February 20, 2017 Show with Charlie Liebert on “Always Be Ready to Give an Answer”

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Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown

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Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors,

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Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

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Proverbs 27 verse 17 tells us, Iron sharpens iron so one man sharpens another.

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Matthew Henry said that in this passage, quote, we are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

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It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next hour and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

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Now here's our host, Chris Arnzen. Good afternoon,

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Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet

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Earth who are listening via live streaming. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron, wishing you all a happy Presidents Day on this

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Monday, February 20th, 2017, and boy did our

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Lord and Creator provide a phenomenal, beautiful, gorgeous, breathtaking, nearly summer -like day today here in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

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Can't believe the gorgeous weather out there, but if God created the world in six days,

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I'm sure that having a beautiful day in Carlisle, Pennsylvania is not a problem for him, but I am delighted to have somebody on the program today who has been on as a co -host.

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You've all heard him, or many of you have heard him on the program as a co -host on Iron Sharpens Iron, but today for the first time he is going to be my guest on the program, my primary guest, and his name is

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Charlie Liebert, founder of 6daycreation .com, and we're discussing one of his three books,

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Always Be Ready to Give an Answer, and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron, Charlie Liebert.

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Thank you, Chris, it's great to be here. And in studio again is my co -host, the Reverend Buzz Taylor, and I hope you two can introduce each other because I know that you just met seconds ago.

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Yes, that's true. It's the competition of the co -hosts, and if anybody would like to join us on the air, our email address if you have a question is chrisarnson at gmail .com,

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chrisarnson at gmail .com, and please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside of the good old

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USA. Charlie, this book that you have written, Always Be Ready to Give an

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Answer, there are other books on apologetics that have been written on how to answer the questions of skeptics and those who are in opposition to biblical evangelical

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Christianity. Perhaps they are either atheists or agnostics, perhaps they're even

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Roman Catholics or members of a non -evangelical church or a cult or some other religion outside of Christianity.

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Why did you see a need for another book that helps listeners to be ready to give an answer for the hope that lies within them?

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Okay, let me give you a little background on that, Chris. I was teaching in a study back in 2010 in Greensboro, North Carolina, where I lived at that time, a bunch of Christian businessmen, and as we talked about evangelism and talked about being able to witness for Christ, one of the things that came up very clearly again and again is,

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I get into a conversation that's going to lead in a spiritual direction, and they ask me a question, and I can't answer that question, and I get diverted off the subject and never get to the gospel.

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So I went back and for about, actually for about two years, I went back and studied the scripture. What did Jesus, how did

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Jesus, would Jesus have handled something like that? And if you look at his encounters with the Pharisees and other people in scripture, you see that he never answered the question.

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He asked the question, answered the question with a question, and I didn't find any other evangelistic book that ever said that.

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So I said, let me put down on paper how to do this. To doing this is very simple. They ask you a question, like, where'd

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Cain get his wife? You don't answer the question. You say, that's a good question, but let me ask you a question.

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Why did you ask me that? Did you ever run for a political office? Actually, that's not true.

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Yes, I did. I ran once for school board and lost third in a race of fives, but that's a whole other story. So I was,

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I was confronted with this again and again, and I decided to call this taking the spiritual temperature.

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You ask a person a series of questions that probes to their presuppositions. This is what he did with the Pharisees. He asked them about the baptism of John.

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He took them completely off the track of what they were trying to do to him and took them to their presuppositions, forced them to think about it.

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That's the key, okay? You get the presupposition, you evaluate a person. Are they hot? Are they ready to hear the gospel? Are they lukewarm?

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Well, maybe they are, maybe they're not. Or are they cold? They say, like, for example, an atheist said to me recently, I don't care what you answer.

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I won't believe anything you say. Well, what's the point of answering his question to begin with? So you take a spiritual temperature.

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And then the key, the key thing that I put in here is then you go to a testimony. You say, look,

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I know that's a good answer to your question, but let me tell you about why I believe there is a good answer. And you walk right into your testimony.

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I came to be a believer as this, whatever your testimony is, three to five minutes testimony, quickly, and then you come to the end, you end with another question.

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What do you think about the gospel? What do you think about Christ? Just a question that leads to that spiritual temperature that you've already evaluated to say, well, where is the person?

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Sometimes they get angry and walk away. Other times it's an invitation to go further with the gospel. And sometimes you get to what

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I call closure, which is a section of a chapter in the book that says, basically, how do you close the gospel?

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How do you bring a person to faith? What do you, what do you tell them? Now, you've got to understand that men were dead in their sin.

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God's got to have made them alive to hear. If they've got ears to hear, then they're ready to hear.

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And you share the gospel. That's what basically the book, the book, the book says. Well, as far as that question, actually,

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I know that after you bring the person back to the question of your own, why do you ask that, that's an interesting question.

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Do you eventually get around to offering them plausible theories? Because obviously the Bible doesn't tell us specifically, but the only theories

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I know of is that there was a period of time where obviously

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God, before he prohibited incest, permitted brothers and sisters to have relations.

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So the only alternative I could think of is that Cain had marital relations with his sister or even his mother.

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Or, I wouldn't think his mother, but his first cousin. Right, because if enough time elapsed.

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Yeah, because these lifespans are five, six, seven hundred years, so the lifespan is sufficient that it would be time to marry a second or third generation person.

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And in the recording of Scripture, only a few women are mentioned in someone's genealogical record, correct?

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That's correct. There's only one or two in all the genealogies in the Bible. It's pretty much the male line. And it was interesting that both of the women in the genealogical accounts in Scripture were notorious sinners who came to faith.

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And they were not Hebrews. Right. They had Rahab the harlot, who actually became a believer.

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Right, and Ruth. Ruth is the other one, yeah. Right. And let's see here, we do have a question from a listener already.

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Okay. And I'll repeat our email address if anybody else has a question.

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It's chrisarnson at gmail .com. chrisarnson at gmail .com.

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And as I said before, please give us your first name, at least, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside of the good old

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USA. We have a question from Arthur in Middletown, Pennsylvania.

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And Arthur asks, ask Charlie if he would please explain presuppositional thought so people can use it to understand that the use of evidences is only effective if you also deal with the way your object of concern thinks about the world.

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How do you deal with your friends' presuppositions and worldview? So I'm assuming that Arthur is either guessing or is aware already that you are a presuppositionalist, because we haven't established that, although you did somewhat give a hint there.

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Yes, I did. Because I know that presuppositionalists do not like to be derailed by trying to prove everything that people ask.

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That's correct. Yeah, thanks Arthur for the question. I would say this to the listeners in general.

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Every person has an attitude or a view of life, which we called a worldview. And that comes from the beliefs about who they are, what their position in the world is, what their life is about.

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All the different things that relate to who you are are a set of presuppositions. For a Christian, it's a certain set.

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For a humanist or atheist, it's a very different set. And what you're trying to evaluate when you're talking to the person about, why did you ask me that question?

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If I answer that question, will it change anything about what you believe? You can go and pursue this, and you do that to get them to reveal to you what their presuppositions are.

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I mean, you could have, for example, a dialogue with an atheist, and he says, I don't care what you say, I'm never going to believe anything you say.

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Well, then the conversation probably is never going to get spiritual, although you should give a witness anyway. But you may have a conversation with the person that says, gee,

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I'm really confused. I go to church, but I really don't understand how that's supposed to change my life.

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Well, now you've got an opportunity to go further with the gospel and your own beliefs about who

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Christ is and describing all the things related to your life. Remember, when you give a testimony, a person can't question it.

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It's your experience in your life. So they really can't say, I think you're wrong, because you're not wrong, you're describing what happened to you.

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And when you come to the end of it, then you've got to close with some kind of a question that's going to pursue them to give back to you more of the presuppositions.

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Where are they spiritually? That taking temperature is real important, because you know then how a person is receptive to the gospel or not.

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Now, I don't want to be too severely critical of any evidentialist listening.

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One of my greatest living heroes is an evidentialist, R .C. Sproul. And in fact, John Gerstner, who is now in eternity with Christ, was an evidentialist.

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And they are both thoroughly Reformed. In fact, John Gerstner is even more thoroughly

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Reformed. I agree, I agree. But can you give an outline of evidentialism?

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Yes, let me set it up. Actually, when I was first converted, I was more of an evidentialist than a presuppositionalist.

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Yeah, well, I would think that evidentialism would be a common understanding of life, unless you are brought deeper into philosophical things.

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That's correct. And in fact, one of the principal things I had to deal with as a new Christian was evolution.

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Because I bought the goods on that completely, because I'm a trained scientist. I got a bachelor's in chemistry. So I bought the goods on that.

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So that was one of the big wrestles I had. It took me three years, and I'll say this humorously, to evolve from an old earth atheistic evolutionist to a young earth biblical creationist.

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It took about three years. I read the people like Ken Ham, Henry Morris, Dwayne Gish, all those different books.

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And it took a while to get there. And as I got there, as I began to mature in Christ, I began to understand that men are really dead in their sin.

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They're not asleep. You can't waken them. And all the amount of evidence you could ever give to a person that's dead falls on dead ears.

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They can't hear you. So the reason I go to presuppositions is because I want to discern, has the

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Holy Spirit worked in that person's life? To give them ears to hear? Jesus talked about that all the time, ears to hear.

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Do they have ears to hear? Can they hear the biblical truth? If they can, then it's time to give it to them.

