TPW 34 The Age of Anti-Antithesis

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If you are not standing upon the sure foundation of the word of God, listen closely, you will catch the vain philosophies of the world around you, like a disease.
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Our goal as Christians is to have sharp swords, to engage in warfare, not to draw away. Our lives are lives of battle, war.
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There is antithesis, irreconcilable differences, and I want to encourage you, you can make history, especially in the dark times in which we live.
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Welcome to the Protestant Witness, this is Pastor Patrick Hines, and I think my voice is back enough to do a little intro here.
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My voice was completely shot by Sunday night. I've had a really bad cold, several of my kids have had it, but I'm feeling much better today, and my wife knows how to make this, like, this concoction of apple cider vinegar, cayenne pepper, and what else does she put in there?
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Some other really abrasive stuff, and you just kind of guzzle it down, and it kills every virus and bacteria or whatever.
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It really works well, though, and she's made a couple of those cocktails for me, and has done the trick enough.
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But today's episode of the Protestant Witness is going to be on the topic of antithesis.
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One of the things I've tried to emphasize with folks is that in our age of relativism and a lack of understanding that there is such a thing as truth and absolute truth, we live in an age of what
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I've called anti -antithesis. People don't like antithesis, but in being against the idea of antithesis, they are actually expressing the antithesis itself by doing that.
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But what is antithesis? Antithesis is actually the Greek word antithesis simply means contradiction.
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If something really is true, then everything that's contrary to that would, by definition, have to be false.
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And God is true, and every man is a liar, says the scripture. In Romans, I think that's 3, verse 4.
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Let God be true, and every man a liar. What God says is true, what God has revealed is the truth, and so everything that is contrary to it or everything that denies that God has spoken in scripture would be antithetical to that truth.
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That's really what this sermon is. I actually preached this. This was a sermon, and it's a real popular sermon. I've noticed it's gotten hundreds of downloads, so I wanted to go ahead and post it because I think it's a really, really, really important thing, especially in light of starting the
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Genesis series. I'm going to be posting more of those Genesis 1 to 11 sermons because I've not only walked through the text there, but also address a lot of other issues that circulate around those first 11 chapters of Genesis and all the worldview issues and everything else.
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And I really think that's the key to winning the future generations, is teaching them how to think in terms of worldviews and presuppositions and how to do apologetics and evangelism biblically.
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So, with that end in mind, I hope you enjoy this sermon on antithesis.
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Good evening, everyone. Please take your Bibles and turn to Colossians chapter 2. Again, Colossians chapter 2 for our scripture reading.
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Here, we're still laying the groundwork for the larger series on worldviews and world religions, and we're still laying that foundation of a
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Christian biblical world and life view. And this evening in my message, I'm going to cover just a little bit at the intro the importance of antithesis in the way that we think and the way that we approach the world around us, the importance of biblical presuppositions and the biblical world and life view.
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And then we'll move into just a few more facets of a biblical and Christian worldview. Some of this will be review, but I feel like as part of this series, it needs to be firmly laid out at the beginning before we go into all of the various isms and cults and religious groups that are out there so that we really do think as Christians and we are committed to being biblical
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Christians and we remain Christians and remain Christian in our thinking as we interact with anyone, no matter who they are.
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And as long as we do that, we can have the utmost confidence that we can engage anybody no matter what perspective they're coming from.
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Let's look at our Bibles here at Colossians chapter 2 and verse 8. This is
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God's word. See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception according to the tradition of men, according to the elementary principles of the world, rather than according to Christ.
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May God bless the reading of his word. Let's pray, please. Our heavenly father, we thank you for giving us your infallible revelation.
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Breathe forth in words that we can understand, in language that we can comprehend and take into our hearts and live and think by.
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For we know that your church throughout its history has struggled, has been more and less faithful at various times to the written revelation that you have given to us.
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We pray you would help us to divest ourselves of unbiblical thinking, of various philosophies and ideas and worldviews that are popular in our day and have been popular in the past that have influenced our thinking, that have caused us to be somewhat neutralized.
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Maybe not across the board, but in different areas that have made our Christian witness much less effective than it could be.
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We pray you would help us to think and see things accurately and biblically so that we can have a humble boldness in the way that we talk to people, so that we're not nervous, we're not anxious, but that we're fully confident that if we know the text of Holy Scripture and if we know and understand what you have spoken from the first verse to the last in terms of the basic elements of our understanding of the world around us, that we can not only engage anyone no matter what perspective they're coming from, but we can take them to Christ and preach the gospel to them and proclaim a savior to them who is able to save them from their sins and also to save them from the irrationality and foolishness of unbelief.
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We pray, Lord, that as your representatives in this world, as your ambassadors in this world, that we would think biblically and simply and accurately based upon what you have revealed to us.
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Help us, Lord, to identify and rid ourselves of unbiblical thinking so that we really do stand out exactly as you pronounced to Adam and Eve and as a judicial curse upon the serpent, that there will be enmity between those that know and follow you and those that know and follow the devil.
