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It's a great time to be a Christian, do you agree?
You should. It really is a great time to be a Christian and we're going to talk about that today
on Creation Magazine LIVE!
Welcome to Creation Magazine LIVE! I'm Richard Fangrad and I'm Calvin Smith.
Today we're going to talk about how great it is to be a Christian today?
What's the matter with you! That's the reaction that you get
right? Now exactly.
You say it's great time to be a Christian and people say what are you talking
about? I mean
look at the Western world nations. In just a couple generations
they've back-slidden we're less Christian, there's anti-Christian laws
being put into place now in our country and other Western world countries.
Look at church attendance it's dropping,
What are we going to do with the youth? I mean, most people if you say it's a great
time to be a Christian they'd look at you like you've got 3 eyes or something like that.
Well we'll maintain that position that its a a great time to be a Christian.
If you take a global view things are a little bit different. Yes in Western
nations as you mentioned, and
most Christians are aware of these things church attendance is
dropping, those kinds of things.
But that's not true globally. Globally Christianity is growing.
Its actually on the increase. Hard to believe in Canada, the US,
Western nations and so on. A decade ago or so
some African nations were reporting 28,000 people a day
making professions of faith, things like that, just incredible.
Professor Fenggang Yang, he is professor of sociology at Purdue
University and author of 'Religion in China;
Survival and revival under communist rule', he said this;
"By my calculations China is destined to become the largest Christian country in
the world
very soon." He said elsewhere "It's going to be less than a generation."
Wow, that's incredible. China's a huge country. It is definitely a huge country...
A lot of Christians there.
So if we take a global view
Christianity is on the increase, its a good time to be a Christian. What if
China, you know what if the government changes and allows Christianity
to be mainstream. Well that's something to consider isn't it?
It certainly is in a couple different ways actually. Yeah, think
of just the economic impact of that, I mean you can't have a robust economy
if you don't have the Christian morality in place. Do not lie, do not steal, do not
cheat, don't embezzle funds from your company,
don't seek your own good, you know, you're part of an organization and so on.
That all comes from a biblical
morality. Take that away and you have bribery, you have all kinds of things
happening there. Some of these nations
that didn't have a Christian morality years ago
they're now, you know you see Christianity coming on with the parents,
the children of those parents raised in
in Christian homes presumably where the Bible is taught, when they take positions
of leadership and start forming companies and so on.
In a generation or two who knows how that will change, something interesting
to consider.
Of course history shows that where persecution
increases the church often get stronger as well.
I mean it's interesting because you look at it and say the church
is declining here in the Western world but
typically there been a lot of people that call themselves Christians.
if you put on a poll or something like that he said okay are you Muslim, Christian,
many would put down Christian, well I'm a Christian your a Christian everybody's a Christian.
But there's a difference between the visible church
and the true Church. The people that have actually dedicated their lives to
Christ, that are
submitted his authority, that have admitted their sinners and need
salvation and have
repented of that and and they're following him. And so
yes, we would say overall, certainly in the Western world countries, certainly
are less Christian in a sense. But also we're starting to see the increase of
robust churches where the Word of God is proclaimed
faithfully, boldly, and there's a stand being taken,
it's not just like oh well we're gonna water it all down and everybody just loves everybody
and we'll just sing Kumbayah and call
ourselves Christians. So there's a there's a a difference there too.
Yeah, I mean it's not like we're looking for persecution, persecution can be
helpful in some ways but we're not looking for that.
Ya, persecute me!
If you look at Acts 5:41, talking about the Apostles after they were preaching the Gospel,
"Then they left the presence of the council rejoicing that they were counted
worthy to suffer dishonor for
the name." for Jesus. Why were they rejoicing
under persecution? Here's why, Matthew 5: 11-12. "Blessed are you
when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of
evil against you falsely on my account.
Rejoice and be glad for your award is great in heaven."
Really, the point is, we are at the end of two thousand years
of church history now,
and many things which weren't clear in the past
have been thoroughly investigated by by Godly
men and women, they've looked through this stuff and in a weekend of reading
...you become a Christian, you can start looking at things and you can
learn things that took multiple lifetimes and a great deal of study to learn...
...it is a great time to be a Christian. You can just get up to speed
real quick in that sense. But we'll discuss this in more detail when we get back
Imagine hearing that someone has just won the lottery three
times in the same year
or a golfer has hit five consecutive holes-in-one.
We approach such improbable stories with healthy skepticism.