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If they can't, and they're dead in their sin, and they're rejecting you, then give a testimony anyway.

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And I'll talk about that in a second. Give a testimony anyway, because testimonies are seeds, and seeds will germinate or not.

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There's a man that I knew when I was in high school, that I met when I was going for my master's in business at Iona College, about 12 years out of high school.

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And Frank sat across the table from me at a Chinese restaurant, and he told me a story of his life. I knew up to high school.

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He married his high school sweetheart. They had two children. He had a successful business in Amityville, where I lived. He had a, you know, a house, two cars, and a dog.

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All the things you'd expect. Then one day, a fire in his home killed his wife and two children. That destroyed him.

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He became an alcoholic, lost his business, ultimately became homeless. And as he told me this story, I had no way to comfort him.

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I was far from being a Christian at that point. No way to comfort him. So he looked across the table at me, put his fingers straight out in my face, and said,

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Charlie, because of Jesus Christ coming into my life, that changed everything.

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Now that's a seed. And that's 15 years for me, B .C. A long time before I would come to know Christ. But when

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I knelt on my knees in that chapel and received Christ, and Nashville, North Carolina, that seed came back.

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So don't be afraid to plant seeds with people that you evaluate as being dead. And the evidentialist perhaps is more convinced that man is a spiritually depraved sinner, but is like the presuppositionalist would.

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But he would think more in terms of the lost sinner being a clean slate in regard to information, perhaps.

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Whereas the presuppositionalist knows that everyone who claims to be an atheist and an agnostic is really self -deceived, because no one really is an atheist or agnostic, according to Romans 1.

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Am I right? Yes, that's correct. And if men are dead in their sin, they cannot hear truth.

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But their minds are filled with all kinds of other things that are there, and that will lead them astray, in the sense of Romans 1, 2, and 3 teaches it clearly.

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Men are depraved to start with. They're dead and depraved. But more than that, God can give them over. And when that happens, there's a dissent.

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And you see that dissent illustrated greatly today in Dr. Richard Dawkins, one of the prime advocates for evolution.

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As Dawkins has recently said, pedophilia is kind of okay. And that's a dissent. Wow. That's a dissent.

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A dissent further into sin, while all men are sinners and lost, that's a dissent down into the, what

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I say, the pit. Right. Yeah, there's both responses, two responses

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I have to that. Number one, it is consistent with atheism to believe there are no rules.

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That's correct. But even Dawkins, who people view as some kind of a genius, is in some sense even making a self -refuting statement, because we don't need him then to tell us it's okay.

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See, but you got to understand, atheism in itself is an untenable position. Right.

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It's impossible, because you cannot say in one sense there's no absolutes in the universe, because I want to do what

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I want to do for behavior, and then say an absolute statement, there is no God. The best an atheist can ever be is an agnostic.

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Atheism is a contradiction in terms. It's an impossible position. You can't say there's no God. First of all, you're not omniscient.

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You can't know that for certain anyway. Yeah, even Bill Marr made a comment that was true in that regard.

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And I don't know if he's still considers himself an agnostic, but he used to say, well, the reason I'm an agnostic is

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I don't have all knowledge. Okay, that's a great admission for an atheist, because a lot of atheists won't admit that.

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They claim that we know there's no God, because. Right. And then they'll give reasons. And so, as I was saying,

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Romans 1, it gives us a clear indication that man innately knows that he is in rebellion against God, because he knows the truth, but is suppressing it.

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Suppresses the truth, yes. The truth is known. You can't understand anything in the area of science about the amazing things like how our bodies are made, and not see that there's a designer there.

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I mean, it's impossible to see there's no designer. In fact, Dawkins actually says that. I was working on my third book today, and I actually had a quote from Dawkins in there, and basically it says that everything looks like it's designed, but it's really not.

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Well, that's not science. That's nonsense. Yeah, you'll find a lot of their rhetoric absolutely nonsensical.

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In fact, I did a word search on the manuscript for the third book, and I found the word stupid in there.

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I've used the word stupid about five times. We have

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Joe in Slovenia who says, Dear Brother Chris, I've often heard that the fossil record doesn't give evidence for the millions of years of evolutionary theory.

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However, most people believe that it does. Please ask Brother Charlie to give a concise answer that we can give to people who question six -day creation when they claim that the fossil record proves millions of years.

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What specific evidence refutes that error? Thanks for giving us such wonderful tools to engage the culture with the gospel.

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Okay, formation of fossils, first of all, is a process that is sudden and abrupt.

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Fish don't fall to the bottom of the ocean and become fossilized. Fossilization has to take place where animals, alive or dead, are buried suddenly by massive amounts of material, particularly clay or mud, and that will turn into rock.

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So fossilization is a catastrophic process. That's the first point. The second point is, when you look at the record as they constructed for evolution, they've constructed it in a circular argument.

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They've said, because we see the simplest things on the bottom, and they're not always on the bottom, Cambrian layers in some places on the top, but that lower level is on the bottom.

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So they say, well, as a result of that, all the things that resulted from evolution follow.

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Well, they're out of order in a lot of places. That's another point. But let me get to the real essence here. The real essence is, the fossil record was formed as the catastrophic process of Noah's Flood took place.

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And you can confirm that a couple ways. Number one is, 95 % of all the fossils on planet Earth are in the layer that's called

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Cambrian. And the Cambrian layer is a layer that represents the bottom of the sea, the first thing to be buried in a global flood.

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95 % of all fossils are Cambrian. So it indicates catastrophic burial, it indicates the lowest level being the most buried.

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There's two arguments against the evolutionary ranking of the record itself.

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Okay. People talk about the fossil record. The fact that we have amoebas today, and we have humans today, we shouldn't even have to look to the fossil record.

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We should have all the in -between stages, walking around, or swimming, or whatever they may be doing.

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As far as evolution. Yeah. If evolution is not true, and it's not.

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If evolution is not true, if evolution were true, then you'd expect to find biology a mass continuum of creatures.

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We don't. We have cats, and we have dogs, and they're very different. And having said that, you do believe that species, or kinds of creatures, including humans, have changed in their structure to some degree over the years.

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And some even very radically. You have everything from a house kitten to a saber -toothed tiger.

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Okay. So there are differences within species. Let's go back to what's a kind.

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When God created kinds, it's probably at the, in biology, the family level.

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Okay. Because dogs would include dogs, coyotes, dingoes, and wolves. They all have the same number chromosome count.

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They all interbreed. So they're all the same kind. So there was two created originally, with the greatest absolute variation possible, which means that in every gene, there was one dominant and one recessive.

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Which gives you the possibilities. In human beings, that condition of one dominant, one recessive, is how

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Adam and Eve were created. Because all of mankind comes from them. And the variations are incredible. The variations of humankind, in two human individuals, having children.

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They'd have to have 10 of the 2017th power children before they'd be a duplicate. Got that?

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That number is beyond anything we can comprehend. I mean, the universe only has 10 to the 80 atoms. Now one thing that always has baffled me about those who claim an age of the earth that goes into the billions of years, or even if you wanted to say a million or a billion, is how could any scientific experiment prove that?

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Like for instance, if you know where a specific figure from history is buried, and you know the date that that figure from history lived.

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Let's say we go to Julius Caesar, or somebody of that nature.

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You exhume a fragment of his remains, and you find out that the date that you come up with in the experiment matches the date that he lived, and so on.

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How do you get anybody to prove, through a scientific experiment, that something is phenomenally and amazingly old, as even approaching a million years, let alone billions?

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Well actually, you don't Chris. What you have to do is, you have to take some science and make a whole set of assumptions.

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The radioactive dating is the most common thing they would use. But radioactive dating makes assumptions. It makes assumptions that there was no daughter at the beginning, that everything decayed at the same rate.

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I don't know what you mean by that, no daughter at the beginning. The radioactive decay is a series of steps. You go down the ladder, in the sense, losing atomic numbers, as you go down the ladder.

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And what they measure is the thing that's at the bottom of the ladder. Let's say iodine, for example, or whatever.

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You measured the bottom, and you measure the top. How much is there at the top? And then you use that with the half -life, with the decay rate, to determine how long that rock has been there.

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The problem is, first of all, the only rocks you can measure are volcanic rocks. You can't measure sedimentary rocks, because the sedimentary rocks do not contain material that was frozen in time.

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The material just accumulated over whoever knows how long. But in a rock, that's a basaltic rock, that's come out of a volcano, it is liquid and then it becomes solid.

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That moment it changes to solid state, is the moment the clock begins. Now, second thing is, one of the common used methods is called radiocarbon.

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Radiocarbon simply is a method that measures living things, how long living things have been dead.

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So if you find a bone, and you measure radiocarbon, you can estimate how long living things are dead. Here's the problem with radiocarbon.

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At the end of 50 ,000 years, it's completely gone. So you can't get to millions with radiocarbon anyway.

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The second thing is, and this is really exciting, in fact, I say in my third book here, if evolutionary scientists were honest, they'd realize evolution has been falsified.

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Because we have found tissue, that is biological tissue, in bones and partially fossilized bones of dinosaurs.

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That can't last more than a couple thousand years. It can't last 65 million for sure.

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And they've been dancing around this one for quite a long time, and the finds seem to be exploding. Because there's been, there was originally one, and now there's been eight or ten,

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I think there were 14 the last time I looked. And are any of them crying fraud and charlatanry?

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Is it on the part of those? No, they're actually accusing the scientists of contamination. Contamination is one out.

