G1 Conference – Session 1 (Genesis Apologetics)

Opening Prayer and Conference Welcome

King of all heaven, you spoke it all to be.

Thank you for attending our annual G1 Conference. Tonight you will be joining thousands of viewers to take a deep look at the Bible's case for origins. We welcome many tonight who already believe the foundational teachings of Scripture on the topics we will cover.

We pray your faith is made even stronger as we drill into these matters and discover together that the teachings of God's Word are in fact true. Even starting from the very first pages, many attending tonight are already Christians but haven't explored these topics deeply.

Some are even skeptical. We ask you to engage in all three conference sessions to carefully consider the possibility that Scripture can in fact withstand the toughest pressure testing. We also welcome those attending tonight who are not yet Christians.

Coming to Christ is the first step in a journey to a new life, one marked by both blessing and tribulation. We pray that all who attend tonight do so with open hearts and minds. These are life-changing truths, truths that can join your heart and mind together in your faith journey.

No matter what your place is tonight, we make this special request that you listen with an open mind and heart. This is one reason we've turned chat features off, to maximize engagement in each speaker's message.

We answer all questions posed by our viewers. Please just email them to staff at GenesisApologetics .com. This broadcast will be permanently hosted on the platform you're watching from tonight. Thank you again for attending.

Conference Introduction and Ministry Overview

All right, welcome to the third annual G1 Conference. My name is Joe Walters, and I am a pastor here in Sacramento at a church called Encounter Anatomous, and it is my honor to welcome you to this third annual G1 Conference.

I want to thank William Jessup University for letting us use this facility, and thank you Dr. John Jackson for your hospitality. Welcome to the thousands of you who signed up to this conference, and who have a desire to know the truth of the scriptures.

We are here to discuss the trustworthiness of God's word, and specifically in Genesis creation accounts. Is Genesis just a story? Is it a poem? Should it be taken literally? People ask these questions, Christians ask these questions.

Is Adam and Eve literal historical people? These questions are profoundly important to your faith. There is a lot at stake in this discussion. Over the next three sessions, you're going to get answers to these questions to give you the confidence and the boldness to know that you can trust God's word.

We have speakers from Genesis Apologetics, the Institute of Creation Research, Answers in Genesis, Creation Ministries International, and speakers from William Jessup University. We have experts from all over the country that are going to be speaking to you over the next three sessions about Genesis and the trustworthiness of the word of God.

We have experts in archaeology, biology, apologetics, theology, molecular genetics. They will answer top questions about creation, Noah's flood, the Bible, dinosaurs, and much.

More.

So, let us commit our time together, our minds and our hearts, to hearing the truth of God's word and to understand it better. Will you pray with me? Heavenly Father, we thank you, Lord, for a time that we can gather together across the city, across the country, Lord, to hear from you your word, your truth.

Lord, I pray that you anoint each of the speakers to give them, Lord, the power and the courage to speak your truth. We thank you, Lord, for gathering us together to love us, Lord, to speak to us. We ask that you use this time for your glory, in Jesus' name we pray, amen.

I'd like to introduce to you Daniel Biddle, Ph .D. He is the president of Genesis Apologetics, a 501c3 organization dedicated to equipping youth pastors, parents, and students with biblical answers for evolutionary teaching in public schools.

Daniel has trained thousands of students in biblical creation and is the author of several creation-related publications. Daniel's professional background includes training as a behavioral scientist and 20 years' experience as an expert witness in state and federal cases involving statistical research methods.

Genesis Apologetics Ministry and Resources

Thanks again for coming out this evening. We are so excited to be here, and thanks to the thousands of people who signed up and are coming by ways of a small group or a family, and I understand that even some churches are joining all together.

So I just wanted to cover a brief overview about our ministry before we get into some of the detail here. There are four different divisions of our ministry. The first is we love to strengthen Christian schools, so we have about five or six schools in the local Northern California area that use our teaching and conference services on a regular basis.

Our partner, Vice President Dave Bisbee, heads most of those sessions up, and I teach primarily in the high school at the college level. We also give an annual local church presentations and conferences.

There's this annual one at the G1 level, and we also give several that are done at more of a seasonal level, maybe two or three-day church conferences that we do. And then finally, we have a growing social media presence.

We have about 111 ,000 YouTube subscribers that result in 3 ,000 or 4 ,000 views a day of the videos that we have. I think we have a library now of well over 100 videos, and we have about 33 ,000 Facebook followers as well.