Considering the formation of the first living cell by a perfect arrangement of
carbohydrates, fats, proteins and genetic material in a warm pond,
Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick said; "It seems almost impossible to give
any numerical value to the probability of what seems a rather unlikely
sequence of events.
An honest man could only state that in some sense the origin of life appears at
the moment to be
almost a miracle". The evolutionist Robert Shapiro at this point would prefer to
abandon all skepticism.
Why need the event have been probable? We can just stare at the odds,
shrug and note with thanks how lucky we were. When we abandon healthy skepticism,
only gullibility reminds to invoke miracles
without God. To find out more from Creation Ministries International
visit our website
Creation.com
Welcome back, today we're talking about: It's a great time to be a Christian! We were just mentioning how
a believer today, comes to faith in Christ
and of course that's a actually
in a sense a very simple thing. And of course then the Scripture is very complex
as well. When you start
reading the Bible, I remember the first time I ever read the Bible I was like Wow! You know its
so comprehensive and it touches upon so many things and then you start to
learn about all these things and we were saying in one weekend
now, we've got two thousand years of church history and all these things,
these challenges that came against the church
Godly men women, looked at these things, have investigated them, have
written books and things like that, and so for example, our
ministry deals with science
and there have been challenges from... people have tried to use from the field
of science to challenge the scripture but
we have so much data today to support our faith it's a great time to
be a Christian.
And that's part of it... I get really excited when there's some new
science, some new discovery that adds more support to faith. That's what
we do as a ministry.
We're not saying well look at this interesting science, look at these
observations
and then let's use that to understand--to twist and turn God's Word so that it
matches the
the observations. We use those things to to support our faith, our faith is
reasonable, its a supported faith.
Right, we're a presupposition ministry which means we presuppose that
God's Word is true
but then we see how the the facts that we find,
how that can be interpreted according to God's Word so easily, it just dovetails
right in...
...its exciting. Its support for our faith that people living before us didn't
have, that's why we're saying
it's a great time to be a Christian today. We'll give you some examples.
Back in... not that long ago... 1986 to 1994 progressively over those years,
Catastrophic Plate Tectonics. That was one of the
leading researchers, leading physicists
in plate tectonics and modeling plate tectonics on a large scale, on a continent-wide scale
started doing some serious research
and putting out papers showing how this
may have been going on during Noah's Flood. That model has tremendous
explanatory power. Mountain chains and the ocean ridge, and the
magnetic banding of the rocks along the mid-Atlantic ridge
for example and elsewhere. And it has a lot of explanatory power
of what may have been going on geologically in the flood
And before that time with continental drift...
how do we as Christians explain the fit of the continents and so on, there wasn't a good
model to understand that, now there is.
We're post Catastrophic Plate Tectonics, that's a great model and
adds support to our faith. And Bible-believing Christians believed in
the flood anyway
before that so wasn't like we needed Baumgardner to come along and...Oh, now we can
believe the Bible!
But it's just that "Oh Ya!", this makes so much sense and its exciting...
Another example, one of the biggest weapons that
skeptics would use is look.... you guys are talking about a young earth,
but we've got light from from star's that are billions of light-years away,
if it took billions of years for the light to travel here the universe must be very old.
Young earth creationism just doesn't make sense and then of course
Dr Russell Humphries in 1994
came out with 'Starlight and Time' and that was like a blow away
right? Okay so he tipped everything on its head. He said
okay, forget about
light traveling faster, what about time? And he got into this time dilation... Relativity...
...it was the first time relativity had been applied to
creationist models of the large scale structures of the universe... its really exciting.
That's gone on now to spawn probably about five or six, maybe seven different
creationist models. Some people say well this is a
better model than that but it really opened up that field and let people know yes we
have a robust explanation for
that challenge, supposed challenge to scripture. In 2005,
moving forward a little more recently, Dr John Sanford,
a very well-known geneticist, inventor of the gene gun
started life as an atheist. He said evolution was his religion.
He processed all data through that kind of framework, that history, millions
of years
and he wrote the book 'Genetic entropy and the mystery of the human genome'.
In another field that hadn't been written on too much by creationists
before that time. But he just...
...some amazing, powerful, powerful evidence from genetics
that humans could not have been evolving for millions of years...because of genetic decay...
...of genetic collapse. How we could have been around for that long
because we would already have been extinct.
Yet another reason that today is a great time to be a Christian, we've got all this
support.
All this evidence of soft tissue in dinosaur bones, back in 1990
they actually found blood cells in... ...the first major discovery.
