September 19, 2017 Show with Bryan Osborne on “Quick Answers to Tough Questions”

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arntzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Tuesday on this 19th day of September 2017.

Before I introduce my guest for the day, I want to give you a reason to mark your calendar, not that every day isn't a reason to listen to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, but a very timely interview is going to be held this

Friday, God willing, that's September 22nd, 4 to 6 p .m. Eastern Time, with my friend

David Wood. David Wood, who many of you may know, is a

Christian apologist who primarily focuses his ministry of apologetics to the

Muslim people and also atheists, because David was once an atheist himself before coming to Christ, but we're interviewing

David Wood this Friday to pay tribute to his very, very close friend

Nabeel Qureshi, who just last Saturday entered into eternity with Christ after a courageous, valiant bout with cancer, and David is going to be on the program, as I said, to pay tribute to his dear friend, a friend who was

Muslim, who David, while going to college with Nabeel Qureshi, and as his friend, led him to Christ, and not only led him to Christ, but subsequently, eventually led him into the apologetics field himself, the

Christian apologetics field, and so, God willing, we are going to be having that interview this

Friday to pay tribute to this precious brother in Christ, who went home to be to the

Lord, went home to be with the Lord at age 34, and I hope that you share this information with many other folks that you know, who may be familiar with Nabeel Qureshi's ministry and David Wood's ministry, and we would love to hear from you if you have some words of commendation of how

Nabeel blessed your life, perhaps, through his own Christian apologetics ministry, or perhaps he's a friend, or a loved one, or someone that you were just blessed to know, and we are today very happy to have for the very first time on Iron Sherpa's Iron, Brian Osborne, and he is a blogger, a speaker, and an author for Answers in Genesis, and he also is a curriculum writer and teacher for Answers Bible Curriculum.

Today we're going to be addressing his book, Quick Answers to Tough Questions, and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time to Iron Sherpa's Iron, Brian Osborne.

Chris, thank you very much, it's definitely an honor to be here, it's a blessing. And in studio with me is the

Reverend Buzz Taylor, my co -host. And once again, it's great to be on the air with you. And I'll give our listeners right now our email address if you'd like to join us on the air with a question for Brian.

Our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com, C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com.

And please give us your first name at least, your city and state, and your country of residence, unless for some personal and private reason you are compelled to remain anonymous, perhaps you disagree with your own pastor on a certain issue we're talking about, or perhaps you disagree with your own spouse, or some reason you are really compelled to remain anonymous, we will grant your request, but otherwise please give us at least your first name, city and state, and country of residence.

And first of all, tell us, I typically, Brian always have my guests, when they are on the program for the very first time, have them give a summary of their testimony of how they came to Christ, what providential circumstances our

Sovereign Lord used in their lives to draw them to Christ, what religious background, if any, you are raised in, and so on.

If you could do that before we begin our discussion on the subject at hand. Oh yeah, that'd be my pleasure.

Growing up, I grew up in North Carolina, the Piedmont area, kind of very Bible Belt -ish, if you will.

Parents took me to a Baptist church, I was involved with RAs and stuff like that, and I got saved as a young child.

We went to different denominations, actually, for a little bit, hopped around a little bit, got a taste of Methodist, and actually charismatic in different areas, but eventually

I did a, I walked the aisle, made a profession of faith, got baptized, actually taught at the Methodist Church, so I got sprinkled, and at that point my mindset was probably more along the lines of kind of getting fire insurance more than anything else, and I would not say that would be the time where God really just drew me to repentance and to Himself, and it was just a few years later, 17 years old, driving home from church one night, a

Wednesday night, and I was riding in my car, and full rebellion of my heart, had my own plans for what I was going to do that day and that week, and as I was praying home, as I was going home, people praying for me at the church and other things, and literally as I'm driving down the road, can't remember exactly the train of thought that led up to the situation, but I was hit just with the weight of my sin, just broken as to how

I'd sinned against a holy and just and righteous God, and just broken, and I just cried out to Him in repentance right there, just driving down the highway,

Highway 85 in North Carolina, and as I broke down in repentance, confessed my sins, just called

Him to be Lord of my life, and it was a joy that overtook me from that point on, and my life truly was changed from that point, and really

I've never been the same ever since, as God has just done a radical work in my life in so many different ways, just been molding me, sanctifying me since that time, and so I mean, that's kind of my short version of the conversion story of my life, where God just broke me and called me to Himself and saved me.

And you are not aware of any specific thing that triggered that in you, that made you filled with such remorse and repentance?

Well, it was literally, now I'm 40 years old now, and I was 17 at the time, so it was 23 years ago, and I was driving down the highway, and I remember up to that point,

I will say this, I grew up in a church background, I kind of knew a lot of the right information, and I knew

I could feel God tugging at my heart years prior, and basically a few months before at this point,

I'd really told God to back off. I wanted to just live life my own way as a teenager. I was just a foolish boy, and so I was indulging in my sins, and as I was driving home, it was at that point, maybe just recognizing how to just indulge and rebel.

I don't remember the train of thought that led up to it, but I remember just being utterly broken, just never having the recognition of how heavy my sin was in the sight of a holy

God, like I did at that moment, and it led me to true repentance and a true calling out to him, and at that point, my life was never the same.

Well, praise God for His sovereignty and mercy over you. By the way,

I want to, on a side note, I just want to recommend to our listeners what Brian just told us in regard to his testimony made me remember the testimony of Evel Knievel, and Evel Knievel, if you look up his testimony on YouTube, it is quite remarkable.

He is giving this testimony in, of all places, Robert Schuller's Crystal Cathedral, which

I view as a false church. It's no longer in existence, but it was a false church in my opinion, but Evel Knievel nonetheless was giving a solidly biblical testimony of his salvation, and that's quite remarkable, and it reminded me, your testimony reminded me of it only because he didn't really know why he began to be overwhelmed with this recognition that he was going to hell, that he was a sinner.

Unlike you, he was not raised, I don't believe, in a Bible Belt home, in a Christian home, but he just really recognized, seemingly out of nowhere, that he needed to embrace

Christ or he would be in hell, and he radically transformed his life, this work of the

Spirit in him. But you say you're from North Carolina, just out of curiosity, the only places that I have spent any amount of time in North Carolina are

Charlotte and Boone and Blowing Rock.

Were you raised anywhere near any of those places? I was raised about an hour north of Charlotte, in a place called

Thomasville, close to High Point or Greensboro, Winston -Salem, just right in the middle of North Carolina.

It's a very lovely place, love going up there, I'm a big Tar Heels fan. My grandma instilled that in me a long time ago, and so I have that blessing from that heritage.

But yeah, that's the area. And when I was in Boone, North Carolina, I was actually there at a

Christian rehabilitation ministry for drug and alcohol addiction, and I was there because of alcohol addiction, and the

Lord used that place very powerfully in my life. Hebron Colony Ministries in Boone, North Carolina.

But everybody wore the tar, well not everybody, but most of the people were wearing the Tar Heels jerseys and so on, and I never got really a unanimously same answer as to what a

Tar Heel is. Someone told me that they thought it was a goat, a kind of a goat. But you know, what is a

Tar Heel? It's kind of embarrassing, I'm not really sure. I mean, I know for tobacco, maybe it's the tobacco on the hill, stepping in there,

I can't remember for sure. But yeah, I don't know if anybody knows, maybe that's just a trade secret of the college.

Chris, you're going to have to wait a little longer to get a definitive answer, I think. You mean heaven, is that what you mean?

Maybe, that's where, maybe. Hold on, let me Google that real quick, hold on.

When in your life did you realize that the issue of the creation -evolution debate was such an important matter in the

Church, such a huge divide, not only between the

Christians and the atheists, but even amongst the body of Christ, we have some huge differences in regarding to the age of the earth and whether theistic evolution is true or false.

When did these areas of thought become such a primary area of interest for you?

Yeah, I'll tell you, that's a really good question, and I'll try not to make the answer too long. For me, the part of the testimony here for me is that I grew up in a

Christian home in a lot of different churches, and I never saw the importance of this issue until much later in life.

If you go back in my history, I went to church growing up, went to Christian school when I was younger, graduated high school, went to a

Christian college, majored in biblical studies, majored in Greek and Christian education, graduated from there, started teaching in a public school, teaching

Bible history in a public school, a really unique setting. It wasn't until years into that that I was first really introduced to creation apologetics in particular, and also started to see the huge need for this, where God's Word is being under attack, where so many

Christians don't have answers, and the divide that's happening within much of the Church, and that was in my mid -20s. And so I'd never been introduced to this.

I grew up in a church. I went to a Christian school and never knew about any of this. Not really. It wasn't introduced really well.

And if I had not known about any of this, then how much so than many others who have not heard about this issue as well?

So part of the reason I could see the need for this, to talk about this, was because of recognition. Most people don't recognize it's even an issue.

And then once I started getting more into creation apologetics, just being honest, my cards on the table, when

I first got into it, it was all about evidence. More evidentiary, proving that we Christians are as dumb as you think we are.

