TLP 485: Will Your Children Stand? | Ken Ham Interview

You know, or even in the same bag as a sandwich, when you buy a sandwich, it totally destroys.

It.

The smell is terrible.

I agree with you on all of that.

All of it.

I think any vegetable you have to soak for millions of years before you eat it, there's something wrong with it anyway.

But….

Parenting as Worship and the Need for a Genesis Foundation

Parenting isn't about us. In fact, parenting isn't even about our kids. Parenting is just one way Christian dads and moms are to worship God. So welcome to the Truth Love Parent Podcast, where we train dads and moms to give God the preeminence in their parenting.

I'm your host, A .M. Brewster, and today I talk with one of my heroes, Ken Ham from Answers in Genesis, The Creation Museum, and The Ark Encounter. I love and respect this man for so many reasons, many of which will come out during the interview, but the main purpose of this discussion is to help us parents better understand the kind of foundation we should be laying for our kids.

Now there's no guarantee our kids will choose to stand on the foundation we've laid, but there are really good chances that they will be able to stand strong when we parents have rooted them in a Christ-honoring way.

So listen to the conversation, and then check out the link in the description that will provide you additional resources about building a super-strong foundation for your home. Ken, welcome to the show.

Hi, thanks Aaron, it's great to be with you.

I'm so excited that you're here. Now your heartbeat, your mission in everything from AIG to Creation Museum, Ark Encounter comes down to the idea that the things in Genesis are extremely important. It's a thread that goes through everything that you do.

Tell us a little bit about that passion.

Well, you know, it's important for people to understand that Genesis 1 to 11, you know, that's really the geological, biological, astronomical, anthropological history that God's recorded for us in the Bible, is actually foundational to the rest of the Bible, it's foundational to all of our doctrine, it's foundational to our Christian worldview.

And yet I find that most churches, most Christian leaders have either ignored Genesis 1 to 11 or say it doesn't matter, or say it's too controversial or divisive, or that you can believe in evolution and millions of years.

You know, I started to realize this as I started to speak in churches, you know, back in the 70s, actually, in Australia, and found out that most people thought Genesis didn't matter. And yet when you ask them, why do we believe what we do as a Christian, you know, why do we believe in marriage, why do we believe there's such a thing as sin, or why do we even believe the gospel, and started to realize people really didn't have that foundational knowledge from Genesis.

And actually, if you think about the issues that beset us today, what what do we see in our culture, you know, the gender issues, the gay marriage issue, LGBTQ, pedophilia, racism, whatever, unless you have Genesis 1 to 11, that history as the foundation for your worldview, you can't deal with those issues.

Because that's where you have to start. And so that thread, yeah, runs through everything, the Creation Museum, the Ark Encounter, the various books that we have, we have a Sunday school curriculum, that's a four year curriculum that starts in Genesis and goes all the way through to Revelation.

And that's why here at the Creation Museum, we have the seven seas walk through the Bible, walking you through the history in Genesis 1 to 11, to show how foundational it is to the rest. So that's a thread that runs through everything, as you say.

Yeah, and it's so desperately important, because as you've said, it runs through everything else that we do. You hit it the nail on the head, without that firm foundation in Genesis and the truths that God unpacked for us there, we're lost to our own opinion and leading on our own understanding when it comes to so many of these things.

Family Legacy, Godly Offspring, and the Impact of Parents

Now, Ken is married, and they have five children and 18 grandchildren, is that correct? 18?

One on the way?

No way, our 18th one was just born recently. So yep, 18.

Fantastic.

We have a single daughter. We want to get married off so we can have some more too.

Well, of course, because 18 is just not enough, obviously. Please tell us about your family so we can get to know you a little bit better.

Well, we were born in Australia, I was born in Australia, my wife was born in Australia, and we met at church. That's a good place to meet, isn't it?

Yes, it is.

At church.

And we were married actually 48 years ago this year. And we determined that when we had children, that we wanted to raise them up the way God's word told us. We were very, very concerned that we didn't want the world to capture our children.

And so my wife and I, when our first son was born, we said, okay, what does God's word say? And of course, I was brought up in a Christian home with parents who taught me to stand on the authority of the word of God.

