Well, I'm just going to mark that chapter that we read, Genesis 6, because we will be coming back to that. But there's a little verse, a little statement in the verse 4 in 2 Peter 3. 2 Peter 3 and verse 4, and there's a statement that I wish you to take note of. However you do that, you might want to mark it, you might want to put a circle around it, or use some means of just keeping these words before you. And it says there right in the middle of verse 4, for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation. Now, that's not Peter's word. That's the words of the scoffers. And that's the lie that they're peddling. And their line is, well, we have lived all these years, and all this time has passed by, and there's no judgment. Nothing has happened. Why should we fear today? Now, I want you to notice that if you read verse 3 and verse 4 together, that this is a prophecy, and it is a long-term prophecy, and it's a prophecy that's applying to the last days. Now, we spent significant time last week looking at when those days are, when they began, and how there will be a buildup and a rapid growth of evil in the latter days of this world. And this is a prophecy of Peter. He's not speaking about his own day. He's going to die soon. He spoke of that in chapter 1. He must soon put off this tabernacle. And these people to whom he's writing, and they are the readers, they need to know these things and pass them along. And here we are now, two thousand years later, and we're reading the prophecy of Peter. And Peter is saying that in the last days there are going to appear these scoffers, and they are walking after their own lusts, and they're going to deny the promise of the Lord, And they're going to peddle this lie, this lie of uniformitarianism, all things continue as they were. This lie is summed up in this little statement, the key to the past is the present. And if you observe how things are happening at this very time, then you can extrapolate it, you can work backwards and say, well, how long did it take for this to evolve, and how long did it take for this to come about? And this is the scientific observations that are made today. People are observing what they see presently. And they say that present observations are the key to the past, and they come up with a doctrine of uniformitarianism. Now, so you know that this is not just my little term and my little scaremongering tactic, I went to what is a little more of a general source, not the ultimate final arbiter of truth, mind you, but a very common and very accessible source that you can even access yourself, and of course, it is Wikipedia. And I typed in uniformitarianism. And up came all this information and history and definitions and all kinds of knowledge about this doctrine of uniformitarianism. And I want to read to you their own statement here. Uniformitarianism was an assumption. Now, note that—an assumption. that the same natural laws and processes that operate in the universe now have always operated in the universe in the past and apply everywhere in the universe. It has included the gradualistic concept. That's really in keeping with evolution, that things that you observe, they continue on. And that the present is the key to the past. So, what I have learned from Whitcomb and Morris, those who are given themselves to study these things, the terms that these Christian stalwarts have used down through the years, these are the terms that scientists are using, and worldly thinkers are using, the philosophers of this world are using. Now Wikipedia goes on, uniformitarianism coined by William Waywell was originally proposed in contrast to catastrophism. Now that would be the view of the flood of Noah, the judgment upon Sodom and Gomorrah, and those horrific events that were really God's judgments upon the world. So I'm going to read that line again, and I'm not going to comment this time. Uniformitarianism, coined by William Waywell, was originally proposed in contrast to catastrophism by British naturalists in the late 18th century, starting with the work of the Scottish geologist James Hutton. Hutton's work was later refined by John Playfair, a church minister, and popularized by Charles Lyell in a book called Principles of Geology, 1830. Now, when did Darwin come out with his book, The Origin of Species? Somewhere around 1850s. And so you can see now the progression But the reality is that pre-1800, the general premise of understanding the history of the world was catastrophism. That there were great catastrophes that produced what we see, the geological systems that we see in the world. So that when you see rocks, and you see fossils, you see death, you see the evidences of a judgment that came upon not just a locality, but this is right around the globe. Whether you go to the Everest, or the Himalayas, or the Rockies, or the plains of Canada, and America, and China, you will find fossils. And you will even see evidences of fish that have been dumped in mass graves in what is now hundreds and hundreds of miles from oceans and from waterways. And so this is the basis of evolutionary thinking today. They deny catastrophism. They deny that God came in judgment of the world. And they have bought into this new concept, which you can say is less than 200 years old. It's under 200 years old. And the development of this in popular thinking, just about all secular philosophers and scientists, whether they be geologists or biologists, they have bought into this thinking of, The present, what we observe today, is the key to the past. And that is a fulfillment of the prophecy of the Apostle Peter. He warned that in the latter days, this movement, this thinking would arise when they would deny the judgment of God upon this world on those basis. Now, the evidence of the world is that things are not improving or