I want to follow on from the session where I talked about this clash of worldviews, the secular worldview and the Christian worldview, and that what's really happened in our Western culture is that we have lost the foundation of the authority of the Word of God. We've been replaced with a foundation that says man determines truth, resulting in the loss of that Christian worldview and the secular humanist philosophy that's basically taking over society. And we certainly see the secularization of our culture right before our very eyes. And so what are we going to do about this? Well, obviously, you know, our emphasis is we need to go out and preach the gospel. We want to see people saved. We want to see people have that consistent Christian worldview. But I believe we have a problem when trying to do that today. I believe it's a communication problem. I remember the first time we came to the United States from Australia, we had communication problems. I, within the first week, I had a car and I had a problem and I said to somebody, oh, can you help me? My battery's flat. And the person said, your battery's what? I said, it's flat. He said, did you run over it? No, I left the lights on. Oh, your battery's dead. Well, no, it never was alive, so it couldn't die, I mean. See, in Australia, when we talk about a battery after you've left the lights on, and of course the charge runs down, we say it's flat. Over here you say it's dead. By the way, that's why at 30 minutes past midnight last night, when I had a call from my daughter and she said, my battery's flat, I knew exactly what she meant. So we didn't have a communication problem because she was speaking real English. And so we understood that. I would like to suggest to you today that we do have a communication problem in proclaiming the gospel to our culture. When we've been speaking to you here at a seminar like this, and you're listening to any of the speakers or listening to me, as we've said in one of the other sessions, when I say a particular word in context, if you didn't have the same definition of that word, the same understanding that I do, we're not going to communicate, are we? Realise that's obvious. I'd like to suggest to you that the culture in our Western world, America, England, Australia and so on, has changed from being one that was permeated with Christian terminology, Christian jargon that people understood, to one today, when you use the same sort of terminology, they don't understand it like they used to. Increasingly, they don't understand it. You see, when I say God to you, as a group who are primarily Christians, you're immediately thinking of the God of the Bible, the God of creation. But if you say God in a totally different culture that didn't have that foundation, they're not going to hear the same God that you do. And that is true increasingly of our own culture in America, in England. You see, you say, well, look, we need to go out and preach the gospel, the gospel of Jesus Christ. I say, well, that's true. We do need to do that. But isn't it also true that, you know, when you understand the gospel being the good news, the good news of Jesus Christ died on the cross, unless you understand the bad news in Genesis, you're not going to understand what you mean by the good news of the cross, the good news of the gospel. As somebody once said to me, you know you need to go out and tell people that they need to be saved, but the problem is, if they don't know they're lost, how do they know what it means to be saved? And increasingly I see that as the problem. Christians today, going out and telling people, you need to be saved, you need to trust the Lord Jesus, but increasingly they don't know what it means to be saved, they don't know what it means that they're lost, and they don't know who Jesus is, and they don't hear the same words you do. It might be the words in the way we say them vocally, but not in the sense of the definition. And so what I want to do here is this. I want to go through and look at a principle from scripture in regard to how we communicate the gospel to a culture. But we're going to look at that in two different places. We're going to look at two different cultures. We're going to look at the way in which Peter proclaimed the gospel to one particular culture, the Jews, and how Paul proclaimed the gospel to a totally different culture, the Greeks. And then I want us to compare the culture we live in to one of those two examples and to see if we can see something clearly in regard to maybe what we should be doing in proclaiming the gospel of Jesus Christ. Now, before we do that, let me first of all define the gospel in a particular way for you. And I do this so that we can better understand how to communicate the gospel to people. First of all, there's the foundational knowledge, the knowledge that Jesus Christ is creator and sent into the world and death is a result of sin. An understanding of that foundational knowledge is certainly vital to an understanding of why Jesus Christ became a man called the last Adam, why he became one of us, why he died, why he was raised again, and certainly all that is key to understanding why there's going to be a new heavens and a new earth to come. So all of that is the gospel, not just part of it. If you think about it, if you take out the foundation, if you have no knowledge of creation, of sin, of why there's death in the world, then how can you explain the gospel? How can you really understand who Jesus is or why he died or why he died for sin or what that means? How do you explain the Gospel to someone if you don't have that foundational knowledge? Now, as well as looking at those blocks in that particular way that make up the Gospel, I also want you to keep at the back of your mind this particular verse of Scripture, 1 Corinthians 1.23. Here we have Paul saying, we preach Christ crucified under the Jews a stumbling block, but under the Greeks foolishness. The preaching of the cross was a stumbling block to the Jews, but foolishness to the Greeks. Now, I want you to say that to me because I'm going to ask you a few times to repeat it back to me. Okay, sort of like being in a classroom, you know, I used to be a teacher. I don't know if you can tell that, but I used to be a teacher and I like to interact with the students. So let me ask you this question. The preaching of the cross was what to the Jews? Stumbling block. What to the Greeks? Foolishness. Now, as I said, keep that at the back of your mind. And now we're going to go and have a look at these two sermons. We're going to go to Acts 2, Peter taking the gospel to the Jews. Then we're going to go to Acts 17, Paul taking the gospel to the Greeks, and I want you to see some differences here that are very, very important, and then we're going to apply it practically in our own culture today. First of all, Acts chapter 2. When you read there in Acts chapter 2, beginning at verse 22, going through to 24 here, for instance, we have Peter approaching the Jews with the gospel of Jesus Christ. And boy, it was a pretty bold message. Here he is on the day of Pentecost. You crucified the Lord Jesus. You nailed him on the cross. You crucified the Messiah. But God has raised him from the dead. And so he was really laying the foundation there for the Jews to understand what they had done to the Lord Jesus Christ. And then we go on, verses 37 to 38, and then on to verse 40. But when they heard this, they were cut to the heart. What shall we do? Peter replied, repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ, for the givenness of sins. You receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. Save yourselves from the sun toward generation. He was pretty bold, wasn't he? And then what happened? Well, 3,000 souls were saved. Wow. Wouldn't you like to see a crusade like that in your town tomorrow? Wouldn't that be great? By the way, they used to see crusades like that all across America, even in Australia. I remember back in the late 1950s when I was a little boy, so it was a very, very, very late 1950s and I was an extremely little boy. I remember there was an evangelist from America who came to Australia. Now and then, as the Bible says, man, it's been said at that stage in Australia, it was closest Australia ever came to