Dave's going to talk more about this, but I just want to highlight our K -8 solution that we have. So if you have a student who's a kindergartner all the way through eighth grade, go to our K -8 student zone from our webpage.

We focus primarily on the K -8 zone or K -8 level at that section of our ministry. And Dave is, I think he's about 12 different teaching videos now. He's going up to 72 different teaching videos that will be installed in that library, and they can be viewed at your leisure on both Facebook and YouTube.

And then we have our DebunkEvolution .com program that's primarily targeted to fifth to tenth graders. And in that program, we cover about 10 different videos over about six hours of video lessons. And we take a typical standard high school level biology textbook that's taught in secular schools, and we take the leading top 10 pillars for evolution that are typically taught in a high school biology class, and we address them from both a biblical and scientific standpoint.

And you can get that program free at just DebunkEvolution .com. Then if you have an older student starting about 10th or 11th grade, we have our 7myths .com. And in this program, we take the seven leading myths or seven leading false teachings that are typically coming against Christians in their faith when they're at secular high schools or secular colleges.

And even some Christian schools will still teach these things that are really against a historical perspective that's provided in Genesis 1 through 11. And that, again, is a video-based program. You can go there.

You can see it on Amazon Prime. It's free on our website, and you can also view it on YouTube. And then we have one of our leading books. It's called Answers to the Top 50 Questions about Genesis Creation and Noah's Flood.

This is an interesting book and one that's dear to my heart because over the last several years we had to field literally thousands of questions that would come in streamed through our Facebook page or through YouTube comments with people that were consistently asking questions.

Thousands of them are coming in, and I started noticing, my gosh, a lot of these are the same. And so we started developing really cut-and-paste responses for a lot of the similar topics that people were bringing up.

Then we noticed, my gosh, there's really about only 50 main questions that people are asking. There's maybe 200 typical ones, but the top 50 we took and put in this book. And about, well, maybe about a quarter of these top 50 questions also have supplementary video training to them as well.

Things like, what about the different race groups? What about Noah's Flood? Or how do you get all the animals on the boat? Things like this are answered in this Answers book, and they also have teaching videos that go along with them.

We did our first full-feature movie that just came out last year called Genesis Impact. It's about a 40-minute movie where a young college student goes into a museum where a docent is presenting the mainline evidences for evolution, and she starts a dialogue with them, with him, for about 40 minutes.

And in that video, we take the top 10 leading evolutionary icons that are used in museums, natural history museums all over the world, really, and address them in this fun kind of video format that's about 40 minutes.

We take out the top 10 pillars of evolution that are typically displayed in natural history museums. We also have another feature film that will be coming out in about a month called Foundations, and that one's going to be a lot of fun because we take three different life journeys that start from a 10-year-old's life all the way to his deathbed, and talk about the consequences of what you believe, what system you're going to believe in, what worldview you're going to believe in, and how that really does have implications on how our life's played out from a day-by-day and decade-by-decade basis.

So that movie will be coming out in about a month or two. If you go to our YouTube channel, which is shown here, we have, again, about 110 ,000 subscribers. We just crossed over 10 million views. And I wanted to just quickly highlight some of our favorite videos there, and this is real interesting to me because we did these videos not knowing which ones were going to be the popular ones, and it was a big surprise for us to find out that really dinosaurs, Noah's Flood, the miracles of the crucifixion of Christ, and one about behemoth or shore paw dinosaurs turned out to be our most-watched videos that we have.

In fact, the Noah's Flood video is now going on 3 million views. It's probably the most-watched flood video in history. There's a lot of different ways you can look at that, and it's certainly not our doing.

We just took about a year and interviewed the leading flood geologists from the top three creation ministries and distilled it into a video that we were really happy how it turned out because it provides about 23 minutes of very concrete, very compelling evidence of the physical mechanics that happened on earth during that year-long time of Noah's Flood.

And then if you're interested on the five different miracles that happened at the crucifixion of Christ, we now just did a second version of that movie. You guys, there are some amazing physically confirmable things that happened 2 ,000 years ago at the death, crucifixion, burial, resurrection of Christ that we can actually go back and see today and prove through some good historical evidence that that event, the resurrection of Christ and the crucifixion really actually happened.

So I would encourage you guys to watch that video. And then lastly, we have our mobile app, the Genesis Apologetics mobile app. We have over 100 ,000 users that have downloaded that app. And what this app does is it really pipes into our YouTube channel to the leading videos there, but you can download this app on the iTunes or Google Play stores.

