The picture is from Genesis chapter 1, verse
1.
In the deep, God created the heaven and
the earth.
Now the earth was fullness of energy.
Darkness was over the surface of the deep,
and the Spirit of God was hovering over
the waters.
And God said, Let there be light.
And there was light.
God saw that the light was good, and
he separated the light from darkness.
God called the light day, and the darkness
he called night.
And there was evening, and there was morning,
the first day.
And God said, Let there be an expanse
between the waters to separate water from water.
So God made the expanse, and separated the
water under the expanse from the water above
it.
And it was so.
God called the expanse sky, and there was
evening, and there was morning, the second day.
And God said, Let the water under the
sky be gathered to one place, and let
dry ground appear.
And it was so.
God called the dry ground land, and gathered
waters he called seas.
And God saw that it was good.
Then God said, Let the land produce vegetation,
seed-bearing plants and trees, on the land
that bear fruit with seed in it, according
to their various kinds.
And it was so.
The land produced vegetation, plants bearing seed according
to their kinds, and trees bearing fruit with
seed in it, according to their kinds.
And God saw that it was good, and
there was evening, and there was morning, the
third day.
And God said, Let there be lights in
the expanse of the sky to separate the
day from night, and let them serve as
signs to mark seasons and days and years.
And let there be lights in the expanse
of sky to give light on the earth.
And it was so.
God made two great lights, the greater light
to govern the day, and the lesser light
to govern the night.
He also made the stars.
God set them in the expanse of the
sky to give light on the earth, to
govern the day and the night, and to
separate light from darkness.
And God saw that it was good, and
there was evening, and there was morning, the
fourth day.
And God said, Let the water teem with
living creatures, and let birds fly above the
earth across the expanse of the sky.
So God created the great creatures of the
sea, and every living and moving thing with
which the water teems, according to their kinds,
and every winged bird according to its kind.
And God saw that it was good.
God blessed them and said, Be fruitful and
increase in number, and fill the water in
the seas, and let the birds increase on
the earth.
And there was evening, and there was morning,
the fifth day.
And God said, Let the land produce living
creatures according to their kinds, livestock, creatures that
move along the ground, and wild animals, each
according to its kind.
And it was so.
God made the wild animals according to their
kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and
all the creatures that move along the ground
according to their kinds.
And God saw that it was good.
Then God said, Let us make man in
our image, in our likeness, and let them
rule over the fish of the sea and
the birds of the air, over the livestock,
over all the earth, and over all the
creatures that move along the ground.
So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God created him.
Male and female, he created them.
God blessed them and said to them, Be
fruitful and increase in number, fill the earth
and subdue it, rule over the fish of
the sea and the birds of the air,
and over every living creature that moves on
the ground.
Then God said, I give you every seed
-bearing plant on the face of the whole
earth, and every tree that has fruit with
seed in it.
They will be yours for food.
And to all the beasts of the earth
and all the birds of the air and
all the creatures that move on the ground,
everything that has breath of life in it,
I give every green plant for food.
And it was so.
God saw all that he had made and
it was very good.
And there was evening, and there was morning,
the sixth day.
Thank you, Anne, for that dignified reading of
that beautiful passage.
Thank you, Tony, too.
You can tell he used to be a
teacher, can't you?
Just imagine him standing up before the class.
Now, class, hands up if you haven't done
your homework.
There we are.
Now, I would urge you to stay if
you haven't been around.
It is a wonderful demonstration of creativity.
Now, you've got to put up with me
for a few minutes before the other Tim
comes.
I wanted us to think about a creation
theme this evening.
It just seems so appropriate when we've got
so many visual aids all around us.
You may remember back at the beginning of
the year, there was a 17-year-old
who was sent on a safari.
He was in a detention center for young
offenders somewhere near Gloucester and created a bit
of a fuss earlier on.
And this is a report of the safari
that he was given as part of his
punishment.
He said, Cairo was totally disgusting rubbish.
I hope I'm not letting the tab in
for any liability claims here from the Egyptian
Tourist Board.
But this is what he said, not me.
The pyramids were just bits of rock.
I would rather see God's creations than man's
creations.
The cruise down the Nile, that's very nice
and good.
I watched the sun rise over the mountaintops.
That was Mount Sinai.
The wildlife was very excellent.
Victoria Falls was excellent.
God's creation.
