Evolutionists claim that the universe is billions of years old, and that supplies plenty of time for life itself, and all living beings afterwards, to evolve.  How likely is the spontaneous origin of life from non-life?  It is approximately one in 10^112,500(source).  That means that it is incomprehensibly more likely that you will win the jackpot on every single ticket if you buy a billion lottery tickets every single second of your entire life than it is that life will spontaneously evolve:

The likelihood of winning in the Powerball lottery in the USA are slightly better than 1 x 10^-9. If you lived longer than any modern person by surviving to the end of your 123^rd year, and bought one billion lottery tickets every second from the time you were born, you would have 123 x 365.25 x 24 x 60 x 60 x 1,000,000,000 = 3,881,584,800,000,000,000 chances to win the lottery; the likelihood you would do this every single day on every single ticket is 1 x 10^-9 x ≈3.9 x 10^-18 = ≈3.9 x 10^-27 > 1 x 10^-27, a number incomprehensibly larger than the likelihood of the spontaneous origin of life, 1 x 10^-112,500.

While there are great Biblical and scientific reasons to believe in a young earth, as resources from scientists associated with the Institute for Creation Research and Answers in Genesis demonstrate, billions of years do not even come anywhere close to solving the problem of the origin of life for evolutionists.  Only infinite time would do–but even evolutionary scientists now admit that the universe is expanding and consequently had a beginning, and so there is no infinite time for evolution to do its work.

–TDR

Churches can download and add their church address to the tract “God and Science: Friends or Enemies?” at the All Content page of faithsaves.net here.

During my debate with Shabir Ally over the topic “The New Testament Picture of Jesus: Is it Accurate?” Dr. Ally made a number of claims about the Bible being irreconcilably contradictory and, therefore, not being God’s Word. He argued that the genealogy in Matthew 1 was inaccurate because it left out three names and had the wrong number of names listed; that the accounts of Christ’s resurrection in Matthew 28 and John 20 were hopelessly confused; that Luke’s Gospel taught that Christ ascended to heaven the same day He rose, whole Acts taught that Christ only ascended forty days later; and that the accounts of the conversion of Saul of Tarsus in Acts 9, 22, and 26 disagreed with each other. 

As part of the three-part series of review videos on the debate, I examined these claims by Dr. Ally and found them wanting. You can watch the review video below:

or view Bible Contradictions? Christ’s Line, Resurrection, Ascension & Paul’s Conversion; Shabir Ally’s Case on YouTube by clicking here. You can also view it on my website here.  If you think the video is valuable, please feel free to share it with others, “like” it on YouTube, and post comments on it both on the blog here and on the page where the video is uploaded.

–TDR 

As blog readers may recall, I had the privilege of debating Dr. Shabir Ally over the topic “The New Testament Picture of Jesus: Is it Accurate?” some time ago.  I composed a review of the arguments made in that debate not that long after the video became available and I now have the written and video versions of the review live.  In the video and written discussion I examine the key arguments made by Shabir Ally against the accuracy of the New Testament’s picture of the Lord Jesus Christ as the Divine-human crucified and resurrected Redeemer.  The review below deals with his key contention–namely, that the Gospels contain an evolutionary development of the Lord Jesus Christ from a merely human Muslim prophet into the Christian figure–as well as examining the miscellaneous arguments he made against the Christian position.  It also discusses the incredible censorship of arguments in favor of Scripture present at liberal and secular universities which were revealed by the ignorance of evidence that appeared at numbers of places in Dr. Ally’s argument.  I believe that the discussion will be very helpful for those that watched the debate and for anyone that engages in apologetics or evangelism at universities or other places where liberal arguments against the Bible are promulgated and received, since Dr. Ally does not just argue the way Muslims might against Scripture, but employs the same sorts of arguments atheists, agnostics, and other Biblical skeptics use; the case he makes is the one students hear against the Bible in university classrooms day in and day out all across the United States and in the rest of the world.

Read the Shabir Ally / Thomas Ross Debate Review: “The New Testament Picture of Jesus: Is it Accurate?” by clicking here.

Watch the Shabir Ally / Thomas Ross Debate Review video at faithsaves.net by clicking here, watch  the embedded video below:

or view the debate review video on YouTube by clicking here.

If you believe the video content is useful, please “like” it on YouTube, share it on social media, and post a comment, as well as sharing comments on this blog post below.