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And we pray you would help us now to that end, in Jesus' name. Amen. As I said, before we get into all of the worldviews, cults, and counterfeits of Christianity, we need to have a thorough and biblical worldview ourselves.
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And this is the second part of that section of our current series. And as I've emphasized to you all from Scripture, everyone has a worldview.
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Everyone has a network of, please hear me, untested and untestable presuppositions through which they view and interpret everything in their lives.
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Remember that presuppositions together form a person's worldview. And only biblical presuppositions do not destroy the intelligibility of human experience.
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All forms of non -Christianity, whatever they might be, theistic forms, non -theistic forms,
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Christian counterfeit forms like the Mormons and the Jehovah's Witnesses, all forms of non -Christianity will have the same problems with them.
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They will all be arbitrary, inconsistent, have unworkable and contradictory consequences, and will not allow for the possibility of doing science and of having an intelligible view of the world around us.
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Just remember that everyone you talk to, no matter how loudly they tell you that they are neutral, they have a worldview that they are committed to.
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And that nobody is neutral when it comes to Christ and his word in Scripture. If you are not standing upon the sure foundation of the word of God, listen closely, you will catch the vain philosophies of the world around you, like a disease.
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If you're not deliberately biblical in the way you look at things, you will catch the philosophies around you.
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Our experience comes first in a lot of ways. If you grow up and are not taught to think like a Christian, you will catch your worldview.
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You will embrace the ideas that are popular around you.
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If we are not deliberate, and I love this phrase, it was coined by Van Tilbons and I've heard other presuppositionalists use it, if we are not epistemologically self -conscious, we are going to fall prey to the world around us.
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We will be corrupted and cheated through philosophy and empty deceit, according to the, as that passage says in Colossians 2 .8,
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the stoicheia, the elementary assumptions of the world. If we are not clear in how we know what we know, we will become like the world in our thinking.
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Those basic principles, the unbelieving presuppositions of the world, rather than the assumptions and principles that are according to Christ in his word.
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Remember that verse we just read? If you're still looking at your Bible, look at it. You should put an asterisk next to this verse. Colossians 2 .8.
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Beware lest anyone cheat you through philosophy and empty deceit, according to the tradition of men.
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Why is that warning there? Because Christians of all generations, not just the people in Colossians, but people who have lived throughout all the generations in the church, have had to be aware of that danger of being cheated through the philosophies of your time.
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And there are so many unbiblical philosophies out there that have deeply influenced the way Christian people think about things, unfortunately.
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As that passage goes on, according to the basic principles of the world and not according to Christ. What you see
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Paul spelling out there is, there will always be a very sharp and very clear antithesis between Christ and the world.
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What is antithesis? What is that talking about? It is something that stands opposed to something else.
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There is a standing apart that will always exist between the worldviews of the world and the one truth of Jesus Christ.
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Antithesis, a standing apart, a contradiction. One worldview versus another worldview.
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And the temptation that the church has succumbed to again and again and again. You guys that are going to be doing church history and historical theology will see it.
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The church has consistently struggled with compromising with unbelieving worldviews. So many of those early church fathers, especially in the mid second and third centuries, compromised.
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They were deeply, deeply influenced by Plato much more than they were by Paul. During the medieval period, you have the great synthesis of Aristotelian philosophy with Christian ideas through the scholastics and Thomas Aquinas and then the
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Reformation has to come and undo that big mess. But you always have these problems, these unbiblical ways of thinking that are influencing the way
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Christians think when God has given us everything we need already in his word. And everyone, no matter who you talk to, everyone believes in this antithesis.
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And those who say, no, there's no antithesis and everything is true are expressing the antithesis by saying that.
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You understand what I mean? Scripture teaches us that the antithesis between truth and error, between God's word and everything that's opposed to it is extensive.
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It encompasses everything. There is opposition between Christian and non -Christian at every point.
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Our philosophy of life has no agreement with theirs. None. Zero. Zip. Their city is the creation of their own vain imagination.
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We live in the world that we know that God created. Their view is, man is the measure of all things.
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Every time I have ever heard the atheist Dan Barker ask the question in the debates that he has done with Christian theists over the years, every single time he has ever been asked the question, by what standard do you say that that's evil?
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By what standard do you say that that's right? By what standard do you say that's wrong? His answer to every one of those questions is always the same.
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He always says, me. I'm not kidding. Listen to the man debate.
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He is one of the most consistent atheists I have ever heard in my life. By what standard are you saying that's wrong? Me. By what standard do you say that's good?
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Me. That's his answer. Man is the measure of all things. Ours is the opposite.
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God created. Christ saved us. There is a judgment, etc. Man is not the measure of all things.
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Practically speaking, you can have a conversation with your neighbor about gardening, politics, sports, etc.
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And do you agree with them sometimes? Sure. This is not what we are talking about, however. The fact that we agree with non -believers about many things is not relevant to the issue of antithesis.
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What we mean is this. There is a big difference between human beings and the world views that they hold.
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There is a big difference between individual human beings and the world views that they hold. Human beings are not world views.
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Human beings are not world views. Humans adhere to world views, and here comes the key word. They adhere to world views inconsistently.
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Sadly, Christians are not always consistent either. But in principle, it is impossible for unbelievers to be consistent with their world views because, biblically, they are fools and they hold to contradictions.
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No one can actually live consistently with their non -Christian worldview. We have no common ground with the unbeliever in terms of what we believe about reality.
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The reason we find common ground with them is this. They are not being consistent with their worldview and they are exactly what the
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Christ of Scripture says they are. The antithesis that we experience in dealing with unbelief and all unbelieving philosophical systems of thought is a divinely imposed antithesis.
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It is not God's will that we live lives of peace and tranquility. God said to Adam and Eve and said to the serpent,
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I will put enmity, that means hatred, hatred between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent.
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The antithesis is divinely imposed. There is no middle ground. There is no peaceful way of being a
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Christian in this world. There is no theological Switzerland in this world. Yes, we want to be good neighbors with good reputations.
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We want to be kind and gracious. But the fact is, when the rubber hits the road and you start talking about ultimate concerns and ultimate issues, we just are not going to be able to get along with everybody.
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Our goal as Christians is to have sharp swords, to engage in warfare, not to draw away.
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Our lives are lives of battle, war. There is antithesis, irreconcilable differences, and I want to encourage you, you can make history, especially in the dark times in which we live.
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Their philosophy, the philosophies of all forms of non -Christianity, are vain and deceptive.
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There is literally nothing worthwhile in unbelieving philosophies. Does this mean that everything unbelievers say is wrong?
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No, but man has never had an original idea. Ever. Man doesn't have any original ideas, neither does
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Satan. The unbeliever gets his ideas from the God that made him, and thus he doesn't get everything all wrong.
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The problem with man is that what he does is he'll take something in creation that he understands and make an idol out of it.
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He'll take some element of God's truth and make an idol out of it. There is truth in the idea of empiricism, that we can acquire knowledge tentatively through a sense perception.
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Is that true? Can we acquire some that are our senses generally reliable? Yes, but the unbeliever will make an idol out of that.
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He does the same thing with reason. Reason is not a standard. When people say, I only subject everything that I think
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I know to reason, in effect, they really have told you nothing at all. You see, reason does not just stand out there.
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Reason needs a foundation. And what Augustine and what the New Testament and what the greatest thinkers in Christian history have understood is that reason is based upon a
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Christian worldview. Reason is based upon faith. You have to have faith in God, faith in all that is necessary to be true in order to be able to reason.
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Reason is not a standard. Reason is a tool that God gives us to take dominion. And you see, the non -believer, if he were consistent, would know that he can't reason about anything.
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From here, I hope we can see that what we need to do is allow scripture alone to be our great presupposition.
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The Bible alone is the very word of God. That is our starting point. That is our fundamental axiom as we approach life.
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The Bible alone is the word of God. From that presupposition, we can destroy all forms of unbelief and take people to Christ and show them the gospel.
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It is the lens through which everything else is interpreted in life at all times and in all places.
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God has divinely imposed this antithesis. And one of the most powerful ways that our enemy has made the church so much less effective than it could be is not so much by direct attacks but by small compromises.
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By neutralizing certain areas of that antithesis. And as I've emphasized to you all over and over again, one of those biggest ways is through the issue of evolution, deep time, millions of years, and those sorts of things.
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The next critical fact of the biblical worldview we want to look at here, just picking up from last time, is our understanding of man.
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One thing I've pointed out to children at elementary schools for years that we've done good news clubs at is this, you and I are not
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African apes. You and I are not apes. That is what most would be taught in science class.
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That's what I was taught. I was taught that that is a fact. That our great great great many times over grandparents were actually gorillas.
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That they were ape -like creatures and you and I are just evolved apes. We are African apes. The biblical truth is resolutely opposed to this.
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Man has always been man. I hope if you remember anything from this section of the sermon you'll remember that one phrase. Man has always been man.
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We need to repeat that truth to ourselves regularly. Man has always been man.
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There are no evolutionary precursors to man just as there are no evolutionary precursors to all of the different kinds of animals either.
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The study of fossils and of paleontology, the study of ancient beings has also shown this. Fossils are indeed the great enemy of the idea of micro -mutational evolution.
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As hard as evolutionists have tried to say that the evolutionist guy that is the curator of the
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British Museum, Dr. Colin Patterson has a very famous quotation. I've seen it used many many times by Christian creationists and atheists.
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I've read article after article of them trying to discredit this but this man was the curator of the fossils. He was the senior paleontologist at the
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British Museum which has the largest collection of fossils on this planet. He wrote a book with the very catchy title,
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Evolution. Dr. Patterson in his book made no effort at all to try to demonstrate evolution was true, that the micro -mutational version of it was true.
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A very famous Christian creationist author, Luther Sunderland, wrote Patterson a letter asking him why he hadn't shown any transitional forms or anything like that.