Man hadn't touched it.
Well, he obviously enjoyed himself and wanted to
go again very quickly because he was back
re-offending as soon as he was let
out.
But I rather took to that young lad.
I thought he had a point, really.
It is true that whatever God makes is
very wonderful and beautiful, isn't it?
Until man gets his hands on it.
But if you were David Attenborough at this
time, you'd say, hang on, hang on a
bit.
This isn't really God's creations.
This is just part of nature.
Okay, it's the miracle of nature.
But don't go rushing on too quickly about
God and him making things.
I actually think that the wildlife programs on
television are some of the most harmful that
we have, quite honestly, because they are deliberately
anti-God.
So where did it all come from?
Are we here as a result of personal
choice or just impersonal chance?
Do we come from fate or father?
You see, when we went to school, and
those of us who are still there, we
were probably taught in our biology lessons that
Genesis is rubbish and God is redundant.
So who do we believe?
Well, I'm not terribly phased by science.
It wasn't that long ago that I went
to school, but I know that a lot
of what they taught me when I went
to school is now right out of the
window because science is always changing.
Science is fallible.
Very, very few scientists today believe in evolution
the way Darwin taught it.
That's why they took his portrait off the
50-pound note at the back of last
year, because they thought his work wasn't really
worth it anymore.
It had been discredited.
You see, when I was at school, I
was taught that there were a lot of
things called vestigial organs, some of which I
still had and some of which I left
behind when I was an embryo.
And I was taught that these were just
a load of evolutionary hangovers when my ancestors
were just fish or reptiles, like gill slits,
for example, which apparently I used to have
in my mother's womb, and you did too.
But these vestigial organs, there used to be
180 of them, have got whittled down to
about two or three now because they keep
finding uses for these things that they thought
were completely useless.
And indeed, the evolutionary assumptions about our vestigial
organs severely held back the progress of medical
science because people said, oh, they're useless, and
they weren't trying to look for use for
them when they did have a lot of
use.
Indeed, those gill slits developed into the thymus
gland and the middle ear canals, both very
essential for our well-being today.
And another thing they taught me when I
went to school was that as an embryo,
I and you went through a number of
stages.
How many of you were taught this?
Perhaps you'd like to put your hands up.
I'll try not to be the schoolmaster, but
I was taught we went through an amoeba
stage and then a fish stage and then
a bird stage.
How many of you were taught this?
Any of you remember this?
Perhaps you can't remember back that far.
Well, that's absolute garbage now.
It used to be summed up by a
very highfalutin phrase.
I don't think I can recite it, so
I'll have to read it.
Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.
That was the language scientists used.
They said, oh, yes, of course, ontogeny replicates
phylogeny.
And if you say that, you can sound
very, very intelligent indeed.
And, I mean, who can argue with that?
You can't argue with ontogeny replicates phylogeny, can
you?
Nobody can.
But it's scientific gibberish, and actually it's being
completely discredited now.
So science is always changing, and if I
have to make a choice between science and
Scripture, I'll take Scripture any day because God
was actually there when it all happened, unlike
any scientists that you might happen to know.
Having said that, we also have to realize
that our interpretation of Scripture, our interpretation of
Scripture, is also fallible.
And we mustn't give ourselves too many unnecessary
problems by holding to things that the Bible
doesn't necessarily teach.
You know, Galileo got into serious trouble for
holding that the world is round, and people
said to him, ah, but the Bible talks
about the four corners of the earth.
There we are.
A circle doesn't have corners, does it?
Therefore, the word must be square.
But, I mean, we talk about the stars
coming out at night, but we don't sort
of think, well, where do they shoot off
to during the day, do we?
It's just the way we speak.
And the Bible has to be read on
God's terms, not on our terms.
And the trouble is that today some scientists
think, oh, well, I'm a scientist, so the
Bible must be written for me, for scientists.
But, of course, it's not.
It's written for everybody all over.
And if you look at Genesis 1, in
the very highest sense of this phrase, it
is sheer poetry.
It's not the way that I was taught
to write up a laboratory experiment in my
first year, where you had to have method
and then observations and then conclusion.
I was taught this, and it's obviously stuck
with me.
But Genesis 1 is not like that.
Indeed, it's all based around three numbers, the
three perfect numbers, 3, 7, and 10.
