And I greet you friends once again in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, the creator and sustainer, upholder, director of the world. And in him we live and move and have our being. I would like to take just a moment by way of introduction before the screen comes down and cuts me off here to introduce to all of you who may not have met her. My dear wife, Norma, there would you stand. She's in... among other things, in charge of our book table back there. And we're so delighted also to have my sister-in-law, Alberta Henson, from Apple Valley, California. Bertie, would you stand, please? And Bertie was for twenty years a teacher in the elementary school in California, had a marvelous testimony for the Lord Jesus there, and her very close friend, Ruth Wardell, from Texas. Plano, Texas. Ruth, please stand. And Ruth, the Lone Star State wasn't even mentioned in the banquet tonight. I'm sure Ruth was deeply depressed. But she has been a missionary to the Jews for many years, and it's been a delight to have them with us this week here. I would like to invite you all to pray for us as we have a new ministry in Orange Park. Florida two years ago a pastor from Gainesville came and said a young pastor and said Dr. Whitcomb would you be able perhaps somehow someday to teach me theology and I said I would be absolutely thrilled and he came every Thursday night seventy miles for a three-hour class in our home drove back home all fall semester and then in the spring he brought three other men with him And now God has given us twenty students. And the School of Theology is a night school, of course, at this point on Wednesdays and Thursday nights. And we're trusting God to expand this program and to bring more qualified teachers and more students who are dedicated to a masterminding of Holy Scripture in a day where God's truth is being minimized and marginalized and simply ignored. So your prayers. Dear friends, are very important to us to the extent that you have confidence in our ministry of His precious Word. Of course, we have now put, I shouldn't say of course, I'm thankful to be able to announce, we have put hundreds of these theology lectures on videotape and with full syllabi for teachers and students and exams and tests so that assemblies and churches all over the world Now we have four starting in Europe and Africa and Australia can teach the Word of God systematically in depth long term to dedicated disciples without having to go hundreds of miles away to some school. In other words, we're in desperation reverting back to the New Testament pattern where the local assembly was where God's people were taught the Word. of the Lord. Pray for us as we seek to extend this network. We call it the Christian Workman Schools of Theology. And if any of you are interested in where you come from in helping to implement this kind of a program, please let us know. Please let us know we do want to help. Our more popular materials are on the book table. We don't bring any of the Christian Workman syllabi or videos along, but we do have more popular videos on Bible and science, Bible and miracles, and the hundreds of audio cassettes you see in different albums there for home Bible study, complete with outlines. And Norma has put out a marvelous book for children, those mysterious dinosaurs. And it's so beautifully illustrated and so popular now that we were happy to hear yesterday that the Japanese edition has arrived in America. That's the eighth foreign language for this book. French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Indonesian, Russian, Chinese, and now Japanese. I'm sure you all realize that all you have to say is something intelligent and hopefully biblical about dinosaurs and you have the attention of a child and through that medium to present the creator of these creatures who is also, of course, the Savior of the world. And tomorrow night, God willing, we have a two-part study of the origin, destiny, nature, and destiny of mankind. And our basic textbook for that is called The Early Earth, An Introduction to Biblical Creationism. And we have a chart that goes with it. This is one of eight charts, in fact, giving the whole spectrum of God's perspective on how the world began and how it's going to end. And we trust that this will be a help, friends, and encouragement to you. And if you're not personally interested in these things, I mean, we can't all read everything about everything. Please take the order form there on the corner of the table and share that with your family and friends, wherever they may be, who have children that really need to be encouraged and taught in the whole Council of God, especially in these very controversial and difficult subjects. And now we'll ask that the screen comes down and that the lights be dim and we'll trust the Lord for his blessing. friends I now introduced to you a picture a diagram an image of my first religious faith I was raised in a totally evolutionary environment my father was very scientifically minded in the military world and his father even more so as a army surgeon and my dad was an only child and I was an only child and I got thoroughly taught in answer to all the probings and questions in my young mind about where we all came from and here was the answer. Friends, there we are. An infinitesimal speck in a primeval sea two or three billion years ago that somehow managed to struggle into existence from lifeless chemicals that