02.3 - Lesson 02, Part 3: Pagan View of Origins: Pagan Worldview Today!!

Interlocked Series Lesson #02, Part 3
Pagan View of Origins: Pagan Worldview Today!!
August 1, 2023
Dr. Robert L. Dean, Jr.
www.deanbibleministries.org

Opening Prayer

“Father, we thank You that You are our refuge. You are a strong tower. You are a fortress for us. You are our rock and that You are our plus one, that can defeat anybody. With You nothing is impossible.

“We stand in a serious situation not only in this nation, but in Western civilization and many of the countries around the world where there is a full-bore attack on all of the Divine Institutions. There is an absolute attempt to restructure society according to pure creaturely standards and the rebellious creaturely standards of Satan. We know that this is a set up for the end times, but we don’t know how much longer that may be. It could be a hundred years before the Rapture occurs and things could get much, much worse and as bad as they were before the Flood.

“We have no idea how long it will be, but we need to stand firm. The way to do that is to protect our thoughts with your Word and to protect our children and our grandchildren by teaching them the truth and by teaching them Your Word. Father, we need to be challenged to that, and we need to all step up to that plate.

“Father, we pray that by studying in this Interlocked series, it will be part of our response to strengthen us, to strengthen our families and that we’re doing all we can do. We pray this in Christ’s name. Amen.”

Slide 2

As you know we’ve been going through our timeline. This is part three. If I get through it, we’ll start some in lesson three, part one. The pagan view of origins is the topic of chapter two. We didn’t get to everything last time.

I was talking to the Kwoks yesterday, the couple who developed the Interlocked series. We had a lovely two-hour conversation on Zoom. I got to hear their whole life story, how they got into writing this material, and I encouraged them to make a video of this and put it up on the website so people understand it.

It’s a great encouragement and a great testimony to the fact that in the Kwoks you’ve got two people who’ve never been to seminary. They have been theologically trained by their some of the work that they did there. It’s mostly through their own reading and studying. They did that with Good Seed Ministry and John Cross. There, they came into contact with Charlie Clough and his Framework Series. Now I’m in contact with them and we’ve been discussing this so they are also in contact with me and my teaching here at West Houston Bible Church.

They’re doing a series now on the spiritual life based on what I’ve taught. It’s just tremendous. They make everything I do better. We need to pray for them because anybody who’s doing that kind of work is under assault. I just talked with them about different things that we’re doing and it’s really encouraging.

Slide 3

What we’re doing is putting motions to this timeline which is broken down into 11 Old Testament events and 8 New Testament events making a total of 19 events, which are basically what we see in the whole Bible. Everything hangs on these events.

Let’s all stand up and keep going through it until we all learn the motions to accompany these events. You ought to be thinking about it, dreaming about it, all of those things. And we’ll get some kids in here next time to help us a little more.

Are you ready? Creation, Fall, Flood, Tower of Babel, then you have the Call of Abraham, then you have the Exodus, and then the Ten Commandments, the prologue to the Mosaic Law, the Ten Commandments, and then you have the Conquest.

After the Conquest, then God finally provides a king, and then the kingdom splits into two kingdoms, and then there will be the exile where both kingdoms will be taken out of the land. And then God will bring them back. Now that’s the Old Testament.

The New Testament is a fulfillment of prophecy. You have the birth of the Messiah. And then He will go to the Cross where He will be crucified. He will be buried. On the third day He rises from the dead. Then He will ascend to Heaven 40 days later.

Ten days after that, He sends the Holy Spirit, and that is the beginning of the Church. The Church Age will end when Christ comes and meets us in the clouds and takes us to Heaven. Seven years later, after the Tribulation, He will return to the earth and He will establish His kingdom for 1,000 years.

At the end of the 1,000 years, there’s the Great White Throne Judgment, and then God will create the new heavens and the new earth. Great! You did a good job! I hope you can keep remembering all of that.

Slides 4 and 5

We have these coat hooks, these coat pegs for these 19 events. So far we’ve looked at the Creation and we’re looking at the Fall. At the Creation we saw three key things, the Creator-creature distinction, and then we have the Divine Institutions, which are individual responsible choice, then marriage, and then family. Those three were instituted before the Fall.

Slide 6

In this chart, this is just a reminder of what we did in the second lesson. On the left side you have the headings for the Interlocked material. The spirit beings are introduced. These are the angels. We know they were created before the earth for they sang for joy. All of the sons of God sang for joy when God laid the foundation of the earth.

One of the angels was a cherub, the highest order of angels, who is the closest to God, whose name was Shining Star, literally in the Hebrew. And then he becomes arrogant and you have sin amongst the angels. There’s a revolt and a third of the angels will follow him.

That’s the outline for the older kids who are a little more sophisticated. They can engage in more abstract thought. The right side is with the younger children. You can teach them about angels. You can teach them about the problem with the Shining Star. He sins. So he exercises his volition or his free will to sin against God, to disobey God. They can understand this.