If you look at the first three days,
you'll find that there are three separations, light
from darkness, the water above and below the
sky or the expanse, and the sea and
the dry land.
And here, God is making space in which
to work.
And then in the next three days, there
are three acts of creation, the sun, moon,
and stars, the fish and the birds, and
then animals and man.
First, God makes the habitat, and then he
makes the inhabitants.
And you'll see that on days three and
six, he actually performs two creative acts.
It's very carefully worked out.
There are a number of sevens here.
There are seven days, obviously.
There are seven God saw that it was
goods, and there are seven and it was
so's.
And there are a number of tens here.
God said comes ten times.
God made comes ten times.
And according to their kind comes ten times.
And there are a number of threes here,
three let there be's, three blessings, three types
of vegetation, three types of animal.
This really is a literary masterpiece.
It is inspired literature, as I believe, God
directly to Moses.
And it has to be read on its
own terms.
And I believe that is literally rather than
literalistically.
And there's quite a difference there.
If you look at chapter two, verse five,
I think you will see that you cannot
take chapter one literalistically because it just won't
work out.
But it is a masterpiece.
If you read the ancient myths, the Gilgamesh
epics and so on, after having read Genesis
one, you really will go from the sublime
to the ridiculous.
Because on this page, God is telling us
so very, very much.
He's telling us so much about himself.
He's telling us that he is powerful.
Obviously, he can create things with just a
word.
No sinner said than done.
That he is personal.
That he is plural.
Let us make man in our own image.
That he is loving.
That he is feeling.
That he is good.
That he blesses his creation.
That he is orderly because he makes everything
according to their own kinds.
That he is eternal because he is there
from the beginning.
That he is supreme.
He is God over all.
He is not caught up with his creation.
He is independent and above his creation.
And, of course, that he is highly creative.
He's telling us all these things about himself.
But, you know, the most fantastic thing about
this God we read of in Genesis chapter
one is this.
That he made you to have a relationship
with him.
Just think about that.
The reason he made you was to have
a relationship with him.
You may have seen the cartoon about the
two monkeys in the zoo talking to one
another.
One was saying to the other in the
cage, Am I my keeper's brother?
Well, think about it.
But it's a very important question, isn't it?
Are you related to the apes?
Now, I thought I had to tackle this
subject sometime.
And it turned out to be convenient this
evening.
Because, for a start, I know some of
you have to think about these things in
biology lessons.
You do get up against it, really.
And you wonder whether there are any answers
to what you hear.
You only hear one side of the story.
And I remember when I was back in
my own class, although you're taught rather differently
than I was, the basic stuff is still
the same.
That's partly because they actually take a long
time before the truth actually, even in scientific
circles, filters down to the classroom.
It has to go through the professors, first
of all, and then the normal, ordinary graduates.
And then they become teachers.
And eventually, a long time afterwards, you get
something a bit straighter nearer to what is
perceived to be the truth.
The other reason, I think, is because I
believe there's somebody here who's still sheltering behind
the old thing that science has disproved Christianity.
And that's just not so.
It's a very convenient refuge point, but it's
just not true.
Sometimes we Christians do get accused of being
naive and gullible.
Admittedly, our faith works best on a simple
level.
That's undoubtedly true.
But having said that, we are not unthinking.
We don't take our brains out when we
become Christians.
And we have thought about this.
At least I have and a number of
us have.
And although we haven't got all the answers,
neither have the scientists.
Quite honestly, they have not.
We have at least as many answers as
they do.
So I want us to think about concentrating,
sort of using Genesis 1 verse 31 as
a frame, on, first of all, everything that
God made.
The Lord God made them all.
God saw all that he had made.
And then secondly, that it was exceedingly good.
Who has made all things well.
As the same hymn puts it, it was
very good, it was very beautiful.
And that's the framework.
Now in Hebrew there's a special word for
the word create.
It's the word bara.
And it means to create something out of
nothing.
And this is something that only God can
do.
This word bara is only ever used of
God and it's never used of human beings
because the best that human beings do is
to manufacture something out of something that's already
given.
Whereas God can make things out of nothing.
He can truly create.
And in this chapter, this word bara, create,
comes, surprise, surprise, at three points during the
narrative and the third time it comes three
times.
So number one, we read that God created
the heavens and the earth.
He created matter.
Secondly, in verse 21, we read that God
created the birds and the great creatures of
the sea and everything with which the water
teems.