revival. Australia as a nation has never had such a thing as revival, national revival. But it certainly was the closest. I remember as a little boy sitting in the church, you know you didn't have television in those days and in the country areas particularly anyway, and sitting there and you had a speaker box and you heard this famous evangelist down there in Sydney preaching and there were people who had come forward at the appeal at the end and There's no doubt that there were people truly saved, and lots of people truly saved as a result of those particular crusades. You know the interesting thing? Today, statistically, it can be shown that although you might have big crusades in Australia, the whole nation doesn't buzz like it did then. Everyone knew what was happening then. It was sort of a national phenomenon. You don't see that today. Not only that, statistics bear out, and they do so in America too. Whereas generations ago, there were lots of really what you would call real salvation commitments, Today, you notice that most of those who go to crusades already have a church background. Most of those who go forward, it's for recommitment. Very few of those who go forward today, really first-time commitments as we saw generations ago or in the days of Wesley and Whitfield and so on. Now, I say that to you because I want you to understand that something has changed here in the culture and something is different. But here in Acts 2, thousands of people say, 3,000 say, wow, it must have been phenomenal to be there. But here's what I want us to consider. See, when you're talking to someone, we need to ask ourselves, OK, who are we speaking to? For instance, if you're someone who speaks English and you're speaking to someone who speaks Russian, you're going to have a communication problem, unless you both speak the same language. So we have to make sure that the people we're speaking to have the same language as us, they understand the words in the same way. Now, who was Peter preaching to here? Well, he was preaching to Jews, those convinced of or very familiar with the Jewish religion. So, let me ask you this question. At that stage in their history, would you say that they believed in creation? Oh yes, they did. I mean, when Peter said God, did he have to define God to them, or could he assume that they defined God in the same way he did, by and large, so when he said God, he could just assume they would understand it like he did. Wouldn't that be true of Peter preaching to the Jews? Did they know why sin was in the world? Well, they had the Law of Moses. They had the Ten Commandments. They knew it was sin. Sin was idolatry. Sin was taking the name of the Lord their God in vain. Sin was murder. Sin was stealing. Sin was adultery. They knew what sin was. He didn't have to deal with defining sin. Did they know why death was in the world? Well, they were there to sacrifice animals. Of course they knew why death was in the world. My point here is that Peter didn't have to convince them of the foundational knowledge to understand the Gospel. They already had that, if you like, inherent in the culture. They had that foundation. That's why his major message concerned the message of the cross. Now, we can picture it this way. Peter was actually preaching to a creation based culture who had a knowledge of God, sin and death. But remember what we said earlier, the preaching of the cross was what to the Jews? Stumbling block. It was the preaching of the cross that was a stumbling block to the Jews. And I picture it this way for ease of understanding this. You see, the Jews were on a road. They had the right beginnings, they had the right history, they're on the right road, they're on the road that led up to the message of the cross, but their stumbling block was the message of the cross. Peter didn't have to make sure they're on that right road, he could assume they were on that road, but he had to deal specifically with the message of the cross, the message of the resurrection, that Jesus Christ is the Messiah. That's why his message concentrated on the message of the cross, the message of the death, burial, resurrection of Jesus Christ. In other words, he was speaking to a culture who already had their feet firmly on the right foundation. What he had to do from a human perspective, knowing it's God who opens people's hearts anyway, but was to build the rest of that structure. Now, keep that at the back of your mind, and we're going to go to Japan. I went to Japan a number of years ago, and I went over there to speak. It's interesting because the Japanese translator said, I need to meet with you before you speak over here. So he sat down and he said, what do you know about the Japanese culture? I said, well, they make motorcars. And he said, no, no, what do you know about the way they think? I said, well, really, I suppose I don't know much at all. Never been here before. He said, well, I want you to understand something. He said, do you realize when you say God, for instance, I said, yes. He said, I just can't translate it as God. I said, why? Well, look, you've got to understand. Do you know how many Christians are in Japan? It's something like less than 0.1%. It is not a Christian-based country. It is a pagan culture. And he said, up until the last war even, you know, Christians were persecuted and thrown out, killed in Japan. The major religions are Shinto and Buddhism and Shinto, they have many gods and then they mix Shinto and Buddhism together and so on. Evolution is taught as fact in the schools over here. They don't have that Christian base that you're familiar with in America and even countries like Australia, even though Australia is a pagan country, nonetheless, you know, the Bible used to be in schools once and people are very familiar with Christian jargon, you know, because of what we inherited from England. You know, I know you people over here pride yourselves on the fact that your founding fathers had great convictions. Well, you know, it's true that our founding fathers in Australia had great convictions also. But they weren't convictions of the same sort. But nonetheless, we still inherited from England, you know, that Christian base that was sort of there that permeated the culture. But that's not true of Japan. And so he said, here's the problem. He said, look, when you say God, I said, yes, he said, they're going to think of, oh, yes, we have all these other gods. And so here's another God with all these other gods. He said, I'm going to have to define who God is, that this is the God who made the world. And he's responsible for the first man that he created. And he said, I'm going to have to define really God in the context of the true history of the world. And I said, wow, these are going to be long lectures. And he said, if you say sin, yes, why would they understand sin? Without the foundation laid there in Genesis of the original man, Adam, and the rebellion, why will they understand what sin is? And made me realize, hey, without that history, without that foundation, why will they understand the rest? And then you start to realize, you know, we grow up in a culture where we're so familiar with all this Christian jargon, if we go to church and we're within that Christian culture, even if it's a subset of the culture we're in, but Do the people outside that really understand it? You know, how can I go to a pagan culture and use that same terminology? They're not going to understand. You know what it reminded me of? It reminded me of New Tribes Mission. How many of you have heard of New Tribes Mission, by the way? I think most of us. Ever seen those videos like Itau and other videos like that? You know what they found? They found when they went to a pagan culture and they preached the message of the cross, they thought they had all these responses. But when they analyzed it carefully, they found out that really most of those people didn't have a clue what they were doing. They just did what they thought the missionaries wanted them to do anyway. By the way, I think that happens a lot with certain evangelists today in certain countries, too, where we think we have thousands of conversions. And I think when I talk to some of the people in those countries, they say, really, most of those people