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Transcript of message from TV Broadcast 787 -- taken from Closed Captioning Text -- Brother Phil Enlow: Well I'm gonna step out tonight on something...I'm gonna take a page out of Jimmy Robbins' book. He's been known over the years for coming to convention with unusual subjects, and teaching subjects that have been a great blessing. And, I've had something on my heart and I've wrestled with it, but I'm just gonna go ahead step out and trust the Lord, and it's gonna sound like it's from out in left field, but it isn't. You know, Brother Jimmy has told me over the years that if the Lord gives me something to write about it and then preach about it--or was it to preach about it and then write about it? I don't remember. -- Brother Jimmy Robbins: You're supposed to write about it first and then preach it. -- Brother Phil Enlow: Okay. Well, I've written half of what I have on my mind tonight. ( laughter ). So, I figured I'd have it covered either way. ( laughter ). Anyway...this is gonna sound like it's unrelated, but it's centrally related to what's been talked about. But I believe there's a need for clear teaching in this area. So I'm gonna talk about, "What About Genesis?" What about Genesis? The word 'genesis' means beginning. The Book of Genesis is the beginning of God's revelation. It's the beginning of God's account of history, and it's the foundation for everything in the Bible that follows, including the cross. You remove Genesis, you don't have anything. And, I think perhaps the most key verse in the Bible is "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." (NIV). It's the foundation. You know Brother Pappy quoted the verse from Psalms. "If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?" (KJV). Well, I'll tell you, this is something that the enemy has trained his guns on and it's affected all of us in one way or another, and I believe it's time for this. It isn't something to major on, but it's certainly time for it. There is...it seems like for decades, science, standard science, evolutionary science has pretty well had the microphone all to itself...and have really come on strong with a very anti-biblical message. In varying degrees, it's affected the church. But today there is a growing debate that is...I believe God is giving Christians ammunition to fight back. But the questions that are raised by Genesis are...are the stories of Adam and Eve in the Garden and all of that, are they just myths? Are they nice religious stories that we're supposed to draw spiritual lessons from, or is it real history? And, what do we do with the claims of science that I know all of our young people face...the ones that aren't home-schooled and the ones that go to school, they face it every day. Some of you know what I'm talking about? Is that what they...do they teach you to believe the Bible? ( congregational response ). No, they don't, do they? Of course, the question can be raised, can science reasonably be challenged? Or are we just sort of...sticking our heads in the sand, refusing to face reality, and just...making wild claims about the Bible, without any real foundation? But yet there's...there are other people in the church...I'm not particularly referring to anybody here, but it's a common question...well, what difference does it make? And I can tell you that reaction is out there, because that used to be my reaction. What difference does all this make? We just need to preach the Gospel. Preach about Jesus, get people saved, get 'em ready for the coming of the Lord. What difference does Genesis make and how we understand that? But what has happened is, about...a little over 200 years ago, there were secular scientists who began to challenge the idea that the earth was only 6,000 years old and they began to say at first, well, it's really 50,000 years old. We've found stuff in nature we can't explain any other way except by long age. And 50,000 years grew to hundreds of thousands, and millions, and then billions pretty quickly. And, what happened was, Satan understood something...that if you could undermine the beginnings of Truth, you have undermined everything and sooner or later, it will collapse. And we've seen it happen in churches across the land, as they've begun to compromise on this issue. And I believe God wants to put a firm foundation under our feet so that we know from Genesis 1 to Revelation 22, what we stand on. Praise God! So, the motivation of the enemy was to begin to compromise, but Christians generally didn't recognize it. And they said...like we tend to say...well, what difference does it make? We're here to preach the Gospel. And so, what we're gonna do is just find...now that the scientists say there's millions of years, well there must be. They know, so we'll just fit it in the Bible somewhere, somehow. And so they tried to figure out where they could shoe-horn those millions of years into Genesis, and that's kind of where things were for a long, long time. And the world that I grew up in was part of that compromise. So this part is a testimony. I grew up and there were all kinds of different explanations. I, like most boys, had my toy dinosaurs and I loved them. And