He created life, the first creation of life.
And then the third point in verse 27,
we read this three times here just to
underline it and put it in bold and
capitals and everything else that you can put
it in to reinforce this.
God created man in his own image.
In the image of God he created him.
Male and female he created them.
So let's have a look at these three.
Created matter.
Now of course if you get hold of
a physics textbook, what it will say is
in effect this.
First of all there was absolutely nothing and
then there was a big bang and then
there was something.
Now obviously that contradicts the first law of
thermodynamics which states that matter can neither be
created nor destroyed.
But it doesn't really seem to bother the
physicists because they say well there was an
exception at the start of time for some
reason.
And then they say that from this massive
explosion, the fallout of all of this was
the most complex and ordered universe that you
could possibly wish to imagine.
Now that's also rather strange because if you
had an explosion in a print factory you
would not expect to end up with a
complete set of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
And indeed you wouldn't expect to end up
with anything sensible at all.
And indeed that contradicts the second law of
thermodynamics which states that systems always run down.
They always become more and more chaotic.
They never become more and more ordered.
Well the first and the second laws of
thermodynamics are scientifically proved and demonstrated principles but
the account that scientists give for the origin
of matter are certainly not and they contradict
all of the observed scientific principles that we
have.
Professor Paul Davis, he's a British astronomer, talks
about the miracle of the big bang for
this reason.
You see if you're an evolutionist you have
to believe in miracles only you have to
have rather more faith than we do because
these miracles happen out of complete chance rather
than by design of someone who is behind
them.
Now what about animate life after we've looked
at matter?
Well again we have the same story.
People used to believe in the spontaneous generation
of life.
They used to believe that if you had
a really smelly, sweaty shirt and they used
to know about this in the Middle Ages
because they never had a bath, they only
had one pair of clothes and if you
left it out and put a bit of
grain on it after 30 days you would
produce a mouse.
That was how mice were supposed to be
made by these theories.
Now there was a guy called Louis Pasteur.
He was quite a bright French scientist and
he established that living things never arise from
non-living matter.
That was his principle and that was how
the matter rested until the evolutionists got going
and they turned the clock right back.
And you may have heard of the experiment,
you may not know the name of the
guy who performed it but he was a
guy called Stanley Miller in 1953 who put
an electric charge, he zapped this current through
a mixture of ammonium, hydrogen and water vapor
and hey presto what did he get?
Amino acids.
And everybody said life created in a test
tube.
Well as Time Magazine last year reported it
was a beautiful picture but unfortunately probably wrong.
Now you've all heard of that experiment.
It's all given proof as evidence as to
how life could come about.
It's probably wrong.
It's widely denied in the scientific community now.
You see even if you could do that
with no intelligent person doing it then that
experiment would never actually form the base of
life because the amino acids which were formed
in this experiment and are always formed when
it's done in laboratory conditions are always a
mixture of left-handed amino acids and right
-handed amino acids.
Whereas for life to form you can only
possibly have left-handed amino acids.
Once you get one right-handed amino acid
that's it.
It just blows the whole thing.
It just falls down the system.
And there are other snags as well about
this commonly given origin of life.
For example if you have oxygen in the
primeval soup I don't know what you think
of when you hear that phrase primeval soup.
I always think about my school ham and
pea soup that they used to dish up.
I always used to imagine it was something
a bit like that.
Not that anybody's ever seen any primeval soup
and there's not any evidence that it ever
existed actually.
But if you had oxygen around at the
time then as soon as life would start
to emerge these amino acids somehow forming into
DNA although they couldn't do it it would
be immediately oxidized and that would be the
end of the story.
But having said that if you have no
oxygen you have no ozone.
And if you have no ozone you just
get a lethal dose of ultraviolet as we
know today.
So you've got no life that way either.
So whether you've got oxygen or not you've
got no life.
It's catch 22.
Indeed somebody has calculated the probability even if
these amino acids could be formed in this
way of them combining in a way which
allows for reproduction is 1 over 10 to
the power 87.
Now I believe that there are only 10
to the power 30 atoms in the whole
of the universe.
So you can see that the probability of
1 over 10 to the power 87 is
just a little bit unlikely.
But what's really bad news for the evolutionists
is other calculations that Professor Freight Hoyle some
of you will have heard of him and
his sidekick or partner Chandra Wickramsinger have made.
