Creation Day 6, Part 1

We don't believe life is random. We believe the universe as it is right now was created I'm your host Phil Johnson.

We'll be right back. Let alone what we have today. So some folks started making recordings and then all of a sudden cassettes became common and so we started making cassette tapes and it wasn't too long after that. Someone in the church said, why don't we go on Christian radio?

Why don't we find a way to do that? And so way back then, very soon after I had come to Grace Community Church, we launched our radio program on one station out here in Oxnard, I think it's K-D-A-R, but even before that we found out that people were playing the cassette tapes on radio stations as kind of an open pulpit that was going on on the east coast and so we were sort of on the radio before we knew we were on the radio and then we started with that one broadcast, kind of an official broadcast and it just kept going because God honors his word. That's the one thing I was confident of, not necessarily confident in my own ability or my own ideas or leadership or whatever, but I knew this when I came to Grace Church that God would honor his word because that's a promise.

His word would not return void but would accomplish what he intended. So we launched out doing what we say we do now, unleashing God's truth one verse at a time and God's people wanted that. They wanted to be fed the word of God and as the ministry grew, God provided folks who came alongside and gave generously and have continued to give generously to this ministry so that it could expand. And we live within the confines of those dollars that the Lord gives us through our friends and the folks who listen to grace to you. We're deeply indebted to you.

It's completely a partnership. You decide in many ways where this ministry goes and how it grows because it's your gifts that are the source of our sustenance. So thank you for believing in the word of God. Thank you for standing with us. And we'll continue to do this work for the glory of God and we'll all begin to see the benefits of it when we get into the presence of the Lord someday, hopefully soon.

Yes, hopefully soon. Thank you, John, for that. And friend, as John said, Grace to You is a partnership with friends like you to stand with us in proclaiming biblical truth for God's glory.

I'll tell you how to contact us after the lesson. But right now, here's John MacArthur to continue his look at the battle for the beginning. Satan is the archenemy of God. Satan is an incurable liar and a deceiver. And the Bible says he's the father of lies.

Satan hates the truth of God. And he dominates the world that he rules with falsehood. In fact, Romans 1 says that civilization in general has exchanged the truth of God for the lie. In other words, the world lives under pervasive deception and falsehood. And Satan's lies literally pervade all human thought, governing all intellectual work, all science, all philosophy, all sociology, all psychology, and everything else. But there are two lies in particular that provide the basic paradigm for modern culture, two lies.

Lie number one is that life is random. That is that the way things are is just the way they kind of happened with nobody planning and nobody carrying it off. It just sort of evolved that way. Life is random. There is no purpose to it.

There is no reason for it. There is no sovereign unfolding plan being carried out by a designing and powerful Creator. Life is just random.

To put it another way, the universe as it exists was not created by God, nor is God the authority over this creation. It's just a matter of chance, random chance. Second lie, verse 1, life is random. Second lie, truth is relative. Truth is relative. The Bible is not the Word of God. The Bible does not give us the truth about right and wrong, life and death, morality and immorality in the past and the future.

There is no authority beyond yourself. Life is random. Truth is relative. Now those two lies are so established in our society that people hate the Christian worldview which opposes those lies.

We don't believe life is random. We believe the universe as it is right now was created by God and is sustained by God and ruled by God. We do not believe the truth is relative. We believe truth is absolute and it is absolutely revealed on the pages of Scripture which is the revelation of God. To say that life as we know it, the universe as we know it is the work of the Creator God who is its sovereign and its sustainer and who as He began it will bring it to its end is to go against the grain of our culture. To say the truth is absolute and the truth is as revealed in the Bible is to generate the hostility of the society around us. Two great ideologies rule, no Creator and no moral law.

And that dispossesses man of any accountability. Now in this series, we're looking really at both of these lies because the lie that life is random flies in the face of Genesis chapter 1. Genesis chapter 1 does away with all evolution, establishing the fact that God is the Creator of everything as it is. And we also by accepting at face value the teaching of Genesis chapter 1 are countering the attack on the Bible as the Word of God. We believe the Bible is the Word of God no matter what it says, whether it's talking about history, morality, or creation.