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The other is that it was preserved because it was in an environment that was basically in a vacuum without any oxygen.

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That's impossible to believe that could happen on planet Earth. There's no way that can happen, but that's part of it.

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And they also claim that there are some ways to preserve it using certain kinds of minerals like lead. But there you have evidence of people having such a convinced presupposition that dinosaurs died before men and that the earth is billions of years old, that they are just refusing to see what scientific evidence they are being shown.

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Scientists, it doesn't matter to them at that point. Because when you attack the presuppositions, they will not give those up.

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So because they won't give those up, you're reasoning with a post. You're not reasoning with someone who can reason.

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Now, can scientists fairly accurately determine the age of things like, for instance, in the year that Julius Caesar lived or something?

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Is there a reasonable accuracy? Yes. If, for example, you had a wooden coffin that was buried with the body, because the body's probably going to mostly turn to dust, probably not going to have any body.

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But if you had a wooden coffin that was buried with the person, and you excavated that coffin and took that wood and done radiocarbon, you'd get an age that would be reasonable.

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However, there's one problem. If you go before the flood, the atmospheric conditions are so different that you're not going to be able to use the radiocarbon to measure something.

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So you've got to be sure that what you're trying to measure is something that grew or came into being after the flood.

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Because one of the pre -flood stuffs is the fossil fuels, oil and coal.

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I mean, that's part of the results of the flood. In fact, let me say that, think about that, there's another apologetic here for your listeners in evangelism.

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That's one thing that's really important. Fossil coal, diamonds, and we can't really do oil, but fossil coal and diamonds have been measured with radio and found radiocarbon in them, which means for sure it's less than 50 ,000 years old.

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And that's a huge problem, because they have the carbon difference period of 750 million years ago, when they're supposed to have formed that stuff.

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And they have really no good explanation for it for me. We've got a great explanation. When the flood came, it washed all the forest stuff together and buried it.

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And under the pressure and heat of it being buried inside the earth, it turned into coal and oil.

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We could do that in the laboratory, actually. We're gonna go to a break right now, and if you'd like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com

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chrisarnsen at gmail .com. Please give us your name, at least, your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside of the

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USA. Oh, and by the way, Joe in Slovenia, you have won a free copy of Charlie Liebert's book.

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Always be ready to give an answer, and thank you for providing an American address where your daughter lives, and we will have that shipped through her, and that will be shipped out by our friends at Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service.

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CV for Cumberland Valley, BBS for BibleBookService .com. Also, Arthur. CVBBS .com.

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Oh, yes, Arthur in Pennsylvania is also receiving a free copy. I forgot about that.

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Sorry about that, Arthur. And we're gonna be right back after these messages, so if you'd like to send in a question of your own, do so as soon as possible.

29:29

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Paul wrote to the church at Galatia, For am I now seeking the approval of man, or of God? Or am

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Welcome back. This is Chris Arnzen. She just tuned us in. Our guest today is

34:23

Charlie Liebert, a Christian apologist and founder of sixdaycreation .com. He is the author of two books with Christian themes.

34:30

The first, Always Be Ready to Give an Answer, teaches a Christian evangelism strategy that gets to witnessing every time an unbeliever asks you a question.

34:39

His second book, Answers for the Hope that is in You, provides answers to over 100 questions that Christians are commonly asked by family and friends.

34:53

They can both be found at the website yourchristiananswers .com.

34:59

That's yourchristiananswers .com. His third book to be published later this year titled,

35:05

Without Three Miracles, Darwin's Dead, that shows that science proves atheistic evolution is impossible.

35:14

Our studio co -host today again is Reverend Buzz Taylor and we are accepting your questions at chrisarnzen at gmail .com.

35:24

chrisarnzen at gmail .com. And we do have, before we go to your book,

35:29

I just wanted to get one more listener question out of the way. We have Lou in Sharpsburg, Georgia, who asks,

35:39

Among the most famous world religious leaders outside of Christianity, such as Muhammad and others, do you know what the origin and age, what their views are or were, regarding the origin and age of the universe?

35:59

Well, you go to Jewish, the Jewish would be basically

36:04

Young Earth, similar to what the Young Earth Christians would be. Islam, generally, there are apologists in Islam, and I've seen some of their writings, that are also

36:15

Young Earth, that believe that the biblical account, as it's given in the Bible, as we have it, even though the Quran is different,

36:21

Muhammad did have reverence for the Bible in the sense of saying a lot of it was true. They'd be kind of to that also.

36:29

The rest of the world religions, no. They would either not make a statement or they'd be millions and billions of years, whatever.

36:37

Things like Hinduism. And obviously, I'm assuming that there are some

36:42

Jewish, not only theologians, but scientists, who would have an

36:49

Old Earth view, and even saying that Muslim scientists as well. Yes, yes. It's going to be mixed in all those faiths, because there's always contention about it.

36:58

But you have to understand, and I'm going back to my book now for a second, Chris, you have to understand there really are only three religions in the world.

37:06

There's the one that says God's not relevant. That's atheism, agnosticism, humanism, things like that. The second religion is, there is a way, by some human means, to get reconciliation to God.

37:18

All the world religions recognize something's wrong with humanity. So there's a way to get there, and it's human works that would get you there.

37:24

In Islam, it's Ramadan, and some other things you've got to do, or die as a martyr. In Hinduism, it's

37:29

Nirvana going around again and again and again as reincarnation. So that's the religion. That is, there's a human effort way to get to God.

37:37

Christianity is the third and very different and unique, because it says you ain't got no way to get to God. You are dead in your sin, and you are separated from God.

37:46

You're in a reconcilability. The only way that you can be reconciled to God is if God himself were to pay the penalty that you can't pay.

37:55

And that's radical and different from other world religions. So there's three. God's not relevant. You can get there by some means yourself, or you're lost and undone, and only

38:05

Christ can bring you reconciliation to God. Well, thank you Lou in Sharpsburg, Georgia. Make sure you get us your full mailing address so we can send you a copy of Charlie Liebert's book,

38:16

Always Be Ready to Give an Answer. So you wanted to obviously go back to the main content of the book and the questions that you pose by skeptics that we are to be ready to give an answer.

38:29

Yeah, let's go back to that. Well, first of all, what I just recited about the religion is right out of the book. It's in a chapter called

38:34

The Uniqueness of Christianity, okay? I just gave that to you directly. But the approach here is they ask you the question, and you ask them a question.

38:44

Why did you ask me that? If I answer, how does it impact you? What difference does it make in your life?

38:51

Does it really mean anything? I mean, I've had people tell me that's the one question that keeps me from Christ. I've had other people tell me, well,

38:57

I'm just asked that because I'm a hardcore atheist and I just want to stump you. So you probe and you ask questions until you get to their presuppositions and get them to admit it.

39:08

Because an atheist, if he sees his presuppositions, is probably not going to be happy, because most of the time they'll get angry.

39:15

That's what I call the normal atheist response, okay? When you finally expose the presuppositions, they're going to get angry about it, because they don't like to admit that they're a contradiction.

39:27

They can't say there is no God because they're not omniscient, so they have to be stuck with their view that, well,

39:34

I don't believe there's a God. You say, well, you don't believe there's a God. I believe there's a God. Then the beliefs are on equal level. That will get them very upset, because they think they're superior, because of their viewpoint of having the definite statement there is no

39:47

God. We have a lamb lamb, that's obviously an alias, in Valley Stream, Long Island, New York, who asks, besides the presumption and those errors in dating methods like carbon dating,

40:04

I always think that there's fact that God did create man and things with age, etc.,

40:12

or example, I'm sorry, he didn't make all seeds to start, but may be very old trees here and there already.

40:21

Is that a valid point, and if anyone considers that, and what's the reasoning behind it?

40:29

Okay, when God creates, he creates it in a certain state. He created

40:35

Adam, and Adam wasn't a single -celled zygote, okay? Adam was an 18 to 20 year old mature man when he was created, so anytime

40:44

God creates, it looks like it has age, doesn't, Adam's only seconds old, but he looks mature.

40:50

Yes, you never see a painting of Adam with a pot. And Eve always has long hair, too, that's another discussion.

41:02

Actually, I don't know about that one. I don't know if the paintings that I've seen, he has long hair. Jesus always.

41:07

Well, the concept was there that she would either have pig leaves or something covering her chest, but let's go on from there.

41:14

Oh, you mean Eve always has long hair. Yeah, but anything, I mean when Jesus made the cane of wine, he changed the water into wine instantly, but what was it?

41:23

It was old wine, good wine. It was wine that had been well fermented, because when God creates, that's the way that's the way it happens, okay?

41:28

But once he's created, then the natural laws come into play, and process continues in time. So if you're looking at the age of the universe, you've got to discuss then, and we probably won't do this now, to discuss about how do we get along with the universe that's a hundred and eighty million light -years across, maybe, and only have an earth that's six thousand years old.

41:51

And there are three creationist answers to that. All right, why don't you give them. Oh, in fact, let me just tell

41:57

Lam -Lam that she's won a book. Okay. Lam -Lam, please send me your full address so that we can have a copy of Always Be Ready to Give an

42:05

Answer, shipped out to you by CVBBS .com. That's CV for Cumberland Valley, BBS for BibleBookService .com.

42:13

This is an area that creationists have struggled with for a long time. How do you explain this huge, vast universe, when in fact it's only a short age old?

42:21

And there are three creationist models that are working on it. Now remember, science is never absolute, because science will always change.