Then soft tissue in 2005 and now there's over 30
instances of soft tissue being found in dinosaurs.
I mean how much more powerful evidence could you have that the earth is young
and that these creatures didn't die out millions of years ago, they died out
very recently in a great Flood.
And again as you say it's just powerful evidence that supports
the Bible. And we will get into more of that when we get back...
Many Christians today have a diminished view of the Bible because they can't
answer questions like "Is there really a God? What about evolution? Are their
facts to back up the Bible or is it all just faith?"
Creation Ministries expert speakers visit churches all over the world
to help pastors equip their congregations to understand that the whole Bible,
even Genesis, is accurate. We help to demolish the arguments that the world uses
to try to convince people that the Bible isn't true.
For more information on getting a CMI speaker to visit your church
contact your nearest CMI office through our website.
So we're talking about how it's a great time to be a Christian. We've just
went through some great evidences that again support our faith in Scripture and
so on. But of course there are many attacks against
Christianity, philosophical attacks or different areas. The New Atheists
enjoy attacking Christianity and they've got these arguments and stuff.
Yes they do!
But the fact is most of these arguments are just repackaged arguments from
a long time ago... they've already been refuted... already been refuted
and for example we already have answers to those things. So it's not like
we as Christians need to just sit here and get pounded by this stuff and "Wow! They
read the Bible and look they noticed this verse!"
It's like yeah, we kind of noticed that verse before. But of course many people haven't
been exposed to apologetics.
And that's what our ministry is all about. For example
"Christianity for Skeptics", a fantastic book... great book... to deal with
so many of these arguments that the new skeptics are coming out with. How do you even know
there's a God, and is it more logical to be
an atheist than a Christian? Well that's what they claim right?Tthey
claim atheism is rational, logical, and they're following the facts to their conclusion and
that stuff.
Actually, no. Logically we defeat them there too. But anyway,
I encourage you to check out that book "Christianity for Skeptics", you can get it at creation.com
and its just a fantastic book. Of course
the secular philosopher George Santayana said
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it".
King Solomon wrote something similar actually in Ecclesiastes. He said,
"What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done,
and there is nothing new under the sun. Is there a thing
of which it is said, 'See, this is new'?" So
putting those two thoughts together
by studying the errors of the past throughout 2000 years of church
history, and we're here 2000 years after Christ and so on.
And and seeing how those errors
were refuted with biblical truth,
in a sense, we can recognize some of the modern counterparts, the false
ideas, the heresies if you want
to use that strong word, that we see in the church today. We don't have to
re-fight those battles, they've already been fought
and decided...
...the error has been refuted definitively
with Scripture in the past. They get repackaged... they have different
names and that kind of thing... and typically today you'll see a lot of these
old arguments kind of repackaged but just with
a modern hip sounding jargon, and a lot of sarcasm thrown in, and some
some humor and then sometimes people get fooled. But if you just go back to the basic,
what's the heart of the error that they're talking about here...
...church councils we dealt with this a long time ago. And different church
councils got together... the first church council we read about in the New
Testament there, that's the Judaizers
its legalism, legalism crept in, we read about this heresy
creeping into the the early church 2000 years ago.
And the Jerusalem Council there where Paul has to rebuke Peter to
some extent.
People were saying well you have to add works to grace,
its grace and works, it works and faith, and so on.
And Paul says no, we don't require people to be circumcised or
conform to the Law...
...you don't have to eat specific types of food,
or things like that. We know there's certain people that are going to do
that and we want to
be graceful with them and stuff, but as a Christian you can just read the
Scripture and understand you don't have to
do things to be saved. And today when we see that error creeping into our own lives,
our own thinking,
our own churches and so on we don't have to rehash all those arguments. We can
just... we can learn from
the errors in the past and see how they were refuted
and just move on. In the second century of course he had the Gnostics,
and they were denying the reality of the incarnation...
...the idea that dualism...
Gnosticism is a little hard to explain, it has a lot of similarities to
the modern New Age movement.
But the Gnostics, one of the ideas they had was a dualistic idea,
that spirit is good and matter is bad. So they said
well Jesus couldn't really be fully man, He could be couldn't really be
fully human, because He was made of
matter... Because He's made of matter that's bad. So there's this dualism.
And that was refuted, you know you can see hints of that creeping in as
the later books, the
later Epistles are written there in the New Testament. And we can learn
from that. The *** controversy.
The *** controversy, I've studied that to some extent. I think somebody should make a
movie of that.
It would make a great drama.
There, Christ wasn't God.