evolving. You ask any scientist, give me evidence anywhere that things are evolving, that we observe today things are improving, and that there are changes that actually produce higher health, longer life, or in the physical world, changes that are working for higher efficiency, and that cannot be found. So this is a lie from two angles. They deny what has happened in the history in the past, and they project the idea that evolution is happening before our eyes, when in reality it is not. So how do these scientists hold up their heads and make such statements? Their answer usually is, just add millions of years. Just add more time. To produce what we see around us took millions and millions of years, and you get what they call the result of evolution. And they deny all of this, of course, because to accept catastrophism to accept that when they look at rocks and they look at fossils, and they look at riverbeds like the Grand Canyon, or even in the Rockies here in Canada, and they discover buried layer upon layer of sedimentary rock, various fossils, and they say, that didn't happen by a catastrophe. It happened incrementally over a period of time. Now, I don't claim to be a geologist, but if the evolutionist is right, and if this is the product of a gradual incremental change over a long period of time, then you would expect that you would have the lower species, which belong to the extreme past, the lower species would be buried in the lower levels of rock. And the higher species, larger animals, and especially apes, monkeys, which are the near, according to the evolutionary tree, the near relatives of man, you're going to find them on the higher levels and the various stratas of rock, if the gradual theory is correct. But what is the reality? Geologists find that there is no pattern in the layers of rock. And fossils, which is animals, vegetation, fish, people, all manner of species, buried in rock, and that they were fossilized. Now, there's no pattern. So the gradual theory breaks down. There's another one, and I'm throwing this in as a little extra here, that for fossilization to take place, it has to be rapid. It has to take place very rapidly. What happens to roadkill? Say you go home after church tonight, and it's never a very pleasant experience, and maybe a squirrel or some rodent comes out, and you knock it with your car, and it's mush. What happens? Well, the birds will pick it up in the morning, or they'll eat the flesh of it. But what happens to that roadkill? Well, when it lies out in the sun on the surface of the ground, it deteriorates rapidly, and soon it will stink, and the bacteria will eat it, and it'll just gone. It'll be gone. it'll be undiscoverable. Even if it's landed in a field on top of the earth, in the sunshine, in the heat of the day, in the elements, a skeleton will not last very long. But for fossils to be preserved for a long period of time and in perfect shape, And some of them with embryos, those that were pregnant whenever they died, the very babe in the womb is fossilized. Some have the very food that they were eating preserved in their tract and in their stomach, so that these fossils give out tremendous amounts of information on how they lived, what they ate, what their young was like. All of that can be found. For a fossil to be preserved, it has to be a sudden event. It has to be a catastrophic event, and it has to be sudden, and it has to be completely buried in that rock. And that's certainly the evidence that we see in the world around us. Now, these scoffers are just like the scoffers in the days of Noah. Noah, we are told, was a preacher of righteousness. And he warned the people, and he began to build the ark as God commanded him. And for 120 years he was employed in building that ark with his sons. And the scoff and the mockery of men as they obeyed God to the preserving of their own souls and their own bodies, the world watched on in mockery. But God determined this destruction of every living thing outside of the ark. And the Genesis record, which is our first book in the Bible, is absolutely clear about God's intention and how God destroyed all of the world. And we read that in Genesis chapter 6. Now, the next question is, does the Bible consistently back up the Genesis record? Because you must realize that modernist liberals of today deny the first 11 chapters of Genesis. They deny that it is a literal, historic account of events. And they reduce it at best to a paraphrase, a parable, a language that is not literal. And so we have to now scan the Bible to discover, is this man Noah a real man? Is this judgment really a worldwide judgment? And was there really a literal arc? a vessel that would survive that flood for a total of a year and ten days, as the book of Genesis tells us. So that's our task right now. We're going to scan a few verses where the term Noah comes up. Now, we're not only just going to look for Noah, we're going to look for the term ark, and we're going to look for the term either flood or destruction. so that we are seeing these things come together in the true picture as Genesis presents them. Let's go to Isaiah chapter 54 and verse 9. Now, Isaiah is writing about 800 years before Christ, And a lot of time has gone by from Noah's flood. The world has repopulated. Israel has advanced as a nation. And Isaiah now is writing a biblical history. And of course, people in those days needed either to know or be reminded of this historic figure, Noah. And you'll notice in Isaiah 54 and verse 9, and he's talking here about God's covenant. Now what could that possibly mean to the reader of that statement, the waters of Noah? Is that not a reference to some extreme event? If Noah had some other water problem, or a boating problem, or some other little issue with water, this wouldn't really make sense. For