Tell them they have in their soul both a yes button and a no button. When you’re obedient to your parents, that’s your yes button. And when you’re disobedient, that’s your no button. When you’re obedient to God, that’s your yes button. And when you’re disobedient, that’s your no button. From an early age you can use those kinds of tools to teach your kids individual responsibility and also consequences for individual decisions.

What happened was that Satan said no to God, and then after God created the earth as we know it, there’s trouble in the Garden of Eden. And this is the origin, as we looked at last time, of the pagan views of how things came to be, which as we’ll see is a violation of the Creator-creature distinction.

This pagan worldview today has been dressed up in pseudo-scientific terminology. For the little kids, they just express that more simply as Adam and Eve believed Satan’s lie. They thought Satan was more truthful than God.

Slide 7

The focus of our very first lesson was on God’s creation and the three Divine Institutions. Lesson 2 focuses on the wrong views of Creation. And we studied the spirit beings, shining stars, the Fall, the angelic rebellion, and then the deception of Adam and Eve. That was last week.

Last week we were on Lesson 2.2, which helped us understand why are there so many wrong views and where they came from. They came from who? What’s his name? Satan. They all originate there in the Garden of Eden with Satan.

Slide 8

This third part focuses on what this pagan worldview looks like today. One of the most important things that we study conceptually is this understanding of a Creator-creature distinction that so often people get involved in trying to understand certain things. Part of the problem is that we have to recognize that the Creator, who is infinite in all of His attributes, who is unique in all of His attributes, can only be understood to some degree.

His thoughts are not our thoughts, and His ways are not our ways. He is far beyond our comprehension. We can understand true things about Him, but we cannot understand Him fully or exhaustively and never will.

He is the infinite personal Creator God. That’s the first level at the top. And we are creatures. The problem of sin is that the creatures wanted to become like the Creator. Satan wanted to be like God. That was his enticement to Eve. He told her that if she ate of the fruit, she would be like God.

Slide 9

We saw that the Divine Institution of marriage was to be between one man and one woman, and then the family was to be the training ground, the teaching ground, the education system for future generations.

Slide 10

We could summarize the biblical worldview with three things. First of all, the Creator-creature distinction. God is the Creator, and He is totally different, unique, one of a kind from all His creatures. There is only one God, and He is separate from man.

Man is separate from the natural creation. He is not an animal and he is not a god. Man is in the image and likeness of God in order to be able to rule and reign over God’s creation. That distinguishes him from the angels because they did not do that.

God is a personal God and He is sovereign. He is the ruler of His universe and the One who makes the rules. He is the ultimate authority. He is the One who is always right, so we are to obey Him.

Slide 11

We saw that in the Genesis account Yahweh God is the ultimate authority and He determines right and wrong. The creature does not.

Yahweh God created human beings in a specific way. He designed our bodies to be the way they are for specific reasons related to our purpose. He created our minds to be the way they are as a home for our soul and how they interact together. And to this day, there is no scientist and no laboratory or philosopher that can understand how an immaterial soul can control a material brain, a physical brain.

What you have today in the pagan worldview is that everything is material. There’s nothing that’s immaterial, and everything is determined by just your chemistry and your DNA. It’s fatalism, and it denies the first Divine Institution, which is individual responsibility based on freedom of choice.

Slide 12

Satan’s attack plan was first of all to diminish Yahweh God by calling him only Elohim. Only God, not, you don’t have the capital L-O-R-D, or sometimes you’ll see a capital G-O-D, and that would indicate Yahweh is the Hebrew there. And so this was just a sneaky way, a very subtle way to attack the nature of God.

Satan was saying God’s not really different from the other angels, and we went through a lot of verses last time showing that often the angels are also referred to by this word Elohim. When he comes to Eve he refers to God as Elohim. His enticement is for her to think that she can be at the same level of God.

He’s saying Eve can level up on the continuity of being. She can be like God. He’s reducing God to just the level of all the other angels. There’s nothing really that special about Him. And you can be like Him also.

In the pagan worldview there is only chaos and chance. It’s out of this chaos and chance that the gods and goddesses pop. You go back and read Babylonian creation myths, origin myths, you can read Roman, Greek, Egyptian, Mesopotamian. You come over to the Americas and you read origin myths among the Aztecs, among the Incas, among various aboriginal tribes in North America and even among the various Mongolian tribes in Asia. They all have some sort of remnant ideas but they all start with something that exists. Matter is always there, but it’s not in a formed shape yet. Then something happens and out springs all these gods and goddesses.

Slide 13

At Satan’s fall, he wanted to be like the Creator, and so that’s his issue. He is in rebellion against God.

Slide 14

You have this original chaos in the pagan view, where there’s no distinction or difference between gods and goddesses and man and a rock. They’re all part of the same continuum, all participating in something called just existence.

According to pagan views the universe begins in a state of chaos. Somebody sent me a video the other day of electric vehicles that had collided that were just exploding and exploding and exploding and parts of vehicles and all kinds of metal was flying everywhere and huge fireballs going up into the air. As I looked at that, the first thing that popped in my mind is what you have here is order that is being blown up.

Can explosions ever produce order? Can you go out and blow things up and produce order? Yet that’s what the Big Bang Theory says. There was a huge explosion and out of it comes increased order but there is no evidence of that ever happening in anything like that.

Pagan worldview starts with chaos, out pops the gods and goddesses, and the thing about them is that they all have evil characteristics. They have good characteristics and they have evil characteristics. And so that tells you that in a pagan worldview, good and evil are what?

First of all, they’re always there. They always will be. They’ve always been there. Evil then is normal. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a situation where somebody said, well, I’m so mad at God because He just lets all this evil happen. How can you have a good God and have all this evil?

The way to handle that is say, well, that’s fine. I’ll answer that in a minute. But you tell me this. If you live in a world that is operating on chaos and chance, and then slowly over time, order develops out of the chaos. Evil has always been there. In fact, evil is the normative means by which evolution occurs according to your view.

In evolution, the key principle is survival of the fittest. What does survival mean? It means some creatures survive, but all the other creatures die. So, to get survival, you have to have death. Death is the means of advancement in the evolutionary scheme. Death is not only normative, it’s necessary in order for advancement to occur. So why are you complaining about death and sickness and disease and famine and all of these other things? In your view, that’s necessary for there to be evolution.

Slide 15

Anyway, back to what I’m saying. In Satan’s attack plan, his appeal to Eve was to make her think that she was in a position to evaluate the claims of God and the claims of Satan. God said, “the day you eat from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you will certainly die.” And then a couple of days later, this serpent comes along, beautiful serpent, attractive, has a way with words and says, “did God really say that?” And he’s questioning, is God really right?

By asking that question, he’s putting her in a position to decide whether God is right or not. Now, what should she have done? She should have said, yes, that’s what God said, and He’s always right.

What Satan does is he puts her in a position of thinking she’s smart, so she falls for the trap, and she’s going to treat these two claims as equal. Satan says you won’t die. God says you will die. Now she’s got to decide who’s telling the truth.

She walks right into that trap, and she’s making herself above God, because she’s going to evaluate God. That’s the essence of sin. Every time we sin, we are saying, well, God said this isn’t right, and I think He’s a liar, because I think it is right. And we don’t make it quite that bold in front of us, but that’s what we’re saying. God is lying to us.

Slide 16

To summarize the pagan worldview, there’s the continuity of being and there’s a sliding scale so everything’s on that same line from the gods to the rocks. There’s just something that gives us existence and plants have more of that than rocks, but they’re on the same scale so they can slide up and down the scale. And animals have more of it than plants and humans have more of it than animals. Angels have more of it than humans and gods have more of it than the others.

But they all came out of this chaos. This is called continuity of being. It states that you can move up or down this scale. You can be reincarnated as an insect or as an amoeba or something. If you’ve been good, maybe you’ll move up the scale.

Part of the pagan worldview is that ultimate reality is controlled by impersonal fate. It’s impersonal. That means it really doesn’t have an intellect. Intellect and volition are all part of personhood so it’s impersonal fate and random chance. Ultimate authority is just the self. It’s all about the individual.

Slide 17

When we contrast and compare the biblical worldview on the left with the pagan worldview, the biblical worldview says there’s a Creator-creature distinction. The pagan worldview says, no, there’s a continuity of being. We’re all part of the same stuff, so we can level up or level down.

The biblical worldview says there is a personal, infinite, sovereign Creator God. The pagan worldview says, no, there’s nothing out there, just all impersonal fate and chance. If ultimate reality is impersonal faith, how did personhood ever come along? The ultimate authority is God in the biblical worldview, and in the pagan worldview, the ultimate authority is just the self.

Slide 18

Satan was promising Eve that she could be like God. You too can be God. That reminds me of the charismatic movements of 50 years ago. Now they call it the health and wealth gospel and the healing and prosperity theology.

They say you are little gods, and you can “name it and claim it”. You can create your own reality. They’ve denied the Creator-creature distinction in that whole prosperity gospel. They’ve bought into a purely pagan worldview of experience, and actually it’s existentialism married to the Bible in terms of some verbiage.

Slide 19

Second, the pagan worldview suggests man can move up the scale to be a god, and that’s exactly what Satan tempted Eve with. You will be like God, so you can just level up, and the Creator-creature distinction doesn’t matter.

Slide 20

“So when the woman saw,” what’s she doing? She decided to make the decision as to what is right or wrong, putting herself into authority over God. She was thinking “It’s all about me. I’m in authority.”

