Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / October 22, 2017 | Living At The End Of Time - This Is How The World Ends

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October 22, 2017 | Living At The End Of Time - This Is How The World Ends · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

0:00
SPEAKER_00: Good morning.
0:02
SPEAKER_00: How are you today?
0:05
SPEAKER_00: How are you in the cab building?
0:07
SPEAKER_00: College Avenue building?
0:09
SPEAKER_00: Good.
0:09
SPEAKER_00: Glad to hear it.
0:10
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
0:13
SPEAKER_00: So what a gorgeous day.
0:16
SPEAKER_00: We're in a sermon series called Living at the End of Time, and the End of Time and Jerusalem are linked up, so I'll mention again what I did last week because that um next May uh there is the culmination of 17 Jews for Jesus campaign events in large cities across the world.
0:35
SPEAKER_00: It's been going on for a long time.
0:38
SPEAKER_00: And this is the final campaign, and we're gonna be one of 40 churches or so that's sending over a team to actually help them during this month of campaigning.
0:48
SPEAKER_00: We'll go over for maybe two weeks.
0:50
SPEAKER_00: Tony and Judy will lead this.
0:52
SPEAKER_00: And uh Tony and Judy and I are leading a meeting tomorrow night at Tony's home.
0:57
SPEAKER_00: If you're interested at all in perhaps going over last two weeks of May approximately next uh next year to help out, please uh stop over at Tony and Judy's house at 7 o'clock tomorrow.
1:10
SPEAKER_00: So I get to talk to you today about some really interesting stuff to me.
1:18
SPEAKER_00: Science and um, you know, the the the earth, the our planet's past and its future, and and God, uh our sovereign God, a God who creates, God who intervenes, God who judges.
1:38
SPEAKER_00: And um so uh we get to talk about the end of the world, and that's that's what we're studying in the book of 2 Peter.
1:47
SPEAKER_00: If you have a Bible, open it up to 2 Peter, the third chapter, the last chapter of 2 Peter.
1:52
SPEAKER_00: It's uh just just left of Revelation.
1:55
SPEAKER_00: So when I was thinking about this chapter, I thought of one of my favorite, if not my favorite, American poet, Robert Frost, and a little poem of his that's very popular called Fire and Ice goes like this.
2:09
SPEAKER_00: Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice.
2:15
SPEAKER_00: From what I've tasted of desire, I hold with those who favor fire.
2:20
SPEAKER_00: But if I had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate to say that for destruction, ice is also great and would suffice.
2:29
SPEAKER_00: Isn't that a clever, cute poem in which he makes uh he builds a bridge between fire and ice, from fire to desire and ice to hatred, and and uh just muses that with a strong desire in the world and strong and the strong hatred in the world, both fire and ice would be appropriate?
2:49
SPEAKER_00: No, we'll come back to that eventually, but I want to title my message then.
2:54
SPEAKER_00: This is how the world ends, because 1 Peter 3, 1 through 7 tells us and chooses one of those two options.
3:01
SPEAKER_00: Now Peter's actually writing, this is uh he says in chapter 3, verse 1, this is his second letter.
3:07
SPEAKER_00: Special prize.
3:08
SPEAKER_00: Can anybody name his first letter?
3:13
SPEAKER_00: You got it, yeah.
3:15
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
3:16
SPEAKER_00: This is a second letter I'm writing to you.
3:18
SPEAKER_00: And he says, beloved.
3:20
SPEAKER_00: This is interesting.
3:21
SPEAKER_00: Usually you begin a letter, dear Joe, dear Susie, whatever.
3:26
SPEAKER_00: You say something sweet to them at the beginning.
3:29
SPEAKER_00: I think it's significant, by the way, that he drops in a beloved here.
3:34
SPEAKER_00: It's the first time he said something like this in the book, and he's now going to repeat it three more times in this chapter.
3:40
SPEAKER_00: And it strikes me, this is a little psychoanaly-analyzing of Peter, that Peter's just said something really hard to them.
3:48
SPEAKER_00: If you were here last week, or whether or not, it doesn't matter whether you're here last week, I'll tell you what he said last week.
3:55
SPEAKER_00: He got really kind of in their face.
3:57
SPEAKER_00: He said, Listen, you guys are Christians, right?
4:00
SPEAKER_00: I understand that, but you can be suckers because we have these really charismatic, sharp, false teachers out there, these people who say things that aren't true, and they're saying two things.
4:10
SPEAKER_00: One of them has to do with uh the second coming of Christ, when they're saying you've got to be some sort of naive fundamentalist to believe that.
4:17
SPEAKER_00: And the other thing they're saying has to do with urges and desires and temptations.
4:21
SPEAKER_00: So when they say you've got to be some sort of narrow fundamentalist to always be repressing your desires, live it up a little, stop being a stick in the mud.
4:29
SPEAKER_00: And the temptation is that even good Christians who have been climbing the ladder of virtues that were listed in 2 Peter 1, who've been growing in Christ and are semi-mature, man, you guys can fall too.
4:41
SPEAKER_00: You don't realize it.
4:42
SPEAKER_00: And when you fall, it is worse for you to have climbed and fallen than never to have climbed at all.
4:47
SPEAKER_00: It's worse to be a mature Christian who, let's say, has an affair, ruins their family, embarrasses the church and Christ.
4:55
SPEAKER_00: That's worse than if you had just been a basic fundamental Christian and you'd never grown at all and been immature.
5:02
SPEAKER_00: And you know that's true.
5:03
SPEAKER_00: And then he ended with these words.
5:04
SPEAKER_00: He's so, so wrought up about this.
5:06
SPEAKER_00: He says, if you do that, you're like a dog returning to your vomit or like a sow returning to the mire.
5:12
SPEAKER_00: You go, uh, okay, if you say so.
5:15
SPEAKER_00: That's the Bible.
5:16
SPEAKER_00: And and so I feel like anybody else like uh hockey?
5:20
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I I grew up loving hockey.
5:22
SPEAKER_00: Hockey has three periods first period, second period, and the big break for in hockey is between the second period and third period.
5:28
SPEAKER_00: And coach takes them back in the back room, and let's say they've had a bad second period.
5:33
SPEAKER_00: Let's say, like 2 Peter chapter 2, got in their face, it's pretty tough.
5:37
SPEAKER_00: Well, I think what what you want to do is the coach is you want to encourage them and you want to motivate them.
5:41
SPEAKER_00: So I think in verses 1 and 2, we have the coach talking to players that have really that he's gotten in their face and they haven't done really well during period number two.
5:53
SPEAKER_00: And so now he wants to let them know hey, listen, I love you.
5:56
SPEAKER_00: Like a parent to a child.
5:58
SPEAKER_00: I've just gotten in your face, I've rebuked you.
6:00
SPEAKER_00: In fact, I was thinking, you know, there's a tip here, I think, for mentors or parents.
6:05
SPEAKER_00: After you say something hard, like Peter did in chapter two, say something soft.
6:12
SPEAKER_00: I know you don't feel like it sometimes because they've been such total jerks.
6:16
SPEAKER_00: Your kids, I'm talking about your kids, not mine, of course.
6:19
SPEAKER_00: But no.
6:20
SPEAKER_00: I mean, you know how it is sometimes you're so upset, and so you've said something, but you know it's important.
6:26
SPEAKER_00: Do what Peter did.
6:27
SPEAKER_00: You know, you know, let them know you love them afterwards.
6:30
SPEAKER_00: That's just a brief tip.
6:32
SPEAKER_00: That's not the main point today at all.
6:33
SPEAKER_00: But I think that you need to rebuke people, you need to get in their face sometimes, but then say something soft.
6:40
SPEAKER_00: And that's what he does here.
6:41
SPEAKER_00: He does it four times, bang, bang, bang, bang, in chapter three.
6:44
SPEAKER_00: And so I thought I would mention it.
6:45
SPEAKER_00: And then he says, in both of these letters, I am stirring up your sincere mind by way of reminder that you should remember something.
6:52
SPEAKER_00: I think what's going on here is that Peter didn't actually lead them to Christ.
6:57
SPEAKER_00: These are churches and groups of people in Western, what we call Western Turkey.
7:01
SPEAKER_00: There it was, then it was Asia.
7:02
SPEAKER_00: And actually it was his friend Paul and Barnabas who had gone through and led them to Christ.
7:08
SPEAKER_00: And so Peter's not coming and saying, I'm not giving you new stuff.
7:12
SPEAKER_00: Paul did a great job.
7:13
SPEAKER_00: He told you stuff.
7:14
SPEAKER_00: I just want to remind you of things.
7:16
SPEAKER_00: Before I die, I want to re-cause he he is about to die, I want to remind you of these things.
7:21
SPEAKER_00: They're really important.
7:22
SPEAKER_00: And frankly, sometimes I feel that's most of what I do as a pastor.
7:27
SPEAKER_00: Because I know, I know you've heard most of what I say.
7:31
SPEAKER_00: But but there's a value in just simply, you know, right, like reminding you.
7:35
SPEAKER_00: And that's probably what you do as parents or teachers or whatever, basically reminding people of what they know already.
7:42
SPEAKER_00: What is he reminding them of in these two books?
7:45
SPEAKER_00: Well, he says the predictions of the holy prophets, he mentioned that before.
7:50
SPEAKER_00: What he's talking about is the 320 predictions of the second coming, of God's return in the Old Testament.
7:57
SPEAKER_00: God continually saying, I'm coming, I'm coming, I'm coming.
7:59
SPEAKER_00: I'm going to judge the bad people and preserve you guys.
8:03
SPEAKER_00: And he says that you should remember the commandment of the Lord and Savior through your apostles.
8:09
SPEAKER_00: I think through your apostles mean through Paul and Barnabas.
8:12
SPEAKER_00: What was the commandment of the Lord and Savior through the apostles?
8:17
SPEAKER_00: Well, I think it has to be in context, it has to be Jesus' command to watch for his return.
8:24
SPEAKER_00: Which five times in the Gospels he looked at his disciples and said, Listen, what I say to you, I say to everyone, watch for my return.
8:33
SPEAKER_00: Be ready, believe in the second coming and watch for it.
8:37
SPEAKER_00: Now, so there's his encouragement and his motivation, verses one and two.
8:43
SPEAKER_00: And now he kicks them back out on the ice and he says, Listen, let's go back to this whole issue of end of times and false teachers.
8:52
SPEAKER_00: Know this, he said, first of all, verse three, that in the last days mockers, scoffers will come with their mocking, following after their own lusts, and saying, Where's the promise of his coming?
9:06
SPEAKER_00: For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all continues just as it was from the beginning of creation.
9:13
SPEAKER_00: So notice these two things.
9:17
SPEAKER_00: The false teachers, we should know who they are.
9:20
SPEAKER_00: They you identify them by something they say and the way they live, their lip and their life.
9:25
SPEAKER_00: And this is a secondary.
9:26
SPEAKER_00: He said this at the beginning of chapter two, now he says it again.
9:29
SPEAKER_00: Their lip, as they say, Jesus returned, that's ridiculous.
9:32
SPEAKER_00: Only naive fundamentalists believe that.
9:35
SPEAKER_00: Their life, they live it up.
9:37
SPEAKER_00: I mean, they just satisfy their urges.
9:39
SPEAKER_00: And they say, why why be a narrow fundamentalist?
9:43
SPEAKER_00: You know, don't be a stick in the mud.
9:46
SPEAKER_00: And so we have to say, okay, that was a long time ago.
9:48
SPEAKER_00: Who says these two things today?
9:50
SPEAKER_00: And we said last week, uh, like everybody.
9:53
SPEAKER_00: Like, I mean, who doesn't say these things today?
9:57
SPEAKER_00: Who doesn't say, I mean, in the media and social media and some college professors and certainly TV talk shows and movies.
10:07
SPEAKER_00: For instance, the whole idea Jesus returned is ridiculous.
10:10
SPEAKER_00: Sure.
10:10
SPEAKER_00: It's one of the most ridiculous things people believe, says this online atheist.
10:16
SPEAKER_00: More than half of Americans believe the stupid prophecies of the book of Revelation, including the idea Jesus will return to take the faithful.
10:23
SPEAKER_00: Meanwhile, we atheists pray the faithful are right.
10:25
SPEAKER_00: They'll disappear and get out of the way.
10:28
SPEAKER_00: Humanity's progress.
10:29
SPEAKER_00: And the morally, the the way they live.
10:32
SPEAKER_00: I mean, who how often we hear people say, why why should you, why should you stifle your urges, yield to temptation?
10:41
SPEAKER_00: Now, you may not know this, but there is a natural connection between these two things.
10:47
SPEAKER_00: Between the idea that maybe there's no God or that he's disappeared, that there's no second coming, and this idea that you should live it up, morally or immorally.
10:57
SPEAKER_00: That was never made more clear than a hundred years ago by the founder of the American Humanist Association and the author of really an interesting, good book called Brave New World, fascinating book, which, by the way, totally makes fun of the idea of the second coming of Christ, Brave New World does.
11:14
SPEAKER_00: Aldous Huxley, father of the famous, you know, atheist Julian.
11:18
SPEAKER_00: And Aldous Huxley, after writing Brave New World close to the end of his life, wrote sort of a confession called Ends and Means, sort of a pamphlet, and said something absolutely remarkable.
11:31
SPEAKER_00: He said, I had motive for not wanting the world to have meaning.
11:37
SPEAKER_00: Consequently, I assumed that it had none and was able, without any difficulty, to find satisfying reasons for this assumption.
11:47
SPEAKER_00: The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics.
11:56
SPEAKER_00: He's also concerned to prove that there's no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do.
12:05
SPEAKER_00: Isn't that remarkable?
12:07
SPEAKER_00: For myself, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation, sexual and political.
12:14
SPEAKER_00: Do you hear what he's saying here?
12:16
SPEAKER_00: Notice the connection between saying either there's no God or certainly no second coming, and the philosophy of sexual liberation.
12:27
SPEAKER_00: You get rid of one and get rid of the whole idea of morality, and in that way, you get rid of the whole practice of morality if you don't want to follow it.
12:39
SPEAKER_00: This is why, friends, you sometimes, once people say to me, I'm just an innocent Christian.
12:46
SPEAKER_00: How come I'm getting such hate on social media from, let's say, a section of my family that's getting, you know, it's, you know, like gay marriage section of the family or something else.
12:58
SPEAKER_00: And I haven't said anything, I haven't done anything, but I'm just getting poured on with hate.
13:03
SPEAKER_00: And the answer is, of course, you don't have to say anything because there's such anger at the idea that there is a God, because if there is a God, then there is a morality and there are rules there, and therefore I'm not obeying those rules, and I want to get rid of the whole idea that there even are rules.
13:23
SPEAKER_00: You see how this works.
13:24
SPEAKER_00: So there's an actual connection between these two things.
13:28
SPEAKER_00: So, anyway, so Peter makes this connection as well as Aldous Huxley.
13:32
SPEAKER_00: The Apostle Peter makes the connection between people who say there's no second coming and people who live a sexually liberated life.
13:41
SPEAKER_00: By the way, this is really up-to-date stuff, isn't it?
13:44
SPEAKER_00: This week's Time magazine features just a horrible picture of uh of Harvey Weinstein.
13:52
SPEAKER_00: I'm sure you've heard of this famous producer, you know, who for decades was hitting, more than hitting, on all of the pretty actresses and basically compelling them, you know, if they wanted a job, to uh get in bed with them.
14:06
SPEAKER_00: And it has a terrible time.
14:07
SPEAKER_00: Producer, predator, pariah.
14:09
SPEAKER_00: I couldn't help thinking of that.
14:10
SPEAKER_00: I saw the magazine cover this week, and and I thought of this line that Peter uses in verse 3, following after their own lust.
14:19
SPEAKER_00: Because in the Greek, it's got this, got this sort of picture.
14:24
SPEAKER_00: Following is like, you know, being led by a leash.
14:29
SPEAKER_00: And I know probably nobody here wants to feel sorry for Harvey Weinstein, but we have to keep in mind, and some of you know this because you have loved ones, you have relatives, you have children, you have family, you know, who are who you know who are going down a certain road.