We're right, you're wrong. It's kind of that more of a mindset for me. But the more I looked at this, the more I recognized the reason this is so important is because it relates directly to biblical authority and the gospel based in that authority.

Because if you can't trust the Bible's history, why trust what it says about salvation? And so as I got more familiar with creation apologetics, answers in Genesis in particular,

I saw that was the heartbeat of this ministry. And it was at that point where I really began to connect with that and also see the need to spread this message to other

Christians and other churches. So that was probably just around 14 years ago for me, when

I was really first getting saturated with this sort of information. I want to read just a brief portion of Ken Ham's forward to your book,

Quick Answers to Tough Questions, that we're going to be addressing today. Ken Ham says,

Quick Answers to Tough Questions is your handy tool that offers relevant answers to many of the pressing questions people have.

It is dedicated to upholding the authority of God's word from its very first verse and to answering the skeptics of our day.

Of course, the gospel is presented in the book. And this book appears to be a book for laymen, perhaps laymen of all ages.

And you have basically five major sections of this book.

We have a perfect creation. We have a corrupt creation. We have a catastrophic flooded creation.

And I make a correction here. This is six major sections. A confused creation, an evolutionary takeover of creation, and a redeemed creation.

Why don't we start with a perfect creation. What are you mainly covering in that section? What we're dealing with there is going to start with the foundation of how

God made the original creation, that it was indeed a perfect creation. One of the questions we get asked often is, why do we live in a world that's full of so much death and suffering, and why do we have to endure all this pain and hardship and see all these diseases and people dying of cancer and so forth.

So recognizing that God did give us a perfect creation. He gave us what he wanted. And we start there, the biblical understanding of God's original, very good, perfect creation.

And it was man's sin that brought death and suffering into this world. So this responsibility falls on man, under, of course,

God's sovereignty, but responsibility on man. And we see the consequences of that sin and the effect on the world.

And so we start from there, really start with a biblical foundation of understanding that history answers some of those fundamental questions.

And so I need to back up a little bit before that section, the introduction. Chris, the first thing

I want to do in this book is to tell people why all of this is so important. I am a speaker for the ministry.

I travel around 30 weekends a year to a lot of different conferences and churches. And one of the first talks I do is about the relevance of Genesis, how this is so important because these issues relate to biblical authority and the gospel based on that authority.

Because really, if you look around, so many people today, especially younger generations but outside of them as well, there are many who don't believe the gospel.

Why? They don't believe the book from which the gospel comes. They think the Bible has been disproved with evolution, eight men, big bang, millions of years, so forth and so on.

And if the Bible gets history wrong, then why trust it about salvation? And so we start with a foundation of this is ultimately a biblical authority issue, it's a gospel issue, and this is where the attack is occurring today.

And it's where the enemy is getting people to question God's word and doubt it and reject it, just like in Genesis 3 verse 1 when he did with Eve.

And so we're going to recognize where the attack is happening, defend the faith, stand on the foundation of God's word in order to boldly proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ.

And so that is the foundation. That's why we say these answers are so important. Yes, and you have a lot of people in the 20th century, and in fact they've been doing it for every century.

They mock the stories especially of the Old Testament because many of these stories that we as Christians, at least we as Christians who take the

Bible seriously and believe it is the inerrant word of God, God -breathed teachings that are found in there, but they are mocked because the stories are so fantastic.

The stories defy human experience and logic.

You know, the fact that we have the universe being created out of nothing and we have man being created out of the earth and we have

Eve being created out of him, out of his rib, and we have all these things happening in this section, the

Hebrew Scriptures, the section of our Bible. We have the flood, the global flood, where two of every animal that would have perished in the flood taken into the ark.

And people look at these as merely children's fairy tales because if you are not filled with the

Holy Spirit, if you do not take the Bible seriously, that could be a logical thing to think.

I mean, if you have not the indwelling of the

Holy Spirit guiding and teaching you and you're not thinking as a reborn individual, this is something that you might readily think.

And we shouldn't necessarily be overly condemnatory, even though we are obviously supposed to be disagreeing radically with the unbeliever.

We shouldn't be so quick to condemn them as being a reprobate or idiots, even though they may be calling us idiots.

Don't you think that when we approach this area of Genesis, we have to recognize that these are fantastic things, that if we did not believe in God, we would reject them as childhood fairy tales as well?

Yeah, no, I definitely agree with what you're saying there. And one of the things we say, I say in the book, one of the first chapters, actually the fourth one, two worldviews,

God's Word versus man's, and we say often as a ministry, this is a battle between the two fundamental religions of this world, between two foundational authorities.

Either God's Word is the authority, we build our thinking from there, and you do that, Christ is Lord, we take every thought character, make it obedient to Christ.

So either God's Word is the authority, or the only other alternative is man's

Word is the authority in some way, shape, or form. So either we submit to God's Word as our authority, or we don't, and man's

Word becomes the ultimate authority. And something we say very often is that people have the same evidence in the present.

This is not a battle of accumulating piles of evidence. You know, we creations got our pile over here, and we got this amount over here, and the evolutions have their pile over here, and whoever has the most evidence, they win.

That's not the debate. Actually what it is, we got the same evidence in the present, the same rock layers, the same distant starlight, the same

DNA, the same fossils. But we interpret those things differently in the present and make different guesses about their origin based on our different starting assumptions about the unseen past, based on our different worldviews.

And the bottom line is if you start with the wrong assumption, you'll most likely get the wrong conclusion.

I'm reminded of the story of an elderly gentleman who was sure his wife was going deaf. So one night he snuck up behind her about 10 feet away, and he whispered,

Can you hear me, honey? Nothing. He got a few feet closer. Can you hear me, honey? Nothing. He got right behind her.

Can you hear me, honey? To which she responded for the third time, Yes. Right?

Yeah, it wasn't her problem, right? Right. But you see, wrong assumptions, wrong conclusions.

And here's the thing. Secular scientists and secular people give really wrong conclusions about certain things.

Why? Because they're starting with the wrong assumptions. And you know what? It's no big surprise that someone who's rejected

God's word will believe that maybe life came from non -life, or aliens created life, or evolution is a good theory.

They're being consistent with their worldview, with their foundation. What we say is they have the wrong foundation.

They should be built on thinking of God's word. Of course, we recognize ultimately that is a heart issue. They're rejecting the

Bible. Why? Because they're suppressing the truth in unrighteousness. We as sinners want to be our own gods, so we suppress the truth of God and His word.

And so we recognize ultimately it's an authority issue, which is ultimately a heart issue. And that's why we use answers to give the answer, because the gospel alone is the power of God unto salvation.

Amen. You know, you were referring to Romans 1 there, and something

I still don't quite understand about Romans 1, because basically

Romans 1 is teaching us that there are no atheists or agnostics because of the fact that every human knows the truth but suppresses it.

Now, in defining that, it's hard for me to know, and I know that there's even differences of opinion amongst

Christians on it, but when somebody says that they're an atheist or an agnostic, do you think that they're actually lying, or is this something that they have suppressed so deeply and have become so accustomed to rebelling against God and rejecting

His existence that they are not currently conscious of it?

How do you define what Romans 1 is talking about when it's saying that they know the truth but suppress it?

Yeah, that's a really good question. I think that's going to depend on the person we're talking about, how long they've been suppressing the truth, how long they've been hardening their heart, how given over to sin they are based on their time frame.

Of course, people much smarter may have tried to dive into the depths of this passage, but I think it does depend on the person.

I think some genuinely think what they think is right, some use it as an excuse. I think the bottom line is a nonbeliever can't find

God for the same reason a thief can't find a cop. Does it want to? And I think ultimately that's really the bottom line issue.

We like our sin, and whether we recognize how much we're doing it or not, we are suppressing that truth of God.

The truth of God's creation screams at us that there's a creator. Our conscience tells us there must be a God. And we suppress that, whether it's consciously or subconsciously, because we want to do what we want to do.

And I've often thought about it from this perspective. You hear very outspoken atheists like Richard Dawkins or Lawrence Krauss, and you hear some of the things they say.

And, you know, part of my heart breaks for them in a particular reason because, you know what, if they don't get saved, and I pray they do,

I pray that they come to repentance, they recognize their sin, and they bow to Christ as Lord before they die, and they get saved.

That's just an awesome testimony of God's power and His grace. But if they don't get saved, when they stand before God, I heard

Richard Dawkins say that if he stands before God and God is real, he'll start asking God, why didn't you show yourself? Why didn't you prove yourself?

Why did you make yourself so hard to find? And he's acting like he's going to put God on trial. But in truth, if he doesn't get saved and he stands before God, as soon as he's before God, he will know in an instant that he is condemned.

There will be absolutely no question in his mind of how he will recognize automatically he has suppressed the truth, that God has made himself obvious and he rejected it because he wanted to be his own

God. There will be no question, there will be no arguing with God. He will know that God is holy, righteous, and just, and he deserves his condemnation.

And I think that kind of, to me, just kind of reminds us of why this is so important, but also ultimately, just to get back to that, really the heart issue that we, in our sin, we suppress it.

But when we stand before the light of the truth of God's Word and who He is and when we're judged, there'll be no surprises.

It'll be clear that God is God and we have been suppressing the truth. Amen. That's why you would have somebody who is considered by most people to be a genius,

Professor Stephen Hawking. He actually believes, as you were referring to this before, without naming him, but he actually believes that the existence of life on Earth began with aliens from other planets.

And here you have somebody who's considered a genius and even though scientific evidence completely militates against this notion, we have never discovered a planet that is capable of sustaining human or even any kind of life that's anything similar to ours.

Sure. And yet you have somebody that hates God and His Word so much and people like him that they would rather believe something as insane as that than believe in the biblical account.

And Reverend Buzz Taylor has something to say. Of course, you've noticed that it's much more prevalent now on the

History Channel and all that about aliens and I think that they're trying to put that before our face so much that after a while it will not be considered in any way weird.

Right. We're going to go to our first break right now and I want to get more into the creation as being perfect and because there is, as you know, debate that continues to go on amongst professing

Christians. I would even say amongst genuine Christians. I disagree with Old Earth creationists very strongly on that area of theology but that would tend to muddle the area of the biblical account of a perfect creation because you have death before the fall and things like that.

But I want to have you get into that a little bit more before we take any of our listener questions.

We already have several people waiting to have their questions asked and answered by you. If anybody else would like to get online and have your question asked and answered, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com.

C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com. Please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside of the

USA and only remain anonymous if it makes you feel more comfortable because the question regards a personal and private matter.

Don't go away. God willing, we'll be right back with Brian Osborne. Hi, I'm Chris Arnsen, host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, here to tell you about an exciting offer from World Magazine, my trusted source for news from a

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Reformed commentaries are 50 % off. Well, welcome back. We are interviewing today

Brian Osborne on his book, Quick Answers to Tough Questions. If you'd like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com,

chrisarnson at gmail .com. And Brian, if you could revisit the concept of this creation being perfect.

Yeah, no, absolutely. Before I do so, I just wanted to say really quickly during the break, I did go to the

UNC website to look up what a tar heel officially was. And just to set your mind at ease, they have no set understanding of its origin either.

They have a few different theories, but nothing absolute. So nobody technically knows, not even

UNC Chapel Hill. So you're not alone, brother. But back to the idea of a perfect creation.

One of the introductory chapters we have is why do Bible believers believe creation?

And the fundamental answer to that is because that's what the Bible teaches. And if we look at the straightforward biblical teaching of creation,

God made it originally perfect. He called it very good. It was good to God other than perfection.

And so he gave mankind what he wanted for them. And this is so important because what the

Bible says for us is that after he made that perfect creation and then gave them the tree of knowledge and the option to obey or disobey, death was therefore set as a consequence.

You will surely die if you disobey me. And we know from the Bible, it teaches from beginning to end, that death entered this world as a result of Adam's sin.

Death is a consequence. It's an intrusion on God's perfect creation, which, as you know, will one day be dealt with and thrown into the lake of fire when

Christ returns. There will be no more death, no more suffering, no more bloodshed, back to its perfect state. And so we see this clear biblical teaching of death and the consequence for sin and so forth.

And that has ramifications for how we understand so many different things, which I'm sure we're going to get to.

But the Bible is clear that God gave us this perfected state in the beginning. Now, as I hinted at earlier, the old earth creationists, those who actually believe in the inerrancy of the

Bible, they would say that this perfect creation would only be referring to sin specifically because they believe that death occurred amongst animal life and plant life prior to the fall.

And this is one of the areas where there is a huge divide between the old earth and young earth creationists.

And why would this, in your opinion, be a violation of proper exegesis to say that the creation is perfect and we're only speaking about sin and it has nothing to do with the death of animal and plant life and it only is in regard to the introduction of the death of humans?

Yeah, biblically speaking, we don't see the death of an animal until after Adam sinned. That would be one thing you see there.

After they sinned, then God comes and kills an animal. He sheds His blood to make clothing for Adam and Eve. He really shed

His blood to cover their sin and their shame. Of course, that's a picture of Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God, who has shed His blood to cover our sin and our shame.

One thing to think about, if you had millions of years of animal death before sin, and then when

Christ returns, He returns creation back to its original perfect state, does that mean animals still die when He returns? Is there still bloodshed?

Is that still happening on the Earth? That would be a conundrum. Also, I think when you look at the passages that deal with Romans 5, 1

Corinthians 15, talk about through man's sin and the world's death as a consequence, Romans 8 .22, that sin affected everything.

All of creation is groaning in pain as a result of what? Of Adam's sin. It affected all of creation.

It affected the man, mankind. It affected animals. It affected dirt. It affected everything. And I know many do try to jump through hermeneutical gymnastics to try to make it fit within the biblical text, but it's not naturally there.

You're definitely always kind of twisting and prodding to try to get this idea imported into the text.

People often ask us as a ministry, they'll put it like this, well, couldn't God have used evolution if He wanted to in millions of years?

Chris, our answer is commonly, yes, He could have, because He's God. He can do whatever He wants. The question is not what

God could have done. The question is what did He say He did? And the clear text within the context of many different passages points to this very perfect creation, man bringing death and suffering into this world.

Death as a consequence affecting all of creation. Death will be one day dealt with when

Christ returns. And so that context, overarching concept, the metanarrative, if you will, of the individual text all point to that clear truth.

And you can try to twist it to fit with man's ideas, but you're going to change or affect multiple doctrines in doing so, which we'll probably touch on as we go through.

And therefore there were no carnivores before the fall. Yep. And it's obviously death is only speaking about animals and humans.

It's not referring to vegetation, because obviously the animals and Adam and Eve ate vegetables and plant life.

That's right, and plants don't die in the biblical sense that we think of, the biblical understanding of death. They don't have the nefesh in them, the soul, like animals or humans.

And we can understand this instinctively. There's a good analogy, if you're walking in the woods and you see a dead deer, and it's kind of decomposing, it's halfway rotten, and you're walking with your spouse, and you'll say to your spouse, hey, let's sit on that dead deer for a rest.

That'd be weird. That'd also be the end of the marriage, probably. That's right, yeah.

So if you see a tree that's fallen over and it's rotted out, but it's still sturdy enough to hold you, we have no qualms whatsoever sitting on that fallen tree, because it's not dead in the biblical sense.

It was never alive in the biblical sense. So there's a distinct difference between how we understand plant life and, of course, animal and human life.

So in the Bible, it has the nefesh, the breath of God, and that's the distinct difference we see in the text.

All right, let's go to some of our questions. We have Bruce in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who says, my question for Brian Osborne is, is there any truth to the assertion that Charles Darwin, on his deathbed, may have renewed his faith and renounced evolution?

Yeah, that's a popular tale. We definitely hear a lot of. Dr. Tommy Mitchell, another speaker for the ministry, did a whole in -depth series on this, and he did a lot of reading into this.

Basically, what we found in the in -depth research is, no, most likely that is not true.

It seems to be an old wives' tale that's been passed down. It'd be great if it was. Obviously, we hope that it's true. Whether it was, you know, in private between him and Christ or out loud to someone he loved and cared about that he did repent and truly confessed

Christ as Lord, that would be wonderful. But there's no actual record of it.

It's something that was invented by someone who's a little excited to have that as a point to share, but does not have a root in history, unfortunately.

Yeah, I actually heard that myth repeated at a Bible conference that I was recently at.

It wasn't by one of the speakers. It was by somebody who was in attendance who got up to a microphone and made that announcement.

But thank you, Bruce, in Pittsburgh. Thanks, Bruce. Please give us your full mailing address in Pittsburgh so we can have

Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service ship you a free copy of Quick Answers to Tough Questions by our guest

Brian Osborne and Bodie Hodge, who we've had on this program. I believe

Bodie is Ken Ham's son -in -law, right? That's correct. Yeah, yeah. Bodie's a great guy. I enjoy working with him on the book.

That's another speaker and writer. It was great to tag team with him to put this thing together.

Great. And we have Daniel in San Jose, California, who says,

Thank you for having this discussion, brothers. Can you ask Brian Osborne what motivated him to engage in apologetics, especially with Answers in Genesis?

We already touched on that to a bit, but you can expand on that. Also, where has he seen the most growth or breakthrough as far as reaching people with his apologetic?

Was it amongst adults or youth? Can you give detail on some of the questions that you yourself have been asked and struggled with throughout your time in apologetics?

Wow. There's a lot of good questions in that question, Daniel. By the way, I was just in California, got to see the

Sequoias up close and personal, which was awesome. I got to go to Yosemite Park with my wife.

We really enjoyed that. And going back to Pasadena here in a couple weeks, a beautiful area for sure. So I guess the first part was what got me interested more than anything else.

For me, it was a recognition of recognizing where God's Word is under attack today, to realize that really what the devil has done.

If you go back to Genesis chapter 3, the first attack on God's Word was when the devil said to Eve, did

God really say? It was very clever because what he was doing was getting her to question God's Word, to doubt

God's Word, and reject God's Word as a consequence. And the method was so effective, he's used it ever since.

It comes in different forms, but same basic attack. And we would say one of the main ways he's doing this attack today is by attacking the

Bible's history with the ideas like evolution, millions of years, and eight men, using those ideas to get people to question

God's Word, to doubt God's Word, and to reject God's Word. And so really my passion for this was born out of a recognition of where the

Bible's being attacked today, particularly in the Western culture. Because God's Word's always been under attack, but where it's happening today and equipping ourself and other

Christians to defend the authority of God's Word, where this attack is happening, so we can stand on the firm foundation that is

God's Word, not fall away like so many are, and then boldly proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Giving answers, show people God's Word is true, to then clearly proclaim the answer, Jesus Christ. And I will share with Daniel and all your listeners that that is what this is all about.

This is not about winning a debate. If you're just all about winning a debate and that's all that we do in the course of a conversation, then we've done nothing.

Because our heart should be, what is the eternal destiny of this soul? If I'm talking with an unbeliever and I convince them that evolution is silly and dinosaurs lived with man, the

Bible's right about creation, but I don't share the gospel, they're still heading to hell if they don't hear the truth of God's Word and repent and confess

Christ as Lord. So we're using all of these answers to emphasize the truth that God's Word is true so we can proclaim the gospel to people through the proclamation of His Word and the gospel,

God works and changes hearts and minds and draws people to Himself. And that's just so needed in our day and age that it's so secularized.

Our culture's so secularized. So that's why we do it. In the real sense, apologetics is just another side of sharing the gospel.

It's part of the process. First Period 315, always ready to give an answer for the hope that is within you when people ask, why do you have hope?

Well, it's because of what I believe. What do you believe? I believe the gospel and here's why I believe it. God's Word is true and defending that truth and proclaiming the truth of the gospel.

And so that was a little long, I'm sorry, but I get passionate about that because ultimately we're doing apologetics as part of evangelism of sharing the gospel to the lost and dying world.

Now, he asked if there's any age group that might have been more dominant as far as people being convinced of your arguments through, obviously, the work of the

Holy Spirit. Now, obviously, let's remove tiny children out of this because even an unregenerate child will sing,

Jesus loved me, this I know, before the Bible tells me so. If his parents sing it with them,

I mean, a child is going to parrot his parents and his teachers or her parents and her teachers.

But as far as teenagers or older adults, where do you find, if there's any difference at all, according to our questioner,

Daniel, where you have seen most breakthrough in your apologetics work? I tell you, the most, it's hard to quantify that.

I won't try to give an answer, be more specific, but I see it in every age group in different ways.

So with the older age groups, with the fifties and ups who are dealing with this more from their past parenthood, maybe an older parenthood or grandparenthood, they actually, when they start hearing answers to particular questions about dinosaurs and rock layers and ape men and whales, there are biblical answers for those things, and the importance of having those answers for their grandkids, many grandparents respond really, really well.

First, they're excited to get these answers. They've had these questions for a long time. And then they, of course, have their relationships with their grandkids.

They're wanting to be an influence on them in a biblical way. And, of course, they recognize, and we help them recognize, that many kids today who grow up in a church setting are walking away from the faith.

Research shows around two -thirds of kids who grow up in a Christian home are walking away from the faith by the time they reach college age.

And so, I mean, there's, you know, they recognize that they need to be helping equip these kids to defend the faith. So grandparents respond well.

Christian parents, of course, respond well because they have kids. They want to equip their kids and themselves. And I tell you, teens respond well because these are their questions.

I was just doing a camp for Missouri Synod, a Lutheran church over on Mackinac Island, Suffering for Jesus on Mackinac Island, and it's such a beautiful place, and it was 1 ,000 kids, and every one of my breakout sessions during that conference was packed out.

I mean, my room was standing room only, people standing all around to hear about my sessions.

And why? Because my sessions were dinosaurs, what about evolution, what about flood and the rock layers, and then, you know, one blood, one race.

And kids came to that because those were the questions they were dealing with. And honestly, Chris, you just give a good, solid biblical answer to those questions.

It doesn't have to be super in -depth, super techy, just a good biblical worldview on those questions, and we have really good answers, and typically any age group finds them very convincing recognizing that God's Word is true.

And that's really the goal of the book, honestly, in giving these short answers to help people recognize it does not need to be a super long answer to get a good answer to carbon dating, or what about dinosaurs, or the rock layers.

Just address it from a biblical worldview, some basic science, and we get really great answers to these questions that we can defend our faith and reclaim the

Gospel. Now, the notorious troubling question that comes up usually at any event involving creation and evolution, especially if you have someone who is a skeptic, they're always going to bring up, if there's enough time allotted for a conversation to develop, where Cain found his wife.

And obviously, that may make us uneasy because we know as Christians that must involve something that would later in history be condemned by God as incest.

But that's the only conclusion we can draw, is that that was what was going on there for the earth to be populated.

Am I right? Yeah, you're absolutely right. So, you look at the text, for your listeners, they probably know this, but just in case, you've got

Adam and Eve of Cain and Abel, and Cain killed Abel, then we look there and it says Cain went off and knew his wife in later

Bill of Cities and so forth. It doesn't say he found her there, but people say, well, where did Cain get his wife from?

And if you want the answer, you're sitting in Genesis 4, you flip the page, you go to Genesis chapter 5, and we get the answer that Adam and Eve had many other sons and daughters.

Actually, Jewish tradition suggests that Adam and Eve had around 56 kids, which, hey, when you're living for 900 years and you have perfect bodies, why not, right?

And so, most likely, they had many, many kids, and that would mean ultimately that Cain had to marry most likely a sister or a very close relative.

And people ask, well, wait a minute, can you marry a close relative? Yes, no, probably only after counseling, right?

And the answer is, yes, you can marry your relative. And as soon as I say that, people say to me, aha, you're from Kentucky, I knew it.

Yeah, first cousins are not prohibited. First cousins are not prohibited in the Bible.

That's not under the ancestry, the incest code. Right, but wait, hold on now.

We have to marry a relative, right? If you're not marrying a relative, you're not marrying a human, then you've got real big issues.

Right? Right. There's only one race. We all descend from Adam and Eve, so we all marry a relative.

Of course, we don't marry a close relative today. And there's a reason we don't marry a close relative today.

If you marry a close relative today, it's very plausible that you two have very similar genetic codes with similar mutations in that code.

If you guys get married and pass on that same mutation to your child, it's like they are born with a birth defect, right?

So we marry someone further away in relation to us to get a good gene to mask a bad gene to prevent that from happening.

So the primary reason we don't marry a close relative today is because of the mutations and the birth defects that result. But originally, that was not a problem.

Adam was made pre -programmed straight from the hand of God. Genetically perfect. No mutations in his genome whatsoever.

Eve, also perfect from the hand of God. And actually, technically, Adam was married to his rib.

Right? That's right. That's a really close relative. You can't get closer than that.

I never heard that statement before. So you can't get closer than that.

And actually, it wasn't until the time of Moses, I think as you hinted at a while ago in the book of Leviticus, 2 ,500 years after creation did

God step in and say, no longer shall you marry a close relative. Because most likely, when Adam and Eve sinned, that brought the curse and mutations started.

They started to accumulate over the centuries. After about 2 ,000 years, they got to a bad point.

They're accumulating so much they don't marry a close relative anymore. Makes really good sense, biblically and genetically, if we just start with God's word.

But as I said before, though, marrying a first cousin was never a prohibition in the word of God.

And every other kind of familial, inter -family sexual relation is an abomination.

But something as distant, which is still fairly close, starting with the first cousin and anything beyond that, is still legal in the eyes of God.

In fact, you have people for centuries in royalty that married their cousins and so on.

I know people today, actually, believe it or not, that have married their first cousins. I only know a few.

And there are even states, I don't know if it's changed, but there are even states in America that do not prohibit that.

Yeah, and so you got that. You're very right on that. And of course, we've got the biblical standard of understanding the history and all sorts of things, original, perfect creation.

If we just start from a biblical perspective, you see our problem so often is if we try to take today's world and squeeze it into the biblical text instead of starting with the

Bible and using the Bible to understand the world around us, we've got to start with the word of God as our foundation and use that as a lens to properly understand the world we're looking at, including the past that we can't observe directly.

So God's word should be our foundation for all things, past, present, and future. Well, thank you,

Daniel. In San Jose, California, you are also getting a free copy of Quick Answers to Tough Questions by our guest

Brian Osborne and his co -author Bodie Hodge. Please make sure we have your full mailing address in San Jose, California.

We're going to a break right now. It's going to be a little bit longer. It's our midway break. And as we always do, we have to accommodate

Grace Life Radio in Lake City, Florida by taking a longer break in between our two -hour segments.

So please send in your emails now. If you'd like to get online and have your question asked and answered, it's chrisarnson at gmail .com,

chrisarnson at gmail .com. Don't go away. God willing, we're going to be right back after these messages with more of Brian Osborne and Quick Answers to Tough Questions.

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If you live near Norfolk, Massachusetts or plan to visit our area, please come and join us for worship and fellowship.

You can call us at 508 -528 -5750 that's 508 -528 -5750 or go to our website to email us, listen to past sermons, worship songs, or watch our

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that's lindbrookbaptist .org Hi, I'm Pastor Bill Shishko inviting you to tune in to a visit to the

Pastor's Study every Saturday from 12 noon to 1 pm Eastern Time on WLIE Radio www .wlie540am

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Pastor's Study by calling in with your questions. Our time will be lively, useful, and I assure you, never dull.

Join us this Saturday at 12 noon Eastern Time for a visit to the Pastor's Study because everyone needs a pastor.

And Pastor Bill Shishko, the host of a visit to the Pastor's Study is going to be my next

Iron Sharpens Iron Pastor's Luncheon keynote speaker that is

Thursday, October 26th from 11 am to 2 pm at the Carlisle Fire and Rescue Banquet Hall and also speaking at this event is

Pennsylvania State Representative Stephen Bloom who is also a candidate for Congress and if you are a pastor, a deacon, an elder which in my understanding of church polity an elder and a pastor are the same office but I know that some of you differentiate the two but if you're a church leader of any kind or a parachurch leader of any kind you are welcome to attend this free

Pastor's Luncheon October 26th 11 am to 2 pm in Carlisle, Pennsylvania and not only are you going to be fed physically with delicious food by our friends at Firehouse Subs who are catering this event at no charge to our

Iron Sharpens Iron budget here but you are also going to be fed spiritually by the speakers and you're also going to leave the event with a sack filled with perhaps as many as a couple of dozen brand new

Christian books donated by the major Christian publishers all over the

United States and in the United Kingdom with very few exceptions the most memorable names in Christian publishing typically every year give us a book of my choosing for every pastor that attends so you will be having quite a number of free gifts that you'll be leaving with and this is all free of charge and nothing is sold there at the event that is a rule that my wife my late wife came up with many years ago this is her brainchild and the reason we started the

Pastor's Luncheon is because my precious late wife realized that I had many friends in the ministry due to my work in Christian radio and she said that instead of exchanging

Christmas gifts we should start a tradition where we treat my pastor friends to lunch and this grew into a huge event with sometimes over 100 people attending which required corporate sponsorship and so on and this has been going on since the 90s this event and I relaunched it after moving here from New York to Pennsylvania and so there's no ulterior motive we're not selling you

Amway products or some kind of pyramid scheme you are merely going to be there as a gift from Iron Sharpens Iron Radio to hear

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Visit to the Pastor study and to eat well and to receive all these free books and CDs and DVDs that we will be giving you please email me if you'd like to attend at chrisarnson at gmail dot com this is for men only by the way men in ministry leadership and you don't have to be specifically a pastor but a man in ministry leadership please email me at chrisarnson at gmail dot com chrisarnson at gmail dot com and put pastors luncheon in the subject line and let me know if you would like to register for that and that is as I said

Thursday October 26th from 11 a .m.

to 2 p .m. coming up before that we have the

Gospel of the Reformation a 500th anniversary celebration being conducted by the Word of Truth Church in Farmingville, Long Island, New York in cooperation with Long Island Spurgeon Fellowship the keynote speaker is my very good friend

Dr. Tony Costa of Toronto Baptist Seminary who is their professor of apologetics and Islam that's going to be held

Friday September 29th and Saturday September 30th at the Word of Truth Church in Farmingville, Long Island if you would like more information on that event which is free of charge go to wotchurch .com

W -O -T which stands for wordoftruthchurch .com wotchurch .com or call 631 -806 -0614 631 -806 -0614 the very next day

Sunday October 1st at 11 a .m. the aforementioned Dr. Tony Costa from Toronto Baptist Seminary will also be speaking at Hope Reformed Baptist Church of Medford, Long Island, New York and if you'd like to attend that Sunday morning worship service go to hopereformedli .net

for more details hopereformedli from longisland .net hopereformedli .net

or call 631 -696 -5711 631 -696 -5711 after that the

Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals is having their annual Quaker Town Conference on Reformed Theology at the

Grace Bible Fellowship Church in Quaker Town, Pennsylvania that's November 17th through the 18th on the theme

For Still Our Ancient Foe a reference to Satan in that classic Reformation hymn by Martin Luther A Mighty Fortress the speakers include

Kent Hughes Peter Jones Tom Nettles Dennis Cahill and Scott Oliphant if you'd like to register go to alliancenet .org

alliancenet .org click on events and then click on Quaker Town Conference on Reformed Theology then coming up in January from the 17th through the 20th the

G3 Conference returns to Atlanta, Georgia the G3 standing for Grace, Gospel, and Glory and this coming

January the theme is Knowing God a Biblical Understanding of a Discipleship the 17th of January will be exclusively a

Spanish speaking edition of the conference and from the 18th to the 20th is exclusively an English speaking edition of the conference featuring

Stephen Lawson Votie Balcom Phil Johnson Keith Getty HB Charles Jr Tim Challies Josh Bice James White Tom Askell Anthony Mathenia Michael Kruger David Miller Paul Tripp Todd Friel Derek Thomas Martha Peace and Justin Peters if you'd like to register go to g3conference .com

g3conference .com and please make sure you tell all of these organizations having these events that you heard about them from Chris Arnzen on Iron, Sharp, and Zion radio and I plan on being at all of the events that I just mentioned with an

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God in those areas then please consider donating to us if you do indeed want us to remain on the air well now we are back to our discussion with our guest

Brian Osborne we are discussing his book Quick Answers to Tough Questions and let me go to another questioner in our audience let's see we have we have

David David in Ada, Ohio and I have to enlarge

David's question because the font is very small so here we go we are enlarging the font and the question is

I have been wondering if Adam and Eve could have conceived a child while in the Garden of Eden hmm if so that child would not have inherited the sin nature correct me if I'm wrong that said after Eve was given to Adam how long did it take for the fall considering the union of one man to one woman and once she was given to Adam they must have consummated the marriage the same day if so the fall must have happened the same day shortly after Eve was given to Adam otherwise a child could have been conceived in the

Garden of Eden if that happened that child wouldn't have and I think he's repeating himself here that child wouldn't have the sinful nature the fall of Satan and the fall of man must have happened in a short period of time i .e.

the same day to prevent a child being conceived without the sin nature just wondering what your thoughts are in other words he's saying that he doesn't seem to think that there was anything that would prevent procreation to begin before the fall but according to God's orchestrated purpose it did only occur after the fall but if you can have your own comments on his questions sure good question it's an interesting question it's one we have to use a biblical lens try to make a good guess about there's no explicit teaching per se as far as we do know that Adam and Eve were commanded to fill the earth so they were given the command to indeed fill the earth which implies procreation so it makes sense to be obedient to fulfill that command and Bodhi has a really neat chapter in one of his books,

The Fall of Satan dealing with this issue he makes a really good argument that most likely you can put the fall of Satan after day 7, probably within a couple weeks because his thinking and the logic presented in the book and also on our website and other places is that God looked down on day 6 and called everything very good

Satan had not fell yet, it was perfection he would call a fallen angel perfect it was perfection and then he rested and then

Satan falls sometime shortly thereafter and then he tempts Eve, she falls away man sins, and it would seem that would be within a couple weeks after day 7, why?

Because God had given them the command to fill the earth and given that they had perfect bodies pregnancy should not have been that hard to do if they were being obedient so most likely they sinned before the first full female cycle taking place so she could have a child and so the suggestion is based on that, just a biblical educated guess, it would seem to imply they may have fallen within a couple weeks after the 6 days of creation and the 7th day of rest that's just a biblical educated guess, cannot be dogmatic on that, would not be dogmatic on that, it does seem to make good understanding of the text, but just a nugget to chew on Now this whole issue of the time frames he's speaking at, a lot of this is mystery isn't it?

It is I mean, you know, we say often at the ministry we are dogmatic about what the

Bible is dogmatic about when the Bible is not explicit we are not explicit we can make some good biblical educated guesses but we recognize that's what they are if it's not taught explicitly in the

Word of God so always, always, always God's Word is our foundation and we may start thinking from there

Yes, and I'm assuming when David says I've been wondering if Adam and Eve could have conceived a child while in the

Garden of Eden I'm assuming he is meaning by that not that they may have actually conceived a child, but that it was physically possible and there was no reason why,

I mean other than God's orchestration and His divine plan was obviously that they did not conceive while in the

Garden before the Fall, but we have no reason to believe they weren't physically capable of doing that Yeah, sure thing, good clarification

Alright, well thank you David and thanks for giving us your full mailing address in Ada, Ohio because you have also won a free copy of Quick Answers to Tough Questions by our guest

Brian Osborne and his co -author Bodhi Hodge, so keep your eye open for that to arrive in the mail from cvbbs .com,

cv for Cumberland Valley, bbs for BibleBookService .com We want to thank very much

Master Books and New Leaf Publishing for providing us with these free copies of Quick Answers to Tough Questions for our listeners submitting questions today, at least a limited number of them, and we want to thank them for being so loyal and faithful to Iron Trip and Zion Radio for frequently giving us books that they publish and we have interviewed,

I should say, many authors from Master Books and New Leaf Publishing, so we are so delighted to be cooperating with them in Kingdom work

We have Sterling Vanderwerker Pastor Sterling Vanderwerker of Good Shepherd Fellowship in Greensboro, North Carolina Hey, look at that!

Tar Heel! Go whatever you are! He can't be a

Duke fan What is the most difficult question that you answer in your book from your perspective?

The most difficult question probably is dealing with something as technical as radiometric dating

To summarize that in 500 words or less can be tough but I think we got the job done which

I was really excited about just for your listeners so they know what we did in the book was we did answer every one of these questions in 500 words or less, which is basically two short pages, the book done by Master Books and New Leaf Publishing very visual, a lot of great pictures, they did a fantastic job with the layout and the answers are short less than 500 words, that way you can come to the book and get a nice, concise answer about carbon -14 dating or radiometric dating or about the age of the earth or what it can get his wife.

We have 33 questions answered in 500 words or less and so the tough part is making it concise at times so things that are more technical like radiometric dating can be a little tougher but we did a good job of breaking it down to the fundamental assumptions that drive the raw conclusions when involving things like radiometric dating or just the starlight or whatever and so that's why it's a tough one from that angle the biggest question that people struggle with as Christians from what

I found is the issue of the age of the earth it's interesting Chris as I go and speak at churches and I talk about how the idea of evolution is actually doesn't fit real observations and real science refutes the idea and what we observe when science confirms what we read in God's word,

Christians are excited about that and then as soon as I start talking about the age of the earth as the

Bible clearly implies is around 6 ,000 years old, that's when even most Christians start to say whoa hold up now, now you're getting kind of crazy on me and so for many

Christians that is kind of one of the bigger issues they're having a real struggle with so that's one of the questions

I deal with quite often we deal with in the book as well Well thank you Pastor Sterling please make sure that we have your full mailing address in Greensboro North Carolina because you have won our final copy of Quick Answers to Tough Questions by Brian Osborne and Bode Hodge thank you so much for participating in the program today with an excellent question, keep spreading the word about Iron Sharpens Iron Radio in North Carolina and beyond We have

Joe in Slovenia who says please ask Brother Brian to address the issue of the size of the

Ark and any reliably verifiable remains since it was so large and most likely would have been around for a long time after the flood recorded are there any extra biblical accounts that describe its location that corroborate the

Bible account to locate its resting place are any of the occasional claims of its remains having been found verifiable thank you for a great show and encouraging discussion that's an interesting question because I asked the same question or nearly the same question to one of your colleagues at Answers in Genesis and he does not believe that there is anything that would be believable in regard to archaeological evidence involving the remains of the

Ark but I don't know if you have a different answer to that I'm glad you told me what he said so I can be sure

I'm in line with it appreciate your ministry brother no actually

I would agree with that that is the ministry line as we deal with that issue we had that line for a couple different reasons

I'm sure he probably expressed these to you before but we recognize of course in the Bible where the Ark landed was in the mountains of Ararat not necessarily

Mount Ararat which is a dormant volcano which actually formed based on the geological evidence probably post flood and so towards the end of the flood and maybe even volcanic active after the flood which would be a problem if the

Ark landed right on Mount Ararat going back for a second the size of the Ark roughly about 500 feet long and 85 feet wide and 50 feet tall it was three different levels a huge structure

I don't know Chris if you've been to the Ark Encounter yet or not not yet but I'd love to oh brother if you get a chance it's so worth coming it's incredible you walk up to the

Ark Encounter if you're a listener I'll know answers in Genesis it's the parent ministry for the

Ark Encounter and the Christian Museum and so forth if you go to the Ark Encounter and you see the size of this life -size replica of the

Ark it just blows you away it's a huge huge ship it is not a bathtub

Ark no giraffes coming out of chimneys this is a real ship and then of course you look inside three different levels over 100 ,000 square feet

I mean you get tired walking around and inside we're answering popular questions like I was being asked right now but we recognize the ship was huge and then you think about after the flood you have the post -flood world kind of settling back into some sort of normalcy tectonic activity still happening still volcanic activity taking place that's going to make it hard for a wooden vessel to last even after it lands maybe still a bit or some post -flood landslides or whatever may be going on and if the

Ark landed in the mountains of Ararat and lava did hit it that's going to be of course taking away the wood and then maybe the practical thing maybe one of the reasons we find no remnants of the

Ark Encounter if we think about it the Ark lands no one in the family eventually gets off the

Ark they start to multiply but initially when they first built the Ark not a whole lot of plant life that's really mature, not a whole lot of trees to use

I mean so where would you go to get lumber for anything you wanted to build well, why not go to the

Ark and use some of that wood just sitting there and maybe for many generations multiple peoples went to the

Ark and used that wood for building different things, different projects can't be dogmatic on that, it wouldn't make sense though and then all the finds that people say when they come to where we think we found the

Ark or we almost found it or we saw it, but it's not a good picture there's things that tend to leave us wanting, there's no real solid evidence that they found remnants of it now we would not say that that would be impossible it is plausible that the remnants could still be around somewhere they could be found, we're just very leery of those particular accusations but when people say they found it, we're leery of those just in case, be very careful of that if it's proven to be true later on, that'd be great but that's not panned out yet and for many reasons, most likely the wood has either deteriorated over the last 4 ,000 years, that's a long time or it's been used in other ways or destroyed by natural things so all those things would make it very doubtful to find remnants plausible, yes, but doubtful

I remember I was captivated as a young Catholic boy before I converted to Biblical Christianity but I was captivated by a book called

Noah's Ark, I Touched It I don't know if you recall that or have heard of that book I remember the author's name was

Thor could it have been Thor Hiredall, I'm not sure but I remember that being very compelling to me, but then later hearing that that was most likely not an actual find of the

Noah's Ark and of course we know that the Lord and His Providence has kept a lot of these things from discovery because look what happens with the folks like in the

Roman Catholic Church who have turned things into idols things that were most of which are not likely even actual genuine archaeological discoveries yeah you're exactly right in fact

I don't know if it was Martin Luther, I think it was Martin Luther but someone from that era had said that after discovering all of the carnival -like charlatanry going on in Rome at the time where idols and relics were being sold, he said that if you took all of the splinters from the actual cross of Christ that were being sold, if you assembled them together you would have enough wood to actually build the

Ark I'm going to read a question to you from Jenny from Ben Salem, Pennsylvania and then

I'll have you answer it when you return she actually has two questions and they're both very good, I'll ask the first one.

When speaking with non -believers, the age of people in Genesis living lives close to 1 ,000 years of age is often mocked.

What is the best explanation that I can offer of why they lived so long prior to the flood?

And you can answer that, as I said, when we return. This is our final break. If anybody would like to join us on the air with a question for Brian Osborne our email address is chrisarnson at gmail dot com chrisarnson at gmail dot com please give us your first name, your city and state and your country of residence if you live outside of the good old

U .S .A. Don't go away, God willing, we're going to be right back after these messages with Brian Osborne and more quick answers to tough questions

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It just deals with where the attack is happening today. Well, let's go to that question from Jenny.

When speaking with non -believers, the age of people in Genesis living lives close to a thousand years of age is often mocked.

What is the best explanation that I can offer of why they lived so long prior to the Flood? Yeah, it's a really good question.

If you come from a biblical perspective, it's a really good answer though. It's interesting. If you look at the timeline and trace the length of people's lives in the

Bible, they live up to around 900 years on average. And then after the Flood, if you draw a line for the

Flood, after the Flood people are living for much shorter periods of time. It goes from 400, then just to 200, then just 100 years of age.

So something happened at the time of the Flood to change why people used to live so long. Beforehand they lived longer, now not so long.

So what happened at the Flood to make such a dramatic change? Well, we get some hints. The Bible says in Genesis 6, 13, that God told

Noah his goal with the Flood was to destroy the people and the earth.

Part of the purpose of the Flood was to wreck this world. That we most likely right now live in a junkyard compared to what it used to be pre -Flood.

And then also at the time of the Flood you have a genetic bottleneck taking place, reducing human population just to eight people.

Animals just the two of each kind. And so that genetic bottleneck causes mutations to accumulate much quicker after the

Flood. When they accumulate, then people and animals live much shorter lives. So most likely we're living in a wrecked world, and genetic bottleneck are the two primary causes for this shortened lifespan post -Flood.

Okay, and her second question is, another source of mocking from non -believers is that Adam and Eve cannot possibly be the first parents of humans because of the great diversity of skin, hair, and eye colors, among other diverse attributes of humans.

And that in fact there must have been many Adams and Eves to account for that diversity.

What is the simplest answer I can provide? Simplest answer?

I will start it with God's Word. Let me get a pretty straightforward answer. Before we get to that though, good question Jenny, by the way.

Let me just say this, it's kind of ironic that you would hear that because even secular scientists right now would argue that you can trace all females to a common female ancestor using the

Y chromosome to roughly around just 6 ,000 years ago if you just assume humans are only related to humans and not chimps.

I'm sorry, not Y chromosomes, the mitochondrial DNA for the female. You can trace it in the males in the Y chromosome to a common male ancestor who lived probably at the time of the mitochondrial

Eve. So even by secular estimations, the people we see today came from two people.

