From One Man God Made Every Nation - Life of Paul Part 50

How about grabbing a Bible and opening it together to Acts chapter 17. You know, we're in a study of the life of the great man, the Apostle Paul.

And when we left him last week, he was in Athens. And we were partway through the sermon that he preached up on Mars Hill. So let's pick up there, Acts chapter 17. And last week, we stopped at verse 24. And in verse 24, Paul made this comment. He said, God made the world and everything in it. And we said last week, well, what that proves is that the Apostle Paul believed the Bible's account of how the universe came into being. And so we spent all of last week talking about does the Bible's account make any sense? Will it at least square with the facts in a way that's reasonable? And if you missed last week, we've got tapes, we've got CDs, pick one of them up.

I don't have time to review. But today what I want to do is I want us to keep going on in Paul's message until we find some other place that's worth stopping. So let's do that. I'm going back now to verse 24. Paul said the God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth. And he does not live in temples built by hands. And he is not served by human hands as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else. From one man, verse 26, he made every nation of men. Now let's stop there for a second.

It's clear from verse 26, where Paul says from one man, God made every nation of men, that not only did Paul believe the Bible's account of how the universe came into being, but Paul also believed the Bible's account of how life came into being, human life and every other kind of life on this planet. And I want to stop there. We'll pick up again next week and keep moving on. But I want us to take the rest of our time now to talk about that issue, or to put it a little more simply, to talk about Darwin versus the Bible.

Let's do that. Now I don't know if you've ever had a truly profound thought in your life that's ever hit you. I had one back in 1965. I might have had more than one since, but I had one in 1965. In 1965, I was a 16-year-old Jewish high school student, and I'll save you the trouble that makes me 54 today. And I was at Virginia Tech spending the summer there.

I'd been chosen by the National Science Foundation to attend a summer seminar for six weeks at Virginia Tech, along with high school students from all over the United States. And in the afternoon, we all did individual research projects, but in the morning, we all took a class together, and the subject for the class that particular summer was enzymes. Now I don't know if you know much about enzymes in your body, but enzymes are tiny little protein molecules that cruise around in your body, making chemical reactions go much faster than they would ordinarily. Without enzymes, life on this earth would be impossible. Without enzymes, we couldn't talk, we couldn't walk, we couldn't eat or digest food, we couldn't see or hear. And there are literally thousands of these enzymes right as you sit here this morning, cruising around in your body, making stuff happen.

And if even one of them is defective, if even one of them is missing or broken, you would be a very sick person this morning, or you were likely to be a very dead person this morning, because you couldn't exist. Now I also learned the most amazing piece of information that I learned about enzymes that summer is that enzymes, every one of them, is code specific. What we mean by that is that every enzyme in your body is coded to do only one chemical reaction. It won't do any other reaction. So therefore, if an enzyme is missing or an enzyme is broken, no other enzyme comes along and picks up its duties, that reaction just goes undone. You know, they don't say, well you know George Enzyme isn't here today, he's out sick, we need to do his job. That's not how they work. You say, it sounds to me like enzymes have a union contract.

Well, they might. But anyway, the point of all this is, this is what they were teaching us. So I walked across campus there in July 1965, back to my dorm after learning some of this that morning. I'll never forget thinking about the incredible complexity of just this one bodily system, and I got to the steps that went up to my dorm, and I stopped there on the steps, and I remember saying out loud, there has got to be a God. Now friends, it would be six years before I'd asked Jesus Christ in my life. Nobody had ever taken me to church. I'd never read the Bible in my life.

Nobody had ever shared Jesus Christ with me. At 16 years old, what convinced me there was a God was that as a scientist, I took a hard look at the complexity of human life, the little bit I understood it, and I said to myself, this is statistically impossible to explain apart from an intelligent, purposeful creator. Now this is exactly what the Bible claims. The Bible claims that we have an intelligent, purposeful creator in this universe, and today we want to look at the Bible's claim, and then we want to look at the evidence, and we want to say, well, what do you think? Does that match up?

Could that be possible? Is the Bible's explanation at least reasonable for how life got here? So let's begin by looking at what does the Bible say first. Well, Genesis chapter 1 tells us how life got here.

Genesis 1, verse 21. So the Bible says, God created every living thing according to its kind, and every winged bird according to its kind. Then God made the wild animals on land according to their kind, and the domesticated livestock according to their kind, and all the other creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds.