14:46
SPEAKER_00: You have to realize that lust is the real demon here.
14:50
SPEAKER_00: Lust is the real problem that they are following.
14:52
SPEAKER_00: They're being tugged.
14:53
SPEAKER_00: There's an addiction here.
14:54
SPEAKER_00: There is something that is too big for them to handle.
14:57
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, Harvey did some terrible things, but but this verse would imply that, listen, they're just following after something big, some, this demon of lust that seems to hold the world around the neck.
15:11
SPEAKER_00: So, anyway, that's what we're talking about.
15:12
SPEAKER_00: But Peter doesn't want to spend much time on the lust side of it.
15:15
SPEAKER_00: He wants to spend his time on the promise of his coming, the second coming thing.
15:19
SPEAKER_00: And he says, so they are also saying, where's the promise of his coming?
15:23
SPEAKER_00: For since the fathers fell asleep, all continues just as it was from the beginning of creation.
15:29
SPEAKER_00: In other words, you got the logic here.
15:31
SPEAKER_00: It's the logic of a closed universe.
15:33
SPEAKER_00: Nothing has changed, therefore nothing does change, therefore nothing can change, therefore, any any idea of a divine intervention to second coming makes no sense.
15:46
SPEAKER_00: This is a philosophy called nine syllables, get ready for it.
15:51
SPEAKER_00: Uniformitarianism.
15:53
SPEAKER_00: Say that with me, it'll be the only nine-syllable word you have to use today.
15:56
SPEAKER_00: Uniformitarianism.
15:58
SPEAKER_00: It means that things are uniform, that they're the same, same, same, same.
16:03
SPEAKER_00: And as you can imagine, this is not just a philosophical theory.
16:07
SPEAKER_00: This is a geology 101, biology 101, one of the two major theories about how life works on Earth.
16:16
SPEAKER_00: Uniformitarianism is the assumption that the same processes that operate on the earth now have always operated on the earth in the past.
16:25
SPEAKER_00: For example, given a long period of time, a river can erode a valley.
16:30
SPEAKER_00: Based on the principle of uniformitarianism, all valleys in the past have been formed by rivers eroding them, and all future valleys will be formed this same way.
16:40
SPEAKER_00: Now, immediately you should be able to see a little problem, or at least some exceptions, to the theory of uniformitarianism, and that is that it implies that the universe is closed and that there's and that there's no God that can sort of interrupt, or that is active, or cares.
17:02
SPEAKER_00: And I have to force you back, like I do nearly every year, to one of my favorite quotes from the humorous, journalist, and British thinker G.K.
17:11
SPEAKER_00: Chesterton from a hundred years ago, who influenced C.S.
17:15
SPEAKER_00: Lewis so much, who said, But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony.
17:21
SPEAKER_00: It is possible that God says every morning, do it again to the sun, and every evening, do it again to the moon.
17:27
SPEAKER_00: It may be that he has the eternal appetite of infancy, for we have sinned and grown old, and our father is younger than we.
17:35
SPEAKER_00: Isn't that a great quote?
17:37
SPEAKER_00: Every time I flop that up there, somebody comes up to me afterwards and says, That's such a great quote.
17:42
SPEAKER_00: So feel free to do that today.
17:45
SPEAKER_00: See, the point there is that is that there's actually a God.
17:48
SPEAKER_00: The universe is not closed.
17:50
SPEAKER_00: There's some things that can happen that we don't expect.
17:53
SPEAKER_00: But this theory, of course, has become the strongest theory, for as one geology says, it became almost the only theory in geology during the last two centuries, 1800s and 1900s.
18:06
SPEAKER_00: The theory that Earth's features are mostly accounted for by gradual small-scale processes that occurred over long periods of time.
18:14
SPEAKER_00: And Peter says, listen, that may work to some extent with geology, but it doesn't work with history.
18:22
SPEAKER_00: And he summarized, and notice where he goes in verses 5 and 6.
18:26
SPEAKER_00: He says, There shall come in the last days scoffers saying, quote, all things continue as they were from the beginning, unquote.
18:33
SPEAKER_00: But he says, they are willingly ignorant that by the word of God the heavens were of old.
18:41
SPEAKER_00: That's, friend, creation.
18:44
SPEAKER_00: That means that the earth didn't just begin by a little bacteria in a pond and grow, grow, grow, grow.
18:51
SPEAKER_00: What he's saying is that Genesis 1, 1, and God spoke and said, Let there be, and that's how the heavens and earth came into existence.
19:02
SPEAKER_00: And secondly, the world that was then being overflowed with water perished.
19:08
SPEAKER_00: And that's what we call the great deluge or the flood.
19:11
SPEAKER_00: So he says, no, there are two catastrophes at least that they're forgetting about, and some of them willingly forgetting about, creation and the flood.
19:19
SPEAKER_00: God spoke everything into being in Genesis 1, and then in Genesis 6 through 8, because man's sin was so wide and so deep, Genesis 6, 1 through 6, God sent a great flood in the 600th year of Noah's life, and the second month, on the 17th day of the month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst open, and the floodgates of the heaven were open, and the rain fell on the earth 40 days and 40 nights, Genesis chapter 7.
19:46
SPEAKER_00: It's uh there are lots of reasons as you study that to say this had to be a universal flood, both biblically and logically, and so forth.
19:57
SPEAKER_00: And when someone denies the flood, you need to listen carefully for what they say about the second coming.
