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As we start this session, I want
to share something that I recently came across on YouTube. That's
probably a dangerous thing to say, because you can come across
a lot of things on YouTube that aren't worth paying much attention
to. But this was a bit of a composite
video that took some snippets from two different people whose
names you'd probably recognize and put them side by side in
this little video. The names of the two people in
this video are Andy Stanley and William Lane Craig, not to be
confused with William Neal Craig, present today. And what was alarming about this,
and I was aware that William Lane Craig has a reputation as
a Christian apologist. I do recall watching a debate
of his some years ago And I wasn't really impressed, frankly, because
at the very beginning of the debate, he did what a presuppositional
apologist would never do. He said to the person he was
debating, I'm willing to concede to you the laws of logic. And
I'm thinking, you just lost the debate. Because that is one of
the most important presuppositions that you need to argue. And it
comes from the Christian presuppositions and not from atheistic presuppositions. So I never paid that much attention
to him as an apologist over the years until this video came across
my suggested videos a couple weeks ago. And I watched it,
and there's no surprise that Andy Stanley would stand up and
declare that Genesis is a myth, that the creation story is a
myth. This is the same guy who said a year or two ago that we
don't need the Old Testament at all. So I'm not sure why he
would even care whether Genesis is true or not. But what surprised
me was for Craig to say the same thing. And it really begs an
important question, doesn't it? What is that? If you call yourself
a defender of Scripture, the obvious question is, where would
you like to start? And if somebody's not willing
to defend Genesis 1 or 2 or maybe 3, I don't know how far. That's
the question. We don't know, is it? If you
say that Genesis 1 is a myth, then what about Genesis 2? Mythology
or truth? Genesis 3, mythology or truth? Genesis 4, mythology or truth?
Where does the truth begin in Scripture if you're not willing
for it to begin in the first verse of the first chapter? And
where exactly do you begin your apologetic of Christianity if
you're not going to begin it at the beginning? And to receive
the Word of God as true and authoritative, inerrant, infallible, all of
those things. That exposes a real problem. What does it mean to be an apologist
or a defender of Christian truth, Christian faith, if you're not
going to start at the beginning? And we can ask ourselves, why
is that? Why does it seem to be the case that so many ostensibly
Christian people, even those who say they're apologists of
Christianity, are not willing to start with Genesis chapter
1? What is it that's drawn us away
from the Word of God? And of course the answer is that
there's a lot of deception, what seems like plausible ideas about
how things got started, and how they developed over time, and
how long it took for that to happen, and so forth. And a key
idea that I want you to have in your mind as you think about
how do we reconcile Genesis chapter 1 with what we call science,
and I'm putting air quotes around it at the moment, is that when we start to bring
those two in proximity to each other, we have to notice something.
There's a question of authority that comes into play. Which of
those two words, which of those two worldviews, as Bill would
put it, which of those two worldviews is authoritative over the other
one? Because that's what it is. It
is a conflict of worldviews, and I'm glad you made that point,
because it fits very well in what we're thinking about right
now. Evolution is not science. It's a worldview. I'll be more
specific. It's a religion. and it's a religion
that explicitly denies the existence of God. We call it atheism. Is
it surprising that if you start with the presupposition of atheism
and try to work your way through an explanation of how things
got to be the way they are, and you compare that to what we find
in Scripture that begins with the presupposition of the eternal
power and existence of God who creates with a purpose, that
you're going to come to different conclusions. In fact, they're
completely incompatible. And I'm going to throw out another
term for you to think very carefully about, because what we're actually
doing is we're mixing two religions when we do that. And the word
is syncretism. And here's a way to think about
it. I think it was John MacArthur who said something like this,
that when you take the truth and mix error with it, it doesn't
get better. Mixing truth and error does not improve the truth
at all. In fact, in the dichotomy between truth and error, if you
have something that is perfectly true over here on this hand and
something that's perfectly false on the other and say, I think
I'll take a little of this falsehood over here and mix it in with
the truth over on this side, what do you end up with? You
end up with untruth. There's no middle ground between
truth and error. And as soon as you start mixing
untruth with truth, you get error. And that's often part of the
tactics of the deceiver. This is part of his craftiness,
his subtlety. He's going to say things that seem very plausible.