haven't got a clue what they're doing. They just do that because that's what the evangelists want them to do. And so you know what New Tribes Missionary did? They did something incredibly radical. This is so radical, it's going to blow you off your seat. It's phenomenally radical. You know what they did? They found out, now you're not going to believe this, this is just phenomenal. Here's what they did. You would never have thought of it, but they decided you need to start at the beginning. Isn't that radical? And then you know what else? Something else. They decided that you needed to do things, listen to this, this is really radical for this culture, in order, chronologically. step by step. Wow, how's that for a radical suggestion? As you know, what they started to do was this. Let's go back to Genesis, the beginning of history and it's laid that foundation from Adam and Eve and the fall of man and as they laid that foundation all the way through the right history and then got up to the message of the cross, they found people understood it and then there were real commitments because they had the right foundation. Can I just as a little aside make a suggestion here? You know, there are many countries of the world where missionaries have been very frustrated. Japan is one, by the way. It's often called the missionary graveyard. You know the sad thing when I was over in Japan? Remember one church that I spoke at? The pastor, the Japanese pastor, was excited. He was jumping up and down with excitement. He was so thrilled I was there. The missionary from America that was there to help him was really upset with me because I should not teach six literal days and shouldn't teach millions of years and Genesis doesn't matter anyway. Here's the sad thing. Most missionary colleges, Bible colleges, seminaries and so on have sent missionaries out around the world from America and England and Australia who've been told Genesis is not important, doesn't matter and you always start in the New Testament anyway. And I suggest to you that maybe one of the reasons many missionaries get so frustrated is because they've never been taught to lay the foundation that's necessary to understand the gospel. Because primarily they're taught you start from Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. And you go in there and tell them they're sinners, repent of your sin. Well, just like with new transmission, I'm suggesting to you, many of these cultures haven't got a clue what they're talking about ultimately. But you see, because Genesis is not important as far as many Bible colleges and seminaries and churches are concerned, and because you've got to believe in millions years evolution anyway, that's not important. And yet that's the very foundation to understand the gospel. I believe maybe many missionaries would have been much more successful had they been taught the right way. to preach the gospel by the colleges. Now see, it was interesting over there in Japan, because I found out at the end of my tour, I remember the Japanese translator telling me something like this. He said, do you remember when you told such and such a joke? I said, oh, they really liked that one, didn't they? And he said, they didn't understand anything about what you said. I said, what do you mean? He said, culturally, That joke doesn't mean anything in Japan. I mean, that's one of those Western jokes that you've got to be brought up in a different culture. And I said, well, why did they laugh? He said, because Japanese people are very polite. And I just told them, Mr. Ham told a joke, please laugh. Now that is really embarrassing, as you can understand. But see, again, it brought home to me the point that if you're going to communicate to somebody, you have to understand the culture that they come from. You have to understand how they define the words, you know, the terminology. By the way, that really taught me a lesson because when I go to different cultures, you know, I mean, I understand Australian culture fairly well and American culture fairly well, and I can speak in those cultures and I know certain things that will tweak people, you know, that they can laugh at or they'll understand. But when you go to a new culture, I tend not to use any of that sort of humor, because you realize they won't necessarily even understand that, they won't even think that way. Now, as I thought about New Tribes Mission and as I thought about Japan, I also thought about then Acts Chapter 17. Because see, in Acts Chapter 17, here we have a situation where Paul goes to the Greeks. Now remember, let's go over this again. The preaching of the cross was what to the Jews? Stumbling block. What to the Greeks? Foolishness. Now here we have Peter going to the Greeks in Acts 17. to Greek philosophers and Mars Hill, the Epicureans and the Stoics. And he preached the message of the cross. But when he did, look at the response. What would his babbler say? He didn't get 3,000 souls saved, as Peter did in Acts 2. He was poor preaching the good news about Jesus and the resurrection. And basically the response was, huh, this is foolishness. Now we've got to stand back and say, OK, who was Paul preaching to here? Well, he was preaching to the Greeks, the Epicureans and the Stoics. Who were the Epicureans? Well, they were basically the atheists of the age. And they were evolutionists. You see, Darwin didn't invent the idea of evolution, he just popularised a particular mechanism of evolution. The Epicureans were evolutionists, the Stoics were evolutionists. The Epicureans believed everything evolved from the earth and sensuous pleasure was the chief good of existence. The gods evolved. I'm sure to them it was foolish that Paul seemed to be indicating that a god came to earth to die. That wouldn't make sense to them. And the Stoics were pantheists, but pantheism is just another form of evolutionism. And so here we have Paul going to a culture that had no concept of the God the Jews would understand, and they did not. No concept of a God separate from, responsible for his creation. And when he preached the message of the cross to this evolution-based culture, who had really no understanding of God, sin and death, what happened? Well, it was foolishness. Now compare that to Peter preaching to the Jews. So see, here you have a creation-based culture versus an evolution-based one. And for one, there's an understanding of God's sin and death, so you have that foundation. For the other, no understanding of God's sin and death. So for one, the message of the cross was a stumbling block, but for the other, it was foolishness. And so let me help you to picture this with my road diagrams. The Greeks were on a totally different road. Their road could not lead up to the message of the cross. They had a different history. It was a wrong history. They had a whole different beginning, a whole different understanding of life. And so they're on a totally different road. The cross is on a different road. And so they're looking at that saying, huh, what's that all about? Because their road didn't lead to the message of the cross. Now, if you look at that, you say, you know, if you wanted the Greeks then to understand the message of the cross, we're going to have to take them from the road they're on and put them on the right road, take them back and give them the right beginning, the right history, so that then we can lead them up to the message of the cross. Do you know that's exactly what Paul did? See, one of the things I believe we do here at Answers in Genesis is this. Certainly, we need to be able to go to scripture and take verse by verse and study word by word and understand the context. But one of the things we also need to do, which is what I believe God has raised us up here to do in Answers in Genesis, is to stand back and look at the big picture. Sometimes people miss the big picture of what's happening. And we need to do that as well. And so let me give you the big picture here in regard to what's happening. See, as you go to Acts chapter 17, Paul looks around them after they basically said, oh, this is foolishness. He says, well, here's an altar to the unknown God. The Him whom you eagerly worship, let me tell you who He is. And then you know what he did? He defined God. Very similar to