which by an unbroken series of small, gradualistic changes, gave rise to an unbroken chain of steps from the original cell up to man himself, and biology was strictly continuous." This is just unbelievable. And only a man in Darwin's time who didn't know genetics would ever come up with such a statement, because if a one-celled thing, listen to this, developed into a man, then all the encoded information necessary to run that one-cell thing and to run everything from then on all the way up, including the man, had to be in the original cell. And if it wasn't in the original cell, then where did it come from? That's the question. It's ridiculous. They know that all of the encoded information to run every living thing in the universe is not contained in a one-celled amoeba. What is contained in a one-celled amoeba is the code for a one-celled amoeba.
Wilder-Smith goes on and says, "There was one great aspect of reality about which Darwin, and indeed everyone of his epic, knew nothing. I'm referring to the modern science of information theory; for if a primeval kind of amoeba is to develop up to a primate, that primeval cell will have to gather all sorts of new information on how to make kidneys, livers, four-chamber hearts, cerebra and cerebella." It's just going to have to, as this one-celled thing goes, it's just going to have to collect information; from where?
If the law of entropy is true, and it is—that matter is breaking down, things are getting worse—how can things be getting more complex and more ordered simultaneously? Wilder-Smith says, "For the synthesis of such reduced entropy systems, as for example a primate brain, requires all kinds of solid, actual information, which neither the matter of which the primeval amoeba consisted, nor the intact amoeba cell contained. Similarly, inorganic matter will have to assemble huge numbers of bits of holistic information before it can synthesize an amoeba."
So he says whatever it was that started the first amoeba, whatever inanimate thing started the first amoeba, would have to have collected information to make that happen. I'll give you an illustration; maybe help you a little bit. Have you been reading about the fact they've cloned rabbits and then they cloned sheep? You say, "Does this, is this an evolutionary triumph?" No, you know what this proves? This proves that it takes an outside intelligence to do this. You can have a sheep and put him in a pen and say, "Um...mutate!" You can put, you can put the sheep in there and say, you know, you can, "Please, have a clone." But that sheep's not going to have a cloned sheep unless an intelligence, a higher intelligence, in this case a human brain, understanding genetics, works from the outside to produce that. That is a classic illustration of why evolution can't happen. It's classic. Whenever we want to create something that is in the least sense out of the natural order, it takes an intelligent human brain to invade that level of life. It has to come from the outside because the information isn't in the code system.
That's exactly how God operates. You can't have evolution. First Corinthians 15 says “there's a flesh of animals and there's...a flesh of birds,” and “there's a flesh of man,” and that's how it is. And it's all determined by the genetic code, and they don't crisscross and jump over those bounds.
Wilder-Smith further writes, "Assuming that original primeval form of life was kind of an amoeba, a kind of amoeba, where did it obtain the almost infinite number of bits of information required to be stored in its DNA storage and retrieval system? In order to transform the amoeba-type of cell to a mammal, a primate, an octopus, or a bee, new bits of holistic information are required. Neither the primeval amoeba-type of cell nor the inorganic matter of which it is constructed contains such highly specialized, holistic information, which is necessary to transform from the alleged amoeba into say, an anthropoid ape. [It is legitimate to assume that such incredible amounts of information arose.] Is it legitimate to assume that such incredible amounts of information arose spontaneously, out of thin air, by pure chance?" Absolutely ridiculous.
I mentioned this morning, went down to the Sonoran Desert this week to spend a little time with my dad and my sister, decided to cart us out to the desert there and to go out with some naturalists and poke around under rocks and look at cactus and things like that. And I'm always kind of fascinated by the creation of God and I've seen the desert a lot in my life because I've always lived in the West, or most always. And, but I was introduced to some things that were really amazing by these naturalists. You know, they turned over a rock and out came a little gecko and they gave me the whole ecology of how they operate. And out from another rock with a little pair of tweezers came a scorpion and I, I learned more about a scorpion than I ever cared to know or could use in about five minutes. But I did learn one thing: That they survive by cannibalizing other scorpions, and that's how they survive. And it talked about how their sting operates and how; they talked about all the details. Then we went over to see a saguaro cactus. And a saguaro cactus, there's a whole ecology in one of those things that's incredible. They think they live 800 years. They don't know for sure because no botanist lives long enough to see one live and then die. So, you know, it's sort of a guess. But they go through these incredible, this thing is incredible. Its needles crisscross like this because there's high winds in that, there, the only place in the world it grows in the Sonoran Desert. And the needles that grow out of them, as they do in cacti, crisscross each other, and that defuses the wind so it doesn't blow them over, doesn't snap them off. It's a marvelous ecology. There's legend, too, in fact one of the legends. You ever see a saguaro cactus? Some of the arms go up and like this. And they say the main stem of a saguaro cactus is representative of the man and the other branches are representative of his wives. And if they grow upward, he had a very ordered life and dutiful wives, but if they go all directions, the poor guy had a really tough time. Well, I mean that's legend. But apart from the legend, as they began to define the ecology of this thing, the complexity of this thing, how it retains water and how it creates these ribs, how it produces an incredibly gorgeous flower at the peak of each branch once a year, and it dies burned in the sun. They took us over to a paloverde tree, the tree with the smallest leaves of any tree on the face of the earth. And it desperately needs water, and they have found them, get this, with a one main root 300 feet below the surface of the ground, though the tree is only six feet high. Amazing ecology, amazing complexity in all these forms of life.
And they were going through all of this, and all this. Then I jumped in and said, "May I say something?" And I gave them this speech basically that I'm giving you, you know, that every one of these living organisms in the universe has its own code. How did it get that code? Where did it come from? It had to come from a divine mind who made everything. Listen to this, when God created, He created everything and encoded everything. Just get a grip on the vastness of His intelligence, staggering, staggering. Everything demonstrates the imprint of God.
And then Wilder-Smith in his books, book, likes to talk about a guy named Von Neumann, Von Neumann actually, German scientist. Von Neumann defined these living machines (machine referring to an organism that's alive), and he said, the amazing thing about living organisms, get this, is they are self-producing, self-sustaining and self-repairing. That is what's known as a Von Neumann machine, self-producing, self, or self-reproducing, self-sustaining, and self-repairing. And he points out in his book that we've never been able to build a machine like that.
