The Lie: Evolution (9 page)

However, this same degeneracy (this same rejection of God’s laws) can be seen in so-called civilized nations that cut people up alive all year long (one and a half million of them in the United States each year), and it is legalized. This is what abortion is — cutting up people alive and sucking out the bits and pieces. The so-called "primitive tribes" had ancestors who once knew the true God and His laws. As they rejected the true God of creation, their culture degenerated in every area. The more our so-called "civilized nations" reject the God of creation, the more they will degenerate to a "primitive culture." Thus, a culture should not be interpreted according to whether they are primitive or advanced (as presupposed by the evolutionary scale), but every aspect of their culture must be judged against the standards of God’s Word. How does your nation measure up?

Chapter 7

DEATH: A CURSE AND A BLESSING

WHY SIN AND DEATH?

Suppose someone came up to you and said, "You Christians are saying that we need Jesus Christ, and that we need to confess our sins. Sin? Why do we need Christ anyway? Besides, God can’t be who He says He is. If He is, like you say, a God of love, look at all the death and suffering in the world. How can that be?" What would you say?

THE GOSPEL, SIN, AND DEATH

What is the gospel message? When God made man, He made him perfect. He made the first two people, Adam and Eve, and placed them in the Garden of Eden where they had a special, very beautiful relationship with God. When He made them, He gave them a choice. He wanted their love — not as a programmed response, but as a reasoned act. They chose to rebel against God. This rebellion is called sin. All sin comes under the banner of rebellion against God and His will.

As a result of that rebellion in Eden, a number of things happened. First, man was estranged from God. That separation is called spiritual death. On its own, the final effect of this would have been living forever in our sinful bodies, eternally separated from God. Imagine living with Hitler and Stalin forever! Imagine living in an incorrigible, sinful state for eternity. But something else happened. Romans 5:12 tells us that as a result of man’s actions came sin, and as a result of sin came death; but not just spiritual death, as some theologians claim. To confirm this, one needs only read 1 Corinthians 15:20 where Paul talks about the physical death of the
first Adam
and the physical death of Christ, the
last Adam
. Or read Genesis 3, where God expelled Adam and Eve from the Garden so that they would not eat of the Tree of Life and live forever. Physical death as well as spiritual death resulted from their sin.

Why did God send death? Three aspects of death should be considered carefully:

1. God, as a righteous judge, cannot look upon sin. Because of His very nature and the warning He gave to Adam, God had to judge sin. He had warned Adam that if he ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, "In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." The curse of death placed upon the world was, and is, a just and righteous judgment from God who is the judge.

2. One of the aspects of man’s rebellion was separation from God. The loss of a loved one through death shows the sadness of the separation between those left behind and the one who has departed this world. When we consider how sad it is when a loved one dies, it should remind us of the terrible consequences of sin that separated Adam from the perfect relationship he had with God. This separation involved all mankind because Adam sinned as the representative of all.

3. Another aspect of death which many people miss is that God sent death because He loved us so much. God is love, and strange as it may sound, we should really praise Him for that curse He placed on us. It was not God’s will that man be cut off from Him for eternity. Imagine living in a sinful state for eternity, separated from God. But He loved us too much for that, and He did a very wonderful thing. In placing on us the curse of physical death, He provided a way to redeem man back to himself. In the person of Jesus Christ, He suffered that curse on the cross for us. He tasted death for every man (Heb. 2:9). By himself becoming the perfect sacrifice for our sin of rebellion, He conquered death. He took the penalty which should rightly have been ours at the hands of a righteous judge, and bore it in His own body on the cross.

All who believe in Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour are received back to God to spend eternity with Him. Isn’t that a wonderful message?
That is the message of Christianity
. Man forfeited his special position through sin, and as a result God placed upon him the curse of death so he could be redeemed back to God. What a wonderful thing God did! Every time we celebrate the Lord’s Supper, we remember Christ’s death and the awfulness of sin. Each Lord’s Day we rejoice in Christ’s resurrection, and thus the conquering of sin and death.

But evolution destroys the very basis of this message of love. The evolutionary process is supposed to be one of death and struggle, cruelty, brutality, and ruthlessness. It is a ghastly fight for survival, elimination of the weak and deformed. This is what underlies evolution — death, bloodshed, and struggle bringing man into existence. Death over millions of years. It is an onward, upward "progression" leading to man. Yet, what does the Bible say in Romans 5:12? Man’s actions led to sin, which led to death. The Bible tells us that without the shedding of blood there can be no remission of sin (Heb. 9:22). God instituted death and bloodshed so that man could be redeemed. If death and bloodshed existed before Adam sinned, the basis for atonement is destroyed.

Evolutionists would say death and struggle led to man’s existence. The Bible says man’s rebellious actions led to death.
These statements cannot both be true. One denies the other — they are diametrically opposed. That is why those who claim to hold both positions at the same time (theistic evolutionists) are destroying the basis of the gospel. If life formed in an onward "progression," how did man fall upward? What is sin? Sin would then be an inherited animal characteristic, not something due to the fall of man through disobedience. The many Christians who accept the belief of evolution and add God to it destroy the very foundation of the gospel message they profess to believe.

At one church, a man came up to me and insisted that a Christian could believe in evolution. Since I had spent considerable time during the service showing that the Bible teaches there was no death before the Fall, I asked him whether he believed there was death before Adam fell. In an angry tone he asked me, "Do you beat your wife?" This took me aback a little, and I was not really sure of the point he was trying to make, so I asked him what he meant by that. He asked me again, "Do you beat your wife?" Then he walked off. Life is full of interesting experiences on the preaching trail. However, I thought about this man’s comments for quite some time and then realized, after talking to a psychologist, that there is a type of question you can ask and no matter whether you answer no or yes you are trapped. Actually, what this man should have asked me was, "Have you stopped beating your wife?" If you answer either yes or no, you are admitting that you beat your wife. In relation to the death issue and Adam’s fall, if the man had answered in the affirmative, "Yes, there was death before Adam’s fall," he would be admitting to a belief in something that contradicted the Bible. If he answered no, then he was denying evolution. Either way, he was showing that one cannot add evolution to the Bible. He was trapped, and he knew it.

I need to state here emphatically that I am not saying that if you believe in evolution you are not a Christian. There are many Christians who, for varying reasons (whether it be out of ignorance of what evolution teaches, pride, or a liberal view of the Scriptures) believe in evolution. Those who do believe in evolution are being inconsistent and, in reality, are destroying the foundations of the gospel message. Therefore, I would plead with them to seriously consider the evidence against the position they hold.

Even atheists realize the inconsistency in Christians believing in evolution, as seen in a quotation from an article by G. Richard Bozarth entitled "The Meaning of Evolution," from
The American Atheist
. "Christianity is — must be — totally committed to the special creation as described in Genesis, and Christianity must fight with all its full might, fair or foul, against the theory of evolution…. It becomes clear now that the whole justification of Jesus’ life and death is predicted on the existence of Adam and the forbidden fruit he and Eve ate. Without the original sin, who needs to be redeemed? Without Adam’s fall into a life of constant sin terminated by death, what purpose is there to Christianity? None."
¹

The atheist Jacques Monod (noted for his contributions to molecular biology and philosophy) said in an interview titled "The Secret Life," broadcast by the Australian Broadcasting Commission on June 10, 1976, as a tribute to him: "Selection is the blindest, and most cruel way of evolving new species, and more and more complex and refined organisms …the more cruel because it is a process of elimination, of destruction. The struggle for life and the elimination of the weakest is a horrible process, against which our whole modern ethic revolts. An ideal society is a non-selective society, it is one where the weak are protected; which is exactly the reverse of the so-called natural law.
I am surprised that a Christian would defend the idea that this is the process which God more or less set up in order to have evolution"
(emphasis mine).

Original sin, with death as a result, is the basis of the gospel. That is why Jesus Christ came and what the gospel is all about. If the First Adam is only an allegorical figure, then why not the Last Adam (1 Cor. 15:45–47), Jesus Christ? If man did not really fall into sin, there is no need for a Saviour. Evolution destroys the very foundations of Christianity because it states, "Death is, and always has been, part of life." Now, if you lived in a skyscraper, and if there were people underneath that skyscraper with jackhammers hammering away at the foundations, would you say, "So what?" That is what many Christians are doing. They are being bombarded with evolution through the media, the public school system, television, and newspapers, and yet they rarely react. The foundations of the "skyscraper" of Christianity are being eroded by the "jackhammers" of evolution. But, inside the skyscraper, what are many Christians doing? They are either sitting there doing nothing or are throwing out jackhammers saying, "Here, have a few more! Go destroy our foundations!"

Worse still, theistic evolutionists (those who believe in both evolution and God) are actively helping to undermine the basis of the Gospel. As the Psalmist asks, "If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do? (Ps. 11:3)." If the basis of the gospel is destroyed, the structure built on that foundation (the Christian Church) will largely collapse. If Christians wish to preserve the structure of Christianity, they must protect its foundation and therefore actively oppose evolution.

NEW HEAVENS AND NEW EARTH

Paradise Restored

Evolution also destroys the teaching of the new heavens and the new earth. What are we told about the new heavens and the new earth? Act 3:21 says there will be a restoration (restitution). That means things will be restored to at least what they were originally. We read about what it will be like: "They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain" (Isa. 11:9). There will be vegetarianism and no violence. "The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them ... and the lion shall eat straw like an ox" (Isa. 11:6–7) — that is vegetarianism! "And there shall be no more curse" (Rev. 22:3).

In Genesis we find that man and animals were told to eat only plants (Gen. 1:29–30); they were vegetarians. Only after the Flood was man told he could eat meat (Gen. 9:3). There were only vegetarians when God first created, and there was no violence before Adam sinned. Some people object to the claim that the first creatures were vegetarian by saying that lions have sharp teeth which were created to eat meat. Is that necessarily so? Or is that just what you were taught in school? What we should say is that the lion’s sharp, canine teeth are good for ripping. The same teeth that are now good for ripping up other animals would also be good for ripping up plants. According to God’s Word, lions were vegetarian before the Fall and will be once again in the future paradise. By the way, "meat-eating" animals can still be vegetarian. Dogs and cats will survive quite well on a balanced diet of vegetables. Also, the Bible does not exclude the possibility of direct action by God at the time of the Fall (and in the future restoration), having a direct biological effect on the creatures in relation to feeding habits. There are many animals living today that have carnivorous-looking teeth, but only use these teeth for eating fruit or plants (e.g., the flying fox or fruit bat — see Appendix 1).

To believe in evolution is to deny a universal paradise before Adam, because evolution necessarily implies that before Adam there was struggle, cruelty and brutality, animals eating animals, and death. Is the world going to be restored to that? If you believe in evolution, you must deny a universal paradise before Adam (because you believe that there was death and struggle millions of years before Adam), and also at the end of time (because the Bible teaches the world will be restored to what it used to be). Thus, evolution not only strikes at the heart and the foundation, but at the hope of Christianity as well. We all should be out there doing something about it. Many of us have been hoodwinked into thinking that evolution has to do with science and that you need to be a scientist to do anything to combat it. But evolution is only a belief system, and you do not need to be a scientist to combat that.