THE ONLY WAY …

Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me” (John 14:6).

“Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name [than Jesus Christ] under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved” (Acts 4:12).

“There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death” (Proverbs 14:12).

THE ONLY TRUTH …

“The Word [Jesus Christ] was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth” (John 1:14).

“Jesus answered, Thou sagest that I am a king. To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear wit­ness unto the truth” (John 18:37).

“Buy the truth, and sell it not; also wisdom, and instruction, and understanding” (Proverbs 23:23).

THE ONLY LIFE …

Jesus said: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent rye, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life” (John 5:24).

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life”
(John 3:16).

Jesus said, “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abun­dantly” (John 10:10).

“This is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent” (John 17:3).

One such explorer was Jimenez de Quesada. He led an expedition into the mountains of what is today Colombia. He conquered the Chibcha Indians there and established the city of Bogotá.

In the land of the Chibchas, Quesada heard a fascinating tale of a king who covered himself daily with gold dust and then bathed in a lake to wash it off. In addition, offerings of gold were thrown into the lake. The Spanish began to call this legendary king El Dorado, the Golden One.

Quesada spent much money for arms and supplies. He led his men on new searches for the mysterious land of El Dorado. Quesada never found the place. The legend cost him much wealth and the lives of many men who accompanied him. Quesada, however, believed the legend and pursued it until his death. As he lay dying at nearly eighty, he urged others to take up the search for El Dorado.

The American poet, Edgar Allan Poe, de­scribed Quesada’s mad dream and had Death making mockery of him:

And, as his strength failed him at length,
He met a pilgrim shadow.­
“Shadow,” said he, Where can it be­
This land of Eldorado?”
“Over the Mountains of the Moon,
Down the Valley of the Shadow,
Ride, boldly ride,” The shade replied,­
“If you seek for Eldorado!”

What a senseless waste of time, wealth, and men’s lives, we must conclude. What folly to throw away one’s life in a senseless lust for gold. Certainly few people in their right minds would be so foolish. Or would they?

Many are spending their lives in search of their own El Dorados. Everyone wants financial security and prosperity. It seems a pity that we must slave away the best years of our lives, hardly taking time to “live” and to do the really important things in life.

How then shall we judge the depth of finan­cial involvement we should tolerate? At what point do we become guilty of the vain pursuit of El Dorado?

Right attitudes and right priorities begin early in life. “Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth” (Ecclesiastes 12:1). Do you place money and things above your relationship with God and with your fel­lowman? When you talk to your friends, does your conversation always drift to cars, machin­ery, and other “things”? Do you feel awkward talking about God and Christian living? Do you find yourself spending a lot of time daydreaming about future prosperity?

If your answer was “yes” to any of these questions, beware. The stage may be set for a materialistic life. The Bible says, “Labour not to be rich…. Wilt thou set thine eyes on that which is not? for riches certainly make themselves wings, they fly away as an eagle toward heaven” (Proverbs 23:4, 5).

How shall we avoid the temptation to center our lives on the quest for El Dorado? Certainly we need to alter the natural way of thinking and work at cultivating the spiritual, but how? The key is found in Matthew 6:33: “But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.”

That commitment takes a series of deliberate choices, beginning with accepting Christ as Lord and Saviour. It continues with a daily determination to do something for God. Are you engaged in this pursuit of the true riches?

“Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”

-by Roger L. Berry

Christian paleontology may seem to be a contradiction of ideas, but if we define the two words and analyze the subjects, we find compatibility. The result is not the current “politically correct” view of our society but it is a blend of scientific evidence with spiritual truth.

A Visit with a Paleontologist

I recently visited with a paleontologist who lives at Arcadia, Florida. He is retired from a position as paleontologist with the Dallas Museum of Natural History. He has built a house in a wooded area where he displays fossils he has acquired around the world. I considered it a rare privilege to visit and converse with a paleontologist at the top of his field of study. We maintained a mutual respect for the right to have the perspective we were both educated in, yet we discussed some of the differences.

He planned the lobby of his house large enough to set up a full-sized duck­billed dinosaur he had found called Edmontosaurus. On the wall was a framed fish fossil about five feet long. On the desk in his study, he was reconstructing and gluing together the bones of a small dinosaur from Mongolia called Psittacosaurus. In some unfinished rooms in his house he had tall chests of drawers he had made with multitudes of fossil bones, seashells, skulls, and other body parts.