And that's a great part of this whole ministry, really. I see answers in Genesis, the Creation Museum, the Ark Encounter is really a legacy of parents who brought us up to stand on the word of God, who taught us to defend the Christian faith, who would never knowingly compromise the word of God, who had a heart for evangelism, and would go out and get missionaries to come and evangelize children, evangelize people in our area.

And I saw they had that heart and heart to support missionaries. And my mother drummed into us right from a young age, it's only what is done for Jesus that counts and that lasts. And to remember that that's all that lasts in this world.

And my parents were never interested in material things, they wanted to use whatever resources the Lord gave them to bring up their own children, to love the Lord and stand on his word, and to impact others.

So it had a great impact on my life. And I have a very godly wife who together, we also see that she was called to this ministry as much as me. And she sees it as her role to support me a million percent.

And the Ministry of Answers and Genesis, the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter. And I think because of that commitment to the ministry and our children seeing that she's never ever questioned me being in the ministry, going away at times to speak all.

Over the world.

She's always seen by the kids as supporting me a million percent. And so that's one of the reasons I believe that there's never been any question in our kids' lives in regard to who we are as Christians, as Christian parents, and they stand on the Lord too.

And so it's thrilling to see that we have five children who love the Lord, and four of them have married godly spouses. And now they're bringing their children up to love the Lord and to stand on his word.

And this ministry has had a great impact on those grandchildren too, because they're growing up with an Ark Encounter, a Creation Museum, and they're growing up with apologetics teaching. So they already know answers about dinosaurs and the ape man and all the other sorts of things.

And so they've grown up to know that those answers are there and not to be able to question the word of God. And so it's wonderful to see them have a heart for the Lord. And as they get older, to see them passionately proclaiming God's word as well.

So that gives you just a little bit of history there in regard to things. I became a teacher in 1975. And it's interesting, that's really when the Lord started to burden me in regard to a ministry for apologetics.

Because one of the first questions the students asked me was, Sir, we know you're a Christian, but how can you be a Christian when we know the Bible is not true? And why is the Bible not true? I said, because of what we're taught about evolution.

And then they asked me how Noah could fit all the animals on the Ark. And that started me, that real apologetics meant, I mean, I'd already researched some of these questions going through high school and university, and my father had helped me to have answers.

And then when I saw how much this was a stumbling block to others listening to the Bible, I realized how important it was to get those answers to them. And that led to a ministry that started in Australia in 1977.

1979, I was school teaching to go full time. And 1987, my wife and I and four kids at the time came over to America as missionaries to this culture, to help call the church back to the authority of God's Word beginning in Genesis.

And now we have five children, 18 grandchildren, and also built a Creation Museum and Ark Encounter, the two leading Christian themed attractions in the world. And they are, you know, the burden for the Creation Museum also goes back to those teaching days when my students saw evolution presented as fact at the museums I took them to, and the Lord gave me a burden.

Why not have a Creation Museum? And I prayed for a Creation Museum in 1980 in Australia, and God answered that prayer in 2007 in America, in the state of Kentucky. How's that?

Wow, that's amazing. And whoever you are, that kid in that school classroom in Australia in 1975, thank you for pushing him with those questions. We may not have had the Ark today, who knows? Now a lot of what he just said is right here.

He gives a fantastic step through about how formative his parents were in his own Christian faith and how God used his mom and dad, and he spoke of his wife. I'm going to ask for forgiveness here. Is it Mally?

Yes, her real name is actually Marilyn, and it's spelled Mary Lynn, named after some of her family, her mother and one of her other relatives. And as a little child, her mother gave her the nickname Mally, and so it stuck.

And so she's known as Mally. Most people don't even know her real name is Marilyn.

Oh, there you go, TLP, it's been revealed here now, we all know. Now I read a lot of parenting books. As a book reviewer, they're sent to me all of the time. I read a lot of them. But I thought Will They Stand was probably one of the most unique, and I'm using that word on purpose.

It was one of the most unique parenting books I've ever read. It's part biblical commentary, part autobiography, part apologetics curriculum, with parenting application all throughout it. It's really a diverse and unique read.

So please tell me about your experience writing Will They Stand. I mean, since no one else I've come in contact with has written a parenting book quite like this, you did something very different. What were you thinking as you sat down to write this?

