Welcome to the preaching ministry of Tri-City Baptist Church in Chandler, Arizona. Our desire is that God would be magnified through the preaching of His Word, and that Christians will be challenged, strengthened, and edified in their personal walk with Christ. Good morning, good morning. I want to thank you for the wonderful invitation that you gave, not just to myself, but to the Institute for Creation Research yesterday and all the things we're able to do. What a blessing it is. And you are blessed to have a pastor who knows the importance of the doctrine of creation. It is the battle of the day. There is no doubt about it. It's the battle of the day. And for a pastor to love you enough to make sure that you get the education and training on this is a rare thing. It's a rare thing. So thank you, pastor. Where'd he go? Hey, hey, the rapture, and we're all left behind. Oh, man, alive. There you are. Okay. Phew, scared me there for a second. So thank you, pastor. That was pretty quiet right off of there on that. What other traps do you have going on here? My good wife is out there. She's at the book table. Her name is June and she's manning it this morning. So if you get out there and you happen to want to get one of the resources, that'll be my wife who will be attending to you. And that is very important today. So I sense I sense, even before I get into my message, that this is a church that is very oriented towards evangelism. Is that true? You want to see people come to faith in Christ. So let me tell you how I got here, how I got here to this position, because unlike many of you and like those delightful little kids who just were dismissed, I did not grow up going to church. In fact, I didn't grow up in a Christian home at all. And I had wonderful parents, wonderful, in many, many ways. I'm very thankful for them. My mom passed away five years ago. My dad's still alive. But they never took me to church, never gave any religious instruction, never told me about the Lord Jesus Christ. And I never went to church. And when I said I never went to church, I wasn't even like those people who went on Easter or who went on Christmas. I never Went to church. I believed in God. I knew there was a God. But never had any instruction in all of those things. And now looking back, I can see the providence. The providence of God because He changed my life with a change in a school policy. From eighth grade until the time I was in my last semester of my senior year of high school, I was a junkie. Not a drug junkie, but I was a junkie to wood shop. I was a wood shop junkie. And I tell you, I took it all the time, even when I couldn't get credit for it. And eventually, when I wasn't able to take it for class, I was going to lunch. and built projects every day over lunch, from eighth grade until senior year of high school. And then the school board said, unless you were actually enrolled in woodshop, you couldn't use the tools. So at the last semester of my senior year, I had to do something I hadn't done in five years almost, and that was go to lunch. on that. So, I had to start to go to lunch. So, I still remembered how you did it. You got in line and you picked up, what, one of those trays and you went through and they plopped something in one of the cubicles, they plopped something in the other. I remember looking down thinking, boy, I haven't really been missing much here these days on that. But I got my tray and we had a rather large high school. We had an eating area probably as big as this this auditorium and there were tables all over. So I had my tray and I'm a young man and I look out over the students and what am I looking for? Okay, I gave you a clue. I have my tray. I'm a young man. And what am I looking for? I'm looking for a girl. There you go. Come on, it hasn't been that long, has it? No, I'm looking for a girl because we all are, you know? So I'm looking for a girl. And so I look over all the tables and I spy a gal and I thought, she looks good. So I go over and I sat down and I put my tray down. And I began to talk with her and joke with her and tease her, talk and joke and tease, and that's called what? Flirting, flirting, yeah. There it is, it's called flirting. And I'm a pretty good flirter on that. And gals, you probably already have figured this out, but guys don't flirt, guys always flirt for a purpose. there's always a goal to the end of our flirting. We don't invest our flirting time for nothing. And so, after several days of flirting, we want, whatever we ask you, we want the answer to be yes. Yes. And so, I told you, I'm a pretty good flirter. So, after about four or five days of flirting with this gal, I called her up and I said, hey, I'm going to date myself here a little bit. Would you like to go roller skating with me on Friday night? Now, young people today, roller skates were shoes with wheels on them back then, and you could go around, and the key thing to that was you got to hold hands. Well, the gal I had been flirting with, unbeknownst to me, had just become a Christian only about six months before my flirting episode. And her Sunday school teacher had told her that she should only date who? Christian guys. But she's a new Christian. She doesn't know how to figure all this out. So she said, well, I'll go roller skating with you if you come to church with me on Sunday?" She thought if I said yes, that's because I was a Christian. I said yes, because I thought, wow, guaranteed second date, you know, Friday night, Sunday, and I knew they didn't hurt you in church or anything, so I said, sure, sure, I'll go to church with you on Sunday. And I went to church with her, and she went to a church called the Berean Fundamental Church. I was like, what in the world? I mean, I'd heard of, like, Protestants and Catholics. What's this Berean Fundamental Church? But they were a Bible-believing, Bible-teaching church, and I heard the gospel for the first time in my life. And it went in one ear and out the other on that, just boochooom there. But I still liked her, so I called her up again, and I said, hey, would you like to have pizza