Lesson 92 - Senior
Memory Verse
"For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him" (Colossians 1:16).
Cross References
I The Supreme Authority God's Word
1. God has anticipated man's perverse nature, and has made His Word plain, [JHN:1:3]; [MAK:10:6]; [ROM:1:20]; [COL:1:16].
2. God's authority has been rejected by many, [PS:53:1]; [ROM:1:21-25].
3. Many people are trying to serve two masters the evolutionary theory and the Bible, [MAT:6:24]; [2PE:2:12].
II Scoffers in the Last Days
1. We should not deny the creative act of God, and substitute "chance," [1CO:15:38-41]; [GEN:1:1-31].
2. We cannot deny the fact that man fell, [GEN:3:1-24].
3. Unproved theories are exposed and rejected, [2PE:3:1-14] .
III The Test of Time
1. Man's wisdom is discredited by God, [1CO:1:19-21]; [1CO:2:6-8]; [1CO:3:19,20]; [JAM:3:15]
2. The Bible is to be our guide and authority, [ECC:12:14]; [REV:22:18,19]
Notes
The Authority of the Bible
For the child of God who has experienced the transforming power of the Spirit, and has enjoyed the promises given him in God's Word, one passage of Scripture such as this, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth," would be answer convincing enough of the origin of man and the origin of the universe. But the unbelievers, the scoffers, and the more or less indifferent persons must be convinced by having the folly of man's theories pointed out to them. No doubt the heart of the scoffer will still be fully set in him to do evil, believe a lie, and be at enmity against God: "Because the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be" (Romans 8:7).
Rejection of a Personal God
There is no place for God in the theory of evolution. One of the early evolutionists said: "If you let God in one place you may as well let Him in all along the line." If what the evolutionist calls the "God idea" is admitted at all, it is generally the idea of some sort of evolutionary god: "God, nature, or universe -- all the same." Some men even declare that man is God. In His Word, God tells us that some men will deny Him: "The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God." One of the evolutionist's objections to God and His Bible is that there has been no change, no progress in the idea of God and in the Bible accounts, which were written when the evolutionists declare "science was not known." No; there has been no change, because the perfection of God and the perfection of His Word were from the very beginning. They did not need to be changed.
"Ape Ancestry"
In most of the schools, children are told that they are related to the ape; that evolution is seen everywhere; that the Bible is too unscientific for this age of advancement. A great many people are bewildered and deceived by that teaching; the Bible is being discredited; and Satan has found a most effective method of drawing men away from God: "And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables."
The Real Issue
Atheists and scoffers are not so much interested in the age of the world as in the "origin of man," because that settles the whole question as to whether there is a Divine Creator who made the universe. Thoroughgoing evolutionists have generally been atheists. They say that they must forget anything like man's being made "a little lower than the angels," and must study him as one would a "new bug." It is not easy to tell whether they are atheists because they are evolutionists, or evolutionists because they are atheists.
Ready to Believe a Lie
In the nineteenth century there was a "deluge of doubt." Science was substituted for God. One man said he was afraid of believing in God because of his reverence for science. Those who had turned away from God were in the right mood then to receive Darwin's "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection," published in 1859. Even an evolutionist admitted that "shortly after the theory of evolution was launched in the world a wave of suicide swept through England and Western Europe." Also, spiritual suicide often follows in the trail of the teaching of organic evolution.
No Fall
According to the evolutionist, there is no need of a Saviour for there never was the fall of man. They say man has always been progressing upward. They believe a lie: "And with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish; because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved. "And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie" (II Thessalonians 2:10, 11).
Evolution Defined
Evolution is defined by one of its supporters as a continuous process, which operated at all times upon plants and animals the world over. It is used to describe all development. Many people are deceived by the word "evolution." They believe it means merely a progress of development such as the oak growing from the acorn, the frog from the tadpole, the butterfly from the caterpillar, and the human embryo developing into a man. That kind of evolution is the truth, but that is not the evolution that is meant by the followers of Darwin.
"Evolution," as the word is used in the widespread discussion of the present day, denotes a process which has taken place entirely naturally, without the miraculous intervention of any Divine Being, by which, from out of a single remote ancestor living in the waters of some distant sea, have come all the living things in the world today. It is a natural process, which would enable all birds, fish, reptiles, mammals, apes, and men to trace their ancestry back to a speck of protoplasm that somehow came into existence hundreds of millions of years ago.