Well, you know, the family is the first and most fundamental of all human institutions God ordained in Scripture, and the family is the unit God uses to transmit the knowledge of himself from one generation to the next and to the world around.

And I realized the family has come under incredible attack. And I've seen too, as I've traveled widely, how so many families, I hear parents telling me their kids no longer go to church, their grandkids no longer go to church.

And I also see many instances where fathers haven't taken on their God-given and God-commanded role to be the spiritual head of their house and a priest to their wife and family as they should be. And thinking back to my own days and just my own days as a child and being brought up in a Christian home and just knowing the impact that my parents had on me.

I had a father that, you know, when we were transferred around in the state of Queensland because he was a teacher and we would go to little country towns that might have had one church or two churches, and we'd find the pastor invariably was impacted by liberal theology.

So my father was often researching what the liberal theologians were teaching and what they were teaching at these theological seminaries so that he would have answers to give to us so that we wouldn't be led astray and so that he could challenge the pastor concerning standing on God's word.

And I saw a father who was so strong in the scriptures, who would never knowingly compromise the word of God. He would stand up boldly and stand for the word of God and stand against any compromise that he saw coming into the church or in any books that he saw.

And that had a big impact on me to see my father do that. And a mother that showed such love towards us and exhibited such godly qualities in her life and the way she treated others and the way she treated us and always wanting us to learn the truth of God's word and praying with us every night.

And I realized how much my parents had an impact on me and how much really the legacy of my parents is the ministry of answers and Genesis that's impacting. Think about it. We're impacting directly 30 million people a year, we'd say conservatively and tens of millions of people more indirectly.

So how could you write a parenting book without talking about your own upbringing, your own parents, my parents, because this is really part of their legacy and really their children then, that spiritual legacy that they passed on.

So I needed to start there. So it ended up being a book that's really a testimony about my own life and growing up and the impact of my parents on me and my father on me, and then how that led to a ministry called Answers in Genesis, a worldwide apologetics ministry, and then building the two leading Christian themed attractions in the world.

And then for us too, when we were married and then had our first child to realize, okay, if we truly understand what God's word is, it's not just a book you add to your thinking, it's the foundation for our whole worldview.

What does God's word tell us about how to train children? Not what somebody else has necessarily said, but what has God's word said? And another impact for me too was getting into the apologetics ministry and realizing how important it is that we know how to defend the Christian faith.

And so as I talk in the book about raising up godly offspring by putting that biblical salt in them, and that consists of apologetics, learning to defend the faith, and also learning that our Christian worldview, our whole way of thinking has to start from God's word.

So we've got to be raising up children to think foundationally, putting in that biblical salt, making it uncontaminated, getting them ready for this world that we live in and understanding that the world that we live in is the broad way and the devil is out to capture our children.

And I've seen so many parents that have seen their children depart from the church or their grandchildren depart from the church and to recognize, man, we need to be doing this God's way and also incorporating all the ministry that the Lord has enabled me a part of into doing that, to be able to then come up with a book on parenting that is very, very unique in many different ways.

And for me, I just open up my heart as to who I am, and the same for my wife as well. One of the chapters is actually written by our eldest daughter. She founded a Christian school associated with Answers in Genesis.

I love that chapter.

Just to see how she writes and her understanding of biblical worldview based on the Bible. And I say to people, there's a product of the training that I outlined throughout the book right there. That's why I want her to write that chapter.

And I didn't tell her what to write. I just asked her to write it and she wrote it. And then I sent it to the editors to just go through grammar wise and so on. And I hardly made any changes. And to me, I'm saying, yes, see there, that's a product of the sort of training that I'm talking about through the book to be able to raise up godly offspring.

Amen. Amen. Yeah, I love that chapter. I thought it was absolutely fantastic. She did a great job as an educator myself. So many of the things resonated with me. Now, again, I've obviously said I love all of the unique facets.

It was biblical, it was personal, it was extremely applicable. And when I say biblical, I don't just mean like biblical ideas. There are so many scriptures all throughout the book. It's absolutely fantastic.