And he's also going to rely on what may be a lot of truth, even
quoting scripture and saying, well, what about this? but using
it in the wrong way. So we have to be mindful of that
sort of thing. That's really the big issue and the reason
why we have to defend Scripture from the first verse. It's like
I mentioned with my anecdote in the last session, if there
are errors in the Word of God, then what's the standard? How
are we ever going to know what is true? and if we're left to
our own devices to figure out what's true, we're already in
trouble. Let me point this out before
I forget about it and miss the opportunity to mention it. When
Adam and Eve were confronted in the Garden of Eden with the
deception of the serpent, they were still perfect. Well, as we'll see a couple sessions
further down the road, we're not. We're going to talk about
the fallenness and what the fall has done, what effect it's had
on our minds and on our ability to reason, our ability to discern. Adam and Eve didn't have the
defect of the fall when they were confronted with a little
bit of a lie, and they fell for it anyway. So we really need
to be mindful of how important our powers of discernment are
in an age when we really are surrounded by or you might say
immersed in all kinds of deception. So based on that little introduction
you can gather that when it comes to apologetics, I don't mind
starting with Genesis 1, chapter 1, verse 1, because there's no
place else to start. If you're not going to start
with Genesis 1, 1, I'm inclined to say just pack your bags and
go home, because you're not an apologist. The Bible is true
from the very first verse. Now, in this session, I'm going
to be talking a little more about science, so-called. And I say
so-called Because from one standpoint, I mean, if we just take a little
etymology again, science is a word that means knowledge. What is
science? It's the pursuit of knowledge
or the pursuit of truth. And there's a methodology behind
that. How do we discover truth with something called science?
And it's, frankly, a very slow and a very messy process. We'll
talk a little more about that in a bit as the process goes. But here's where we're running
into trouble. And if you haven't noticed over the last year and
a half, it's been very troubling to see what I would almost describe
as the death of science in real time. Because of the way data has been
manipulated, the way the narrative has been manipulated, taking only bits and pieces of
things, not looking at the whole picture, or perhaps jumping to
certain conclusions that are not warranted from the data,
those kinds of things. But measurement especially, I
could be on my soapbox all day long about what has gone haywire
just over the last year and a half with regard to measurement. Because
if we're going to use the facts of science, we need to measure
things properly. At the risk of getting too distracted,
I'll give you an aside just to illustrate the point. When it
comes to the question of climate change, you hear this narrative that
the temperature of the earth is increasing. And I run that through my scientific
filters and I say, how do you measure the temperature of the
earth? How could you even do that? Now, I'll give you a simple
illustration to show you how absurd it is. How do you measure
the temperature in this room? Oh, well, there's a thermostat
on the wall back there. It has a thermometer in it. We could
go back there and look at the number and see it says the temperature
is such and such in this room. But is that the temperature in
the room? Well, it's the temperature of that spot on the wall back
there, but is that the temperature in the room? Because the temperature
on this side of the room might be very different from the temperature
on that side of the room. And how do we do that? Are we
going to take one measurement? Are we going to say, oh, here's the number?
This is the number at this particular moment in time? Are we going
to continue to collect data 24 hours a day? And then what are we going to
do with it? How are we going to average it out to determine what is the
temperature? It's not a simple matter. And so when you hear narratives
regarding science that involve things that sound so certain,
so absolute, they're not nearly as certain as you might think.
Because something as seemingly simple as measuring the temperature
in a room is a science unto itself. I'll give you one more illustration
of this point, something that you can do as your own little
practical experiment. The next time you go to Walmart,
or maybe one of the hardware stores, something like
that, go into the garden center, where they have all the thermometers,
right? All kinds of thermometers. And just see if you can find
two of them that agree with each other. It's not as simple as
it sounds. So all that to say that we have
to be very careful about the pronouncements of science because
they may sound very authoritative, they may sound very factual,
they may indeed be using facts, but the facts that they're using,
in some cases, frankly, are fabricated by something called proxy data.