Slide 21

Just as Satan failed and was unable to promote himself up to the level of God, so he enticed Eve and then Adam to do the same thing, to try to be like God.

Slide 22

Satan tricked Eve into thinking she was the ultimate authority over her life. She was an authority over God. She could determine if God’s mandates, God’s revelation, was true or false.

Slide 23

So where did that come from? Well, we studied that. It’s all Satan. Satan’s the source of the pagan worldview. Satan deceived Eve into thinking that she too could change who she was as a creature. And Satan planted that idea, but Eve and Adam freely chose.

Satan did not make them sin. They freely chose. They exercised their responsible choice and did it irresponsibly.

Slide 24

They could have gone to God and told Him that the creature He had created, the serpent, said that God didn’t know what He was talking about. He told them that if they ate the fruit they weren’t going to die. They could have asked God to help them understand what was happening, but they didn’t. They decided to find things out for themselves.

Slide 25

What does this look like today? What does continuity of being look like in relation to evolution? If you look at some of those diagrams from ancient times, they’re not too different from what we have today in the scale of life and evolution. This all comes out of what is considered to be science.

Today we have people in our world who would say that if you didn’t agree with what they said, then you weren’t following the science. One of the things you can always count on when you’re dealing with people operating on propaganda and operating on irrationality is they don’t deal with facts and they just accuse people of certain things, trying to shame them and trying to intimidate them. This is a normative procedure for propaganda.

They will seek to shame Christians, calling them names like, you’re just anti-science, and you’re science deniers. You’ll see that with everything from climate change to evolution to COVID.

By the way, just throwing something out there that I learned recently. and that you should be aware of. I ran into a very good friend of mine recently that I first met when he was a vice president for Pfizer. He had worked in research and development for Pfizer for a number of years and his conclusion was that based on his knowledge, the protocols and procedures of every drug company, every pharmaceutical company today, is not what it was 25 years ago. He said that he wouldn’t trust any of them. So that’s just something that is helpful to know. Don’t get sucked into things. We don’t know what to believe and what not to believe.

Parents, you need to teach your kids, and you Sunday School teachers need to teach your students that this way of shaming people is just a debater’s technique that is used to put people on the defensive in order to win an argument. It is based on emotion, making you feel bad, and it’s not based on an analysis of facts, which is exactly what science is supposed to be.

Slide 26

When we look at the question of what science and the scientific method is, what I learned is that you start off with a hypothesis where you wonder about something. You hypothesize that something causes something else. Then you have to test that hypothesis. You test it in a couple of controlled environments, and if it seems like it’s right, that forms what’s called a theory.

Once you’ve had a couple of experiments that come out the same, you have other people do it under other circumstances. If it works itself out in those other circumstances, then you can reach a conclusion that this is something that always happens under certain given conditions.

It always starts with a hypothesis, and when you’re testing that hypothesis, you have to be able to repeat it. When it looks like you’re right, then you have to be able to repeat it in different places, in different environments, so that it’s repeatable.

If somebody questions it, you can say, okay, let’s go in and let’s do the experiment. And because other scientists in other laboratories around the world can repeat those same experiments and get the same results, you can reach a conclusion that your hypothesis is probably true. But guess what! That’s not what evolution does.

Slide 27

Let’s look at an example. In the 1600s, you had Galileo propose that all objects fall to the ground, even though they might have different mass, they will all fall to the ground at the same rate. To test that hypothesis, he constructed a platform and an angled ramp with balls of two different masses and released them at the same time. They hit the ground at the same time. That’s science.

You have a hypothesis, you test the hypothesis with an experiment, and that then is demonstrated.

Slide 28

When you get into evolution, we call it the “theory of evolution.” It’s really more of a hypothesis, I believe, but we’ll give them the fact that it is a theory, but no one has ever observed it. There’s not one place, there’s not one laboratory that has ever observed evolution.

You have changes that occur within a species or within a kind, but no one has ever observed a transition from one species to another. It’s never happened. No one can test it or repeat it in a laboratory. It’s never been done, never can be done.

If it were done, what’s the problem? It’s a controlled environment. In the theory of evolution, it happens with no controls. It’s pure random chance that occurs. But if you do it in a laboratory, it’s not pure random chance. So, you’ve tilted it, but guess what? You still can’t do it. No one can test it or repeat it in a laboratory.

The use of scientific names only disguises the fact that it isn’t science. When I talk about this sometimes with people, they’ve never heard this. They didn’t know it had never been observed or tested. I started learning this from a lot of top-notch scientists when I started studying the issue of Creation and evolution when I was 14 years old.

I was blessed by the fact that as I was growing up at Camp Peniel when you reached 13 you were done as a cabin camper but they had canoe trips for older kids. This is like back in 1965–66. And the guy who ran the canoe trips was not only a high school history and biology teacher.