If you are interested in hosting another debate between Shabir Ally and me, please contact me.  I would be honored to debate Dr. Ally again.

–TDR

My wife and I currently live in the great state of Wisconsin, where we have approximately 5.8 million people.  California, by way of contrast, has approximately 40 million people.  The Bay Area, where Bethel Baptist Church is located in El Sobrante, has approximately 7 million people–considerably more than the entire state of Wisconsin! In fact, there are only 13-14 states of the 50 in the USA that have more people than the Bay Area on its own–of the 50 United States, more than 35 of those states have fewer people than just this one part of California!

How many historic Baptist churches are there in the Bay Area–an area with more people than the entire state of Wisconsin?  The Unaffiliated Baptist locator lists only one–Bethel Baptist Church.

There are a few other independent Baptist churches in the Bay Area, but if one wants one that stands for the perfect preservation of Scripture, local-only ecclesiology, gender distinction, and a Biblical gospel that includes repentance, the number is few indeed–possibly only Bethel Baptist.  Furthermore, many of the churches that are in California are not growing stronger, but are falling into contemporary/emerging apostasy through the influence of West Coast Baptist College / Lancaster Baptist Church or are under Hyles-type influence and do more “1-2-3 pray after me” and marketing gimmicks than pure gospel preaching. The need in California is very great–greater, considering the population, than it is on significant numbers (though by no means all) foreign mission fields.  It is a safe assumption if you are walking around in San Francisco, Berkeley, Marin, and many other parts of the Bay Area that nobody in our lifetime has ever even one time knocked on the doors of the houses you are walking past in order to preach a true gospel to them (although the Watchtower Society might have gotten there in order to bring them into their cult).  It is a safe assumption that a very high percentage of the people you are walking by have never in their lives been offered a gospel tract even one time.  I know that growing up in the Bay Area I never, ever heard the gospel even one time, nor was I ever given a gospel tract–and I am very, very far from the only one, sadly.

Would we think it a terrible shame if, in one of these fifty united States, there was only one faithful church in the entire State?  Is the situation different if it is not a specific State, but instead a region with more people in it than over 70% of the States in the union?

While the need is very great, Bethel is a great place to be a member to help reach the area.  Bethel Baptist Church holds to:

a.     Historic
Baptist belief and practice

b.     Careful
preaching and teaching of God’s Word—the entire Bible has been proclaimed through solid expositional preaching over the course of several decades (2 Tim 4:2)

c.    Willingness
to change/conform to Scripture—the church has grown and continues to grow
stronger over time as Christ washes it with the Word (Eph 5)

d.     A
commitment to Biblical discipleship of members of the congregation, producing a
church of people who know, love, and obey the Bible

e.     A
pure gospel, including Biblical repentance and consistent separation from those
who do not preach it (Mark 1:15)

f.     
Evangelistic passion, obeying the Great Commission to
preach to every single person in the area house-to-house (Mt 28:18-20)

g.     Verbal,
plenary preservation of Scripture in the Textus
Receptus and stand for the KJV (Ps 12:6-7)

h.     Biblical
local-only ecclesiology, accompanied with consistency in practice in baptism,
the Lord’s Supper, Spirit baptism, and other areas

i.     
Biblically dispensational, pre-Trib, pre-Mil
eschatology

j.     
 Non-Calvinistic,
non-Arminian soteriology

k.     Historic
Baptist, non-Keswick sanctification

l.     
Christian living and church practice by faith and trust
in the power of the Word and the Spirit, rather than worldly or pragmatic
methods of church growth methodology and promotion and marketing techniques

m.   Qualified
leadership—men who personally meet the requirements of 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1

n.     Emphasis
on and careful teaching on the family

o.  Careful
Biblical philosophy in a Christian school that uses the rod and reproof in
obedience to God’s pattern (Prov 29:15)

p.    Sacred,
reverent worship and obedience to the commands to sing psalms as well as hymns
and spiritual songs (Ephesians 5:18-22; James 5:13)

q.     Gender
distinction (Deuteronomy 22:5)

r.    Commitment to allow “no other doctrine” in the church
(1 Tim 1:3) and separation from those who teach and practice other doctrine out
of love for Christ

s.     Biblical
philosophy and practice of world evangelism/foreign missions

t.    People who love, carefully study, and treasure the
Scriptures, and talk of them regularly, seeking to conform their lives to the
Word in every area