20:04
SPEAKER_00: Because Jesus, remember, constantly hooked those two together by saying, as it was in the days of Noah.
20:11
SPEAKER_00: Remember that?
20:12
SPEAKER_00: Dot, dot, dot.
20:14
SPEAKER_00: All right.
20:15
SPEAKER_00: So I made a mistake several years ago.
20:18
SPEAKER_00: Um, I saw this movie coming out, 2014, called Noah.
20:21
SPEAKER_00: And I looked at the pictures, I thought, yeah, an Ark, Noah, it's gonna be, ah, he's shaking his head already.
20:27
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's why I feel bad.
20:29
SPEAKER_00: I can never even mention this without getting embarrassed because I go, yes, it's gonna be this movie.
20:34
SPEAKER_00: So I'm gonna lead into this movie.
20:35
SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna preach on Genesis 6 through 8.
20:37
SPEAKER_00: And I did this whole series that would conclude right at the same time the movie came out.
20:41
SPEAKER_00: Oh my goodness.
20:43
SPEAKER_00: So hundreds of you went to see the movie and then came back and said, I want my 1250 back.
20:47
SPEAKER_00: So, I mean, because it was an awful movie.
20:51
SPEAKER_00: But the fact of the matter is, is that I tried.
20:55
SPEAKER_00: The fact of the matter is, was that this flood story was, of course, not a children's story.
21:00
SPEAKER_00: In the Bible, it's a story of God's wrath against sin.
21:04
SPEAKER_00: And all of the earth getting submerged, everybody dying, except for eight human beings and some animals, seven of each, two of some.
21:15
SPEAKER_00: And the message of the flood was pretty simple.
21:17
SPEAKER_00: The wickedness of man, very great.
21:19
SPEAKER_00: God's patience comes to an end, and he destroys unrepentant sinners in judgment, but judgment's not the end.
21:26
SPEAKER_00: God saves a righteous remnant and makes a new beginning.
21:30
SPEAKER_00: And the principles of divine judgment in this passage were that sin brings judgment.
21:36
SPEAKER_00: God always gives early warning of judgment, God always gives time to turn and escape judgment, and God always rescues his people from judgment.
21:43
SPEAKER_00: Great principles still apply as we approach the second coming.
21:48
SPEAKER_00: Now back to science.
21:50
SPEAKER_00: So we have two scientific philosophies about the earth and the flood, which you'll learn in Geology 101 or whatever uniformitarianism versus catastrophism.
22:00
SPEAKER_00: And I haven't made this up.
22:02
SPEAKER_00: This isn't Christian.
22:03
SPEAKER_00: This is okay, just the way it is.
22:06
SPEAKER_00: You can even read about it on Wikipedia if you want.
22:09
SPEAKER_00: And the principle of catastrophism is that to explain Earth's history, and this was true up to about 1830, most scientists supported the principle of catastrophism.
22:19
SPEAKER_00: Catastrophism or catastrophism is the principle that geologic change occurs suddenly.
22:24
SPEAKER_00: And the supporters of this theory thought that mountains, canyons, seas, and other features formed during rare sudden events called catastrophes.
22:32
SPEAKER_00: To contrast the two theories, catastrophism and uniformitarianism, prior to the 19th century, it was largely assumed by geologists, by scientists, that catastrophes, such as the biblical flood, were responsible for the majority of the Earth's fossiliferous rock and features.
22:51
SPEAKER_00: Uniformitarianism, a guy named Lyle, Hutton, a couple of those guys around the end of the 1700s, early 1800s started publishing, arguing that no, there hadn't been any big catastrophes.
23:05
SPEAKER_00: It was just gradual.
23:06
SPEAKER_00: And that took over around 1850, the non-catastrophic view of Earth theology didn't just develop, that's when it took over, which suggested that gradual processes and uniform intensities were instead response.
23:19
SPEAKER_00: And Grand Canyon has always been, uh some of you know I took a 10-day trip to Grand Canyon with 25 scholars, 25 professors, uh, and a couple Christian geologists who were pointing out the stuff this summer and and and arguing that there was uh just as much evidence, if not more, for a flood uh in these sediments as there was for 500 million years.
23:43
SPEAKER_00: So, but the Grand Canyon is always the picture you see when you look by uniformitarianism in the in the geological textbooks.
23:50
SPEAKER_00: Very interesting.
23:51
SPEAKER_00: So let me end up summarizing here and take you someplace where I think you might want to go.
23:58
SPEAKER_00: As we contrast catastrophism and uniformitarianism with geolog, as we look at geologic features, uniformitarians say they form slowly over time, over millions of years.
24:08
SPEAKER_00: Catastrophists say they formed rapidly due to floods, huge events.
24:14
SPEAKER_00: The age of the earth, for uniformitarians, is billions of years.
24:18
SPEAKER_00: It's four point, what is it now?
24:20
SPEAKER_00: 4.55, I think.
24:23
SPEAKER_00: Which shows how old I am, because when I took the courses in science over at Washburn, it was it was like a billion years ago.
24:31
SPEAKER_00: You know, I'm in the age of the earth was like a billion and a half less, so it shows how old I am.
24:37
SPEAKER_00: But anyway, that's what it is.
24:38
SPEAKER_00: That's what it's believed to be right now.
24:40
SPEAKER_00: Catastrophists, and by the way, this is not true, catastrophists can believe the earth is billions of years old too.
24:45
SPEAKER_00: Emmanuel Velikovsky and other catastrophists certainly did, but you can believe in young earth creation if uh if you're a catastrophist.