Christ wasn't really God. He's a very moral person and so on, and
we hear that today alot.
Of course, there's many religions... modern religions like the Jehovah's Witnesses
would say things like that. But but those things... I mean the
the Nicene Creed, Jesus is light of light, God of God...
those battles have already been fought and it's a great time to be a Christian
today, we don't need to re-fight those battles. And it's not like
someone just made something up, well, this is what we believe now and we should I
all believe it. I mean if you go back and study these things and look
at this scripture, look at this scripture, yes but what about this scripture?
Well look at this scripture, they went through it, they didn't just come to some
decision like, okay we're all gonna believe this now right? They
came to it from a biblical
perspective and of course you don't just have to put your trust in
some council. You put your trust into... look what the scripture says,
that came to that decision. Exactly. and we'll pick it up in just a minute...
Who would have ever thought that scratches in rocks
could disprove the Biblical Flood? Well, scratches in rock called
striations, are sometimes caused by a glacier moving over bedrock.
Therefore when geologists encounter striated rock
they often claim that a glacier caused it. Striated rock occurs within the
sedimentary rocks that were laid down by Noah's Flood.
Evolutionary geologists claim this is evidence of multiple ancient ice ages,
so they claim that Noah's year-long flood could not have laid down these rocks.
However we now know that underwater landslides
cause rocks striations similar to those caused today by glaciers.
Furthermore there are important differences between glacial deposits
formed today
and those of the alleged ancient ice ages. So don't let scratches in rocks
scratch away your confidence
in God's Word. To find out more from Creation Ministries International
visit our website Creation.com.
Okay this week we're talking about how it's great to be Christian, its a great time
to be a Christian. So many
resources for example that we have at our fingertips today
that many, many Christians, lived their entire lives
perhaps had a copy of the scriptures but not much else.
But look at what we have today. And from the Scriptures had big
questions about things
that they never got answers to, we have resources for those things today.
We sure do, and of course we deal with creation/evolution, these types of
science issues and things like that. Just think of the amount of books.
You go to creation.com,
you go to our our webstore and you look at the amount of books, the authors
and the brilliant scientists
that have just gone through incredibly detailed
information in all aspects of the creation/evolution debate.
Look at some of the DVD's that are available, we've got to downloadable
videos that people can get. Creation magazine!
I mean it's been around now for getting close to forty years
above a magazine that you can subscribe to, it comes into your home,
its information scrutinized by our scientific staff
gone through by our people looking at the theology and
how it relates, a family magazine.
The TV show, I mean we wouldn't be able to do the TV show without that information
right? Creation Magazine LIVE! Yes that's where we get our information from for this program.
You can have a speaker in your church. If you're like "How do we
learn about this stuff?" Well CMI has seven offices worldwide. You want a
speaker? Contact one of the offices and say we'd love to have a speaker in your church.
And when we arrive we're going to bring resources with us.
So you don't have to go... And the resources we
carry, we carry resources from
scientists from all over the world. And researchers, and just
good resources, books, DVD's and so on from all over the world,
it's not just our own guys.
Those have been previewed, they've been carefully screened,
any flaky theology or flaky science we try to keep those out of
our listings and yet we have
over 500 titles of books and DVD's? Its a
huge amount resources that people forty years ago never had.
If Christians living 40, 50, 60 years and before
had questions about, you know, where did Cain get his wife or
how did Noah get all the animals on the Ark, or how can you build a large wooden
structure like that would survive the waves in the flood?
All of these questions that our ministry deals with, and then outside of creation,
all of the other questions that people have.
What about the existence for God? How do we know that the Bible hasn't
changed down through the years, has been copied over and over again?
There are answers for all these questions today,
that years ago weren't there. That's why it's a great time
to be a Christian today. Study tools like your idea,
you know we had all our articles on our website... and then you thought
why don't we have a Genesis Verse-by-Verse site? And of course that's built right
into creation.com so
for example a pastor, or anyone really, wanting to do a Genesis Bible study...
you can go through and you can read, you know... In the beginning... you can
read the the verses... Content is arranged by
Bible verse from Genesis 1-11...you read these
scriptures and then over... oh yes that question could arise from
this or that.
It's just a great way to package it and anybody has access to that data. Its a free
online tool...I mean the Internet. The Internet is
just by itself. The internet in the early days was called the
Information Highway. Anybody remember that term?
That's a bit of an old term. But we have the greatest information that's ever been!