what my Japanese translator told me. God that made the world and all things therein, seeing as He is Lord of heaven and earth, clothed not in temples, made with hands, and others worship with men's hands, as though He needs anything, seeing He gives to all life and breath and all things. You know what else He's doing? He's counteracting They're false gods, they're idols. And he's giving the definition of the God that he's talking about. And then he goes on, and God is made of one blood, all nations of men, for to dwell on the face of the earth. In other words, we all come from one man, we're all related. He's giving the right history, the right foundation to understand the message of the cross. So we could say that what Paul was doing here was saying to the Greeks, okay, I'm going to take you off this wrong road you're on, I'm going to take you to a different beginning, I'm going to give you a different foundation to understand things, put you on a whole different road, because I want to lead you up to the vital message of the cross. And then you'll notice that he gets back to the message of the resurrection, say in verse 31 of Acts 17, he has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead. And then I want you to notice something. When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, now this time you compare it to the first response there, This time there were three different responses. Okay, three responses. Number one, some of them sneered. That's basically the same response as last time. What's this babbler on about? This is foolishness. But there were two other responses. Secondly, some said we want to hear you again. In other words, oh this is interesting. I believe God was opening their hearts. I think there was a little light of understanding there. And then there was a third response. You know what the third response was? Have a look at verse 34. A few A few men became followers of Paul and believed. Not many, just a few. Wow, Paul wasn't very successful, was he? He didn't get 3,000 converts like Peter. He just got a handful. Paul was phenomenally successful. And I want to deal with this a little bit here because on more than one occasion in America, I've come across students who said, do you realize our seminary profs Our Bible College profs have told us, don't use the method that Paul used in Acts 17 where he tried to get all intellectual about his faith. Because that doesn't work. Look, even there we see that with Paul it didn't work. But in Acts 2, look what happened when you use the method of Peter and just get out there and proclaim the message of the cross. See, in Acts 2, wow, Peter was so successful. Thousands converted. That's why you've got to get out there and be like Peter. Be bold about your faith and tell people they're sinners and proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ. And isn't that the major method that we really use in evangelism today is based on Acts 2, isn't it? But see, I've got news for you. Paul was phenomenally successful. Do you realize Paul was going to a culture that had the total wrong foundation, a total different foundation, a whole different worldview, a whole different history. He had to change their entire thinking from the foundation up. They're thinking about everything, every aspect of reality, basically. Do you realise how hard that is? In essence, that'd be like trying to change a Japanese into an American overnight. doesn't happen. I mean, if you come from a totally different culture to America, you're not going to be an American overnight. It doesn't work that way. I've lived here for 16 years and we even speak English and come from a country like Australia and I can tell you there are many, many differences. Many of them are very subtle, many of them are very obvious, but there are many differences. You can't just think as an American overnight. It's the same if you went to Australia. You couldn't just become an Australian overnight. I'm not sure Americans could ever become Australians, but such a sophisticated culture that we have. You know, I had a missionary friend in Australia who was with Bible translators and he was up there in Indonesia, you know, in Irian Jaya there, a very difficult place. And he said, I learnt the language, I learnt the language at Bible College. I studied it, was good at the language, but I found that when I went to preach to these people, it's one thing to know the words of the language. It's another thing to understand the culture, to communicate to them. He said, for instance, just give you sort of an example here. He gave me many, many examples. Here's just one. He said, I was trying to get across to them that the blood of Jesus takes away sin, which he represented as dark spots on your soul, and it makes your soul white and pure before the Lord. And he said these people kept saying, why does the blood of Jesus make you dirty? He said, no, no, the blood of Jesus makes your soul white and pure. Why does the blood of Jesus make you dirty? He said for months he couldn't figure out, every time he talked about that, they said, why does the blood of Jesus make you dirty? Until one day he figured out because there are dark skinned people, they sit beside the fire, they get ash on their skin, they go white, they get dirty. So they equated going white with getting dirty. And until he understood that from their culture, he was not able to communicate a particular concept to them. You see, we have those sorts of problems even with people who are from similar cultures that speak the same language. For instance, take Australians and Americans, okay? I mentioned the flat battery, dead battery thing. There's all sorts of other differences, you know, gas and petrol. I thought your cars all ran on gas, but they don't. They run on petrol. Well, they call cars around gas propane, is that right? And we call them gas. Anyway, there's all sorts of problems there. But when we first came into America, we came to California, which is a different country anyway, but we're invited out, I think it was the first week or two, we're invited out for supper. That was a problem. You know why? They did not define supper. You say, well, why do you want to do that for? Well, because in Australia supper has a different definition. Supper in Australia is a snack before you go to bed. Supper over here is your main meal at night, so we ate before we went. And then they serve you a big meal again. I mean, it's not like throwing up. And then the other thing that really hit us was this. See, in Australia, the norm is when somebody leaves your home, you know, the hospital thing to do is you walk out with them and close the car door and you wave and you watch the dust disappear down the road. First time we left someone's house in California, I turned around to say something and the door shuts. I thought we'd offended them. I was depressed for a week. And then we were invited to somebody else's place and just as we were leaving, door shuts. But I found out that's what they do in America. You know, glad they're gone. Well, no. You see, you have to understand, culturally over here you just do things different to Australian. You've got to learn not to get offended by each other. But there are even worse problems than that. I remember the time when we had a teenage girl staying with this American girl and I was, well, trying to impress her, you know, being Australian, and so, we had a little baby at the time, so this American teenager, and I said, oh, would you like to nurse our baby? I mean, she gave me the most weird look, and then, I'll never forget the look on her face when I said, well, it doesn't matter, I'll nurse the baby then. Now, at that stage in our lives, we did not understand that Using nurse in that context over here meant something different in Australia. See, in Australia, nursing a baby means hold a baby. So I said to her, would you hold our baby? I found over here, much to my embarrassment, nursing a baby doesn't mean hold a baby, it means breastfeeding a baby. And I thought, oh man. I told this girl to breastfeed our baby. If that wasn't bad enough, I said I'd do it. Maybe she thought we Australian males had some onward-upward evolutionary mutational change. We are the superior race, after all, as you know, but... Now, you see, I