The Beginning of Life - Genesis Part 3

You know, several years ago I received a letter from a young man who was a student at Lehigh University. And I want to read just a little part of it to you.

Here's what he said. He said, When I was a high school student, my parents brought me to McLean Bible Church nearly every Sunday. However, since then, I have discovered that I am irreconcilably at odds with Christian theology. You and McLean Bible Church, he says, seem to support very strongly the creation story found in the book of Genesis. He said, The idea that a supernatural being that is omnipresent yet stands outside the universe and interacts with the universe is an absurdity. I must remind you, he says, that the theory of evolution is a scientific one and is as much a fact as gravity.

End of quote. Now, the reason I share this letter with you today is because it reinforces what I said to you last week. Namely, that for many Americans, especially under the age of 40, what the Bible says about how the world came into being represents a major obstacle in their coming to faith in Jesus Christ. And because of this, we as followers of Christ must be able to show that the explanation the Bible gives of how the world and how life came into being, that that explanation is at least possible, that it is at least plausible. And last week we demonstrated that what the Bible says about the origin of the universe and the cosmos is not as crazy as your science teacher told you it was, but that, in fact, the Bible's account in Genesis chapter one actually may be the most intelligent of all the theories that are out there. Now, if you missed last week, I urge you to pick up a copy of the CD in our bookstore or to go online, mcleanbible.org, and download it or listen to it. Today, what we want to do is move on to look at what the Bible says not about the creation of the cosmos and the universe, but rather what the Bible says about the origin of life here on this planet.

And so I got a scad of stuff to give you, a scad, and it's all good. So buckle your seat belt and here we go. Genesis chapter one, verse 21. So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living thing with which the water teems after their kind and every bird after its kind. And God said, Let the earth bring forth living creatures after their kind, cattle and creeping things and wild animals, each after its kind.

And it was so. And God made the beasts of the earth after their kind and the cattle after their kind and everything that creeps on the ground after its kind. Now, in these verses, I'm sure you picked up that there's a phrase repeated seven times. What is that phrase after its kind?

That's right. And the Bible is telling us something absolutely key here, because the whole foundation of Darwinian evolution is based on the fact that there were transitions between species and genuses and families of animals here on Earth. I mean, amoebas became fish and fish became reptiles and reptiles became mammals and mammals became monkeys and monkeys became us. But the Bible says absolutely no. The Bible says that God created each creature after its kind, that God placed absolute and insurmountable boundaries around every genus of plant and animal here on Earth, and that no amount of lightning and no amount of cosmic radiation and no amount of gene mutation has ever will ever or can ever successfully cross these boundaries. Dogs produce dogs and cats produce cats. Cats can't turn into alligators and dogs can't turn into sheep and Yogi Bear did not come from the Geico Gecko.

This did not happen. Now, that's the explanation for how plant and animal life got here from the Bible. But how did man get here? Well, the Bible answers that force chapter one, verse twenty six of Genesis, then God said, let us make man in our image according to our likeness. And I'm sure you picked up the first person plural in here, us, our many commentators have said, well, this is God talking to the angels and or to the seraphim or to the cherubim.

Well, friends, there's a problem with that. The Bible doesn't say we're made in the image of angels or cherubim or seraphim. The Bible says uniquely and particularly we are made in the image of Almighty God himself. So what we have here in Genesis one twenty six is actually the three persons of the Godhead, God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit talking among themselves.

Amazing. Verse twenty seven. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God. He created him male and female.

He created them. Genesis Chapter two, verse seven. The Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathe into his nostrils.

The breath of life and man became a living being. Once again, the Bible presents a very different explanation for how we got here as human beings. Then we get from the Darwinian evolutionary model. The Bible tells us we did not come from monkeys or from chimpanzees or from orangutans or anything like that. The Bible tells us we're not just some highly evolved form of lower life, but rather the Bible tells us that we are the unique apex of God's creative work, different from every other creature God made in that God created us in his very image. Listen, too much cosmic radiation might have hit some monkey way back there in time. But friends, that did not make that monkey your great great grandfather.

