The Authority and Reliability of Scripture

Thank you. It's great being with you today. I really appreciated the special music we just just had. And I think, you know, we it's easy for us. to lose sight of the fact just how awesome God is. I think that's a problem. If we had just a little more glimpse of how awesome God is, it would really change our priorities.

What I would like to talk about today, well, Many of you, or at least some of you I know, attended our conference yesterday on radioisotopes in the age of the earth. And we were dealing head on with the issue of the age of the earth and why this is such a critical issue as far as biblical authority is concerned. And that's mainly what I want to talk about today. So let's see. So the topic is, why is a literal understanding of Genesis 1 through 11 so critical?

Now, since this is a Bible church, and you give a lot of attention to God's word, I thought we would start this morning with a pop quiz. OK, is that all right? Or do you come to church and sort of just take it very casually? Studying God's Word is sort of optional, and whether you learn much about it, it's optional. It's not that important. I believe it ought to be as important as anything we study, any topic, anything we would major in in college. So here's the question.

What deception does Scripture reveal will be the chief deception of the last days? Is it A, the Antichrist is God? B, Christ's second coming will be in secret. C, one must avoid marriage and abstain from certain foods to be saved. In 1 Timothy, Timothy talks about that. D, the Bible contains the word of God. E, the fear of the Lord is an Old Testament concept.

Any of those anybody thinks is the chief deception? Well, I put another one, another choice, F. And so, I'm going to give you a clue. This deception has led directly in our day to wholesale rejection, even ridicule of the Bible as an authoritative source of knowledge and wisdom.

And it was, and I'll give you a further clue, and it's prophesied very clearly. Let's look at this passage. I'm giving you a clue where it's going to be. It's in this passage. 2 Peter 3, verse 3, Know this first of all, that in the last days mockers will come with their mocking, following after their own lessons, saying, Where is the promise of his coming?

For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all continues just as it was from the beginning of creation. willfully ignorant of this fact, that by the word of God the heavens existed long ago and the earth was formed out of water and by water, through which water the world at that time was destroyed, being flooded with water, but by his word the present heavens and earth are being reserved for fire, kept for the judgment and destruction of ungodly men. I want to highlight, I'm going to more or less give you the answer here. Highlight this portion of verse 4 and saying, Where is the promise of his coming?

For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all continues just as it was from the beginning of creation. Now that may sound very subtle, I mean innocent, like an innocent argument, but let's see. So the correct answer to the pop quiz is F, other, all continues just as it was from the beginning of creation.

The biggest deception of the end of the last days. In modern jargon, the present is the key to the past. Now, how can an assertion so subtle have such a far, far reaching impact? You might say you might be asking probably most of you're asking, how can something like that have such far reaching consequences?

Well, let me give the answer. Let me summarize the answer. Just in a nutshell, if slow and gradual processes, if all continues just as it was from the beginning, if slow and gradual processes like we observe today are responsible for the geological record, then the Earth must be millions of years old or more.

And if this is so, then Genesis 1 through 11 simply cannot be true in any literal or historical sense. And if the biblical text cannot be understood in terms of the normal meaning of its words, then its interpretation becomes an entirely subjective enterprise and the Bible has no objective authority. It's just that simple. You take away that the first 11 chapters of the Bible mean what they say, and basically it opens the door to human interpretation. Human authority then becomes above the authority of God's Word just plainly understood.

And so that's what we're dealing with. That's what has happened. And it happened, this process was well underway before any of us in this room were even born. So I want to go and give a little historical background about how this happened. But I want to say that this is right in keeping with Satan's tactics from the very beginning. Namely, to call God's word into question.

Genesis 3.1, he approaches Eve and his first words, indeed has God said? Satan directly challenged God's word that God had said these things. His tactics have not changed. For the past 200 years, his main target has been Genesis 1 through 11. through false beliefs about the uniformity of rates of geological and other physical processes. So how did Satan pull this off?

How did this darkness that we are groping around in today, how did this darkness fall upon a world, especially the western world, that was so informed with biblical truth prior to 200 years ago? Well, he promoted a worldview called naturalism, a worldview that rose to prominence in intellectual circles in the 1700s to introduce this radically different understanding of the earth's past. Naturalism was what was behind the French Revolution. where people were calling for abolition, so anti-God, abolition of the seven-day week, want to replace it with a ten-day week, installing a statue of the goddess of wisdom in Notre Dame in Paris, and basically an all-out assault on religion. In France it was primarily the Catholic Church, but nevertheless it went way beyond the Catholic Church to anything associated with God.

So here are naturalism's axioms. Naturalism is nothing but radical atheism. The first axiom of naturalism is there is no God. Absolutely no God. That's the beginning point of naturalism. And the next step is almost a corollary to that, that if there's no self-existent God, the thing that must be self-existent is matter. So matter has no prior, no creator. It's self-existent. And it constitutes all that is real. So another term for this outlook is materialism or materialist philosophy. That matter is all there is.

And on the, what's the program that Carl Sagan used to, was it Cosmos? Yeah, Cosmos program. Many times Carl Sagan said, the cosmos is all there is, all there was, and all there ever will be. That is a, first of all, it's blasphemy, but it's an assertion of this naturalism, this radical materialism. And therefore, all events in the cosmos are consequences of the way matter behaves, matter governed by its unchanging internal laws.

So this is a belief system. And this belief system has more or less dominated public education, university education in the Western world, in the United States, certainly for the last hundred years, and in some places in a significant way even before that. But those of us that were born in the 20th century, we have been saturated in this world view. These truth claims have dominated. are the world that we've grown up in. So let's look at some of the implications. If you buy into these axioms, these are some of the implications.

First, humans are purely material entities governed by the same laws that govern everything else. In other words, they claim the words that there is such a thing as soul and spirit is nonsense, because there is nothing besides matter. So it's a direct assault even on what a human being is. And in fact, I don't have it on my slides, in the materialist framework, there really are no categories for love or beauty or any aesthetics. You just can't derive those from the properties of matter, from the elementary particles of physics. Moreover, and certainly there's no ultimate purpose or meaning. And there's no ultimate standards of right or wrong. And since there's no agency outside the cosmos to intervene, and the laws of nature are unchanging, it's a logical step to understand that all continues just as it was from the beginning. The present must be the key to the past. Okay, so this kind of worldview, these kinds of ideas have taken root and gotten us to where we are today.

Now, as far as the, I'm gonna focus a lot on geology from this point on. And these ideas, the first written record of this concept applied to geology is in the writings of James Hutton. who lived at the end of the 1700s. He's regarded as the founder of modern geology because of his introduction of the idea of uniformitarianism, which is the central guiding concept of modern geology. Since he was the first to propound it, he's credited to be the founder of modern geology. This appeared in his book, Theory of the Earth, in 1795.

A famous quote from that book is no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end, as we look at the rock record. His understanding of present-day processes have operated into the distant past as far back as one could imagine, operating so long you can't even see any evidence of a beginning. And since he believed that these laws would never change, there's no prospect of an end. So he articulated these ideas, advocated them, and it was new. So in those days, most people believed in God and believed that God created the world fairly recently and that the Genesis flood was responsible for most of the sedimentary rocks that were around.

So this was a radical idea, but it was picked up A guy named Playfair popularized Hutton's ideas in the first decade of the 1800s. Hutton died in 1897. It turned out the guy that would pick up the baton was born in 1897, Charles Lyell. And although he started out as a lawyer, he became very interested in geological issues and became the person who is considered the father of modern geology. And he's famous for his book, The Principles of Geology.

Most people don't know the rest of the title, but it indicates that he definitely was a uniformitarian, being an attempt to explain the former changes in the Earth's surface by reference to causes now in operation in the present. This was first published in 1830 and updated in 11 subsequent editions. And so he was a very prolific writer, traveled around the world making geological observations. And he was knighted for his scientific achievements in 1848 and was buried in Westminster Abbey because of his contributions, you know, sanctioned by the Church of England. So he was zealous in his advocacy of uniformitarianism, summarized in the slogan, the present is the key to the past.

So all the geologists that have been trained since that time see Lyell as their father and this principle uniformitarianism has dominated geological thinking, geological understanding, geological interpretation since the early to mid 1800s to the very present hour.

Now, Lyell's book, Principles of Geology, had a profound effect, influence on Charles Darwin. Darwin took a copy of Lyell's book, hot off the press, on his voyage on the Beagle in 1831, this round-the-world trip Darwin took on the Beagle. And there's no question that the concepts advanced by Lyell were foundational to Darwin's speculations on how life might possibly arise apart from any input from God. I would say that Darwinian evolution is but a corollary, simply a logical extension of uniformitarianism in geology.

So if you have millions and even billions of years, if you have life, different types appearing and disappearing through time, like that was the way Lyell interpreted the geological record, Darwin's ideas are just a logical follow-on to that, applied to biology. So the issue here is how do we interpret the geological record?

Here is a photo of the Grand Canyon and we see all these horizontal layers exposed so magnificently in the Grand Canyon. So are these layers a product of some 500 million, actually close to a billion years of process like we see operating today? maybe a centimeter of sediment per year, gradually developing and producing all these layers. That's what we're taught in school. That's what geologists are indoctrinated with.

Is that the truth? Are these layers a product of a massive, world-destroying cataclysm that is mentioned in the Bible, namely the Genesis flood? Which is it? The latter was what was believed up until about 1800. But for the last almost 200 years, that view has been abandoned in favor of this other view. So which do we give priority to?

What the Word of God says or speculations of men? He gave these words to Nicodemus, John chapter 3. If I have spoken to you of earthly things and you do not believe, how then will you believe if I speak of heavenly things? And I would say that those words are applicable to us today.

You know, if we're not willing to believe the earthly things in God's Word, the things about earthly history, things that we can verify, just looking around us, if we can't believe the earthly things that God has said, how are we going to believe the heavenly things that are in the Word of God that are not so simple to verify and confirm?

So, if we look at what the Bible With the Bible, the biblical picture of earth history, just very quickly, we have a miraculous six-day creation. God, in an awesome way, an awesome God, bringing about all of earth, space, time, and light on day one. Then creating an expanse in the midst of the waters day two. And then gathering the waters together in one place, letting the dry land appear and creating plants on it of all kinds on day three, supernaturally, miraculously. And then on day four, after he created light on the first day, created lights on day four, the sun, moon and the stars on day four. And then on day five, fill the sea and the air with living creatures, sea creatures and flying creatures. And then on day six, the land animals and Adam and Eve.

And we have, just to drive the point home, the kind of picture that Genesis chapter one paints is dramatic. creation. At one instance, there was no dog on the face of the earth. The next instance, there were a pair of full-blown dogs right there running around.

That's the kind of miraculous creation that Genesis chapter 1 is talking about. And we've been so brainwashed with uniformitarian thinking, most of us don't ever read Genesis 1 and understand it the way it was intended. And I believe that is robbing glory from God, robbing from God the glory that he deserves if we don't understand Genesis at face value, Genesis chapter 1. And then the next major physical event in the biblical account of earth history is the Genesis flood. Uh-oh, I'm sorry, I hit the wrong one.

The Genesis flood, which because of human sin, human wickedness, all the thoughts of the intents of the heart of the humans on the earth, only evil continually. The only course God saw that was possible is to simply destroy everything and start afresh. We have a world destroying catastrophe. And then after the flood, evil again rears its head and God had to take action and disperse human beings, confuse their languages, disperse them to keep evil somewhat under control.

So this is the picture all unfolding in just a few thousand years in our past. So that's the biblical picture. And these are the earthly things that God has told us about. Okay, so in the early 1800s, Bible-believing Christians held fast to the biblical truth that God had judged the world with a catastrophic flood just a few generations before Abraham. There were Bible-believers like most of you, I assume, here in the auditorium this morning. and that the fossil-bearing strata must be testimony to that awful judgment. And even there were geologists that held firm to that view, known as the scriptural geologists.

And they were vocal up to 1830, 1840, but the uniformitarian view eventually won out. And I would say that Christians in that era because they could not deliver a mechanism by which such a vast amount of geological work could be accomplished during the year of the flood, found themselves unable to convince an unbelieving world and unable to believe the skeptics in their midst that the flood had really accomplished so much work. So they basically found themselves marginalized. And then the sort of the blow that really, really set Christians reeling backwards was what happened in the first decade of the 20th century.

Satan brought in his heavy artillery, namely radioisotope dating, which appeared to show with little room for doubt that the earth and solar system were billions of years old and that life had existed on earth for hundreds of millions of years. And the atheists, when this technique was discovered, it was a time of celebration. They realized we'd have no more concerns about the Christians, about the Bible. We can press our agenda with no opposition now.

So, the Bible is God's inspired and inerrant word came under ferocious attack. after that first decade of the 1900s. Seminaries and denominations, whole denominations went liberal. Abandoned any pretense of believing that the Bible was the Word of God. Public education was taken over by naturalists.

So this happened in the early part of the 20th century. And we all grew up in this world. But God, I believe there are prayers, earnest prayers by a lot of Christians for God to intervene. I believe we have seen in the latter half of the 20th century, God has begun to answer the prayers of his people for help in this awful battle.

And just a few little points, there's a lot more to the story than this, but one thing that happened in 1961 is that a hydraulic engineer from, it was at that point on the faculty at Virginia Tech, Henry Morris and John Whitcomb, a seminary professor at Grace Seminary in Indiana, published the Genesis flood that documented the abundant evidence for a world-destroying cataclysm, a global catastrophe that had produced the fossil record. This resulted in the birth of the modern creation science movement. So this was off almost everybody's radar screen. Only it impacted a few Bible-believing Christians in the United States and a few other places in the world. but it started something going. And just some highlights since then, I'll say one of the results is what we presented at the conference yesterday.

This group called Radioisotopes Rate, standing for radioisotopes in the age of the earth. as a result of their eight-year research project, documented that the assumption that nuclear decay rates have always been the same as today is false. In other words, uniformitarianism applied to radioisotope dating is a false assumption. And therefore, these radioisotope dates simply are wrong because the assumption is wrong on which the interpretation of those measurements are based.

And some of the key results behind our conclusion came from documenting that there's significant levels of C14 in coal and even diamonds. and also that zircon crystals in granite contain high levels of helium from the decay of uranium, indicating more than a billion years worth of decay has occurred in only the last 6,000 years because of how fast helium escapes out of any material, any solid. Helium rapidly diffuses out of it, including zircon crystals.

And what the rate research did was actually measure exactly that diffusion rate. So let me just give you just a couple of examples. This is some coalified wood that one member of our rate team had tested even before the rate project, or right about the time the rate project started.

The normal age given where this coalified wood was found would be 250 million years. But the C14 age, just as it came from the laboratory, was 33 million years. only about 34,000 years. However, accounting for the reality of the flood, adjust this age down to less than 5,000 years. The lab, of course, just made the assumption that the atmospheric level of C14, when the plants and the coal grew, was the same as it is in 2001, or whenever this was done. I guess, well, whenever it was done. So it's easy to understand that assumption is problematic.

When you do estimate what the pre-flood C14 level was and make the appropriate adjustments, this date comes down to less than 5,000 years for the age of the wood in this coalified wood sample. All right, Ray team also looked for C14, something unthinkable by a uniformitarian, look for C14 in diamonds. And lo and behold, documented the existence of C14 in diamonds, which supposedly were formed billions of years ago. How in the world could you have in the hardest substance on earth, C14 in a diamond? And so we talked about that yesterday. Again, a radical refutation of the uniformitarian radioisotope dating methods.

And these are the zircons that I mentioned. Tiny crystals, common in granitic rocks, zirconium silicate, And because the size and charge of the zirconium ion is very similar to uranium, there's quite a bit of uranium gets concentrated in these zircon crystals. And uranium decays, it emits eight alpha particles as each uranium atom decays to lead, those alpha particles grab electrons and become helium atoms.

So we, We did some measurements, measured the diffusion rate of zircon, contracted that out to the best laboratory in the world and predicted that the diffusion rate would be in this range if the zircons were only 6,000 years old. We predicted that and published it before we had the measurements made. And it's in one of our books published in year 2000. And we also predicted that if the zircons were really 1.5 billion years old, the diffusion would have to be at this level. And so it was just extremely exciting when we got the results back from the lab represented by these blue dots here. They fell exactly on this curve. indicating that the diffusion had only been going on for approximately 6,000 years.

I can't go into detail here. We had a whole conference yesterday on these kinds of issues. And this is summarized in a relatively accessible book. We have a condensed version of our results. The main report is 800 pages long, This is a 200-page paperback, a summary of that, and it's available from Institute for Creation Research, or you can order it from Amazon, thousands, not billions, if you're interested in more information.

So not only have we done, have people, have Christians, has God raised up Christians who are scientists to look at some of these issues in the area of radioisotope dating, He's raised up many to work on the issue of the mechanism of the flood, trying to understand the flood.

And we now believe we have the explanation of how the flood could produce, how that catastrophe could produce 10,000 feet of sedimentary rock in the middle of Kansas and over much of the continental United States in just a short period of time. And one of the key aspects of that is, well, the process has come to be known as catastrophic plate tectonics, that the flood was primarily a tectonic catastrophe. It involved movement of material inside the earth and the replacement of all the pre-flood ocean floor with new ocean floor and the movement of continents by thousands of miles during the year of the flood. And so I don't have time to go into detail, but basically what secular geologists claim has taken 500 million years to happen, and the plate motions that have gone on during the 500 million years worth of earth history, that plate motion occurred rapidly.

The Atlantic Ocean opened rapidly. in a matter of a few months time. And it involved an instability which allows the plate, the ocean plate to sink rapidly into the Earth's interior at meters per second or something like five to 10 miles per hour because of the deformation properties of mantle rock, that kind of instability is possible.

And laboratory experiments document that very, very clearly. So there's been a lot of work by creation scientists on this particular issue. And so as the seafloor spreading is taking place rapidly, you have hot magma coming in. have melting right underneath where these plates are pulling apart. That molten rock comes in contact with ocean water, producing steam jets that come ripping up through several miles of ocean water, entraining lots of liquid water as they come roaring up.

And then that water falls as torrential rain. So we now have a mechanism. And the Bible speaks of the fountains of the great deep being opened up. And if anything ever qualified as a fountain, these steam jets with supersonic velocities spewing out water, like you wouldn't believe, should qualify, it would seem to me.

And so we have, we have in the present day ocean basins, a chain of high topography, 40,000 miles long, running like a baseball seam around the earth, where this rapid seafloor spreading took place, where these steam jets came forth. And so we see this map of the, Atlantic seafloor, what's known as the Mid-Atlantic Ridge here, but this extends throughout all the other oceans of the earth as well.

Just giving you a flavor, a little idea of what happened during the flood. I might digress here a moment. Most of us, our education, our Bible education on what happened in the flood ended about when we were four years old, when in Sunday school class we learned the little song about the rains came down and the floods came up. Most Christians have not gone beyond that mental idea of what the flood was like. I believe it's time we got up to speed on some of these things.

Okay, so just another little cartoon summary. We have the old pre-flood ocean floor that sank into the middle of the earth, into the mantle. It dragged the continents down, lowered the below sea level. The hot rock came up, replaced the colder ocean floor with warmer ocean floor again, tended to raise the sea level, produced these violent steam jets, that water came down as intense global rain, and you had a world-destroying cataclysm, which produced these massive sedimentary formations we see here. This is a cross-section running northward from the Grand Canyon region. This is the Grand Canyon shown here. These sediment layers you see exposed in the Grand Canyon extend both directions, north, south, east, west, by hundreds, in some cases thousands of miles, the same layer. And there is evidence of an incredible cataclysm.

There's no modern analog to formations this extensive being formed on the continents today. So this idea that the present is the key to the past is falsified just obviously falsified just in the distribution, how extensive these formations are. Also internally, if you look internally at these rock layers, there's evidence of high rate processes, high velocity water transport and deposition. So just at a very basic level, uniformitarianism can't be defended, can't be sustained.

And creationists have been active in documenting that and pointing out that. And this catastrophe buried lots of fossils, lots of animals. And essentially, and many of them buried alive and buried whole. And here in this case, these are dinosaur bones at Dinosaur National Monument. We have many cases, the bones are still connected, still articulated. But it turns out, as you study this, that there's big chunks of dinosaur. The process that buried all this material was so violent, it tore these dinosaurs apart. So you have big chunks of dinosaurs all buried together.

Violent evidence of great violence, if you just have the eyes to see. And the exciting thing for creationists was in 2005, secular researchers published the evidence for flexible blood vessels containing red blood cells and bone from a T-Rex dinosaur from Montana. Can you imagine the blood vessels were still flexible in that bone, still had the red blood cells. This is the photograph of the blood cells in these blood vessels from a dinosaur.

It's hard to imagine that sort of preservation even in an animal 10 years old or 100 years old. But because these animals were buried rapidly, it appears that they could be preserved, you know, since the flood just a few thousand years ago. But it's completely unthinkable that these fossils are 65 million years old. So it's not, I would say for Christians today, it's not a leap. to take the Bible at face value with all this kind of evidence, and not to be intimidated by what the secular world is saying, and even going beyond that in challenging the secularists.