Those are not real measurements. We don't know what the temperature
was 800 years ago. We've only been taking temperature
measurements for about the last 150 years. So you have to be
careful of that. There needs to be some caution
and some skepticism in regard to what science says. And of
course, that's what brings us to the question today. What does
science say about creation? What does science answer to the
question, how did we get here? What are we doing here? How did
this all happen? How did it all get started? How
did it progress? And here's where I'm going to
put on the hat of the secular scientist for just a moment.
It's like Paul saying, if you'll forgive me, I'm going to be a
fool for just a moment. Let's pretend as if it really
is true that the universe is 15 billion years old. We'll play what if, OK? And then
how long has man been here? A few thousand years. Who was
around to see the beginning of creation? Well, we weren't here
yet. Evolution hadn't done its thing. Now let me illustrate the absurdity
of the question by asking you a personal question. What did
you have for dinner last Wednesday night? And you say, well, I don't
remember. I was there. I had something,
I'm sure, but I don't remember what it was. And then I said,
well, your task if you're willing to accept it, is to go back and
figure out what you had on dinner last Wednesday night. And you might be able to look
at your shopping list or, you know, there might be some clues.
Maybe you got a text from your spouse, you know, something like
that. Some evidence that's left behind about what you had for
dinner last Wednesday night. Now, in my case as a bachelor,
I'd just dig down to the bottom of the sink and see what's still
on the plate. I could dig up some forensic
evidence pretty quickly. But for the rest of us, it's
harder. And think about how hard it is the further we get away
from a certain event to determine what happened, even if it's just
a few days and something that doesn't matter at all, like what
you had for dinner last week. And then we come to this idea
that the universe is 15 billion years old. And when a scientist
starts telling you that it all came into being with something
called a Big Bang, you stop and think about the fact that there
was nobody around 15 billion years ago if, in fact, that happened.
There are different kinds of science. The two that we rely
on the most are observational science and experimental science. I can go out here in the churchyard
and observe how fast the grass is growing at this time of the
year. I can measure that. I can measure it today, and then
I can come back in a day or two and measure it again and say,
the grass is growing at this rate. It's an observational measurement. Or if I said, I want to find
out just how fast St. Augustine grass will grow, I'm
going to set up a controlled experiment where I create just
the right conditions for St. Augustine to grow as fast as
it possibly can. And those kinds of things are
in the realm of either observational or experimental science. But
the kind of science that we're talking about now is not just
forensic, but it's philosophical. Now, forensic science If you
like forensic kinds of shows, like crime scene investigators,
what do they do? There's a crime. There's been
a crime. And so the crime scene investigators
go into the crime scene and do what? They look for evidence. They're looking for evidence
that would tell them what happened and who did it. That's the drama
in the TV shows, right? Who did it? Sometimes how they
did it. Everybody's trying to figure
out how to commit the perfect crime. The problem that we're running
into with that is that the evidence is going to be very limited.
And the further we are away from the event, the less the evidence
is going to be, the more it's going to be degraded. And the
more likely we are to be collecting evidence that may have nothing
to do with what actually happened. There's something called contamination,
right? Especially if it's an outdoor
crime scene, it's very quickly and easily contaminated. So you're
collecting evidence, it's scientific, but does that evidence connect
to the event or not? You end up with spurious evidence
and you're having to try to filter through what is the evidence
of the event and what is evidence that may have come along afterwards.
We run into those kinds of things with forensic science. It's not
nearly an exact science. It's highly speculative, in fact.
And what could be more speculative than sitting here, if the universe
is 15 billion years old, and speculating about what happened
15 billion years ago that got it this way or that got it started?
It's pretty sketchy. And I go through that to illustrate
to you that that's not really science. That's making up a story. This is what we think happened.
And you can say, this is what I think happened. That's not necessarily what happened.
It may have no connection at all to what happened. The creation
account that Bill read a little while ago from the first chapter
of Genesis describes a very orderly creation. God was very orderly
and systematic in how He did things. And yes, it says He created
in six days. Why is that so difficult to understand?
