My personal greetings to you, friend. We’re grateful and glad that you have chosen to spend this time with us In Search of the Lord's Way to become and to be a Christian. We pray we’ll both be blessed by our study.
Welcome to our Bible study In Search of the Lord's Way. We’re sponsored here by some friends of yours and ours who are members of some churches of Christ in this area. We’re inviting you to attend their Bible studies and worship assemblies. And if you need our assistance in locating one of those churches near you, we’ll be so happy to help you.
Recently the disciples of Charles Darwin celebrated his 200th birthday. What was so disappointing to me was that some churches joined in the celebration. Darwin believed that all of life evolved from the first living cell. But the Bible says “God created;” “God made the world and everything in it.” So, can Christians believe both God and Darwin? Well, Phil Sanders will discuss this question today in the program titled, “Created In God’s Image.”
If you think you might want or need a free printed copy, a CD or an audio cassette tape of it, simply address your request to In Search of the Lord's Way, P.O. Box 371, Edmond, OK 73083. Or, our e-mail address is searchtv@searchtv.org. And if you prefer you may use the telephone, just call us and use our toll-free number for this purpose. It’s 1-800-321-8633. You may want to view it or hear it again on our website at www.searchtv.org. Ken Helterbrand is our music director. He is going to lead us now as we sing; then we will be back.
Our reading today comes from the first chapter of the first book from the word of God-- Genesis chapter 1, verse 26 down through verse 31. “Then God said, Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. Then God blessed them, and God said to them, Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth. And God said, See, I have given you every herb that yields seed which is on the face of the earth, and every tree whose fruit yields seed; to you it shall be for food. Also, to every beast of the earth, to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, in which there is life, I have given every green herb for food; and it was so. Then God saw everything that He had made, and indeed it was very good. So the evening and the morning were the sixth day.” That is from Genesis 1, verses 26 to 31. Let’s pray together. O, Lord, we are thankful that You have provided food for us; that You have blessed us; and that we have been made in Your image. O, Father, help us to be more and more like You, to love the things You love, and to please You in every respect. In Jesus’ name, Amen!
In 1859 Charles Darwin put forth the theory of evolution in a book called “The Origin of Species.” Since that time many scientists have come to believe that man was the product of a primordial soup that spawned human and all life. Now according to the theory, natural selection and small, random changes over billions of years led to the development of man from a one-celled organism. Some scientists and blogs suggest that everyone believes this theory, and anyone who denies this theory is uneducated and blinded by religion. Even some religious leaders have endorsed the theory of evolution. Recently the newspapers carried a story about thousands of ministers and clergymen who have signed “An Open Letter Concerning Religion and Science.” And in that letter, these ministers and rabbis say: “We believe that the theory of evolution is a foundational scientific truth, one that has stood up to the rigorous scrutiny and upon which much of human knowledge and achievement rests. To reject this truth,” they say, “or to treat it as ‘one theory among others’ is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children.”
Well, is it really ignorance to believe what the Bible teaches that God created man in His own image on the sixth day of creation? The ministers said that the Bible is full of timeless truths. Are we to understand that when God tells us He specially created man in His own image that He deceived us? You see, if evolution is true, then God didn’t really create the world in six days, and you and I are not really made in His image. We are simply products of chance with no hope of life beyond the present. We merely live for the time and then vanish completely. Well, how do I work my way through these two different ideas: Am I made in God’s image or did I evolve from a primordial soup?
Well, some folks, in order to harmonize science and Scriptures, suggest that Genesis 1 was speaking not of days but of long periods of time. And they say no one knows how long a “day” in Genesis was. But the Scriptures themselves help us to understand the word-- that is the word “day.” For instance Genesis 1, verse 5 says that, “God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.” Well, the language of Genesis 1 appears to have been crafted so that no reader would mistake the word “day” for anything other than an ordinary 24-hour day if it is talking about day and night or a 12-hour day if it is talking about the light. The light portion is named “day;” the dark portion is named “night.” Well, that’s just how we think and talk. And you see when God in this same book of Genesis speaks to Noah about day and night, He says in Genesis 8, verse 22 that, “While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.” And you know what in all these thousands of years that’s been the way it has been. They didn’t cease. Day and night, summer and winter, cold and heat! All these occur today in the same way it was back in the days when the Biblical stories took place.