These two lies go together. Evolutionists who reject the idea of a Creator God, therefore reject the idea of the Bible as an authoritative document written by that Creator God. But beyond that, evolutionists, both theistic evolutionists, those who say that evolution occurred but there is a God, he sort of launched evolution and those who are atheistic or humanistic evolutionists, in any case, any evolutionist at all, whether he believes there's a God or not, in order to espouse evolution has to deny Genesis chapter 1.

He has to deny then that God created the universe as it is and that the record of that creation as contained in Scripture is infallible, inerrant, and true. So we're really running across the grain of these two great deceptions because Genesis 1 affirms God as the Creator and it affirms that the account of that creation in the Bible is, in fact, infallible, inerrant, and true. The truly Christian view is that the Bible is the Word of God and God exists and has in Scripture revealed Himself.

The truly Christian view then is that God is the Creator, God is the moral lawgiver, and the universe around us is the work of His creative hand and the Bible is the revelation of His moral and spiritual law. We believe that what Genesis 1 says is as true as any other part of Scripture. Genesis 1 is just as true as Exodus 20 which gives us the Ten Commandments. It's just as true as Isaiah 53 which describes the suffering servant who would be the Messiah and bear our iniquities. It's just as true as Matthew chapter 1 which indicates that Jesus was to be born of Mary and to be the Savior of the world. It's just as true as John chapter 3 which says you must be born again.

It's just as true as any other and every other part of Scripture. There is no basis for tampering with, questioning, or denying the veracity of Genesis 1 any more than any other part of Scripture. In fact, any disbelief in or tampering with or altering of Genesis 1 is an act of rebellion against God and His Word. It's a serious thing to do that because like any other such rebellion, one who attacks the veracity of God and the Word of God brings upon himself the threat of divine judgment.

Listen to the words of the last chapter in the Bible. Revelation 22 verse 18, I testify to everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book, if anyone adds to them, God shall add to him the plagues which are written in this book. And if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part from the tree of life and from the holy city which are written in the book. The bottom line, the Bible ends with a warning that you better not tamper with Scripture. And anyone who tampers with Scripture to add to it or take away from it brings himself under divine judgment. So we could readily conclude that altering the Scripture, tampering the Scripture, or just flatly not believing the Scripture is unthinkable for a faithful, wise believer.

It's unthinkable. It is only reasonable that an ungodly and foolish unbeliever would attack the testimony of Scripture and they do that all the time. That's just a way of life with them. For a believer to assault the veracity of Scripture is an unimaginable thing. And yet, there are many so-called Christians who do that. They wouldn't deny the morality of the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20. They wouldn't deny the prophetic testimony of the coming, suffering Messiah in Isaiah 53. They wouldn't deny the virgin birth of Jesus Christ. They wouldn't deny the gospel of grace and the need for the new birth. They wouldn't deny other things in Scripture, but they do deny the clear teaching of Genesis chapter 1. Why do they do that? Why do so-called Christians bring themselves under such jeopardy, under the threat of the closing portion of Scripture, which says their names could be taken out of the book of life and from the holy city, and the plagues that are written in Scripture could be pronounced upon them as divine curses? Why would people jeopardize themselves by tampering with Scripture in the light of such warnings? Do they do it because they desire to please evolutionary scientists rather than holy God? Do they love the...do they love the applause of men? Do they love the reputation of academics more than God? Do they seek the approval of departmental committees more than the holy God of the universe? Fair questions, weren't they? It's unthinkable to me that so-called Christians would deny Genesis.

On the basis of what? This is the Word of God. But Satan has managed to be extremely successful in getting his evolutionary lie out, so much so that most professing Christians, by far most professing Christians, would deny the simple straightforward testimony of Genesis 1 that God created the entire universe as it is now in six 24-hour days, and that about six or seven thousand years ago. Far and away most evangelical Christians, professing Christians, would deny that.

Why would they deny the clear teaching of Scripture, tamper with the veracity and integrity of the Word of God and bring themselves into such jeopardy? Satan is very clever, very subtle, and has done an immensely successful job in selling the lie of evolution. Now no part of the evolutionary lie is more loudly proclaimed or more widely believed than the evolution of man. In fact, when most people think about evolution, they think about man. They think about the picture in National Geographic of the ape-like creature on fours, and all of a sudden the sequence of about ten different pictures as this four-legged creature all of a sudden becomes erect and takes the posture of a man, and they tell us that's the progression of human evolution. We've all seen those imaginary human evolution lines where we go from ape to man in a series of drawings.