The curriculum that he taught these 14-, 15-, 16-year-old kids that went on canoe trips was about Creation and evolution and the biblical truth of Creation. And he had me reading the book, The Genesis Flood by Whitcomb and Morris. Henry Morris and John Whitcomb.

John Whitcomb did a great job teaching on this at this church at the 2010 Chafer Conference. He was 90 years old at the time. I wanted to have him here because a lot of these young students needed to hear him. They needed to say, I heard John Whitcomb talk on this.

Also, I had the privilege when I was at the end of my first year at Dallas Seminary, of attending a five-day seminar given by the Creation Science Institute. They would start at about 8:30 in the morning and go to 4 in the afternoon. And they held it at Dallas Bible College, which is no longer in existence.

On the front row, right under Henry Morris’ face, just beyond his sneeze line, was Tommy Ice and myself, Robby Dean. Every single morning, all day long, with our big reel-to-reel tape recorders set there to record the whole thing. To me this is everyday normal information. I’ve known the truth about evolution since I was 14 years old. But I tell people this and they don’t want to believe it.

The use of scientific names only disguises the fact that it isn’t science. Evolution does not follow the scientific method. I mean, Henry Morris would drill that into us again and again and again. I learned then that evolution is not science because it doesn’t follow the scientific methodology. It is a philosophy. It’s a religion. But it is not science.

Evolution claims that life differs only in degrees. It’s just putting a scientific face on the continuity of being. The conclusion is that evolution is fake science. One of the great tools of cultural Marxism today is to accuse their enemies of doing what they’re doing. You hear this all the time in politics, you hear it on the streets, and so it’s all about shame and intimidation.

Slide 29

What’s the impact of this continuity of being concept? How has that impacted our culture how does it undergird, as a philosophy, a number of different things? First of all, it had a major influence on both world wars, both World War I and World War II. In World War II, the Nazis specifically built their philosophy on social Darwinism. Social Darwinism is the logical conclusion and application to society of the principles of Charles Darwin’s evolution.

The Nazis carried it to its logical conclusion, which was the Holocaust and the murder of six million Jews and the world was shocked. They couldn’t handle that consequence, so they just said it’s not logical. No, it is logical. You just don’t like it, so you can’t just impose your view on it and say it’s not white when it’s clearly white.

It resulted in the legalization of abortion, which is directly argued for on the basis of Darwinian principles of evolution. It also led to the legalization of euthanasia. See, if human life is just the product of time and chance, then all you have is molecules and physical DNA. You do not have an immaterial soul and spirit.

That is where modern psychology is today. It is based on the belief that everything is material, everything is determined by chemistry. There’s no such thing as a soul or a spirit. And so if man is not created in the image and likeness of God, then human life does not have value. This is what I’ve taught several times on the beginning of human life. The ancient Jewish position was that even though the immaterial soul and spirit was not created and transmitted by God until birth, because what started in the womb is a human physical life. Because it is human, and not non-human, it had to be protected because that was part of what God designed for mankind.

Jesus quotes from the Psalm 40, “A body you have prepared for Me.” There’s a recognition God didn’t just say, “Let’s throw some dirt out there and see what shape it takes and we’ll call that a man.” God designed everything intentionally because He knew that in 4,000 years, He was going to incarnate Himself into this body.

The body that Jesus would inhabit had to be the most perfect body because it would reveal God to mankind. John 14 says that that “no one has seen God at any time, the only begotten has revealed Him.” And He reveals Him in a human body.

There’s something important about that which is human, even if it isn’t fully human yet, until it receives the soul and the spirit. This was the ancient Jewish position, that even though the soul and spirit don’t come until birth, that which is human is important and valued.

When it comes to euthanasia and assisted suicide, that’s a major problem. It’s human life, even though there’s all kinds of problems, dementia and Alzheimer’s, and I’ve had to deal with that quite a bit in my family. And so I know just exactly that you just hate to see people suffer. But God uses the suffering of people in your family to teach you to take care of them so that you can learn a lot of things you wouldn’t learn otherwise. It’s not about you, it’s about others.

Genocides, mass killings in Germany with the Holocaust of the Jewish people, the Armenians, Africans, Cambodians, Rwandans, Sudanese, and many other peoples. These mass killings are all generated by an evolutionary Darwinist framework.

Eugenics, which is the medical practice of improving the human race by selecting people who had certain traits. And if they had other undesirable traits, then you were going to sterilize them.

There have been horrible sterilization experiments on black people and on a number of other unwanteds, whether they had dwarfism or some of these other characteristics. And so it was just human arrogance because this is caused by a belief that people are just an accidental result of an electrical discharge on a massive protoplasm. So none of us have any real meaning or value over time. All of that is the impact of continuity of being.