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Here is what Patterson wrote in response. Atheist groups and the evolutionary groups have contacted him.
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Did you really say this? Did you really say this? And he has verified, yes this is what I said because it's true. Here's what he said.
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The evolutionist, I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book.
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If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them. You suggest that an artist should be used to visualize such transformations, but where would he get the information from for his drawings?
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I could not honestly provide it, and if I were to leave it to artistic license would that not mislead the reader?
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Steven J. Gould, the now deceased professor of paleontology from Harvard University and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when they say there are no transitional fossils.
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You say that I should at least show a photo of the fossil from which each type of organism was derived?
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I will lay it on the line there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument, end quote.
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Even the hard sciences as they've developed, that's what that book Evolution's Achilles Heels is about. It goes down each of the hard sciences, every one of them.
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As more and more knowledge has been gained, as more and more studies have been done has simply shown that these ideas are a sham.
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They have not panned out. So, please remember this. As part of your mental machinery, as a
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Christian man has always been man. Man has always been man.
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Evolutionism's priests and clergy have tried their best to show ape -like ancestors for humans all the way to the point of frauds and fake fossils like Piltdown Man Nebraska Man, Java Man but the stubborn fact remains man has always been man.
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All the kinds of animals have always been their kinds. Nothing ever becomes anything else no matter how much genetic information they lose over time.
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The biblical truth of Genesis 1 needs to remain firm in our minds at all times. I want to suggest to you the reason we hammer that point so much is that is one of the reasons people don't listen to the church in this country anymore.
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It's because the church has handed this over to the secularists. Everything reproduces after its own kind.
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The Genesis kinds do not overlap or ever become new or different kinds. This is why cats and dogs, elephants and giraffes ostriches and camels cannot interbreed.
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They were created according to their kind and reproduced according to their kind. Man has always been man created out of the dust of the ground and made in the image of God.
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Animals have always been animals. Man is above animals.
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Remember I told you about that conversation with that young guy at the orthodontist office in the room there in the waiting room and he told me that humans are no different from amoebas and mosquitoes and to kill a mosquito is identical to killing a human.
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That's consistent thinking right there and that's what leads to things like genocide and ethnic cleansing and everything else.
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Man is not an animal. We need to have that in our thinking all the time when we talk to people because most of the secularists out there in our country today really do think that we are animals, that we are mammals we have gender just like all the animals do.
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We're just mammals with bigger brains. That's all. Man is not a beast. Man is the image of God and has dominion over all other forms of life in this world.
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Genesis 1 26 and God said let us make man in our image according to our likeness. Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.
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So is there a hierarchy to living things in the credit order? Yes. We are superior to the animals.
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We are more important than animals. We are more important than animals and I would rather see every endangered species on this planet die off than to see one human being aborted and that's something all of us need to have in our thinking.
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One human life is more important than every animal on this earth and that is the exception not the rule in people's thinking today.
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Genesis 2 7 and the Lord God formed man out of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living being.
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Folks, that gets rid of progressive creationism, that gets rid of the gap theory, that gets rid of the day age theory that gets rid of the idea of soulless hominids before man that God directed along the way and eventually he got one with a big enough brain and infused his soul in him.
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All those positions go away with one verse if we believe it. Where did man come from?
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God made him out of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils and man became a living being and he is in the image of God.
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Man has always been man. 1 Corinthians 15 47. The first man was of the earth made of dust.
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What does that tell you? Paul believes that Genesis 2 7 exactly as it is written and then he says the second man is the
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Lord from heaven. Do you see how futile all compromised positions on man's origins really are?
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Divine revelation is clear. Man began at a point in time not at the end of millions of years of evolution.
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Man began at a point in time on day number 6 of creation. You see how clear the antithesis is here?
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God is calling us to believe what he has said and when people contradict it, we say as Christians, no that is wrong.
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Well, the science this and these facts and these observations, no. God's word says this and if you're contradicting that, that is the antithesis.
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I stand here and everything against that is over there and needs to be refuted on the basis of what the scripture says.
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Some professing Christians have even argued as I said, for some form of soulless hominids that were evolutionary precursors of man and that eventually as God guided evolution, he selected one and named him
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Adam and put a soul in him. Is any of that even remotely defensible from the scripture? No, it is not and yet there are men who are reformed and confessional who hold to our
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Westminster standards who believe things like that and think it's compatible. By the way, the book that I promised to read,
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I started reading it, A Biblical Case for an Old Earth. Just FYI, if you ever read the book,
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I'm not finished with it yet, but it's not a biblical case for an old earth. What it is, is it's arguing you can hold this view and it's not necessarily contradictory to scripture which is what
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I probably thought it would be, but the title is very misleading, at least so far it's been very misleading, because there is no attempt being made to try to make a positive case that the earth or the universe is old.
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It's more so, well, there's no reason to think that you couldn't hold this view and still in some way be compatible with scripture.
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Are there truth in labeling laws as far as titles of books? That kind of irritates me, to be honest with you. I was expecting here's exegesis of the word of God, we're going to show it, and that's not what we're getting, at least not so far.