Do you know any machine like that? Do you know any computer that has little computers? Do you know a computer that sustains its own life and repairs itself? How about a car? Do you know a car that does that? Von Neumann pointed out if we could make a machine complex enough to reproduce itself and sustain itself it would always be in disrepair because of its complexity. So it couldn't keep up with the self-repairing responsibility. We've never created a machine like that, yet every single living organism is just that: self-producing, self-sustaining, self-repairing. Is that incredible? This is the mind of God. Don't tell me this is chance. Blind devotion to chance is an act of defiance against reason, and more importantly against revelation, and more importantly against God Himself.
Douglas Kelley says, at the very least one can note that the whole edifice of evolutionary theory is increasingly seen as a faith rather than objective, empirical science and its foundations are shaky, end quote.
According to Michael Denton—he's written a book called A Theory in Crisis—he says, "There can be no doubt that after a century of intensive efforts, biologists have failed to validate it in any significance sense. The fact remains that nature has not been reduced to the continuum that Darwinian model demands, nor has the credibility of chance as the creative agency of life been secured." In fact—that's end quote—in fact, it's just the opposite. The more science learns about astonishing complexity, the more science learns about harmony, the more science learns about design, the more science learns about the intelligence of the universe, the more science must confess there has to be an intelligent creator.
And again Douglas Kelley says, "Now in the nature of the case, we are dealing here with a unique situation, the bringing into being of the space-time universe by a transcendent source who according to the Scriptures [Listen to this.], spoke it into existence out of nothing but the word of His own power." Hmm, what power, what complexity, what order, what intelligence! You know, reasonable science, reasonable science should suggest that an intelligent and powerful supernatural creator had to be out there and still is. But although science should recognize that, because it's the only reasonable explanation, to know who He is and to know how He created, science must bow its knee to the Scripture and the God of Scripture.
Our sole source of knowledge is the Bible, the Bible. Evolution is an act of faith, irrational faith. Creation is an act of faith, revelational faith. I don't know about you, but I believe the Bible and I believe the Word of God. Evolution is a twentieth-century religious sect that denies reason and denies revelation. Creation is the worship of the true God in perfect accord with reason and revelation. So I go back to where I've started. Either you believe in an eternal God or you believe in eternal matter, or eternal energy, or eternal amoeba; nothing in between, nothing in between. You are either a materialist who believes in the eternality of matter, or you are a supernaturalist who believes in the eternality of God. That's the only two choices there are.
What happens to a world that rejects the Creator and replaces Him with material? What happens to a world that replaces the Creator God with faceless time, chance, matter, energy? What happens? William Provine of Cornell University stated it clearly, quote: "The implications of modern science are clearly inconsistent with most religious traditions. No inherent [Listen to this] moral or ethical laws exist, nor are there absolute guiding principles for human society. The universe cares nothing for us and we have no ultimate meaning in life," end quote. That's right. If we're just the result of chance, nothing matters. There is no moral standard, there is no ethical standard; all you're left with is tragedy and despair. If this universe is the result of impersonal forces, if this universe is faceless, if it's pitch dark out there because nobody's there, that makes a tremendous difference in my life. But if there is a Creator and if that Creator showed His face in human form in Jesus, and if He is a loving, saving, blessing God who stands behind this creation, that makes all the difference in my life.
And you know, the Bible, I'm so glad the Bible doesn't start like this, "I know you guys are going to find this hard to believe but in the beginning God." It doesn't do that. It just says, "In the beginning God..." There has to be something in the beginning. The evolutionist would say, "In the beginning amoeba, in the beginning matter, in the beginning energy." The Bible says, "In the beginning God..." And in John 1, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God... All things were made by Him, and [without Him, this says it], without Him was not anything made that was made." That's another way of saying nothing evolved. Hebrews 11:3, "By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the Word of God," not by evolution. "The worlds were framed by the Word of God." This is repeating: It's in Genesis, it's in John, it's in Hebrews. And as I said at the beginning, either you believe it or you don't.
We can conclude then that evolution is a false religion. And why in the world would we want to bring it into the Bible? Why would we want to borrow from the false religion of evolution and impose it upon the straightforward account of Genesis? For what? That's an assault on the revelation of God. The Bible tells us how energy got here, it came from God. It tells us how matter got here, it came from God. It tells us how the heavens and the earth were formed, God did it. That's all we need to know. Nothing could be more logical than that. An intelligent Creator God made it. And here come the evolutionists with all their lies, and their disregard of Genesis, and why in the world do we buy into that and try to impose that on the Scripture?
Evolution is a false religion. Here are the principles it’s based on, just to give you another perspective:
One, evolution is pure science. That's what the evolutionists would like you to believe. It's pure science, it's a closed system founded on reality, not on the illusion of a God.
And secondly the evolutionists would say that evolution is equal to rationality because it excludes miracles and the supernatural. But, friends, there comes a point in which the supernatural is the only rational thing.
Thirdly—and this has been adapted from Philip Johnson's wonderful book, Reason in the Balance—thirdly, evolution is liberating because it eliminates God and His commands, which restrict free sexual behavior.
Fourthly, the evolutionist says his religion is democratic because every man is his own source of moral judgment, since there is no God, no moral judge, no law.
Fifthly, evolution is broad because it allows a belief in God, just not the biblical God.
That's the religion. You want to know what the tenets are of the religion of evolution?
One, evolution is pure science, they say, it's a closed system founded on reality not the illusion of a God.
Two, it is equal to rationality because it excludes irrational miracles and supernatural interference.
Three, evolution is liberating because it eliminates God and His commands which restrict free sexual behavior. And, folks, I want to tell you, that's what drives the whole thing. They love their sin.
Fourth, evolution, they say, is democratic because every man can be his own source of moral judgment.
And fifth, evolution is broad because it allows belief in God, whatever you want Him to be except the God of the Bible.
Amazing, isn't it? People fighting reason, embracing absurdity, to avoid accountability to the eternal judge.
Let me close tonight by taking you over to Romans 1. And this is just a pertinent statement from God that addresses those who reject Him. Romans 1 verse 18:
"For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men [Listen to this.] who suppress the truth...because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them. For since the creation of the world, His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without [What?] excuse. For even though they knew God, they didn't honor Him as God or give thanks,...they became futile in their speculations,...their foolish heart was darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man...birds...four-footed animals and crawling creatures."