24:54
SPEAKER_00: You can believe in the earth's only thousands of years old.
24:57
SPEAKER_00: Now, let me bring it up to the present day because here's something very interesting happening in geology.
25:02
SPEAKER_00: Catastrophism, I'm quoting a couple of famous geologists, is enjoying a renaissance in geology.
25:09
SPEAKER_00: Now, there are several reasons for this.
25:11
SPEAKER_00: One reason might be events like Mount St.
25:14
SPEAKER_00: Helens in 1980, May.
25:16
SPEAKER_00: When I grew up, I'd go outside the door of my little brick house, you know, uh close to the Columbia River Gorge in northwest Oregon and look to the east and see beautiful Mount Hood, sort of in a point, and look to the north, and we could see beautiful, snow-capped, crevaceous Mount St.
25:31
SPEAKER_00: Helens.
25:31
SPEAKER_00: And then something happened in six minutes in May of 1980.
25:35
SPEAKER_00: It blew its, uh, Mount St.
25:37
SPEAKER_00: Helens blew its top.
25:39
SPEAKER_00: A violent volcanic eruption completely altered the surrounding landscape.
25:44
SPEAKER_00: It's the most studied volcano in history and has reshaped thinking regarding catastrophic earth processes.
25:52
SPEAKER_00: And I might also say, for those of us who love Oregon and who go back there, it's no longer fun to look at.
25:59
SPEAKER_00: It used to be really pretty, as you see the before here, and now it sort of lost something in the after.
26:06
SPEAKER_00: But Professor Douglas Kelly uh says something I think really significant that has to do with our text this morning.
26:14
SPEAKER_00: The uniformitarian assumption that millions of years of geological work is required to explain structures such as the Grand Canyon is undermined by Mount St.
26:23
SPEAKER_00: Helens, May 1980, the energy equivalent of 20 million tons of TNT, destroying 400 square kilometers of forests, digging out canyons.
26:33
SPEAKER_00: Unlike the Grand Canyon, uniformitarian theory dates some of that to millions of years old, but we know that was created in 1980.
26:46
SPEAKER_00: Thirty years later, the lessons from Mount St.
26:49
SPEAKER_00: Helens, I'm quoting Brian Thomas, here, horizontal sediment layers hundreds of feet thick were formed within hours during the eruption.
26:56
SPEAKER_00: This sparks the question.
26:58
SPEAKER_00: What other layered sedimentary rocks in Earth's crust were formed rapidly?
27:04
SPEAKER_00: The mountain also provided a clear reason to distrust the reliability of radiometric dating.
27:11
SPEAKER_00: A new rock cap atop the mountain that formed after the 1980 eruption should have shown it to be on the order of tens of years, but standard analysis gave the totally incorrect date of 350,000 years.
27:23
SPEAKER_00: What other rocks have been dated incorrectly by following those standard dating protocols.
27:30
SPEAKER_00: Experts at the time of the 1980 eruption predicted that the area would take perhaps hundreds of years to rebound, yet, after only 20 years, biologists noted the speedy recovery of plants and animals on what had been a vast moonscape.
27:42
SPEAKER_00: Today the 30-year-old blast zone is a lushly treed forest.
27:45
SPEAKER_00: My brother John taught head of the science department at the largest high school in Oregon, would take me and others of my family on field trips during family reunions.
27:55
SPEAKER_00: We go up to Mount St.
27:56
SPEAKER_00: Helens and he would point out these things.
27:59
SPEAKER_00: Because of the Mount St.
28:00
SPEAKER_00: Helens eruption, Brian Thomas concludes, scientists know that sedimentary rock layers can form in only hours rather than requiring millions of years.
28:10
SPEAKER_00: It also showed radiometric dating is not necessarily accurate, and God gave animals and plants the ability to rapidly recolonize barren land.
28:17
SPEAKER_00: So I found myself wondering, well, where exactly do we sit today in science?
28:23
SPEAKER_00: I picked up yesterday in the airport in Texas, Popular Science magazine, because I noticed it had a couple of articles relating to this.
28:34
SPEAKER_00: The subtitle of the lead article, Where Did It All Begin, is A New Geological Finding Stirs Questions and Controversy about where and when earliest life emerged.
28:45
SPEAKER_00: Basically the question is, did it emerge on the sea, which has been the predominant view, or on land, which is now a recent view?
28:53
SPEAKER_00: And there was the there was this sort of uh a graph, a brief history of origin theories as part of the article.
29:01
SPEAKER_00: I've I've added my summary of each of them.
29:04
SPEAKER_00: And there were ten of them here.
29:05
SPEAKER_00: Uh the ancient Greeks believed life just appeared, you know.
29:09
SPEAKER_00: And 1871, Darwin thought life began in a warm little pond.
29:13
SPEAKER_00: 1908, panspermia.
29:15
SPEAKER_00: Comets with like bacteria would crash into Earth, and that's what started life.
29:20
SPEAKER_00: 1920s, there was a primordial soup.
29:22
SPEAKER_00: 1953, uh it took some water that had organic compounds in it and zapped it with electricity, and life began.
29:30
SPEAKER_00: So they said maybe lightning made it happen.
29:32
SPEAKER_00: 1977, deep sea vents.
29:35
SPEAKER_00: Turned out there's way in the deep sea, there's actually some warm water vents, and they thought maybe the confluence of the two temperatures may have started it.
29:42
SPEAKER_00: Uh 1986, RNA, 2006, early rocks.
29:46
SPEAKER_00: This is, and now we get to on land rather than sea.