didn't think you needed to define those terms, but obviously we did need to define those terms. Incidentally, if you go to Australia, you need to understand some of these things, because when you go to a park, you know, where they have Australian animals, and somebody says to you, would you like to nurse a koala? That could conjure up some interesting images, unless you understand the definition of that particular word. You see, what I'm trying to get across to us here is this. is that with Paul, he had to change a culture from the foundation up. They didn't think like him, didn't have the same definition of the words. It was a whole different culture. That is a very, very, very difficult thing to do. In fact, it's an extremely difficult thing to do. And so I'm going to suggest to you that Paul was incredibly successful. Because Paul was going to a culture that had the wrong foundation. and he was able to actually get some of them to understand the message after he laid the right foundation. Now, comparing Acts 2 and Acts 17, we're going to compare them as a type here. Acts 2, we're talking about the Jews, we're going to use the Jews as a type. Acts 17, talking about the Greeks, we're going to use the Greeks as a type. And I want us to look at our own Western culture. We'll look at America. But before we do that, let's look at England. You know, back before the last war, they say 40, 50% or more attended church in England. Well, let's look at some statistics. We did this in one other session, but let's do them again. Let's look at some statistics here from this particular news source in 2003 about England. Holy Week has begun with an expert prediction that the Christian church in this country will be dead and buried within 40 years. It will vanish from mainstream British life with only 0.5% of the population attending Sunday services of any denomination. according to the country's leading analyst. In 40 years, they're predicting that 0.5% of the population will be attending church. Boy, that's a dramatic change from before the last war. And then part of the rest of the quote says this, these findings have come just five months after the publication of this latest English church attendance survey It showed that only 7.5% of the population went to church on Sundays in the past 10 years, billed by the churches as a decade of evangelism. Church attendance dropped by an alarming 22%. What has happened to England? You know what happened to England? See, that compromise we've talked about in the other sessions, that's what happened to England. Back in the 1700s, 1800s, the idea of millions of years was popularized. As the church adopted millions of years and the theologians said, well, we can believe in the millions of years and reinterpret the days and reinterpret the geology and reinterpret the biology and reinterpret the astronomy and reinterpret the anthropology, the church disconnected the Bible from its history. And the church basically said, well, we can teach the spiritual moral things. That's OK. We can we can believe the world's history. That's all right. We don't have to believe the history in the Bible. And that doesn't matter anyway. As long as we teach that Jesus Christ rose from the dead and we maintain the Bible's spiritual things, moral things and and that sort of thing. That's what's important. By the way, stand back and look at England today. Now they've lost that. To me, it's really summarized. With this illustration. is the premier church in England, Westminster Abbey. You know, a lot of dead people in Westminster Abbey, I mean real dead people, buried in Westminster Abbey. It's full of graves. There's a particular grave in Westminster Abbey, the first time I stood there and looked at it, I thought of a particular verse of scripture, Psalm 113. You see, that grave belonged to Charles Darwin. You know, Charles Darwin was going to be buried in a little country graveyard, but humanists like Francis Galton, his cousin, Arden Humanist, and others, Thomas Huxley, well documented in secular circles, by the way, they knew that if they could get the church to honour Darwin, what that would do for humanism, for evolution. And that is well documented. And so they put pressure on the Abbey and pressure on Parliament and So the Abbey honoured Darwin and buried Darwin in the Abbey. But they just didn't bury him in the Abbey, they buried him in the floor of the Abbey. In fact, when you walk in to Westminster Abbey, if you go to a place and you look down, and there's Darwin's grave in the floor. Do you know why that's significant to me? Because Psalm 113 came to mind, if the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do? And I apply that verse in this particular way, in this instance. A man that popularized a philosophy to destroy the foundations of the church is honored by the church and buried in the very foundations of the church. That is what happened in England. And that compromise from England spread around the world. And it spread to America. You know what you see happening in America today? You see most of your Bible colleges and seminaries and most of your church leaders who say, you can believe in millions of years and or evolution. You can believe in Big Bang, that doesn't matter. As long as we cling to the spiritual moral things, that's what's important. You know, we can believe the world's history, it doesn't matter. We can disconnect the Bible from its history. Whoa, whoa, wait a minute. America, the greatest Christian nation on earth. with the greatest Christian influences in the world, the greatest number of Bible colleges, seminaries, Christian bookshops, Christian radio, Christian TV, is becoming, as a nation, less Christian every day. And they say today about 40% or so attend church in America. That's where England was before the last war. I'm going to predict that unless the church gets on its knees and repents and turns around on this issue, that where England is today, America will be tomorrow for exactly the same reasons. Now, as you think about all that, see, even in Australia, you know, back in the 1950s, why did an evangelist could come and have such great impact? You know, my father was the principal of an elementary school and we were transferred around the state of Queensland. Do you know what they used to do in those days? Well, they had prayer in the schools. My father had prayer with every student at public school before they went into class. They had Bible readings in every classroom. Ministers were invited in to teach the Bible. You see, even though Australia only has about, what, 5% attending church and probably about 2% born-again Christians, which is about the same as England, by the way, right now, nonetheless, still, the Christian message was understood in the culture. And people knew what the Bible was and when you said words like Jesus and God and sin, they basically understood because there was that knowledge that was there. But you know today, if you go to Australia, they don't have prayer in the public schools. They don't have Bible readings in the public schools. They teach evolution as fact. Things have changed. And by the way, the responses to the evangelists have changed. I remember when I was a teacher, I was at a town called Dalby and a group of ministers approached me and they said, can you're a teacher in the school here? Yes. Why is it the kids don't listen anymore? I mean, we come in and we tell them about, you know, Paul's missionary journeys and Jesus on the cross and they don't listen, they're not interested. And I said, you know why? Because in the classrooms, they're being taught millions of years evolution. They're being basically indoctrinated that science has proved the Bible wrong. If you want to communicate to them, you know what you've got to do? You've got to come in and start helping them understand that you can really trust this history. You can trust the doctrine of creation. You've got to come in and show them you can trust the Bible's biology, geology, and so on. Because until you start answering some of those questions that they have, and show that you can uphold the authority of the Word of God from Genesis, they're not going to listen to you. And so they asked me to help them. We devised a course and they came in and started