Because they've said but life you see isn't
just life.
We have an incredible number of enzymes which
are extraordinary protein molecules.
We have about 2,000 of them and
they're all very, very improbable compounds but we
need them to sustain life as we know
it.
And the probability that these have all come
about by chance is 1 over 10 to
the power 40,000.
That's 10 with 40,000 noughts on the
end.
It's just unbelievable.
It's even less than the chances of two
all British singles finals at Wimbledon.
It's just not ever going to happen.
So Professor Hoyle and Wickramsinger have come to
the amazing conclusion that life must have been
seeded here from outer space.
It didn't start here at all.
It couldn't have done so it must have
come from somewhere else.
And indeed in that they've been joined by
a number of scientists including the Nobel Prize
winner Professor Francis Crick.
And he says that life is such a
complicated system it's the most complex system of
all that it could not possibly have come
about by gradual evolutionary development.
It seems that that must be the final
nail in the coffin of evolution.
Well that's everything that God made.
The third special creation that he made was
man and woman together in the image of
God.
And of course it's when that is denied
that our problems really begin.
It's when we're told that we've just climbed
out of the jungle, crawled out of the
pond in some way and we treat ourselves
as animals that life begins to disintegrate.
More of that a little bit later.
Certainly let's have a look at the phrase
very good, very beautiful.
He has made all things well.
We'd have to say that, wouldn't we?
I mean you can't have eyes and look
around you here this evening and not say
that God has made all things well.
I was up on the downs on Monday.
I was on an orchid hunt.
I thought I stood a good chance.
I knew where to go and I wasn't
disappointed.
I found my bee orchids I was looking
for.
I haven't got the pictures back yet but
if any of you want me to show
you them later on you can see them.
These incredible flowers which look just like a
bumblebee has landed inside.
How could they possibly come into being?
You see if they evolved gradually, slowly then
there must have been a time when the
thing inside looked absolutely nothing like a bee
at all.
Therefore it would have no competitive advantage over
any other orchid.
Therefore it would never have turned into a
bee shape in the middle, would it?
It must be there by somebody's deliberate design.
Somebody perhaps who has a little bit of
a sense of humour.
I think it must be said.
Somebody who likes making things beautiful because they
are beautiful flowers.
God, Father God.
The Bible of course does allow for what
we might call micro evolution.
If you believe the Bible you have to
believe in some what we might loosely define
as evolution because obviously you have to believe
that everybody all over the world all mankind
are descended from one single pair of human
beings.
Our knowledge of genetics now allows us this
that we could have all come, whatever our
skin colour whatever our face shape whether we've
got slit eyes or eyes as we have
in the West we could all have come
from two human parents just a matter of
a few thousand years ago.
But the Bible does not allow for macro
evolution between families.
There is no evolution inter-genus as the
biologists would put it because we have been
made after our own kind.
That is how God made us.
And the fossil record bears this out.
You see when mollusks, clams, oysters, snails and
slugs suddenly burst onto the fossil record they
do so all complete and all very different
from one another.
So that any sort of mollusk that you
might know today resembles almost exactly the first
mollusk that ever appeared in the fossil record.
There was never an in-between stage and
that is true of all families.
The missing links are precisely that as a
Guardian writer put it last year missing, believed,
non-existent.
And that is the conclusion that more and
more evolutionists are coming to that these missing
links just don't exist.
Darwin thought they would be found but they
never have been.
Even though many, many living species, a good
proportion of our living species have been found
in fossilised form those species which were supposed
to have been found to bridge the gaps
just haven't.
Now in 1938 a fisherman of Cape Province,
South Africa netted a colocanth.
This was a bit of a shock to
him, not to mention the colocanth because these
fish were believed to have been extinct for
100 million years and one suddenly then turns
up in a net and a number of
others have been caught since then.
Now biologists got very excited about this because
the colocanth is very closely related to a
group of fish called the ripidistia and they
were supposedly one of the few classic evolutionary
missing links between fish and amphibia.
And indeed they do have certain skeletal similarities
to these land creatures on four legs.
Unfortunately when they dissected it because this colocanth
wasn't eaten for somebody's dinner that night they
found that the heart and lungs of this
fish are exactly like the heart and lungs
of, well, a fish.
They had nothing to do with amphibia at
all.
