Hello this is Paul Scharf for Whitcomb Ministries again and Dr. John Whitcomb is here with me this morning and Dr. Whitcomb in a few weeks will see the approach of Father's Day once again. And this morning we're going to talk about Father's Day in a very special way because as was noted in a previous recording, we spent some time remembering Henry Morris. And as you were preparing to leave for his funeral, you said something just off the cuff to me that in my interest you said, oh, my fathers are gone now. We know that Henry Morris' passing made you stop and think about some of these things, and so with Father's Day approaching, I wanted to just have you share with our listeners from your heart what you meant by that and what Father's Day, in light of all that, might mean and what it really means to be a father, not only physically a father, but maybe a spiritual father as well. Yes, God has a plan, namely that every single human being who's ever walked this earth, with the exception, of course, of Adam, came from a man, a father. Even Eve came from a man. in order that there should be some reflection of the mind of God to pass on to the new generation and how desperately, friends, we need help and encouragement and maturity, guidance and someone to lean on and look back to for help in times of need throughout our lives. Now, many of us have only one spiritual father. Wonderful it is to think that your physical father could be your spiritual father. That was not my case. My physical father, who lived to be 81, who died in 1976, was a good father. I was the only child in the home. He was a very outstanding military leader, a West Point graduate and an officer in both world wars in Europe, and was a good example to me in many, many ways. But he did not know the Lord until probably his last year or two on earth. and he came to live with us after my mother died and he participated with us in family devotions and gave some evidence that he acknowledged Christ Jesus as his Lord and his Savior. But actually he was responsible under God for sending me sending me to Princeton University in 1942 to begin my studies at great expense to himself and to my mother in those years. And it was at Princeton that I came to know Jesus Christ as my Savior. I had been in a prep school in Chattanooga, Tennessee called Macaulay School. where actually I heard the gospel from the headmaster, J.P. Macaulay, and yet I resisted that, suppressed that, and finally when I arrived at Princeton University, I was determined to prove to my physical father that I was a worthy inheritor of his investment and his hopes and dreams that I might someday perhaps even be an ambassador or diplomat in the U.S. State Department. It was at the end of that year, however, that God sent a missionary to me from India and Afghanistan who had graduated from Princeton back in 1913 and had returned in 1931 in broken health, came to the university, asked permission to teach the Bible at the student center called Murray Dodge Hall. and thereafter being prayed for, I'm sure, by some of his disciples and frequently invited and invited. I came. I heard excellent teaching that I had never really heard before. And one night in my dorm room, Donald B. Fullerton led me to a personal knowledge of Jesus Christ as my savior. He didn't answer, of course, all my questions. I was a total evolutionist at the time. But he showed me that God's Word is my source of ultimate eternal truth, focused in Jesus Christ, the Savior of the world. And that was sort of hard, friends, sort of hard on my father and my mother. They thought perhaps that their ambitions and goals and hopes for me had been dashed, that I had been somehow influenced by a cult. And it took 30 years of prayer for them and to try to be a loving and gracious and submissive son that they realized that it was no just temporary psychological catastrophe. but it was a long-term commitment to learning the Bible, teaching the Bible as my life goal. So my spiritual father prayed for me much when I got drafted just a month after I was saved. In March 1943, I was hurried off to Fort Bragg, North Carolina and became part finally of the 84th Infantry Division in Europe and survived the Battle of the Bulge in Belgium in December of 44, and came back in 1946 to complete my studies at Princeton University. And to Dr. Fullerton, who received an honorary doctorate from our Grace Theological Seminary, where I later taught, guided me, encouraged me, and helped me tremendously on how to be an effective witness for God in a university campus where the name of Jesus was officially rejected, really, ignored, even worse. So he showed me how to go from room to room in the dormitories and to graciously invite people to come and study God's precious word. I have amazing memories of some of those encounters with students under his prayerful, humble, gracious, and brilliant leadership. So finally when I graduated from Grace Seminary, excuse me, from Princeton University in 1948, at his recommendation, in