running courses on this, answering those questions like dinosaurs and Cain's wife and age of earth and so on. And you know what they came and said? Wow, these students have all sorts of questions and they're starting to get interested. Now, let's come to America. I want you to think about this culture. Generations ago, prayer in the schools, Bible reading in the schools, creation in the schools, Ten Commandments in the schools, prayer graduation, football games, nativity scenes in public parks. Generations ago, as a type, would you say America was more like the Jews or more like the Greeks? What would you say? More like the Jews. And therefore, the foundation was there to understand the message of the gospel. In other words, generations ago, did evangelists really need to define what they meant by the word God, or sin, or Jesus? The answer would be no, not really, because primarily people understood that. It was like the Jews. But let's come up to the present. Now you look at this culture. Evolution taught us, back in the schools, Christianity is taught against, if anything, Bible thrown out, prayer thrown out, Ten Commandments thrown out, Nativity scenes shown out of public parks, Ten Commandments out of courtrooms, prayer not allowed, graduation, so it goes on. Increasingly, generations coming through this culture, do you think they're thinking more like Jews or thinking more like Greeks? What would you say? They're thinking more like Greeks. Now I'm going to ask you what I believe is one of the most important questions that I want to ask to sum up the entire conference. Because remember, the preaching of the cross was what to the Greeks? Foolishness. I want you to tell me in a big loud voice here in a moment, when I finish my question. It's a long question. Would you say that the main major methods of evangelism, primarily used by the church, Bible colleges, seminaries, Christian radio, TV, evangelists, street preachers, vacation Bible school, our Sunday school curriculum, the tracks that we use to hand out, the major thrust of most of the evangelism that's done here in America and most of the evangelistic tools that are produced in the books and the videos and everything else. Would you say primarily they assume people are Jews or they assume people are Greeks? They assume people are Jews. But you told me increasingly the culture thinks like Greeks, you have just told me one of the major problems in regard to why the church increasingly is not reaching the culture. The church is not touching the culture because the culture invaded the church. You know whose fault that is? The church. Because God's people said, we can let the culture invade the church, we can believe the world's history, we don't need to believe the authority of word in Genesis, we can reinterpret that, we'll cling to the spiritual and moral things, and you know, you think about this. You go out and turn on Christian radio, you turn on Christian TV, you go to the average church service. You know what you see today? The emphasis is on spiritual things, on moral things, on relationship, on worship, but you don't see this, in fact, much at all dealing with the earthly things in regard to where the culture has lost its foundation. You know, you come into a church and they say, well, the most important thing here is we've got to have worship and music. Don't get me wrong, we need worship and music, but See, what I see as I travel across America, the church recognizes there's a gap between the church and the world. They're trying to bridge that gap. And so to them it's, well, maybe more music, maybe more drama, maybe more worship. That'll help. And people come in and, well, maybe we need more evangelism. You know what they mean by more evangelism? Get out there and tell people about Jesus and that they're sinners. And I'm saying, whoa, whoa, don't you understand? You're not dealing with the problem as to why the world is not listening anymore. You're still approaching them as Jews, and then you're trying to make the church look more like the world anyway, to try to overcome this problem. When there's a fundamental issue here, we've lost the foundation of the authority of the Word of God. In this era of history, there's been a particular attack concerning the millions of years and so on, and the history generations have been taught in the schools. You've said they can learn, and that's okay, but that contradicts the Bible's history. It's this loss of biblical authority. Don't you understand? And they say, oh, that's just a side issue. Don't worry about that. No, no. No, look, we've got to do this drama and this worship and these praise songs and we've got to have more evangelism here. Do you see the problems? See, what I'm saying to you, friends, is this. We have whole generations today that are being put on a different road. They've been put on the Greek road. Generations, millions in this culture have been put on the Greek road. And mostly the church, the pastors, the Christian leaders are preaching to them as if they're Jews. They're not. Increasingly, they're Greeks. And if we want to be successful in reaching them, we've got to start recognizing, wait a minute, God's already shown us what happens to the Greeks. And he's already given us an example right there in Acts 17 of how Paul reached the Greeks. And friends, I also want you to understand this. Do you remember from Dr. Terry Mortensen's lectures? This area of compromise in our culture began in a big way in the 1700s, the 1800s. There's been 200 years of intense humanistic, evolutionary, uniformitarian indoctrination to change people's entire way of thinking from the foundation up. There's been 200 years of of increasing compromise in the church and teaching generation after generation. We don't have to believe the word of God as written. 200 years of changing people's entire way of thinking. Remember back to one of the other talks I gave, it's not something that happened overnight, but progressively, generation after generation. It's this whole different way of thinking about the Bible, this whole philosophical change, this attitudinal change in regard to what the Bible is that's occurred in the church and it's occurred in the world, which means If we're going to have to deal with that, it's not going to be an easy task. It's not going to be something you can do overnight. And that's another reason why I believe we have a major problem in the church. Because we recognize the moral collapse in the culture. And the church wants a quick fix solution to whatever seems to work. Because they don't understand the fundamental problem. And usually what seems to work superficially is the appeal to the emotions. Because people have those needs. And you know, for all the megachurches, and for all the worship, and all the praise songs, and all the evangelistic programs, and all the parachurch organizations, and all the Christian radio, and all the Christian TV in America, when you stand back and have a look, we are losing the culture. Because The real problem has not been dealt with, where the word of God has been undermined and compromised in this era of history. See, those castle diagrams that I use, I've now relabeled them as the Greeks and the Jews. You see the one on the left, the foundation of evolution, millions of years, man determines truth, because that's really what millions of years is all about. The castle comes out of that humanism. In other words, all is relative. Man is a measure of all things. Man can do what he wants. Man answers to himself. You can justify anything you want, if you can get away with it, or if you want to. On the other side, we have the foundation of creation. God's Word is truth, the structure of Christianity. You see, the left of the Greeks, the right of the Jews, the Greeks have been very, very clever. How do you change Jews into being Greeks? Well, that's easy. You change their history. You get rid of the foundation of the authority of the Word of God. You get rid of their history. Put in a different history. And the church has said, that's okay. We'll help you put in your history. That's all right. And then we see the collapse of the Christian structure. And we still see people in that structure who are basically the Jews and they're looking up and saying, whoa, whoa, wait