Slide 30

We’ve seen the comparison and contrast in the top square between biblical worldview and pagan worldview. But in the biblical worldview, when we say, who am I? The answer is, I am a creature created in the image and likeness of God to serve God and to glorify Him forever. That’s who every single human being is. They’re not just accidents.

The pagan worldview says, “I am my own person. I’m just an accident. There’s no higher authority than me. It’s all about me and I can do whatever it is I want to do”.

On the biblical worldview side, when you ask the question, what is truth or how do I know? We look to the Creator to tell us and then we base knowledge on that framework. In pagan worldview, truth is whatever we make it and however we shape it, it’s up to us. We generate our own law. We do whatever is right in our own eyes.

In the biblical worldview, the purpose of life is that God defines what I do, and God gives the rules. He has the right to make the rules because He designed us to be a certain way, and so the rules are to keep us in bounds so that we don’t destroy ourselves. He knows exactly how He made us, and when he tells us don’t do this or don’t do that, He knows that He designed us in a way that by doing those things, it’s self-destructive.

Under the purpose of life for the pagan, we do what’s right in our own eyes. It’s all random, it’s all chance. What’s right today may be wrong tomorrow.

You parents and teachers need to teach children this. You must start when they’re young by telling them they are special in God’s eyes and that God created them in His image and likeness. If they have a birth defect or whatever, God designed them the way they are for a purpose.

Some of the greatest hymn writers we’ve had in Christian history were people who had horrible physical difficulties. Fanny Crosby, for instance, was blind from birth. She wrote over 5,000 hymns. She wasn’t saved until she was in her late 30s and up to that time, she wrote poetry that was so good it was read at the White House.

When she was in her early 40s a Christian friend of hers told her that she should be writing words for hymns. From then until her death (in her early 90s), she wrote over 5,000 of these hymns. We don’t sing all of them today, maybe about 50 or 100 at the most. She just kept writing and kept writing and the best have been preserved and are best-loved hymns now.

Help the children in your life to see that no matter what their flaws or failures may be, whatever their features may be, or whether or not they’re satisfied, that God made them the way they are for a reason. Each has a value and a purpose and children need to know that from the youngest age. When life gets rough and things happen to them, maybe coming back from combat after losing a leg or an arm, there’s no need to be discouraged or depressed.

What gets people through adversity? It’s the truth of the Word of God. If you understand that God has a plan and a purpose, even though you may be maimed, even though you may be suffering, God will use that for His glory, and that’s why He has allowed that to be a part of your life.

Slide 31

Let’s review. First there’s this Creator-creature distinction that tells us God is wholly separate from the universe He made. Second, He’s the Creator of all things. Third, all things came into existence, not because God transformed part of Himself into things and we weren’t made from God parts, but He created something out of nothing just by the power of His spoken word.

Fourth, the Bible teaches that there is a clear boundary between human beings, animals, plants, and God. Each created entity procreates according to its own kind. One will not morph into the other. A rock will never be an animal, an animal will never become a man, a man will never become a god.

Slide 32

Look at what Scripture says. In Genesis 1:11 “Then God said, ‘Let the land sprout with vegetation.—God just speaks every sort of seed into existence—every sort of seed-bearing plant, and trees that grow seed-bearing fruit. These seeds will then produce the kinds of plants and trees from which they came.’ ” That’s the New Living Translation.

The New King James translation of that verse is closer to the original Hebrew. It says, “… each seed according to its kind.” When you translate, you can try to translate as close to a literal translation as possible. But if you translate it hyper-literally, it often will not make sense when you bring it over into the target language. So, all translation to some degree is what they call a dynamic equivalence. The closer it is to the original, it’s called formal equivalence. And when you get out on the fringe, you get things like a paraphrase. A paraphrase is at the end [of the fringe]. A paraphrase is not looking at the original.

A famous paraphrased Bible is the Living Bible by Kenneth Taylor. It’s not the same as the New Living Translation. Kenneth Taylor was trying to make it understandable to his kids. He was trying to take the King James verbiage and put it into kids’ language so they could understand it. First, he had the Living Epistles. Then he had the Living Acts. Finally, he had done the whole New Testament, and then did the whole Bible. The problem is he put his theology into it in many ways. His paraphrase is very nuanced to his theology. It may not actually reflect what the original Greek or Hebrew does. That’s what happens.

You get more of the translator’s theology the further you get into dynamic equivalence. Wayne House often refers to the New International Version (NIV) as the New International Commentary. It’s not a translation.

One of my verses I like to use for this is in 1 Corinthians 3, where it’s talking about fleshly people. Now we know that fleshly and flesh, are often used to describe the sin nature, and that sinful people are fleshly, SARKIKOS in that passage, from SARX, meaning flesh. The NIV translates it worldly, but worldly is the concept of KOSMOS, something totally different. But that’s the translator’s theory.

So, what I did when I looked at this New Living Translation that the authors of the Interlocked Series use is to say it’s good, I think, for the most part, but I disagree here and there. Allen Ross, who was one of my professors in Hebrew, was the main translator of Genesis. He wrote a commentary on Genesis. I really trust Allen Ross. He does a great job.

Then I was reading some of the stuff that the Kwoks were using like verses from Romans, and Ephesians, and some of their sanctification teaching. I tried to figure out what translation they were using so I went to the beginning of the New Living Translation. It lists who the translators were for every book, and most of them I know personally. They are all people who believe in lordship salvation, extremely reformed, and that comes through in how they translated passages in Romans 8, Galatians 5, and Ephesians. It’s more theologically nuanced than the NIV. It’s terrible.

I talked to the Kwoks about this today and they’re not adverse to fixing translations. So we’re going to be working on that. It’s just a word of warning here. This is why I put the New King James Version here. I think for a kid using the fact that the seeds will then produce “the same kinds of plants and trees from which they came.” I would have added that there.

The original Hebrew is closer when it says, “According to its kind, whose seed is in itself”. The Bible says all these kinds. A kind is not the same as a species. A kind is broader. It’s somewhere around family, or in modern scientific taxonomy it’s a little bit lower than that. It’s not quite equivalent to any of our modern taxonomic terms for plants and animals. It’s much broader. The biblical “kind” is much broader than species.

Slide 33

Genesis 1:21. “God created great sea creatures and every living thing that scurries and swarms in the water, and every sort of bird—each producing offspring of the same kind.” See, there’s no transmission of species. There’s no jumping the line up or down the continuity of being. As I pointed out, the New King James translates it “according to their kind.”

Slide 34

Genesis 1:24. “Let the earth produce every sort of animal, each producing offspring of the same kind.” Horses produce horses.

Sometimes they’ll tell you about experiments in school. They will tell you about a place in England that during the early Industrial Period had a lot of smog. The trees were blackened by smog and soot. So there were a predominance of black moths instead of white moths. Then later when they cleaned up the air, then the trees had a lighter bark. The moths would show up better. The white moths survived and the dark moths were eaten by birds because they showed up better on the white bark. But the thing is, they were still moths. You never saw them change from one thing to another. They were still moths.

The environment determined that a black moth was camouflaged against the soot and crud on a tree, so the birds didn’t see them to eat. The birds would see the white though. They would stand out against the black background and they would eat the white moths. Then when they cleaned it up, well, now the black moths stand out against the lighter bark of the trees. And so they would get eaten, but the lighter moths would be more camouflaged, so they wouldn’t be eaten. But the moth is still a moth.

Another thing they do is experiments with fruit flies. At the end, though, a fruit fly is still a fruit fly. It may be a little larger or a little smaller. It may have four wings or six wings, but it’s still a fruit fly. So they’re not jumping barriers. Genesis 1:27.

Slide 35

God created human beings in His own image. In the image of God, He created them, male and female He created them, and they propagate according to their own.

Slide 36

When you come to the end of Lesson 2 in the course notes, there are these boxed areas. What we’ve just gone through is the first boxed area. The next slide comes from the second boxed area, which is on the top of page 10 in those notes, or about halfway down.

It’s on impersonal fate or chance. And in impersonal fate, what you have is someone or something that is non-personal. It is just random with what happens. It is not a person who has intelligence and will. You’ll often hear people talk about luck. There’s no such thing as luck in the Bible or in Christianity. Read the Proverbs. Every toss of the lot is overseen by God.

Karma. I saw a poll yesterday that was talking about belief in God in America. It found that 70% of people still believe in a personal God but you go down the study and 50% of them still believe in karma. They’re just cobbling things together from different worldviews.

You’ll hear people say, well, the universe just doesn’t want me to do that. Does the universe think? Does it have will? Does it have volition? What do you mean when you reference the universe? You’ve personalized something that is impersonal. What justifies that?

Just ask questions.

Positive energy. Electricity comes either positive or negative. This idea of positive or negative. Where do you see that idea in the Bible anywhere? In the Bible something is either right or wrong. It’s either godly or ungodly. It’s either evil or it is righteous. You don’t have this idea of positive or negative.

What about horoscopes? Many people look at their horoscopes and, you know, these things wouldn’t gain traction if they didn’t have a higher degree of accidental or coincidental results. People read and they’ll believe what they see, and they ignore it when it’s wrong. It’s like they don’t even read the stuff that doesn’t fit.

Then there’s the Force. Back in the 80s, after a woman named Constance Comby, who was a lawyer and researcher, wrote a book called The New Age Movement. It came out about 1982. It was the first Christian book to really expose the New Age Movement. Then there were a number of books that followed that.

The first three Star Wars movies came out in that same period of time. George Lucas came up with the idea of “the Force.” “May the Force be with you.” I used to do seminars where I’d go into churches and I’d teach on the New Age Movement back in the late 80s. I would critique “the Force,” and people didn’t want to believe it.

Sometime in the early 90s, I accidentally, in God’s plan, turned on PBS one night, and they were interviewing George Lucas. He’s the one who produced the initial Star Wars film. And they asked, “Where did you get the idea of the Force? What was your inspiration for that?”

He said, I modeled that after Buddhism and Shintoism in Japan. He was promoting a totally religious concept. In the second one, The Empire Strikes Back, you’re introduced to little Yoda. He is training Luke to fight with his light saber. He goes out into this foggy, misty, swampy jungle. And all of a sudden Darth Vader shows up and you hear the deep breathing and everything.

They have their little battle and Luke cuts Darth Vader’s head off. And it falls to the ground, rolls to Luke’s feet. Luke bends over and he pulls up the visor and he sees himself. You know, that is monism. Monism is a philosophical position in Eastern religion that all things are one.

The Beatles wrote a song with the words, “I am You, You are Me, He is She, We are One.” It was after they ran into the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and got into Eastern mysticism. It was pure monism, and that’s what you’re seeing visualized right there in the second Star Wars film.

All of this is permeating our culture in very clever ways, and people just buy into it in all these ways.

Slide 37

God’s Word, the Bible tells us, that God is a person. He’s capable of thought, reason, relationships, and choices. The universe isn’t. God controls everything ultimately. He has permissive will so that He allows a measure of choice and freedom, but He also chooses to give human beings and angels limited choices.

In 1 Corinthians 29:11 we read, “Yours, O Lord, is the greatness, the power and the glory, the victory and the majesty; For all that is in heaven and in earth is Yours; Yours is the kingdom, O Lord, and You are exalted as head over all.” He is ultimately the authority and in control.

Slide 38

In Isaiah 46:8–11, we read, “Remember this, and show yourselves men; Recall to mind, O you transgressors. Remember the former things of old, for I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like Me, Declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times things that are not yet done, saying, ‘My counsel shall stand, and I will do all My pleasure,’ Calling a bird of prey from the east, the man who executes My counsel, from a far country. Indeed, I have spoken it; I will also bring it to pass. I have purposed it; I will also do it.”

Slide 39

Ultimately authority. Is it the self? No!

Proverbs 19:21 says, “You can make many plans, but the Lord’s purpose will prevail.” Proverbs 14:12 and 16:25 says, “There’s a path before each person that seems right, but it ends in death.” That verse is identical in two places. That’s very important. There’s a way that seems right to us, but the end is death.

Slide 40

Satan is the arch deceiver, and he is always seeking to deceive us. This is what we see in Job 1:6–7. “One day the members of the heavenly court [of the angels] came to present themselves before the Lord, and the Accuser, Satan, came with them.” This is in the throne room of God. “ ‘Where have you come from?’ God says to Satan. Satan answered the Lord, ‘I have been patrolling the earth, watching everything that’s going on.’ ”

In 1 Peter 5:8, Peter says it’s still going on. He warns us to “Stay alert! Watch out for your great enemy, the devil. He prowls around like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour.”

Next time what we’re going to do is we’re going to get into the third lesson. When I was talking to the Kwoks, they said the thing about going through the first twelve chapters of the lessons or the first twelve chapters of Genesis is there’s so much that’s important there, because this is the foundation for everything else in the Bible, that it’s hard to keep just two hours for one lesson.

These lessons need thought. They need a lot of understanding, and we need to be teaching this to our kids. We’re in a battle. If you are a Christian grandparent or parent, then your kids are on the front lines of the cultural battle in Western civilization. You are the training officer so that they can survive against the enemy. That’s got to be the mindset of every parent because what has happened in the last 50 years to education is destroying this nation. It’s destroying Western civilization.

Whether the United States survives, whether Western civilization in some form or another survives or not, we need to make sure that our children and our grandchildren can handle whatever comes their way. You’re only going to have them as a parent for about 18 years. And the training that is most significant is what happens in the first eight or nine years. After that, they’re going to grow up really fast and want to make their own decisions.

Closing Prayer

“Father, we thank You for this opportunity to study these things, reflect upon Your Word, and to understand reality as it is, as You have created it. Father, we live in a world that wants to redefine it. They want to destroy the Creator-creature distinction, get rid of that top level, and make ourselves gods and determine everything. It is so irrational and unrealistic and just neurotic and psychotic.

“Father, we know the truth and the truth enables us to understand what is actually going on. We only know that and learn that from Your Word. Only on the basis of reality and real true information can we make wise and good decisions.

“Father, we pray for the parents that are here, the grandparents, and the ones who are listening. that they will learn that we’re in a battle, and every day we have to take the strongholds of thinking. We have to do what the Scripture says. We are to take captive every thought for Jesus Christ. That is not an easy task. Father, give us the strength and the desire and the wisdom to do it. In Christ’s name, Amen.”