Did you notice five times God repeats the same phrase here? According to it or their kind. That's really important for us to understand because the foundation of Darwinian evolution is that there was transition between the kinds, between species, not, as the Bible says, that God made every unique species as its own kind. Darwinian evolution says that as the years passed, as cosmic radiation struck genes and caused those genes to mutate, as the survival of the fittest dominated, that there was this movement, this transition from one kind of animal to another kind of animal to another kind of animal eventually culminating in human life. In other words, amoebas became fish, fish became reptiles, reptiles became amphibians, amphibians became mammals, and mammals became monkeys, and monkeys became us. Now in direct contrast to that, the Bible says here in Genesis 1 that God created every creature according to its own kind, genus, specie. Genesis 1 declares that God placed absolute and insurmountable boundaries at the edge of every specie of plant, every specie of animal on the face of this earth, and that no amount of lightning, no amount of cosmic radiation, no amount of gene mutation has ever, will ever, or can ever cross that boundary successfully. In other words, dogs produce dogs, and cats produce cats.

Cats don't produce alligators, dogs don't turn into sheep, and lassie did not come from Miss Piggy, if you understand what I'm saying. Now how did human life get here? Well, the Bible explains that to us as well. Genesis chapter 1 verse 26. Then God said, let us make man in our image and in our likeness, and let mankind rule over every other creature on the earth. So, God made man in His image. In the image of God, He created mankind, male and female, He created them. Of course, the Bible tells us the name of the first male and female, Adam and Eve, and the Bible declares that Adam and Eve were not just highly evolved forms of lower life here on earth, but rather that they were the crowning apex of God's creation. They were unique and different from every other form of life on this earth because they were created in the image of God Himself. So, let's summarize. Here we have the Bible's clear, unambiguous, absolutely definitive explanation of how life got on this planet, that life here is not the result of evolution, mutation, natural selection, random chance, or any other earthly process, but that an almighty, life-possessing, life-creating God directly, personally, uniquely, and deliberately created all the life that you and I see on this planet, including human life, or, as the Apostle Paul put it on Mars Hill, from one man, God made every nation of men.

They say, okay, Lord, okay, I hear what you're saying, I hear that's what the Bible says, but, you know, I've got some things that really bother me about this. I mean, I've got some whatabouts like I had last week. All right, well, ask them. All right, well, here's my first one. What about the fossil record? I mean, there's an awful lot of animals there that we don't see around today.

What about all of this? Well, that's true. I mean, there are a lot of species that seem to be around back then that we don't have today, woolly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers and all our friends from Jurassic Park, you know, but that's not the issue. The issue is, when we look at the fossil record, do we find any of these transitional animals? Do we find any of these half and half animals, you know, half bird and half reptile, half amphibian and half mammal? If Darwinian evolution is right, these half and half animals had to exist.

They had to. So do we see any of them? Well, Dr. Luther D. Sutherland, in a book entitled Darwin's Enigma, tells about how he went to the five greatest fossil museums in the world looking for transitional animals, and I quote, none of the museum officials, he says, could offer a single example of a transitional series of fossilized organisms that would document a transformation of even one different kind of animal to another. What he's saying is, there ought to be thousands of these transitions from one animal to another. We couldn't even find one. Dr. Colin Patterson, senior paleontologist at the British Museum, and I quote, no one has ever produced a species by the mechanisms of evolution or natural selection. No one has ever gotten near it. Now, what Dr. Sutherland and what Dr. Patterson are saying, I hope you hear it, they're saying that the mechanism that is supposed to be responsible for the six million species of animals and plants we see today, that when you go to the fossil record looking for an evidence of that mechanism, there is no evidence of it anywhere in the fossil record, no place.

You say, wait a minute, Lon, wait a minute, wait, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho. I read an article about this dinosaur bird thing they found a couple years ago, you know, that was supposed to be the perfect example of a transition between birds and dinosaurs. What happened to that? Well, you're right. The animal's name was Archaeoraptor. Let's show you a picture of that little guy. There he is.

And he's supposed to be the perfect example. He's part dinosaur and he's part bird. But listen to what Ms. Nancy Piercy said in an article entitled The Missing Link That Wasn't. And I quote, when National Geographic published the first picture of a fossil creature that looked like a bird dinosaur, it was hailed as a stunning coup for Darwinian evolution. National Geographic convened a press conference in October 1999, heralding the fossil as a crucial missing link between dinosaurs and birds, the first truly transitional creature ever substantiated by the fossil record. Now, stop there a second. Would you notice, National Geographic even admits that there are no transitional creatures anywhere in the fossil record. This thing would have been the first one, okay?