And so this record, this fossil record that we have, is a record, it documents the destruction of life, and the order indicates it progressively higher elevations on the continents during the Genesis flood. So we have a record of the order that the various ecological zones were destroyed, starting with the shallow marine environments, as you go up more and more terrestrial types of plants and animals, as you go from the bottom to the top.

A cataclysm that unfolded in a few months time during the time that Noah was on the ark. And then after the flood, The ocean water was heated such that the, and it's documented, the secular world has documented this, that near when the end of the fossil record, when the fossil record ends, we end up with the oceans heated from top to bottom at the poles, equivalent to what they are in surface waters at the equator today. At the end of the flood, the oceans were very warm. There was lots of evaporation, lots of moist air carried to the poles by atmospheric circulation, and so much snow falling in the winter after the flood in these high latitude areas. a lot more snow that can melt during the summers that you had the rapid buildup of ice sheets and what's called the ice age.

But if you look at areas right adjacent to the front of the ice sheet, you find evidence for warm climate. So contrary to what most people, even a lot of climate scientists understand, if they look at the fossil record, The climate was not cold, it was warm. You have magnolia trees. You have magnolia trees growing right up next to the glacier, the front of the ice. So it was an interesting time, those centuries after the flood, but it included this ice age.

Now, so what has been the response, given the kind of history I've just outlined? Well, many Christian teachers have sought to harmonize the uniformitarian framework, that is the belief in an ancient earth that is billions of years old, with the Bible.

So here are some of the various ways this is happen up the I'm sorry idea of a local flood theistic evolution progressive creation gap theory framework hypothesis but for the same reasons I've mentioned before this is devastating to biblical authority I'm I really hadn't watch the time I'm really take a lot of time here up Please bear with me if you can. I'll try to move a little faster. I just now looked at the clock. What are some implications of compromising with this naturalistic worldview?

First, one is forced to interpret the geological record instead of the record of God's judgment during Noah's flood, rather as a record of his creation. So you're looking at evidence that is really evidence of God's judgment and interpreting it as how God created. That is what happens with these compromised views, apparently spanning hundreds of millions of years.

But this implies there were hundreds of millions of years of animals eating other animals, of suffering disease and death before humans appeared on the scene. Now, let's look at what the Bible says the earth was like at the end of the six days, Genesis 1, 29 and 30. Then God said, Behold, I have given you every plant, speaking to Adam and Eve, yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree that has fruit yielding seed that shall be food for you, and to every beast of the earth and every bird of the sky, and to everything that moves on the earth which has life. I have given every green plant for food, and it was so.

There's no hint of any carnivory in God's original creation, which He declares to be very good. Okay, so the old earth view implies there was no originally perfect world that God could declare to be very good. So that's one point of violence, these compromised views, these old earth views have, as far as God's word is concerned. You have to give up the doctrine of original, perfect, created world. This also implies, furthermore, it implies that Adam's sin was not the means by which death entered the world and the reason God cursed the world with thorns and thistles and why the whole creation groans and longs to be set free from its slavery to corruption. So you do away with the idea that death came by sin. You have to give up that doctrine if you want to entertain an old earth view. And if God cursed the earth with thorns after Adam's sin, why would we find fossil thorns deep in the geological record, you know, millions of years before Adam was formed? Again, a contradiction to God's Word.

If God used evolution with animals eating other animals, with suffering and death, with large numbers of species going extinct in the process, it has some very serious implications about his competence and character. And the skeptics are very aware of that. This is a this is a quote by Carl Sagan. If God is omnipotent and omniscient, why didn't he start the universe out in the first place so that it would come out the way he wants?

Why is he constantly repairing and complaining? No, there's one thing the Bible makes clear. The biblical God is a sloppy manufacturer. He's not good at design, not good at execution. He'd be out of business if there was any competition. It's because he's interpreting the judgment of God for a record of the creation of God.

And that's what our brethren at all these other churches around Denver who have bought into an old earth view, that's what they're doing. That's the doctrine. That's the implication of that doctrine of an old earth. So you look at the rock record, interpreting it through human reasoning, millions of years, and it is shouting out clearly what that record is saying. It's a record of pain, death, killing, disease, thorns, struggle, suffering, and extinction.

They're saying this is the way God created life through this process. That definitely has some serious implications about the character of God. I claim it's doing violence to what Genesis 1 reveals about the way God created. Most teachers who try to reconcile the Bible with the ancient earth interpret the days of Genesis as long eras. But it is logically impossible to reconcile the order of events given in Genesis with this record.

So we have, just to recapitulate, God creating the earth formless and void on day one, and then said, let there be light, and there was light. Day two, he said, let there be expanse in the midst of the waters, which were covering the earth. Day three, he gathered the waters below the expanse together. and let the dry land appear, created plants. Day four, after the plants were there, he then created the sun, moon, and stars. Then day five, the sea life and flying creatures. Day six, I've already said, land animals and man.

And the differences between the biblical order and that of the ancient earth views are dramatic. We have the earth created before the sun, moon, and stars. That's one huge difference from the way the old earth people would interpret things. Have flowering plants created before the sun. Flowering plants created before marine life and before land animals. In the standard reconstruction using the record of the flood, You don't have flowering plants appearing until almost the dinosaurs are extinct. So it's just totally impossible to reconcile the order. You have birds created before land animals.

The ancient view denies the clear biblical revelation of a rapid supernatural creation by God and thereby robs God of the glory and majesty that rightly belongs to him. I've already referred to that. Genesis 1 speaks of God creating things dramatically, supernaturally, perfect, fully formed. That's the kind of God, that's the kind of awesome God we're talking about.

Third, the ancient earth view requires Noah's flood to be a local event that left no tangible evidence. So the old earth view basically has to give up the doctrine of the flood, of a universal flood. And the reason is that there's simply no evidence whatever for a global scale catastrophe in the past 10,000 years using the uniformitarian time scale. So they have to put the flood, given the genealogies in the Bible, they have to put the flood basically after the ice age. And in that part of earth history, there's no evidence of any global catastrophe. So here, the way they reconstruct the rock record, they have all these billions of years, 4.6 billion years. And then at about 500 million years ago, you start having multicellular life appear.

This column expands that part of this column and you have all the record here, which I'm claiming is a record of the flood. And then this tiny little piece right here is expanded here. And the time when Noah's flood would have occurred is in this tiny little bit of this expanded part of this little piece here. So there's no evidence of any flood there. So they have to abandon a global flood.

On the other hand, if we understand the physical history of the earth according to the Bible, we have all of these rocks being formed days one through three of creation. Then we have all of this being a record of the flood. Expanded here all this is the record of the flood and this little period right here is the is the post-flood time Which involves from Noah to Abraham about 500 years the ice age and then about 4,000 years since Abraham till the present Jesus coming about halfway in between So a radically different radically different understanding of the rock record Radically different understanding.

Again, the old earth view has hundreds of millions of years unfolding for all these layers to form. All right, fourthly, the ancient earth view has anatomically modern humans in existence for the past 150 to 200,000 years scattered over Europe, Africa, and Asia for much of that time. If again, they're taking the standard time scale at face value. When they do that, that time scale, you find modern humans existing for the last roughly 250,000 years all over this, in many places in the world.

So, this makes complete nonsense of the genealogies of Genesis 5, 10, and 11. Nonsense of the present day people being descendants of Noah's sons. Nonsense of all the present day people being descendants of the groups dispersed at Babel just a few thousand years ago. So, this long earth view does incredible havoc to all 11 chapters, first 11 chapters of Genesis. Instead of this view of God creating Adam and Eve, had sons and daughters, Noah and his sons, the flood, and then people at Babel being dispersed to give all the different language and ethnic groups we have today.

It does away with all that doctrine, all that understanding. You can no longer, as a Christian, if you allow that old earth view, believe this kind of picture of human history. Moreover, it does have up to the genealogies of Christ. Those genealogies name the individuals tracing Christ all the way back through Adam, apparently both through Mary and through Joseph's line. Back to David and then a single line back to Adam. And again, you have to give up that those genealogies are talking about real history if you entertain an ancient earth.

So if Jesus is not authentic, then we have no salvation from our sin and our faith is futile, our hope is worthless. So key implications of compromise interpretations These include, as I've said, the day-age theory, theistic evolution, progressive creationism like Hugh Ross advocates, framework hypothesis like many seminaries are advocating, implies large portions of the Bible, Genesis 1-11 plus other sections that refer to these passages as actual history are not factually true. The Lord Jesus, because he quoted from these portions of the Bible, cannot be who he claimed to be if you want to be logically consistent. So this old earth view is a serious attack on the word of God. These compromised views are direct assault on the essentials of historical Christian belief, namely, the inerrancy of scripture in the deity of Jesus.

Therefore, they represent grave deception. To the Jewish leaders who were rejecting him, even seeking to kill him, Jesus said, if you believe Moses, you would believe me. But if you do not believe his writings, how can you believe my words? And so he's basically saying rejection of Moses' words goes hand in hand with a rejection of Jesus himself. However, today there's absolutely no need for Christians to compromise with naturalism's false assumptions and interpretations. Solid scientific answers exist today for every naturalist challenge. So to be sure, a fierce battle is raging. And the other side is going after the six days and the time frame given in the Word of God.

A lot of Christians are oblivious to what's going on, sleep at the switch, shooting off in other directions, going after the symptoms of the problem, not the cause of the problem, even helping destroy our own foundation. It's amazing we're making any progress here. Fortunately, I believe God is doing something special in our day. However, just to sort of give you a little bit different picture, another way of looking at this process that's been going on for the last hundred years, we have the claim that the earth is millions of years old, and it's aimed not at the cross itself, but what's under the cross.

Blam, bam, there, okay? It's aimed at Genesis, the foundation of the Bible, of the word of God. And the church has, for the most part, has said, oh, it's just a side issue. This age of the earth, just a side issue. So there's more and more missiles coming in. Radioisotope dating methods, evolution, ape-in, no global flood, okay?

And the other side claims that it's a direct hit, exactly what they were going after, the foundation. And the church still says it didn't hit the cross. Many churches have decided, well, we must fit. Evidently, science has proved this. We just have to fit millions of years into the Bible.

So they come up with all these ideas. Progressive creation, theistic evolution, framework, hypothesis, gap theory, day-age theory. And what does it destroy? It destroys the same thing, the foundation, the book of Genesis. And so the Bible-believing churches, many of them, most of them, said, OK, we're in spiritual warfare, but at least it didn't hit the cross. But what happens? Unbelief in God's word. Newsflash, prayer outlawed in the schools. Newsflash, Ten Commandments outlawed in the schools. Creation outlawed in the schools.

But as I said, there have been some creation ministries raised up over the last 50 years seeking to repair this damage and sounding the warning that these things are a problem and actually making some efforts to do something about it. And also doing something about what I've been just doing. Showing that these ideas, these doctrines have the same effect. Going after those, showing how those are false. And then in some cases, training some churches to start doing the same thing. First sounding the warning, taking out these missiles.

So, the solution is to repair our foundation and to expose the error of the other castle here. Hopefully, we see a lot of the people bailing out before the whole thing comes crashing down. Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 10, for the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but divinely powerful. destruction or pulling down of strongholds, destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God." So Paul talks about an aspect of our warfare, destroying speculations and lofty things raised up against the knowledge of God.

I believe we have a mandate to be doing something. And so that's the calling that God has put on my life and And if some of you are interested in more information, I recommend our website of the Institute for Creation Research, www.icr.org. And much of what I've presented are posted as research papers on our webpage. Plus we do seminars like we did yesterday. So thank you for your attention.

Why don't we close in a word of prayer? I should have opened one in a word of prayer. But let's at least close in a word of prayer. And I want to pray God will continue to raise up more people. Just like in the harvest with the gospel, Jesus said the harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few. It seems like in almost any enterprise that God is involved in, the laborers are few. So one thing, we at ICR are looking for a younger generation to replace all of us old people if this work is to be carried on.

So let's close in a word of prayer. Heavenly Father, thank you that your word is true and reliable from the very first verse. Thank you for what you're doing, that all of this is in your sovereign plan, Thank you for the faithful people that you have called and raised up throughout church history and even in this hour. Thank you for the people of this church. Thank you for the special purposes you have for each one. I pray you would give each of us, help us be wise and help us to have our lives count in our day, in our generation.

Help us fulfill all the good works that you have prepared beforehand, as you say in Ephesians 2.10, for each one of us here. Father, I pray you would raise up young people that have your calling on their lives, your enablement, your gifting to help join in this battle and to rebuild the foundations, to encourage your people that your word is true, to enable your people to wield it with authority like it used to be wielded. And we pray that you would encourage us all Thank you for your love, your grace, your provisions for us.

We look to you. We thank you for this exciting day in which we live, exciting day to be witnesses for the true and living God. We thank you for Jesus, our Savior, our Redeemer, the one who is coming again soon, and the one with whom we will be forever. We look forward to that. So thank you. Thank you for your great purposes for us, your love for us. In Jesus' name, amen.