I could just sit here...play with them and maneuver 'em around and imagine all these wonderful mysterious ages gone by. I know...anybody that's ever been a boy can identify with what I'm saying. It's fascinating stuff. I didn't really ever hear any serious challenge to the idea that there was millions of years in there somewhere. All I ever heard in school was that. My dad never really openly challenged it, although I think he didn't quite believe it. He just didn't know how to fit it together and how to work it out. He was the one that later pointed me in the right direction. So I think he had the right idea all along. But generally speaking, my belief at that time...I could have summarized it was that I believed that God was the Creator, I believed that Eden was a real place, and I believed that dinosaurs died out 65,000,000 years ago. Problem? What problem? ( laughing ). Yeah. That was kind of where I was at. So, in school that's all I ever heard. So then I went to college. Well now if I'd gone to the colleges some of you went to, there's no question what I would have heard. But I went to a Christian college. I went to a Christian college that had a strong belief in the inspiration of scriptures, and so what were they going to say about this? Well, it didn't take me long to find out, because one of my very first courses was "Old Testament Survey." Guess where the Old Testament begins? ( laughing ). In Genesis. So the very first day of class, we were launched right into a discussion of Genesis and the creation account. And it very quickly became evident that the professor and certainly probably all of the students had just accepted the idea that science has proven that we have millions of years, so we're just gonna have to deal with it somehow. And so what they did was kind of give us a menu of different way to deal with it. And, as best I remember, they came up...they explained, well the days weren't really days. They were long ages. How many have ever heard that? After all, a day is a thousand years, and all that stuff. Nobody would ever read that strictly, blocking everything out, and simply reading the Hebrew would ever, ever come to that conclusion. It was obvious that the author meant it to be 24 hour days. You know, you can go into the...all of that, but I'm not gonna take a lot of time with that. But anyway that was one of the theories. And to counter evolution, what we said was, well, God specially created all the different kinds of animals and He introduced them periodically, so that He did create everything after its own kind, He just did it over a long period of time. And then we finally got to Adam. Well another theory was popularized by Scofield. How many of you ever heard of the 'gap theory'? That there's a gap between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2, and what he did was figure out...here's where we can put the millions of years. We can dig up all the old fossils...that happened in another world, in the beginning God created and then He sort of re-created everything in Genesis 2 and that was 6,000 years ago. So all the death and all of that other stuff was long gone and it was almost like the Garden of Eden was built on top of the bones that were underneath. But anyway, that was the way they handled it. So that was another theory. Then theistic evolution...I can't even...it's like saying black-white or up-down...they don't go together at all, but people would try to fit 'em in and just say, well, God used evolution to create everything. Anybody ever heard that expression? ( congregational response ). Yeah. And talk about compromise, that's a serious one. But anyway, my conclusion when I come out of college was, "I don't know." ( laughter ). Basically we...as I said we were presented with a menu and it's like, take your choice, any of 'em are good, you just decide which way works best for you. So I just sort of filed the idea...filed the whole business away. I said, well, it doesn't matter. And so anyway, if you had asked me about 15 years ago, let's say...I'm trying to pick a rough date, about all of this, I would have said, ah, it doesn't matter. I don't know how...God did it, that's all I know. I don't know how He did it, or when He did it, it doesn't matter. We just need to preach the Gospel, get people ready for the coming of Christ. What difference does it make? That was my attitude. And I probably would've been...sounded very superior about it. ( sighing heavily ). ( laughter ). You know, very cocksure and looking down my nose at your ignorance to ask the question. ( laughter ). We're something, aren't we? ( laughter ). I'm confessing. But anyway, all of a sudden several years ago, and Jimmy will remember this, my dad handed me a series of audio tapes and you heard them, too. And all of a sudden I heard PhD scientists who had all the credentials to know what was going on, who actually believed that Genesis should be taken exactly as it is written as history. And they presented all these arguments and ideas to show, first of all 'course they showed evolution was wrong and I didn't have any problem with that. I knew that was nuts. It's very easy to unravel if you look at real science. But anyway...be that as it may, that wasn't the issue for me. The issue was that I had, up to that point, really scoffed at the idea that the earth was 6,000 years old. I mean, any of the others were okay, but the idea that it was that recent, that's ridiculous. Scientists have proven different. Everybody knows that. But here, all of a sudden, I was presented with the idea, hey, maybe I'm wrong. And I listened with considerable interest, and an area of science after area was just presented to me in a way that I just got my wheels turning and I said, boy, this is interesting stuff. And I got to the end of it and I said, well, maybe. And I just went on. I didn't really get into it a whole lot. But every once in a while I started visiting websites. And, 'cause there are of course plenty of websites that present this point of view and one of them that I actually went to was the Institute for Creation Research, icr.org, and I began to read some of their materials and got more and more interested. Every once in a while, every year or two, I'd go back and kind of dig in a little bit and then I'd put it on the shelf, and say, ah I won't worry about it. But, as you know, we have gone, several of us to the NRB meetings, these conventions every year for many years now. And it was about four years ago, roughly, whenever it was...it might have been Charlotte, but anyway we went there and I happened to notice that one of the exhibitors in the exhibit hall was ICR and somehow I was just primed to say, oh boy, this is my chance. I'm gonna learn something here. So I went and I took everything I could lay my hands on that they would let me have, and I read it, and all of a sudden, the light went on. ( snapping fingers ). Suddenly I knew why it mattered. And I just began to ravenously look at stuff and get videos and actually have been to seminars and I've interacted with others. I've met men like Ken Ham and gone to 'Answers in Genesis' website and other things like that...men who've really...that's their ministry. It's not my ministry, but it is theirs and God has seemingly called them to raise this issue, because it is so foundational to the very truths we were singing about tonight. And so my beliefs became very changed and, it was the year after that...the convention was out in Anaheim, and I suggested to Jimmy and Don and Paul, I guess went with us...that we go out a day early because ICR, Institute for Creation Research is in San Diego. That's not very far. And, of course, with the time change, we were up and down there and had breakfast and still there before they were open, 'cause our bodies were so used to eastern time. So anyway we got down there and who should show us through but John Morris the President. And he showed us just about everything, down to the broom closets. And every laboratory, everything...we went around and met...one of the men that I had heard...that we had heard on those tapes was Dr. Steve Austin. He's a world class geologist, believes this Book the way it's written, and has actually discovered things that have revolutionized standard geology. He has had to make them change their minds about some things. And he was working in his lab. Well he popped out in the hall and we had a nice chat with him for about 15 minutes...nice guy. The great privilege we had, though, was meeting Dr. Henry Morris. He was the man that I believe God used to absolutely begin to mount a challenge to modern science. He was a...he was just about standing alone in the late 40's and early 50's, but then he began to hook up with a theologian named John Whitcomb and the two of them collaborated on a book called, "The Genesis Flood." And what they did...the book is about this thick and it's written not just for you and me, but for scientists, to make them think about every aspect of the Genesis flood. Can we really look at the geological record and account for it that way? Does it make sense that way? Does it make sense in feasibility? Could He have held all those animals and all those things? I'll tell you, a lot of people's careers were launched by that book. I wish I had known about it. It was published in 1961. I never heard about it until very recently. But we had a chance to sit down with Dr. Morris, a gracious, sweet man of God, for about 15 minutes and chat with him. And I'll tell you, he was a very, very special man. And it wasn't but a few months later the Lord called him home. He was about 86, still active, still writing. But anyway, things have just gone on from there, and I've continued to learn and be interested. But I want to get to it because I've got a lot of material I want to try to cover. I want to answer some real questions. Basically the questions are these. Number one, why does it matter? Because if you don't think it does, I hope to change your mind. And then, once we establish what the Bible actually says, what do we do with the science? And I don't think...I think I can look at it in a stripped down way, enough to point you in the right direction and say, hey, here's why we don't have to be afraid of science. Here's why you can go into a science class, and look the teacher in the eye and know in your heart, I believe what God says and I don't have to be afraid of what you say. Praise God! I know we've got young people who are affected by this. ( congregational amens ). I know there's questions raised in people's minds. What we've really got here...you know the scientists like to portray this as a battle between science and religion. Science deals with facts. We just...it's just beliefs and once you start talking about anything other than the standard science they believe...oh, you're into religion, we don't deal with that. That's not the truth at all. The truth is what you're dealing with is two different religions, two different belief systems, because all modern science is, is atheism with a lab coat. ( congregational amens ). That's all it is. The whole foundation of what they are calling scientific fact is a refusal to believe God. ( congregational amens ). They've got to come up with some kind of an explanation. That's what you're dealing with. Now naturalistic evolution...their world view, their way of looking at the world basically says that we're an accident, that so many billions of years ago, there was this singularity, this...all that we see in the whole world was all condensed into one tiny little point, infinitely dense and hot, and all of a sudden, it expanded and things began to coalesce into galaxies and planets and by some pure accident several billion, a couple of billion years ago, maybe a billion years ago here on earth, the right combination of chemicals and energy came together and cells were born, and to make a long story short, here we all are. And it's sort of the...it has been described as the 'goo to you, by way of the zoo' theory. ( laughter ). Basically what you and I are in their view is simply 'slime plus time.' ( laughter ). But you can see, can't you, when you think about that viewpoint...when you're founding your whole thinking on atheism, there is no God, you have done away with any reasonable explanation of where we came from, why we're here, how we're supposed to live, or what's gonna happen in the future. ( congregational amens ). If you found your thinking on atheism, I'll tell you it explains a lot in our world. You look at a man named Jeffrey Dahmer, some of you remember him...a horrible serial killer who just killed people in the most gruesome ways. And when they were questioning him after he was caught, he talked about the relationship of atheistic evolution in his thinking. He didn't...he honestly believed that none of this mattered. It doesn't matter. You know, if I were to pull a gun out and shoot Jimmy tonight, if that were true, if what they say is true, what difference would that make? We're just accidents...like killing a mosquito. You know there's no rhyme or reason to this world, there's no logic, there's no morality, no basis for right or wrong. In fact, the truth of the matter is, in an evolutionary world view, 'might' makes right. It's the survival of the fittest, isn't it? And so the strong are supposed to triumph over the weak. So if I have a gun, I'm the strong one, and he's the weak one, I have every right to eliminate him. I mean, what's the...you can understand your world a lot better if you understand what's going on in the way they think. But in the biblical world view, there is no way to mix the two. The biblical world view, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." (NIV). He is above and beyond and greater than His creation. He sets the rules. He is a God of intelligence and purpose. That's why we can see so much evidence...well, we see some intelligence anyway. ( laughter ). But we do see evidences of order and all of the things that just are evidences of God. Everybody should be able to see...you'd think they ought to be able to see it. But anyway, they don't. I've got some papers here mainly because there's things I want to refer to, that I want to quote accurately. The real rationale behind atheism, though, is with its belief in an old universe is the desire to be rid of God. That's what's going on. This is not an honest atheism. This is a point of view that people take deliberately and many of them are not shy about saying this, and I've quoted one example, I've read others, but anyway, Aldous Huxley said, "I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning. Consequently assumed that it had none..." Notice the word 'assumed' in there. "...And was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption." You know, if you want to believe something, you can find a rationale to go with it. "The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics..." That's just ideas. "...He is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do. For myself, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation, sexual and political." You can find quotes like that in the philosophers who are underlying all of this stuff. They had an ulterior motive to believe that there was no God. They just wanted to do as they pleased. That's the whole thing behind it. But here we are today, and you can go into churches and schools around the country...Christian schools and find plenty of people who will compromise what the Word of God says. Now why in the world, should we ever allow evolutionary science, based upon atheism to sit in judgment of what God has said? That's what we have done! That's what I did. So I am publicly repenting. You know, I drew this analogy in an article that I just wrote. Why don't we go back to Sigmund Freud, who is the father of modern psychiatry, who based his beliefs on evolution and atheism, why shouldn't we just go ahead and take his wonderful insights into the human psyche and read them into the Bible and re-interpret the Bible to go along with that, with this higher light. See that's what's gone on. We've treated the beliefs of men who are motivated to get rid of God as higher light than what God has said. Something's wrong. ( congregational amens ). Something's wrong there. Now we...you know we think...part of the problem we have is our image of scientists. We think that they are unbiased, very smart men, who are in a pursuit of truth, an honest pursuit of truth. We just want the facts, we're not gonna deal with all these religious beliefs. We just want to pursue the facts. Boy, I'll tell you, that is a lie from the pit of hell. Nobody who pursues that kind of knowledge is unbiased. I'll talk about that a little bit later, as the Lord helps me. But, I'll give you one example. And this is a quote from a man named Mano Singham, and he was a university professor, and he was writing about the trust placed by students in their highly educated professors. Now listen to what he says. "And I use that trust to effectively brainwash them. We who teach introductory physics have to acknowledge if we are honest with ourselves, that our methods...our teaching methods are primarily those of propaganda. We appeal without demonstration or evidence that supports our position. We only introduce arguments or evidence that support currently accepted theories..." which change all the time, by the way, "...and omit or gloss over any evidence to the contrary." That's pretty much what they do, isn't it? Now, I will...I will stick this in, in case somebody hears this, because I did read on one website by an anti-creationist who criticized creationists for using this quote, because he said we took him out of context. So I went back and read the context. And truthfully the man did not exactly suggest that they ought to do what he says they do. But he says, as a matter of fact, they do. And he sort of justifies it by saying, well, we just don't have time to deal with all these questions and all these viewpoints, so what we do is give 'em what we believe is the truth, what will best serve their interest. To be able to be successful in the world, they're gonna have to come to this viewpoint sooner or later and after all I believe it. So, I mean, what's the difference? I think I took him right in context. Basically that's what he was saying, 'cause it's obvious he believes that he was doing right. Even though he said, it's a time constraint that forces me to do it this way. This is still what he did. He brainwashed people. Don't allow any other questions...anything to question what we believe is the truth. Here it is, you take it or leave it. How many have encountered that kind of thinking. Yeah, you've encountered it. It's the truth. But if you read Bible history, just the Bible itself, let's just kind of block out anything else. Let's go to Genesis, chapter 1 and just look at some things here. You've got a very different picture of the beginnings. And one thing that I wanted to focus on...I don't want to try to go through every little thing, but...I wish I had stopped and underlined every one of these instances, but throughout this account, you will find that God did something on each given day. He spoke and it happened...this is a mighty God we're seeing pictured here. Verse 9, the end of verse 9, or verse 10 rather, "...And God saw that it was good." And He comes down to the next day and does some more things and...anyway in verse 18, you'll see it again. "...And God saw that it was good." And you will go on through, and every one of these days you will come to the conclusion, God did something and He saw that it was good. And you come down to the end, verse 31, "God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning--the sixth day." Now the issue...so what we see taught by the scriptures is God created a very good, pure creation. Animals did not eat each other. He made plants for them to eat. It was a world without death, without suffering, without any of those things. I don't know how you can harmonize anything the scientists say with that simple truth right there. That's what He says. And we find that death entered because of what? ( congregational response ). Sin! Okay. Let's look at some scripture so you know I'm not getting this out of Sears & Roebuck catalogue. Turn to Romans, chapter 5-Romans, chapter 5, and look in verse 12 where it says, "Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned..." And so we see sin entering the world. You can read something very similar in 1st Corinthians 15, where it talks about all in Adam die, all in Christ are made alive. You've got this perfect contrast that death is a result of what Adam did, that's where death came from. You look at Romans chapter 8, and you've got a couple of verses that refer to the present condition of the world. |