Every school child in public education is constantly taught that man has come like this from apes. And supposedly, they say, there is fossil evidence for this, and I want to speak of this for a minute because if I don't, somebody's going to ask me about it. But there supposedly are fossils.

Every once in a while somebody finds a bone somewhere in Africa or somewhere, and out of that bone they tell us they have identified the missing links in this sequence. Supposedly there is fossil evidence. Well, the fact of the matter is there isn't, and most all of those fossils are hoaxes. The presupposition is that evolution is true.

They're trying to make the bones fit the drawings in National Geographic. In a book written by John Ankerberg and John Weldon called Darwin's Leap of Faith, it says, despite widespread belief to the contrary, the fossil record of mankind is woefully inadequate to justify any belief in evolution. Despite 130 years of searching, there are no fossils that have convincingly related man to any other species. Most have been conclusively proven false. And as I said, many were outright hoaxes. Anthropologist Kathleen J. Reichs, editor of Hominoid Origins, cited many authorities who disagree about the interpretations of these many alleged human ancestry discoveries.

Until accurate dating of the fossils is possible, she writes, reconstruction of hominoid relationships must remain tenuous at best. Now there's an honest anthropologist, an honest evolutionist who says none of the fossils prove anything. Duane Gish writes, There is no evidence, either in the present world or in the world of the past, that man has arisen from some lower creature. He stands alone as a separate and distinct created type or basic morphological design endowed with qualities that sets him far above all other living creatures. Now I don't want to get too technical, but just to kind of show you that you can do your homework on this, and the Bible will stand. The evolution of man has sort of been divided into three sort of Latin terms, ramapithecus, australopithecus, and pithicanthropus.

And those names will be on the quiz, of course. These have all been...these are the Latin terms given to these supposed fossils, and they have been heralded as transitional forms between ape and man. The average person on the street probably still believes these classifications represent genuine intermediate forms, but they don't. Even evolutionists are seriously divided, and none of these classifications documents any human evolution at all. For example, ramapithecus, the first one, is just one of a long series of creatures that have been suggested at one time or another. In other words, all different kind of bones have been thrown into that ramapithecus title. They've all been suggested as missing links, but when more complete evidence has become available, we're all relegated to the ape family. And then there's australopithecus.

They said that that was evidence of human evolution. The view that these fossils represent genuine intermediates has been challenged by the famous British anatomist, Solly Lord Zuckerman and Dr. Charles Oxnard, formerly director of the graduate studies, professor, by the way, of anatomy at the University of Southern California Medical School. Zuckerman headed a research team for over 15 years, studied the anatomical features of apes, man, monkeys and the australopithecan fossils and anatomical specimens from hundreds of apes, humans and monkeys compared along with almost all available important fossil fragments of this particular category. Most evolutionists seem to classify australopithecus as a genus of the hominoid or family of men rather than apes.

But Zuckerman replies to all of them, I myself remain totally unpersuaded. Almost always when I've tried to check the anatomical claims on which the status of australopithecus is based, I have ended in failure. And he concludes that this was nothing but an ape and as such in no way related at all to the ancestry of man. An honest evolutionary look at these things debunks them.

The work of Zuckerman and Oxnard literally has tended to be so conclusive that many other scientists have had to fall in line behind it. And that's the way it goes with the final one that I mentioned to you, Pythicanthropus, it's the same story. Pythicanthropus you might know as the Java Man or the Peking Man, the creation of some kind of transitional form out of some minute skeletal fragment they now believe was never a man at all, but some creatures related to the Gibbons, the Gibbons not being a family down the street, but an ape as you know. Cro-Magnon Man, Neanderthal Man, they now know were nothing more than just human skeletons. There's a fascinating book on this if you really want to read. I don't want to talk anymore about it, but there's a fascinating book called Bones of Contention, it's a good title. It's a creationist assessment of human fossils by a very outstanding creationist scientist by the name of Marvin Lubenow.

It's published by Baker in 1992, Bones of Contention, if you want more study. You will find the debunking of all of these supposed transitional fossil forms. Now, here's the simple understanding. Because man did not evolve, it's impossible to prove he did, okay?