as I have sworn that the waters of Noah should no more go over the earth, So have I sworn that I would not be wroth with thee, nor rebuke thee." And so here we have the prophet Isaiah. He is the most evangelical prophet of the Old Testament. He is the man who spoke more of Christ, and he's backing up his preaching of Christ with the covenant that God gave to Noah, the man who saved his family from the flood by the building of an ark. And you'll notice that this covenant is mentioned in verse 10. It's called the covenant of peace, and it is a covenant of mercy. And you know, of course, the whole history of how God gave to Noah a covenant of the rainbow that he would never again destroy the world by a flood. So the whole history of a flood a destructive flood upon the world, and the preservation of life in the midst of it, in Noah's case, is all inherent in that statement and that passage in Isaiah 54, verses 9 and onward. Now we go to the New Testament, and we come to Hebrews 11. Hebrews 11, of course, is that hall of faith where you have these great mighty men and women of faith, and we have a reference to Noah in verse 7, and we're told that, by faith, Noah being warned of God of things not seen as yet. moved with fear. Now, things not seen as yet. When God told Noah to build the ark, there never had been rain in the world. And of course, that was part of the mockery. What are you building this huge vessel in dry land when we don't even know what rain is? And Noah said, there's going to be a deluge. But he was moved by fear, prepared an ark, to the saving of his house, by the which he condemned the world." And so here in the New Testament, you not only have a reference to Noah, you have a reference to a flood, you have a reference to condemning the world, and a reference to the ark, all in that same passage. 1 Peter 3.20 is another passage. 1 Peter 3.20. And we have the statement, which sometime were disobedient, when once the long-suffering of God waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was preparing which wherein few, that is, eight souls were saved by water. So here now we have even more specific data given by the apostle Peter. Peter, the apostle of the Lord, takes in the whole scheme of the Genesis record. And so we have a problem if we're going to say, well, you can't depend on Genesis 1 to 11. Those are really not literal accounts. They're not historic events that you can bank on. What are we going to do with all these references that are made by inspired men in the Bible who took every one of them as inspired? And so, there you have them. 2 Peter 2, verse 5, which no doubt we've alluded to already. And here again, you'll see these things coming together. The old world, that's the world pre-Noah. So there was an old world, a world that perished. but saved Noah the eighth person. Now that builds into the account that there were eight people in that ark. Noah, his wife, three sons, and their three wives, a preacher of righteousness, bringing in the flood upon the world of the ungodly. Now his preaching didn't bring the flood, but what God told him to preach came true. And the people having been warned Those who did not obey perished in that flood. And so we have this scanning of the Bible, where Noah appears. Not only do you have the name of the man, but you have the key event—the flood, the judgment, the world that perished, and the vessel, the ark that was used to save and preserve life and all on board. I wonder, have you heard about the ark that has been built in Holland. There is a private businessman that has constructed a modern-day ark. And it is full-size. He took the measurements right out of the Bible. I'm not sure what he used for cubit. There's always a bit of a debate on the exact length of a cubit. Minimum is 18 inches. Some extend that a little bit further. But he took the very dimensions and the details from the Bible and constructed himself a complete vessel and ark. And he applied for a license to seal across the English Channel and to seal up the Thames and bring it into the city of London. But that didn't fly. They didn't want it. They didn't want Noah's Ark arriving up the Thames. And so now he has a plan. He is going to put it on a ship and take it to Brazil, where it's going to be on show there. Now, you might ask, but if it is a vessel that's seaworthy, why would you put it on a ship to transport it to across the Atlantic Ocean? Well, remember that the ark was not a ship. The ark was just a vessel for survival. There was no rotors. There was no steering mechanism. There was no engine, no driving to empower it or propel it into a particular direction. All of that was in the providence of God. And so, all they can do is tow it or load it onto a vessel and transport it. That's what they're doing to Brazil at this time. And so, we're thankful that the memory of this ark is being kept in place, and people are, at least in the news items, people are faced with this. But we have one more area to look at, and that is the ministry of the Lord Jesus. And that ought to convince us that this history of Noah is no fabrication, that it is no mere concocted story that we have to shun or be afraid of. In Luke 17, verse 26, we have the prophecies of the Lord Jesus. He's speaking of the end times, and he's drawing some parallels of what it's going to be like. And he is saying it will be as the days of Noah. Now, why would the Lord bring that up if it's not a real history, if it is not literal, and if the events don't tie into the specifics that you have in the book of Genesis? Luke 17 and verse 26. And as it was in the days of Noah, so shall it be in the days of the Son of Man. And you will see the careless attitude that they had when God pronounced judgment upon the old world. They did eat, they drank, they married wives, they were given