It's a free app, and you can go to that app and watch our different videos there. Now, some of the topics that you guys are going to hear today are going to be new. Some of them are going to be novel, and frankly, some of them might be unbelievable to many of you.

Things like man walking with dinosaurs and man living contemporary with dinosaurs. These are some amazing things to hear and some things that I found really challenging when I was a Christian and started learning about these things, but things that I firmly believe now.

But these are not new things. We're not quack scientists up here presenting new theories. These are really grounded theories. Thousands and thousands of scientists take the same perspectives that we're going to be sharing in this conference.

And leading curriculum providers, over 90 of Christian K -12 schools, at least all those in the California region, about 90 of them do teach Genesis as a real historical narrative. And these are places where there are hundreds of students going, and they're using a curriculum like Bob Jones University or Rebecca, things like that.

So it is a predominant viewpoint that we're going to be sharing from today. And also, of course, leading ministries like Answers in Genesis and creation .com or CMI and ICR also hold to these same biblical perspectives.

So with that, I'm going to transition and hand it over now to Dave Bisbee, who's our vice president to cover the student zone.

Thanks.

Thanks, Dan. So I'm Dave Bisbee, vice president of Genesis Apologetics. And today I want to talk to you about our brand new program called the K -8 Student Zone. So but before we do that, I want to give you just a little bit of background.

First of all, why is it important to teach apologetics to kids? I mean, isn't it all about Jesus? Yes, it is. But let's take a look at a few things. So based upon some research, there is a very disturbing prediction.

Two out of the three kids that are in church programs when they hit college are going to walk away from their faith. Now I can tell you I can relate to that because I was one of those kids. Allow me to share my story.

So when I was a boy, I was sent to a very strict private school. And I was that kid, you know, the one over in the corner that always asked why, asking question after question. And unfortunately, this was the response I got.

Just believe, sit down, be quiet and just accept it. Well, it didn't take long for me to conclude that, you know what, they really didn't have any answers. I also developed a very warped view of God that he was some angry guy in the sky, just waiting for me to slip up and just smash me on the head.

Now later in high school, I went through some very dark years. And I had some friends that were Christians. But you know what, I really couldn't relate to them. Their lives seemed to be so perfect and mine was just so dark.

And my questions were met with silence. So I concluded then that they too didn't have any answers. So as an adult, I decided to try the church thing. And once again, my search came up empty. I'm really glad to report though, that God never gave up on me.

So, what can we do to prevent this type of thing from happening? Well, I'll tell you what we can, should not do is this. I can tell you firsthand that beating people the head over with arguments and theology just doesn't work.

In fact, my life verse is this, 1st Peter 3 .15 tells us to always be ready to provide an answer. But notice what it says, be prepared to provide an answer. That presupposes that somebody's asking you a question.

Now why would they ask you a question? Well, hopefully as a Christian, you are living in a way that you're loving people and you're kind and you're honest, and they notice that you're different. And then they want to ask you about your faith.

So which leads me to the zone. So during this COVID crisis, the Lord put it on my heart to do a video series, which is kind of comical because I do not like to be on camera. But okay, God, we're going to do this.

So I built a little tiny little studio in my garage and we went from there. So as you can see, we've got a lot of different topics to cover here. And these are topics that are not typically taught in Sunday school programs.

The purpose of all of this is so that students can develop a confident faith and that they're confident in going out and sharing the gospel, the good news about Jesus Christ. So there are two ways to access the zone.

One is through our YouTube channel. But I would really encourage you to go to the website shown on the screen here. There you can find the videos and you can also find some handouts and activities which will hopefully enhance your students' learning.

Well, I'm Dave Bisbee. I hope to see you soon on the zone. Thank you very much.

William Jessup University and the Authority of Scripture

I'd like to welcome to you Dr. John Jackson. He is the president of William Jessup University. Prior to joining Jessup as its sixth president in March 2011, John served as the executive director of Thriving Churches International and as a senior leader of Bayside Church in Granite Bay, California.

He is the founding pastor of LifePoint Church in Minden, Nevada and previously was the executive minister of the American Baptist Churches of the Pacific Southwest, now Transformation Ministries, where he was responsible to serve more than 270 churches in four Western states.

John also served as the senior pastor in several staff roles at First Baptist Church in Oxnard and as the youth pastor of the First Baptist Church in Buena Park. Dr. Jackson earned both his PhD and his master's in educational administration and organizational studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara, an MA in theology, Christian formation and discipleship at Fuller Theological Seminary, and a BA in religion, Christian history and thought from Chapman University.