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Maybe it'll come in the second part of the book, I don't know, we'll see. I'll let you know. Do you see why
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I began this message with the concept of antithesis? Where does evolution come from, not science?
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But rather rebellious sinners who want a scientific pretension. You know what, I keep trying to figure out where to put this thing.
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I don't keep buffing into it. Okay, I don't think there's anywhere I can get it over there. Where does evolution come from?
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It comes from those rebellious sinners who want a scientific pretension to quiet their conscience so they can enjoy sin.
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That's where it comes from. So why would Christians feel the need to compromise with stuff like this? Why would
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Christians feel intimidated into finding somewhere to cram millions of years into Genesis or into trying to argue that the
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Bible doesn't necessarily explicitly teach billions of years or death before the fall because that's not necessarily incompatible with Scripture to believe those things.
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That's what that book is trying to argue. Because of Satan's ongoing attempts to erase the antithesis.
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Where do those compromised views come from? They come from Satan. That's going to give the dander of some up, but that is where they come from.
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Why is Satan trying to neutralize us? Is Satan trying to get rid of the antithesis? Satan's most effective weapon is not direct attacks.
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It's always getting us to compromise. Getting us to sell out certain parts of the Christian worldview so that it loses its edge.
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It loses its antithesis. I think the secularists who have gotten Christian churchmen and theologians and seminary professors to embrace the old earth, they're basically, our work's done.
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They handed over the whole history of the universe to us. We're done. We've totally destroyed them and neutralized them.
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So I want to encourage you know that that is one of Satan's tactics. Don't attack directly.
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Just make people neutralize. If Satan attacks us directly, usually people will dig their feet into the ground and bow their backs.
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But if you, through small compromises, try to get the neutralization of the church, that's much more effective.
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Undermine biblical authority and history by a non -stop avalanche of millions of years of evolution.
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Millions of years of evolution. Billions of years of evolution. Eight men, dinosaurs killed off by a meteor 65 million years ago, etc.
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I was going to share with you, on my YouTube feed, I watch all sorts of creationist stuff and evolutionary stuff too.
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And I watched a video this past week in preparation for this. The video was titled, What was it like for the dinosaurs when the meteor hit?
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And I could not believe the speculation in this video. They were claiming to know approximately where it hit, what time of day it hit, how fast the explosion blast headed towards them, about how many degrees
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Celsius the temperature climbed per minute along the way. I'm watching this going, how could anyone possibly think this is science?
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Were they there for this? You're going to tell me what time it was when the temperature got too hot in North America and dinosaurs started falling over and dying and everything else and how long it took that cloud to cover over the earth and so on and so forth?
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That's not based on science, folks. All that is is a worldview being announced, not proven, not argued for.
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This has to be true because if it's not, then God might exist and we can't believe something like that.
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I was just stunned at the detail with which they think they know this happened.
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Amazing. So don't compromise with any of that. There is a fundamental antithesis with all forms of unbelief.
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The next major facet of a Biblical Christian worldview, and this is very important. We've talked about this before, but I want to emphasize it to you again.
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It's very important in all of your engagement with people no matter where they're coming from, even if they think that you and them are both
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African apes. Man is the image bearer of God. This is another important facet of a
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Biblical worldview. It's something to always bear in mind. God made man to visibly show his glory to the world.
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Notice this truth, Genesis 5 .3 Adam lived 130 years and begot a son, listen, in his own likeness after his image and named him
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Seth. Why do all of us bear the image of God? All of us here bear the image of our
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God and Father all the way back to Adam because our fathers begot us in their likeness after their image.
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That is why everyone here, all human beings have the capacity for communion with God and are by nature covenantal creatures.
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Whether we like it or not, we are covenantal creatures. We are covenantal in the sense that we are all in spiritual relations to God through the covenant of life or the covenant of works, whatever terminology you prefer.
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This is why all people have functioning consciences, although some are much more marred than others. We all have a sense of the reality of God in us.
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Even the most strident non -believer in his heart of hearts has that sense of the divine in him. John Calvin called that the sensus divinitatis, the sense of the divine.
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All men are also dominion men. All men are dominion men by creation. What this means is
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God created us with the desire to take control over our environments and to study and understand the world around us.
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And that is why babies will reach for things and desire to get to know them from their earliest days.
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It really is an amazing thing to watch the image of God and this inborn dominion project at work, especially in a little baby.
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Anytime you put anything new in front of an infant, once they're just a few weeks old, they will immediately get big eyes and reach out for it.
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The inborn curiosity is astounding to watch. That's the image of God at work in them. I still remember. I can't remember which one of my kids it was, but I remember when they discovered that the things reaching forward were their arms and were then looking at these things like the instinct, the image of God is
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I want to go get it and I didn't even realize they had arms and they were shocked by seeing them and then looking at them and just thinking isn't that incredible?
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God created man. Man is so different from everyone everything else around him. He wants to control.
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He wants to get to know he wants to subdue and take dominion. That's the way God hardwired us.