with me on Friday night? And she said, I'll have pizza if you come to church with me again on Sunday. I thought, wow, these are the easiest dates I have ever had on that. What a good deal. So we went out and we had pizza Friday night and had a really nice time. And I got in the car and I drove home and parked in front of her house and I turned the car off and she looked at me real serious and I looked at her and she looked at me And she said, Randy, there's something I need to tell you. And I thought, ah, best date she's ever had. Best guy she's ever dated. Something with best in the sentence was gonna come out. And she said, Randy, you're going to hell. And I said, what? Where did this come from? You know, I've had a bad date before, but it never merited hell. And I said, well, what do you mean by that? And she said, well, Randy, you're a sinner. And I looked at her, I said, I'm not a sinner. Sinners are in prison. And she said, no, you're a sinner. And then the defense came in. I said, no, I'm not a sinner because I obey my parents. I obey the law. I obey my teacher. I don't do drugs, all this other kind of stuff. The key word that was coming out of my mouth was what? I, I, I. And she said, well, you may be a good person compared to other people. And then she hit me with this low blow. She said, but do you have the righteousness of Christ? What? Righteousness of Christ? Who's got the righteousness of Christ but Christ? And she said, I do. Oh, this is really bad. You've got the righteousness of Christ. I'm a sinner. I bought the pizza. I mean, how does all this work out here? And then she began to share the gospel with me again about this, that I was a sinner. And this flogging happened every Friday night without fail. Sinner does that. Well, I still liked her. I don't know why. But anyway, and I went to church with her and after several months, you know, the sin part began to really sink in, really, really sink in. And then for high school graduation, guess what she bought me? She bought me a Bible. And she even unwrapped and said, smells like leather. And she had verses highlighted in the Bible that I should read and think about and study them. And one of them said, for all have sinned. for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God." And by this part, the sin was sinking in. The sin was sinking in. I began to realize, you know, I say a lot of things. I look at a lot of things. I do a lot of things that are really sinful. And the fact that God could see everything, even my thoughts, was there. So, the fact that I was a sinner was true. I am a sinner. I am a sinner. And then a few pages over, she had another verse highlighted. It said, for the wages of sin is death. death, for the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord." And I could see the sin, I could see the death, I could see the punishment, but the gift part I was really struggling with, because in my mind there was still this idea that I had to do something, do something, do something to merit God's favor, that there was some effort that I could do to impress him or win him over. And I really had been struggling with this whole idea of gift. How could this gift be? How did this gift even work? And then she had another verse highlighted. It said, For God made him, speaking of the Lord Jesus Christ, to be sin for us who knew no sin, in order that we might be made the righteousness of God in him. Wow, this is how that works. There was an exchange. There's an exchange. My sin to Christ paid the penalty on the cross, and that's how it works. His righteousness, the righteousness of Christ to me. To me. Another verse was highlighted, for whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. And another verse was highlighted by the Lord Jesus Christ himself, who said, truly, truly, I say unto you, he that hears my words and believes on him that sent me has everlasting life and will not come into condemnation, but has passed from death unto life. And I wanted that life. I wanted that life. And one evening in my living room, I got down on my knees and I said, Lord, I am a sinner and I am deserving of your punishment. But I believe that you died for me. Please forgive me of my sins. Come into my life and be my Lord and Savior. And I kid you not, I got up from my knees and I was changed. I was literally born again, born again from that point on, all because a young gal had the courage and the boldness to tell me what I needed to hear. what I needed to hear, and that I was a sinner, and that I was going to hell. So that's how I got here today, because of that one bold person. So my encouragement to you is this, particularly young people, old people, be bold in your witness. Be bold. Tell people what they need to hear. Share with them the gospel. Give them Bibles. Make sure that they hear the word of God. Now I know at least half the people in this room, probably all the gals, are wondering whatever happened to that gal? Whatever happened to her, Miss Bold, on that? Well, I continued to date her for another year, and I asked her after about a year, would you marry me? And she said, I told you I'm a good flirter. She said, yes, yes, of course she said yes. And she is out there in the book table right now. And we just celebrated our 45th wedding anniversary. So praise the Lord for that. Amen. Well, that's how I got here today, and there's another long testimony of how I got into creation ministry. But what I would like to do to this morning is share with you three important questions. I did a debate in Southern California several years ago, moderated by a man named Sean McDowell, And he had three questions that he wanted the debaters to debate. Myself, a representative from another group called Reasons to Believe, and a representative from another group called BioLogos, BioLogos, Catherine Applegate. And we debated these three questions. Question number one. Question number one was this. How do you understand and interpret Genesis 1 and 2? How do you understand and interpret Genesis 1 and 2? Do you know what? You may be asked that question yourself someday. Someone may