42:28

As we discover new things, we discover things. We change things. When I was in high school, when

42:34

I was in college, I was told the cell will fill a protoplasm, and the protoplasm made the cell alive. We know today that's not right at all.

42:40

It's a huge conglomeration of all kinds of things, like a small city in a cell. But for the origin of the universe, and the concept of the vastness of it, there are three creationist explanations.

42:51

The first one is that the speed of light, which is the measure, to measure how big the universe is, has declined over time.

42:58

That although now it's down at the bottom and is not going to decline anymore, that at the moment of creation it was all close to infinity, which means the light would have traveled vast distances in what we consider short times in that sense.

43:11

That's the first one, the speed of light. The second one is what's called time dilation.

43:18

We know that time is affected by gravity. Now Newton doesn't tell us that. Newton tells us the opposite.

43:24

But it turns out Einstein tells us that. That time is distorted by gravity. We've seen that. We send the astronauts up with atomic clocks above the

43:34

Earth, a little further away from the Earth's gravity well, we'll find their atomic clocks are going to run a little faster.

43:41

The point simply is that we could have one day on Earth and have 50 million years distance from us, because the gravity well is less.

43:51

That's the second one. That theory is being worked on by about three or four different experts, including I believe Jason Lyle's working on it,

43:57

I know Dr. Russell Humphrey's working on it. And the third one is simply what your listener implied before, that God created with a appearance of age, that when he put the stars in place he put also the light traveling from the star to the earth in place at the same time.

44:11

So the light was like a hose full of water. The moment you turned on the light at the other end, the light came out this end.

44:18

It was instantaneous because the light was already transited the whole distance. So that's the three different models.

44:23

Creationists, being good scientists, don't say one or the other is true. We try to work on finding out which one is true and that's the pursuit of science, to find out what is true.

44:33

Newton said it best, he said that science is really finding God's truth after him. Well thank you for your question and you will be getting a free copy of Always Be Ready to Give an

44:48

Answer by our guest Charlie Liebert. And going back to presuppositionalism, it's interesting.

44:56

I believe that there are a number of evidentialists in this very field that you are discussing when it comes to using fossil records and so on.

45:07

Yes, yes, there are quite a few evidentialists. And if you look at the two major ministries in Christian apologetics,

45:14

Answers in Genesis and ICR, in the area of science and apologetics, you'll find out that ICR is basically an evidential ministry.

45:22

That's what they do, they employ scientists and they do scientific research to give an answer. On the other hand, if you talk to Ken Ham, and I worked for Ken Ham for three years, if you talk to Ken Ham and the people in his ministry, they'll be presuppositionalists.

45:33

They'll say, we know what the evidence is, but we also know that a person's presuppositions dictates how they think, that they're going to come to Christ, they've got to get to those presuppositions first.

45:43

That's the difference. Both are powerful tools, but it depends upon your view of mankind, and my view is that presuppositionalism is the key, because you've got to get there.

45:54

People got to consider what they believe before they can consider claims of Christ. Yes, it is interesting that when

46:01

I saw Ken Ham's debate with Phil Nye, the science guy, that Ken brought up a phrase that was very interesting, and I can't remember exactly what it was, but it was on the concept of seen science, or the fact that those who are creationists base their scientific views in regard to those things that we believe in the scripture, solely based on the science that is merely backing up what we believe already in the scriptures.

46:44

In other words, that when it comes to the scientific aspect, there is not a lot of discussion about great theories and mysteries of the things that we can't prove scientifically, and I'm solely talking about the scientific aspect.

47:02

I'll go back to something out of my book, okay? One of the key things here is differentiating the nature of science.

47:10

Science by its very nature has some significant issues, okay? It can't predict, it can't tell us what happened yesterday.

47:17

That's a critical issue, because Ken differentiated between what we call observational science, experiments you do now and get results, and historical science.

47:24

We take science and try to press it back into the past, determine what happened. That happens, and this is right out of my book now, that happens all the time with juries.

47:32

You have evidence, all in the present, the DNA, the knife, the weapon, whatever you have, and you bring it in the courtroom and show it to the jury.

47:41

Now, the jury can't go back and see what happened. The jury has to take that evidence and make a conclusion about what actually happened.

47:47

That's what the origins debate is about. Same evidence, same science, we can all go to the same Grand Canyon, look at the big hole in the ground, but how do we get there?

47:56

The evolutionist looks at it and says, wow, look at that, millions of years of erosion. The creationist looks at that and says, wow,

48:02

Noah's flood, look at how fast that stuff was carried away. It's the same canyon, hasn't changed.

48:08

What's changed is the presuppositions of the person looking at it. That's the point. And by the way, we are going to eventually have a pro and con back -and -forth series, perhaps just two days of discussion, where we have

48:23

Old Earth representatives here on Iron Sherpa's Iron, followed by Young Earth scientists.

48:29

So, I just wanted to let our Old Earth listeners know that I am going to give you a fair hearing on the program eventually, even though that is not my personal opinion.

48:39

But I'm even, where there is debate over the age of the earth, even amongst

48:46

Christians. Yes, that's correct. But I'm talking about where you will have evolutionists not only mock and laugh at and discredit, but even perhaps ruin the careers of people who disagree with things that can never be proven scientifically.

49:06

Like, for instance, even evolution itself. When you have zero fossil record of the transitions of men from apes or any of these other animals from other life forms, where you have things like that, where you are having scientists teaching these things as fact, when there is zero evidence to prove them.

49:31

You have the Christian, who is supposed to be the unscientific

49:37

Neanderthal, for lack of a better term, moron.

49:43

The Christian is the one using more of scientific evidence than the secularist scientist who is an evolutionist, isn't that right?

49:52

Let me give a, and now I'm into book three, okay? The title of book three, again, like you said before, is

49:59

Without Three Miracles, Darwin's Dead. And I'm basically saying as a sub -headline of that, science proves that atheistic evolution is impossible.

50:07

And let me address that, particularly with the ape to man transition, because that's an interesting area. You'll notice that ape to man transitions, there's two issues.

50:17

Number one is a lot of them are fraudulent. I use three in my book. But more than that, the ones that are supposed to be in the line, given 50 years or more of scientific scrutiny, are thrown out.

50:31

There's none, none, none that exists that are more than 50 years old. And every time a new one is found, you'll read the headlines and the headlines will say this, this new discovery proves man evolved from apes and throws out everything else that went before.

50:46

They do that every time. And the reason simply is there's no real transitions there.

50:53

So every time someone comes along, and I say Lucy's about gone now. Some of the scientists have really objected to Lucy.

51:00

Lucy's not 50 years old yet. But the other ones, Piltdown, Nebraska Man, all these other ones,

51:08

Neanderthals are now regarded as fully human. So that goes out. In that book, I have a website there that lists all the transitions.

51:16

And if you go through that, you take all the Neanderthals out, take all the humans out, and wind up with the transitions, you'd be lucky to fill two coffins.

51:25

There's almost nothing there. And you also have the scientific proof that could be proven through repeated experiments, even though you don't need to, is that only dogs give birth to puppies, and only cats give birth to kittens, and only monkeys give birth to monkeys.

51:43

Only humans give birth to humans. And if there is some kind of a deformity in birth, where there is a some kind of mutation, they are likely to be sterile and not be able to reproduce.

51:56

That's correct. And then there's something else here that's real important. The other area that makes this critical,

52:08

I've got it here, is the chromosome count. Because when

52:14

God designed the creatures, he gave them different counts of chromosomes. And the chromosomes come, what, one set from the male, one set from the female, to make the progeny.

52:23

And those progeny are based upon the uniting of that. Now in the case of horses and donkeys, one's 46 and the other's 48.

52:33

But they're close enough to create a mule, but the mule can't reproduce itself. But other things, like cats and dogs and humans, all have different counts.

52:43

And the counts are so different that you couldn't crossbreed. That's an issue that evolutionists have never addressed, and creationists, for some reason, don't want to attack it.

52:51

I think it's a great approach to say, look, your chromosome counts are so different. If evolution were true, you'd expect it to be, what, getting a little more each time as things improved.

53:00

That's not the truth. Not the case. The most highest chromosome count is in a plant. So that's nothing to do with it.

53:08

So that's a critical issue also, that the chromosome count itself. We're going to a break right now.

53:14

If you'd like to join us on the air with a question for Charlie Liebert, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

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chrisarnson at gmail .com. Please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence, if you live outside of the

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Welcome back, this is Chris Arnzen. If you just tuned us in, our guest today is Charlie Liebert, founder of sixdaycreation .com.

01:04:14

By the way, the other day I humorously made an error and announced you as the founder of sevendaycreation .com,

01:04:22

and that was not only an error, but I created a new doctrine. But we are discussing his book,

01:04:30

Always Be Ready to Give an Answer. If you'd like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnzen at gmail .com.

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C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com. Before I return to the interview,

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01:06:48

We are back now on the air with our guest Charlie Liebert, founder of sixdaycreation .com,

01:06:55

and we are discussing his book, Always Be Ready to Give an Answer. Charlie, what are some of the more prevalent questions that skeptics or even, dare

01:07:06

I say, rigorous opponents to the Christian faith may ask that you have brought up in your book?

01:07:14

Most important questions that I deal with, actually before I deal with that, let me make a correction,

01:07:19

Chris. I cited the wrong thing, I must be dyslexic here. I said 46 and 44,

01:07:26

I believe, for horse and donkey. It's 64 and 62 for the chromosome count. Just want to correct that. It's a good thing because I was about to go into the lab after the show and conduct an experiment.