Hi, my name is John Jackson and I'm the president of William Jessup University. I want to thank you for letting me share with you here today and I decided that what I would do is I would share my conclusions at the very beginning.

That will allow you to know where I'm coming from and it might end my talk a little bit.

Sooner.

But before I do, let me share a story with you. It's a story of a little girl. She was in an art museum and she knew more about theology than some people did. As she was walking through the art museum, she saw a painting of Adam and Eve.

That little girl stood next to that painting and raised her little fist and said, You ruined everything! That little girl knew a lot more than some of us. Let me share with you four conclusions that I start with.

I think they'll be helpful for you to understand my perspective on these matters. Number one, I want to contend that truth matters and grace matters. An unflinching commitment to the Word of God is the only secure foundation in a world that's cut loose from any moorings of truth.

Number two, if Genesis 1 -11 is an allegory, then Jesus accommodated himself to the ignorance of his audience or worse, maybe he didn't know any better. If Genesis is not true, then humanity, sin, salvation, marriage, family, history, good and evil are all social constructs subject to change depending upon cultural norms.

Number three, to deny the historical Adam is to stand against the teachings of Moses, Luke, Jesus, and Paul. And again, they were either confused, deceived, or even worse. And finally, number four, denying the truth of Genesis is like unleashing an army of termites under the foundation of a wooden home.

In time, everything crumbles. What we know about free will and sin and salvation and family and gender and identity and marriage all crumble in time. I believe Genesis 1 -11 is the hermeneutical issue of our day.

The dignity and fall and hopes of humanity all rest on the story of Adam and Eve. In fact, B .B. Warfield, a famous systematic theologian, said this, The unity of humanity in Adam is the postulate of the entire body of the Bible's teaching of its doctrines of sin and redemption alike.

So it's a whole structure of the Bible's teaching, including all that we know as its doctrine of salvation rests on it and implicates it. I want you to be clear about this. The God of reason and the God of revelation are one and the same.

He cannot contradict himself. There's no conflict between right science and right scripture. The fact is, is that when there appears to be a conflict, we either have incompleteness or error on one side or the other.

Now many of you know my background. You know that I'm a pastor, but you also know that I've been a higher education leader in a faith-based, a Christian setting this last decade. I am deeply committed to the proposition that biblical truth is the foundation for everything.

I also want you to hear this. I think there are four things that God wants for you. God wants you to be saved. He wants you to be grounded. He wants you to be healed, and he wants you to be equipped. But, you know, we live in a world that has a problem with authority and truth.

It used to be that we could think about truth from the conduct of maybe scripture as truth, that you could just make that assertion and people would rest with that. Or you could say, well, a pope or some scholar or community of scholars, what they say is our source of authority.

But we live in the modern era. In the modern era, we've introduced something else, and that is the concept of experience. For many in our modern world, our experience is the final determinator of truth.

My experience is what determines truth around me. I experience things, and therefore my truth might be different than yours. Let's begin by being very, very clear. I believe that God is the only source of final authority and truth.

In John chapter 8, verse 31 and 32, Jesus Christ himself said this. To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, if you hold to my teachings, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.

A lot of times people pass Jesus off as a good teacher. You may not know this. Seventy-eight times in the New Testament, Jesus said, I tell you the truth. Many people in our modern age say, well, all religions are different, but they're all kind of the same.

What works for you might not work for me. My experience is what determines reality. In fact, the ultimate value being lifted up in a number of contexts these days is experiential.

Truth.

My experience is truth. And quite frankly, a lot of people who claim to be scientists are looking at physical evidence and essentially interpreting through their own lens. Tolerance is the new reality.

In fact, I wanted to share a quote with you. Thomas Helmbach, the Executive Vice President of the National Lambda Chi Alpha, has about 280 ,000 members in 195 college campuses. This is what he explains.

The definition of new tolerance is that every individual's beliefs, values, lifestyle, and perception of truth claims are equal. Let me reread that. The definition of the new tolerance is that every individual's beliefs, values, lifestyle, and perception of truth claims are equal.

There is no hierarchy of truth. Your beliefs and my beliefs are equal. And all truth is relative. That's the world that you live in. And quite frankly, sadly, that is often the determinative world of higher education.

Relativistic truth, or relativism, requires truth to be dependent upon social, personal, historical, and linguistic factors. Not absolute factors, but relative ones. This stands in stark contrast to a biblical worldview.