And it all starts in verse 18. The wrath of God is unleashed on these people who replace the supernatural with the natural, who replaced God with creatures. This is God's judgment on them. Now two weeks from tonight, next week is a baptism on Easter Sunday, but two weeks from tonight I want to go back and start in Romans 1 because I want to unfold this passage to you a little bit. Then we'll go to a number of passages in the New Testament that show you why you have to have a creationist view or you impact negatively the gospel, okay? So, that will be two weeks from tonight. Let's pray.
Our Father, this is so important for us to have our faith again encouraged. We don't need to be caving in to the supposed wisdom of the world, those who know You not. Give us a firm, and resolute, strong confidence that Your Word is true, that every Word of God is pure, as Scripture says, that all Scripture is given by inspiration of God, that no Scripture comes by private interpretation, but holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit. Remind us that You created the world in the way that You said, that there wasn't anything in this universe created that You didn't create. By You the worlds were framed. Father, help us to know You as the Creator, to know that the worlds were framed by Your Word and You did it so marvelously and magnificently in six days, as it's outlined in the book of Genesis. Strengthen our faith in the God who created, the God who redeems sinners. We are overwhelmed at Your greatness, the vastness of Your intelligence, and Your power, and the sweetness of Your mercy toward us, and we thank You for it in our Savior's name. And everybody said, amen.
(For main source and audio please follow this link www.gty.org/library/sermons-library/90-209 )
Well, I'm glad tonight for a little bit of extra time because I have much on my heart that I want to say along the line of our series on origins. Last Sunday night I began to talk to you about the issue of origins and tonight I want to continue in part two on the issue of creation and the gospel. As I said last time, the issue of origins is absolutely critical to all human thinking, human behavior and human life. It is the foundation of our existence. It is the foundation of our purpose. It is the foundation of our destiny. Without a right understanding of origins there's no way to comprehend ourselves. There's no way to understand our earth, our universe or the ultimate meaning of anything.
And there are only two options when it comes to origins. The two options are: there is a Creator God, or there is not. Those are the only two options. There either is a Creator God or there is not. If there is not, then everything is an impossible, implausible, irrational result of chance. And the equation that I gave you last week is "nobody times nothing equals everything." If on the other hand there is a creative intelligence, if there is a Creator God, then creation is understandable. It is possible, it is plausible, it is rational. And even the scientists who have left their mark on the scientific world, those who think honestly and make honest confessions about origins, will tell you that there must be a creative intelligence. Even Einstein said that.
Recently the well-known scientist who teaches at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania has written a book called Darwin's Black Box. He is a scientist. He is not a Christian. But he says, in effect, guys, the jig's up. The ruse is over. There is no explanation for this universe apart from an intelligent creator. That's the only thing that makes any sense. Darwin explained the universe purely on the basis of external appearance. But the deeper science goes, the more it is forced to the conclusion of a Creator God. Behind this complex universe is an incomprehensibly intelligent and powerful eternal being who made everything. That is the only thing that makes sense. In fact, evolution in any form doesn't make sense.
Now the question is, if this universe is the product of a Creator God with an infinite amount of intelligence and power, how can we know anything about this God? How can we know who He is and how He created? Well, there's only one answer and that is we can only know about Him and how He created if He chose to tell us. That's the only way we can ever know. Has He? Yes, He has. In fact, He has revealed an entire 66 books of personal self-disclosure. And included in that revelation, in which God has revealed Himself, is very clear instruction about how He created the universe.
For example, in Psalm 19 the psalmist writes these familiar words, "The heavens are telling of the glory of God; and their expanse is declaring the work of His hands. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night reveals knowledge." In other words, day and night, everything in the universe speaks of a Creator God. "There is no speech, nor are there words; their voice is not heard." In other words, it's a silent revelation but it's a revelation that's unmistakable. Just look at the creation, look at the universe, look at the heavens and their expanse and everything that He's created in the day and in the night and it's clear. He says, "Their line has gone out through all the earth, and their utterances to the end of the world." Everyone on the globe can look out and see the creative evidence of a Creator God.
The psalmist goes on to talk about the fact that He has made the created universe “a tent for the sun, which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber; It rejoices as a strong man to run his course. Its rising is from one end of the heavens, and its circuit to the other end of them; and there is nothing hidden from its heat.” He picks that one body, that one celestial body out of the great expanse of the universe, that one celestial body that most dominates our life, the one that is closest to us in terms of a star, the one that has the greatest impact on us, the one that affects us, the sun, the unmistakable one. And he says about the sun that the sun runs its circuit from one end of heaven to the other so that nowhere in the created universe is its heat not felt. That's one of the things that science has discovered in modern times is that the sun is in orbit. We talk about the sun as the center of our solar system and everything orbiting around it, but you need to know that science has discovered that the sun itself has an orbit and this orbit goes from one end of the infinite space to the other. The sun is moving and dragging our entire solar system with it. It is not fixed any more than the things that revolve around it are fixed. So the psalmist says you can look up and you can look at the universe and look at the creation and it gives you loud testimony to the glory of God, to the majesty of His intelligence, to the massive character of His power to create all of this.
In Hebrews, chapter 1, going to the other end of the Bible, we read that God who “spoke long ago to the fathers in the prophets in many portions and in many ways, in these last days has spoken to us in His Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the world.” Hebrews 1 says that God made the world. Psalm 19 says He made the universe. Hebrews 1 says He made the world. The only way we're going to know that is if God tells us that. We are natural. God is supernatural. The natural cannot comprehend the supernatural. So on our own we can't find God, we can't discover God. We're locked in a time-space world. We can't crawl outside of it into eternity and comprehend what is incomprehensible. The only things we know about God are those things which He has told us, and that's why He gave us the Bible.
First Timothy 3, 2 Timothy 3, I'm sorry, says familiar, familiar words to us. "All Scripture is inspired by God," 2 Timothy 3:16. "All Scripture is inspired by God." God breathed it out, so that it is His Word. Second Peter 1, "Know this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture is a matter of one's own interpretation, for no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God." The only source of knowledge we have about God is the Bible and the external evidence of God in creation. We can know about God by creation; we cannot know God except through Scripture. We can know that He created, as we look at the creation around us. It's reasonable to assume there was a Creator. But we cannot know how He created unless He reveals it to us. So we can know some things through what theologians call natural revelation. But in order to really know God, and how He created, and how He operates, and how He saves, we have to have special revelation, which is the Bible, and the Bible alone.