Can you handle that one? They're having a hard time proving man evolved because he didn't. And so they're in hopeless confusion because they're trying to make this whole deal fit the drawings in National Geographic and it doesn't work. And I'm going to give you some quotes from some leading evolutionists. Robert Martin writes, So one is forced to conclude there is no clear-cut scientific picture of human evolution, period. Bleek is a very famous name in human evolution. The noted paleoanthropologist says, It may never be possible to say exactly what evolved into what. Well, that's pretty comprehensive.

Spend your whole life to come to that conclusion. Another leaky, Richard Leakey in an interview concerning the study of early man said, and I quote, I think we're still doing a great deal of guessing. David Pilbeam commented, There is no clear-cut and inexorable pathway from ape to human being. As to whether man evolved from chimps, orangutans, or gibbons, he said, The fossil record has been elastic enough, the expectation sufficiently robust, to accommodate almost any story. And in a further telling statement, he says, Perhaps generations of students of human evolution, including myself, have been flailing about in the dark. Our database is too sparse, too slippery for it to be able to mold our theories. Rather, the theories are more statements about us and our ideology than about the past. And another leaky, Mary Leakey, well-known anthropologist, commenting as to the effort that she'd made all her life long to construct an evolutionary family tree, she says, quote, I do not believe it is possible to fit the known hominoid fossils into a reliable pattern, end quote. Of course it's not possible because it's not the way it happened, not at all the way it happened.

In fact, you know, they shoot themselves in the foot. The oldest human fossil is identified as KP271. They believe that's the oldest human fossil that evolutionary anthropologists have found. They date it at 4.5 million years ago.

Now you and I know that the whole thing was done about six or seven thousand years ago, but they've got their own uniformitarian dating systems, evolutionary dating systems, that are invented to accommodate their theory of evolution which they believe can only happen if you have enough time, and so they stretch everything out millions of years. The interesting thing about it is they say the oldest human fossil is dated 4.5 million years ago. And furthermore, it seems that this human fossil appears on the scene suddenly without any evolutionary ancestors. And if indeed this is human, the theory of human evolution is totally discredited. Totally discredited because if you have humans 4.5 million years ago, then evolution can't happen because that's when they also date other animals. In fact, other animals that they thought were in the evolutionary scheme are dated after that. They have a real problem. And furthermore, the bones that are 4.5 million years old are identical to humans today.

No evolution in 4.5 million years. I mean, the whole thing is just a figment of their imagination because they do not like to retain God in their knowledge, Romans 1. And they have exchanged the truth of God revealed in Scripture for the lie. Men don't want God and they don't want the Bible, right? They don't want God crowding their lives. They don't want the Bible establishing moral standards for them.

Scientists and those who follow their deception and hoaxes about evolution are like the Jews of Jesus' day who said, We will not have this man to...what?...to reign over us. We will not come under the sovereignty of God. And so they fit into the classification of Psalm 14 one and Psalm 53 one. The fool has said in his heart, There is no God. I understand the ungodly believing that. I understand the ungodly not wanting God crowding their lives. I understand those who love sin and want to commit sin, not wanting a moral judge looking over their shoulder and holding them accountable and sentencing them to eternal hell. I understand their desire to get rid of God. I understand why they don't want to accept the first chapter of the Bible, why they don't want to accept a clear record of Genesis. But I do not understand the ridiculous, intolerable affection for this deception which belongs to professing Christians.

I cannot understand that. Even the prophet Malachi, Malachi 2-10 put it simply, Has not one God created us? We're all the product of God's creation. All things are made by Him and for Him. And without Him was not anything made that was made. The truth about the origin of man is that he was created as he now is. Adam wasn't any different than you. In fact, if anything, you're not what he was. You're inferior.

And I'm sure that's true. Not because of you personally, but because of sin. is what connects people with John's verse-by-verse teaching, taking it to believers around the globe. To have a part in this strategic outreach, make a donation when you get in touch today. You can mail your gift to Grace To You, Box 4000, Panorama City, California 91412. You can also make a one-time donation or set up a convenient recurring donation when you call us at 855-GRACE. That's our toll-free number.

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They are all free in MP3 and transcript format. You can also review today's broadcast and share it with a friend when you visit gty.org. Now for John MacArthur and the entire Grace To You staff. I'm Phil Johnson inviting you back when John continues his study, The Battle For The Beginning, and shows you how God made you and me and all mankind distinct from the rest of his creation. It's another half hour of unleashing God's truth one verse at a time on Tuesday's Grace To You.