There was no resemblance when you actually cut
them open and saw their soft tissue inside.
So again and again evolutionary predictions have not
been borne out and that's why evolutionists now
are divided pretty much evenly between those who
maintain with Darwin that evolution is a gradual
process as its name and those who say
no, it's taken place in a series of
jumps.
This is called saltational evolution.
And those who hold to this believe that
every so often there is a lucky break
as it were.
All the mutations suddenly come right together and
you suddenly develop something else which is different,
a different family.
However, the trouble is that the chance of,
say, throwing up a feather with all of
its intricate complex design to be so specialized
in order to help a bird to fly
from a scale is absolutely nil.
Again, it's as unlikely as some of those
probabilities we were talking about earlier.
But of course if all you get is
a frayed scale that's not going to help
the poor amphibian to fly at all, is
it?
The poor lizard or whatever it was.
It's just going to obviously plummet straight to
the ground and get eaten by a prehistoric
cat of some kind.
It's got to be formed fully if it's
really going to work.
And again, the chances are just not on.
Indeed, one of the opponents of saltational evolution,
Professor Mary, says that it is the equivalent
of believing in miracles.
So there you are again.
If you're an evolutionist, you have to believe
in miracles.
A microbiologist I've been reading recently, I don't
know whether you've been able to tell I've
been reading microbiology recently, but Michael Denton, he's
an Australian, he says this.
He's not a religious man.
He said, it appears absurd that chance should
have thrown together devices of such complexity and
ingenuity that they appear to represent the very
epitome of perfection.
And that's just true.
You see, you are absolutely amazing.
I don't know whether you've thought that recently
or looked in a mirror and said, boy,
you're just amazing.
But you are.
Take just one cell of your body, for
example.
And again, this is sort of recent knowledge
from breakthroughs in molecular biology.
To appreciate a cell, you have to magnify
it a thousand million times so that you
could see it properly.
And then it would be like a giant
balloon shape sort of which would fit over
London.
And in this cell, you would see millions
and millions of openings, all opening and closing,
and streams of materials going in and out.
And if you entered in through one of
these openings, you would get into a most
amazing labyrinth of corridors and conduits.
And they would take you all over the
cell to various assembly plants and processing units.
There would be a central memory bank in
the nucleus of the cell, but other memory
banks as well in the outlying areas.
All around, you would recognize sort of robotic
-type machines, all organized in a very, very
efficient way.
All kinds of products being processed all over
the place and made.
And you would also, if you knew what
they were, recognize artificial languages and decoding systems,
quality control units and fail-safe devices within
this one tiny little cell in your body
that you couldn't see without a microscope at
all.
But one of the most amazing things about
this cell, with all of its complex ingenuity,
is this, that it can reproduce itself in
just two or three hours.
All that amazing functional design.
And wherever you look, you just see perfection.
Perfection everywhere, whether it's in the eye of
a hawk or the human brain or the
feathers of a bird.
It's just everywhere.
And beauty as well.
Beauty that doesn't just seem to be functional.
When we make things, we like to make
them beautiful, even if they don't serve any
useful purpose.
And when God makes things, he loves to
make them beautiful, beautiful.
No wonder, at the end of his week's
work, God sat back and admired what he'd
done.
He said, my, that's very, very good.
That's excellent, excellent.
So, it's just not true that science has
disproved Christianity.
No matter how often you hear a phrase
like that, it's just not true.
I've heard it over and over again.
Actually, it's the theory of evolution which rests
on missing fossils and unobserved genetics.
In other words, it's not really very scientific
at all.
Michael Denton, who I was referring to earlier,
describes evolution as the great cosmogenic myth of
the 20th century.
He says that a myth is a way
of going back to the beginning to explain
your present beliefs.
And he says, and he's not a religious
man, don't forget, that the thing is that
20th century man wants to be independent.
And therefore, he has to have a theory
which makes him independent.
You see, if you are accidental, then you
are not accountable.
If you're here by design, if somebody made
you, your maker is to be your master.
You can't escape from that.
You belong to the one who made you.
That was Darwin's problem.
The latest biography of Darwin is a fascinating
book.
It shows you how his whole life he's
on the run from God, that he was
brought up in a Christian family and had
Christian friends at various stages.
And you see, if you can knock out
the creator, then you can run from God.
But to knock out the creator, you've got
to come up with evolution.