fact his urging, I went to Grace Theological Seminary, Winona Lake, Indiana, because he had heard that Alba J. McLean was the president of that school, and one of the finest theologians of that era in American church history. And I was not disappointed at all. When I arrived there in the fall of 1948, I sat at the feet of a man who was amazingly brilliant in the whole spectrum of biblical theology. He introduced to me a deep, profound understanding of the whole sweep of history from Genesis to Revelation, and how the coming kingdom is the focus of it all, step by step from Adam and Eve right on through the public ministry of Jesus 2,000 years ago. The human race has been informed of, prepared for, warned about, encouraged to pray for the coming of that kingdom. And that finally eventuated in his masterpiece called The Greatness of the Kingdom, which has been widely used and recognized in our generation for its contribution to the whole spectrum of biblical truth. So I looked upon Alba J. MacLean as my third father, my own father, my spiritual father, Donald B. Fullerton, And now my theological father, if I could say that, to the glory of God. And Dr. MacLean lived to be 80 years old, dying in 1968, just 17 years after I began to teach at Grace Seminary in 1951. Dr. MacLean helped me to understand that the Bible must be honored and respected, with the passages taken in context, to see the whole flow of history, not to just pick out a verse out of context here and there and build up a case for some theological heresy or inadequate idea, but to take the whole sweep of Bible history and to see step by step how God has prepared the way for the coming of the Lord at the end of the age. Just like Jesus himself on the road to Emmaus took those two confused, depressed disciples And beginning with Moses, and all the prophets, he explained the things concerning himself. And thus they understood, and they believed. That gave me a tremendous desire, which has never ended, to not only master God's word for myself, but to do everything possible to make it known in whole and in part through Bible charts, through commentaries, theological studies, videotapes, DVDs, CDs, whatever means available to implement across the world of what I saw and learned and heard from Dr. Alva J. McLean and his faithful, godly colleagues, such as Herman Hoyt and James L. Boyer, Homer Kent Sr. and others. I say, well, thank you, Lord, for giving me this master of theology to be my mentor, my encourager, And so around the world we are attempting to help local churches now, or groups of churches, to have their own long-term, in-depth, intensive study programs. We call these the Christian Workmen Schools of Theology. And we have many, many of my courses and the courses that other godly men have taught. now available on videotape and on CD that can be used by local churches or groups of people to study the Word of God systematically. Really, every solid church should be a theological seminary because not every person can go off a thousand miles away to a seminary to study, however advantageous that might be. So, McLean will never be forgotten. in my heart and mind as my third father. And I say, well, thank you, Lord. Because, you know, when you look in the book of Hebrews chapter 12, after the list of all these great men of God, you know, starting all the way back to Adam and Eve and Abel and Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and so forth, the Hebrews 11 Hall of Fame. Finally, the author says in chapter 12, the next chapter, verse 1, Therefore, since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us also lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider Him. who has endured such hostility by sinners against himself so that you may not grow weary and lose heart. Well, friend, God knows that every one of us needs encouragement from those who've gone before. A godly people God has used in our lives. Hopefully in your case, dear friend, even though it wasn't true of me, a godly mother, a godly father who established us from childhood in the wonderful things of the Lord. to give us stability and direction and hope that the end of the world, there's a light that will shine and flood the planet Earth and the peoples of the world. So I say, well, thank you, Dr. MacLean, for being one of my fathers, even though you may not have realized that. And thank you, Donald B. Fullerton, for being my spiritual father at Princeton University. And he went to be with the Lord in 1985. And I say even thank you to my own physical father for finally acknowledging, I believe, the Savior that I want to honor and serve throughout my life. But friends, there's one more father I have to thank God for. Some people obviously then need more fathers than other people do, and I was very, very needful at various stages of my life. Even though I'm now in my 80s, I look back and say, Lord, I can see those steps, those crisis points, those turning points in my life. where you sent somebody my way to help me in