Especially when you add in the fact that one of his reasons
for creating light on the very first day was to mark the passage
of the days, morning and evening the first day, morning and evening
the second day, until we had the sun on day four that took
the place of that original heavenly light. So it very clearly says
that Genesis is a six-day event. And why should we doubt that
if God is who we think He is based on what we said in that
last session? We could put it this way. In
the debate about how long it took God to create, Scripture
says it took six days. If He'd wanted to do it in an
instant, He could have done it in an instant. as we saw, nothing's too hard
for God. If He did it in six days, then
there must be a reason why He did it in six days, and then
that should drive us back to the Scripture to understand what
was God's intentions. What's He trying to teach from
that process? So, no one was there at the beginning
No man was there. I can say that with confidence.
Perhaps the angels were there observing creation, but man was
not there to witness the creation. Man didn't come along until the
very end, in fact. Another thing that makes forensic
science sketchy as a scientific method is that unlike going out
here and measuring how fast the grass is growing naturally or
setting up an experiment in a laboratory, those things can be repeated.
One-time events that are not observed and not repeated, that
ends up being in a category besides science. And that's where things
start to get sketchy. But when science tries to claim
those kinds of things, that's where it's getting into trouble.
And that's why we need to be able to differentiate between
what constitutes good science and science that is really operating
according to an atheistic worldview and has an agenda behind it. So we talked in the last session
about how creation reveals who God is. We see him operating in a very
orderly and a systematic way. Another thing that we see throughout
the course of that week of creation, there is a certain refrain, there's
more than one actually, that comes up. One of the refrains
is, and God said... and there was... and then at
the end of each of the days, what does he say? As he looks
over this creation as it's beginning to take shape over the course
of that first week. that it was good, that it was
good. And that refrain continues until
the end of the sixth day where he doesn't say, it is good. He
says, it's very good. Now, how does that fit with the
idea that over millions or billions of years, everything took place
very slowly, randomly, that you had the formation of life, but
you have lots of monsters that are fighting and killing each
other and trying to survive until we finally end up with mankind? It doesn't quite fit the narrative. And we could not say at any stage
of that so-called process, if that's how it happened, that
it was good. That would have been bad. One of the things that
fully convinced me some years ago about the necessity of six-day
creation was a little book by Ken Ham called Evolution the
Lie. And I read that book and I thought,
oh, well, yeah. Because his argument is that
evolution depends on competition and death over millions and millions
and millions and millions of years. But death did not enter
the world until what? After the fall. Everything was
created very good. It was a perfect world. That
has very important theological consequences, by the way. Everything
was very good at the beginning, so there could not have been
any death. There could not have been competition. We were not
killing each other. whether we were monkeys or whatever
we were on the way to becoming people, reptiles or whatever,
right? The idea of evolution is a very
violent and disorderly process. And that doesn't bear any resemblance
to what God reveals in Genesis chapter 1. So really, it comes down to this
question. Put science next to scripture,
and the question is which one has authority over the other
one? If science says this is how you have to interpret Genesis,
it didn't happen the way God said in Genesis chapter 1. It
was evolution in billions of years, and the Word of God says,
no, it was six days, it was all very orderly, and the end of
it was all very good. Which one of those has authority
over the other? Because one of them, here's the law of non-contradiction,
One of them is wrong. And if we take science as the
authority, which I don't recommend, by the way, then we have to rewrite
scripture. Suddenly science, and this is
a couple thousand years down the line in church history, suddenly
science is the new hermeneutic. For several thousand years that
God has been revealing himself through his word, we didn't know
how to interpret it until we got to science in the 20th century.
that said, here's how it really happened. That's impossible. So keep in mind what's happening.
And it's alarming to me again that so many Christians, well-known
teachers and pastors, will simply refuse to defend Genesis chapter
1. They're willing to compromise
and they may not realize just how severe the problem is. There's no common ground, particularly,
between creation, biblical creation, and what passes for cosmology
today, what's called the Big Bang. Now, there was some excitement
in the middle of the 20th century when the Big Bang theory started
getting bandied around, and scientists were a little uneasy with that
because they're saying, uh-oh, instead of an eternal universe,
now we're talking about the universe having a beginning. That sounds
a lot like Genesis. And Christians may have been
getting excited saying, aha, science is finally showing that
there was a beginning. But they're still not compatible.