But one thing I want to focus in on, and you mentioned it already, you talk a lot about legacy and you've already explained how even the Ark encounter in a way is the legacy left by your parents. And we've discussed legacy from time to time on Truth Loved Parents, but we haven't dealt with it to the same degree that Will They Stand does.

So what is legacy? I know it's a relatively simple concept. So also in your estimation, is there a secret to then leaving a godly one?

Spiritual Legacy Versus Material Legacy

Well, you know, when a lot of people think about legacy, they think more about a material legacy and what material legacy we're passing on to our children. But when I talk about legacy, I'm talking about spiritual legacy, because one of the things, for instance, I say in the book, I challenge people, you know, what can you take to heaven with you?

You know, and for instance, I show a picture, a picture of a house and some money, like representing a bank account and a boat and a poodle and a cat. Well, the reason I use poodles and cats, because I don't like them actually.

And then a little child. And I said, which one of these is going to last forever? Well, the only one that's going to last forever is the child. And which one of these can you take to heaven with you? Well, the only one you can take to heaven with you is the child.

So we need to recognize that when God entrusts children to us and he says children are inherited of the Lord, they're a gift from the Lord to us, then our role as parents is to pass on to them a spiritual legacy so that we're considering here beings who are going to live forever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever in heaven or hell.

So that is extremely, extremely convicting in regard to me as a parent and how I'm going to pass on the spiritual legacy to them so they will pass on that spiritual legacy to the next generation and to the next generation and to the next generation.

In other words, if you look at Malachi 2, for instance, in Malachi 2, we have there the prophet who's asking the question, why did God make two one? You had men who were divorcing their wives, marrying pagans.

And so he asked the question, why did God make two one? Which is a reference to Genesis and it's a reference to Genesis 2, 24, actually, because you become one because you're one flesh, because woman was made from man.

And so in marriage, you become one. And so why did God make two one? And his answer was this, because he sought godly offspring, not just offspring, but godly offspring, godly seed. In other words, where to produce godly seed, pass on that spiritual legacy, who will marry godly seed and impact the world with the message of God's word, who will then produce godly seed, to marry godly seed, to impact the world, to produce godly seed, to marry godly seed, who will impact the world.

That's what it should be generation after generation after generation after generation. That's what legacy is all about. You know, in the book, one of the things I do do is compare certain people's legacies.

And for instance, I say, well, take Darwin. You could go to the town of Shrewsbury over in England where I visited and you'll see statues of Darwin and streets named after Darwin. You can visit Darwin's house as a school where there's a statue of Darwin.

There's a shopping center called the Darwin Shopping Center. And people look at that and say, wow, Darwin has an incredible legacy. Look, there's lots of things in this town named after him and statues.

And you can go to the British Museum of Natural History and see a big statue of Darwin and what a legacy he's left. But Darwin's legacy was one where he popularized an idea to try to explain life without God.

And so he popularized the idea of evolutionary naturalism. And Darwin's ideas have been used by Margaret Sanger to found Planned Parenthood. They've been used by Hitler to justify what he did to the Jews and certain people that had, you know, disabilities or other sorts of people as well.

And so we can see the evil fruits or the legacy of Darwin, which is a devastating legacy. Then when I look at my own father, I'm saying, what's the legacy of my own father? Now, he doesn't have statues like Darwin.

He didn't write a book like The Origin of Species that, you know, cost you a million dollars to buy one of Darwin's Origin of Species books today because they're rare to find the original. He didn't leave, you know, anything like that.

But he left a legacy in his children that has resulted in impacting tens of millions, hundreds of millions, I believe, of people all around the world with the truth of God's word and the gospel. Now, that's the legacy that I'm challenging parents.

We need to leave. You know, you don't have to be a famous person to have a statue. You don't have to have an auditorium named after you or anything like that. You don't even have to write a book that becomes a billion copy seller or something like that.

But you raise up godly children who will impact the world for the Lord Jesus Christ and pass on that godly legacy to others. That's the greatest legacy you could ever leave.

Amen. Amen. Well, you might find this interesting, but I am a Mayflower Pilgrim descendant. So right from William Brewster, who was one of pretty much the foremost elder, I suppose, of the Mayflower Pilgrims.

And my life, I've talked often, is an example of that, how the truths that he passed on to his children passed on to his children. I mean, he's pretty well known. You might still learn about him in a history book, maybe.

Very few people know who I am and the people in between have been lost to time. But by God's grace, I'm so thankful for the spiritual knowledge and the love for God that he passed down. So, yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about.

And it makes me think I need to start the second greatest Christian theme park, you know, where we take the Mayflower and take it back to its original roots. We can even, like, reconstruct the Mayflower, you know, life side.

Just kidding. Now, what's really interesting. As a biblical. Go ahead.

I was going to say, yeah, I've been in England and to the actual port where the Mayflower came in there before it launched on its voyage. Of course, you know, today the sea is much, much further out. It's very, very different.

But it's interesting when you talk about that and you go over to those places and actually say, wow, there's a sign that says it actually was here. That's fantastic.

Yeah, that's especially very important because generally speaking, the Brewsters aren't very revered in England because, you know, they left. But as a biblical counselor, what's really interesting to me is that a lot of professing Christians haven't really heard anything like what you're talking about right now.

They've heard all of the things about, you know, having insurance policies and, you know, leaving physical things for their children. But this idea of a spiritual legacy is unfortunately far too often not spoken about.

Now, TLP's audience in particular is a very diverse group of people. Many have been biblically parenting their children for years, but many more are very new to the concepts we discuss, either because they haven't been doing biblical parenting or because their children are very young.

So here's a question. What encouragement or challenge would you give to those who are listening today who are new to this idea of biblical parenting?

Acquiring a Taste for the Things of the Lord

Well, let me refer to one of the chapters in the book where I talk about Vegemite.

Kids. Now, I'm so glad you brought that up because that grossed me out. I just want to say that.

Well, Vegemite is a black paste. It's very salty. There's sort of a leftover sludge from the breweries in Australia, but they made it into a food and Australians just love it. And we were brought up on Vegemite.

Now, if you give Vegemite to the average American, they will spit it out and say it's gross and they'll say it ruined their taste buds and all the rest of it. But why do most Australians love Vegemite?

Why do I love Vegemite? In fact, I had Vegemite crackers last night, actually. You take a cracker and you put butter on it and you put a thin layer of Vegemite. And I just love that or on toast. But why do Australians love Vegemite?

Well, as a young child, in fact, when we were very young, my mother would put a little bit of Vegemite into our mouth and it would teach us to acquire a taste for it. And so it gives a little bit of the taste.

And then you become sort of hooked on the taste and you start to acquire a taste. And that taste is with you when you're older because you acquired that taste when you were younger. I use the other example for Americans of pickles that over here.

I'd never eaten these dill pickles, these pickles before. I can't stand them. They are gross. In fact, when they put pickles on a sandwich, you know, or even in the same bag as a sandwich, when you buy a sandwich, it totally destroys it.

The smell. I agree with you on all of that.

I think any vegetable you have to soak for millions of years before you can eat it, wrong with it anyway. But I tell Americans, the reason you don't know pickles are so bad and they taste so horrible is because you were brought up on them.

And so you don't know how bad they taste. In other words, think of the biblical application. When Paul was talking to Timothy in the Bible, he talks about Timothy from a child. You have known the scriptures.

And so I use Vegemite to challenge people. Look, if your children aren't taught to acquire a taste of the things of the Lord right from when they're born, don't think that when they get older, you can suddenly say, oh, they're college age or high school age, I need to do something with them.

Because if they haven't acquired a taste when they're young, it's hard to get them to acquire a taste later on. So what I would really challenge parents concerning and encourage them to do is this. Look, right from a young age, start teaching your children to acquire a taste of the things of the Lord.

Now, what does that mean? Just reading the Bible to them? Well, no, it means more than that. You see, I talk about putting salt into our children. You know, one of the fallacious arguments people have often used with me in regard to the education of children is, oh, our kids should be in the public schools to witness to the other kids because we're to be the salt of the earth.

Now, where people send their children to be educated is up to them. But when people use that argument, I have to deal with it because it's a bad argument. It's a fallacious argument. Because when they say our children are to be the salt of the earth, I say, now, OK, have a look in the Bible.

Mark 9 .50 says, have salt in yourselves. You can't be salt till you have it. Your children can't be salt till they have it. When our first son was born, he didn't look at me and say, Dad, what do you use a soteriology and eschatology?

And we have great theological discussions, right? The Bible tells us that God has made it evident to all that he's creator, that he's written right and wrong in our hearts. We have a conscience. Romans 2 tells us that.

But our job as parents was to put that salt in. And then Matthew 5 warns us if salt's contaminated, it's no good. So we have to put as uncontaminated as possible salt in to fill them up with that biblical salt so that they can be the salt of the earth.

You can't throw them to the world. You don't send them to the Philistines to be trained. You have to train them up to go out to the Philistines to witness to them. And when you're putting in that salt of biblical truth, it's not just reading the Bible or what we call Bible stories.

It means teaching them to be able to be ready for this world they're going to live in. You know, in 2 Corinthians 11, 3, God warns us through Paul that the devil is going to use the same method on us as he did on Eve to get us to a position of not believing God's word.

Well, what was that method? Genesis 3. Did God really say to attack God's word, to undermine God's word, to get you to doubt the word of God? I call that the Genesis 3 attack. So we need to look at the world and say, what's being used today to cause generations to doubt the word of God?

Well, evolution, millions of years, science, questions like, how do we know there's a God? Where did God come from? Isn't the Bible just a book of mythology? How do you know the Bible is true? How could Noah get the animals on the ark?

What about the Big Bang?

I mean, all these are used to try to undermine what people believe today, what your children believe about the Bible. And so putting that biblical thought in right from their young age is teaching them answers to these skeptical questions, getting them ready for the world they're living in and teaching them foundationally from the Bible so they know what their doctrine is.

You have to teach them from Genesis, which is the foundation for marriage, for sin, for why we die, for why we wear clothes, for why Jesus died on the cross, teaching that foundation. And can you do that right from when they're born?

And I say yes. In fact, we produce books for all ages, even little rhyme books for 2, 3, 4, 5 year old that teach doctrine and apologetics. But even more than that, you know what my wife and I used to do when our kids were born?

You know, we would then start to show them pictures, children's books with pictures and talk through some of the accounts in the Bible or talk about dinosaurs or, you know, all sorts of different topics.

Now, people thought we were nuts. But as our children got older, they loved those picture books. They loved them. And then we started to teach them more about the content. And then we would start to even read them the content because these are some of the apologetics books that we have produced over time and books dealing with biblical authority and so on.

And then our kids would start to read and they became their favorite books. And so right from a young age, you're teaching them to acquire a taste of the things of the Lord. Children are like vacuum cleaners.

I mean, they really suck up information. A lot of times we think we can't teach them those things until they're much older. That is simply not the case. You need to be putting as much of that biblical salt, the foundational teaching, apologetic teaching into them while they're young so that as they grow up, then they have that with them.

We've seen our kids do that with our grandkids. And then our older grandkids, we see them defending the Christian faith on social media. We see them witnessing to others using those arguments that they were taught because they were brought up on that.

And that's the way that we brought up our own children. Our own children are all passionate for the Lord. If they see someone contradicting God's word, they know the arguments to use with them because they've been brought up right from a young age to understand that.

And, you know, for many parents, I understand they say, well, I don't have the information. I don't know how to do that, which is why we produce books and curricula. We even have a homeschool Bible curriculum based upon our four year Sunday school curriculum we have called Answers Bible Curriculum.

So there's lots of material out there and we're producing those materials. I believe the ministry of Answers and Genesis is at the cutting edge of dealing with where the battle's at, what's being used today to drag your children away, to capture them for the world.

How is the devil doing that to help parents to be able to have that right foundation, to be able to fill them with that biblical salt?

Amen. And you can start early. Like he said, I was talking with a friend of mine recently who was a one year old, was making some very poor choices. And I was saying to him, you know, in addition to this and this and this, you need to be speaking God's truth to him.

Because even though even if he won't get it all, even if he won't understand it all, he gets used to hearing that that God has expectations, that sin hurts, and that there is important relationship that God wants to have with him.

And that is incredibly important. And you can never start too early with that. Now, this next question is closely tied to the last. OK, it's a very important concept for me, but I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on the role of the church in the spiritual discipleship formation of our children, because I think a lot of people get this wrong.