They have a different interpretation based on people being related to chimps and does it get different ages for that, but it's interesting to note that.

But to get the variations, all you need is the information originally implanted into the original couple, which would have been by God, and then you need some mechanism to later on create isolated genetic pools within humanity where certain traits would become dominant, take over those populations in those distinct areas.

So what you need is an event in human history where the human genome got split up into isolated gene pools to get those distinct traits.

Well what event happened in human history to cause that? That's going to be the Tower of Babel. At the time of the

Tower of Babel, God gives people, by the way, it's about a hundred years after the flood, Tower of Babel, because of man's disobedience, he confuses their languages and spreads them out all over the world.

And now you get isolated people groups. They're isolated by, number one, language barriers. You'll stay within the group that speaks your own language.

You will marry someone who speaks your own language. They're isolated geographically. Back then, no planes, trains, or automobiles.

When you're in a place, you're in that area, you're going to stay there. It's hard to travel. So you get these isolated gene pools where certain traits will become dominant for various reasons and take over the population, creating distinct tones of skin, distinct eye shapes, so forth and so on.

Really easy to understand biologically and genetically. It's not hard to do if we just start from a biblical perspective.

And just a little side note here, talking about this issue, some would say, okay, if we all come from Adam and Eve, then how do you explain all the people groups around the world with all these different colors of skin?

But let's clarify. Are we different colors or are we different shades? You see, actually, every person on Earth is a shade of brown.

It's mostly based on a pigment called melanin. Some people have more, some people have less. We all have different amounts, thus creating different shades, but all the same basic color.

And with those different people groups and those isolated gene pools, certain tones of skin will do better in different environments for various reasons and take over the population.

Really easy to understand genetically and biologically. And so some cool stuff, you just stand on the word of God.

Yeah, that was an excellent point about us actually being all the same color, but different shades. Excellent point.

Well, guess what, Jenny? You know, I ran out of books before, but we were speaking about chronology before, and I noticed that you are actually chronologically the first person that sent in a question today, and I somehow missed that.

So what I'm gonna do is I am going to trust in the fact that Master Books is going to provide us with more of these books when we have,

God willing, Brian Osborne back on the show. That'd be great. So I'm gonna give Jenny my copy of Quick Answers to Tough Questions by Brian Osborne and Bode Hodge, and this is definitely now the last copy that we have.

So we thank you for the excellent two questions. And by the way, we have

CJ in Lindenhurst, Long Island, New York, who said that Noah's Ark, I touched it, was written by Fernand Navarro.

Well, thank you very much for that, CJ. I don't know why I thought Thor hired all, but he was,

I think, an explorer, wasn't he? That name just seems to be synonymous with somebody that was a mountain climber and all that.

We have, let's see, we have a couple more folks here who have written in their questions, and we have

Tyler in Mastic Beach, Long Island, New York. Is it true that atheists in reality just worship and serve themselves in which mistakes, oh,

I'm sorry, in which makes them their own God? Well, you know,

I mean, I think if you really kind of break it down at a foundational level, I mentioned this earlier, Chris, you know, either we approach life from one of two perspectives.

Either we submit to God's Word, we bow the knee to His authority, and we do life

His way, we try to think His thoughts as revealed in His Word, or we reject the Bible, and the only other option is man's

Word becomes the ultimate authority, and at that point, which word of man do you go with? Well, as a person, you listen to different people, you weigh their opinions in the scales of your own mind, and then you decide which one you think is best, and that's the one you adopt.

So in a real sense, you become the judge and the jury. So in a real sense, you have indeed become your own God. You've determined this is the standard of goodness or morality or the life you want to live based on your understanding of all the things that you look at.

And so, I mean, yeah, at a foundational level, that's what's happening. It wouldn't be just atheists, though, it's just any non -believer.

Anyone who has rejected the true revelation of Jesus Christ through the Word of God and have adopted some other view of reality based on man's

Word as a foundation for that thinking, in a sense, they've deemed themselves as a higher authority than the

Word of God. They've placed themselves in the seat of God. So, and that's what we all do as sinners until we repent of our sins and confess

Christ as the Lord. Thank you, Tyler. And we have Jeff in Clinton Township, Michigan, who says if a literal six 24 -hour day creation account is true, then how come those who teach otherwise aren't considered heretical?

Why is the subject of biblical creation considered a secondary issue? Charlie Liebert the other day mentioned that there are three creation views that are acceptable.

Why are they? This makes defending the reliability of the scriptures difficult, doesn't it?

Well, yeah, obviously you're gonna have Christians who have different levels of importance that they place on things.

You're not gonna have unanimity completely in the body of Christ on how serious one person takes an issue over another.

Like, for instance, I know a friend of mine, the late Dr. Bob Cameron, now in heaven.

He was a very, very conservative African -American pastor and he took issues very seriously on matters like these and he was very outraged that the denomination he was in, one of the denominations he was in, not the last one, but one of the earlier denominations that he was in, was ordaining men into the ministry that believed in an old earth and he was very upset by that.

But I have friends that are my brothers in Christ, even some who I have interviewed on this program, who are brilliant and who have a lot to offer the body of Christ, but I disagree with them on this.

So where are you on this? Is this something that is damnable in your opinion? Is it just seriously flawed, but we can still accept somebody as our brother?

Where do you land on that? Yeah, typically when we're asked this question, we get asked it in a different way.

It kind of comes about more like this, are you guys telling me that if I don't believe, if someone doesn't believe in young earth and a six -literal dead creation and literal

Adam, that they can't be a Christian, that they can't be saved? And of course not.

We often joke, if you read Romans 10 9, it says, confess your mouth to the Lord Jesus, believe in how God's raised from the dead, and believe in young earth, in six literal days you'll be saved.

You know, that's not what the text says, right? We're saved by grace alone, through faith alone, and Christ alone, plus nothing.

So it's not a direct salvation issue, but it is indirectly salvation issue, because ultimately it's an authority issue.

And that's what I think the gentleman was getting at, is that basically, if we can't trust the Bible's clear teaching about creation, then why should we trust what it says about the resurrection of Christ and salvation?

And make no mistake, the Bible is very, very clear. The text and the context of Genesis is clear, that the six regular 24 -hour days,

Exodus 20 11, four and six days, the Lord made heaven, and the earth, and the sea, and all that is in them.

Jesus and Matthew 19 4 and 5, in the beginning God made them male and female. Every single biblical author referred to Genesis as real history.

So does Jesus himself. The Bible's clear on this. And so if we then say, well, the

Bible's clear on this, but that can't be what it really means. We're saying that God's Word is fallible, that it is not inerrant.

We've undermined the authority of God's Word. And so yes, it is a huge, huge, crucial issue.

And I think many Christians aren't fighting over it. They're not trying to defend it, because they haven't recognized this is an attack on God's Word.

For many Christians, they grew up and it wasn't an issue for them, and so they just kind of ignored it, not recognizing it's become a huge issue for multiple recent generations.

This is where the attack is happening now. It's one of the primary reasons two -thirds of our kids who grew up today in the church are walking away from the faith.

And so we do need to be like the sons of Issachar, who had an understanding of their time, and we need to understand our times, what's happening, and what we need to do to defend the faith where it's being attacked today.

I was just going to ask you, how much difference have you found amongst young earth creationists, such as yourself, you know, you're in the same camp, you're in agreement that the earth is young, how much difference have you had, and debate and so on, have you discovered amongst those that are that like -minded?

Just those within young earth creationism, if you will? There are, I mean, there are many different views in regards to models, and often what we say at the ministry is we hold

God's Word with a closed fist. God's Word does not change. We hold our models of certain biblical events with an open hand.

So, for example, if you look at the flood, the biblical account of the flood, the Bible tells us in Genesis 7 that the cause of the flood is found to the great deep burst forth, and the four gates of heaven were opened, and the rain fell forty days and forty nights.

Now, the four gates of heaven, or found to the great deep burst forth, seems to refer to subterranean water bursting through the crust of the earth.

That applies to the crust of the earth as moving catastrophically. But how exactly did that go down?

How exactly, what was the mechanism geologically that drove all of that, and what were the geological reactions as a result of all the tectonic activity?

And so, when we try to make good guesses about that, we create a model based on our best understanding of God's Word.

But those models can change over time. God's Word does not. It's found to the great deep burst forth.

Absolutely true. Now, what that exactly looks like, we're doing our best to understand that. And so, within the biblical community, there'll be different views of those models, but we still agree, global flood found to the great deep burst forth.

So, you'll find some variation there and in other places as well, but they're over more of those model issues, not the text itself.

Yeah, and I'm wondering if you would have found, I'm sure you have, differences of opinion on the

Nephilim and things like that, whether or not they were angelic beings or, you know, all these kinds of things, because there is disagreement on whether an angelic being could possibly procreate and things like that that seem to be a mystery availed over them.

Yeah, no, you're exactly right. Even as a ministry, when we talk about that particular issue, we give kind of the three prominent views and leave it up to, you know, the reader, the

Christian, to understand the text to the best of their ability. So, yeah, there are a lot of views on that, for sure, and other things.