a minute, increasing abortion, homosexual behavior, using lasers, suicide. What are we going to do with this culture? We've got to fight. Look at all the problems. I've got news for you. They're not the problems. Doesn't mean you don't stand against them, doesn't mean we shouldn't do something about them, but they're not the problems, they're really the symptoms or the consequences of the problem. And the problem is a change in foundation. So what I see the Answers in Genesis ministry is all about is this. Hey, if you want to change Greeks into Jews, to be successful you've got to do it from the foundation up. You've got to replace their false history with the true history, which means you have to be able to answer the questions of the world so that you can defend the Christian faith and show that it's the Bible's history that's true in geology, biology, astronomy, anthropology, to restore that foundation of the authority of the Word of God so we can build that Christian structure and therefore effectively fight that secular humanist structure that's taken over the culture. Another little example here, the parable of the sower and the seed, Matthew 13. You know the parable of the sower and the seed, and there's different sorts of ground out there. But the parable also makes it obvious that the sower wanted seed to grow so he could reap a harvest. That's why a sower sows seed. If you think about it, when the pioneers went westward in America, they didn't just put their wagons in a circle, throw out some seed and say, well, we'll sit here and wait for harvest. They had to have prepared ground, didn't they? They had to work hard to prepare the ground. I'd like to suggest to you that generations ago, in America, even in Australia, certainly in England, there was lots of prepared ground. It was prepared by the schools, by the homes, by the churches. There was rocky and thorny ground there too, that's true, but there was lots of prepared ground. And evangelists could come in and sow the seed of the gospel, preach the gospel, and there were people there that had the fertile ground so it could take root and reap a harvest. And so thousands were saved, like Acts 2. But you see today, most of that ploughed ground in our culture has disappeared. It's been flooded up by the rocks of evolutionary geology and the trees of evolutionary biology for millions of years. And so the church is out there by and large, wow, this is why we've always spread the gospel in the past. Wow, these weeds are getting worse every day. Oh, well, we keep throwing it out anyway. Well, it's not working. But anyway, we keep throwing it out. You know, when I was over in England, I think it was last year. It might have been the year before. I was near Victoria Station, a very busy place at five o'clock in the afternoon and there's just thousands of people a minute just zooming across all these intersections and so on. There was a man there with a speaker box and a microphone and he was screaming at people, you know, repent of your sin, Jesus is coming back, trust in the Lord. And as I watched him I thought, you know it's interesting, not one person I saw listen to him, not one person. But in the days of Whitfield and Wesley, thousands listened. Something's different. Whitfield and Wesley were preaching to Jews. This guy was preaching to Greeks. That's what was different. You know, I see the Ministry of Answers in Genesis as a pioneer ministry. We call it pioneer evangelism, creation evangelism. We're coming in with a big bulldozer, if you like. Now, before someone gets upset and tries to punch me in the nose, I used this in California once and was accused of using an anti-environmental illustration. So, ever since then, I want people to understand, nothing in that picture is real. The trees aren't real, the thorns aren't real, the bulldozer's not real, the plow is not real, there's no owl in the tree. Or bald eagle, or anything like that. There's nothing like that in the tree. The only thing real there is the creation scientist sitting in that bulldozer. The symbolic bulldozer. Okay, now we've got rid of that, let's discuss this illustration. You see, what we're doing is we're saying, don't you understand? The ground's all but gone. We need to replow the ground. This is going to be hard work. 200 years of intense indoctrination to take over the ground and plant a totally different forest there. It's a whole different environment. We've got to change the entire environment from the foundation up. This is going to be hard work. And results are going to be slow. See, Paul only got a few converts. He was phenomenally successful. To get a few converts when he was talking to a culture that didn't have the right foundation, he was phenomenally successful. Peter was phenomenally successful, but he was going to a whole different culture. And what we need to do is clear out those rocks and clear out those trees. We plow the ground. You know what that bulldozer really represents? It represents answers like this. So where did God come from? And who was Cain's wife? And well, what about the dinosaurs? What do you do with ape men? And how do you explain fossils? And what about the age of the earth? And how did Nile get all the animals on the ark? And there's not enough water to cover the earth. Do you know why they're the questions? Because they're the ones people ask today because they actually summarize the very things they've been taught in schools and universities and through the media that stopped them believing what the Bible teaches. that's a direct attack on the authority of the Word of God. But for most of the churches, well, don't worry about that. Trust in Jesus anyway. You know, one of the other things that we have to understand is this. Not only is the culture as a whole more like the Greeks than like the Jews, but most of the kids that come from church homes are also Greeks. Because most of them are actually trained by the same system. But the sad thing is, it's not just the public schools that are training them to be Greeks. Most of you, Christian colleges, Bible colleges, seminaries, even many Christian schools, even parts of the homeschool movement, are training kids to be Greeks. Because they won't take a stand on the six days, they won't take a stand on the flood, they won't take a stand on the age of the earth, because, oh, they're just side issues. You know, people say to me, it doesn't matter whether God created in six days or not, You're prepared to stand before the God of History and say, Lord, I don't care what your word says. That's in essence what they're doing. And they're teaching generations of kids, this is not important. Well, you know what they're going to say? Well, neither is this and neither is this and neither is this and eventually neither is this. And they don't see it as an absolute authority. If we want to be successful today, we've got to start recognizing, hey, If what I'm saying is true, friends, do you realize something? If what I'm saying is a correct picture of where the culture is at and the church is at, we need to revolutionize our Sunday School material. We need to revolutionize our Bible studies. We need to radically change the way we preach in churches. We need to radically change the way we run youth groups. We need to radically change our Vacation Bible School curriculum. I mean radically change. Remember I said in one of the other sessions, the trouble is most of the curricula I see, whether it's in homeschool, Christian school, Sunday school, youth group, Bible studies, we teach Bible stories. We teach the Bible in a bubble. We teach the Bible separate from its history. Because most of those programs do not teach people How to answer questions in biology, geology, astronomy, anthropology, chemistry, physics. We gave that up to the world. We teach them morality. We teach them relationships. We teach them spiritual things. I'm not saying they're not important. Don't get me wrong on that. But we're preaching it disconnected from its history. And we've said to them, you can learn the history of the world. And they're coming back and saying, But these spiritual things and moral things, how can they be true? Where did Cain get his wife? What about the millions of years? What about the radiometric dating