The new cosmology is not any more compatible with scripture
than the last one. And just wait a while, a few
generations maybe, who knows, the paradigm's going to change
again. That's the nature of science. The story in science is always
contingent. As I say, every conclusion is
contingent upon the next observation. I may go out there and make some
conclusions about how the grass grows, and then tomorrow something
happens, and I say, oh, well, that was wrong. I need a new
theory, a new paradigm, because my data no longer fits. That's
the nature of science. It never knows everything, and
it never knows what it doesn't know. That's a really big problem. We talk about the advances of
science, for example, but compared to what? If we look at where
we are today versus where we were 50 years ago, we say, wow,
look at these advances in science. But if we'd been living 50 years
ago, and some have, you might remember, before we knew all
the things that we know today, we still thought we were pretty
smart. Because we look back another 50 years and say, well, look
at how much we know today compared to what we knew 50 years ago.
But that pattern continues. 50 years from now, it's going
to be the same thing, and 100, and so forth. The proclamations
of science, the ideas, the theories that it promotes are always changing. And the reason is because we're
always learning. That's the process. We learn. We test. We keep what appears
to make sense. And we reject it if it doesn't
and come up with new ideas. I've used the expression that
the progress of science can be measured by the pile of discarded
ideas out behind the laboratory. That's how science progresses.
We take today's idea, we throw it on the trash heap, and we've
got a new one to work with. And then a few days or a few
years later, that one goes in the trash heap and here comes
the next one. It's a very slow process. I'd like to turn your attention
to a passage of Scripture in the book of Jeremiah that recently
came to my attention and seemed like a very fitting few verses
to include in our discussion today. It fits in with what we've
already been saying in the earlier sessions about the folly of idolatry. I'm in the 10th chapter of Jeremiah.
and I would like to read the first 10 verses. And by the way, this just adds
to the point. This is an indictment against
Israel, Israel's idolatry. They're on their way to judgment,
or at least we might say the discipline of being sent into
exile. And what is it that's the recurring
theme throughout the prophets? Idolatry, idolatry, idolatry,
idolatry. Even if we're not paying very
close attention, we might start to notice a pattern. So, Jeremiah 10, starting in
the first verse. Hear the word that the Lord speaks to you,
O house of Israel. Thus says the Lord, learn not
the ways of the nations, nor be dismayed at the signs of the
heavens, because the nations are dismayed at them. For the
customs of the peoples are vanity, A tree from the forest is cut
down and worked with an axe by the hands of a craftsman. They
decorate it with silver and gold. They fasten it with hammer and
nails so that it cannot move. Their idols are like scarecrows
in a cucumber field, and they cannot speak. They have to be
carried, for they cannot walk. Do not be afraid of them, for
they cannot do evil. Neither is it in them to do you
good. There is none like you, O Lord.
You are great, and your name is great in might. Who would
not fear you, O King of the nations? For this is your due. For among
all the wise ones of the nations, and in all their kingdoms, there
is none like you. They are both stupid and foolish.
The instruction of idols is but wood. Beaten silver is brought
from Tarshish, and gold from Uthaz. They are the work of craftsmen
and of the hands of the goldsmith. Their clothing is violet and
purple. They are all the work of skilled men. But the Lord
is the true God. He is the living God and the
everlasting King. At His wrath, the earthquakes
and the nations cannot endure His indignation." Now I want
to make an association. I want you to remember this passage.
Maybe come back and read it a couple more times just to kind of Reinforce
it. And then here's the association
I want to create with you that I hope you never forget. Evolution
is an idol of wood. It doesn't speak, can't talk,
it has no power. As a so-called theory, it has
no explanatory power. It doesn't explain anything. It's a lie, just as it says in
the title of Kinham's book. Evolution is a lie. And more
specifically, it's an idol. It is a false religious system. And it is in no way compatible
with the revelation of Scripture. Anything that we do, I could
refer back to the passage from Psalm 115 that we looked at a
few minutes ago. where the psalmist says, not
to us, O Lord, but to your name be the glory. That when we start
introducing these idols of wood, we are taking glory away from
the one who created the heavens and the earth and created it
all very good. So don't let that happen in your
mind and in your heart. I propose this thought that man
is on the escalator. Here's a mental picture for you.