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And so it's very critical that we see man as the image bearer of God. Man is completely unique.
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Man is, as the scripture said, created just a little lower than an angel. Man is extraordinary. And as much as people can get on our nerves, especially nonbelievers, and we want to pray the psalms of imprecation, we still need to recognize that in our interactions with human beings, there's nothing more precious than a human being.
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There's nothing more precious in this world than a human life. And so all people are worthy of our respect and of our kindness and of our time.
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I had a really dear friend when I was in college, a really godly Christian man. He said the only thing that someone needs to have to be worthy of your time is a pulse.
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And worthy of your respect is a pulse. In other words, if they are a human being and they are alive, then they are worth your time.
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Okay, so man's the image bearer of God. Man fell from the glorious estate. We are still in the image of God.
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We're still covenantal creatures, but we lost our communion with God and are no longer have his blessing, but instead are under his divine curse.
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We are all conceived with the guilt of Adam's first sin upon our legal account. This is why people of all ages die.
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Romans 6 23, the wages of sin is death. The greatest visible empirical reputation of all forms of every kind of theology that tries to deny original sin and the guilt of Adam's first sin being imputed to us is the death of infants and small children.
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It's a sad and tragic thing, but if they were not legally guilty for what Adam did, they would not be able to die because the wages of actual sin is death.
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Not of a sinful nature, but the wages of actual transgression of the law is death.
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We also lack the original righteousness in which we were created. That's why we come into the world with a propensity towards self -destruction.
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That's why we come into the world dissatisfied. Our hearts wander all over the place. We have pride and all sorts of terrible things that go on in our hearts and minds.
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We want glory and worship for ourselves. And so man is this glorious creature that the high point of God's created order, made in the image of God for communion and fellowship with God has now become this ruin.
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He has become marred. We also inherit a corrupted nature that is in bondage to sin, hates
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God, loves sin, and has within it the positive existence of total resistance to God apart from His grace.
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And that corrupted nature is called in theological terms, original sin. Always remember, original sin is not the sin that Adam committed in the
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Garden of Eden. Original sin is the nature that we inherit from Him, from which flow all of our actual transgressions of the law.
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So everyone you talk to, whether they're a secularist, an atheist, an agnostic, a Mormon, Jehovah's Witness, Roman Catholic, whoever, they are image bearers of God who are fallen, who are subject to the curse of God and are willfully in Adam and willfully in rebellion against God apart from God's grace.
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Men are anything but objective, good, and open -minded. The people that you talk to will be anything but objective, good, and open -minded.
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In fact, the Scripture teaches just the opposite, that man is actively engaged in the suppression of the truth that God has revealed to him.
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You all know the passage in Romans 1, just listen to a couple parts of it. The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth and unrighteousness, because what may be known of God is manifest in them for God has shown it to them.
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For since the creation of the world his invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even as eternal power in God has so that they are without excuse, because although they knew
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God, they did not glorify him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts. Remember that?
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That's part of the antithesis, the thinking of the non -believer. Before regeneration, before their minds are enlightened by the
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Holy Spirit of God, their thoughts are futile and their foolish hearts were darkened, and professing to be wise, they became fools and changed the glory of their incorruptible
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God into an image made like corruptible man and birds and four -footed animals and creeping things. Ephesians 2, 3 describes fallen man in these terms, among whom we also once conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, just as the others.
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And so man died spiritually, was separated from God and bondage to sin. The image of God is marred and we are enslaved to sin and love sin and suppress the truth and we're just a mess when we're conceived and born into this world since the fall happened.
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And I also want to emphasize again to you, since I've corresponded recently with very solid reformed guys that are my brothers that love the true gospel like I do and want to see it defended against some of our modern, some of its modern despisers who really do think that the only thing affected by the fall was man and that everything else in creation is exactly the way it was now, but the greatest reputation of that is
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Paul in Romans 8, 18, and this is really borrowing from Genesis 3, because not just Adam was cursed, but the ground itself was cursed.
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Romans 8, 18, for I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed on us for the earnest expectation of the creation eagerly waits for the revealing of the sons of God.
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You hear that? The creation itself is waiting for the revealing of the sons of God for the creation, not just man, but the creation was subjected to futility not willingly, but because of him who subjected it in hope, because the creation itself also will be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.
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I also want to emphasize to you, it is essential to our Christian worldview as we engage with the world.
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The world was radically affected by Noah's flood. You have man and the world before the fall.
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The fall, obviously, is the most devastating impact upon the world, but the world was also impacted dramatically by Noah's flood, and there is nothing good that can come from us saying, well, maybe it is an allegory, or maybe it's just an illustration, a poetic illustration of how angry
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God gets at sin. Nothing good can come from that. The world was radically affected by Noah's flood, so much so that the majority of animal kinds are now extinct, and the size and lifespan of men and animals was also dramatically reduced after the flood.
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Genesis 5 records that normal ages for men prior to Noah's flood was just shy of a thousand years.
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I want to let you know, for the first many years of my Christian walk, I did not believe those years.