Now with that in mind, go back to Genesis, chapter 1. When God began the Bible as His self-revelation, He began at the beginning. He began with an account of origins. He began by telling how He created the universe. Verse 1 of Genesis 1 says, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." And then He goes on into chapter 2 and verse 4 with a description of precisely and exactly how He created the universe. Now this is where Genesis begins. But it doesn't end there. Genesis is a book of origins. To show you how important Genesis is, let me tell you the range of origins that are found in the revelation of this one book.
Now the word genesis, by the way, means origins, beginnings. And in the book of Genesis you find many beginnings, many origins. First of all, and we just noted that, you find the origin of the universe. Genesis 1:1 is unique in all literature, all science, and all philosophy. Every other system of cosmogony explaining the universe, whether in ancient religious myths or modern scientific models, starts with eternal matter, or eternal energy in some form. Only the book of Genesis starts with eternal God. Genesis then is the book of the origin of the universe.
Secondly, in Genesis we find the origin of order and complexity. Man's universal observation of his world is that it is, it is an orderly world. It functions on fixed rules and it is profoundly complex. Order and complexity never arise spontaneously. They are always generated by a prior cause programmed to produce order and complexity simultaneously. And in the book of Genesis we meet God, who programmed order and complexity into His universe. We also find in Genesis the origin of the solar system. In the midst of this vast, limitless universe, God created a solar system. The Earth, as well as the sun, and moon, the planets, all the stars of heaven, were brought into existence by the Creator and we're told that He created them all.
Fourthly, the book of Genesis tells us about the origin of the atmosphere and the hydrosphere. The earth is uniquely equipped with a great body of liquid water and an extensive blanket of oxygen-nitrogen gaseous mixture, both of which are necessary for life. These have never shown up on any other celestial bodies or any other planets and are accounted for only by special creation by God to provide an environment for human life.
We also find in Genesis the origin of life, the marvels of the reproductive process. The almost infinite complexity programmed into the genetic system of plants and animals are inexplicable apart from special creation by a great, supernatural, powerful intelligence.
Sixthly and certainly centrally, Genesis tells us about the origin of man. Man is the most highly organized and complex entity in the universe. Man is the supreme illustration of order and complexity. He possesses not only innumerable, intricate, physical, chemical structures in the marvelous capacities of life and reproduction, but beyond that sort of physical part of man, there is a nature which can contemplate abstract entities of beauty, and love, and worship, and which is capable of understanding and thinking about its own meaning. It is self-awareness that singularly identifies and separates man from the rest of the created order. The true record of man's creation is given only in Genesis.
In Genesis you also find the origin of marriage. The remarkable universal and stable institution of marriage and the home, a monogamous, patriarchal, social culture is defined and described in Genesis as having been ordained by the Creator. And polygamy, and infanticide, and matriarchy, and promiscuity, and divorce, and abortion, and homosexuality, and all the corruptions developed later after the Fall, corrupting God's initial order.
You also find in the book of Genesis the origin of evil. The origin of physical and moral evil in the universe is explained in Genesis as a kind of temporary intrusion into God's perfect world, allowed by God as a concession to the principle of human freedom and responsibility and also to manifest Himself as Redeemer of sinners as well as Creator. You find, number nine, in the book of Genesis the origin of judgment on evil. All the forms of God's wrath are set in motion and illustrated in Genesis.
Also, number ten, in the book of Genesis you find the origin of salvation by grace through God's mercy and a substitute. That's all in Genesis and it starts to show as God is merciful to Adam and Eve and doesn't kill them, even though they deserved to die for their sin. And then God develops a system of animal sacrifice which pictures a substitute who will take the place of sinners, which is an act of mercy and grace on God's part. The plan of redemption leading to Christ is even referred to when the book of Genesis talks about the seed of the woman, that being the seed planted by God in Mary; the Messiah, the Savior.
It is in the book of Genesis that we find the origin of language. You know, one of the things that evolutionists gag on all the time, and I was reading it in Newsweek this week, is how you go from apes to man not just making some physical transition, but developing language. How you go from grunting and making unintelligible noises to human speech. Newsweek was trying to present an article to answer that and it was just bizarre and pointless and unbelievable. The gulf between the mindless, instinctive chattering of animals and the intelligent, abstract, symbolic communication of man is absolutely and completely unbridgeable by any evolutionary process. And the book of Genesis not only accounts for the origin of language in general—that is, God is a communicating God and He created someone in His own image who thereby could communicate—but Genesis also tells us not only how man was given by God the ability to communicate but how so many languages occurred from the judgment of God at the Tower of Babel. That's in Genesis, too.
You find in Genesis, number 12, the origin of government, the development of organized systems of human government for the maintenance of orderly social structures through systems of law and punishment. You find in Genesis the origin of culture. You find here such things as urbanization, the development of metallurgy, music, agriculture, animal husbandry, writing, education, navigation, textiles and ceramics. All of that starts in the book of Genesis. You find in Genesis the origin of nations and that is related, of course, again to the Tower of Babel, as God takes one race and scatters them all over the world. That is the only source you'll ever find of how we have so many different peoples scattered all over the earth with different languages and cultures.
You find in the book of Genesis the origin of religion. Both the true religion and false religions appear, first of all, in the book of Genesis; organized systems of worship and conduct. The origin of man's unique characteristic, of man's own consciousness and his ability to comprehend a God and to structure a system of response to the God he believes exists. That all appears in Genesis.
You find also significantly, number 16 in my list, the origin of the chosen people, Israel, who were the conduit for God's revelation to all of the world. It was Israel that was God's people, through whom He gave His revelation and through whom His saving covenant came, in Genesis 12, to Abraham.
Now when you talk about origins you're going to have to go back to Genesis. This is a book of origins. And let me put it again on the line where I put it last Lord's Day. Either you believe Genesis or you don't. It's that simple. Either you believe what Genesis says about all of those origins or you don't. And that would include either you believe the creation account in Genesis 1 and 2 or you don't. And if you don't believe the Genesis account, then I just, I have to tell you, you have no hope of coming to the truth. You're not going to discover it. Unconverted scientists aren't going to discover it. You either believe Genesis or you don't.