Man on the escalator. If you see a snapshot, not a
moving picture, man on the escalator is about halfway up. The question
is, is he going up or going down? Because the two worldviews that
we're talking about have two very different answers to that
question. What does evolution say? Man is on the escalator
going up, getting better by the day. What does the Bible say? Man was at the top, and he basically
wrecked it. He's on the way down. And if
there's any doubt about that, all you have to do is kind of
look around and see what's happening in the culture, and you can begin
to grasp that. Here's a little anecdote that
I find fascinating, that if you look at surveys that ask people,
do you think things are getting better or worse, Interestingly,
they say, in a majority, things are getting worse. And the question
is, how would you know that? You see, we already have the
sense that things are getting worse, and the reason we know
we're going down is because we still have the law written in
our hearts, even though we're fallen. Evolution says man is on the
way up, and that opens the doors for all kinds all kinds of cruel
and disgusting things. What do I mean by that? We could
talk about the Nazi Holocaust, of Hitler thinking that he was
improving the stock of the race by eliminating the Jews. But eugenics actually started
in America. And eugenics is a byproduct of
an evolutionary worldview that says, We're getting better as
time goes by, and since we know that, we can do some things to
help move the process along, speed it up a little. It is evil
because it devalues human life. So the consequences are profound,
and we see those consequences all around us in the culture
and the way that we dehumanize life in so many ways. Now when we get to the bottom
of it, we have to say that no matter what your worldview is, that the answer to the question
how things got started is still a miracle. It doesn't matter
what your worldview is. You can take the religion of
atheism or you can take a Christian worldview and frankly as miracles
go, I'm thinking a miracle that has God behind it probably makes
more sense than a miracle that has absolutely nothing behind
it. That really is a miracle of everything created itself
out of nothing. That's a bigger miracle than
even God could accomplish. So we need to understand the
categories. The categories are not science versus the Bible
or faith versus science. It's not thinking about it correctly.
That's actually, I would say this is part of Satan's deception,
trying to get you to think that this is science versus the Bible.
It's not. It's two competing worldviews.
that are in conflict. Now, I couldn't say much about
science without talking about the fallacy of consensus. What is the fallacy of consensus?
What is this story that you hear? If we go back to climate change
as an example of that, I posted something on Facebook recently
about that, where one scientist declared, we're now at a, we're
more than a 99% consensus on man-made climate change, and
there's no reason to have any more public discussion about
this. Huh. That's not the kind of science
I was trained in. The kind of science I was trained in requires
reproducibility. It requires the theory to fit
the facts. Not, here's an idea, and we're
going to say it's true because we all believe it. Is that science
or is that faith? Because it's not hard to get
a consensus. You know pollsters do that all the time, right?
Every one of the polls that you see in the news, well, 51% of
somebody believes this. Well, it has a lot to do with
the way you ask the question, and it has a lot to do with who
you ask. And if you ask the right people the right question, guess
what? Wow, consensus. It shouldn't be surprising, though,
that in a world that now denies the objectivity of truth, that
we're falling back on something called consensus. What else do
we have? If there's no such thing as truth, if it's not a question
of what is true or false, then it becomes a question of what
do we mostly agree on. and that becomes the basis for
what we do. So that idea of a consensus in
science is, frankly, meaningless. I'll give you just the quick
anecdote of Albert Einstein, who, at the time that he came
up with the theory of relativity, was not really part of the physics
community, and yet he turned the physics community upside
down. Newtonian physics had stood for
several hundred years, and then it fell when Einstein came along. How many does it take to overturn
a theory, even if it's been around for generations? Just one. Because it's a question of the
truth, not a question of what everybody agrees on. As we get to the close of this
session, well, before I do that, let me do one more thing. I did
want to share with you a few examples of how science actually
agrees with Scripture. It might shock you for me to
say that science actually agrees with Scripture. Well, it does. What do we mean by that? Think
back to what Bill was reading at the beginning of this session.