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I did not believe that. Even today, you read through the Bible of people who are not used to hearing believing preaching from those first 11 chapters, and they'll ask, did they really live to be 868?
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Did Methuselah really live to be 969? Did Noah really live to be 950 years old?
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Folks, yes, that's what it says. What we see today in the world is a shadowy reflection of the glory that this world once was.
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If all of the animal kinds are restored in the new heavens and the new earth, I think that we probably won't recognize 8 or 9 out of 10 of what we see when we get there.
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Because we've never seen them. Even many animals today, they discover new species and new kinds of animals that are extinct from fossil digs and everything else.
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They discover all sorts of animals. I watched a documentary about a new dinosaur. They call it Spinosaurus.
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It was way bigger than T -Rex. It was one of the most scary looking things I've ever seen. Just gigantic dinosaur.
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What else is buried in the world that perished? Underground somewhere in this world.
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Always remember that outside of Biblical Revelation, we really know nothing about the world prior to the flood.
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We're not given a whole lot of information about what it was like. There was only one language back then.
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People lived to be about a thousand years old. There were far more kinds of animals than there are now.
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People were more genetically pure. Thus, they were probably a lot smarter, a lot more creative, and a lot physically stronger.
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A lot more strong than people are even capable of being today. There's a powerlifter today named
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Zydrunas Taviskas who's from Lithuania. People say about this guy all the time, he's the strongest man who ever lived.
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I doubt that. They talk about old man strength. Imagine talking to a guy who's 680 and has been carrying around trees and building things for six or seven hundred years.
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How strong they would be. Of course, man's greatness before the flood only added to the problem, as we read in Genesis 6, that the whole earth was filled with violence.
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Man took these remarkable gifts and was using it to set the world on fire and destroy it. But let us never forget what
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Scripture calls the Antediluvian world in 2 Peter 3 .6. Every time I read this, it gives me the chills.
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I just wonder, what did it look like before the flood happened? What would people have seen? What did animals look like?
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And what did people look like? 2 Peter 3 .6 says, the world that then existed perished being flooded with water.
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That world and almost everything in it except eight people on the ark and the animals on the ark, perished.
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It's all still buried. Entire civilizations, their buildings and everything else are buried underground and probably will never be seen by human eyes.
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That world was basically erased except for what God revealed to us through the hand of Moses in Genesis 1 -9.
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Folks, we must not ever allow people to remove that from us as real history. That is real history.
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That's not allegory. That's not myth. Those are real events. And that's essential to our understanding.
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Why is the flood so essential? Because the geologic formations that you see around us are, for the most part, the result of a global catastrophe, not slow processes.
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And that's why the evolutionist who rejects the flood of Noah looks and says, well, it had to have taken millions of years for that to form and for that to form and for that to form if the processes today are the keys to understanding everything.
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But, of course, we look at that and say, but that's not the way things always were. There was this massive event, this global level catastrophe that destroyed the entire world and every human being in it and all their cities and inventions and who knows what all those people had accomplished.
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We'll never see it. It's all buried underground somewhere. I've often wondered if people keep digging, what might they eventually find?
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Who knows? We must have a biblical doctrine of the origin of man, a biblical doctrine of man's uniqueness from animals and why the world is what it is today in terms of what animals, what animal kinds are left and why human lifespans are what they are.
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And also, and this is very important, why human languages are so different. Remember, I've mentioned to you all before about the
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Tower of Babel. I've actually got a whole book about that that recently came out. I'm really looking forward to reading that. The Tower of Babel is a really important facet of human history.
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You want to read something that is almost comical, look at the secularists' attempts to explain the diversity of human languages.
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They have no explanation for this. If we're all the same species and we can all interbreed all over the world, what in the world happened that human languages are as radically different as they are?
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Genesis 11, you all know the narrative. The whole earth had one language and one speech and it came to pass as they journeyed from the east that they found a plain in the land of Shinar and they dwelt there.
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And they said to one another, Come, let us make bricks and bake them thoroughly. They had brick for stone and they had asphalt for mortar.
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And they said, Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower whose top is in the heavens. Let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.
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Which is, of course, remember that's what God told them to do. Be fruitful and multiply and cover the earth. Spread out. And they said,
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No, we all want to be together. The text goes on, But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of men had built.
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And the Lord said, Indeed the people are one and they all have one language and this is what they begin to do. Now nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them.
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Come, let us go down and there confuse their language that they may not understand one another's speech.
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Train yourself to remember to ask that question. When you talk to someone, if they're a staunch evolutionist, not to try to provoke a fight or anything, but ask them,
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What is your perspective's explanation for the diversity of human languages on this planet?
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And the diversity of their written forms and their spoken forms and the way they form ideas and the way that they put sentences together and everything else.
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You know, I remember being all excited about learning Greek when I was in seminary and when you learn it from Bill Mouse's Basics of Biblical Greek and you learn all these vocabulary words and you learn, you know, a certain several hundred words and you now know 85 % of all the word occurrences in the
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New Testament. I thought, Man, that's great. I'm going to start reading the Greek New Testament now. And you open it up and you start looking at it going,
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What are these collections of completely unrelated words I'm looking at? The way that they form ideas and wrote sentences is nothing like we do in English.