Spontaneous Generation
When asked how that first "speck of protoplasm" came into existence, the evolutionist is compelled to say he does not know. But he will be very slow to say that God created it. It came by chance, he says by spontaneous generation, life coming from dead matter. He has also tried to explain it by saying that four gases carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen accidentally ran into one another and exploded, and the result was the protoplasmic cell that after many millions of years developed into a man. But he does not say where the gases came from.
The theory of spontaneous generation has been dropped by most of the leading scientists because experiments have been made repeatedly to produce life and no one dares say that he has succeeded. Life can come only from life. In the Bible we read where life came from: "And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul" (Genesis 2:7).
Compromisers
There are young men and women, older men and women, and preachers, who want to appear up to date on "science," but they do not like the ape ancestry idea. They say they believe that God created the universe, but they want to reconcile that belief with "science" and popular thought. They discredit the animal ancestry part of evolution but they are confused by the evolutionist's theory about the rocks that are said to be millions or billions of years old, in which "fossils of the ape man and extinct animals" have been found that are supposed to "prove the evolutionary process."
Someone has said that a man can be both an evolutionist and a Christian if he is not much of either one. It is impossible to believe in the theory that everything came by chance, that there is no Divine Creator, that there has always been an upward progress of man no place for the fall of man and his need of a Saviour and still believe that "in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth," as the Bible declares that He did.
Blasphemy
Evolution even teaches that the universe produced Jesus, that He, too, evolved from a lower form of life. In a geography for little children, an evolutionist describes the way he believes Jesus came: "First, the little scum on the warm, stagnant water, then the little colonies of cells ... the green moss . . . the movement of the shellfish . . . centipedes, insects, fish, frogs, lizards, dinosaurs, reptile birds, kangaroos, mastodons, deer, apes, primitive man . . . Abraham's migration, the Exodus, the development of Jewish religious life and the climax in the purest of maidens, Mary of Nazareth. The hour had come for the dawn of a new day, and the light of that new day was the birth of Jesus." Evidently without the moss we would not have had Mary; without an ape we would not have had Abraham; without the centipede the world would not have known Christ. This is one of the many blasphemies of the last days: "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 1:23).
The Blood Tests
"Blood counts," says the one who tries to believe that blood tests have proved the relationship between a man and an ape. A scientist who has given the "blood tests" very careful study said that those who made the tests were really not testing blood at all. The Scripture tells us: "The life of all flesh is the blood thereof" (Leviticus 17:14). When the blood cells have been killed in the test, the life principle has been lost; and what they are experimenting with is, according to a true scientist, nothing more than a "solution of certain salts chiefly table salt, in water." This asserted "serum" test, therefore, proves nothing.
God has given life and breath to all things "and hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth" (Acts 17:26). The race to which a man belongs cannot be ascertained from the blood which proves just what the Word of God declares, that God has given life and breath to all things, "and hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth."
The kind of animal can be known by the blood. Evolutionists have laughed at the Apostle Paul's "ignorance" because he wrote: "All flesh is not the same flesh: but there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds" (I Corinthians 15:39). But today they have to admit it is a great scientific truth. The Bible and true science always agree. God gave them both.
Mendel's Law
One of the most important discoveries of science, and one that causes the evolutionist the most trouble, is called Mendel's law. Evolutionists have maintained that by small, slow changes that have been going on for millions of years "new" species have been produced. The Bible tells us that the "seed is in itself"; and this law of the Creator is the law that Mendel and others have found to be operative in all life. The Mendel law proves that what is appearing as "new" forms is merely a combination of the old parts of old "factors" that were in the species from the time God created it. A man wiser than the evolutionists said: "There is no new thing under the sun."
God has made possible wide variations in the kind. There are 40 or 50 kinds of dog, 40 or more kinds of cat, 5000 or more kinds of grass. Possibility for wide variation in many forms is God's loving forethought for man's comfort, convenience, and pleasure.
But variations are not new species. God has set the bounds "after his kind." Acquired character cannot be transmitted through heredity to the offspring; and this discovery has upset the evolutionist's theory, because transmission of changes was absolutely necessary for evolution. While carrying on experiments, a Columbia University professor discovered "blind" flies among fruit flies, which he had produced in glass milk bottles in the sunlight. Therefore all students of heredity have had to accept the truth that the so called "eyeless fishes" did not become blind because they had lived so long in dark caves but that they were blind before they drifted into the caves, and they remained there because it was a safe shelter. Therefore, the evolutionary theory that the "eyeless" fishes in the dark caves had lost their sight because of their environment has been proved to be false.
The reputed "new" lilies that Burbank was said to have created are by Mendel's law found to be only new forms of the old lilies, new combinations of the old "factors" that had always been in the lilies. To assert that it is a new species, the evolutionist must prove that the "factors" for the new form were not in the species from the very beginning. This they cannot prove. Mendel's law stands today, and it stands right with the Word of God: "On the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made" (Genesis 2:2). God created all and finished His work of creation. But He still governs it.
Prophecy and Evolution
For its alleged "proof" evolution depends almost wholly upon fossils being found in chronological order in the layers of the soil, in mountains and deep in the earth. The simplest forms of life corals and starfish are said to be in the lowest and "oldest" layers of the earth, and the more complete forms bears, elephants, camels are found in the highest or, "youngest" layers. This is merely a paper diagram that evolutionists have made to fit their theory. They have not dug into the lowest layers of the earth to find the fossil deposits. The deepest that has been dug is ten miles, in search of oil. True geologists admit that there is no reliable dating of the rocks. They are not found in a chronological order. On the other hand, in very many places the fossil deposits are exactly contrary to what the evolutionist calls the "natural" evolutionary order. In China, Norway, the Alps, Scotland, New York, Tennessee, Georgia, Idaho, Montana, Alberta, and in other places the supposed to be "old fossils" are in the "new layers" and the "new fossils" are in the "old layers." A noted geologist frankly states: "I know as much of nature in her geological ages as any man living, and I fearlessly say that our geological record does not afford one syllable of evidence in support of Darwin's theory."
The Flood
When conditions contradict their theory, the evolutionary geologists call them "faults," and are forced to say that the mountains must have been lifted up by a great convulsion and pushed over a great many miles into the "faulty" positions in which we now find them. Another geologist admits that "the physical evidence is against any such thing's having taken place." But on the basis of the great Flood the formations of the rocks are reasonably explained. It is not difficult to understand that the torrential waters that God sent in the Flood, and the great tidal waves over the submerged mountains, made a complete change of the earth's surface during the Flood period and, very likely, for a long time afterward. The vast amount of water pouring down from the high mountains, retreating to the oceans, could scoop out valleys, overturn rocks, and form great channels and rivers: "And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth" (Genesis 7:19).
Fossil Beds
The theory that sea bottoms were "elevated" and land surfaces were sunk is a see saw process of millions of years that evolutionists declare but cannot prove. It was easier for them to make this claim when it was believed that the interior of the earth was a molten mass. Today, however, it is generally asserted by physicists that the earth has a solid core consisting of iron, nickel, and a small amount of other metals; and, therefore, another of the pet theories has been exploded. It is reasonable to believe that the great Flood made the fossil beds.
Uniformity Continued
The claims of the evolutionists that the highest forms of life have evolved from the lowest forms through a period of millions or billions of years, and will continue uniformly to go on in the same process, with new forms constantly being created, is proof of the Scriptural statement that some men will always deny the coming of the Lord and will say, "Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation." The Apostle Peter closely connects the evolutionist's denial of the Lord's coming and the Biblical account of the Flood when he says: "For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water: whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished" (II Peter 3:5, 6).
The Test of Time
Hundreds of false theories have been and are today being discredited by men of true science. The Bible has withstood the attacks of kings, false prophets, men of a false science, and atheists. Today evolution is said to be "dead at the top," discredited by the leading men of true science. As reliable science advances, the Bible is found to be scientifically accurate in every pronouncement. The Holy Spirit inspired the Bible writers and their scientific knowledge, and the Holy Spirit was present in the creation: "And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters."
The Bible story of creation tells us the origin of man. "So God created man in his own image" (Genesis 1:27). The evolutionist can only imagine what man's origin "may have been" or say that he does not know. It took millions or billions of years for the evolutionist's imaginary work to be accomplished. It took God only six days of twenty four hours each to speak the whole creation into existence. "By the word of the LORD were the heavens made; and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth" (Psalm 33:6).
Questions
1. Why are atheists and scoffers more interested in the origin of man than in the age of the world?
2. Why is the theory of spontaneous generation unreasonable?
3. The conditions of the rocks can be explained by what event?
4. What important principle is last in the blood tests?
5. What statement of the Apostle Paul has been proved to be a great scientific truth?