unPHILtered: The Way I See It (16 page)

Consider the following—a simple birdhouse, a doghouse, your house, a grand hotel. They all have certain things in common—walls, an entrance, a roof, and other touches. Why do they have a similar pattern? We attribute it to intelligence—ours. We take a functional design and then adapt it to whatever purpose we have for it. Isn’t that exactly what we expect from an intelligent Designer?

Look at a whale’s flipper, a duck’s wing, a squirrel’s front leg, and your arm. They all have a large bone above the hinge (elbow) and a couple of smaller bones below the hinge, and then several smaller bones (phalanges) at the end. Science says these indicate a “common origin.” I say “yes, they do”—but was it blind chance or intelligence? Take a functional design, and then adapt it to whatever purpose it serves. Again, that’s exactly what we would expect from an intelligent Designer.

There is no rule that says we have to accept blind chance, whether wind, explosion, or wave action (these forces never organize systems), as the only possible organizer of cells, DNA, protein synthesis, the nervous system, bone tissue, the endocrine system, the autoimmune system, the respiration process, and so on. To say it was by blind chance takes an awful lot of faith!

Those who defend the religion of blind chance often do so by intimidating, belittling, criticizing, yelling, and bullying those
with other views (why are they so defensive?). All the while, they can’t show the working model or pathways that demonstrate how the creation of life, a living cell, occurred—just a fervently held faith that we could not have come from an intelligent Designer. Their faith, secular evolution, provides no reason or purpose for your existence now, and no hope for the future. Pride and resistance to the concept of a Creator (to whom we are obliged) is a powerful emotional response that ignores a logical option to “chance.” Intelligence. I’m telling you, don’t ever doubt that you have a purpose, because you were made on purpose!

The origin of matter, the atom, Earth, the chemical processes by which DNA was formed, life, and on and on—you can find the theories. But they are only theories with no real answers. In the end, you put your faith in either blind chance or an intelligent Being. I find the latter much more satisfying and reasonable.

Back to the biblical account: After God introduced vegetation, He created the sun and the moon on the fourth day and said,
“Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times, and days and years, and let them be lights in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth”
(Genesis 1:14–15). Did you notice that using the sun to count days and time, as we do now, is not introduced until verses fourteen and fifteen, on the fourth day? So God created light on the first day (verse three) but did not localize that light into the sun to count days and seasons until much later.
The vegetation created on the third day had light (verse three), but the sun as we know it was not formed until the fourth day.

Genesis 1:20 tells us that on the fifth day,
“God said, ‘Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the vault of the sky.’ ”
The fish are in place, and then come the birds, which feed on the fish and vegetation. The water was “teeming” with living things—from microscopic to bigger and bigger—a food chain. To this day, you can go to the ocean and see shrimp, shad, mackerel, albacore tuna, swordfish, and sharks all still according to their “kind.” What about the winged creatures? There are robins, bluebirds, sparrows, owls, hawks, and eagles. There are mallard ducks, teal ducks, wood ducks, and gadwalls. All covered in feathers with unique and beautiful markings. And they’re all reproducing kind after kind.

Genesis 1:24 says,
“And God said, ‘Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: the livestock, the creatures that move along the ground, and the wild animals, each according to its kind.’ ”
The earth was created for humankind to inhabit. Living creatures were placed here before we were. We needed a food supply: vegetation, fish, birds, and wild animals—they were all created for us. And God gave us permission to whack ’em and stack ’em.

According to Genesis 1:26–28,
“God said, ‘Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the
ground.’ So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”
He introduced Adam and Eve to Earth and all that he had created for them.

God wanted people to rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky. There are your ducks, geese, quails, and pheasants. God wanted people to rule over the livestock and wild animals. There are your four-footers like deer, bears, moose, and squirrels. He told us everything that lives and moves would be food for us. So much for PETA and these other animal rights groups telling me I shouldn’t be shooting ducks. God sanctioned me to do it, Jack!

One word here about people being made in God’s image. What makes us human? It’s not intelligence. It’s not standing on two legs. It’s our soul and spirit made in God’s image. The existence of a conscience, moral values (when man doesn’t smother it because of sin), ethics, aesthetics, and abstract qualities are all
spiritual
qualities. These qualities do not come from dirt or water; they are not found in the animal kingdom. They come from God. Spiritual qualities exist today because they were part of the “First Cause,” God, in the beginning.

Based on what I’ve read in the Bible and what I’ve seen on earth, I know there will be a resurrection of human bodies from the ground. I see resurrection all around me. The secular crowd and many evolutionists say they don’t believe in God. They ignore what He gave us. When, in fact, we should be in awe of
what God gave us. It is literally amazing. He can grow a plant from a seed the size of a grain of rice and make a bull redwood out of it that would take several trucks and loaders to haul off. Everywhere I look in nature, I see evidence of a Designer.

I can’t measure God or weigh Him to prove Him to you in a physical sense. And our secular friends cannot prove that He is not there. He operates in another dimension (as well as this one). He is Spirit. I choose to accept by faith (and by looking at a lot of evidence) that He is here! I look at what has been made, and it screams “intelligent design” to me from every direction. I didn’t major in biology or chemistry. I’m an average-intelligence guy. I also know that the chair you’re sitting in right now did not just fall into place. It was thought about. Then it was constructed. It’s design.

Scientists have used this same logic. You’ve heard of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) project. How are they going to determine if space aliens are out there? They are searching for radio waves—a pattern of radio pulse. In other words, they are looking for intelligent design in the form of radio waves or Morse code or the like. It makes no sense that secular people rant about intelligent design not being scientific. It’s the very principle the SETI scientists have been using since the 1980s. And then there’s the science of archaeology. Archaeologists search through dirt and make determinations about past peoples when they discover some drawing or artifact that shows what? Intelligent design.

A scientist you’ve all heard of, Albert Einstein, once said, “Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible laws and connections, there remains something subtle, intangible, and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in fact, religious.”

I’ve read the Bible from cover to cover many times in my life, and I can’t get over the fact that fifty or so individuals, who were scattered out across the world and whose lives were spread out thousands of years apart, each picked up where the last one left off and continued a story that is the answer to our existence on earth. On their own, that many people, separated by time and distance, could not create a story beginning with the creation of the cosmos and moving to the end. And then they weaved into it the prophecies to be fulfilled by one Man—seeing His birth, His death to remove our sin, His resurrection from the grave, and the contentment of a godly life and all that’s involved in an eternal inheritance. I believe God was speaking through them. It was His plan. Such a story over time is beyond man’s capacity to contrive. The Bible has to be true. It is the story of all time, and it is for us!

Every time I look around me, I see His creation. There is no other explanation for watermelons and acorns and honeycombs.
I also know Jesus Christ was here and is the Son of God. We are still counting time by Him! He died to pay my sin penalty. He was buried, and He was raised from the dead to show me I can be raised, too. God has defeated death for us. These facts give me faith that there is an eternal future and that I can get off the planet alive.

S
ome of my favorite movies had classic story lines of good versus evil. Let’s face it: the heart of every good story is a struggle, and oftentimes it’s a hero against a villain. Who will ever forget Rocky Balboa fighting Apollo Creed and Ivan Drago in the
Rocky
movies or Jake La Motta battling Ray Robinson in
Raging Bull
? Hey, my all-time favorite actor is Clint Eastwood, who battled serial killers and hit men as the protagonist in the
Dirty Harry
movies. “Go ahead, make my day,” Eastwood told them. No matter the odds, we always seem to find ourselves rooting for the underdog, the outnumbered, and the outsized.

Let me tell you something, folks: we’re facing that kind of struggle in America every day. In my sixty-seven years on earth, I’ve learned that I’m coexisting with two kinds of people: good
ones and evil ones. I’m only talking about the creatures living on earth because that’s where I happen to reside. It’s actually a much bigger battleground, but we’ll start with planet Earth for now. According to 1 John 5:19,
“We know that we are children of God, and that the whole world is under the control of the evil one.”
In case you haven’t figured it out yet, let me reveal this startling fact: there are far fewer children of God on earth than there are people being controlled by the evil one. We’re the underdogs, the outnumbered and outsized.

Now, I know that’s a mouthful and a big pill to swallow. But when you think about the world today, that particular scripture from the Bible explains why everything happens the way it does. Understanding that the world is under the control of the Evil One explains killing, wars, robberies, injustices, and why men do what they do. It explains why a group of men would get on four jet airplanes on the morning of September 11, 2001, and fly the jets into tall buildings full of people in New York and Washington, DC. Hey, let me get this right: The terrorists didn’t know the passengers on the airplanes and didn’t know the people in the buildings. They’d never met them. You had women and children in the mix, but the terrorists still hijacked the planes with smiles on their faces and rammed them into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon, killing nearly three thousand people in an instant.

If you’re anything like me, you probably asked yourself on 9/11:
What in the world were they thinking?
They weren’t thinking
for themselves, folks. They were under the control of the Evil One. It explains why they did what they did. I know that’s probably enough to make you say, “Good grief!” But I’m only getting started, and it’s going to become crystal clear as you read this.

Look at what two brothers did during the Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013. It was a foot race with thousands of people running in the streets of Boston. It’s an American tradition and a celebration of Patriots’ Day, which commemorates the battles of Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts, the first military engagements of the American Revolutionary War. But as the people of Boston celebrated on what was a beautiful spring day, two brothers carried two pressure-cooker bombs in their backpacks and placed them near the finish line of the race. When the brothers set them down, there were women and children everywhere. The brothers walked about fifty yards away, looked at their cell phones, and then consciously and knowingly punched in a code to detonate the bombs and blew the legs off women and children. The bombings killed three people and injured more than two hundred and fifty others.

The terrorists who attacked Boston lived in America, after fleeing the former Soviet Union and immigrating to the U.S. They were college students. Why would they do something evil like that to their fellow countrymen? Why did they hate us? You’re probably asking yourself:
What in the world were they thinking?
They were under the control of the Evil One; that’s why they did it.