I will say this, though, one of the really great things about working at Ancestors of Genesis, and there are a lot of them, truly are, but it's so neat.

It's a big ministry. A lot of people working here, different venues, the museum, or the Ark & Counter, or the writers, or whatever, and we're all here under the banner of biblical authority in the gospel of Jesus Christ, and since the ministry is non -denominational, then there are a lot of different denominations within the ministry, and it is just so wonderful to work with different brothers and sisters who do come from different denominational backgrounds, united under the banner of the gospel of biblical authority, to stand on God's Word, defend it, and proclaim the truth of how we're saved through Christ alone, and so that's a really cool thing to see here at the ministry, that even though there are denominational differences among us, we can stand on the authority of God's Word, to rather understand, you know, things like history, and origins, and creation, and the flood, to really defend the faith, to proclaim the gospel.

We can do that united as we stand on God's Word. It's such an awesome thing to be a part of here at the ministry. Do you have a personal, definitive opinion on the

Nephilim yourself? I do not, actually. As of this point, I'm a little bit in flux. I've probably taken a little bit of each view here lately.

I mean, over the years, I've kind of oscillated between them. I think there's some really good points on all of the sides.

Bodie recently did an article that I found very powerful on this issue, kind of giving a different view on the

Sons of Man, not necessarily just the Sons of Seth. It was an interesting take, and I thought I had a lot of persuasive power to it.

That's on the website, so people can check out answersingenesis .org and look at the most recent article on the

Nephilim. He does a really good job there. Honestly, there's some really good points on a couple different sides of that issue.

It's also widened out, and again, you know, I think you can genuinely look at that from different angles, and so we can there, but that's not the case for the biblical text, like the clear six days of creation, or death before sin, or stuff like that.

Now, Reverend Buzz Taylor. Well, I just wondered, I don't know, do we have any more? I don't want to get in the way of anybody else's questions.

Go ahead, just go ahead. I just wanted to hear a few words, you know, you gave the six -point outline of his book, and we didn't really go through, and I was just wondering if you could say a few words about those, just so we know what they're about.

Yeah, sure, if I may, that'd be great. Yeah, so the general outline of the book is we have the introduction, which tells why it's important, why it's a biblical authority issue, and that's a gospel issue indirectly.

The perfect creation is dealing with questions around the original creation, where did death and suffering come from, why do we see all this pain and suffering in this world?

Other issues wasn't really a six -day creation, why do we believe that? And then we get to the corrupt creation, when man sinned, bringing death and suffering, the consequences of that, talk about those sorts of issues.

The catastrophically flooded creation gets at issues like the rock layers and the fossils, were there dinosaurs on Noah's Ark, and stuff like that.

Also, we're talking about the age of the earth, that wasn't a literal six -day creation, which the text is clear.

If I may, a little bit of a ramble, but I want to say a little side note that's really important, I meant to say it earlier, and I just didn't get a chance to, and Chris, you alluded to it.

The reason we cannot squeeze millions of years into the Bible, because no matter how you do it, whether it's the day -age theory, or the gap theory, or progressive creation of theistic evolution, no matter how you try to squeeze it into the

Bible, you're putting death before sin, because the supposed evidence for those millions of years are the rock layers, and in those rock layers, we find evidence of things being dead and killed and bloodshed and disease, and you supposedly have millions of years of death before man, and thus death before sin, and then here's the key.

If you've got millions of years, you've got death before sin. If you've got death before sin, then death would not be the payment for sin, like the

Bible clearly teaches, and if death is not the payment for sin, then Jesus' death does not pay our sin debt, and we're still lost in our sins and bound for hell.

We just destroyed the foundation for the impossible, whether we meant to or not, and we deal with that issue in those earlier chapters about why this is so important, why we can't have death before sin, and why we take a stand on this.

And then we get to the confused creation tower of Babel, one blood, one race, and then the evolutionary takeover is kind of looking at how, today, secular scientists try to reinterpret present -day evidence of the secular worldview and reject the

Bible initially to interpret it from a different perspective, and then impose that religion on us, and then the

Christ -redeemed creation, how do we use all these answers to share the gospel? I've got another mission to you guys already, and it's my heartbeat, it's our heartbeats in ministry.

What we want to do is equip Christians of all ages to give answers to defend their faith so they can share the answer of Jesus Christ, because that is what our culture needs, that's what every individual person needs, is the gospel of Jesus Christ.

That is the answer. And so we answer their questions in love and truth in order to make a beeline for the gospel that God would use to change their heart, and that will change their thinking.

You can't change someone thinking to change their heart, but if God changes their heart, that'll change their thinking. And going back to the death -before -the -fall issue, the

Old Earth folks would say, again, that Jesus Christ did not die as a

Redeemer for animals, so therefore they will say that the only death that did not occur before the fall, nor was it possible to occur, involved humans.

And even those that would go as far as being believers that men evolved from lower life forms, they would say that that only would include the first human that came out of that evolution, but it did not involve animal death.

So how do you respond to that kind of logic? Yeah, well, I mean, people, when they make those sort of claims, they really are playing hermeneutical gymnastics.

They are bending over backwards to try to reinterpret a text. The clarifications of the text, like Romans 8 .22,

all of creation was affected by that original sin, including animals and plants and the universe.

All of creation is groaning in pain, wants to be fixed back to the way it was. Death is presented as a payment for sin throughout the

Bible, and we see it in the sacrificial system as a picture of Christ, but also related to just the consequence of death being the payment for sin.

The consummation issues, when Christ comes back, returns creation back to the perfect order. So there was death before sin, even with the animal kingdom, he's going to turn it back to more death before sin, even after he comes back, because he'll have all that bloodshed.

And then you got issues like, if that's the case, then God would have looked down on day six, after millions of years of death and suffering, and called all that death and suffering and bloodshed very good.

That's an attack on his character. And also that would mean he's the author of animal death, if that's what you believe.

He made creation, and death was part of his creative process. And so that's part of how he made things, full of all this disease over millions of years, and cancer and stuff like that.

And then also, I'll say this, the fossil record in the rock layers gives clear indications those things were laid out rapidly during a global flood.

But for millions of years it's true that a flood could not have been global, but it's just been a local event. You've got to reinterpret that. And then critically, if we all do not descend from a literal first man named

Adam, if we're not all related to Adam, then not everyone can be saved. Because only descendants of Adam can be saved, through the last

Adam, Jesus Christ, who became part of our blood, our relative, to pay our debt.

If we put our faith in him, we can be saved. But if we're not all related, then not everyone can be saved. That's a huge gospel issue.

And there are more. People go to our website and find so much more information on this, why this is so important, even at a deeper theological, exegetical level.

If you want to get even deeper into the text and parse it out, it is clear there's so many replications when we undermine

God's Word, especially at the beginning, with a foundational history in Genesis. We have time for one more quick question.

B .B. in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, says, I swear I'm not making this up, but have you ever heard the theory that Cain and his descendants came from a sexual union between Eve and Satan?

You know what? I'm not sure I've heard that one. Okay. Wow. I can add it to the list.

That's a new one. That's good. I'll get new questions very often. I appreciate that new question. I actually have heard of that.

There was some television evangelist who was known for being a racist who died not long ago.

I'm not saying that this theory is only exclusively for racists, but I have heard of it.

And I think two -seed -in -the -spirit predestinarians, it's a very small group of people, have claimed that view.

But anyway, we are out of time, and we want to make sure that our listeners have all of the contact information.

First of all, Answers in Genesis' website is AnswersinGenesis .org, AnswersinGenesis .org,

and you can also find the Answers curriculum at that same website.

And of course, let's not forget our friends at New Leaf Publishing Group and Masters Books, which is a part of the same publishing ministry.

Their website is NLPG .com. N -L for New Leaf, P -G for Publishing Group .com.

Do you have any other contact information that you care to give? Well, I'll just say you said the website, AnswersinGenesis .org,

that's great. They can get the book at Amazon or they're from New Leaf Publishing or Masters Books. But yeah, just using its resources, get the book, get equipped.

Chris, honestly, I made this book, me and Buddy worked together to make this book one of the most practical, useful tools a

Christian can grab, quickly read, and be ready to defend their faith and effectively proclaim the gospel. Because when everybody's busy, so we want quick answers, that's why it's named

Quick Answers to Questions, so the busy mom or dad or the kids who are doing sports and whatnot can sit down, read these quick answers, and be equipped to defend the faith to proclaim the gospel.

And the Masters Books division also has their own website, MastersBooks .com, MastersBooks .com.

And of course, you could always get books mentioned on Iron Trip and Zion Radio from Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, our sponsor,

CV for Cumberland Valley, BBS for BibleBookService .com. If you could hold on, Brian, I would love to schedule you for another interview.

And I want to thank everybody who listened today, especially those who listened, those who took time to write in questions.

Oh, by the way, Jenny in Ben Salem, Pennsylvania, our friend Pastor Sterling Vanderwerker of Greensboro, North Carolina, said that,

I already have this book in my library so Jenny can have my copy. That surely makes me feel a lot better.

Well anyway, thank you very much for your generosity, Pastor Sterling, and I want everybody to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater