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The Purposeful Contortion and Confusion of End Time Truth
A primary way Satan keeps people deluded about life and the world is by his contortion and confusion of either origin or end time truth. God reveals with pristine clarity the beginning and ending of everything. Both of these revelations are vital for faith and practice. Satan wants people deceived on how they got here and what will happen to them in the future.
Naturalism breeds more lust. I like to say, it means we got here by accident. No one’s your boss, so you’re your own boss. That sounds great to most people, doing what they want to do. Since they just happened, no design, they aren’t accountable to anyone or anything. They live like they want, which, based on the nature of man, means following lust.
Origins
Even if someone contemplates a possibility of God, that isn’t strong enough to replace the dominion of lust in a life. All the truths about God transmit from Him as origination of everything. Other truths about God diminish when He didn’t create us. The elimination of God creating man for HIs glory greatly decreases the power and importance of everything else scripture says.
The perversion of beginnings relates most to its compatibility with the theory of evolution. Modernists of the nineteenth century began rethinking the meaning of Genesis to fit with Darwinism. An allegorical interpretation of the first three chapters of the Bible allows to read evolution and an old earth into Genesis.
With people unsure about the beginning, it’s no wonder they doubt the ending. Even theologians turn eschatology into a non-essential now. They relegate prophecy to ambiguity. Many churches have removed most of their eschatology from their doctrinal statements. You don’t need a position to fit into a church. It’s too uncertain to require for even professing Christians.
Endings
On a recent prophecy post I wrote here, an anonymous commenter (whom I did not publish) called crazy (he used “nutjobs”) churches that talk about or preach prophecy. Opinions and speculation abounds on end time events.
The doctrines of Christ, salvation, man, and angels dovetail with prophecy. When Jesus arrived in the first century, very few were ready or awaited His coming, because they had detached from prophetic reality. The promises of God become of no effect as people falsify what He says will happen in the future. This then deadens their anticipation and smothers their hope.
History functions in a chiliastic manner. You could call it “going full circle.” Paradise lost and paradise regained. The destruction of the first necessitates the destruction of the last. This renders meaningless everything in between. Why believe anything if you can’t know how it starts and how it ends?
Many theologians and church leaders have capitulated to the attack on the origin and the ending. This relegates most everything to what people call, living in the present or living in the moment. I understand that concept in a positive way to a certain degree. Living in the moment requires mindfulness and focus on the task at hand and perhaps gratefulness for what you’re experiencing in the present. However, God wants futuristic living for the saints, an outlook of expectation.
A Forward Look
Scripture requires a forward look. Paul in Philippians said, “reaching forth unto those things which are before” (3:13) and “we look for the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ” (3:20). Jesus said, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God” (Matthew 6:33). If we can’t know our beginning or ending, we lose the basis for living like scripture says. An ultimate motivation for Paul was “we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ” (2 Corinthians 5:10).
‘Putting on the helmet of salvation’ (Ephesians 6:17) relates closely to last days events. Salvation is complete in the future. If people can’t be sure about most of the details, what can and do they mean? How would we be sure that these uncertain things could be true? This is where it stands in most ways today in eschatology.
Spiritualizing
The fastest growing view of the future is to spiritualize or allegorize the future. People allegorize almost all of the prophetic passages and they take on numerous different possible meanings. This has become not just possible but the preferred take in many places.
Now men spiritualize and allegorize the first few chapters of the Bible and the last book of the Bible. People can make it mean what they want. It’s no wonder people won’t take God’s Word seriously and churches are apathetic. If people can’t really know the beginning and the ending, why care about everything in between?
Creationist testimony to the King James Bible: Henry Morris
Henry Morris was the founder of the Institute for Creation Research and has been called the “father of the modern creation science movement.” Did you know that he wrote a work explaining why the King James Bible was the version to use for creationists? If you have never read his argument, please consider and read it by clicking here. If you are a creationist who has given up on the King James Bible, please consider if the father of modern creationism has given some good reasons why you should return back to the KJV.
–TDR
The Prime Directive Isn’t a Biblical Directive
The Star Trek series began in 1966, when I was four years old. In my home in a small town in Indiana, I grew up watching our black and white tube television set. I became a “trekkie” with Captain Kirk, Spock, Scottie, and McCoy. If someone held up his hand with only his middle fingers separated, I knew that meant, “Live long and prosper.” It isn’t unusual in this country. Many watch and read fantasy and science fiction.
I’m not endorsing Star Trek or even the genre of science fiction. I lay down a full disclaimer. I would argue for disinterest as the superior position.
Star Trek shows a naturalistic world view. It imagines that everything came about by accident and evolved, producing whole other galaxies full of living creatures and intelligence. Having progressed in technology to the extent that people can travel at light speed to get to those galaxies, the science fiction of Star Trek says this is how good things should be. None of this mirrors a Christian worldview, which is the only true one.
Christianity, of course, reveals the best possible outcome for people. God wants people to have it and it could not be better.
In the Star Trek imagination, the future sees very evolved, sophisticated people visit less evolved ones. They study them like scientists, almost like humans watching an ant farm. The speculation is that this is bound to happen. All these different creatures evolved in their separate locations.
When the main Star Trek characters visit, they cannot interfere with development or evolution. Some of you reading know the law. They call it the “prime directive,” which “prohibits Starfleet personnel and spacecraft from interfering in the normal development of any society, and mandates that any Starfleet vessel or crew member is expendable to prevent violation of this rule.”
While traveling, my wife and I used a laundromat (also called a launderette some places). At one location, while I went to get cash for change, she started into evangelism with a woman, who was a secular humanist. I didn’t hear the first half of the conversation, but the woman was arguing against Christianity interfering with indigenous people. Why should Christians see their point of view superior to tribes with subsistence living and their accompanying religions?
I had walked in to hear the woman say this to my wife. I smiled to myself, because it sounded like the prime directive. Just leave people alone. Just because they’re different doesn’t mean they’re inferior. I also recognize this as multi-culturalism. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says:
While the term has come to encompass a variety of normative claims and goals, it is fair to say that proponents of multiculturalism find common ground in rejecting the ideal of the “melting pot” in which members of minority groups are expected to assimilate into the dominant culture. Instead, proponents of multiculturalism endorse an ideal in which members of minority groups can maintain their distinctive collective identities and practices.
The prime directive says “don’t assimilate” the minority culture. This philosophy further associates with “cultural relativism.” Foundational to this thinking is the absence of objective truth, goodness, and beauty. With cultural relativism, one people cannot say that they are better than some other people in their beliefs, practices, and aesthetics.
If there is objective truth, goodness, and beauty, which there is, you help a culture when you intervene with the truth, goodness, and beauty. There is one God, no other. He is also the judge of the world. Every person, whatever culture he’s in, will face the same God.
The Bible teaches the polar opposite of the prime directive. Something is better than something else. One culture is superior to another.
Multiculturalism, the prime directive, or cultural relativism reject the truth. Satan wants men going down the broad way unaware that it sends them to eternal death. They think they’re fine, because no one can say with certainty what the truth is.
Cultures are different dependent upon their relationship to the truth. The closer to the truth, the better they are. If they aren’t following the truth, someone can help them by preaching the truth to them. God requires the violation of the prime directive.
Not Knowing What You With Certainty Can Know Is True and Knowing What You Can’t Know Is True
What you can know with certainty is anything that God says. You know the Bible is true. God said it. It’s true and you can know it with certainty. More than ever, what God says, people don’t know. They treat what God said like they can’t know it.
Scripture talks about treating what you can know like you can’t know it. It’s not about knowing. It’s about wanting. Someone doesn’t want to do it, so he eliminates it by not knowing it. He can know it and he does know it. He says he doesn’t know it.
What I’m writing about is like a little child who “forgets.” A parent asks if the child knows. The child nods, “No,” shaking his head back and forth, when the child knows. Not knowing is an excuse for not doing. He does know. With a very large sample size, I can say that children know more than what they act like they do.
Very often, for what people can know, they stay ignorant. They could know, but they don’t want to know. They like what they’re doing. If they don’t try to find out, then they won’t know. If they don’t know, they won’t have to do.
Knowing what you can know with certainty very often isn’t popular. It’s easier just to say that you don’t know.
On the other hand, people treat the Bible like it can’t be known. It’s just opinion. It is a story book of preferences. If it makes you feel good, sure, go ahead with it, but don’t treat it like something you can know.
An example of not knowing what you can know occurred recently in the Senate hearings for confirming the Supreme Court justice, when a Senator asked her to define a woman. She said she didn’t know that. She could know, but wasn’t willing to know.
Very often what the world knows is that it can’t know. It knows with certainty that it can’t know. The unknowability provides freedom. You’re not to judge what you can’t know, so you must not know. That way no one can judge. Then you get to live like you want.
Unwillingness to know becomes a basis of toleration. You’re in trouble if you judge something wrong, because you’re saying you can know, when you can’t. You’re left with tolerating wrong things. It’s required. The judgment itself becomes what’s wrong. An irony is that you can know when someone else can’t know.
I’m not saying, however, that people don’t say they know things. They know what’s wrong with their meal at a restaurant. These people write a bad review with complete conviction of their own knowledge. They know if they got bad service from someone. They know when someone offends them because it’s what they feel.
People know evolution is true. Evolution is still a theory. That status hasn’t changed, but men now know men evolved. This theory promotes naturalism. Knowing it frees men from their accountability to God, when they don’t know it. It’s a theory. It’s a theory that we actually know is not true.
Critical theory poses as knowledge. People know your motives. They know you’re racist. Climate science says it knows the world will end by global warming. Man causes the end of the world through natural means. God tells man how the world will end. That we know.
Churches are more and more worldly because of more and more preference, a lack of knowledge about scriptural things that were once known. They are still known, but treated like they are not. What distinguishes the roles of men and women, what were once known, now not known. The psychology behind overturning scripture, creating victims, who are not victims, this is now known. People are sure of this.
What I’m describing is leaning on man’s understanding and not on God’s. God is always right. Man is rarely to never. Living by faith, which pleases God, is living by what man can and should know, not by what he knows, but that he really cannot.
How should someone treat willful not knowing or rebellious knowing? He should tell the truth. He should embrace knowing what he can and should know. As the psalmist wrote in Psalm 118:6, “The LORD is on my side; I will not fear: what can man do unto me?” He should also stand against what he knows men cannot know.
Christianity: Pro-Racism, Pro-Slavery White Man’s Religion–Reject it for Atheism!
I have written a pamphlet dealing with attacks upon the Bible and Christianity from its (alleged) racism and (alleged) support of chattel slavery, compared with the (alleged) anti-racism and anti-slavery position of atheism. It deals with the objection that “Christianity is the racist white man’s religion” and, as the Freedom From Religion Foundation claims, “[W]hite supremacy [is] interwoven with Christianity … inextricably intertwined.” (Sources for all quotes are in the pamphlet.)
Click here to read the pamphlet Biblical Christianity vs. Atheism on Racism and Slavery
You may think that such claims are so ridiculous that they do not deserve a refutation. You are correct about them being ridiculous—and, as Bethel Baptist Church, where I serve the Lord, is not majority white now and has not been for a very long time, reflecting the ethnic diversity of the area, it is indeed a very foolish claim. However, sadly, in secular college campuses and in liberal media these egregious falsehoods are regularly propounded. Not that long ago a very angry black man at a place where I was passing out gospel literature said that all white Christians were supporters of white nationalism. (He also said, ironically, that they all denied it when he said that to them. Hmm… ). He said he had a degree in religious studies. (Perhaps they should give him his money back.) In any case, the attack on Christianity from its alleged racism and pro-slavery position is very much out there.
The pamphlet demonstrates that:
1.) The Bible rejects racism.
2.) Christian churches in Bible times rejected racism—for example, the church at Antioch had a leader in the category of “prophet and teacher” whose name was “Simon the Black” and another born in Africa, while the rest were all from Asia; an African whose family became close to the Apostle Paul helped Christ carry His cross; etc.
3.) Christian churches and the wider realm of Christendom were profoundly impacted by Africa. Did you ever think about the fact that possibly the two most influential people in the history of Western Christendom were from Africa—namely, Tertullian and Augustine? Furthermore, the ancient Anabaptist movements, the Novatians and Donatists, were both led by African Anabaptists. Did you know that the Baptists were the first group of churches in the American South to come out against slavery?
4.) Christianity very rapidly spread from Israel to Africa to China to India to Britain.
5.) Ancient paganism was pro-slavery while Christianity was pro-slave (since it taught that “All Lives Matter,” and therefore the lives of slaves, people of darker and lighter skin, etc. all matter), and Christian influence, unique among world religions, led to the abolition of slavery.
6.) Modern racism actually stems from the Enlightenment and its rejection of Biblical Christianity, combined with the anti-creation philosophy of biological evolution. (This fact should be taught in all public schools, and at the very least every student in Christian schools needs to know this. Did you know it?)
7.) Slavery exists today in atheist countries such as North Korea and China, in accordance with the racism of people like Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, Hegel, and David Hume. Everyone should know that Darwin anticipated genocide by whites of “lower races”:
“The … Caucasian races have beaten … [others] in the struggle for existence. … [At] no very distant date … the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world.”
Everyone should know Marx said:
“Let us … speak of the beautiful side … of the slavery of the blacks in the East, in Brazil, in the Southern States of North America. … [S]lavery is an economic category of the highest importance. Without slavery … you would have … the complete decadence of modern commerce and civilization. … [S]ave slavery … [c]onserve the good side of this economic category.”
8.) The pamphlet then explains how spiritual slavery is the worst problem people suffer today. It illustrates that the root causes of racism (pride) and slavery (covetousness) are sins that the reader has been guilty of, and how, through the ransom payment of Christ, they can become spiritually free from the control of the sins that lead to racism and slavery now and eternal hell fire in eternity.
I would suggest reading the pamphlet yourself, keeping the link or a few copies on hand for people who run into this objection when preaching the gospel. I would also suggest that Christian schools, in history class, when they teach the Enlightenment and the impact of evolution and its pre-and post-Darwinian influence in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, make sure students know that modern racism came from these movements. Missionaries in Africa, the Caribbean, and, frankly, on most of the globe should know these things and share them with those to whom they minister.
Cancel culture should cancel Darwin, cancel Marx, cancel Biblical skepticism, cancel evolution, cancel atheism, and cancel agnosticism.
Everyone should recognize Christianity is the best friend of those who are against racism and slavery.
Click here to read the pamphlet Biblical Christianity vs. Atheism on Racism and Slavery
–TDR
Charles Darwin on Design in Creation
The Bible teaches that all men know God’s nature and power from creation, but they suppress that knowledge, leaving them without excuse. “All men” includes Charles Darwin, the incredibly influential promoter of the theory of evolution.
Scripture says:
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness; Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them. For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse: Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things. (Romans 1:18-23)
Is there evidence in Darwin’s life that his study of the creation pointed the evolutionist to the Creator? In a conversation between the Duke of Argyll and Charles Darwin, in the last year of Darwin’s life, the Duke recounted:
In the course of [our] conversation I said to Mr. Darwin, with reference to some of his own remarkable works on the “Fertilization of Orchids,” and upon “The Earthworms,” and various other observations he made of the wonderful contrivances for certain purposes in nature—I said it was impossible to look at these without seeing that they were the effect and the expression of mind. I shall never forget Mr. Darwin’s answer. He looked at me very hard and said, “Well, that often comes over me with overwhelming force; but at other times,” and he shook his head vaguely, adding, “it seems to go away.” (Charles Darwin, Life and Letters, ed. Francis Darwin, vol. 1, letter to W. Graham, July 3, 1881 (London: John Murray, 1887), 316.
In public schools, when they teach Darwinian evolution, they should tell impressionable young people that in Charles Darwin’s studies “often,” “with overwhelming force,” the reality that the intricate design of creation is “impossible” to explain except as “the effect and the expression of Mind” struck the author of The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection and The Descent of Man. This statement from Darwin should be pounded into them the way they pound atheism and socialism into them.
I’m not holding my breath.