come up to you and say, well, how do you understand and interpret Genesis 1 and 2? Well, we'll discuss that today. Question number two is this, kind of modernish. What is your take? What is your take on Darwinian evolution? That's like question 2a. What is your take on Darwinian evolution? And 2b was, and its compatibility with Christian faith. What is your take on Darwinian evolution and its compatibility with Christian faith? And then question number three was, are you open to the natural world pointing to design? Are you open to the natural world pointing to design? Those are good questions. Someone may come up to you, are you open to the natural world pointing to design? What's your take on Darwinian evolution? Do you think it's compatible with Christian faith? So we're going to answer those questions today. But since I'm in California and I want to be a little countercultural, I'm going to start with question number three first. Question number three. So we have, it's there, a whiteboard. and we are going to do a whiteboard talk. See? It moves. There's an eraser. There's a marker. There's all those things. And I have the ability to write really fast on the whiteboard. So, question number three. Boom! Are you open to the natural world pointing to design? Are you open to the natural world pointing to design? And here was my answer to that. Of course. Yes. Period. I could have put yes exclamation mark. Yes, the workmanship seen in living things is best explained by intelligent design. Now those of you who are here yesterday, you know why I picked the word workmanship. Because when you look at living creatures, you see incredible workmanship. And in the book of Romans, chapter 1, verse 20, Paul is laying out the fact that everybody can know there is a God. And he says, invisible things of him, the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen being understood by the things that are made. by the things that are made. And the Greek word translated made there is used only one other time in the New Testament, in Ephesians chapter two, verse 10, where it says, we are his workmanship. created in Christ Jesus. Now that makes a lot of sense. When you look at creatures, you see incredible workmanship. You see handiwork. You see the work of his hands. You see something that is highly, highly engineered. So I'm gonna give some evidence for why I think the workmanship is best explained by intelligent design. And I'm going to look at how organisms adapt. And I'm going to use a couple of examples for everybody in the audience. There was about 600 people. who were there in the crowd, and they were listening to this. And so I asked them the question, how might creatures adapt to an intense challenge, like being a sighted fish, like you see there, the ones with the eyes, that somehow gets swept into a cave and they are now trapped in a world of darkness in a completely different environment, and they suddenly morph from those sighted pigmented fish to those blind hypopigmented fish. How in the world could they even adjust? And I also know that these blind cave fish are an icon of evolution. And evolutionists have told people it takes millions of years for that to happen. But then I pointed to the fact that when I look at scientific papers today, I don't see the words millions of years for organisms to adapt. In fact, these are the words that I'm reading in scientific papers. Adaptation is regulated, not random, regulated. It's not slow, but rapid. It's repeatable. Sometimes it's even reversible. And the responses to the challenges are so targeted to solve that environmental challenge that they're even predictable. Predictable. Now, these words that you see up there don't sound like a random process. They sound like something that is highly, highly engineered. Highly engineered. And so let's explain on how those things happen. In fact, there's actually many different types of cave fish. We know that there's at least 280 different species of cave fish. All different kinds of fish when they get trapped into a cave. Lose their pigmentation, they go blind. And you can see the sided ones at the top and then at the bottom, that's what they look like after they've morphed and they've gone blind. And it doesn't take millions and millions of years. In fact, this paper was published, and since I'm doing a scientific debate, I'm putting the scientific papers up there on the screen, so everybody can see where I'm coming from. This scientific paper, actually published in the leading scientific journal of the United States, demonstrated in 2013 that those fish can go from sighted and pigmented, as you see there at the top on the right-hand side, to hypopigmented and blind in one generation. One generation. Now, when I said that, there was this audible gasp from the audience. It's like, what? I never heard that. Nobody ever told me that. I mean, that sounds like that could be something that was highly, highly engineered. So down goes one of their icons of evolution. Here's another icon of evolution. These finches. These finches have been named, whose finches? Darwin's finches. Darwin's finches and you see all their different sizes of the beaks and we're told that those beaks change very very slowly over a long period of time. based on the different environmental conditions. As they struggle to survive, and sometimes when the seeds are big and hard in dry conditions, the big beaks prevail. And when they're small and tender in rainy conditions, the small beaks prevail. But this paper came out just a few years ago that did a study on two different populations of finches, urban finches and rural finches. And they found that these beaks could change in as little as two generations. The urban finches have moved in. They're close to cities, and they're living close to people, and their diet has changed to living off human trash food, where people throw their food out, and the birds start feeding on that. The rural finches are still living out in the wild, and they're eating traditional finch food. And they found that the beaks of the urban finches could change in two years, and