just floated together, and one day it happened by pure chance, or as theistic evolutionists insist by God's providence, that the speck appeared in the ocean. Of course, that's why modern environmentalists and ecologists are desperate to go back to the ocean and to honor the womb from which we came, you see, and emerged upon the continents billions of years ago. And that speck was a marvelous speck. It was programmed with such marvel and beauty and complexity by that God that they worship at chance that it was able to replicate itself and to diversify into all the kinds of plants and flowers and trees in the world and all the kinds of invertebrates and arthropoda and insects in the world. And over in this branch, all the chordates and the vertebrates and the fishes and the amphibians and the reptiles. And here came the dinosaurs. And out of them, of course, evolved the birds. And here come the ungulates, the hooked animals. And you know where the whales came from, don't you? All evolutionists can report this immediately as a statement of their faith that the greatest animals that have ever lived on this planet the blue whales and all the other marine aquatic mammals evolved from hoofed animals that went back into the ocean, evolved their legs back off again and shifted their noses to the tops of their heads and became the whales in case you were wondering. But wait, more is coming. Out of the mammals, especially this group called the primates, orangutans, chimpanzees, monkeys, gorillas, Finally emerged Homo sapiens sapiens. That's Latin, you know, man, smart, smart. We have finally arrived. That was the family tree of life. You'll find this diagram in every textbook in every public school in the United States today. Elementary, secondary, all graduate schools, friends, this is a statement of faith projection. And we are now being taught as you well know, that all living things are absolutely equal in importance and significance to each other since we all came from a common ancestor, there he is. And even human beings, therefore, have nothing special about them at all. And when you therefore swap mosquitoes, think of what you've done, you've destroyed a distant relative. When you pull up weeds from your garden, think twice of what you just did. because we're all in this gigantic vibrating complex tree of life, this biosphere uniquely thus far existing on planet Earth. But friends, there's a problem with this tree, and that's the red lines you see there. You know what those are? Those are the imaginary parts of the tree. Everything else is fine. one million kinds of animals and one-third of a million kinds of plants. But you see, imagination, depraved imagination, puts all those beautiful things that God designed and created into an artificial relationship to each other called the family tree of life. Why honest evolutionists admit we haven't the faintest idea where anything came from. All the links between the kinds are still what? Missing. So what the depraved mind of man does is to superimpose upon God's marvelous creatures lines of relationship that never existed and absolutely could not. One evolutionist whose textbook I have from England, University of Southampton, put it honestly, he said, I've taught evolutionism for decades and I've never yet been able to prove how anything ever came from anything else. In fact, what he said was quite remarkable. that what we really do have, and this is science, empirical observational science, is hundreds of thousands of marvelous, unique, complex living beings actually suspended in mid-air. Nobody knows how any of them relate to any of the other ones. That's true. But you see, evolutionism doesn't like things hanging in mid-air. So it puts them all on a tree, which they call the tree of life. Now friends, what do you think God thinks of this tree of life idea? Well, you can't get more opposite than between God's concept of the origin of living things and the evolutionary concept. Let's just simplify this for the sake of understanding tonight. Imagine just four living things on a tree of evolutionary life, namely gorillas and men and dogs and cats. What does an evolutionist say about those amazing living things that we're quite familiar with? He would say, well, gorillas and men are obviously closer related to each other than either one is to a dog or a cat. And dogs and cats are a lot closer to each other than either one is to a man or a gorilla. But if you go back hundreds of thousands and millions and billions of years, you will finally arrive at a common ancestor, that single cell organism, at the point of origin in that ancient sea. That's the point of faith of origin for the evolutionist. Now, what does God say about this? Absolutely the opposite. God says that men and gorillas, dogs, and cats were never related to each other. In fact, hold on, friends. They were simultaneously, supernaturally created, full-grown with all their potential for variation built into their dominant and recessive genes in the gene pool. And they were never connected with each other by root or branch. There were... one million three hundred distinct trees of life in a vast forest of trees that were never connected with each other and never will be. Now, nothing could be more shocking to an evolutionist than a statement like that. But you know what? As you open and read reverently, patiently, and prayerfully God's word, from beginning to end, God guarantees this, friends, that we will be shocked. at everything he's ever done and everything he said about everything he's done. He specializes in shocking to praise people in his love and grace to drag them, to wrench them from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of light where God is specializing in the impossible. Now friends, take a closer look at these trees. Let's look at the dog and cat tree here for a minute. Do you know what God has permitted us to discover about dogs and cats? Well, friends, it's absolutely amazing. We've discovered that they are exactly what the Bible says they are. Separate, distinct, unique creations of God with separate designs. Take a look. There they are. Now, you can just see the dog saying about the cat, I am never going to be related to that thing. And you can see the angry expression on this cat. Don't you ever connect me with that awful thing. And you know what? Scientists have been astounded to discover that every single body and reproductive cell and every cat on planet Earth is programmed in the deoxyribonucleic acid information system to reproduce nothing but cats. No cat will ever start to become a dog. And if you think your cat is beginning to bark, it's your problem, not his. And look at that dog, friends. Hundreds of varieties of dogs. Great Danes, St. Bernard's, Toy Poodles, Fox Terrace, every kind variety of dog, I should say every variety of dog in this planet is totally programmed and if billions of body cells Every single one of them has the whole DNA, mathematical, coded information to reproduce nothing but dogs. And no dog will ever start to become a cat. And if you think your dog is meowing, look twice. And in a distance on a foggy morning, you might not be able to tell whether that fuzzy thing over there is a dog or cat. Be assured they do know the difference. Oh, friends, there's an unbridgeable chasm. between every variety of cat and the world and every variety of dog and it can never be bridged you can never produce a dat or a cog now that's amazing because they really aren't all that different from each other are they I mean they both have hair in their bodies instead of scales and feathers and they're both quadrupeds walking on all fours They're both carnivores, flesh-eating, and they cover the same size spectrum, big cats, little cats, big dogs, little dogs. But friends, they are so unique and distinct that they are as different from each other in terms of origin, nature, and destiny as an apple tree is from a grasshopper. You know something? That's exactly what God told us in Genesis chapter one. And he didn't say it once. He said it ten times. He said he created living things to reproduce exclusively and forever after their kind. After their kind. After their kind. After their kind. After their kind. After their kind. After their kind. After their kind. After their kind. After their kind. After their kind. After their kind. After their kind. After their kind. After their kind. Why does God say it ten times? Because he anticipates a problem. I mean, God doesn't have to say something ten times for it to be true. It's like parents who say to a naughty child, I'm saying, when I say it the third time, please obey. Why not try the first time? No, no. God knows there's going to be a resistance to this truth, and he's going to pound it in to our resisting hearts and minds by... constant repetition ten times in the first chapter of the eleven hundred and eighty five chapters of the Bible that is a foundational major truth from the living God to his creation now the resistance of course is this friends let's face it let's face it Satan the God of this world wanted our first parents to believe that that is not true First thing he ever said to Adam and Eve was this. You shall be as what? God. God. You're not going to be locked into this finite creaturely realm here, taking instructions, suffering limitations from some so-called God that talked to your husband. No. You'll be free from these limits. You will be as God. Well, Satan wants to be God. He wants to be like the most high. And he told the one who created him, you bow down to me and I'll give you all the kingdoms of the earth. And they were his to give. And the Lord Jesus knew that and recognized that, didn't he? Of course. By virtue of what? The king and queen of the earth surrendering their God-given dominion to this alien being. Now friends, Satan wants to be God desperately. He wants people to believe that they can be God. He wants people to believe that they were once animals. He wants us to believe that everything is in a flux and everything is changing and God says, no. God is God, angels are angels, humans are humans, and dogs are dogs and cats are cats forever. We are locked in. Now friends, it's just one apparent exception to that. Two thousand years ago, the second person of the triune God had added a human nature to his divine nature and became God-man, the theanthropic person. But mind you, he didn't change his deity. He didn't lose his attributes. He just added another nature in order that he might, through virgin conception and incarnation, die upon a cross, to pay in full the penalty of our sin which otherwise could never have done without that miracle of incarnation. So now he's God-man forever. Now friends, that is one of the fundamental, basic truths of Holy Scripture. Now watch how this applies. If all dogs in the world were allowed to interbreed with each other, instead of being isolated, you see, by dog breeders, they would all revert to type and two or three generations and look like the two dogs that walked off of Noah's Ark. You of course knew that on Noah's Ark there were not two toy poodles, two fox terriers, two bulldogs. There were just two what? Dogs, thank you. That helped the population problem in the Ark too. And all the cats in the world today Believe it or not, lions and tigers and house cats are all the same kind of animal and can be crossed under certain conditions to produce hybrids. And if all of them were allowed to interbreed, they also would revert to type and look like the two mongrel cats that walked off of Noah's Ark. And thus, friends, on the Ark were no varieties, just the basic kind, two of each. among the airbreathers except the very few that were clean animals that went in three pairs plus the extra that ended up on the altar for sacrifice. And of course, eight people. Now, when we think of that, we have a fundamental basic reality of biblical creationism, namely that God created in the first cats, first dogs, and so on, an enormous potential for variation within the kind. But the variations are not an improvement with added genetic information that leads to evolution. It's just the opposite. Variation within a kind weakens the individual through gene depletion and isolation and inbreeding and makes that individual animal more vulnerable to environmental changes and thus extinction. a beautiful toy poodle for nine years in our home. And I want you to know, friends, that that animal would have been totally helpless if released into the wilderness. You see, inbreeding doesn't help the animal. It just makes the owner happy, I guess. But God, of course, wants us to know that the farther back you go in history, the more genetically pure and powerful and flexible every kind of living thing was until you get back to Creation Week. And those first animals were marvelously pure of any mutations or genetic defects of any kind. Now, let's take a look at gorillas. I'm just so amazed at gorillas. I try to go out of my way to take a very close look at gorillas. Excuse me, I didn't want you to see that one. That's too frightening. Let's look at this one. Right? We had a giant male gorilla in the Brookfield Zoo of Chicago for many years near where we lived in northern Indiana. It went on the lake. And I want you to know, friends, that thousands of people wanted to go to see this great gorilla. And I was in line waiting to get to see him. It's a beautiful building they built for him. big as in this auditorium, perfectly air-conditioned according to the humidity and temperature of the typical jungles of Zaire. And over here one of his mates with a couple offspring, and over here another mate with a couple of offspring, and a very narrow moat separating this monstrous animal from the tourists that came by to take a close look at him. And finally it got to be my turn as people pushed by and mothers said to their children, dear, that's one of our closest relatives. Because, of course, you know what happens to children in the school systems of America now. They're gradually but definitely and persistently indoctrinated and brainwashed day after day and year after year and that five days a week and just compensated by maybe a little touch in Sunday school in some churches to contradict this distortion of God's truth. Well, it came my turn. And I looked at him. And I think for a moment he looked at me. And I want to tell you, folks, I had two thoughts right then. Thought number one. You are a magnificent creature. Just look at him. Look at the shape, the function. Look at this thing. There's only one person in the universe that could have designed and created him. And his name is Jesus Christ the Lord. And I have a verse. This is my favorite gorilla verse. You ready? All things are made through him, the word. And without him, there's not anything made that was made. Does that include the gorilla? Thank you. Three people agree. If you don't think so, you try to make one. He's magnificent. But I had a second thought. Here's the big one. This took courage. I'm not related to you at all. That's a rare thought today. You know how I somehow arrived at that conclusion? By a miracle of God called new birth whereby the Holy Spirit put eyes of understanding into my heart and transformed me from one who denied and suppressed the truth of God to one who by His grace and through the illumination of Holy Scripture recognized him as my Creator and my Lord and my authority on ultimate origins. In fact, I had to have intraocular lenses implanted. Now, ten years ago, that happened to me in Florida. St. Luke's Cataract Clinic had a Christian surgeon who examined me and said, I think we can help you, sir. I was legally blind in serious astigmatism from childhood with thick glasses. And as years went by, as you know, the heavy cataracts developed. I couldn't tell at night when I was driving whether that light up there was red or green, and that's serious. So Norma did the driving. And a friend said, you need to check with this doctor. This surgeon can maybe help you. And he said, what I'm going to do is to remove... the cataracts from this eye and implant an intraocular lens in here. Not a contact, but an intraocular lens. Amazing technology. I mean, a hundred years ago, who could have imagined such things? And a week later, the other eye. And friends, I can't tell you the emotional shock to be able to see for the first time in my life the brightness and the colors and the sharpness of God's creation. I'm still recovering from that. And students used to sit in the back row for years at Grace Seminary knowing that their professor couldn't even see them there, sleeping. And then I was able to say, I can see you now. In nineteen eighty-nine. And you know what, friends? That's what happened to me here. Fifty-six years ago, God put new lenses in the eyes of my understanding and my heart. called the lens of Holy Scripture. And unless we have supernatural perspective from God Himself, we have in the faintest idea what the ultimate difference is between a gorilla and a human. It's impossible in the spiritual astigmatism and myopia and the cataracts of depravity. You can't even see what's there. You can't. But now we know what that is. Look. It is an animal that is infinitely different than a human. Underline infinitely. What do you mean, sir? Well, the animal indeed has two eyes like we do and two ears like we do and one heart and one pair of lungs and muscle for muscle and nerve for nerve and bone for bone. An organ for organ is fantastically similar to a human being, but the differences biblically are infinite. Look. This animal is totally incapable of experiencing self-consciousness. No gorilla can ever say, I am a gorilla. If he could, he wouldn't be one. No gorilla has any purpose in life or perspective. He can't say, I can't wait to get out of here. Or things are better for me last year. Or I'm frustrated. Or I want my rights. Or I'm unhappy. No. Not one such thought. Ever. No gorilla has the capacity to appreciate art and music creatively. Or can invent tools. And no gorilla that's ever existed or ever will, dear friends, has a moral nature by which it can discern right from wrong. That's why no gorilla has ever sinned and never will. No gorilla can even talk. They have no capacity to communicate abstract symbolic language. And furthermore, dear friends, here's a big one. No gorilla can know God, honor God, love Him, sing to Him, praise Him, worship Him, love Him, serve Him. Are you ready for this? And when this magnificent animal dies, it sinks into everlasting oblivion instantly and does not enter an intermediate state awaiting resurrection and judgment. He doesn't need a savior. You'll never see him again. He's gone forever. He served his momentary purpose on this planet to show us things about God's greatness and glory and wisdom. But friends, he has no eternal existence. You can't get that different. In fact, God has been very careful to make it obvious that we're not related. Look at this. Can anybody tell the difference between that and these? Look hard, friends. That gorilla is a quadruped. He has to walk on all fours. And God is sort of saying by means of the very design, structure, and function of that animal. just look just see reality but but you have to have my help God says to see the whole picture and we say thank you Lord we do want to see the whole picture we want to see things the way you want us to see them because unless we honor the living God in terms of his infallible inerrant inspired revelation and holy scripture we become vulnerable to accessible to satanic and demonic blindness in our depravity which is just open to satanic health. Satan can't blind us unless we want to be blinded. And millions of Americans tonight in a nation that we thank God for and the marvels of its physical contours that God presented to this segment of humanity to be used for his glory is sinking deeper and deeper into darkness, distortion, and thus despair because we have said no to God's interpretation and thus to common sense observational capacities that God gave us to see what's really there as we sink into the bottomless pit of evolutionary disaster. Friends, tomorrow night, God willing, we're going to see what this is going to result in. and we'll hope that you'll come back and pray that somehow God will communicate to our heart that unless we have a lens of holy scripture implanted in our heart, nothing that we ever see with these two eyes fits God's descriptions and God's eternal purpose in terms of their true significance. We must have God's precious word In thy light, we see light, and may God help us. Father, I just thank you for the preciousness of this book, supernaturally designed over two thousand years through forty writers that you chose and guaranteed that what they wrote for this book would never pass away, even if heaven and earth will pass away. And Father, there are many things that we don't understand. We can surely say of the book of Genesis what Peter said of Paul's epistles. And these are some things hard to be understood, which the ignorant of the unstable twist as they do the other scriptures to their own destruction. And Father, we're terrified at our grandchildren, great grandchildren being systematically poisoned, not just in school systems, but through magazines and journals and newspapers and television programs and their neighbors and friends that were just simply inundated and avalanched with error and perversion day after day, year after year. And unless we do your things your way, we will just be one more statistic of the disaster that you have promised for those who do not set their heart and mind. on the Lord Jesus Christ, the author of the universe and the author of truth. May we be walking in his light. We ask in his great and glorious name. Amen.