Here's one of the refrains from that first chapter of Genesis.
After it's kind. After it's kind. What is the
law that God built into the creatures? Everything reproduces after its
own kind. That alone makes evolution impossible.
You cannot have a flamingo that turns into a giraffe. Flamingos
make flamingos, giraffes make giraffes, and that's always true. And if you want an illustration
of how we've tried to overturn that law, you can look at the
research that's been done in the area of using fruit flies
because they reproduce very quickly. We've been trying to make fruit
flies into something else for the last 100 years. And a funny
thing happens. Fruit flies only produce fruit
flies. And another funny thing happens. The ones that are mutated
often don't reproduce anything. Everything reproduces after its
own kind. There's a scientific fact for you. Does that preclude
variation within species? No. In fact, I notice as I'm
looking around the room, nobody in this room looks exactly alike.
And if we had twice or three times as many people, that would
still be true. Nobody's going to look exactly
alike. And it's actually remarkable and points back to God in His
original creation of Adam and Eve that all the variation of
all the people in all the world that would ever be born was already
in the genes of Adam when he was created. You're not a mutation. You're a variation of what God
originally created. Another one, this one kind of
hits kind of hard as far as our culture goes right at the moment,
that it says Verse 27, God created man in His own image, in the
image of God He created him. Well, it's hard for me to say
this. Male and female, He created them. There is male and there is female,
according to God's creation, according to His original design.
That may not be true in every species, but it's true in most.
We see, for example, if we skip ahead a few chapters to Genesis
6, As Noah is preparing the ark for the flood, what happens?
God brings the animals to Noah in pairs, male and female, so
that they can reproduce after the flood. That's been that way
from the beginning, and it's that way from now on. It's not going to change. Our
efforts to try to change the nature of gender or to deny it
are fruitless. And it's unfortunate that we
will take something that ought to be a good thing, which is
medical science, and use it for self-mutilation and to try to
be something that we are not. It's a violent denial of the
nature that God made us to reflect. Another important consequence,
we'll talk a little more, I think, about this in the next section,
is that when it says God made man in his own image and made
man male and female, that an important consequence of that
is whether you're male or female, that you have the capacity to
fully reflect God's image. So whatever God's image is, at
the end of the day, whether you're male or female, you can perfectly
reflect that image, because Eve did. Both Adam and Eve did. It was not simply man, as in
Adam, made in God's image, but man made in God's image, male
and female. And yet we can see that male
and female are different from each other. I know a president
of Harvard got himself fired for saying that in public. Not politically correct to say
that. It's also the case, and this is another thing that we
have to be cautious of with regard to evolution, is that people
and animals are categorically different. When we start talking
about what does it mean to be made in the image of God, Lisa's
cats are not made in the image of God. Fido is not made in the image
of God. you are, and that makes you unique. Another important consideration
that Scripture gives us is that there's only one human
race. Every human being who has ever lived have all descended
from Adam and Eve. And all this stuff about race
that we talk about, because we don't all have the same skin
tone, imagine that, God has made varieties, but there's only one
human race. And so when I was saying at the
outset that part of the reason for Genesis is that it helps
us answer virtually all the issues that we're wrestling with today,
that's an example of what I mean. Now let me close this session
as we get ready for our lunch break with a quote from John
MacArthur. If we cannot believe what Genesis
says about origins, we are lost as to our purpose and our destiny.
Whether this world and its life as we know it evolved by chance,
without a cause, or was created by God, has immense comprehensive
implications for all human life.
P3, Creation From Nothing
Series Fall Conference 2021
Dr. J.R. Dickens taught a conference on some of the key Christian doctrines as found in Genesis. This is lecture 3 of 6 entitled, "Creation From Nothing."
| Sermon ID | 116212220415112 |
| Duration | 45:56 |
| Date | |
| Category | Conference |
| Language | English |
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