He was generous in giving away items. He took a handful of fossil shark’s teeth and poured some into the hands of the children that were with us. He also gave me a four inch stone nautilus (coiled seashell), a fossil oyster shell, a two inch pre-historic megalodon shark’s tooth, a brachiopod (clam-like mollusk), and an armadillo scute (horny bone plate from the ancient three to four foot high creature).

His fireplace face had ten to twelve inch polished chambered nautilus shells and mammoth and mastodon teeth embedded in cement.

Definitions

Now to define our title. Paleontology is the study of animals, plants, and other living organisms from prehistoric times (time before secular records of history). “Fossil remains of (these) organisms occur in layers of sedimentary rocks (rocks formed when mineral matter settled out of air, ice, or water). The organisms that are now fossils were alive when the rocks were being formed. They were buried and preserved as the layers of rocks piled up” (World Book Encyclopedia). These muds hardened into rock through cementing action, drying out, and pressure.

To define the other word in our title, Christianity is of course the belief in Jesus Christ the Son of God and His word as revealed in the Old and New Testament of the Bible. Jesus Christ taught (and believers accept) the world wide flood in Noah’s day which destroyed the first world.

Jesus said, “In the days of Noah … they [irreligious society] did eat, they drank, they married wives, they were given in marriage until the day came that Noah entered into the ark and the flood came and destroyed them all” (Luke 17:26, 27). The apostle Peter also referred to the pre-flood world when he said, “They were disobedient, when once the longsuffering of God waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was a preparing, wherein few, that is eight souls were saved by water “ (1 Peter 3:20).

Current secular paleontology is a mixture of facts with an evolutionary interpretation. Charts on our friend’s wall showed sequences of mammoth and mastodon evolution with variable forms. These are, of course, human arrangements and fabrications of variations in kind to fit preconceived ideas. We could as easily line up Holstein cows in a stable to “prove” evolution from black to white! Despite much rationalization by nominal Christianity, evolution with its struggle, pain and death to produce everything from nothing cannot be fit with the loving God of creation. “Thou wilt have a desire to the work of thine hands” (Job 14:15). Evolution does not need God and God does not need evolution.

Biblical Solutions

Biblical paleontology does give answers to how all the plants and animals we find in the earth were fossilized, when they were deposited, why they were buried, and even who did it! The fossil record also has a special message for humanity today!

The ice age after the flood is the premiere evidence for the Biblical flood scenario. Secular scientists fall into the trap of saying the earth slowly cooled down for an ice age. Cold air holds very little moisture and could not provide the mechanism to unload water from the oceans onto the continents.

Antarctica is a prime example. It now has the thickest ice sheet on earth. But it gets only 1-7 inches of precipitation per year. It is just too cold to snow much! However Antarctica once got terrific snows from surrounding warm oceans to build up an ice pack that averages over a mile thick!

What is needed for an ice age is a quick climate change that leaves the earth with warm oceans and cold continents. This is the effect of the world-wide Flood. The earth had to be warmer in places where it is now an icebox. When the oceans and polar regions cooled down, the ice packs melted on the continents. The new earth, now open to the chill of space, cooled quickly. With a new snow cover, the earth also reflected 90% of the suns radiation while the oceans still absorbed 90%.

The cause for such a quick change is found in the break up of the water vapor blanket (Job 38: 9-11) that God decreed above the atmosphere at Creation (Gen. l: 6, 7). When these climate tempering warm waters precipitated, it rained forty days and forty nights (Genesis 7:11, 12). These waters along with underground waters from “the fountains of the great deep” rose to cover the highest hills of the pre-flood world (verse 19). In this catastrophic geologic event, water currents spread sedimentary layers one upon another, some containing life forms that fossilized.

The dinosaur footprints in the Paluxy River Valley of Texas were made in freshly laid mud with a higher cementing content. Over 300 footprints in the area are all heading the same direction. The signs claim they were migrating! More likely they were fleeing rising waters that quickly laid down the next layer of softer clays before the footprints could deteriorate. In recent centuries, the Paluxy River washed out the softer sediments and exposed the hardened casts of footprint trackways.

The evidences among the fossils for a sudden one-time worldwide catastrophe are many:

• Tree trunk fossils extend through multiple layers of rock presumed to be hundreds of thousands of years apart on the evolutionary time scale.
• Dozens of fish are found in the process of swallowing other fish and even giving birth.
• Clams and brachiopod are found closed. They open, decay, or are eaten when they die naturally.
• Two dinosaurs were found fighting with their claws into each other. Animals don’t just die and fossilize.
• Ferns and tropical plants are found in slate along coal seams looking as if they had been preserved fresh. Such plants would ordinarily wilt in a day.