Now, Ms. Piercy goes on. She says, it turns out that the dinosaur tail was attached by a local Chinese farmer to a bird fossil. Chinese farmers have grown adept at gluing fossils together in ways that increase their black market value, which is what happened in this case. As Jeff Hecht of New Scientist magazine said, this missing link was forged by glue, not by evolution.

Ms. Piercy continues and concludes by saying in the months that the fake dino bird was proudly on display at National Geographic's Explorers Hall in Washington, D.C., some nine million school children filed by to see it, leaving with their imaginations full of feathered dinosaurs that never existed. This is a disgrace and a powerful reminder that scientists often see what they want to see, especially when it supports a theory like evolution that they cherish. Friends, the truth is, when we look carefully at the fossil record, we find it is utterly devoid of any transitional creatures, any of these half and half creatures. Now, if this has been going on, evolution's been going on for billions and billions of years, like the Darwinian evolutionists want us to believe, there should be scads of these half and half creatures spread all over the fossil record, yet the reality is there's not a single one.

Why? Because maybe God created everything according to its kind, that's why. Dr. Michael Denton, molecular biologist, said, and I quote, evolution would be established today beyond any reasonable doubt.

Remember what he says? We could prove evolution is absolutely right if, uh-oh, if it had been shown that divisions between species could at least theoretically be crossed, even by inventing a really convincing series of transitional forms. However, this has never been achieved. And finally, Charles Darwin himself, in the book Origin of the Species, and he said this, and I quote, if species have descended from other species by insensibly fine gradation, why do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms? Why is not all nature in confusion instead of the species being, as we see them, so well defined? End of quote. Well, Charles, I got an answer for you. Maybe your theory is wrong.

Well, you say, wait a minute, Lon, wait a minute, I got another what about. My second what about is what about DNA and all that we're learning about the cell and its genetic makeup. Doesn't that give us some insight into whether evolution happened?

Yeah, it sure does. You know, we've learned a lot ever since Dr. Watson and Dr. Crick unlocked the DNA code a few years ago. And what we've learned is that the genetic makeup of life is so complex that it defies all mathematical odds of happening by chance.

Drs. Radmar and Wagner in Scientific American magazine said, and I quote, the set of genetic instructions for humans is roughly three billion letters long. What this means, friend, is if you wanted to spell the word human being using amino acid letters, you would have to spell out a word that was three billion letters long. Now, what are the odds of something like that happening by chance? What are the odds of something like that happening by the random processes of evolution? Well, mathematicians tell us it's testingly small. You say, how small? Well, listen to mathematician Dr. George Howe, and I quote, the chance that a useful DNA molecule would develop without a designer is approximately zero.

Well, okay, I'd say that's close to nothing. What do you say? Cambridge University professor, astronomer, mathematician, Sir Fred Hoyle, here's what he said about it. 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 full of airplane parts and form a Boeing 747, end of quote.

And Dr. I.L. Cohen, mathematician, wrote a book entitled Darwin Was Wrong, a Study in Probabilities, and Dr. Cohen is not a follower of Christ. Dr. Cohen, Dr. Cohen, you with me? All right, Dr. Cohen.

Now, listen to what mathematician Dr. Cohen says, and I quote. He says, 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, there is no possibility that evolution was the mechanism that created the approximately 6 million species of plants and animals that we recognize today.

You know who else recognized this? Dr. Francis Crick, the guy who unlocked the DNA code, won the Nobel Prize for doing that. He recognized also that the chance of DNA happening by itself is impossible, which is why he wrote a book entitled Life Itself, and in this book, Dr. Crick suggests that the first living cells were actually brought to Earth by a spaceship filled with aliens from outside our solar system. So, you see, it wasn't God that started life here on Earth, it was the Klingons who started life here on Earth.

You say, well, well, well, hold on a minute. This guy won the Nobel Prize? Yeah, he did. You say, well, did he start smoking something after he won the Nobel Prize?

You know, space aliens? No, he didn't start smoking anything. He recognizes mathematically it is impossible that DNA developed by itself. He's unwilling to say God did it, so the only choice he's got is the Klingons, friends.

That's it. You say, all right, Lon, wait a minute. You know, in science, you never say never.

I mean, anything could possibly happen, right? No, wrong. Not in this case. You say, well, how can you say that? Well, I've got a thing called the second law of thermodynamics on my side.