there wasn't any genetic change involved. As it says there on the lower right-hand side of the screen, Growing evidence suggests that epigenetic mechanisms may be involved in what kind of adaptation? Rapid adaptation to new environments. That means the genes didn't change, but how the genes were regulated during development when they're developing in that little egg changed the size of their beak very, very rapidly, very quickly in all of that. Not only did their beak change, but their bodies changed. They had all kinds of other changes which made them suitable for living closer to people, and it happened rapidly. Icon of evolution number two, down the drain. Well, here's another icon. Everybody has seen this in your biology textbook, the moths, the peppered moths. You had all of those white moths, and they were living in England, and then the people in England started burning all the coal, putting coal soot all over their buildings, turning their buildings and their trees black, and the white moths supposedly stuck out like a sore thumb, and the birds came and ate them, and it was survival of the fittest, and the black moths were able to survive. And here it is, evolution in action. Wrong again. Wrong again. This paper was published just a few years ago in the leading scientific journal of the world, Nature, that says the industrial melanism, that's the ability to turn dark there, and the British peppered moss is a transposable element. Now, what in the world is that? Well, let me tell you what that is. This is fascinating. Everybody thinks you're born with the same DNA that you've had all your life. Totally wrong. Your DNA is actually changeable in real time. in real time. Little machines can go through and they can actually change it so that you can express different traits in real time that you need. And in this particular case, a piece of DNA can be cut out and it can be transposed and relocated and pasted in on the chromosome in a different spot. And over 96% of the moths that had turned dark had a big section of DNA transported over and pasted in a section of DNA which promotes the black color. In fact, it's a huge chunk of DNA. And it's the same chunk every single time. And of the white moths, zero, none, zero had this transposable element. It wasn't hit and miss. It wasn't trial and error. In fact, there are other creatures that can express this dark coloration when needed along these lines. So three major icons of evolution down, and people are hearing something that no evolutionist has ever told them before. That you are highly engineered and highly regulated in order to change rapidly when needed. Okay, here's another one. I just kept piling them on. That's a big old, look at that fisherman there. You guys don't know what that is, but that's snow up there. And he's on a frozen lake and he's an ice fisherman. And does anybody know what kind of fish he's happy that he caught there? It's a big what? Northern pike. It's a big northern pike. It's a predatory fish. And it'll eat bass. It'll eat trout. It'll eat carp. It'll eat all kinds of stuff. Now, in this particular case, it's a study on this carp. And when one of those bat, one of those pike, eats one of those carp and digests it and puts little carpy vapors into the water, the other carp can sense that their cousin was just eaten. And within one day, they change from this shape, they begin to change from this shape to that shape. which makes them taller and faster and harder to be eaten. Huh, very specific and very targeted. Very specific and very targeted. How many of you knew fish could do something like that? That's quite remarkable. So everybody's saying, wow, it sounds like this adaptation is an engineered process. Well, here's another one. Let's go from living up there on the frozen lakes down to the Caribbean. These are called reef race, W-R-A-S-S-E. The mail is that highly colored, blue and striped creature there you see. The females are the yellow ones. And there's usually about one male for a little school of 10 to 15 females, and he covers them all and keeps them happy. So what happens when that male dies? Or maybe a fisherman comes by and fishes that male out of that little school. What are those lonely females to do now? Well, those females, usually it's the biggest one, can sense that the male is gone, and within one day, her ovaries regress, she grows testes, and she morphs into a male. Wow. Problem solved. What females have wanted to do forever is just happening right there before their eyes. It's just boom. This rapid change. Rapid change. It's incredible. Here's another one. Mice can warn sons and grandsons of dangers via sperm. How does that work? Well, what did these scientists do here? Well, they took some male mice. They took a bunch of male mice and they put them on a little metal pad. that could shock their feet, shock their feet painfully but not lethally. And then they would expose them to cherry blossom odor and shock their feet. Expose them, shock them. Expose them, shock them. This is your tax dollars at work. Shock, shock, shock. And so they shock the feet on these mice. Hurts them. when they are exposed to cherry blossom odor. Then they take these male mice and they made them with naive females. Naive females, those are females that have never been exposed to cherry blossom odors in their life. She conceives, she has pups. and the scientists sacrificed the pups immediately upon birth. And then they stained through the olfactory region, looking for olfactory bulbs in the nerves, and they stained blue. And this is what you see. On the left, here, these are the controls. These are olfactory bulbs and these are the nerves. These are the controls of dads who were never exposed to cherry blossom odor. And these are the sons, the offspring of the dads who were exposed to cherry blossom odor. And you notice they have over a 200% increase in olfactory bulbs, which are specific, guess what for? Cherry blossom odor. So these offspring are sensitized to that before they're even born, based on something that dad was exposed to. That doesn't sound like slow