Evidences for the warm, post-flood seas are the millions of large mammals that evidently flourished on grassy plains along the Siberian and Alaska coasts. The multitudes of bones and ivory tusks found there show that as the oceans cooled and the summers warmed from disbursing volcanic dust, north became the wrong way to go in winter. The coasts became a death trap. A few flesh carcasses are found frozen in these regions yet today.

God Is in Control

There was a reason for the destruction of the first world. God’s blessing or curse hinges on man, the crown of His creation, whom he charged with the care and cultivation of the earth (Genesis 1:28). Man had filled his heart with evil and the earth with violence like it is today. (Genesis 6:5-15; Matthew 24:37).

Satan has removed the love and benevolence of Christianity and brought the prevalence of fear, suffering, and death to much of the world again. Violence and disease, such as AIDS, are taking multitudes to a Godless eternity. The same individuals converted, trained and empowered with God’s righteousness would provide for many others instead of destroying them.

The fossil evidence of the first world that perished was deliberately place here as a reminder of God’s coming judgment by fire. “For this they willingly are ignorant of that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth, standing out of the water and in the water: whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water perished: but the heavens and earth which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men” (2 Peter 3:5- 7).

-by Elvin Stauffer

In a debate, an atheist appealed to a claimed impossibility of finding an unseen, spiritual God in a totally naturalistic world. In contrast, his Christian counterpart made repeated reference to his own rebirth as evidence for God and Christianity. Did either one get the point? I wonder.

These are days when exclusive Christian claims don’t go over well. First of all, religious experience is cheap because religious authority is an easy invention in the human mind. So why shouldn’t every individual have the right to his own religious ideas? Besides, who would you be to suggest your religion is better than mine? I encounter an ongoing flow of people with a mixed religious bag, assembled out of a personal wish list of what God should be like.(Reminds me of the charms that a witch doctor would assemble.)

But why not just come down to the obvious? If God is concocted in the minds and experiences of men and women, then God is not God at all. The god-maker is of necessity greater than his god. Such a god dies when his maker dies, since he never existed except in the mind of his maker. From such a beginning, is there any difference whether one puts his faith in a door knob, in the full moon, or in some vague “man upstairs”? Any “gods” in this range are simply bogus. There is no truth in them now, and they will not save in the end. A lot of thinking people intuitively know this, and quickly dismiss all religious experiences out of hand.

If Christianity is just one more of these invented “isms,” then the debater’s claimed spiritual rebirth is yet another disgusting tool to persuade people of that which is not. The question then is not whether the Christian debater is or was saved. It must rather be in definable, unchanging, historically grounded evidence that such a salvation is even possible.

In one single objective assessment lies the answer — who is Jesus Christ?

This line of evidence points to the conclusion that God did indeed show up in the world which He had made in the person of Jesus Christ. Thus the world was, after all, not invaded by other beings from space (as some evolutionists propose), but from heaven itself, by the one who made the world. Thus the natural world is not isolated from the normally unseen, spiritual God, as the atheist wills to believe. Many people fail to grasp that the Bible is a history replete with hard evidence that Jesus Christ is God manifest in the flesh, that he was introduced in a supernatural ministry, that could not be denied by friend or foe, or Roman executioners. He was put to death on a cross, and then arose again from the dead. These are matters established by may witnesses and more than ample documentation. This evidence places Jesus, the Son of God, as firmly into natural history as Julius Caesar, Shakespeare, Abraham Lincoln, and even the head of your closest atheist organization. This one-time appearance of God in His world only confirms what believers have always known. This God is always involved in His universe, since He gives to all, life, and breath, and all things. Thus the atheist’s predicament is not that God cannot be known, but in attempting a credible refusal of that knowledge.

This God-come-in-flesh evidence fixes an awful gulf between true biblical faith and every other religion. To every reader we raise the proposition — you may disavow and reject every form of idolatrous worship, past, present or future – without consequence. You can likewise refuse Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, and Mormonism or any other “ism.” But there is no getting around the evidence for Jesus Christ. There are only two kinds of people in this world. It is those who bow in surrender, in awe, and in reverence to the Saviour now — and those who wait until it is too late.