Lord willing, my wife and I will be returning to the Bay Area to serve the Lord near the beginning of 2021. We will be seeking to glorify God and fulfill the Great Commission with Bethel Baptist Church by helping to:

1.)   See
men trained for the ministry, both locally and through distance education

2.)   Assist
Bethel in evangelizing with the goal of seeing churches established in the Bay
Area

3.)   Engage
in other ministries, from preaching and teaching in church settings, to campus ministry at the University of California at Berkeley, apologetics/debates, helping
the Christian school, podcasts and other Internet ministry, etc.

Please pray for us as we go, and pray the the Lord of the harvest will send laborers into His harvest for His glory:  "The harvest truly is plenteous, but the labourers are few; pray
ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he will send forth labourers into
his harvest" (Matthew 9:37-38).

Maybe if you pray the Lord will convict you to come to help as well--would He have you help reach this extremely needy area with His gospel as well?

-TDR

If people in your church would like to learn New Testament Greek in 2020, a good opportunity is available.  You can learn from a committed independent Baptist separatist who is committed to the Biblical doctrine of perfect preservation and consequently holds to the Textus Receptus and Authorized Version.  The lectures from our 1st year Greek course at Mukwonago Baptist Bible Institute are (gradually) getting online (we would appreciate prayer for someone who could help us with a lot of material that needs to get posted for God’s glory and kingdom).  If you visit the playlist for the New Testament Greek class on YouTube by clicking here, you will see that a decent portion of the lectures for first year Greek are already available, and, Lord willing, more will continue to be made live.  You would need to purchase the textbooks, discussed in the first class, including William Mounce’s Basics of Biblical Greek with its accompanying workbook, Halcomb’s Speak Koine Greek:  A Conversational Phrasebook, and, of course, a Greek Textus Receptus.  I am thankful that BethHaven Baptist Seminary in Oklahoma City, OK is using the lectures, and would be happy to supply material that could help church-run Bible institutes that currently do not have someone who could properly teach NT Greek use the class to help them in training men for the ministry and helping those, whether they are called to the ministry or not, to know the Word of God better.

Lord willing, I will be able to expand the material related to the class at the college courses section on my website, but a good portion of the most important portion of the class, the lectures, is already available for use on the YouTube playlist.

I have embedded the first three classes below for interested persons.

Class #1:

Class #2:

Class #3:

See the rest of the classes here.

TDR

Since I recently posted my debate with Shabir Ally over the topic “The New Testament Picture of Jesus: Is it Accurate?” (watch the debate here) I thought it would be worthwhile mentioning another debate that is well worth seeing for those who wish to evangelize the over 1,000,000,000 Muslims in the world, namely, David Wood’s debate with Ali Ataie over the topic “Who was Muhammad?”  Few Muslims are willing to debate what Muhammad was like, and Dr. Wood does a great job exposing the truth on this matter.  Dr. Ataie, who teaches in Berkeley, California, is an intelligent man, but he has his hands full defending the indefensible.  While Dr. Wood is not a Baptist separatist and I do not endorse all his theological positions, the discussion between the two is still very valuable to watch.

I would encourage Muslims reading this post to read The Testimony of the Quran to the Bible here and also consider Dr. Wood’s tract “Has the Quran Been Perfectly Preserved?”  Dr. Wood’s tract would be worthy additions to a Biblical church’s tract rack.

Part 1 of the Wood-Ataie debate, “Who Was Muhammad?” (Dr. Wood’s opening remarks)–very powerful.

Alternatively watch on YouTube here.

Part 2 of the Wood-Ataie debate, “Who Was Muhammad?” (Dr. Atai’s opening remarks)–he kept going off topic and making ridiculous misrepresentations of the Bible, but he had a very difficult job.

Alternatively watch on YouTube here.

Part 3 of the Wood-Ataie debate, “Who Was Muhammad”?  In the cross-examination it becomes even more apparent how indefensible Dr. Atai’s position is.

Alternatively watch on YouTube here.

Part 4 of the Wood-Ataie debate, “Who Was Muhammad?” Overall, a clear victory for Dr. Wood and for God’s truth.

Alternatively watch on YouTube here.

–TDR