evolutionary change. That sounds like a highly regulated mechanism in order to bring these things about. And there's a quote from the article that says why this is important. How does all this happen? It doesn't happen by chance and it's not magic. It happens by the exact same mechanisms by which something that human engineers would put into place that is highly adaptable, such as a cruise control. Cruise control makes your car adaptable to different speeds and things like that. And they have sensors. Speed sensors. And then information is sent to a logic mechanism, some computer inside the car that says, if you're slowing down, then do this. If you're speeding up, then do that. And then you have an output response which regulates it. You and every other creature on this planet adapts by the exact same elements, by the exact same kind of systems. You have sensors, you have logic, and you have output responses, which enables you to adapt highly specifically and in a highly targeted way. And not only that, the changes that you make are not due to evolution. The changes that you make were programmed in you before you ever had the exposure to begin with. You were engineered up front, prior to any of these exposures. to have the proper response to them. What a change of thinking that adaptation is not a random willy-nilly process at all. It is a highly regulated, highly engineered, highly specific process with targeted solutions that are even predictable. By this time during the debate, the crowd is utterly silent. because they've never heard this before, because they're not being taught this in school. NOVA, National Geographic, nobody's telling them any of this information. And so we have just eviscerated the core element of evolutionary thinking, which is adaptation. And so they asked me the question, are you open to the natural world pointing to design? Pointing to design? Of course I am. It's everywhere. It's everywhere. And since these people are doubting their Bible because they think science has proved it wrong, we've just cut the legs right out of the science. Which brings us to question number two. Question number two is actually two questions. What is your take on Darwinian evolution, question number one, and its compatibility with Christian faith? Well, here's a good answer to that question. I know it's good, because it's mine. Anyway, it says, Darwinian evolution is a weak scientific theory and a poor explanation for all of the design that we see in creatures. Number two, the basic premises of the theory cannot be reconciled with, and I added a word, I didn't just say Christian faith, I put in what? Biblical Christian faith. biblical Christian faith. They cannot be reconciled. Hopefully, that was clear enough. These two are incompatible. Now, why is this such a weak scientific theory? Well, let's blow through this really quickly. One, if you're going to tell how life evolves, you have to at least explain how life began. And nobody on this planet, nobody on this planet is even close to explaining the origin of life. No matter how certain they might talk about it on television shows, the reality is nobody has a mechanism to explain the origin of reproduction, the origin of metabolism, the origin of growth, the origin of adaptation, and all the things that organisms do, particularly when you need all of those interchanged with each other. And that's why John Horgan there in 2011 said, don't tell the creationists, but scientists don't have a clue. of how life began, and they still don't have a clue. So it's weak scientific theory because it can't explain the origin of life. In addition to that, you have to explain the diversity of life. And in all of human experience, with zero exceptions, none, no exceptions, in all of human experience, the only thing that everybody has ever seen is that organisms faithfully reproduce after their kind. Varieties, varieties of cats, varieties of horses, varieties of dogs, varieties of people, but distinct cats, dogs, horses, and people. And nobody has ever seen this. So in spite of their certainty on the two basic premises, getting life going and explaining the diversity, they have zero scientific evidence for that. That's why it's a weak scientific theory. Next, their predictions are wrong and we should be rubbing their nose in their failure over and over again. without apology. They said life should evolve like this, start out as a simple and over long periods of time branch into all the diversity of life on earth. But when you look at the lowest layers in the fossil record where you find fossils, you find nearly every major body plan show up suddenly, period, with no evolutionary precursors whatsoever. You don't find a branching tree, you find a forest. Right off, right from the beginning. They were completely wrong on that prediction. They were completely wrong on this prediction that similar features should be due to and should be explained by common ancestry. But we find similar features like the squid eye and the human eye, which there's no common ancestry unless you go way, way, way, way back. We find similar features between fish and mammals like you see there. And you know the echolocation that you find in bats and the echolocation that you see in dolphins and some whales? When you look at it genetically, the genetics are identical. Are identical. There's no common ancestry which can explain any of this. Wrong on that prediction. They were wrong on a lot of their declarations, totally wrong. They said your appendix was a useless vestigial organ. But we've known for years, even when I was in medical school in the early 1990s, we knew that the appendix had tissue that was intimately involved in your immune system. And it does have a function, it has important functions. It monitors what's going through your colon. and it helps you adjust to the different types of foods that you ate. The bone that you're sitting on, which everybody has mislabeled a tailbone, a tailbone, has functioned. It anchors muscles in your pelvic floor. It's not useless. In fact, I tell this story at every place, and I just happened