Seventh Sunday After Pentecost
He said to me, “Son of man, stand up on your feet and I will speak to you.” As he spoke, the Spirit came into me and raised me to my feet, and I heard him speaking to me.
He said: “Son of man, I am sending you to the Israelites, to a rebellious nation that has rebelled against me; they and their ancestors have been in revolt against me to this very day. The people to whom I am sending you are obstinate and stubborn. Say to them, ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says.’ And whether they listen or fail to listen — for they are a rebellious people — they will know that a prophet has been among them.
Ezekiel 2:1-5
In our Old Testament lesson today, God told Ezekiel to say something that’s not very popular to say today: “This is what the sovereign Lord says.”
Ezekiel belonged to a priestly family. As a young man he was carried off into captivity in Babylon, about ten years before the destruction of Jerusalem. He prophesied for over twenty years, and probably knew both Daniel and Jeremiah. His commission to go to the Israelites in captivity is our Old Testament lesson. In his commission God told Ezekiel, “The people to whom I am sending you are obstinate and stubborn. Say to them, ‘This is what the sovereign Lord says.’ And whether they listen or fail to listen – for they are a rebellious house – they will know that a prophet has been among them.”
“You shall say to them, ‘This is what the sovereign Lord says.’” And I think, in these days of liberal theology and liberal morality, that it would do us all good to be reminded of a very basic truth where “this is what the sovereign Lord says,” and which is constantly being challenged from outside the church and even from within the church.
The very first verse in the Bible says, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” And the first sentence in the Apostle’s Creed reads, “I believe in God the Father almighty, maker of Heaven and Earth.” God is the creator of the heavens and the earth, and of all things visible and invisible! This is what the sovereign Lord says!
And God’s word contains hard evidence that His words and His works are in harmony – not in conflict. All other ancient books, and even some fairly recent ones, contain scientific blunders and mistakes. In the sacred writings of the Hindus you find such nonsense as this: The moon is 50,000 leagues higher than the sun and shines by its own light; the earth is flat and triangular and is composed of seven layers – one of honey, another of sugar, a third of butter, and still another of wine. This whole seven-layer mass is supposedly borne on the heads of many elephants which are shaking or stumbling, thereby causing earthquakes. Read the Muslim’s Koran and you’ll find that the stars are torches and that men are made out of baked clay.
Why is it that ridiculous teachings like these aren’t found in the Bible, which is much more ancient? Because a higher intelligence than that of man presided over the composition of the Bible and inspired its writers. This is what the sovereign Lord says!
Compare the teaching that the earth is carried on the heads of giant elephants to what the Bible has to say about gravity in Job 26:7, “He suspends the Earth over nothing.” No one even today can really explain what gravity is, or why it is, only its effect!
Or consider Isaiah speaking of God and recording, “He sits enthroned above the circle of the Earth.” The words translated “circle” here is the Hebrew word “chuwg” (pronounced khoog) which may be better translated as “roundness” of the Earth. The book of Isaiah was written approximately 2,700 years ago, yet as recently as a little over 500 years ago, educated people were taught that the Earth was flat!
Or consider the “water cycle.” (And I don’t mean those little pontoon outfits that you peddle around on small lakes.) I mean the water cycle whereby rain water drained off by rivers into the oceans, then raised back up to the sky by evaporation, and then carried by wind currents back to rain on the land again. This became an accepted fact in the new science of meteorology a little over 100 years ago. Yet 2,000 years ago Solomon wrote in Ecclesiastes, “The wind blows to the south and turns to the north; round an round it goes, ever returning on its course. All streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full. To the place the streams come from, there they return again.” (Eccl. 1:6-7)
Well, that’s just a few examples of God’s word giving evidence that it’s in harmony with His works. And His words and His works tell us that He created the heavens and the Earth, and all that’s in them and all that’s on them! This is what the sovereign Lord says!
I said that’s not a popular thing to say today, and that’s very true when it comes to creation by God. The world doesn’t like to give credit to God. They like to say that the heavens and the Earth, and everything in them and on them, are products of time and chance.
The theory of evolution is subtly injected constantly in National Geographic articles, the Discovery Channel programs, and news articles about our space program. And of course it’s taught in our schools.
The thing that bothers me about all that isn’t so much that some people believe the theory of evolution, but that it’s presented as a scientific fact. And it’s not a fact – it’s a theory! It’s a speculative idea of how plants and animals – including man – may have come to be! If it’s going to be taught at all, it should be taught in a philosophy class – not a science class!
There are volumes written by scientists from every field of science that show that evolution of living matter, from dead, inorganic matter – and then onward and upward to man – is virtually impossible! As Dr. Edwin Conklin, a biologist at Princeton University wrote, “The probability of life originating from accident is comparable to the probability of the Unabridged Dictionary resulting from an explosion in a printing shop.”
Professor Edward Blick of the University of Oklahoma cites what he calls four crises confronting evolution:
Evolution is presumably a “creative” process which increases order, which goes against the second law of thermodynamics which states there exists a universal principle of change in nature which is downhill, not uphill, toward disorder, not toward order.
The second crises confronting the theory of evolution is that of fossil gaps. If evolution were true, then the fossil record in the Earth’s crust should show transitions between invertebrates, fish and reptile, or reptile and bird. But there has never been a single fossil found with part fin and part foot, or part feather and part scales. And the biggest missing link, of course, is the one between ape and man!
The third crises is a lack of mechanism for evolution. There are two mechanisms for change in plants and animals: natural variations and mutations. Natural variation can produce all the varieties of modern-day horses from just one pair of horses. Mutations are the only observable things that can affect the hereditary portion of the life cell; but the change is always an injury and the resulting organism is always weaker!
The fourth crises facing evolution, Blick says, is the considerable amount of recent evidence which points to an age of the Earth and the solar system far too young for life to have evolved.
In other words, understand that the evolution of man from lower animals – all the way back to one-cell beings, which evolved from dead, inorganic matter, which came from who-knows-where-or-how – is a theory of how we came to be. It is not a scientific fact!! And parents, for Heaven’s sake, help your children to know that!
Now, you just might be saying, “That’s all very interesting, but so what?” “What difference does it really make?” To that question, I’d answer, “A lot!” It makes all the difference in the world whether we were created by God as the Bible says, or evolved from one-cell organisms as the world says.
When we have a severe drought in our nation’s Midwest, we have a feed shortage for cattle. When that happens, we solve the immediate problem by killing the cattle. And if you think of man as just being an animal, high on the evolutionary scale, and if you’re expecting a baby – which condition is a nuisance or an inconvenience – you kill it! Which is the way that immediate problem is solved over 4,000 times a day in this country alone! And at the rate we’re going, one of these days old people just might be considered as nuisances!
What difference does it really make? Our Savior is our Creator. In John’s Gospel we read, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through Him all things were made; without Him nothing was made that has been made… The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us. We have seen His glory, the glory of the only begotten who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.” (John 1:1-3, 14)
What difference does it really make? Not only is our Savior our Creator, our Creator is our Savior – our Savior from sin and eternal death which was brought into the world by our real ancestors, Adam and Eve. We read in the Epistle to the Romans that “Sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men.” (Romans 5:12) “But the gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died by the trespass of the one man, how much more did God’s grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many!” (Romans 5:15) If the first half of that sentence isn’t true, how can I believe the second half? If things were dying for billions of years before sin, then sin didn’t cause death, did it? And then Jesus’ death for sin didn’t save us from eternal death, did it? What difference does it really make whether we were created as the Bible says, or evolved from one-cell organisms as the world says?
Well, I have confidence in Jesus Christ as Savior, and as the Creator and sustainer of the universe. I know that I’m not here by chance, but by God’s design. I don’t believe that I’m a product of natural selection, but I’m created in the image of God. I don’t believe I evolved from a primitive ape, nor did my Savior receive His human nature from a woman who evolved from a primitive ape!
God’s words and God’s works are not in conflict – they’re in harmony. So I can believe Him when He says, “For God so loved the world (the world that He created) that He gave His only-begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.” (John 3:16)
This is what the sovereign Lord says!
Amen
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