methods? What about the ice age? What about those ice cores that supposedly tell us millions of years? What about the ape men? How did Noah get all the animals on the ark? That's got nothing to do with it. It's got everything to do with it. Because that's the very focus of attack. You know, I just spoke up at Word of Life Bible College in New York. And afterwards, one of the students came down to me and he looked at me and he said, you know, you know what you've done for me? He said, you helped me to focus on where the real attack has occurred in regard to biblical authority in today's era of history, the focus of that attack. So now I can focus on dealing with that attack. So that's exactly right. You know, in our creation museum, the whole philosophy that undergirds our message there is going to be what we call the seven C's. Many of you have already seen that, but let me just now apply this practically for you so you see what we're doing. Creation, corruption, catastrophe, confusion, Christ, cross, consummation. Here's basically what we're doing. We're going to say to people, and by the way this is a very different museum because we're actually going to bring them in and say, we're going to start at the beginning and take you step by step through the true history of the world. So even when you go to secular museums, here's a thing on fossils and here's a bit on net, and they've got evolution of millions of years everywhere, and people have sort of got this vague idea of things and all the rest of it, but what we're going to do here is, we're going to do it chronologically, in order, like the Bible does. Man, radical. And so we're going to start with creation, corruption, catastrophe, and what we're going to do is we're going to say, here's what the Bible says, And, you know, where it deals with geology, we deal with geology. Where it deals with biology, we deal with biology. Where it deals with astronomy, we deal with astronomy. You get the idea? And we're going to say, this is what the Bible says. Now, here's how we should be thinking, and I believe we should do this in our Sunday school lessons, vacation Bible school, preaching from the pulpit. What does the world say today to stop people believing this? And I'll give you real easy examples, but you can start to apply it in all sorts of other ways. Adam and Eve, the world says ape men. So what do we need to do? Counteract the ape men, give the answers to the ape men. And then, help people understand how we can all go back to one man, one woman, answer questions like Cain's wife, and so on. And then what are we going to do? Build the doctrine of marriage, one man for one woman, and then apply that practically in regard to issues like homosexual behaviour. See, I have people say to me, When you're going to teach young people today, like in our church, we need to have programs on sex and drugs because that's where they're at. Well, I totally disagree. You know why I disagree? Because if you taught the Bible foundationally to them, in this particular way, you will deal with sex and drugs. But you'll deal with it foundationally. And you'll be dealing with it in a way that you'll be answering the objections that they have as to why the Bible can't be trusted anyway. But you see, we don't teach like that. We just take something like sex or drugs and we try to impose morality and relationships and things like this. See what I mean? But if you're taught foundationally from this book of history, you will build that morality and those relationships. Another example would be, say, the flood of Noah's day. What does the world say? Millions of years. Noah couldn't get all the animals on the ark. Fossils are laid down for millions of years. You answer those questions. Then you talk about even the gospel of salvation here. As Taz talked about, you know, the doorway to be saved. No one in the family had to go through a doorway to be saved. Jesus said, I am the door. And so you bring it all together. And as I said in one of the other sessions, friends, we need to wake up as a church. This sounds so radical, but it should not be. It's only because of the culture we've been brought up in, we've been conditioned to think this way by the church and the culture as a whole. We need to be teaching geology, biology, astronomy, anthropology, physics, chemistry in Sunday school, in Bible study, in youth group, from the pulpits. Not in the sense of, you know, necessarily all the equations like you saw up here with Keith Wancer, but in the sense of the big picture. And those equations and all those details are important and we can go on and study them. And that's why we have scientists like Keith Wancer and Larry Vardaman and Taz Walker and and Emil Silvestro and so on, to help fill in those details as real scientists. But you see, you don't have to be a PhD scientist to do what I'm saying in church. We're building the big picture. We use the PhD scientists to get the answers to help us, but we build the big picture of biology, the big picture of history, and then answer those questions of the world. So we train up generations who know what they believe, know why they believe what they do, know the right questions to ask, know how to give the answers, can connect the Bible to every aspect of reality, have a foundation for their faith, understand the gospel grounded in real history. Imagine if we trained up generations like that. We'd change the world. Change the culture. And I would pray that as you leave a conference like this, that you'd be starting to think about the fact that, you know, I need to start going back and evangelizing maybe my deacons and elders in our churches and maybe my own pastor. It's possible. Probably very probable in a lot of instances. Sad to say. And I know for those of us that have been really trained in seminaries and Bible colleges, it's hard to change your whole way of thinking in regard to these things. It really is. And we've grown up in a culture where we are so used to a particular way of doing things in churches, it is so difficult for us to even think about a radical change like this. And we don't know when the Lord's going to come back. And I see today, too, there's a bit of an emphasis. People say, well, the Lord's going to come back tomorrow, so we just need to see, get people saved. Well, people were saying that to me 30 years ago. and look at the work of Answers in Genesis now around the world. Imagine if I had said back then, 30 years ago, well, you're right, we just need to go ahead, we don't need to worry about dealing with this foundational stuff. Look at the millions of lives that have been touched by Creation Ministries, whether it's Answers in Genesis, ICR, Creation Research Society, whatever, around the world. Look at the influence of that book. What if Dr. Morris hadn't written The Genesis Flood, what was it, 40 odd years ago? How many of you have read The Genesis Flood, by the way? I meet people like that all around the world. I've met so many pastors who've even said to me, the Genesis flood saved me from my liberal college. Imagine if you decided, well it's not important to me, this is a long-term thing. Well, that was 40 years ago. You know, the Lord mightn't come back for another thousand years. I mean, I hope he comes back tomorrow. It saves me eating, I was going to say it saves me eating airplane food, but they don't serve it anymore, so you can't even eat it anymore. Martin Luther, I believe it was, was once asked, what would you do if you knew the Lord was coming back tomorrow? And I think his reply was something like this, I'd plant a tree. In other words, I would keep on keeping on doing the things that I'm doing. Which is what I believe the Bible teaches us to do. And I believe we need to have some long term goals in this regard. Because maybe it might be that generations to come might look back on this time in history and say, wow, those Christians back in the 21st century who started to understand the times like the Men of Ishikar in the Bible. You know that you read in Chronicles there, the Men of Ishikar who understood the times. We need to be people who understand the times. Maybe generations will look back and say, wow because of what they did they started a new reformation that changed the church and changed the culture.