Sorry, it probably killed him or gave him a bad sunburn, but it did not make him your great grandfather. And the Bible goes on to tell us that, in fact, when God created human life, he created two kinds of human life. Listen, Genesis Chapter two, verse 21. So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man. And while he was sleeping, God took one of the man's ribs and closed up the flesh at that place. Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib he had taken from the man and brought her to the man, verse 23. And the man said, Yabba Dabba Doo. I don't know for sure if he said that.

I have the feeling he did. But what the Bible records, he said, is this is now bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman for she was taken out of man. And it's critical for us to notice here that the Bible clearly says God did not create woman in a separate act of creation from man. That would have given us two different gene pools here on the earth. That would have given us two different races of human beings here on the earth. The Bible says God created the woman out of the man flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone so that there is only one gene pool here on earth. There is only one race of human beings here on earth. And this is central to what we're going to see in Genesis chapter 3 when we get there. So important. So I'll point it out to you now.

We'll come back to it later. All right, let's summarize. What exactly is Genesis chapter 1 calling on you and me to believe? Well, it's calling on us to believe that life on this planet is not the result of evolution or mutation or natural selection or random chance, but rather personally and directly and almighty life-possessing life-giving omnipotent.

God created all the life we see on this planet culminating with his creation of mankind in his own personal image. Now you say, all right, Lon. I see that. But I got some questions just like I did last week. I got some what abouts that I'd like to ask.

Let's do it. You say, all right, my first what about is this. What about the fossil record? I mean, when we look at the fossil record, there are all kinds of species there that aren't around anymore. I mean, don't some of them explain how life on this planet evolved up the way Darwin said and got to us?

Well, you're right. There are a lot of animals present in the fossil record that aren't around anymore. Everything from wooly mammoths to saber-toothed tigers to our friends at Jurassic Park.

But that doesn't mean a thing. That doesn't prove anything because, friends, the issue is not whether we can find some animals in the fossil record that aren't around anymore. The issue is, can we find in the fossil record any transitional animals? Can we find any animals in between amoebas and fish in between worms and alligators, animals that are like part bird and part reptile, part amphibian and part mammal?

Well, the answer is no. Darwin himself said, and I quote, if my theory be true, numberless intermediate varieties must assuredly have existed, end of quote. Now, when he said this 150 years ago, there weren't a lot of fossils around today. We have got so much fossil record beyond anything Darwin probably ever conceived. And he said, as we find more numberless of these intermediate varieties ought to be in the fossil record.

We don't have even one. Dr. Luther Sutherland, a paleontologist, went to the five greatest fossil museums in the world and asked if they could show him one transitional animal, anyone. And then he wrote a book called Darwin's Enigma in which he says, and I quote, none of the museum officials from the five greatest fossil museums that I visited could offer a single example, look at this, of a transitional series of fossilized organisms that would document the transformation of even one different type of animal to another, end of quote. Dr. Mark Czarnecki, an evolutionary paleontologist, wrote an article in Maclean's magazine, and here's what he said, and I quote, he said, a major problem improving the theory of evolution has been the fossil record.

This record has never revealed traces of Darwin's hypothetical intermediate variants. Instead, he says, species appear and disappear abruptly, and this has fueled the creationist argument that each species was created by God. Dr. Carlton Brett, professor of geology at the University of Cincinnati said, and I quote, did life on earth change steadily and gradually through time? The fossil record emphatically says no. And finally, Dr. Stephen Jay Gould, I think many of you have heard of this gentleman. He is a professor of geology and paleoanthropology at Harvard. Okay, and here's what he says, and I quote, he said, from such scrappy data, it is hard to see how anyone could derive with confidence the gradualistic interpretation of Darwin unless one were predisposed to it from the start, end of quote.