in marriage until the day that Noah entered into the ark. Now, I've already said to Alan, we might be living in the days of Noah because of all these weddings that are being announced these days, but that's not the intent of this passage. The intent is that people just went on with life, and they didn't listen. This is the Lord Jesus speaking, and He's speaking of Noah. He is speaking here in verse 27, of an ark, and he speaks of a flood, and that there was total destruction, and destroy them all, the Lord Jesus pronounced." Total destruction! And so, you can say without a shadow of doubt that our Lord Jesus took the Genesis record of that event, literally, in totality, and the great scheme of those events, that there was a man, Noah—now, he's spelt differently here in Luke's gospel, because what happened? You remember how the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek about 300 B.C.? ? And it was translated into Greek, so the spelling obviously was changed. Then, when it's translated into English, if they're going to try and convey what's in the Greek into the English, there's going to be a difference in the appearance of the name. But it sounds the same, And as far as phonics go, it's the same pronunciation, and it is the same man, it's the same history, the same event. It's about a flood, and it's about a world that was destroyed, and the Lord is preparing men and warning men that when the Lord returns, that there will be a replay, many parallels in those events. Now, these things are denied today. The scoffers of this world, the philosophers of this world, the modern liberalists in Christianity, and if you go around the mainline churches, the seminaries that are pumping out new men to go to pulpits, they will laugh and scorn the notion that God intervenes in this world to judge sin. They will mock it. They will preach a social Jesus. They will preach a modern Jesus that's all love, but they will not take the message that our Lord Jesus warned of such a judgment that's coming upon this world. Now, some ask, how could God in creation do so much in six days? Now, I know I'm switching from the flood to the six days of the actual creation, but these things tie in together, because they who deny the flood deny the six-day creation as well. And the question is asked, how can God produce all of this world in six days? Well, the answer to that is, how come it took God so long? Why did it even take six days? Because the power of God, all He has to do is speak the Word, And it happened. Let there be light, and there was light. And everything that God brought into the world in creation, He spoke it into existence. So He could have done everything in an instant. But why did it take six days? God was laying out a pattern for the world that's to this day. And as we know that commandment, that there is a Sabbath to keep. There's a day in seven. that God has ordained that we rest just as God rested on that day. Now, the six principles. I know I'm getting near the end of my preaching time here tonight, but I was planning ahead, because I'm gonna be away all week and traveling and coming back, and it's never easy to come back and have messages for the next Sunday. So I've been working ahead. And I've been planning not only for this meeting, but for next Sunday's meeting as well. And I have six principles to stop the scoffers, those who peddle the lie of uniformitarians, those who tell us that the key to the past is the present. Will you allow me to preach one of them tonight? Just give me time to preach the first one. That's not very short, but it's good to get into this. The first thing to notice here, that before the end of the world, there will be a terrible apostasy. That's the first principle. We're going to expect these scoffers to arrive. They're not going to surprise us. They shouldn't be a shock to the Christian. Anyone who reads the Bible and reads this passage of 2 Peter 3 is going to say, hey, you know what? Scoffers are going to appear in the latter days. And if we're living in such times, we may expect such things. But you know also that it's not only a theological apostasy, it's going to be a moral apostasy. You'll see here in 2 Peter 3 and in the verse 3, knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers. Now, they're not only mockers of truth who deny the truth, but they are walking after their own lusts. And so there is going to be, along with this scoffing attitude, a moral apostasy, a plummeting into lawlessness and to immorality. And these will be the days just like the days of Noah, when God judged the whole world by a flood. Why did he do it? Well, we read in Genesis 6 a number of times that because man became corrupt, The evil of his heart was only—the imaginations of his heart was only evil continually. And the immorality, the ungodliness of the age got to the point where they were ripe for destruction and ready to be destroyed. And just as the Lord said, as it was in the days of Noah, so shall it be in the days of the Son of Man. Now, I say again, categorically, we don't know the date. The date will not be known, but the evil times will be known. We will not be able to read the day on the calendar the Lord returns, but we will be able to read the times. Henry Morris, whom I have quoted already, and he and John Whitcomb have co-authored a book called The Genesis Flood. It's a classic. And if you want to know your facts and figures on these issues, that's the book to study. And Henry Morris has a list of comparisons between Genesis 6, the days of Noah, pre-flood corruption and ungodliness, with the world that we live in today. And he made this little astute comment. He said, although the world had forgotten God, God was still looking on the earth. Now, he got that from Genesis 6, 12. I want you to look at this, Genesis 6 and verse 12. You