How sinners can be saved. That's fantastic information. And then
of course our focus as a ministry is on the early chapters in the Bible
and so on,
and we want to share great information on the Information Highway.
Of course all that is free, the internet is free. You don't need to get a subscription to our
website or whatever.
I encourage people to go to the Verse-by-Verse, go to creation.com/vbv
and you can check out the Genesis Verse-by-Verse, it's a fantastic tool...
We should talk about the Answers Book. The Answers Book is our
most popular book because in one book it covers a huge range of topics. More than 60
of the most asked questions in a single resource.
And you can get that at 30% off,
just use this code CMLCAB, Creation Answers Book, when you check out of the
web store.
You can get that book, our most popular book for 30% off.
The reason that the Creation Answers book is so popular
is because it covers a huge range of topics and answers more than 60 of the
most asked questions about Genesis and the creation/evolution issue.
Questions like; "What is the evidence for God's existence?"
"Could the days in Genesis 1 be long periods of time?"
"How did all the animals fit on Noah's Ark?
Does radioisotope dating prove that the earth is very old?"
"Where do dinosaurs fit into the Bible?" And many more...
To order your copy visit creation.com.
Welcome back to Creation Magazine LIVE!, we've been talking about how great it is to be a Christian
today with all the resources we have
and the truth that's been refined over the years, many people working on
defining truth from Scripture,
starting from Scripture and discovering
what it really says. Now evolutionists haven't been silent either.
They try to clarify their argument as well.
Of course, as creationists have exposed some of the major flaws in their thinking.
I thought this article was interesting. It's talking about things
that are in the news, happening in the news, it sort of relates to our topic on the show today.
This is by Robert Carter, one of our geneticists down at our US office;
'Slaying yesterday's dragons'. And he starts this way.
"Darwinism as a science has been evolving that is
it has changed from its original concept and continues to change.
it would do us well to pay attention to the latest trend so as not
to be caught
arguing against yesterday's theory. When Charles Darwin initially postulated that
all species could be traced back to a single common ancestor
he suggested that the mechanism causing these changes was natural selection.
That was in 1859.
Later he backed off from his initial hypothesis and suggested
that other forms a selection, for example *** selection,
were not only involved but they were more important.
Worse, not knowing anything about genetics he came up with
and strongly promoted Lamarckianism, the idea that
the environment causes changes in organisms which were then inherited by
their offspring.
This was contradicted by his contemporary Gregor Mendel
who published the laws in genetics in 1864,
but that was the state of evolutionary theory at the close of the
nineteenth century".
After that came Neo-Darwinism,
which said, we need some way to
create new genetic information. If we're going to go from pond *** to people
there would have to have been an upward
increase in genetic information. This creature doesn't have eyes...
where do the information for eyes come from?
Bird's feathers all that kind of stuff, and of course with what we're
learning from genetics today the idea of mutations,
spelling errors in DNA
creating new information, that's... absolutely devastating to evolution...yes that's going
out the window. So you are getting all these new kinds of
ideas. They stick to the concept of evolution...
...the basics, the historical time-line, millions of years and so on
that is a given...But we need new mechanisms we need
new ways to explain it and stuff like that. So one of the comments Rob said is "Things
are shifting under our feet. We need to be careful not be caught slaying yesterday's dragon,
yet the new trends within science do not necessarily require a different type of
counter-argument.
Interestingly I find myself arguing population genetics as a cogent weapon
when confronted by these newer
ideas. I find myself talking about what we know about physics and chemistry and
how that contradicts all the ideas
about the physical origin of life from non-life". Your almost getting these
quasi-philosophical
type arguments from evolutionists now about how matter has some kind of inherent
power in it to self-organize and this kind of stuff.
You know when I was in school, I'm 47 now so that was a while ago, but when I was
in school it all seemed to be about the facts. Look at the facts and science has proven this
and you know it was all about these kinds of things
and now you can getting this
pagan kind of Gaia kind of hypothesis, where
matter just kind of knows what it should need to do... really?
Its kind of interesting, it's always been claimed to be science.
We're following science and it's all about the facts,
we have scientists and we're doing science. And now it's,
as Rob is pointing out in this article here, its going in a little different direction.
As he sums up in short there i is to this point no
coherent science coming from this new paradigm
of neo-pagan metaphysics with nature as a self creating
entity demonstrating that the battle is really being waged at a deeper philosophical
level. Actually most the arguments that creationists have used are still powerful arguments
against what the evolutionists have been coming up with. Even with this new trend
towards this Gaia hypothesis...
See you next time...