We get what he's saying here, right? He says, the only way you can look at the data and end up with Darwinian evolution is if you were already convinced of Darwinian evolution before you ever started and worked it in such a way that you knew you had to end up there. If you just look at the data, nobody ends up there naturally from the data. Folks, these people are telling us that we could establish evolution as a fact, like gravity. If we could prove from the fossil record that even one category of life transitioned into another category of life, but we can't. And the amazing thing is that Darwin himself said, given the billions and billions of years over which evolution was supposed to have happened, he said that the fossil record, there shouldn't just be one or two of them in the fossil record, the fossil record should be teeming with these intermediate animals and yet scientists are telling us they can't even find one. And hey, no transitional animals, no Darwinian evolution, sorry. This is what led Dr. Edmund Ambrose, have to take a deep breath before I tell you who he is, Professor Emeritus of the University of London and Head of the Department of Cell Biology at the Chester Beattie Research Institute at the University of London. And he said, and I quote, we have to admit that there is nothing in the geological record that runs contrary to the views of creationists, end of quote.

You say, all right, Lon, I got another what about. What about DNA and all that we're learning about the cell and everything? I mean, it seems like that all of this information should tell us something about how life evolved up the chain, right? Well, indeed, we've learned an enormous amount about the human cells since Watson and Crick discovered the DNA helix in 1953 and they received the Nobel Prize for this in 1962. But what we've learned is that the genetic makeup of human life is so complex that it defies all mathematical odds of happening by evolutionary chance. Listen to Dr. Gunter Wagner, Professor of Evolutionary Biology at Yale. He said, and I quote, the set of genetic instructions for humans is roughly three billion letters long, end of quote. In other words, if you wanted to spell human being using the genetic code, using genes, it would take you three billion letters, three billion genes to do it. What's the likelihood that that happened by chance? Well, Dr. George Howe, biologist and botanist at Westmont College said, and I quote, the chance that one useful DNA molecule could develop without a designer is approximately zero.

Well, if it's approximately zero, that means it's zero. And I love what Sir Fred Hoyle, this gentleman was a late professor of astronomy and mathematics at Cambridge University in England. He's got more honors than you could shake a stick at. Google him, incredibly brilliant man, not a believer in Jesus.

All right. He wrote a book entitled Evolution from Space. And in this book, Hoyle calculated, he's a mathematician, that by the process of evolution, the chance of obtaining the required enzymes for even the simplest living cell was one in ten to the 40,000th power. Which is why he went on to say, and I love this, and I quote, he said to suppose that the first cell originated by chance is like believing that a tornado could sweep through a junkyard filled with airplane parts and form a Boeing 747, end of quote. He went on to say, if one perceived straightforwardly in this matter, without being deflected by fear of incurring the wrath of scientific opinion, stop.

What's he saying? He's saying, if you just look at the data and you don't worry about the retribution that scientists are going to take on you if you come out in public and you say evolution isn't right, if you forget that and just look at the data, watch what he says, one arrives at the conclusion that biomaterials with their amazing complexity and order must be the outcome of intelligent design, end of quote. And finally, mathematician Dr. I.O. Cohen, who wrote in a book entitled Darwin Was Wrong, these words, and I quote, he said, at the moment when the DNA RNA system became understood, the debate between evolutionists and creationists should have come to a screeching halt. Mathematically speaking, and he's a mathematician, based on probability concepts, there is no possibility that evolution was the mechanism that created the approximately six million species of plants and animals we recognize today, end of quote. And you remember Dr. Francis Crick, remember him? We showed you a picture, one of the two discoverers of the DNA helix back in 1953, won the Nobel Prize in 1962, remember this guy?

Okay, you're going to love this. He wrote a book entitled Life Itself, and in this book he says that he believes there's absolutely no possibility at all that life on earth could have come from the random processes of evolution, but he refuses to believe in the God of the Bible. And so instead, his explanation in his book for how life got here to earth is that the first living cells were brought to earth by a spaceship from outside our solar system. You say, this guy won the Nobel Prize?