29:49
SPEAKER_00: Ancient rocks had had uh kind of bacteria in them uh in Australia.
29:54
SPEAKER_00: Uh 2009, deep in the Earth's interior, carbon.
29:58
SPEAKER_00: There, there's just a guess that maybe, you know, that's what and now in 2012, land ponds rather than sea.
30:06
SPEAKER_00: By the way, I found it fascinating as I have read these these ten theories, a history.
30:11
SPEAKER_00: This is supposed to be a history of origin theories.
30:14
SPEAKER_00: I kind of laughed to myself, I thought, wow, we have a history of origin theories that omits the majority theory throughout history held by millions of scientists, which of course is spelled G-O-D, that God is the actual originator of life.
30:28
SPEAKER_00: Now, I understand that's a science magazine, but you would think if you have a title, or, you know, the history of origin ideas, that you would include the major origin idea over time.
30:40
SPEAKER_00: So I thought, well, does this mean popular science is reflecting the fact that all scientists today are uniformitarians?
30:46
SPEAKER_00: And the answer is absolutely no.
30:49
SPEAKER_00: There's this blunt statement, treated as facts in popular science, this this week's this month's popular science magazine, that 4.5 billion years ago, a Mars-sized rock slammed into Earth.
31:03
SPEAKER_00: Now they didn't include the word probably there, creating the moon and nearly destroying our planet.
31:09
SPEAKER_00: Now that's catastrophism.
31:12
SPEAKER_00: Which is why, when you look at uh geologic articles about this, they conclude, there's a couple of them concluded very similar to this, Earth has been shaped by a combination of catastrophism and uniformitarianism.
31:28
SPEAKER_00: Most geologic change is slow and gradual.
31:31
SPEAKER_00: Now, Peter might not agree with that, but that's what they say.
31:34
SPEAKER_00: But catastrophes have contributed to shaping Earth.
31:37
SPEAKER_00: And Peter would say, well, yeah, there is slow and gradual, but boy, the major catastrophes that have happened make it absolutely silly to deny no major catastrophe like Jesus' return and judgment can happen on the earth.
31:52
SPEAKER_00: In fact, Peter concludes in the last verse of our text: by the same word with which he spoke creation into existence, by that same word, the heavens and earth that now exist are stored up, stored up, picture is storing a treasure up.
32:07
SPEAKER_00: They're stored up for fire, being kept until the day of judgment and destruction of the ungodly.
32:15
SPEAKER_00: So a major catastrophe is coming.
32:18
SPEAKER_00: In the today's English version, uh it's put a little bit more clearly, I think.
32:24
SPEAKER_00: The heavens and the earth that now exist are being preserved by the same command of God in order to be destroyed by fire.
32:34
SPEAKER_00: They're being kept for the day when godless people will be judged and will be destroyed.
32:41
SPEAKER_00: And that's the answer, isn't it, to Robert Frost's question about fire and ice.
32:46
SPEAKER_00: Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice, from what I've tasted of desire.
32:51
SPEAKER_00: I hold with those who favor fire.
32:54
SPEAKER_00: I don't know a lot about desire, Robert, but I do know that I agree with you about fire.
32:59
SPEAKER_00: I favor fire, but I favor it because of the Bible, 2 Peter 3, Isaiah 24, and other passages that say that that's how our present world will end and then be recreated and reborn.
33:14
SPEAKER_00: So what do we do with this sober passage about science and false teachers and what people believe and how people live?
33:23
SPEAKER_00: I summarize it this way: I think three things.
33:26
SPEAKER_00: Watch, wait, and then I couldn't decide between these three, so I put them all in.
33:32
SPEAKER_00: Smile, laugh, sing.
33:35
SPEAKER_00: Watch, said Jesus, because you don't know when it's gonna happen.
33:39
SPEAKER_00: So watch for it, believe it's going to happen, and watch for it.
33:43
SPEAKER_00: Keep one eye always on the sky, one eye on the ground so you don't fall over.
33:47
SPEAKER_00: But one eye on the sky, looking for the blessed hope and the glorious return of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ.
33:56
SPEAKER_00: Second, wait, yeah, it's been a long time.
33:59
SPEAKER_00: Man, has it been a long time.
34:00
SPEAKER_00: I mean, Christopher Columbus believed strongly and wrote an article that he was gonna come in 150 years, 152 years or something.
34:08
SPEAKER_00: Martin Luther, who we talked about this morning, he strongly believes he's coming in his lifetime.
34:13
SPEAKER_00: I explained to you last week or maybe the week before why I think there's a great chance he's gonna come in your lifetime on mine.
34:21
SPEAKER_00: So we're gonna have to wait.
34:24
SPEAKER_00: I mean, we maybe we'll just wait till two or three o'clock this afternoon.
34:29
SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
34:30
SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
34:31
SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
34:32
SPEAKER_00: Maybe it'll be really quick.
34:33
SPEAKER_00: But you need to watch and and be willing, be willing to wait.
34:37
SPEAKER_00: Not give up on the hope that we'll be willing to wait.
34:41
SPEAKER_00: And then I put in here, smile, and laugh, and sing, cuz we know, right?
34:48
SPEAKER_00: We know what's gonna happen.
34:49
SPEAKER_00: I mean, when I when I came, when I moved to Topeka some years ago, Time magazine was running cover articles entitled The Coming Ice Age.
35:04
SPEAKER_00: I mean, nothing about global warming.
35:06
SPEAKER_00: I mean, we've got global warming, we've got tsunamis and so forth.
35:09
SPEAKER_00: I mean, that wasn't that long ago that science was predicting a coming ice age.
35:17
SPEAKER_00: And about the same time, a couple years after that, 1980, the prediction, all the all the covers of the magazines were predicting the world was gonna be decimated by AIDS.
35:26
SPEAKER_00: Remember that?
35:27
SPEAKER_00: AIDS.
35:28
SPEAKER_00: Everybody should be afraid.
35:30
SPEAKER_00: Everyone was supposed to be afraid.
35:34
SPEAKER_00: Then there was communism, and the red menace was spreading across Asia and so forth, and and according to the predictions, it wasn't about to be stopped.
35:43
SPEAKER_00: Oh, by the way, one thing that was gonna be stopped, all the articles were saying in the early 80s, was America.
35:48
SPEAKER_00: America was no longer gonna be the dominant force in the world.
35:51
SPEAKER_00: Does anybody remember this?
35:52
SPEAKER_00: America is going to share dominance in the world with Europe, China, Japan, and Russia.
35:59
SPEAKER_00: That makes 0 for 4, just counting.
36:03
SPEAKER_00: And then I was just thinking before the service, and I think it was in 1983 a movie came out, Lawrence, Kansas, nuclear bomb.
36:10
SPEAKER_00: I think it dropped the day after, something like that.
36:13
SPEAKER_00: Any of you, you know, I believed it.
36:15
SPEAKER_00: I believed it was gonna happen.
36:16
SPEAKER_00: So, although why anybody would drop a bomb on Lawrence, Kansas unless you're from Manhattan, made no sense to me.
36:23
SPEAKER_00: But anyway, this prediction, the prediction, you know, somehow nuclear, it was gonna nuclear war was going to happen.
36:31
SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's now 0 for 5.
36:32
SPEAKER_00: Nothing in there, nobody's ever mentioning Osama bin Laden or Al-Qaeda or terrorism or anything else.
36:38
SPEAKER_00: It wasn't that long ago.
36:39
SPEAKER_00: We're terrible at predicting, but we're really good at scaring people.
36:43
SPEAKER_00: And it's so sad, I think, when Christians are joined the fear and anxiety crowd.
36:50
SPEAKER_00: Just because people don't believe that there's a God out there that's going to intervene and going to rescue and bring things about the right way.
37:03
SPEAKER_00: True story, German at German camp, the the prisoners of war, unbeknownst to the guards, figured out how to build a radio.
37:13
SPEAKER_00: So they build a radio and they secretly laid at night, they'd listen to the news.
37:17
SPEAKER_00: One night, to their absolute joy, they heard the news that the German high command had surrendered to General Eisenhower.
37:25
SPEAKER_00: The word went around the camp, huge roar of celebration breaks out.
37:29
SPEAKER_00: Guards go, they didn't know what's going on.
37:32
SPEAKER_00: Because of bad communication, of course, broken down stuff in Germany.
37:36
SPEAKER_00: Guards didn't know for several days.
37:39
SPEAKER_00: But those three days were unbelievable fun days of smiling and laughing and singing for the prisoners of war.
37:50
SPEAKER_00: They were high-fiving each other, they were telling jokes at the table, they were laughing as the German shepherds would come up and growl at them.
37:56
SPEAKER_00: They were they were greeting the guards friendly, like friendly by name.
38:00
SPEAKER_00: They were just having a great time.
38:02
SPEAKER_00: They were so happy because they knew that eventually it was going to happen.
38:07
SPEAKER_00: And sure enough, they woke on the fourth day and all of the guards were gone, and the front gates were open, and their time of waiting was over.
38:15
SPEAKER_00: A little bit like Hogan's heroes.
38:18
SPEAKER_00: Anybody?
38:20
SPEAKER_00: Hogan, you know, and Hogan was, there was this one episode in the middle 60s where he's talking to Colonel Clink, and he basically says, and one day you're gonna look out, and a Sherman tank is gonna roll through that front gate.
38:33
SPEAKER_00: And he said, and I quote, a 19-year-old farm boy from Wichita, Kansas, he said that a farm boy from Wichita, Kansas is gonna get out and say, You're my prisoner.
38:43
SPEAKER_00: Wow.
38:44
SPEAKER_00: I mean the certainty of knowing it's going to happen, and because you and I have the certainty of knowing it's going to happen, because isn't that what faith is?
38:53
SPEAKER_00: Faith is believing in advance things that only make sense in hindsight.
39:00
SPEAKER_00: But you and I know that's going to happen, so we can smile, we can laugh, and we can sing.
39:06
SPEAKER_00: Amen?
39:07
SPEAKER_00: Let's pray.
39:08
SPEAKER_00: Father, we thank you for this assurance, for the knowledge that in a world that debates and is not sure, you know, now a lot of major scientists are saying they're not sure about the Bing Bang anymore.
39:20
SPEAKER_00: Now we're going back to steady state theory.
39:22
SPEAKER_00: And I mean, there's just so much uncertainty about this kind of stuff.
39:26
SPEAKER_00: And and yet we have your word for it that your son will return and will set everything straight in a great, great catastrophe, a happy catastrophe.
39:37
SPEAKER_00: And for that we are eager.
39:39
SPEAKER_00: Lord, we look forward.
39:40
SPEAKER_00: We say, even so come, Lord Jesus.
39:42
SPEAKER_00: In his name we pray.
39:44
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
39:46
SPEAKER_00: Thank you.