But I would also warn those in the Christian church. By disallowing plain teaching of Scripture, we too, get involved in the God-altering business. Today entire denominations subscribe to the notion that women have no moral obligation to carry a baby to term–a religious support for murder, and a useful tool in the landmark Supreme Court decision to legalize abortion. The same could be said in relation to gay issues and same-sex marriages. For example, the annual “Gay Pride Fest” in Minneapolis features many supporting floats, sponsored by old mainline Protestantism. There is no need to wonder where these churches come out on the sins of adultery and fornication.

It seems to me that the height of religious dishonesty is to claim to believe in God and in Jesus Christ, and then disregard the utterly plain teachings of Scripture. This is starting with a foundation of truth and building it into a lie. It is reinventing the true God into some benign Grandad in the sky who loves everyone, accepts every atrocity, and judges absolutely nothing. I suppose these would be utterly chagrined at the suggestion that they don’t love God. Yet, how dare we claim to love God, and disregard His commandments? Jesus said, “why call ye me, Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say?” (Luke 6:46).

In fact the true foundation shows exactly the status of these churches so-called. It is described in a basic biblical principle — a little leaven leavens the whole lump. Perhaps this is best portrayed as the prophet Haggai questions the priests, (Haggai 2). If one bearing holy flesh make: contact with common food items, will they be made holy? The priests answered, “no.” The next question is, If one is contaminated by a dead body, and touch any of these food items, shall it be unclean? The priests answered, “It shall be unclean.” Over the past few centuries, scientists have confirmed this truth about infectious diseases. Had doctors taken ancient Bible teaching seriously, they would not have spread death from the morgue to the delivery room with unwashed hands, nor would they have spread infections in making their rounds.

And how did Haggai rephrase this lesson? “So is this people, and so is this nation before me, saith the Lord; and so is every work of their hands; and that which they offer there is unclean” (Haggai 2:14). To paraphrase, the supposed good deeds of individuals and churches are contaminated and rendered unclean through moral pollution (like a good piece of bread in a sewer). As leaders and pastors, it is our solemn duty to clearly make again the difference between the clean and unclean.

Why do we bother saying things that people don’t want to hear? Because the Christ who came into our universe as a babe, died on the cross, arose from the dead, and then went back to heaven from whence He came. He accomplished the needed mission of salvation from our sins.. He came to turn the fierce wrath of the Almighty away from every person who repents, believes in Christ, and by grace turns from his own abominable ways. Otherwise, the wrath of God abides.

Finally the question is no longer whether salvation is possible. It is who will receive Him in the appointed time? Behold now is the accepted time. Now is the day of salvation.

-by Lester Troyer

A few minutes of seeing and hearing his raucous, obnoxious behavior convinced me that he was trying in earnest not to obey any more rules than he had to. He was fed up with rules.

The rest of the day I pondered those word, “There are no rules!” and and how typical it is of our society. People imagine that freedom and fun come by ignoring rules, doing your own thing, and having your own way.

The longer I thought about that T-shirt, the more I began to realize the incongruity, yes, the inconsistency of such a statement. How could anyone really declare, “I don’t obey any rules”? I dare say that the young T-shirt where did not realize how dependent he was on rules. The trip through town that morning would have been exceedingly difficult without traffic rules. Life would be precarious if lawlessness and disorder reigned in society. If pressed on the point, I imagine the young man would confess to appre­ciation for some rules.

Perhaps the T-shirt message was speaking of certain kinds of rules. It may have been speak­ing of moral restraints or parental rules or perhaps school regulations. I doubt if the young wearer had seriously considered how much he has benefited from even those rules. The order and comparative safety that many of us enjoy in our society exists, as least in part, because there are plenty of rules to insure it.

I’m glad, aren’t you, that just because some­one makes a bold statement does not mean it is true? People have made rash statements before. Some have declared, “The world is flat,” or “Man will never reach the moon, or even “There is no God.” Of course, their statements don’t make these things true.

The Bible makes it clear that there are rules and the purpose of such rules. God has created the universe to run by a set of rules we sometimes call “mother nature” or “natural laws.” He also created rules to guide society and to encourage law and order. The Ten Commandmens are rules that order our relationship with God and man.

The New Testament says: “All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: That the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works” (2 Timothy 3:16, 17). Now that is the positive side of rules! The rules in God’s Word, and the rest of His Word as well, show us what is right, show us where we are wrong, and give us the wisdom to know what to do about it.

If we surrender our lives to God through His Son Jesus Christ, we will not find God’s rules a drudgery but will willingly submit to them realizing they are for our good and the blessing of the world around us. Through surrender to Jesus Christ, we will find obedience to God’s rules s wonderful experience. We will do it willingly.

Yes, there are rules! I am glad there are, aren’t you?