Evolution furthermore sanctions selfishness.
It's a very, very destructive theory.
Richard Dawkins, who makes the national press quite
a lot, he's a great skeptic, again a
biologist, he's written a book called The Selfish
Gene.
Because evolution, of course, teaches as a key
principle the survival of the fittest.
Therefore, of course, we can have abortion for
those who don't quite measure up.
Of course, we can have euthanasia for the
weak and elderly and infirm.
Of course, you can treat granny like the
cat and put her down if she's no
different from the cat.
Evolution was the theory that Hitler worked on.
He said, yes, the Aryan race are the
most highly evolved people.
Therefore, we can knock out some of the
others, Jews, Romanists, Gypsies, and we will be
doing a service to mankind because we will
be enhancing the cause of evolution.
Do you see why it's so dangerous?
It has done so much damage in this
20th century.
There was a fellow called Cedric who was
a geologist who lived at the time of
Darwin and he reviewed Darwin's book.
Cedric was a Christian believer and he made
this prophetic statement at the time.
He said, if Darwin is accepted, humanity will
suffer damage that will brutalize the human race
and sink it into a lower degradation than
it has ever fallen in the course of
human history.
That describes very eloquently in one tragic, awful
sentence what has happened in the 20th century
as evolution has been accepted widely and humanity
has just sunk down and down and down
into depths of degradation we could hardly have
imagined or foretold, certainly not at the start
of the century.
So what about you?
You can do a Charles Darwin and you
can run from God, your maker, too.
But although it does seem sometimes rather threatening
that you have a maker to whom you
are accountable, let me tell you this.
It's quite wonderful, absolutely wonderful to be loved
by the God who made you.
I can't tell you how brilliant it is.
I can't tell you what a wonderful thing
it is to wake up every morning and
know that the God who made me is
with me and I can know Him as
my Father who loves me, who has made
me as I am, who has a plan
for my life and who is totally committed
to me.
Of course I am accountable to Him.
Of course it means I can't just go
and do my own thing as I could
if I were here just by accident.
But it's a wonderful thing to be loved
by the God who made you.
And this God who made you is so
committed to you that even though His perfect
creation was spoiled badly because corruption followed His
creation, He made all things well and then
things went wrong, very badly wrong because mankind,
the crown of His creation, rebelled against Him,
put two fingers up to Him as it
were, went their own way and you and
I are part of that.
But because of His love for each of
us, because of His love for men and
women, God sent His Son in order that
the corruption should be undone, in order that
the creation should be restored.
There is creation, there is corruption, but there
is Christ and by turning to Him you
too can come back into the relationship with
the God who made you.
Let me say this, if you want to
become a Christian and some of you really
need to do that and you know that
this evening, you haven't really got a leg
to stand on and Christianity, let's face it,
you know this really, is a good life.
It is the best life and it is
the true life.
And I just say you've got to be
willing to do three things.
Just hear me out as I finish.
Number one, you've got to be willing to
give up everything that you do that you
know is wrong.
That's the first thing that you must be
willing to do if you are to become
a Christian.
Secondly, you must be willing to be known
as a Christian.
You can't be a Christian on the quiet.
You have got to declare it to your
friends, to your schoolmates, to your workmates, to
your family.
You've got to let anybody and everybody know.
And thirdly, you've got to hand over the
keys of your life to Jesus Christ to
put Him in the driving seat so that
He can be in control and make of
your life the very best to fulfil your
true potential, all that He has given to
you, all that He has locked up within
you.
Those three things.
And then, by the fabulous mercy of God,
you are able to become a Christian at
His own invitation and offer and know that
He is your God, your Creator, your Saviour,
the One with whom you will spend the
whole of the rest of eternity.
Praise and worship and adore Worthy,
oh worthy are you Worthy to be thanked
and praised And worshipped and adored Singing
Hallelujah Lamb of God, Lord We
worship and adore you With major glories blown
Hallelujah Glory to the healing
You're more than a conqueror You're Lord of
everything Worthy, oh
worthy are you Worthy to be thanked and
praised And worshipped and adored Worthy,
oh worthy are you Worthy to be thanked
and praised And worshipped and adored Singing
Hallelujah Lamb of God, Lord
We worship and adore you With major glories
blown Hallelujah Glory to
the healing You're more than a conqueror You're
Lord of everything