Here at William Jessup University, we are deeply committed to a kingdom of God worldview, to a biblical worldview, to a gospel worldview. We do believe that Jesus Christ, when he talks about the truth, he's declarative.

And when Jesus Christ affirms the Genesis narrative, that means something to us. Francis Schaeffer described absolute truth this way. He said, if there's no absolute moral standard, then one cannot say in a final sense that anything is right or wrong.

By absolute, we mean that which is always applies to all people, that which provides a final or ultimate standard. There must be an absolute if there are to be morals. And there must be an absolute if there are to be real values.

If there's no absolute beyond man's ideas, then there's no final appeal to judge between individuals and groups whose moral judgments conflict. We are merely left with conflicting opinions. Some of you hearing this talk have probably participated in one form of social media or another.

You know the reality that in our world, social media is almost like a mud fight at times. Mud gets slung back and forth. And at the end of the day, quoting Bible verses, as I've often done, saying to somebody that your opinion is based on revelation literally doesn't carry the day.

For a lot of people, what matters is their opinion. My opinion, my experience, that's automatically equal, as we heard from the quote earlier, to anything else that you might have to say. Well, the Bible makes it clear that all beliefs and values and lifestyle are not equal.

The Bible teaches that the God of the Bible is the true God. You can look in Jeremiah chapter 10, verse 10, and that all his words are true. Psalm 119, verse 160. And that if something is not right in God's sight, that it's flat out wrong.

Deuteronomy chapter 6, verse 1 and 8. This is not just the view of Hebrew culture or Christian culture or Western culture. It's the truth according to the God who rules over all cultures revealed in God's Word.

Truth matters. Grace matters. The law came through Moses, but Jesus was full of grace and truth. And our challenge as you prepare for this conference is to say, how can we discern the truth of God's Word?

How can we discover and learn the truth of science and make sure that we're being able to understand the world we live in, in alignment with the revealed Word of God, while simultaneously loving the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength?

Here at Jessup, when we first launched the sciences, I actually had newspaper reporters ask me this question. Is it possible, Dr. Jackson, that you can be a Christian school full of faith and you can also really be rational scientists?

They saw a conflict between the two. I want to assure you, fully and completely, as you will learn throughout the day, you can be 100 committed to the authority of God's Word and 100 committed to the discovery of real science and what our world tells us about the nature and character of God.

Genesis matters. Genesis to Jesus matters. Genesis to you matters. If Genesis is not true, and if Jesus is not true, then we'll simply devolve into whatever truth fits our personal or cultural narrative.

You know, our culture has changed over time, and I remember a time, it was quite a few years ago, where people were upset about some of the things that were being said in culture. And so what they decided to do as Christians, followers of Jesus, is develop a bumper sticker.

It was a good bumper sticker. This is what it said, God said it.

I believe it.

That settles it. Well, you know, that was a good bumper sticker, and at the time it created kind of a good reaction. God said it.

I believe it.

That settles it. But the more I thought about that bumper sticker, I actually think it's off the mark. I think the way the bumper sticker should have read is God said it. That settles it. I believe it.

Now what I believe is that you can do real Scripture, and you can do real science. And if you will do real Scripture and real science, you will end up understanding the narrative from the first page of Scripture to the last page of Scripture in a way that honors the person and work of Jesus Christ, the personhood of Adam and Eve, and the narrative that Scripture provides for us of creation, fall, redemption, and consummation.

The whole story arc of the Gospel. God said it. That settles it. I believe it. That is the truth. And from Genesis to Jesus, we can be absolutely clear that the God who made everything is at work in our world.

It's been a delight to share with you, and I think I've actually saved a few minutes off your total conference time by telling you my conclusions in advance. God bless you, and have a great day.

Why Creation Apologetics Matters for Faith and Evangelism

Thank you again for coming tonight. Tonight we're going to be covering one topic that is very, very near and dear to my heart about why are creation apologetics important, and I want to look at Genesis as the foundation of the Gospel.

And I want to start out by making a very bold statement, which is this, a Christian's faith and their eternal effectiveness will only be maximized if they fully believe in the history of the Bible and are empowered by the Holy Spirit.

It's my opinion that you really need to have both of those things if you want to live a fully empowered, fully effective Christian life. Because if you don't believe in the historicity of the Bible, you're going to be carrying a lot of cognitive dissonance in your mind, and your heart's not going to want to go out and evangelize to people because your head is like an anchor, not believing in the truths of God's Word.