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And you're like, OK, there's the subject and there's the direct objects back here.
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And then they've got another word here and they've got a verb over here that's actually capturing a phrase over here and you go,
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Wow. Amazing. God didn't just change words around. He changed the entire way people think.
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He changed the entire way they form sentences. So it wasn't enough to learn, OK, what do you guys call this?
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And what do you call this? And what do you call this? How do you say pick that up in your language? It was thoroughly confusing.
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God thoroughly confused human languages. And it's important that we remember that was a divine act of judgment.
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That's why human beings are spread out as much as they are. It was because God confused our languages. I've emphasized to you all many times the importance of Genesis 1 -11 and how much of a foundation it is for all of biblical doctrine and theology and how essential it is for us to hold fast to it to maintain the antithesis and our biblical distinctiveness from the elementary principles of the world.
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What the God of heaven and earth has said about earth's history, man's origin, what happened to the world, the fall of man into sin, what that did to us, how that affected us, the origin of human languages, those things that God has said to us in his word are an absolute irreconcilable contradiction to every other world's view.
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And that's why it's so important that we think like Christians about all of those topics. Those are the keys to getting across the biblical truth, especially to pagans that know nothing about it.
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Remember, I walked you through Acts 17 when Paul was on Mars Hill there talking to the people. He starts with creation.
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God who made the world. God who made the world and everything in it. He determines where you all live.
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He talks about God's absolute sovereignty. He determined where you all would live in the borders of your nations. He doesn't dwell in temples made with hands as if he needed anything from you all.
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He's not part of the created order. He goes brick by brick, step by step and destroys, pulls the rug out from everything and then points out to them there is a day of judgment and God is going to judge you.
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And that's sort of the beginning of laying the foundation. And I'm sure in his follow -up conversations he talks to them about justification and salvation, the gospel, how a person can be made right with God.
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What God tells us about all those things is an irreconcilable contradiction to everything else around us.
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God owns everything. God owns everything, especially history and everything in the universe.
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Those opening, the opening words of the Bible, that one Hebrew word is actually a preposition with another word,
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Barashith. The Hebrew preposition Ba, it's just the one letter, Ba, means in.
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And then Rashith means the beginning. Barashith. So the Bible starts at the very moment everything begins to exist.
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The elementary principles or worldview of God speaking in scripture starts at the first moment of time and ends at the last moment of time.
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It all belongs to him. Don't ever give any of it over to the world. Maintain that conflict.
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Maintain that antithesis. And remember, the very best Christian thinkers and the best of reformed theologians, the men who have loved the word of God and studied it the hardest have pointed out the temptation to compromise is always going to be great.
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And yes, you will be more liked. Yes, you'll be more liked even in the church if you're willing to spell out on certain points or certain topics like this that are not in vogue in our time.
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But you always do that at the expense of coming under the displeasure of God. Our basic and fundamental worldviews are at odds at every point, the truth and error.
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So why do believers and unbelievers sometimes agree on things? Because the unbeliever is not consistent with his or her own stated worldview and are borrowing ours for the time being.
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As we will see moving forward, pointing this out and then taking people to the gospel is very easy. As long as we are entirely committed at the outset of all of our apologetical and evangelistic engagements to everything in Scripture, we have every reason to be as calm and confident, no anxiety, no knots in your stomach at all.
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Be a Christian and know this is what's true. Everything contrary to is false. Don't let the non -believer get away with borrowing from your worldview.
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Learn how to point out inconsistencies, contradictions, and always end those conversations at the cross.
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Always make sure you're taking people to Jesus. The goal is never to just destroy someone's worldview. It's to evangelize them.
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It's to tell them about Jesus. It is divine revelation that sets apart the way Christians think about everything.
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And so, because, as I said, we come into the world darkened in our thinking, futile in our thoughts, foolish and ignorant.
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God has to supply us with the proper things to think, and we must resist the temptation to mix those with ungodly thinking.
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As long as we're faithful to that divine revelation, we will be effective in maintaining the antithesis and preaching the gospel to every cult, ism, and worldview that we ever face in life.
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Let's pray. Our God in heaven, we thank you for giving us the principles that are according to Christ, the stoicheia, the elementary principles that are according to truth, to Christ.
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Help us to stand firmly upon those as we seek to engage the world, as we seek to engage our own children, the people that we work with, our neighbors, when those conversations happen.
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Help us to be faithful, to be meek, to be gentle, to be godly, and more than anything, to be faithful to what you have spoken, so that you are glorified, and your word is taught and preached accurately.
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We pray in Jesus' name. Amen. 11 a .m.
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sharp, where we open the word of God together, sing his praises, and rejoice in the gospel of our risen Lord. You can find us on the web at www .gridwellheightspca
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.org And may the Lord bless you and keep you, the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you.