When God wrote the Ten Commandments, and you remember He wrote them originally with His own finger; you remember in that He explained to Israel why they were to observe the Sabbath day. God said in Exodus 20, verse 11, “For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day (that is that day of ceasing, that seventh day) and made it holy.” Now, the Hebrew word for day is the word “yom.” It is used some 3,000 times in the Hebrew Bible, and is almost always used to mean an ordinary 24-hour day-night cycle. On the few occasions where that word is used to mean an indeterminate period of time, it is always clear from the context that it means something other than a normal 24-hour day. Israel understood that the seventh day was holy because God rested on that day after making the earth in six days. Now, there is no indication that Moses or Israel understood the word “day” any differently than we do now. To suggest that these six days and the Sabbath come from long periods of time destroys the whole concept of what the Sabbath is all about. My friend, the Bible never gives any hint at all that the development of life took place over billions of years.
God, and this is the good news, had a purpose for making you and me. He made us in His image. Man is unlike any other creature; He is made in God’s image and God gave him dominion over all the earth. Furthermore, He made us with a spirit, an inner man, like His own. Now we are created; we are creatures that have a consciousness of who we are, of how we live, of our accountability, and of a future life. The Bible says in Ecclesiastes 3 and verse 11 that God has put “eternity into man’s heart.” Man is the only creature of God that feels guilt and considers what will happen to him after he dies. The fact is no scientist can explain how this “self-consciousness” came to be. My friends at Apologetics Press in Montgomery, Alabama, Dave Miller and others, good friends of mine, offer a book entitled “The Truth about Human Origins,” in which they cite scientist after scientist saying that evolution cannot account for the fact that man is aware of himself or has “self-consciousness.” Neither can they account for simple things like our sense of guilt or our need to worship. Why does man feel guilty? Why do people in every culture and age have this need to worship? Why has man in every culture felt the need to prepare for life after this life is over?
Well, nothing in the small, random changes that evolution talks about could account for the complexity of the human spirit and this self-consciousness. That’s because the theory of evolution is just a theory; and even if millions of people believe it, it is only a theory. Now, a theory is an explanation to a set of observations. The statement of the theory is generally accepted only in some tentative fashion as opposed to regarding it as having been conclusively established. Now, this may indicate, as it does in the sciences, that the theory was arrived at using potentially faulty inferences rather than the necessary inferences used in mathematical proofs. Now, while some have suggested that the theory of evolution is a settled matter of science, there is an increasing number of scientists who now question the theory. Because of the complexities of the universe and the human body, many scientists now believe that this finely tuned Universe and our bodies are the product of intelligent design, not random chance. According to the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, more than 750 scientists have signed a letter disputing Darwin’s theory. They said, “We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination,” they say, “of the evidence for the Darwinian theory should be encouraged.” Well, these scientists are not ignorant people; they are not somebody who has not been trained in critical thinking; but they are respected, world class scientists that have earned doctoral degrees.
I’m no scientist, but I know enough to know that the complexities of each cell of my body could not just happen. In each of the trillions of cells in your body and mine is a DNA molecule that contains enough information to fill 75,490 pages of the New York Times. They also contain three billion codes of the human genome. George Sim Johnson in an article that appeared in the Wall Street Journal called, “Did Darwin Have It Right?” observed this; he said: “Human DNA contains more organized information than the Encyclopedia Britannica. I tell you that if the full text of the encyclopedia were to arrive in computer code,” he says, “from outer space, most people would regard this as proof of the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence. But when I see it in nature, it is explained as the workings of random forces.” Johnson was so amazed at that. I ask could it be that some have so accepted what Darwin suggests in his unproven theory that they are blind to the truth of the Bible? My friend, an average intelligence could not have put together a DNA molecule; only God could have designed it. The psalmist David said in Psalm 139, verses 13 to 15, “For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth.” You, my friend, are complex and intricately woven by God!