to have my good brother, Frank Sherwin, here because this is his story. And I said it during the debate. If you think, if any of you in this room think that your tailbone is a useless, vestigial organ, our ministry, the Institute for Creation Research, we will pay the medical cost to have it surgically removed from you. But you will have to pay the cost for the rest of the life, your life, for the diapers that you will be in. And no takers? Okay. All right. How about the gill slits? Totally wrong on that. When they look at embryos, they say you have gill slits. Those are little folds of tissue which fold into your thyroid, jaw, voice box, and inner ear. DNA, which they said was junk. Over 98% of your DNA, they were telling people junk, some evolutionary leftover, has function. An important function. It regulates the other DNA. It's really what makes humans, humans. Not junky at all. Totally wrong on all of those. They said that humans and chimps were 98, 99% genetically identical. Totally wrong on that. When we compare large stretches of DNA between chimps and humans, we're only about 80 to 88% similar, and some studies even say as low as 80% similar. Totally wrong on all of these things. Wrong. When I was a kid, Neanderthals were these brutish cavemen. some transitional form between apes and humans. Totally wrong on that. We now know that Neanderthals were totally human. In fact, every one of us in this room has Neanderthal DNA in our system. Humans mated with Neanderthals. They just had to be careful when they did it on all those things. They're totally wrong because they're And their theory relies on just so much imagination. Good science doesn't rely on imagination. Look at the right-hand side. This is an artist's rendition of the famous ape creature called Lucy. Look at her. Look at that artist's rendition. Look how human-like that is. I mean, if you put lipstick on Lucy there, she'd look an awful lot like a Texan. And I mean, it's just incredible on that. But where's the imagination? Look at the artist's rendition, but on the left-hand side of the screen are the bones. Do you see some imagination between those bones and that artist's rendition? Well, that's the 1970s. Nobody would do that wrong. In 2015, they came up with another supposed transitional form, Homo naledi, and there's the artist's rendition on the left, and the bones are on the right. You and I should not like scientific theories which are so highly, highly dependent on highly fertile imaginations. That is not good science. This is why their theory stinks. Scientifically, and that's why I said, it's a weak scientific theory. It doesn't explain anything. In fact, it's illogical. But what about its compatibility with Christian faith? Can you reconcile these things? No, you can't. These two famous evolutionists, they're dead now. Lewis and Mary Leakey, I heard about them when I was a kid growing up. They wrote a book called Adam's Ancestor. They didn't believe in the biblical Adam at all. But they wrote about some evolutionary story, evolutionary story of how humans evolved from an ape-like ancestor, the same story that theistic evolutionists adopt wholesale. So there's not a dime's worth of difference between the atheistic evolutionary story and the theistic evolutionary story, except they dropped interventions of God in there along the way, which nobody could ever observe and nobody could ever detect. So that's not compatible at all. In fact, when you start to look at this whole idea of Adam, we find some major differences between the claims of evolutionists and the biblical account. How was Adam created? The Bible says Adam was a direct creation by God. direct. He took dust to the ground and he made him. Evolutionists say that he descended from some ape-like ancestor. The Bible says that Adam was the first human being. Evolutionists say that can't be true. The first human being is completely indeterminate. Who was that transitional ape-like creature that actually morphed into a human someway, somehow? The Bible says that there were two. two progenitors of the human race, Adam and Eve, who was also, Eve was also supernaturally created. Says there was a pair. Evolutionists say that's crazy. They say you can't get the genetic diversity from a single pair of people. There had to be at least 10,000 to 100,000 of these ape-like creatures. The Bible says There was a, in all of those verses up there, the Bible says that there was a real man who committed real sin and brought real death to everybody so that everybody on this planet has needed a real savior. That's what the Bible says. Evolutionary theory says that's completely wrong. There was no original sin. There was no Adam. There wasn't this fall. There wasn't this universal condemnation. These two cannot be reconciled at all. Not just in those areas, but I'm going to bring up two more areas which we normally don't discuss. The Bible says that death is a sin, is a curse, and an enemy. But evolutionists say death is the means to good. Stephen Jobs, when he was dying of pancreatic cancer, he said in his commencement address at Stanford University that death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent. So in their worldview, the constant unrelenting death and extinction of one creature for the benefit of other creatures is the way to good. And they have no problem with what you see on the left-hand side of the screen. And that's why many of these evolutionists and liberals are always fascinated with predators. shark week, this week, death week, and every one of their nature shows goes from one creature being eaten by another creature being eaten by and pounced on by another creature because they are fixated and fascinated with death. You don't believe me? You just watch the next nature shows. They are always built up from one creature being eaten to another creature. But you know what you see on the left-hand side of the screen? That's ugly, it's wrong, and you and I as Christians are waiting for the day when that is eliminated once and for all. And it's gone. And the lion will do what? Lie down with the lamb. So, that's