Let me tell you what it says. It says, and I quote, in a closed system, things will always go from being more orderly to being less orderly unless there is directive energy put into the system to maintain orderliness. You say, what did you just say?

I have no clue what you just said. All right, well, let science fiction writer Isaac Asimov try to explain it to us. He says, and I quote, we have to work hard to straighten a room, but left to itself it becomes a mess again very quickly. All we have to do is do nothing, and everything deteriorates, collapses, breaks down, and wears out all by itself. This is what the second law of thermodynamics is all about.

Friends, you want to know why your teenager's room always looks the way it does? The second law of thermodynamics is living in your house. That's exactly why.

He's not putting any energy into cleaning it up so it falls apart. That is the second law of thermodynamics, and it lives, believe me. Now the problem is that evolution, Darwinian evolution, demands the very opposite of the second law of thermodynamics. Think about it. It demands that a random system left completely on its own in utter chaos that that system without any directive energy being put in by God, by the Klingons, or anybody else, that that system went from complete chaos to all of the organization that we see around us in the world today. You say, well, all right, but I mean, couldn't that have happened?

Isn't that possible? There's got to be someplace where the second law of thermodynamics is violated. Well, physicist Dr. G.N.

Haspules says there isn't. He says, and I quote, there is no recorded experiment in the history of science that contradicts the second law of thermodynamics or its corollary. So think about it.

If you're going to believe Darwinian evolution, what you say you believe is that you believe that a law of physics, that we don't have a single example of it ever being violated in the history of science, that not only was it violated once, but it was violated thousands of times to create the systems that we see around us today, and it's the only example of that law of physics ever being violated in the history of man. That's what you say you believe. Now, does that make sense? Is that intelligent?

I don't think so. Darwin himself had a little problem with this. Listen to what he said. Charles Darwin, the origin of the species, supposed that the eye, with its ability to adjust its focus amidst different amounts of light and correct for chromatic aberrations to think that it could have been formed by natural selection seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree, end of quote. And yet he goes on in the book to say that he believes in any way in spite of how absurd it is, and I say that's absurd to say that.

That's ridiculous. Biochemist Dr. Michael Behe, Lehigh University, in a book entitled Darwin's Black Box, got two more quotes and we're done with this. Here's what he says in conclusion. He says, life on earth is the product of intelligent activity. This conclusion of intelligent design flows from the data itself, not from sacred books or sectarian beliefs.

Stop there a second. You know what he's saying? He's saying, I believe there was a designer to the human cell, and it's not because of the Bible, and it's not because I'm a Christian or I believe anything about religion.

I'm saying this because as a biochemist, I looked at the data and that's what the data says. He goes on to say the result of investigating the cell biochemically is a loud, clear, piercing cry of design. Somebody made this thing. And finally, Sir Fred Hoyle, our Cambridge University astronomer, mathematician, and tornado in the junkyard thing, you remember him, alright, he says, 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 on which life depends are deliberate. Somebody deliberately did all of this.

Now friends, these people I've been quoting from are not insignificant, biased activists from the Christian right. I've been quoting to you from some of the most imminent and astute scientists in the world, and what they are saying is that Darwinian evolution makes no sense. It makes no sense biochemically. It makes no sense biologically. It makes no sense mathematically. It makes no sense in light of the chemical and physical laws of the universe.

It makes no sense. Now, can I prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Genesis 1 is right? That this is really how life came here? No, I can't.

I wasn't there, you weren't there, nobody else was there. I can't prove that. What I can prove to you is that there are an awful lot of good scientists who say it could not have been Darwinian evolution. So if it's not Darwinian evolution and it's not the Klingons, then who else is around that could have done this thing? I say, you know what?

It takes a whole lot less faith to believe the way God tells me it got here than to believe some of this other nonsense. Now that brings us to the end of where we want to go today on that subject. Are you still awake? Everybody here? All right. I mean, I know, you know, this feels like high school biology class and all three of my boys slept through that, so I'm just assuming maybe you guys were sleeping through this too.

But I hope you're still awake. And it leads us to a really important question. And you know what the question is. Everybody ready? All right, here we go.

One, two, three. So what? Right.

You say, Lon, so what? You say, you're not going to talk about this again next week, are you? No, I'm not. This is it. No more, no more, no more, no more.