And what is really intolerable is to say you believe the Bible but not just the Genesis creation account. You believe Genesis, you believe about the origin of sin, you believe chapter 3 on maybe. Or maybe you're not sure about that because you don't really believe there was an actual Adam and an actual Eve. You've got a small problem because Jesus said, "As in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive," and there was a real Christ, so you can be sure there was a real Adam. But just in case you don't believe in a real Adam, maybe you don't sign on until chapter 6, maybe you just believe the Flood. Well, maybe you don't believe that, maybe you believe when the Tower of Babel is described later on in chapter 11, or maybe you don't believe that. Maybe you don't check in until Abraham shows up in chapter 12. Pretty ridiculous, isn't it? Who are you to be sitting in judgment on Scripture?
You know, I'm never going to get caught in the trap of trying to prove to you that Genesis is true by science. I'm just going to proclaim to you what Genesis says and let science bow its knee to that explanation. As you will see, it will do that. All you can know about how God created is what He said. That's all you can know. And if you don't believe what He said about creation, what kind of precedent have you established for the rest of the Bible?
And what about the end? Do you know how all of redemptive history ends? You know how the whole story of humanity ends? It ends, according to 2 Peter, when the Lord uncreates the universe; I like to use that word. The elements melt with fervent heat. There's some kind of a, literally an implosion, as the nuclear structure, the atomic structure of the universe, literally is totally turned against its existence, and takes it right back out of existence when He uncreates, when the elements melt as with a fervent heat in that kind of nuclear holocaust that ends human history.
And immediately after that it says in Revelation that He creates a—what? A new heaven and a new earth. Let me ask you this, do you believe He can do that? Or is that going to be another umpteen billion years of evolutionary process to get the new heaven and the new earth cranked up? Is it going to take billions of years to evolve the new heaven and the new earth, or do you really believe God might be able to do that just by fiat, just by making the statement and calling it into existence? If you believe that, then what's your problem in Genesis? If God can wipe the entire universe out in a split second, if He can dissolve the whole thing, if He can send it reeling in the time of the tribulation, and refurbish it during the time of the kingdom, and then totally uncreate it at the end of the thousand years, if He can do all of that, then I don't know why you have a problem with Him creating it all in six days. You see, the implications of rejecting the account of Genesis are profound.
And listen to me, because what I'm going to say is very important. It is not necessary to reject the six-day creation. It is not necessary. We have yielded up territory to evolution without cause. Science knows nothing. Science proves nothing that contradicts a six-day creation, nothing. In fact science, as it keeps advancing, makes its own claims to evolution ridiculous, more ridiculous all the time. You know—and having a perspective on this is very important—we've caved in to the scientists too long and it's time to stop. If you want to do some reading on this, get Philip Johnson's book Darwin on Trial; it just devastates the scientific perspectives. Christian people literally accepting the scientific descriptions of origins, and come out of an evolutionary bias as if somehow they've been proven, and somehow the Bible is going to have to give at that point, because a six-day creation is not scientifically possible; that is just not true. But the results are staggering.
Master's College, for example, is a member of the Christian College Coalition. It's a coalition of Christian colleges across America, of which there are about 110 colleges. Of the 110 Christian colleges in the coalition, six that we know of believe in the creation account in Genesis; six out of 110 Christian colleges. That's a small, small fraction. And most Christian leaders and most Christian educators have allowed the teachings of evolution to one degree or another to be added to the Bible; they sort of stuff evolution in between the verses in Genesis. Most Christian leaders have accepted the fact that the universe is billions of years old.
Yet clearly, from the words of Scripture, God created the universe in six literal days. And Christian leaders can't deny that that's what it says because that's what it says. You can translate it any way you want, it all comes out. The word yom means day and you have six of them. But they believe somehow that scientists have proved that the age of the earth must be billions and billions and billions of years old. So they believe you've got to go back to Genesis and fix it. And in so doing they have allowed the authority of the Bible to be undermined, right? It's serious stuff. If the words of the Bible means six days, and you conclude, but so-called science says that's not true, then science is right and the Bible is wrong. Now if you can't trust the words of Genesis, when do you start trusting the Bible? It's a sad indictment of the church, isn't it? And the humanists even use the compromising of the Christian leaders to further their cause to undermine Christianity. And what we have is a kind of Christianity today that loses its absolutes in Genesis 1. That's sad.
Christian leaders might not sign on, of course, to humanistic evolution. They would say, "Yes, there's a God and somehow God's involved in the evolutionary process." That's called theistic evolution, sometimes called progressive creationism, a term developed by Russell Mixter in the science department of Wheaton College a number of years ago. But they would say, "No, there is a God and God is, sort of injects Himself at points at theistic evolution." Says, "God launched it and started it." Progressive creationism says, "He jumps in along the way but it still took millions and millions and billions of years for it to happen." These people call themselves believers in God. They probably would say they believe the Scripture. But they don't want to allow for a six-day creation. This poses immense problems, immense problems.
Here's one of them, I'm not going to give you all, but here's one, just strikes me as a serious problem. If man is created at the end of the evolutionary process, whether it's a naturalistic evolutionary process, or it's a theistic evolutionary process launched by God, which some Christians think they have to affirm in order to pay homage to science, or if it's a progressive creationist view where God injects Himself along the way, the problem you've got is evolution is a process—listen carefully—evolution is a process by nature of death. It's a process known as the survival of—what?—the fittest. It's a process of violence. It's a process of bloodshed. It's a process of suffering. It's a process of disease. It's a process of death as the order rises higher and higher and higher until it gets to man.
Now here's a serious problem. You don't have man until billions of years and when man appears he is perfect and he is sinless and there's no such thing as death. Death doesn't even come into the picture until man does—what?—sins. How can you have death before the Fall? You don't even have a cursed earth. The whole of the Genesis record is stood on its head. If there's been all kinds of death in this billions of years of evolutionary processing, then what did sin do to the world that hadn't already been done? And how could God, who looked over this whole evolutionary deal when it finally reached its completion in man and said He saw it and He looked at it and He said it is good? How could God say that? You see then, the sin of Adam and the curse of death is meaningless, because there's been death for millennia and for billions of years; just convolutes all of the biblical record. Because what you have in Genesis is a perfect world until man is confronted by the serpent, and falls into sin, and God curses the universe and then comes death, and disease, and suffering, and violence, and bloodshed, and not before. Evolution makes no sense in that perspective.
You know, I, Christians will get out there, you know, and they'll say, "Boy, we're against abortion, and we're against homosexuality, and we're against Jack Kevorkian because he's murdering people, and we're against euthanasia, and we're against genocide and, you know, we're against the moral evils of our society, etc., etc., etc.” Why are we against those things? Can you tell me why? Why are we against those things? Give me one reason. Here it is, because they're forbidden in Scripture. Is that not true? The only reason we're against abortion is because God's against it. How do we know that? Because it's in the Word of God. The reason we're against homosexuality, adultery, etc., etc., is because of the Bible. You see, we stand on the Scripture. But the problem is we don't want to stand on the Scripture in Genesis. So we equivocate on whether or not the Bible is an authority at all. What do you think the watching world thinks about our commitment to Scripture? Pretty selective, isn't it? And again, I say such capitulation to evolution is completely unnecessary. Nothing requires evolution. In fact, evolution cannot happen. It can't happen.
Let me tell you why. Now again I want to give a disclaimer. I'm not a scientist and I've got to tell you, I work really hard to try to understand this stuff. I'm going to do my best to make it comprehensible to you. I read a couple of books by a man named Dr. A. E. Wilder-Smith, who has a whole long list of letters after his name. He's a scientist. Now, just to tell you how far I've gone in this reading, I read his book from cover to cover called, The Scientific Alternative to Neo-Darwinian Evolutionary Theory. Now this is a very technical book and I don't recommend that you go try to find it because you'll not really enjoy reading it. You just have to kind of do it, just an exercise that you're sort of forced to do if you're going to do what I'm going to do. But let me distill it to you, the thesis of the book. A. E. Wilder-Smith in this book demonstrates the absurdity of evolution on the basis of one great reality and that one great reality is the encoded information in the DNA of living organisms. Did you get that? Every living organism has in it DNA. DNA is genetic material and on that genetic material in every living thing is a code and that is an operative code. And that living organism, whether you're talking about a cell or whether you're talking about a large man and everything in between, all of that operation of every living thing is dependent on that encoded information. And listen to this, every different living thing has a completely different code.
Darwin had no clue about that. There was no genetic study when he wrote his Origin of Species. He didn't know anything about DNA. He didn't know anything about chromosomes. He didn't know anything about genetics. It didn't exist as a science. He was just describing what he thought he was seeing. It was all according to appearance and nothing more. If Darwin had been alive today and try to sell his deal today, it never would fly; he wouldn't even believe it. He barely believed his own view. He certainly wouldn't have believed it in a day like ours when we have this incredible ability to go with electron microscope into the DNA and see the coded information in living organisms. The entire realm of genetics, Wilder-Smith points out, is all about information, storage and retrieval; was totally unknown to Darwin. Every living thing, if you're talking about before these flowers were cut, they were living things, this one is blue, this one is pink, and this one is orange, etc., because there's information, there's information in the DNA in the genetics that causes that to happen. That's a code of information in every living thing.
It has been discovered in recent years that the genetic programs of say, higher biological organisms, consist of about one thousand million bits of information. One thousand million bits of information in one living organism; and that information that is encoded in that living organism determines the nature, the growth, the development and the death of billions of cells in that living organism. Now who, frankly, in his right mind could ever believe that such supremely complex machines, which is what living organisms are, storing and retrieving the precise information to service a thousand million cells, diagnose defects, and repair them, and reproduce, all developed at random by chance out of nothing? It's absolutely idiotic.
The big issue, the issue that is bringing down evolution, is the study of the origin of information; it's called information theory. Where did the information come from? Where did the code come from? A monkey has a monkey code, and the DNA, and the chromosomes, and the genetics just keep making the monkey behave like a monkey. There's no code in there to turn the monkey into a man. There's no such thing as jumping out of your species.
Well they got all excited in science. Wilder-Smith talks about this, as do some other writers I read, when they got into polymers and they were looking at some things, saying, "Well, maybe those polymers are the transitional things, they look a little unusual, they're a little out of the normal. Maybe they were the transitions." And the longer they studied those, the more they realized those were just elements of the encoded information doing repair work because there was some reason to repair. That's why it was a little unusual because it was repairing damage to that living organism. And after all, polymers weren't transitional forms at all; they were just encoded information in the DNA that you didn't see until there was a need to repair something. It's incredible.
Where did this genetic information come from? Where did it come from? It couldn't evolve out of nowhere. It's too precise. Wilder-Smith says this, "Darwin's so-called gradualism postulated, in the last analysis, all forms of biology were derived from a single, simple cell which by an unbroken series of small, gradualistic changes, gave rise to an unbroken chain of steps from the original cell up to man himself, and biology was strictly continuous." This is just unbelievable. And only a man in Darwin's time who didn't know genetics would ever come up with such a statement, because if a one-celled thing, listen to this, developed into a man, then all the encoded information necessary to run that one-cell thing and to run everything from then on all the way up, including the man, had to be in the original cell. And if it wasn't in the original cell, then where did it come from? That's the question. It's ridiculous. They know that all of the encoded information to run every living thing in the universe is not contained in a one-celled amoeba. What is contained in a one-celled amoeba is the code for a one-celled amoeba.
Wilder-Smith goes on and says, "There was one great aspect of reality about which Darwin, and indeed everyone of his epic, knew nothing. I'm referring to the modern science of information theory; for if a primeval kind of amoeba is to develop up to a primate, that primeval cell will have to gather all sorts of new information on how to make kidneys, livers, four-chamber hearts, cerebra and cerebella." It's just going to have to, as this one-celled thing goes, it's just going to have to collect information; from where?
If the law of entropy is true, and it is—that matter is breaking down, things are getting worse—how can things be getting more complex and more ordered simultaneously? Wilder-Smith says, "For the synthesis of such reduced entropy systems, as for example a primate brain, requires all kinds of solid, actual information, which neither the matter of which the primeval amoeba consisted, nor the intact amoeba cell contained. Similarly, inorganic matter will have to assemble huge numbers of bits of holistic information before it can synthesize an amoeba."
So he says whatever it was that started the first amoeba, whatever inanimate thing started the first amoeba, would have to have collected information to make that happen. I'll give you an illustration; maybe help you a little bit. Have you been reading about the fact they've cloned rabbits and then they cloned sheep? You say, "Does this, is this an evolutionary triumph?" No, you know what this proves? This proves that it takes an outside intelligence to do this. You can have a sheep and put him in a pen and say, "Um...mutate!" You can put, you can put the sheep in there and say, you know, you can, "Please, have a clone." But that sheep's not going to have a cloned sheep unless an intelligence, a higher intelligence, in this case a human brain, understanding genetics, works from the outside to produce that. That is a classic illustration of why evolution can't happen. It's classic. Whenever we want to create something that is in the least sense out of the natural order, it takes an intelligent human brain to invade that level of life. It has to come from the outside because the information isn't in the code system.
That's exactly how God operates. You can't have evolution. First Corinthians 15 says “there's a flesh of animals and there's...a flesh of birds,” and “there's a flesh of man,” and that's how it is. And it's all determined by the genetic code, and they don't crisscross and jump over those bounds.
Wilder-Smith further writes, "Assuming that original primeval form of life was kind of an amoeba, a kind of amoeba, where did it obtain the almost infinite number of bits of information required to be stored in its DNA storage and retrieval system? In order to transform the amoeba-type of cell to a mammal, a primate, an octopus, or a bee, new bits of holistic information are required. Neither the primeval amoeba-type of cell nor the inorganic matter of which it is constructed contains such highly specialized, holistic information, which is necessary to transform from the alleged amoeba into say, an anthropoid ape. [It is legitimate to assume that such incredible amounts of information arose.] Is it legitimate to assume that such incredible amounts of information arose spontaneously, out of thin air, by pure chance?" Absolutely ridiculous.
I mentioned this morning, went down to the Sonoran Desert this week to spend a little time with my dad and my sister, decided to cart us out to the desert there and to go out with some naturalists and poke around under rocks and look at cactus and things like that. And I'm always kind of fascinated by the creation of God and I've seen the desert a lot in my life because I've always lived in the West, or most always. And, but I was introduced to some things that were really amazing by these naturalists. You know, they turned over a rock and out came a little gecko and they gave me the whole ecology of how they operate. And out from another rock with a little pair of tweezers came a scorpion and I, I learned more about a scorpion than I ever cared to know or could use in about five minutes. But I did learn one thing: That they survive by cannibalizing other scorpions, and that's how they survive. And it talked about how their sting operates and how; they talked about all the details. Then we went over to see a saguaro cactus. And a saguaro cactus, there's a whole ecology in one of those things that's incredible. They think they live 800 years. They don't know for sure because no botanist lives long enough to see one live and then die. So, you know, it's sort of a guess. But they go through these incredible, this thing is incredible. Its needles crisscross like this because there's high winds in that, there, the only place in the world it grows in the Sonoran Desert. And the needles that grow out of them, as they do in cacti, crisscross each other, and that defuses the wind so it doesn't blow them over, doesn't snap them off. It's a marvelous ecology. There's legend, too, in fact one of the legends. You ever see a saguaro cactus? Some of the arms go up and like this. And they say the main stem of a saguaro cactus is representative of the man and the other branches are representative of his wives. And if they grow upward, he had a very ordered life and dutiful wives, but if they go all directions, the poor guy had a really tough time. Well, I mean that's legend. But apart from the legend, as they began to define the ecology of this thing, the complexity of this thing, how it retains water and how it creates these ribs, how it produces an incredibly gorgeous flower at the peak of each branch once a year, and it dies burned in the sun. They took us over to a paloverde tree, the tree with the smallest leaves of any tree on the face of the earth. And it desperately needs water, and they have found them, get this, with a one main root 300 feet below the surface of the ground, though the tree is only six feet high. Amazing ecology, amazing complexity in all these forms of life.
And they were going through all of this, and all this. Then I jumped in and said, "May I say something?" And I gave them this speech basically that I'm giving you, you know, that every one of these living organisms in the universe has its own code. How did it get that code? Where did it come from? It had to come from a divine mind who made everything. Listen to this, when God created, He created everything and encoded everything. Just get a grip on the vastness of His intelligence, staggering, staggering. Everything demonstrates the imprint of God.
And then Wilder-Smith in his books, book, likes to talk about a guy named Von Neumann, Von Neumann actually, German scientist. Von Neumann defined these living machines (machine referring to an organism that's alive), and he said, the amazing thing about living organisms, get this, is they are self-producing, self-sustaining and self-repairing. That is what's known as a Von Neumann machine, self-producing, self, or self-reproducing, self-sustaining, and self-repairing. And he points out in his book that we've never been able to build a machine like that.
Do you know any machine like that? Do you know any computer that has little computers? Do you know a computer that sustains its own life and repairs itself? How about a car? Do you know a car that does that? Von Neumann pointed out if we could make a machine complex enough to reproduce itself and sustain itself it would always be in disrepair because of its complexity. So it couldn't keep up with the self-repairing responsibility. We've never created a machine like that, yet every single living organism is just that: self-producing, self-sustaining, self-repairing. Is that incredible? This is the mind of God. Don't tell me this is chance. Blind devotion to chance is an act of defiance against reason, and more importantly against revelation, and more importantly against God Himself.
Douglas Kelley says, at the very least one can note that the whole edifice of evolutionary theory is increasingly seen as a faith rather than objective, empirical science and its foundations are shaky, end quote.
According to Michael Denton—he's written a book called A Theory in Crisis—he says, "There can be no doubt that after a century of intensive efforts, biologists have failed to validate it in any significance sense. The fact remains that nature has not been reduced to the continuum that Darwinian model demands, nor has the credibility of chance as the creative agency of life been secured." In fact—that's end quote—in fact, it's just the opposite. The more science learns about astonishing complexity, the more science learns about harmony, the more science learns about design, the more science learns about the intelligence of the universe, the more science must confess there has to be an intelligent creator.
And again Douglas Kelley says, "Now in the nature of the case, we are dealing here with a unique situation, the bringing into being of the space-time universe by a transcendent source who according to the Scriptures [Listen to this.], spoke it into existence out of nothing but the word of His own power." Hmm, what power, what complexity, what order, what intelligence! You know, reasonable science, reasonable science should suggest that an intelligent and powerful supernatural creator had to be out there and still is. But although science should recognize that, because it's the only reasonable explanation, to know who He is and to know how He created, science must bow its knee to the Scripture and the God of Scripture.
Our sole source of knowledge is the Bible, the Bible. Evolution is an act of faith, irrational faith. Creation is an act of faith, revelational faith. I don't know about you, but I believe the Bible and I believe the Word of God. Evolution is a twentieth-century religious sect that denies reason and denies revelation. Creation is the worship of the true God in perfect accord with reason and revelation. So I go back to where I've started. Either you believe in an eternal God or you believe in eternal matter, or eternal energy, or eternal amoeba; nothing in between, nothing in between. You are either a materialist who believes in the eternality of matter, or you are a supernaturalist who believes in the eternality of God. That's the only two choices there are.
What happens to a world that rejects the Creator and replaces Him with material? What happens to a world that replaces the Creator God with faceless time, chance, matter, energy? What happens? William Provine of Cornell University stated it clearly, quote: "The implications of modern science are clearly inconsistent with most religious traditions. No inherent [Listen to this] moral or ethical laws exist, nor are there absolute guiding principles for human society. The universe cares nothing for us and we have no ultimate meaning in life," end quote. That's right. If we're just the result of chance, nothing matters. There is no moral standard, there is no ethical standard; all you're left with is tragedy and despair. If this universe is the result of impersonal forces, if this universe is faceless, if it's pitch dark out there because nobody's there, that makes a tremendous difference in my life. But if there is a Creator and if that Creator showed His face in human form in Jesus, and if He is a loving, saving, blessing God who stands behind this creation, that makes all the difference in my life.
And you know, the Bible, I'm so glad the Bible doesn't start like this, "I know you guys are going to find this hard to believe but in the beginning God." It doesn't do that. It just says, "In the beginning God..." There has to be something in the beginning. The evolutionist would say, "In the beginning amoeba, in the beginning matter, in the beginning energy." The Bible says, "In the beginning God..." And in John 1, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God... All things were made by Him, and [without Him, this says it], without Him was not anything made that was made." That's another way of saying nothing evolved. Hebrews 11:3, "By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the Word of God," not by evolution. "The worlds were framed by the Word of God." This is repeating: It's in Genesis, it's in John, it's in Hebrews. And as I said at the beginning, either you believe it or you don't.
We can conclude then that evolution is a false religion. And why in the world would we want to bring it into the Bible? Why would we want to borrow from the false religion of evolution and impose it upon the straightforward account of Genesis? For what? That's an assault on the revelation of God. The Bible tells us how energy got here, it came from God. It tells us how matter got here, it came from God. It tells us how the heavens and the earth were formed, God did it. That's all we need to know. Nothing could be more logical than that. An intelligent Creator God made it. And here come the evolutionists with all their lies, and their disregard of Genesis, and why in the world do we buy into that and try to impose that on the Scripture?
Evolution is a false religion. Here are the principles it’s based on, just to give you another perspective:
One, evolution is pure science. That's what the evolutionists would like you to believe. It's pure science, it's a closed system founded on reality, not on the illusion of a God.
And secondly the evolutionists would say that evolution is equal to rationality because it excludes miracles and the supernatural. But, friends, there comes a point in which the supernatural is the only rational thing.
Thirdly—and this has been adapted from Philip Johnson's wonderful book, Reason in the Balance—thirdly, evolution is liberating because it eliminates God and His commands, which restrict free sexual behavior.
Fourthly, the evolutionist says his religion is democratic because every man is his own source of moral judgment, since there is no God, no moral judge, no law.
Fifthly, evolution is broad because it allows a belief in God, just not the biblical God.
That's the religion. You want to know what the tenets are of the religion of evolution?
One, evolution is pure science, they say, it's a closed system founded on reality not the illusion of a God.
Two, it is equal to rationality because it excludes irrational miracles and supernatural interference.
Three, evolution is liberating because it eliminates God and His commands which restrict free sexual behavior. And, folks, I want to tell you, that's what drives the whole thing. They love their sin.
Fourth, evolution, they say, is democratic because every man can be his own source of moral judgment.
And fifth, evolution is broad because it allows belief in God, whatever you want Him to be except the God of the Bible.
Amazing, isn't it? People fighting reason, embracing absurdity, to avoid accountability to the eternal judge.
Let me close tonight by taking you over to Romans 1. And this is just a pertinent statement from God that addresses those who reject Him. Romans 1 verse 18:
"For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men [Listen to this.] who suppress the truth...because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them. For since the creation of the world, His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without [What?] excuse. For even though they knew God, they didn't honor Him as God or give thanks,...they became futile in their speculations,...their foolish heart was darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man...birds...four-footed animals and crawling creatures."
And it all starts in verse 18. The wrath of God is unleashed on these people who replace the supernatural with the natural, who replaced God with creatures. This is God's judgment on them. Now two weeks from tonight, next week is a baptism on Easter Sunday, but two weeks from tonight I want to go back and start in Romans 1 because I want to unfold this passage to you a little bit. Then we'll go to a number of passages in the New Testament that show you why you have to have a creationist view or you impact negatively the gospel, okay? So, that will be two weeks from tonight. Let's pray.
Our Father, this is so important for us to have our faith again encouraged. We don't need to be caving in to the supposed wisdom of the world, those who know You not. Give us a firm, and resolute, strong confidence that Your Word is true, that every Word of God is pure, as Scripture says, that all Scripture is given by inspiration of God, that no Scripture comes by private interpretation, but holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit. Remind us that You created the world in the way that You said, that there wasn't anything in this universe created that You didn't create. By You the worlds were framed. Father, help us to know You as the Creator, to know that the worlds were framed by Your Word and You did it so marvelously and magnificently in six days, as it's outlined in the book of Genesis. Strengthen our faith in the God who created, the God who redeems sinners. We are overwhelmed at Your greatness, the vastness of Your intelligence, and Your power, and the sweetness of Your mercy toward us, and we thank You for it in our Savior's name. And everybody said, amen.