And secondly, if you're not filled and empowered by the Holy Spirit, you won't be there and present and ready to be used. Ephesians 2 says that we are God's workmanship prepared to do good works, which he has prepared in advance for us to do.

Only way we're going to run into those situations, I believe, is that if we're paying attention, we're listening, and we're directed by the power of the Holy Spirit. So here's what students are up against today, at least in the state of California, and it's going to be similar in other states, is in the state of California, between sixth and tenth grade, there is a barrage that happens with students where they're given about 50 hours, 50 classroom hours of instruction on evolution that spans over 250 pages of evolution teaching.

They have Lucy and other human evolutionary icons in sixth grade world history. They've got about 90 pages of evolution and life science, which is usually in seventh grade, and they have biology, which is typically about 150 pages, or about 15 of their biological text is usually on evolution.

So this is what Christians are up against today, and it's having a significant impact in the faith of our Christian students. Millennials today want to know, how many pages do I have to turn in the Bible before I run into truth?

Truth that I can understand, the truth that's not allegorized or mythology. They want to know, if the truth doesn't begin on page one, how many more pages do I have to flip before I'm going to run into truth?

We believe that truth starts on page one. I want to look here at a scripture passage called the Parable of the Sower, where Jesus is giving this analogy, and he's talking about the seed, which is God's word, or the kingdom of God, and he talks about these four different conditions in which the seed goes out.

So the DNA of the seed has a potential to grow when it's going to grow, but it falls in these different types of soil conditions that are going to result in growth or not. There's birds by the wayside that can come and eat up the seed.

There's a stony soil, thorns, and then there's fertile soil. So we'll watch a short video here that will explain and overview this parable.

The Parable of the Sower. Behold, the sower went out to sow. As he was sowing, some seed fell beside the road, and the birds came and ate it up. Other seed fell on the rocky ground, where it did not have much soil, and immediately it sprang up because it had no depth of soil, and after the sun had risen, it was scorched.

And because it had no root, other seed fell among the thorns, and the thorns came up and choked it, and it yielded no crumb. Other seeds fell into the good soil, and as they grew up and increased, they yielded a crop and produced thirty, sixty, and a hundredfold.

So to summarize, we have four different types of soil situations for the seed. The first is where it says that Jesus says the devil is going to come and take away the word that would have otherwise been planted in their hearts and their minds that would have grown up into productive action.

So that's one thing that can happen is the devil can come and take away the word. The next situation is the seeds have no root. They take place in believers that believe for a while, but then they fall away.

The next one is when the seed is choked with the cares and riches and pleasures of this life. And then, of course, is what we want, which is the good soil, where they're going to return thirty, sixty, or a hundredfold what's planted in them.

So if you break these down, the first one where the devil comes and takes away the word can be parallel to someone that just has disbelief. They come out of tribulation or persecution because of the word, and they said, you know what, it just must not be true anyhow.

The next one can be doubt. If they have no root and it's not taking place, they start believing God's word, then it hits a rock and they can't believe it anymore. That would be like doubt. Choked with cares, riches, and pleasures are analogous to when people are distracted by the world.

So the seed of God's word will not grow. Then, of course, there's a good ground. We want to focus on these top two, the disbelief and the doubt. This is where creation apologetics can really shine because they can help people understand that God's word is true from the start.

They don't have to doubt it, and then their roots can grow deeply. Those seeds will be secured and then fruitful trees. So Jesus is talking here and he says, because the seed had no root, it withered away, and he's talking and says that some fell along stony places where they did not have much earth, and they immediately sprang up.

We have a lot of quick believers here, so sometimes it happened, because they had no depth of earth. But when the sun was up and they were scorched and because they had no root, they withered away. He goes on and says, but he who received the seed on stony places, this is he who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy, yet he has no root in himself.

He endures for a while, but when tribulation or persecution arises because of the word, immediately he stumbles. And we've been doing this ministry for a while. I can't tell you the number of parents that have come up to us and said, I raised my kid in church.

They went to one youth group and they went away to their first semester of college at a secular school and they're come back now for Christmas as a self-reported atheist. It happens quite a lot and it's because of this tribulation that happens and the doubt and the disbelief that can foster into a faith that just does not stick.

So tribulation means a pressing, a pressing together or pressure or oppression, affliction, persecution, tribulation, distress, and straits. So in order to get a college degree nowadays, you're required to go through at least seven different specific courses that they regard as core coursework, things like geology and philosophy and other classes like this, where this student is going to get inundated and bombarded with evolutionary thought.