see, no matter what man's behavior and how he becomes ungodly, the one thing we can never say that God doesn't notice, oh yes, God notices. And in verse 12 it says, and God looked upon the earth And behold, it was corrupt, for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth. But verse 11 says, the earth also was corrupt before God. Before God. Man had forgotten God. It's got the idea of God. Noah's preaching made no impact. But God was looking on, and God took heed to every sin and every ungodliness. And today, in our corrupt society, we may get to the point where we say, does God even notice? Does God even take heed at all? You can be sure that in an ungodly age as this, God is looking on. God sees the corruption. He sees the moral plummeting of values in our society. He sees what's going on in the corridors of our schools and universities. He hears the mockery and the ungodly philosophers, and He knows. And God is, in His wisdom, waiting the hour of judgment. Now, in that book by Henry Morris, he gives 15 comparisons between Noah's day and the latter days before God returns when Christ returns. I'm just going to list 12 of them, 12 that really stand out. I thought a few of the others overlapped a little bit, so I reduced them to 12. The first one is uniformitarian philosophies. that everything will just continue the same. And when Noah was building that ark, people mocked. What are you building this for? There's no rain, there's no judgment. And that's exactly how it will be in the latter times. Preoccupation with illicit sex activity, and that marked Genesis 6 and the pre-Diluvian population. They were obsessed with illicit sex. There was an enormous devoid of moral values. And of course, while they were marrying and remarrying and so on, marriage and the value of it was treated very lightly. Another one is rapid advances in knowledge, and he quotes various items of technology that were being developed right back in Genesis 4. The promulgation of systems and movements of abnormal depravity—the word corrupt in Genesis 6 means a destruction. Destruction! Not just a questioning, but destruction. And I think we can see society just breaking apart. We can see misery and hopelessness. The suicide rates are not for nothing. The despair that is upon men's hearts today Population explosion is another one. Men began to fill the earth, and the earth was filled with violence. And of course, the population of the world today is growing rapidly in many places, especially in Africa. By the end of this century, Africa will outnumber the nations of the world. I read some statistics on that earlier in the year. I remember preparing a New Year's message, and it's staggering, the birth rate in Africa. And you'll see the movement of people now to Europe from Africa, and how the density of people in Africa somewhat is difficult to sustain. And that's causing the movement of people. Another one is widespread violence, corruption through society, preoccupation with physical appetites, grossly materialistic aptitudes and interests. And he takes that from Luke 17, 28, that not only will they be marrying and marrying, but they'll be eating and drinking, building, planting, buying and selling. The materialistic attitude. And we see that in the world. Rejection of the inspired Word of God. Oh, the Word of the Lord is trampled, but it will judge men. No concern for God either in belief or conduct. And if you go to Jude 15, you can see how the anti-God spirit, this atheistic spirit, is so prevalent Jude verse 15, to execute judgment upon all, and to convince all that are ungodly among them of all their ungodly deeds, which they have ungodly committed, and all their hard speeches. Can you see the animosity to God? The atheistic view, God—I hate him! God cannot be tolerated. Hard speeches. The word hard there means fierce. There's a bitterness, there's a hostility behind them, which ungodly sinners have spoken against him. There are many examples of this contempt for God in society, the scoffing of men, and this prediction that Peter has given here that in the last days, scoffers shall arise. If a young person was to stand up in a high school class and say, I believe, Genesis 6, that God really judged the world all those years ago, somewhere about 2,000 years before Christ, and that this world came under judgment. If a Christian young person was to do that in a public school classroom today, he would be mocked and scorned. Could you imagine someone doing it at university, in UBC or Simon Fraser, standing in class and defying the odds of the sentiment? There would be a hostility. there would be a rise of fury. And then think of the little child in the elementary class, maybe grade four, five, six. And if that child, in innocence perhaps, might say, well, you know what my Sunday school teacher taught me last Sunday? Genesis 6, Noah's Ark, and how God used Noah, a preacher, to warn the people. You could just imagine how that child, that they would immediately hear the denial of such things, and the children in the classroom even there would mock as well. In closing, I just want to point out that these are the latter days because 200 years ago, prior to 1800, The premise of education, church, whether it was Catholic, Protestant, governments, everybody worked on the basis of a catastrophic history to this world. It's in these latter years that these things have ramped up—Darwinism, evolution—and it's no longer taught as a theory anymore. It used to be just a theory. Now it is called science. And, of course, it is a lie. And we have to arm ourselves that we may silence and answer the scoffers' lie. And so I've preached one point tonight. I've got five more to go. So come back next Sunday, and Lord willing, we will preach the other five principles in 2 Peter 3 to answer the lie of the scoffer.