You can share his sentiments, however, with those who believe that Darwinian evolution explains away the need for the Almighty Creator. They ought to know.
Learn more about God, science, and the Bible by clicking here.
–TDR
Appearance of Age and Recent Creation-John Frame’s Systematic Theology
The Bible teaches that the earth’s age is young; evolutionary long ages never took place. Arguments such as distant starlight and other scientific reasons allegedly proving an old earth have received good answers from creationist sources. I was both surprised and pleased to read the following in Reformed evangelical Presbyterian John Frame’s Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Christian Belief (affiliate link). I expected Frame to explain away Biblical evidence for the young earth and make old earth re-interpretations of Scripture. Dr. Frame said that the issue is not one to separate over (false) and downplayed the issue (too bad), but he actually admitted that the plain interpretation of Scripture is a young earth.
The point of this blog post is not mainly to point out my pleasant surprise from Dr. Frame’s book. It is the quote below, which gives an interesting take on the appearance of age in a newly created world. The quote does not explain everything alleged by old earthers, but it is a useful thought nevertheless:
My exegetical position at the moment is that the earth is young, rather than old. I argued above that the creation narrative suggests a week of ordinary days, and that there is no compelling evidence against that interpretation. That week begins a series of genealogies: Adam, Seth, and their descendants (Gen. 5) leading to Noah, and the descendants of Noah’s sons (Gen. 10) leading to Abraham. These genealogies may well be incomplete. Certainly that is true of the Matthean genealogy of Jesus (Matt. 1). But I doubt that there are enough gaps or omissions in these genealogies to allow for millions of years of human existence.
I think the only way, then, that one could biblically argue for an old earth, billions of years old, given a creation week of normal days, is to posit a gap between Genesis 1:1 and 1:3. Some theologians have argued that the text permits a long period of time there, though of course it is impossible to prove from the text the existence of such a period. The trouble is that during such a period the heavens and earth would have existed (1:1), but there would have been no light (1:3) or heavenly bodies (1:14–19). But most scientists would deny that such a situation ever existed. Therefore, the gap theory, whatever its exegetical merits, creates more problems with science than it solves.
A young-earth view implies the proposition that God created the world with an appearance of age. The Genesis 1 narrative certainly indicates that God created Adam and Eve, for example, as adults. They would have appeared to be, say, twenty years old, when they were actually fresh from the Creator’s hand. Some have said that creation with apparent age amounts to God’s deceiving us, but that is certainly not the case in any general way. Normally, when we see adult human beings we can estimate their age by certain physical characteristics. The adult creation of Adam and Eve implies only that these estimates are not always true. It shows us (as I argued in connection with miracle) that the world is only generally uniform, not absolutely so. God does not tell us in natural revelation that every mature person has existed more than ten years. So he cannot be charged with lying to us when he miraculously produces an exception to this general rule.
Some have argued that God would be “lying” to us if he made stars that appear to be billions of years old, but whose origin was actually only ten thousand years ago. Yet God has never told us that the methods that scientists use to calculate the age of stars are absolutely and universally valid. It is not as if the stars were a book that literally tells us their age. Rather, they are data by which scientists believe they can learn the age of bodies in many cases. Reading that data requires not only the data itself, but a whole body of scientific theory and methods by which to interpret that data. What scientists may learn from Genesis is that these methods do not work for objects specially created. So scientists may need to read Genesis in order to refine their methods to a higher level of precision. Of course, it is a general principle that science may not claim that its theories are without exceptions, unless it claims at the same time divine omniscience.
Anyone who admits to any special creations at all must grant in general the reality of apparent age. Assume that God simply made a bunch of rocks out of nothing and left them floating in space to generate the rest of the universe: even in this case, were a geologist to look at those rocks ten minutes after the creation, he would certainly conclude that they were many years old.
Or what if God made the world by a “big bang,” by the explosion of a “singularity”? Many scientists today think that we cannot get behind the big bang, since the big bang is the beginning of time and space as we know them. But the tendency of science is to ask “why?” and that question is not easily restrained. So some today are asking, and certainly more in the future will ask, where the big bang came from, how it came about. To them, even the elementary particles present at the big bang have an ancestry. Such scientists will pursue evidences in those particles (like the rings of the trees in Eden) that suggest a prior existence. Thus, even those particles, to those scientists, will appear “old.” My point is simply that any view of origins at all implies apparent age. If there is an origin, the things at that origin will appear to be older than the origin.
There are problems with the apparent-age view. One concerns astronomical events such as supernovas. Judging from the time it takes visual evidence of a supernova to reach the earth, most scientists would judge that these events happened long before what young-earthers regard as the time of creation. Why would God make it appear as if a great event took place when, indeed, that event could not have happened in the time available since creation? Here, though, we must remind ourselves that all apparent age involves this problem. Any newly created being, whether star, plant, animal, or human being, if created mature, will contain data that in other cases would suggest events prior to its creation. If Adam and Eve were created mature, their bodies would suggest that they had been born of normal parents by sexual reproduction. Their bodies would suggest (on the presupposition of the absolute uniformity of physical laws and processes) that events had taken place that in fact never happened. Why the apparent supernovas? From God’s point of view, just another twinkle in the light stream for the benefit of mankind.
If that is not a sufficient answer, we should simply accept as a general principle that God creates beings in a way that is consistent with their subsequent role in the historical process. If Adam had a navel, that navel suggested an event that did not occur. But it also made him a normal human being, in full historical continuity with his descendants. Similarly, the starlight that God originally created would contain the same twinkles, the same interruptions and fluctuations, that would later be caused by supernovas and other astral events.
I find the type of explanation given above satisfactory as an answer to most problems of apparent age. One problem I find more difficult to deal with is the existence of fossils that seem to antedate by millions of years any young-earth date for creation. If God at the creation planted fossilized skeletons in rock strata, skeletons of organisms that never lived, why would he have done so except to frustrate geologists and biologists?
James B. Jordan has made some observations worth considering in this respect:
But what about dead stuff? Did the soil [during the original creation week—JF] have decaying organic matter in it? Well, if it was real soil, the kind that plants can grow in, it must have had. Yet the decaying matter in that original soil was simply put there by God. Soil is a living thing, and it lives through decaying matter. When Adam dug into the ground, he found pieces of dead vegetation.
This brings us to the question of “fossils” and “fossil fuels,” like oil and coal. Mature creationists have no problem believing that God created birds and fish and animals and plants as living things, but we often quail at the thought that God also created “dead” birds and fish and animals and plants in the ground. But as we have just seen, there is every reason to believe that God created decaying organic matter in the soil. If this point is granted, and I don’t see how it can be gainsaid, then in principle there is no problem with God’s having put fossils in the ground as well. Such fossils are, in principle, no more deceptive on God’s part than anything else created with the appearance of age.31
Jordan’s comments are bound to be controversial in some circles, but I think they deserve a thoughtful hearing. Other Christians believe the fossils can be completely accounted for by the dynamics of a worldwide flood. But I must exit the discussion here, to leave it in the hands of scientists operating with biblical presuppositions.[1]
31 James B. Jordan, “Creation with the Appearance of Age,” Open Book 45 (April 1999): 2.
[1] John M. Frame, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Christian Belief (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2013), 199–202.
The argument about fossils is, in my mind, less convincing than that for dead plants in newly created soil. Nevertheless, I thought it was worth pointing out and thinking about.
–TDR
Evolution’s Strongest Argument–Creationists are Ignorant! & the Cosmological Argument Examined
Class #1 of my Evidences for Creation class is now available. In it, the strongest argument for evolution–which is not any particular fact, but the claim that creationists cannot really do science and are ignorant–is examined, as is the cosmological argument. At the end, the outline for the class, which was on themes in Genesis, is examined.
I believe the video will be helpful to you in speaking to those who reject their Creator based on evolution. Please feel free to “like” the video on YouTube, comment on it here and on the KJB1611 channel, and share it with others.
On some devices there will be an audio issue, but that will, Lord willing, get fixed in the future.
Watch the class Evidences for Creation #1 on YouTube by clicking here, or watch the embedded video below:
–TDR
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