01:07:35

You have to remember, humans at 46, we have a lower count than chimps, dogs, gypsy moths, silkworms, and pineapples.

01:07:44

Just a little side fact. Okay, there are four questions that I deal with in my book that kind of start at the beginning that are the most important ones that people encounter.

01:07:56

Where did Cain get his wife? For some reason, the unbelievers seem to think that that stumps us.

01:08:04

In fact, I'll share a funny one. I was doing radio in North Carolina when I lived there probably 15 years ago on a secular station and doing

01:08:11

Question and Answer. When I met with the host before the radio show started, he asked, what kind of questions are they going to get asked?

01:08:17

I said, one of the questions I know I'm going to get asked is, where did Cain get his wife? He laughed and said, that's the stupidest question. No third caller asked that question.

01:08:27

Third caller asked that question. So there are four up front. This is now my second book,

01:08:32

Answers for the Hope that's in You. There are four questions up front that I deal with in depth because they're some of the ones that are most critical.

01:08:39

Cain's wife is the first one. The second one is, what happens if the guy in the jungle never heard the gospel?

01:08:44

Does he go to hell? That's a question that challenges Christians and I've got a reasonably concise answer for that in about four or five pages.

01:08:51

The third question is, why do bad things happen to good people? That's again answered in depth because that's a question that Christians get challenged on all the time.

01:09:00

And the fourth one is really a whole lot of materialist things like, I only believe what I can see. Faith is for fools. The materialist worldview viewpoint.

01:09:07

Everything is relative. There are no absolutes. It goes on and on like that. Well I know that the second and third answer is, they don't and they don't.

01:09:14

They don't and they don't. Exactly. Not necessarily for the reasons that people may think.

01:09:19

Some people, in fact, there are multitudes of Roman Catholics who would say that the innocent poor native in the jungle that never heard the gospel will be going to heaven because of Vatican II's introduction of a more milder, kinder, and gentler understanding of invincible ignorance.

01:09:45

And they would that if men respond favorably to God according to the light that they have, that they will be in heaven of course likely going through purgatory first according to the

01:10:02

Catholic understanding. But you also have modern evangelicals saying the same thing. You have, you know, of course mainline

01:10:11

Protestants. Many of them don't even believe that you have to have any belief or understanding of the gospel.

01:10:17

In fact, some would even question whether you are a Christian if you do believe in the exclusive claims of Christ.

01:10:24

I'm going to back, Chris, to the debate you had in town here recently. Yes. And if you heard what the

01:10:30

Protestant debater said, Dr. Tony Costa, he said very very clearly, the one foundation for our belief is

01:10:38

Scripture, period. There's nothing else. And the Catholics said there were three different sources. So of course the

01:10:44

Catholics can conclude anything they want, but I would say to the challenge you just gave, it's simply

01:10:49

Romans chapter 1. It's clear. Men are dead in their sin, and they're condemned already. And they are not ignorant.

01:10:56

And they're not ignorant. All men know the truth. They suppress it in unrighteousness, is what

01:11:01

Romans says. They suppress it. And because they suppress it, they won't hear it. And they're dead in their sin.

01:11:07

So all men from birth are condemned to hell. God chooses by his grace to save some.

01:11:13

And don't ask me why. Now there are certain facts that men are ignorant of that require special revelation, meaning the

01:11:20

Scripture as opposed to natural revelation. So I don't want to exaggerate the fact that men are not ignorant.

01:11:28

I mean, they are ignorant of many key facts of the Scriptures. But they are not poor or innocent.

01:11:37

No, that's right. There is no one who is poor or innocent who is going to hell, because there is no one who is poor or innocent.

01:11:42

Well, I mean, obviously, there are people who are financially poor, but I mean by that, there's nobody who's innocent.

01:11:49

And we have to be careful because there is that emphasis in evangelicalism today that says we're all victims when in fact we're culprits.

01:11:58

We're not victims at all. We're culprits, exactly right. We're guilty. Right. And the other question that somehow escaped my mind about the third question that people pose that you brought up in your book.

01:12:14

Oh, I'm sorry. I lost track of what you're talking about. Question number three, the materialism was the fourth one.

01:12:21

The third one was why do bad things happen to good people? Oh, yeah, and they don't because there is no good.

01:12:27

There's no good people. There's no one. Yeah, that's right. But obviously, though, if you even want to take a few steps back and use the word good on a relative way of explaining certain people, comparative to overtly rebellious and wicked people, there are people who are deemed by their fellow men to be good who still have horrible things occur to them.

01:13:01

You have people who were like wonderful family members and members of the community and citizens who were slaughtered in the

01:13:15

Holocaust. Not only Jews, there were Christians who died in the Holocaust. You know, you have all kinds of things happen to those who are valuable members of our society who are deemed to be, on a human understanding of the term good, good.

01:13:30

In fact, very good, wonderful, praiseworthy. Even Christians can find the reprobate among us who are praiseworthy.

01:13:42

In answer to that question, Chris, I posed another question. Again, going back to my apologetic method,

01:13:47

I posed another question saying, well, what's a bad thing that happened? And I use this example, and it's a great example, okay?

01:13:54

Johnny Erickson Tata has been extremely effective in getting wheelchairs into places in third world countries where people would never have a wheelchair.

01:14:01

And she's been able to do that because of her ministry related to her fact that she's a quadriplegic. Now, if she had never taken that dive and broken her neck and become a quadriplegic, that ministry would never have happened.

01:14:12

So is it a good thing or a bad thing that you broke her neck? And that's something that you got to say, it's in God's providence, and as a result,

01:14:19

God would bring good things out of it. So as a believer, you can say all things work together for good.

01:14:26

I don't understand it. I have friends that have gotten serious diseases and died much younger than I am now.

01:14:32

I don't understand it, but I know that God is sovereign and God loves us. And of course, the complete text that you were citing is all things work together for the good for those who love

01:14:47

God and are called according to his purpose. That's exactly right. So not everything is going to work together.

01:14:53

Things did not work together for the good for Hitler. No, not at all. Not at all. For most evil men, things don't work together for good.

01:14:59

You know, that's the flip side of the coin you were just mentioning, though, about what bad things.

01:15:05

But there are bad things that happen to supposedly good people.

01:15:10

But the question then becomes, well, how can you determine whether something's bad or not?

01:15:16

Exactly. And of course, this is not all there is.

01:15:23

This is not our best life now, as Joel Osteen says is possible. And you heard it here first.

01:15:30

Chris is quoting Joel Osteen now. Those of us who have eternal life have eternal life.

01:15:37

I mean, there is a life after this one that is indescribably joyful and blissful and free from a single tear.

01:15:48

So those bad things happen because even the

01:15:54

Apostle Paul said that they strengthen us, don't they? Yes. Don't they strengthen our faith?

01:16:00

And in fact, we are supposed to rejoice in all things. All things. Yeah. And we are to also comfort those who have gone through great loss through our own example of suffering and so on.

01:16:18

But as far as all the evil that occurs in the world, it eventually is going to bring, in some way, even if we can't see it this side of heaven, it's going to bring glory to God.

01:16:30

Yes, it is. And God will finally judge at the end of time.

01:16:36

And that judgment will be final. And men's answer to God's question as to why should

01:16:43

I reconcile you to myself has only one answer that's valid. Because Jesus paid the price that I could not pay.

01:16:52

Any other answer that I'm good enough doesn't fly. No. It doesn't work.

01:16:59

Yes, and looking at the passage that I was citing before, we have in 1st

01:17:09

Thessalonians 5, 18, and everything give thanks for this is

01:17:16

God's will for you in Christ Jesus. No matter what the circumstances that surround us, we are to praise

01:17:26

God knowing that he will work all things together for the good for those who love him. And what we see and experience on this earth is not the whole picture, it's not the end of the story.

01:17:40

Obviously all of the contributors to the New Testament, with the exception of John, were martyred.

01:17:49

And people would say, well, so much for that religion. Look, all of the followers of Jesus who are most prominent, who gave us the

01:17:57

Bible except for John, were murdered. Well, what happened from that? I mean, thousands have followed, seeing that example, and we have one of the largest world religions.

01:18:10

More importantly, we have the gospel that gives eternal life in our scriptures. Well, right now, if you just think about it, right now, at this moment, as we're sitting here in the studio doing this show, there are

01:18:21

Christians in the world being murdered. Right now, probably in some Islamic countries and war zones, that are being murdered for their faith.

01:18:28

Not for any reason, but simply because they're believers. And we have to understand that that's part of the nature of the world.

01:18:35

This world is dominated by sin. But we have that hope, that we know that this is not the end, this is not the wonderful place to be, this is where we are.

01:18:48

And being redeemed in Christ, then, we should carry that gospel forward into our culture. And that's what that first book is about.

01:18:54

How do you respond to the prevalent Arminian answer to that question?

01:19:00

You may be sitting at lunch. You're sitting next to your Arminian friend, who's a Christian. Okay. And there is a lost person or people on the other side of the table, asking you questions.

01:19:11

And the Arminian friend of yours says, let me get this, Charlie. The reason why there's evil in the world is because God so loves us, that he does not want to remove our free will, because otherwise, we would be all robots.

01:19:25

So therefore, since we have free will, unfortunately, humanity is going to have the curse of those freely acting, doing harmful and wicked things to us.