a time of desperate need. And that fourth father I'm mentioning now, friends, is Dr. Henry M. Morris. As I began to teach the book of Genesis on a graduate level at Grace Theological Seminary In 1951, at the invitation of Dr. Alva J. MacLean and Dr. Herman Hoyt, upon the resignation of my professor of Hebrew and Old Testament the week before, I struggled desperately to how can I relate Genesis, the six days of creation, to the billions of years of supposed cosmic and earth history and life history that I'd been taught at Princeton University in the department of geology, historical geology and paleontology. How can I reconcile and harmonize these apparently conflicting worldviews? Well, I struggled for two years with what we call the gap theory, that maybe there were billions of years between the first couple of verses of Genesis 1 Maybe the fall of Satan caused all the dinosaurs to be destroyed. Maybe Adam and Eve were walking on a vast cemetery filled with the fossils of extinct animals they would never see alive. And I just know in retrospect students were wondering about this. Is that really what Genesis is teaching? And of course that the flood therefore had nothing to do with fossils and was probably a local catastrophe in Mesopotamia. Then it happened, friends. In September 1953, Henry M. Morris appeared, a very outstanding hydrodynamic engineer who took Genesis literally, and who had profoundly investigated, analyzed, and evaluated the geologic column of uniformitarian evolutionism, and had come to the conclusion already that the Genesis flood was the dynamic for global sedimentation and fossilization. He gave a lecture at Grace Seminary on this subject and I was amazed. I had never really thought of that, although I had seen his small book several years earlier entitled That You Might Believe. But now I was shocked into a realization that I needed to study this. So I spent four years now from 1953 to 1957 writing a 500-page doctoral dissertation on the Genesis flood, looking at all the relevant passages in the Old Testament and the New Testament and seeing how they fit together to teach an absolutely global, mountain covering, year-long catastrophe of water. Friends, can you imagine millions of tsunamis sweeping this planet simultaneously for months? What it would do in massive fossilization? Trillions of plants, marine creatures, animals, birds, all over the world. And I began to see, friends, that Genesis insists on that flood being universal and global, and that's the dynamic, you see, of Earth history. Then it was that Henry Morris agreed to co-author with me our book called The Genesis Flood, which took an additional four or five years to finish as we interacted carefully with each other's chapters to be sure that it was a genuine co-authored volume. And God used that book, as I've mentioned before, as like a tiny pebble in the sling of a David to throw at the forehead of a Goliath. How could we ever have realized that this book, just one book, two men, one book, could be used by God to launch a whole movement worldwide entitled Creation Science Movement. And I say, well Lord, you knew back there in 1953 that I needed a creation science father. to help me to teach Genesis more consistently, and I thank you for every remembrance of Henry Morris, who died in 2006, just a month ago today, at the age of 87, my creation science father. Well, all of us in one way or another, friends, have many fathers. Paul said you may have many fathers who in one way or another have been your teachers, but you only have one spiritual father. And I say, well, Lord, the ultimate father that I look to is you. You're my heavenly father. You're the one who designed the universe. And you're the one who honored your son Jesus to create the world. You're the one who sent him into the world to die for my sins and to bring me into your home where you will be my spiritual, spiritual, eternal, divine Father forever and ever. And I remember what Jesus said, I am the way, the truth and the life and no man comes to the Father to the Father, the Father, but by me. So of all the fathers God has given me or a friend may have given you, there is one ultimate Father that is to be honored by these who reflect something of His authority, His love, His wisdom, His grace. And that's the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, in whose name we are baptized, into the name of the Father, and into the name of the Son and into the name of the Holy Spirit. Thank you, Lord, for helping me to have a reminiscence here, a remembrance, an opportunity to pay a word of tribute to those whom you used in my life to help me to know your Son through the illuminating work of the Holy Spirit through the precious book, the Bible. and that I might therefore pass on what you've committed to me, entrusted to me, to yet another generation that is to come, and that hopefully will look back and say, well, thank you, God, for this cloud of witnesses to encourage me along life's pathway in my service for you.