We're not going to do this next week. But you say, this has been interesting, but what when I walk out of my house on Monday morning, what difference does any of this make? Oh, it makes a lot of difference. Because you see, friends, the Bible teaches us that the God of this universe is a personal being, that the God of this universe builds personal relationships. And if Genesis 1 is right, if you and I were created in the image of this personal God, then what this means is that you and I were designed to be creatures of personal relationship too, that we were designed to build personal relationships in a way that no other creature on the face of this earth was designed. I mean, worms don't do personal relationships. Snakes don't do personal relationships. You can't build a personal relationship with a pig, as many of you ladies have discovered. All right, now, I kind of like that, but I don't know.

But it's true. Now, of all the personal relationships that a human being can have, hey, a personal relationship with the God of the universe is the most pivotal. And friends, what the Bible teaches is that there is a God-shaped hole in every human heart and that no amount of stuff that Madison Avenue dangles in front of us, no amount of stuff can fill that hole. It's a God-shaped hole. Only a relationship with God can fill it. Money won't fill it. Power won't fill it.

Prestige won't fill it. Education won't fill it. Religion won't fill it.

Recognition won't fill it. Material goods won't fill it. Food won't fill it. Alcohol won't fill it. Sex won't fill it. Marriage won't fill it. Drugs won't fill it.

Hey, I tried all those things by age 21. And I still walked around saying I'm empty and lonely on the inside. Something is wrong. But I'll tell you what's wrong. What was wrong was that I was not just a highly evolved dog. What was wrong was that I was just not an exceptionally smart monkey. What's wrong was that God created me uniquely as a human being to have a relationship with Him, my Creator and my God, and until I came into that relationship, there was a piece of my soul that was missing and my life just wasn't going to work right. That's what was wrong. And I met a man on the street in Chapel Hill, North Carolina when I was 21 that said, I know how to fix your problem. And I said, you do? He says, yeah, I know how to fix your problem.

You come into a relationship with Jesus Christ and that hole in your heart will be fixed. I got to tell you, friends, I was pretty skeptical. I didn't enter into this with great expectations it was going to work. But I figured, well, what the heck? I tried everything else. Nothing else worked.

Why not give it a shot? I'm not miserable the way I am. And 32 years ago, that piece in my heart that was missing was put back into place by the Lord Jesus Himself. And I've had ups and downs since then and good times and hard times since then.

I've never had a hole in my heart since then. If you're here today, you know exactly what I'm talking about. You've tried to put everything in there. The world system tells you it's supposed to work and you're still empty. And there's still that gnawing feeling in there that something's just not there, something's just not right.

I'm here to tell you what that man told me on the street 32 years ago. We can fix your problem. I can't fix it, but I can tell you how to get it fixed. You come in relationship with the Lord Jesus and He'll put that piece back in your heart and suddenly life will start working the way it was designed to work. Remember, you're not a highly evolved dog, my friend. You're not an exceptionally smart monkey. You're a unique piece of God's creation and He designed you to be in relationship with Him.

You'll never work right until you are. Let's bow our heads together, shall we? Now let's close our eyes and if you're here today and you're willing to take that chance that I took 32 years ago of opening your heart up to Jesus Christ and just giving Him a chance to put that piece back in your life, then I'm going to lead us in a very short prayer and what I want you to do is pray along with me. You pray silently. I'll pray out loud, one little phrase at a time. And let's invite Jesus to come into your life and put that missing piece in and then we'll see what happens. So if you want to, you pray with me silently.

Here we go. Lord Jesus, I come to you today because I'm hurting on the inside. I feel empty. I feel lonely.

And I can't figure out how to fix it. And so I'm willing today to give you a chance in my life. I invite you to come into my life to be my personal Lord and Savior and to put that piece in my heart that you say only you can do. I trust what you did on the cross to be the payment for my wrongdoing and the basis on which you and I can have a personal relationship.

So change my life and my heart today. I surrender to you in Jesus' name. And Father, I want to pray for the folks who prayed that prayer, that you would confirm right in their hearts as they sit here this morning that a great transaction has taken place, that they have passed, as the Bible says, from death into eternal life and also that they've passed into a relationship with you. Lord, may they feel and sense even as they sit here that that piece has been put in place and that things are never going to be the same again.

They're going to be better. And for those of us here who have already done this, thanks for reminding us today that you came and died on the cross so that we could have a relationship with you so that our lives could work the way they were designed to work. Lord, help us cherish that relationship. Help us nourish that relationship. And help us exploit that relationship into an intimate and genuine walk with the living God. Lord, thanks for loving us enough that you came so that we could be everything you designed us to be. And we pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen.