— Part 7 —
( “Be ready always to give an answer.” )
1 Peter 3:12-15,
“For the eyes of the Lord are over the
righteous, and his ears are open unto their prayers: but the face of the Lord
is against them that do evil. And who is
he that will harm you, if ye be followers of that which is good? But and if ye
suffer for righteousness' sake, happy are ye: and be not afraid of their
terror, neither be troubled; But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to
every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and
fear.”
We’ve
been talking about Creation Evangelism or what some call Pioneer Evangelism. We
saw that the people that we will be dealing with in our generation with the
Gospel will be more like the Greek’s that Paul tried to reach in Athens when he preached
on Mars Hill.
We
also saw that in order to reach the hard hearts of the world today, we need to labor
intensively at diagnosing their spiritual condition and then toiling to prepare
the soil of their hearts so that the Seed of the Word of God would take root
and that possibly we would see fruit for God’s glory.
After
we diagnose a person’s spiritual condition and then attempt to plant the gospel
seed in their hearts, we also need to have answers to their questions and
objections from the Word of God. In I Peter 3:15, Peter wrote that we must be
able to, “be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a
reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear.”
In
II Timothy 2:15 Paul admonished young Timothy to, “Study to shew thyself
approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing
the word of truth.” As believers and as the church of the living God which
is the pillar and ground of the truth, we need to study so that we know what
the truth is! We need to rightly divide the word and properly interpret the
Scriptures.
We’ve
already said that there are several reasons why we are not reaching souls today
as in the great revivals of days gone by.
-First
of all we’ve been saying that the world today is getting more and more like the
Greeks of Paul’s day. The Biblical foundation that once existed in our nation
is eroding rapidly. Years ago, even the lost were at least taught Biblical
principals of morality and decency based on God’s word. Prayer was allowed in
public schools, marriage was considered only between one man and one woman, and
people understood sin and judgment. All of that has and is changing. The reaction
to evangelistic preaching today is much the same reaction that the Greeks had
to Paul’s preaching. As I Corinthians 1:23 says, “But we preach Christ crucified, unto
the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness.”
-Another
reason is that our Churches are not equipping the saints. The church is
forgetting the commands of Christ to go into all the
world and preach the gospel to every creature and has substituted teaching and
preaching of the Word with plays, dramas, and rock concerts. In Ephesians
chapter four and verses eleven and twelve Paul says that God has gifted the
church with evangelists, pastors and teachers. For what
purpose? “For
the perfecting (furnishing, outfitting, equipping) of the saints, for the work of the ministry, (service,
servant/deacon) for the edifying (building
up) of the body of Christ.”
Not
only has the church neglected the great commission to go into all the world, but we haven’t trained or discipled every
member about how to give an answer and most of the members haven’t made
themselves available to be trained. We are all so busy that we don’t have the
time or energy to get the training that we need.
Tonight
I want to look at the questions that most people have that need to be answered.
Questions that most Christians are not answering. They
are questions such as:
-Where
did Cain get his wife?
-Can’t
Christians believe in evolution?
-Doesn’t carbon dating prove
that the earth is very old?
-How do dinosaurs fit in the Bible?
-How did Noah get all the animals on the Ark?
-Wasn’t there a gap between
the first two verses in Genesis?
-Doesn’t the Bible say that a
day is like a thousand years and so the days of creation must be long periods
of time?
-Where did all the different “races” of people come from?
-How do you explain the “ape
men?”
Basically
these are the standard questions that people will ask? In fact most Christians
have these questions because they don’t know the answers and couldn’t answer
them for themselves. In fact William Jennings Bryan, who represented
Christianity, couldn’t answer them in the famous Scopes monkey trial back in
1925 in Dayton, Tennessee.
And
so to the non-Christian, when Christians don’t seem to have the answer to these
questions, it is their justification for not believing the Bible. These attacks
are mainly against the book of Genesis and they have been so massive that most
Christians have given up trying to defend it. The problem is that if Christians
can’t answer these questions, then their own children won’t be able to either. Thus
their children could easily reject all of the Bible,
which is what has been happening at an alarming rate in Christianity.
You
see most people in our fundamental churches don’t understand that the Bible is
a history book. Christianity is not based on myth or some interesting stories,
but rather on real history or His-Story. There was a real Adam to whom we are
all related, there was a real fall which is why we are all sinners, and there
was a real curse which is why there is death and suffering.
The
fact is if we cannot answer these questions then we will not be able to reach
the lost with the gospel that they so desperately need. We need to answer those
questions that the majority of people have and we must connect it to the real
world.
Peter
said it like this in 2 Peter 1:16-18. He said, “For we have not followed
cunningly devised fables, when we made known unto you the power and coming
of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of his majesty. For he received
from God the Father honour and glory, when there came such a voice to him from
the excellent glory, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. And
this voice which came from heaven we heard, when we were with him in the holy
mount.” (Mount of transfiguration in Matthew 17:5)
To
many believers, Christianity is only about getting saved, going to heaven, and
warning people about hell. But Christianity is much more than this! It is a way
of thinking and living in today’s world! Our philosophy of life must come out
of our Theology or what we know to be true about God from His word. When our
children ask questions about the real world--questions like we looked at
earlier, concerning dinosaurs, fossils, Noah’s ark, Cain’s wife, and races, we
need to show them that the Bible does connect all of that to reality.
You
see if the connection to history is lost, then ultimately what does it mean to
be saved? From what do we need to be saved if the Bible really can’t be
trusted?
Today
many creation evangelists have prepared various Bible based curriculum as a way
of teaching how everything that we are saying from the Bible connects to real
history. Dr. Ken Ham has come up with an approach he calls the seven “C’s”. The
seven “C’s” represents major events in history from the Bible. We start at the beginning
and follow a time-line of history to its end.
For example, the seven “C’s” are:
-Creation (That God created
in 6 literal 24 hour days)
-Corruption (the first man
Adam sinned and plunged the entire human race into sin)
-Catastrophe (the worldwide
flood of Noah’s day)
-Confusion (the tower of Babel and the different
languages)
-Christ (the second Adam, God
becoming a man to pay for the sin debt of the world)
-Cross (Christ’s victory over
sin, death and hell)
-Consummation (end time
revelation, new heaven and new earth, etc)
These
seven “C’s” are based upon the major events in history. They have been placed
on this time line from the beginning (about 6,000 years ago) up until the
present and into the future. Everything that we teach in Christianity goes back
or forward based on this timeline of history. And that is the point; we need to
show people that the Bible is a history book and that everything connects to
real history and not made up fairy tales and myths.
The
church needs to teach and equip the saints with God’s word in four important
ways,
1) We need to clearly teach-- from plain language-- what
the Bible states. For instance, because it is God’s word and not just a human
work, Scripture must be self-authenticating and self-attesting. Scripture must
interpret Scripture. Now certainly extra-biblical sources can and should be
used to aid us in understanding the background against which it was written,
but these sources must be secondary to the context of the Bible’s words
themselves. We must be people of the Bible.
2) Because the world is against the Bible, we must
understand what the world is saying and doing in attacking and undermining the
Bible. This then must be counteracted.
3) Believers must be taught how to logically defend what
the Bible is teaching us, taking into account how the secular world is
attacking this point.
4) The doctrine that comes out of this section needs to
be clearly enunciated and then application made to our daily living.
Let’s
give some examples of this way of teaching.
A) Let’s say we are teaching about the creation of Adam
and Eve,
-First
we would quote the appropriate scriptures.
Genesis
2:7 says, “And the LORD God formed man of
the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and
man became a living soul.”
Genesis
2:21-24, “And the LORD God caused a deep
sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed
up the flesh instead thereof; And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from
man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam said, This
is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman,
because she was taken out of Man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and
his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.”
And
so we can see that the Bible clearly states that Adam was made from the dust of
the ground and Eve was made from his rib or his side.
-Second,
what is the world saying that goes counter to the Bible? The world teaches that
man evolved from an “ape-man” and woman from an “ape-woman.” This teaching of
evolution must be shown to be wrong. Examples of so-called “ape-men” could be
refuted by showing that there are no transitional forms of half ape or half man
specimen’s only artist’s conceptions to try and get us to believe a lie. We
could also study the facts about the so-called Nebraska man of the early 1920’s
that tells of a tooth that was found and subsequently artist’s drew up pictures
of an “ape-man” complete with wife, children and a cave. This tooth and the
artist’s rendition were used in the Scopes trial of 1925 to prove evolution.
The problem is that in 1927, other parts of the skeleton were discovered
together with other teeth and Nebraska
man was found to really be an extinct pig!
The
fact is that Answers in Genesis and other creation science groups have
multitudes of other cases where we can see that evolution has never been proven
but is still being pushed upon us by the intelligentsia who start from a wrong
assumption about the origins of man.
-Third,
we must be taught how to defend that there was one man and one woman created at
the beginning using other scriptures such as,
-1
Corinthians 15:39, “All flesh is not the
same flesh: but there is one kind of
flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another of fishes, and another of
birds.” This is another verse in the New Testament which agrees with the
fact that God created life forms which are distinctly different and after their
own “kind” or species. Man and beasts are different and one did not evolve to
develop over billions of years to another form.
-1
Corinthians 15:45, “And so it is written,
The first man Adam was made a living soul;
the last Adam was made a quickening spirit.” The first man was made a
living soul. The word for soul here is unique to the creation of man and
different than any other created being by God.
-Genesis
3:20, “And Adam called his wife's name
Eve; because she was the mother of all living.” The original word in the
Hebrew for Eve used here is the word “life.” In other words, Eve was the mother
of all human life and man was specially created and is different than any other
creation and not a descendant of animals or any other living thing.
-Also
scientific evidence about the close genetic relatedness of all human people
groups (which I will not delve into tonight) can be shown not as “proof” but as
solid evidence of the sameness of the human race.
-Fourth,
the doctrine needs to be clearly enunciated and application made to our daily
living. In this case we have the doctrine of marriage between one man and one
woman for life. The fact that two become one flesh in marriage is because Eve
was taken out of man. Eve could not have come from some pre-existing
animal—this would destroy the basis of oneness in marriage.
-Matthew
19:4-6 says, “And he answered and said
unto them, Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them
male and female, And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother,
and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh? Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What
therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.”
-Ephesians
5:31 says, “For this cause shall a man
leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they two
shall be one flesh.”
These
four steps can be used to answer many other questions concerning creation and
the correct Biblical response. We need to be able to have answers ready to not
only refute the lies of the world but how to defend our Biblical positions from
God’s word.
You
see if Genesis 1:1 is not true, if the very first verse in the Bible is not
true, then neither is the rest of the Bible. Not only
is the fact that we have a Creator God a vital and primary doctrine but even
the so-called details about creation are essential as well. For instance, if
Adam wasn’t a real historical figure, then who is our ancestor? How do we know
that we are sinners? If Adam’s fall was not a real event in history, then what
is sin?
If
Adam and Eve weren’t created just as Genesis records, then the doctrine of
marriage is meaningless. If the days of creation aren’t ordinary days, then
there’s no basis for the seven-day week and God’s word doesn’t have to mean
what the language clearly states. And if the earth is billions of years old,
and death, disease, and bloodshed existed before sin, then the gospel itself is
undermined.
We
need to realize and acknowledge that the world is attacking Christianity and
the Word of God by attacking the doctrine of creation, and for the most part
Christians have retreated and compromised with the world’s teachings such as
mixing creation with evolutionary presuppositions.
And so that is why we need to equip the Lord’s army
with the most powerful weapon in the universe—the ever living, never dying Word
of God.
Let’s
pray.