Yes, he did. But wait a minute, here's his logic. His logic is, hey, if there's no way life on earth could have happened by itself, and if the God of the Bible didn't do it, then it has to be the Klingons. That's his logic.

Okay. The point, my friends, is that yes, everything we've learned about DNA has helped us figure out how life began here on earth. It's made us realize that life is so complex that only a masterful God could have possibly created it. And in studying for this message, I came across a mammoth discovery that's recently come from DNA studies that's kind of a little aside, but I want to share it with you. It comes out of National Geographic magazine, and here's what National Geographic said, and I quote, Genetic analysis has traced all modern males back to a common Y chromosome ancestor, nickname Adam, whose descendants spread from there all around the world. End of quote. Well, hello, the Book of Genesis. Hello. Isn't that exactly what the Book of Genesis says?

Man, it's great to see National Geographic catching up. Now, you say, well, Lon, I got one more objection. That's it. And my last objection is, well, Lon, I mean, never say never. You know, I mean, all right, so the mathematical probabilities aren't real good and the odds aren't real great. But I mean, anything can happen, right?

Well, there's a problem with this. This kind of hope against hope approach to evolution. And that is the second law of thermodynamics.

You say, what was that? Well, let me give you the layman's definition of the second law of thermodynamics. The second law of thermodynamics says that things always get more disorderly unless you put directive energy in to keep them organized. If you've ever had a teenager, just look at their room and you understand the second law of thermodynamics. I like the way Isaac Asimov, anti-creationist, evolutionist, science fiction writer, put it. He said, and I quote, We have to work hard to straighten the room, but left to itself, it becomes a mess again very quickly.

The same truth applies, he says, to our workplaces, our yards and our bodies. All we have to do is do nothing and everything deteriorates, collapses, breaks down and wears out by itself. This is what the second law of thermodynamics is all about. But you see, my friends, the problem is that Darwinian evolution demands the exact opposite of the second law of thermodynamics. It demands that a random system here on earth, left to itself, with no input of directive energy by God or anybody else, didn't get less organized.

It actually got more and more organized until it reached a level of orderliness that defies all mathematical probability. You say, well, so maybe evolution is an exception to the second law of thermodynamics. I mean, maybe the second law of thermodynamics didn't apply to evolution.

Well, physicist Dr. G.N. Haspulis said, and I quote, There is no recorded experiment in the history of science that has ever contradicted the second law of thermodynamics or its corollaries. In other words, if Darwinian evolution were true, it would be the only example in the history of the world where the second law of thermodynamics was ever contradicted. That's what people who believe Darwinian evolution are asking you and me to believe. Now, I said last week it takes faith to believe either model of how the universe and life came into being. It takes faith to believe what the Bible tells us, the model of the Bible. It takes just as much faith to believe the model that the Darwinian evolutionists want us to believe.

But friends, as I said last week, I'm sorry. I don't have enough faith to be an atheist. I don't have that much faith because think what that means. I don't have enough faith to believe, number one, that the second law of thermodynamics completely went out the window somehow only once in the history of the universe.

And that was for Darwinian evolution. I don't have that much faith. I don't have enough faith to believe, second of all, that the people who really understand DNA and say evolution could never have produced it, that they're all wrong. And finally, number three, I don't have enough faith to believe that transitional animals existed when the fossil record is utterly devoid of even one single example of them.

I'm sorry. This is not faith to believe Darwinian evolution. This is foolishness.