Charles Darwin did not know anything about DNA in your cells or mine; he didn’t know about the codes that distinguish you from every other person who has ever lived. He looked at the similarity between bone structures and other simple things and theorized that one kind of animal came from another. Now, I realize that the many breeds of dogs are still just that-- they are dogs. I realize that new breeds or species of dogs have come about over the centuries. There are today about 200 breeds of dogs; and they all trace their ancestry back to a few original dogs; and whether it is the little bitty Chihuahua or the great big St. Bernard, they are all still just dogs. These dogs were produced by selective breeding of their owners. Now, you could mix the breeds up for generations and generations, but the fact is they would still just be dogs. But there is no evidence from the fossils or from thousands of years of human experience that dogs ever evolved into anything but dogs. They haven’t developed any new organs or grown wings or fins. In fact, the fossil evidence has never given us that missing link of any kind. There simply is no evidence that one kind of animal ever produced something outside of its kind. Let’s look at Genesis 1, verses 24 and 25: The Bible says “And God said, ‘Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds-- livestock and creeping things and beasts of the earth according to their kinds.’ And it was so. And God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds and the livestock according to their kinds, and everything that creeps on the ground according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.” My friend, you can’t breed a horse with another horse and get a cow; you cannot breed cats and get dogs. You see, just as God says, animals produce after their own kind and only after their own kind.
My friend, take a look at your watch. If you took the back off of your watch, you would see the parts and the gears and they are arranged intelligently and precisely for one purpose: to help you mark time. If you could look through a microscope on the other hand and see the inner working of just one living cell of your body, you’d realize that the cell is far more functional and complicated than the watch. Molecular biologists who study the human cell recognize that the living cell can do things that no man-made machine could ever do. One of the things it can do is reproduce itself in just a few hours. Do you think your watch could do that? You know if it is reasonable to think that the watch was designed and manufactured by an intelligent designer, why is it so absurd to think that we humans are designed and made by God? No intelligent person would say that modern technology happened all by itself. You are watching me over a highly designed television or maybe you are listening to me by a designed radio. How odd that sensible people will insist that the wonders of the natural world originate without a designer!
The Bible says in Hebrews 3 and verse 4, “For every house is built by someone, but the builder of all things is God.” God built you: body, soul, and spirit. First Thessalonians 5, verse 23 gives this blessing, “Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.” The human brain is the most complicated structure in the entire universe, but even the brain cannot account for all that is within you as a person with a soul and a spirit. Wilder Penfield, who is the renowned father of neurosurgery showed how the mind was actually distinct from the brain. He saw patients who would actually struggle with themselves. He would put an electrical current, he would place it at a certain point in the patient’s brain and that would cause the hand to move, but Penfield saw that the other hand was trying to control the stimulated hand. And he recognized that some things were physical, but there was a nonphysical reality that interacted with the brain. The fact that we can control our impulses, that we can reason with ourselves, that we can exercise self-control over our desires, show that there is something more than the physical. That nonphysical presence is the spirit that God gave you. The Bible says in Hebrews 12 and verse 9 that God is the father of our spirits. That spirit thinks, and feels, and wills; that spirit inside us makes us human and distinguishes us from the animals. That spirit inside you will live on, even when your body dies. God put eternity into your heart to remind you that one day you must give an account of yourself to him. My friend, if God made you, are you living like a person who must one day face him? God made you with a spirit to love him and to be loved by him. Do you love God? Do you love him enough to come to him in obedience, in obedience to his word, the Bible? Come to the Lord, my friend, today in faith, putting away your sins, and being baptized into Christ for the remission of your sins? Let’s pray together. O, Lord, we are thankful that You made us in Your own image. Help us to come to love You and be obedient to Your will. In Jesus’ name, Amen!
Thank you, thank you Phil for that informative and encouraging information about our origin. How can a person who says he believes and preaches the Bible as the word of the living God compromise its story of the origin of life with that which so clearly annuls it? Phil, we’ll hear more from you about that in time to come.
If you, friend, would like a free CD or audio cassette tape or printed copy of Phil Sanders’ message titled, “Created In God’s Image,” simply mail your request to In Search of the Lord's Way, P.O. Box 371, Edmond, OK 73083 or to searchtv@searchtv.org. If you like you may use our toll-free telephone number and call in your request. That number is 1-800-321-8633.
It’s been a genuine pleasure and joy, my friend, to have you with us today. We pray that you have been as blessed as we have by the message and our preparation for it, and your receiving of it. And if you like, you may review it again on our web site at searchtv.org. Do that and then let us hear from you, a response from you. We would like to know that you have visited our web site and pray that you will let us hear from you. We pray that God will bless you and keep you all next week until we meet again. We love you.
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