01:19:39

First thing is, you have an illusion of free will. You don't have free will. The illusion is a free will, because your free will doesn't exist.

01:19:47

Because, as a sinner lost from Christ, you will only do things that propagate your sin.

01:19:54

You will never do something that's going to be pleasing to God, because the only thing pleasing to God is to seek reconciliation with him.

01:20:00

And that's only through the blood of Jesus. So the Arminian falls short there, okay?

01:20:05

He also falls short in understanding the world itself. If you understand the world, if God brought judgment tomorrow, all of mankind is wiped out.

01:20:13

He's withheld his judgment intentionally. After promoting, after having

01:20:18

Jesus die and shed his blood for the elect, he's withheld his judgment.

01:20:25

Because if he did tomorrow, everyone's gone. But he's withheld it, because he's allowing time to progress to the end, when the judgment will come.

01:20:34

And the judgment is certain. And there is, of course, we who are on earth experience much more of the harm that can be done to mankind, the sorrow and grief and misery, that not only comes through the hands of sinners, it comes through the hands of natural catastrophes like tornadoes and floods.

01:21:04

And it comes through things like disease, not all of which are direct examples of the acts of sinners.

01:21:13

They are part of the curse, of course, of the fallen world. But God is the one that controls the weather, and yet you have sometimes thousands of people, many of them being devout and faithful Christians, being destroyed.

01:21:29

And you have all other kinds of things that I mentioned happening. So therefore, the free will of man has no point in that equation, if you follow.

01:21:40

Am I right? That's correct. And we can't control those things. I mean, weather is kind of one of the funniest things around.

01:21:47

You know, everybody predicts it, but nobody knows for sure what's going to happen. And it's because we don't have complete knowledge.

01:21:56

We don't have complete knowledge. Because we don't have complete knowledge, we cannot come to absolute truth ourselves. We have to rely on a source to give that to us, and that source is the

01:22:05

Scripture. You go back in the Scripture, you'll see many times Jesus said that when he talked about the tower at Siloam.

01:22:11

He said, those guys were all killed when this tower crashed. Were they more guilted than somebody else? No. That's just the nature of the world, because sin -cursed world is full of all kinds of things that are counter to the betterment of mankind.

01:22:25

Disease, another one. That's a big subject. Disease. Why do we have disease? We have disease because when

01:22:31

Adam fell, the whole creation changed. The Scripture says clearly the whole creation is groaning because of that one act.

01:22:42

And I'll give you a real example I like from Scripture, okay? We have the Arabs and the Jews in the Middle East, and they're never going to get along.

01:22:50

I mean, they're just going to be at each other forever. I guess you're not a post -millennialist. You're your partner there on the couches.

01:22:59

Sorry to do that to you. Yeah, we'll get to that later. That's probably not the show.

01:23:06

But my point is this, that conflict, even if you go post -millennial and say it's going to disappear, that conflict is a result of a single sin.

01:23:18

Abraham went into Hagar, and that started that. So one sin has huge consequences.

01:23:24

Well, in fact, all sins have huge consequences because the wages of sin is death, and men will die because they're sinners, and because they actively sin.

01:23:33

But Christ paid the penalty for that. We're going to go to our final break right now, and if you would like to join us on the air with a question for Charlie Liebert, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

01:23:48

chrisarnson at gmail .com. Please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside of the

01:23:56

USA. Don't go away. We'll be right back with Charlie Liebert, and always be ready to give an answer after these messages.

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01:29:40

Iron Sharpens today. Welcome back, this is Chris Arnzen. If you just tuned us in, our guest today is

01:29:47

Charlie Liebert, founder of sixdaycreation .com, and in studio with me is my co -host

01:29:54

Reverend Buzz Taylor. If you'd like to join us on the air with a question, our email address is chrisarnzen at gmail .com,

01:30:03

chrisarnzen at gmail .com, and we do have an anonymous listener in Indianapolis, Indiana.

01:30:09

Hi Chris, thanks for interviewing Charlie today. Great discussion. I'm certainly not a clever or wise apologist or conversationalist.

01:30:18

Oh, there you have Buzz Taylor to have much in common with. I'm only kidding.

01:30:25

I'm just kidding. Buzz is quite an impressively intelligent man.

01:30:32

How do I speak to my dear friend like a sister of 30 years who is an agnostic and sees no personal need for Christ?

01:30:40

Is there a presupposition on which I can meet her in discussion? I speak of my faith with her a lot, and when

01:30:47

God persuaded me of doctrines of grace and I explained it, she said, well, that makes so much more sense.

01:30:54

I prayed for 30 years that God would save her and use me if it pleases him. Any advice, though I know

01:31:01

God works in the heart, without and in spite of my clever words or advice.

01:31:08

Thank you, anonymous. You want to get to her presuppositions. You want to get to the idea that do you really believe that this world has no

01:31:18

God? Do you really believe the design in nature, the design in your body, just came about by accident?

01:31:24

You want to probe to the presupposition that God, an agnostic would say,

01:31:31

I don't know if there's a God or not, and I really don't care. Well, the question is you're going to have to get to should you care, and should you care based upon what you see in the world?

01:31:42

Now, the biggest reality that you can confront with in this area, and this is one that you've got to be careful with, is death itself.

01:31:51

You know, we're all going to die. Nobody escapes this world, okay? You can, as one of the people

01:31:57

I know said, you come in naked and you out naked. I mean, you're going to be confronted with your mortality, and that's something that in discussing the gospel, that's something you can talk about as to, you know, how do you regard your how old, however old you are, how much longer you're going to live?

01:32:16

There's no guarantees. I mean, I had six peers in high school, and four of them are dead, and the rest of us are going to go there too.

01:32:26

So, I think mortality is probably the best approach to an agnostic. For an atheist, I'd look at the contradiction.

01:32:33

There is no God, and then there's no relative, everything's relative. But for an agnostic, I would look more to mortality and the design in the universe.

01:32:42

I mean, it's so obvious that there's a designer somewhere. I'll give you an example. All the materials required for a watch are either dissolved in the ocean, you could find in the sand on the beach.

01:32:55

But we don't walk around the coast looking for watches. Because what? A watch requires a designer. That's Paley's argument.

01:33:02

And the argument simply is this, that the complexity we see in the world cannot come about by natural processes.

01:33:09

It's impossible. And recognizing that, you've got to say, well, then who is the designer? Has he said anything to us?

01:33:16

If he said something, how has he said it? That's the questions that'll come when the person's recognized that.

01:33:22

Now bear in mind, what we've talked about a couple times here today, that people are dead in their sin, and they can't hear that.

01:33:28

However, you plant seeds, and you allow God to work, and you pray.

01:33:34

Most important, you pray. Because God answers prayer, number one. Number two is,

01:33:40

God has to take that person and make them alive. They're dead in their sin. They're like Lazarus in the cold stone. He's laying there on the bottom, his body's decomposing.

01:33:48

When Jesus calls him, what has to happen? The Holy Spirit's got to come on that body and make it alive first. That's what

01:33:54

Jesus calls ears to hear. And that's the important part of it. Okay? So you've got to pray that the person would have ears to hear, and you've got to plant seeds of doubt in what they believe in.

01:34:06

And part of that is mortality, and part of that's design, design in nature. Well, thank you,

01:34:13

Anonymous in Indiana. And we are going to mail you a free copy of Charlie Liebert's book.

01:34:20

Always be ready to give an answer. And please give us your full name and full mailing address.

01:34:27

That will not be obviously divulged on the air. Thank you very much for that question.

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And that is being shipped to you, compliments of our friends at Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, CV for Cumberland Valley, BBS for BibleBookService .com,

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CVBBS .com. And before the break, Reverend Buzz Taylor, you were bringing up something about -

01:34:52

Yes. Shall I start with my confession that I made during the break? The confession

01:34:58

I made during the break, I wouldn't dare say this on the air, of course, is that when I was making my last point,

01:35:03

I sort of lost my train of thought. So don't tell anybody. But when

01:35:08

I was talking about, you know, looking at the flip side of the coin, and Charlie, you brought out the fact that, you know, Johnny Erickson Todd is a classic example of something bad happening to somebody that ultimately has been for good.

01:35:21

But I wanted to bring out the point that there are things that are happening, you know, bad things because of bad people.

01:35:28

And of course, the main one that people like to go to is things like the Holocaust. You know, well, here

01:35:34

Hitler, you know, was a terrible murderer. And all these people die, all these innocent people died.

01:35:40

How terrible it is. How can you believe in a God who would allow something like that to happen? And the answer from a non -Christian worldview is, how can you say that that was bad?

01:35:51

By what standard can you say Hitler was wrong? I mean, after all, you believe in survival of the fittest.

01:35:58

Well, Hitler was the most fit at that time. Yes, and that's a key issue, okay?

01:36:04

Let's make it clear what you're talking about is that the atheist has no logical reason to give anyone guidelines for morality.

01:36:14

Right. They cannot say what is right and what is wrong, what's a good thing, what's a bad thing. There's no basis, right?

01:36:20

Yes, and before you continue with that answer, Charlie, I just wanted to give a very vivid example of where an atheist was actually honest when faced with the dilemma of answering that question.

01:36:34

I arranged a debate several years ago in Amityville, Long Island. Okay.