This is foolishness. And so let me close with two quotes. Dr. Michael Behe, biochemist, Lehigh University, and author of the book Darwin's Black Box. And he said in that book, and I quote, Life on Earth is the product of intelligent activity. This conclusion, he says, of intelligent design flows naturally from the data itself, not from any sacred books or any sectarian beliefs. He says the result of investigating the human cell, and he's a biochemist, is a loud, clear, piercing cry of design. And finally, our mathematician astronomer friend, Sir Fred Hoyle, he said, and I quote, Once we see that the probability of life originating at random is so utterly minuscule as to make it absurd, it becomes sensible to think that the favorable properties of physics upon which life depends are deliberate and must reflect a higher intelligence at work.

End of quote. Friends, the scientists I've quoted to you today are not marginal scientists. These people teach at Harvard and Cambridge and Yale.

These are brilliant minds. These are the most brilliant scientists, some of them, on the face of the earth. For me to tell you that evolution won't hold water is one thing. For Stephen Gould to tell you that is something completely different.

And what all these scientists are saying today is that mathematically, biochemically, physically, paleontologically, and genetically, Darwin's evolution simply makes no sense. Now, can we prove that the account in Genesis Chapter one of how the world came into being and how life came to be? Can we prove in a test tube scientifically, empirically that it's right? No. Can the people who preach Darwinian evolution prove in a test tube scientifically that they're right?

No, no. But friends, what I believe we have proven here today is that the account in Genesis Chapter one and two of how life came into being on this planet is not as crazy. It is not as impossible and it is not as unscientific as your biology teacher told you that it was. As a matter of fact, it may actually be the most intelligent explanation of all.

Hey, at least it's better than the Klingons, right? I mean, come on now. All right, thank you. Now, let's end science class. Y'all still there?

You okay? All right, no more science class. Now it's time for us to ask our most important question. So it's time to take a good deep breath. And all of you out there on the Internet and all of us here, are we ready? All right, come on now. Here we go. One, two, three. Yeah, you say, Lon, so what?

Say, you know, I appreciate everything you said. And even if I believe that God created the world, I mean, how in the world does that help me tomorrow morning on the Beltway? I know it just doesn't make any difference. Well, yes, it does.

This does. Listen, if the Bible is right, and I believe that it is. And if we were created in the image of God, like the Bible says, then then friends, this means that as human beings, we were designed to be creatures of personal relationship. God is a personal God, and God builds and carries on personal relationships, even within the Godhead. Remember, we saw that the three persons of the Godhead related to one another.

They talked to one another. And if we are created in the image of God, we were created to be people of relationships as well. And the most important relationship any of us has as a human being is our relationship to our creator, Almighty God. Genesis chapter three, verse eight says, Then the man and his wife, Adam and Eve, heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day. And the Hebrew here makes it clear that this was a repetitive action, that God came to the garden every day in the cool of the day.

Now, why? Why did God come and walk around the Garden of Eden? Well, the answer is simple. He came to see Adam and Eve. He came to talk with Adam and Eve and to relate with Adam and Eve and build their relationship together. Adam and Eve were connected with God on a daily basis. They had an intimate friendship with God. Now, when they sinned, they wrecked this for the entire human race. But praise the Lord. When we come to Jesus Christ, the Lord Jesus restores that relationship with Almighty God that we were created from the beginning to have. However, that's not where we stop.

We don't put our hands together and go, wow, this is great. I'm back in relationship with God. End of story. No, no, no, no, no, no.

Friends, that's where we start. Did you ever wonder why God came to the garden every day? How come God didn't come once a week? How come He didn't come once a month? How come He didn't come quarterly?

Well, the answer is very simple. He was cultivating a relationship with Adam and Eve. You can't cultivate a relationship seeing each other once a quarter or once a month. He came daily because it takes that to cultivate a relationship. And so He wanted that close, intimate relationship. And I want to tell you the three things that the Bible says and then we're done about how you and I can cultivate our relationship with God.

That's what God wants us to do to keep going deeper and deeper in relationship with Him. How do we do it? Number one, with honest and intimate communication. Hey, good friends, they talk honestly to each other.

Good marriage partners, what do they do? They talk honestly and intimately about personal things to one another. And as followers of Christ, this is what praying is all about. It's honest communication, us to God, God to us on the most intimate level. We can't build good friendships or good marriages without lots of honest communication. And we can't build a strong relationship with God without a serious prayer life.

Number two, discovering. How do we cultivate a relationship? By discovering who the other person is.

How do we cultivate in a relationship? A big part of that is discovering how this other person thinks, what makes them tick, how they see the world, how they feel about things to the point that you can almost anticipate how this other person is going to react to any given situation. You know, good friends can do that. If you got a really, really good friend, you can almost tell ahead of time what he or she is going to do given a certain situation. Good marriage partners, spouses, they do this. They can anticipate one another.

Well, you know what? We can get to the point where we can almost predict what God might do in a situation because we've gotten to know him so well. And how do we get to know him?

Right here in the book, friends. The reason God gave us the Bible was to tell us what makes him tick and to tell us how he thinks and to tell us how he feels on every single page. This is why the Bible says, Psalm 103 verse 7, that God made known his ways to Moses and he's willing to make known his ways to us. God isn't trying to hide who he is. In the Bible, he's telling us who he is. And I've met people in my 40 years of walking with Christ who have been such students of God in the Bible, they can almost predict what God's going to do in a given situation. But you see, you got to read the Bible right. We don't read it for theology and we don't read it to pick up facts for trivial pursuit. We read it and on every page we say, God, help me discover on this page who you are.

That's how we read the Bible. Number three and finally, dedicated time. Want to cultivate a relationship? Friends, two ships passing in the night.

This is not how you build a good relationship. This explains why David said Psalm 63 verse 6. He said, I meditate on thee in the night watches. David said, I get up in the middle of the night when nobody else is around. I don't have any kingly responsibilities.

I don't have any decisions of state to make. You know, there's no email, there's no fax machine, there's no tweeting going on. And I just spend time, me and God. Well, every believer, folks, needs their night watches.

You can have them in the day, it doesn't matter. But that dedicated time, just us and the Lord, is critical to building and cultivating and nurturing a relationship. So I want to close today with a question.

And here's my question as we close. How satisfying really is your relationship with God? I mean, if you had to rate the satisfaction of your relationship with God one to ten, what would you give it?

And if you don't like the answer to the first question, I got a second question for you. And that is, how much effort then do you put in to cultivating your relationship with God? Folks, this is not rocket science. Prayer plus Bible study where we seek God out on the pages of the Bible plus dedicated time with God equals intimacy and depth of relationship with Him.

This is simple. But the first half of the equation is ours. The prayer, the Bible study, the dedicated time, it's on us. We do our part. Hey, I promise you, God will do His part. He'll reveal Himself to you, but we've got to do our part. And so my challenge to you today and my challenge to me is, friends, God created us above everything else, not to work, not to make money, not to produce children.

He created us above everything else to have a relationship with Him, the living God. So my challenge is we need to be passionate about this. We need to treat it as the highest priority in our life.

And then we need to take the steps passionately to cultivate that relationship. Let's pray together. Lord Jesus, thank you so much for the tremendous information you've given us today, reminding us that we've been told an explanation for how life got here that's not nearly as airtight as we've been led to believe. And I want to pray, Father, that you'll bring us to the place where perhaps we would not be as willing to just swallow that evolutionary model we've been taught, but where we would be willing to look at the Bible's explanation and to say, wow, you know, maybe that makes a lot more sense than I thought it did when I walked in here today. And Father, for those of us who know you and accept the Bible's explanation for how we got here, make us people who are passionate about cultivating the relationship with you that you created us to have. God help us to see that relationship is the absolute number one priority in life, more important than anything else, because it is the very basis for which you made us in your image so that we could be in vital connection with you. So Lord, may what we've learned here today change our lives, change our perspective, may it change our daily use of time, and may it drive us deep into you. And we pray these things in Jesus' name. And what do God's people say? Amen. ...