not even compatible. And then on top of that, the Bible says, Now when you look at creation, you can see evidence of design. You can see that there is a real creator. Evolutionists say the design that you see in creatures is all just a fantasy. It's apparent. It's not real because there isn't a real creator. So what you see on the left-hand side of the screen are tiny little microscopic gears that connect the rear legs of this little creature called a plant hopper, who can launch itself from zero to 700 Gs in a fraction of a second, and it wants its rear legs to extend at the same rate at the same time, so the creator, the Lord Jesus Christ, engineered in a microscopic way two tiny gears. which connect those legs together. So when you see gears, it's totally reasonable and logical to conclude there was a gear maker, but evolutionists say that's completely wrong. And so there's no way that you're going to be able to reconcile the biblical view and the evolutionary view. They're just completely incompatible. They don't even look at the world in the same way at all. In fact, we don't want to look at the world the way they look at the world. We want to reject it altogether. Which then brings us to question number one, which was my question number three. How do you interpret and understand Genesis 1 and 2? How do you interpret and understand that? Well, here's my answer. Genesis 1 and 2 are historical narratives. They're not allegories. They're not fictitious, it is real history. Real history. It's real history of how God created the natural realm. Now you are going to be barraged by many, many Christians who are gonna say, it is not real history. But Genesis one and two, in fact, all of the Bible is real history. And then how do I interpret it? Well, I give words their normal meaning in their normal context. normal meaning in their normal context. That was what I was taught at Moody Bible Institute. Some people call it the literal interpretation. Moody just said we call it normal interpretation because we give words their normal meaning in their normal context like you do every other type of literature in your life. Let me give you a couple examples. I'm a medical doctor, and so people come to me. and they're sick, and they want to walk out with something in their hand other than a bill. You know, they just don't want a bill and go out the door. So, they usually like a prescription or something that they like to get fixed. Now, I don't know if any of you can read this from the back of the room, but here's a medication. It says atenolol. That's a high blood pressure medication. Atenolol, 150 milligrams, by mouth, daily. Is that clear? What do I want you to take? 150 milligrams of atenolol by mouth daily. So you take your script and you go to one of the pharmacies around here and you give it to them and the pharmacist gets your script and they said, well, What does Dr. Galuza mean by mouth? What does he mean by mouth, by mouth? Mouth of a river, mouth of a cave? So he changes your script to read a tantalum, 150 milligrams by a natural opening daily. Wow. Your mouth is, it's a natural opening. But when I say mouth in context, I mean what? This, this. If you get that script from the pharmacist, I have no clue where you're sticking your pills on those things. So in every area of life, we give words their normal meaning in their normal context. normal meaning in their normal context. Before I was a medical doctor, I was an engineer. I was an engineer in the Navy, and I was stationed in Guam. And one of our projects was to rehab a bunch of barracks. And the contract that the contractor got said, contractor shall apply two coats of paint Really simple, easy to understand. Well, this contractor went out to the site and painted all of the rooms and all of the barracks with one coat of paint. And we had an inspector and said, hey, you owe us a second coat of paint because the contract says contractors shall apply two coats of paint. Well, the contractor sent us a letter and said this. What the contract means is one coat thick enough to equal two coats of paint. Hmm. We said what the contract means is what? Two coats of paint. Well, this went to court. This went to court. Now, how many of you think the government won this case? Or how many of you think this chisely little contractor won and your tax dollars were lost again on that? Don't raise your hand, I don't wanna see the cynics. But anyway, on here, well, the government won this case. The government won this case easily and the judge said this, Quote, in contract law, words must be construed to their what? Normal meaning in the context of the specification, otherwise the intentions of either party becomes unknowable. May I suggest to you that when you approach this book When you approach this book from cover to cover, you give words their what? Normal meaning and their normal context. Otherwise, the intentions of the Bible giver become unknowable. unknowable. It's not a hard method of Bible interpretation. You give words their normal meaning in their normal context. And on top of that, there's good reasons why we should see Genesis 1 and 2 as historical narrative. I'm not a Hebrew scholar, but Hebrew scholars can look at the grammar of poetic passages in the Bible, and they can map out characteristics of that, and they can map out characteristics of narrative passages, historical narrative, and Genesis 1 and 2, bang. Pops right up there with historical narrative. So there's good reason to see it as historical truth. But here's a biggie. I'm gonna go back to the Reformation. We don't talk about the Reformation that much, but this was a very important point of the Reformation. And it is called biblical clarity. In fact, I think it's one of the most important things that the reformers even debated or argued about. And biblical clarity was this. Up until the Reformation happened, the church dominated the scene. And the church was telling people, this book, this Bible, this Bible is inherently mystical. It's like a mystical book. And you, the average person in the pew, you can't understand it for yourselves. You must have a priest interpret this book for you. A priest must come up here and tell you what the book says. Well, the Reformers disagreed with that. That's what biblical clarity is all about. The Reformers disagreed, and they said God communicated His message clearly. clearly, so that you do not need a priest to tell you what the Bible says. You can understand it for yourself. And they pointed to all of these passages. In Deuteronomy chapter 30, after Moses gave the law, he said, you don't have to go and get someone from across the sea to come and tell you what the Bible says. all of these passages in John 14, 15, and 1 John, the Lord said when the Holy Spirit comes, He will lead you into what? All truth. The Holy Spirit will lead you into that. In Acts chapter 17, Paul wrote, or Luke wrote, that said that the Bereans, the Bereans were more noble than the Thessalonians because the Bereans search the scriptures daily. You, the average person in the pew, were searching the scriptures daily and checking out the Apostle Paul. So if you can check out the Apostle Paul, then you can understand the Bible for yourself. And this is very important because it's an authority issue. When you have the Bible as your authority and you put a priest between you and the Bible, the Bible ceases to be your authority and who becomes your authority? The priest. the priest. And that is why biblical clarity was such an important Reformation issue. They said, you don't have to have a holy man tell you what the Bible says. And I would agree with that. But today I would add, you don't have to have a science guy either. You don't have to have a holy man, you don't have to have a science guy, particularly when all the science guys are atheists. In fact, these Alca Indians, who have never ever heard of Stephen Hawking in their life, could pick up a good translation in their language of the Bible, and they can understand exactly what it says about how God created. But that's what biblical clarity is, and that's why it's so important. That's one of the major issues of the Reformation. What about this argument? There's a major argument. They said, you know, you Bible-believing Christians, you're hurting evangelism. You're chasing people away. You're making us Bible-believing Christians. You're making Christians look stupid. You're making us look dumb. And you're hurting evangelism by that because everybody knows that you can't trust this. Well, is that true? Are the Bible-believing Christians hurting the church? Well, this is a study that came out just several years ago in 2017. It's by two secularists, one from the University of Indiana and one from Harvard University. And they watched church attendance over time from 1990 to 2015, and they compared it to their view of the Bible. And churches, the big red line at the top, churches that make the Bible say anything they want it to say, what we would probably call liberal mainline churches, their membership over that time hemorrhaged. Hemorrhaged. The middle line, the green line, are the Bible-believing churches. Let's say this is the inspired word of God, and you give words of normal meaning and their normal context, and their attendance over the same time period stayed the same or increased. But the sad part is the people who were leaving these liberal mainline churches, they were just going to no affiliation and no belief. No belief. So the whole claim, it's just a canard that you Bible-believing Christians, you're hurting the church, you're hurting evangelism. They've got it exactly wrong. When people come to a church like this from outside, they don't want to hear the same old message that they hear from the world. They want to hear something different. They want to hear a new message. They want to hear something that's clear. And so even scientific studies show that we're not hurting the church at all. were preserving and keeping the Church. But the main reason for believing these words and giving them their normal meaning and their normal context is because the Lord Jesus did and the Apostle Paul did. When the Lord was asked, is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife, He said, have you not read, actually he begins, have you not read, even though I don't have it up there on the screen, have you not read from the beginning of creation God made them male and female? Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and shall cleave to his wife and the two shall become one flesh, quoting from Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 back to back. And the apostle Paul said, for since by man, that is, Adam, came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive. He gave words their normal meaning in their normal context. And so there you have it. answers to three really important questions and the evidences backing them all up. Now, these are three questions, but there's really a fourth question, which is the most important question of all. The question is, where are you today? We just read from the Apostle Paul, he said, for as in Adam, all die. And every one of us in this world is born into Adam. Now, what separates us is not skin color, it's not money, it's not socioeconomic status. Those aren't the major, that's not the main divide. There's only two groups of people in this world and they're not divided on any of those superficial things. The two groups are this, those people who were born in Adam and those people who are now in Christ. You're either in Adam, which means this, you're lost, You're dead in trespasses and sins. You have no hope and you are alienated from the life of God. That's what people in Adam are, completely lost and hopeless in that way. But by placing your faith in Christ, you can now be in Christ, which means what? You are alive. You are born again. You are regenerate. You are placed into his body and you have hope. You have a hope and assurance of an eternal life. These questions are important, but the most important question of the day is this, where are you? Are you in Adam or are you in Christ? Well, pastor, I turn it over to you. Thank you. Thank you very much.