01:36:39

Freedom Chapel on Route 110 in Amityville. I know it. An Assembly of God congregation where my friend

01:36:47

Pastor Jimmy Jack is the pastor and Bobby Lloyd is the associate pastor, but they were the hosts of that debate that I arranged between James White and notorious atheist

01:36:58

David Silverman, who is now the president of American Atheists, which was founded by Madeline Murray O 'Hare, an even more notorious atheist that is now dead and sadly and tragically in hell for all eternity unless she was somehow converted without our knowledge.

01:37:16

When the question was posed about how morality is determined if an atheistic worldview is true,

01:37:26

David Silverman basically said that it was developed, morality is established by the majority of people who happen to be living in a particular geographic area in a particular era of history.

01:37:41

So then Dr. White said to this Jewish atheist, ethnically Jewish atheist, so you mean if you were being marched through the gates of Auschwitz, the death camp, the only thing that you could really say in objection to this happening to you is,

01:38:03

I find this personally offensive. You couldn't say that it was wrong or evil, it's just that it's bothering you personally, and he admitted it, he said yes.

01:38:15

Well that's how the world justifies abortion. We know that life begins when the zygote is formed, when the sperm and the egg come together, we know that, that's real science.

01:38:26

But even a pro -abortionist or pro -choice person has to at the very least admit that they are guessing and gambling that they may be promoting the murder of a human life, because none of them can say with certainty that it's not human life.

01:38:43

That's absurd, that's completely, that's just absurd scientifically, because we know that's a human life from conception.

01:38:52

I mean all that one cell has to do is survive, nourishment, time, protection, and it becomes a full -grown adult, if it doesn't die for some reason.

01:39:03

And that's a process that's only reversible by what? By death. So the only way you can stop that process is to kill the person.

01:39:12

And this is where atheism comes out very clearly in this culture, or humanism if you want to call it that, because I'll call it humanism because that's the basis of education.

01:39:21

But it comes out very clearly in this culture because they say there are no moral absolutes. Well then, who determines the morality?

01:39:28

The majority? That's pretty dangerous, because the majority can decide pretty much anything it wants to.

01:39:36

Yeah. And let me repeat our email address, it's chrisarnson at gmail .com,

01:39:42

chrisarnson at gmail .com. And please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence, if you live outside of the good old

01:39:53

USA. Let's see. I'd like to go to one more thing for my book.

01:39:59

Oh yeah, definitely. I just wanted to, this is on, let me see, get the book out. It's on page 56.

01:40:07

I talk about equations to go to heaven or hell. And I just want to cite these for the listeners because I thought this was a pretty interesting way.

01:40:15

You've got mankind, and you've got God's law, and you've got good works, and they equal hell.

01:40:24

You've got mankind, you've got God's law, and you've got grace, and that gives you heaven, but it also gives you good works.

01:40:32

Good works moves to the other side of the equation. So mankind and God's law brings condemnation, even with good works.

01:40:38

It doesn't matter how good you are. I've had people tell me, well, I'm good enough, you know, I've never committed adultery, I've never killed anyone,

01:40:43

I'm probably good enough to pass God's standard. And the answer is no, you're not. You're a sinner. But with grace, you get heaven.

01:40:52

And then what? From that life, if God wanted to populate heaven with believers, the moment we are saved, he'd take us out.

01:40:58

He doesn't. He wants us here for a couple reasons. One of them is evangelism. A second is to do good works, to do things.

01:41:05

I mean, Jesus said, take care of the orphans and the widows. Do things to help your society, but believers first, but then the whole society has to benefit.

01:41:17

And it's something the church gave up, probably about the Civil War, maybe a little before that.

01:41:24

The church gave up that responsibility and turned it over to the state. Probably one of the worst things that ever happened in this country, because the state doesn't administer any kind of help to people well.

01:41:34

It makes them dependent. And that's the last thing you want to do is make people dependent. That's a whole nother political discussion,

01:41:40

Chris. We have Arnie in Perry County, Pennsylvania, who says, how can you explain to those who say that God, if he exists, would be unjust for punishing anyone in hell who had never even had the opportunity to hear of him, who had never met an evangelist or missionary?

01:42:04

Because when you are born, you're born destined for hell. It's the nature of your coming as a child of Adam, son or daughter of Adam and Eve.

01:42:15

That is your destiny. It's God's justice has to be satisfied. And his justice simply is that anyone that has sinned is condemned already.

01:42:25

So whether a person hears or not is really irrelevant. What's relevant is the fact that you are born in sin and you are a sinner by action.

01:42:34

It's both nature and action. Understand that both ways. Okay. The two -year -old that is dry, got a clean diaper on, just had dinner and starts to cry for attention is what?

01:42:46

It's a sin. It has no real need. It just wants what it wants as a person.

01:42:54

And that's the nature of sin itself. We want what we want. And God says, no, my law is pretty simple.

01:43:01

Obey it perfectly or you're condemned. And no one obeys it perfectly except Jesus. Now, people very often operate under the assumption.

01:43:13

In fact, some people even who profess to be Christians who are more of an Arminian bent, they operate under the false assumption that man is spiritually or morally neutral.

01:43:27

So you have these morally neutral people living in the jungles and in the deserts where they never hear the gospel.

01:43:35

And people are thinking God is going to punish these people in hell for eternity who otherwise would have embraced the truth, but they weren't given the opportunity.

01:43:46

And they believe that somehow these morally and spiritually neutral people are wandering around as law abiding, good and decent citizens of their own tribe or wherever they are, where they are doing nothing but gracious and kind and selfless and generous things to their fellow man, wherever they are.

01:44:10

But people who are born totally depraved are going to be sinning even if they never hear what

01:44:18

God's law is. Am I right? There's no such person as morally neutral. Right.

01:44:23

Okay. When you find the person that can say at a mature age, let's say 19 or 20 years old,

01:44:29

I've never told a lie. I've never stolen anything. I've never deceived anyone. I've never desired to have someone else's property, which are all part of the

01:44:37

Ten Commandments. I've never done any of that ever in my whole life. You'd laugh them out of the room.

01:44:47

You'd say, we know you're a person. You've done that kind of stuff. Come on. You haven't lied?

01:44:52

You didn't lie to your parents when you were a child? Didn't tell them you got delayed here because you couldn't get home on time?

01:44:58

Come on. You've broken the law. And because you've broken the law, it has a condemnation. Condemnation is simple. Anyone that breaks the law is dead.

01:45:06

And the fact that any missionaries reach any of these people, or some other means are used to communicate them the doctrines of salvation, like for instance, if in a more civilized area where you have

01:45:23

Muslims who may never hear the gospel from a missionary, but they hear it on the internet or something, where they find a

01:45:30

Bible. The fact that God rescues any of them is a gracious and merciful and amazing thing because these people by nature hate the

01:45:43

Jesus of the Bible and the God of the Bible. And were it not for his sovereign and electing grace and his regenerating power through the

01:45:53

Holy Spirit, even when presented with the truth, unless the

01:45:58

Holy Spirit were to convert them, they would still reject and hate the truth. The rich man in hell, when he was telling

01:46:08

Abraham to send Lazarus to warn his brothers, Abraham said, if they don't hear the law and the prophets, that they're going to reject even one who raises from the dead.

01:46:18

There's an interesting part of the Hindu culture has not been reached until relatively modern times.

01:46:25

And two things about that. Number one is Ravi Zacharias comes out of that culture and he's a great apologist. But more than that, there was a mystic, probably in the last century, maybe even the late 18th century, by the name of Sundar Singh.

01:46:39

And he honestly said a claim to make the claim that he was seeking God. But this is what he said after he was converted to Christianity.

01:46:47

He said, meeting God was like finding an old friend. I kind of knew he was there, but I never knew till someone shared the gospel, how he came to us.

01:46:58

So he was basically saying, the gospel comes in a way that I could understand it.

01:47:04

And it made sense to me. But God was obviously wooing him for a long period of time before he actually came, because the missionary had to knock on the door and say, here it is.

01:47:14

He's just died for your sin. You want to accept this penalty, this payment. And of course, that actually happened in the scenario we were sharing before.

01:47:23

Yes. About that poor native somewhere in Africa that never heard the gospel, that would have otherwise turned to Christ.

01:47:30

That's an assumption that we can't make dogmatically, that he would have if. No, there's no ifs.

01:47:39

Oh, by the way, Arnie, I think that we have enough copies.

01:47:45

I think you may be the last winner of always be ready to give an answer by our guest,

01:47:52

Charlie Lieber. If you don't, I have more. Okay. Well, Charlie, even if we ran out, Charlie, we'll make sure that you get one.

01:47:58

Thank you for submitting the question and please send us your mailing address. Thanks again for contributing to Iron Sharpens Iron with your question.

01:48:09

What are some more of, I mean, you said you listed four of these.

01:48:14

Yeah, four of the most important questions. What are some of the other questions that are very common for skeptics to present to the question?

01:48:23

One of the dialogues I have a lot on is old earth, young earth. And let's explore that for a moment. Because that's a debate amongst

01:48:29

Christians. A debate amongst Christians, yeah. Let's explore the moment. And I'm asked frequently, well, why are you young earth?

01:48:36

Why don't you just say you're just a Christian and a creationist and go from there and not do it?

01:48:42

And I say there's a theological issue, not a science issue. You got to understand, science is changing all the time.

01:48:50

Science comes up with new discoveries and new conclusions and new ways to understand the world around us, right? That happens continually.

01:48:55

That's the nature of science. That's the way it works. However, truth is truth. And this is my issue here.

01:49:02

My issue is pretty simple. At the end of the sixth day, the Bible says clearly, and I'll go back to the

01:49:09

Hebrew in a Bible says clearly, God looks at everything he's made and it is very good.

01:49:15

That very good expression in Hebrew denotes both completeness and perfection. So that God is looking at the creation and saying, it's very good, which means that there can be no death before that, because death is the penalty for sin.

01:49:30

That doesn't come until Genesis chapter three. There's no death before that. So my issue here is the old earth models and atheistic evolution and theistic evolution all have death as a process before sin.

01:49:43

In evolution, it's part of the process that drives it forward. In old earth creation, it's just part of the world because the world couldn't have existed without death if you've got millions or thousands or hundreds of thousands or billions of years.

01:49:56

So the death is present. So that's my litmus test there. And you're specifically talking about animal and human death, because obviously, even in the young earth scenario, there is death of plant life.

01:50:09

I'm talking about death. And death is defined in scripture as the loss of the nefesh, which is the soul life, which is animals and humans.

01:50:17

It does not include plants, pleats sides, plants don't die when you consume them. You eat the orange and swallow the pits, the pits come out.

01:50:25

And what that pit can grow into a new tree. That plant hasn't died, that plant's been consumed. And God gave us plants for that purpose, oxygen and food, because that's the only process by which we survive.

01:50:36

Photosynthesis. That's an interesting sidelight. So you mean the sounds of my salad screaming were only in my head?

01:50:43

They're only in your head. The lettuce doesn't care. The lettuce has no care.

01:50:50

But it's that long. And incidentally, that soul life does not include insects. That nefesh word in the

01:50:56

Hebrew, which talks about the soul and being in it, it's the higher animals, and it's the humans. So that kind of death didn't exist.

01:51:03

So I'm certain that Adam was very happy that mosquitoes did die. And also, you have to understand that permission to kill and eat animals only comes after the flood.

01:51:16

And it's because that lush garden was gone. All that plant material had become coal and oil.

01:51:22

And what was left was not enough to sustain the humankind that was going to come on the earth.

01:51:28

So God said, well, now you can kill and eat animals. But he also told us to care for them. We have a mandate to care for the animals.

01:51:38

And what about the fact that obviously one of the arguments that skeptics, agnostics, and atheists, and even

01:51:53

Muslims, and people within the cults, actually take advantage of information by agnostics like the apostate from Christianity who became an agnostic,

01:52:10

Bart Ehrman. It's interesting how many Muslims use his data to discredit the reliability of the

01:52:18

New Testament. And so what do you make of the arguments that, well, we cannot trust that the

01:52:29

Bible, being a book that is thousands of years old, is actually accurate today?

01:52:36

How could it possibly have been preserved? And you don't even have agreement amongst people who call themselves

01:52:43

Christian on what it teaches and that kind of thing. And they will say that there are thousands of errors or discrepancies.

01:52:56

When I get that objection, thousands of discrepancies? In the manuscript. I say to the person that comes to me, and I say, let's take one manuscript, whichever one you want to take,

01:53:07

Receptus, or whichever one, as the authority. Let's not go to the multiple manuscripts because they had to be reconciled.

01:53:13

But let's look at just one manuscript and say, well, what does that tell us? A couple of proofs of the reliability of Scripture, and some of this goes back to some of the writings of Josh McDowell, is the fulfillment of prophecy.

01:53:26

And I'll give an example. Higher critics in the late 1800s had a couple things to say about the

01:53:33

Scripture. One of the things they said was it can't be right, and it was written after the fact.

01:53:38

The book of Isaiah had to be written after the events that happened in the book of Isaiah. Because the prophecies are so specific, it's not possible for anyone to predict that closely the events that were going to happen.

01:53:53

Well, in 1948, those critics were destroyed when they found the Dead Sea Scrolls, because they found them before the events of Isaiah took place and containing the whole book of Isaiah.

01:54:04

Now, those same critics said, probably in the late 1800s, that it was impossible in the book of Revelation for the whole world to see two witnesses dead in the streets.

01:54:15

That's obviously an impossible thing, so the Bible can't be true. Well, what do we do today? We turn on our

01:54:22

TVs and see what's happening anywhere in the world. So the point simply is that any place the

01:54:27

Scripture addresses an issue, find, show me where it's wrong, and the answer is you can't.

01:54:33

There are no contradictions. There are issues, there are seeming contradictions, but there are no real contradictions.

01:54:39

When you look at it, you'll see that. And like I said, when I get challenged in my general context,

01:54:46

I always ask that. Well, give me a couple. Let me see what you're talking about. I've never had anyone give me any.

01:54:53

Well, I'd like you to now have the next four minutes to summarize everything that you most want to be etched in the hearts and minds of our listeners before they leave the program.

01:55:03

Okay, let's come to two things. The first thing is being ready to give an answer, okay?

01:55:09

As a believer, you should be maturing in Christ, number one. You should be growing up in doctrine. You should be studying

01:55:14

Scripture and praying. But more than that, you should be witnessing. Jesus told us that's one of the things we're to do, we're to take the gospel to the whole world.

01:55:21

And to do that, you've got to have a strategy for evangelism yourself. And that strategy has to be able to get to the gospel.

01:55:28

So my first book here, Always Be Ready to Give an Answer, simply says this is a strategy.

01:55:34

This is how Jesus handled it. It's very simple. You ask a question, it's going to derail you, it's going to take you off the subject.

01:55:41

You're going to get away from being able to spiritual things. You don't answer the question. You probe with other questions, like why do you ask me that, to get to their presuppositions.

01:55:50

Once you've exposed their presuppositions, you've seen where they are, then you tell them, let me explain to you why

01:55:56

I think there's an answer, and you give a testimony. You always give a testimony, because you're planting a seed.

01:56:02

You have no clue what that soil is. Is that soil ready to receive? Who knows? It doesn't matter. Frank was 15 years

01:56:08

BC for me, but that would come back. The seed he planted would come back. So you plant the seed, and then you go back to the question.

01:56:16

Now, for questions today, two things. Number one is my second book, which is called

01:56:21

Answers for the Hope that's in You. It's got 106 question answers in it. But more than that, if you go to a site like Answers in Genesis, almost any question you're going to be asked is going to be answered there.

01:56:31

So there's resources today with the internet to get to those answers. So the most important thing to me is to communicate to your listeners the important value of sharing the gospel through testimony.

01:56:42

Now, when you get to a place where a person is ready to receive the gospel, you've got to go to what

01:56:49

I call closure. You've got to bring it in. You've got the fish on the hook, as Peter probably would think.

01:56:56

And you've got to bring the fish in now. You've got to bring that conclusion. And if you think about Lazarus as an example, let me use that as an example.

01:57:03

Lazarus is dead in the tomb. His body's decaying. And Mary says he's going to stink, and he probably would, because he's three days dead, or three or four days dead.

01:57:10

And Jesus calls him out. Well, first, the Holy Spirit comes on Lazarus' body, makes it alive. Lazarus is laying there on the cold stone, wrapped up in the grave cloths, and he hears

01:57:19

Jesus' call. He gets up off the cold stone and walks out. That's man's responsibility, okay? Man's got to respond to the gospel.

01:57:25

There's a human responsibility there. And then after that responsibility, he comes out of the grave, and what?

01:57:30

He's completely bound up with these cloths. That's a representative of his sin. He's got to be unbound.

01:57:36

That's discipleship. That's a place where the church tends to fall down, okay? You need to take that new believer and bring that new believer simply into the basic doctrines of Christianity, to understand what's your daily practice.

01:57:48

Your daily practice is read the scripture, pray, look around you for opportunities to witness. All the things that we would do as a mature believer, we want to teach the new believers to do.

01:57:57

I do part of my teachings with Christian businessmen, CBMC, here in Carlisle. And that's the things

01:58:03

I'm teaching now is evangelism, and simply to share the gospel with anyone you encounter.

01:58:12

Well, Charlie, it's been a joy to have you back on the program. I look forward to your return, not only as a guest, but also as a co -host, along with Reverend Buzz Taylor.

01:58:20

Thank you. On Iron Sharpens Iron. And I want to give your contact information. I know that sixdaycreation .com.

01:58:29

And yourchristiananswers .com. That's sixdaycreation .com.

01:58:35

And that's the word six spelled out. S -I -X, right. sixdaycreation .com and yourchristiananswers .com.

01:58:43

For anybody wishing to find out more about the books that Charlie Liebert has written. Charlie Liebert, in case you're wondering, is a member of Redeemer Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

01:58:56

And he is a theologically reformed Christian apologist.

01:59:02

And, in fact, today we have all three, and the only three, reformed churches in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, represented.

01:59:11

That's right. I'm thinking of it. Yeah, that's true. We have Reverend Buzz Taylor, who is a member of Carlisle Reform Presbyterian Church.

01:59:19

We have Charlie Liebert, who's a member of the Redeemer Orthodox Presbyterian Church. And I'm a member of Grace Baptist Church, the outnumbered reformed

01:59:27

Baptist in the group. But I want to thank everybody for - I want to thank everybody for listening, especially those who wrote in questions.

01:59:37

Please don't forget to pray about Iron Sharpens Iron and our urgent need for donations and new advertisers. And I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far, far greater

01:59:48

Savior than you are a sinner. We look forward to hearing from you with your questions for our guest tomorrow on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.