A Favorite Picture of Mine

When God Became Flesh

When God became flesh… this is a concept too infinite for man to fathom. Why God, the Creator of heaven and earth would decide to clothe himself in human flesh, to die for his creation and save them from destroying themselves…it’s truly amazing!

But here on Christmas, we are celebrating, not just the birth of a baby, but the entrance of God himself on this earth as one of us, so he could know us, understand us, and die for us.

I am amazed that God came, but even more that he came for me!

Truly man, afflicted as we are, tempted with every temptation that we are, yet wholly God. Yet he set aside his power of creation to be crucified of it, and for it.

On this Christmas, let’s remember that it’s not the presents that make Christmas, but the presence of the one that came for us.

…cause it’s still the greatest story ever, ever told!

Merry Christmas!

Hallelujah Chorus - Handel's "Messiah"

Went to Handel's "Messiah" with my friends, the Huussens! Here is the video of the Hallelujah Chorus!

Why?

Why do we do what we do?

I know this is a rhetorical question, but think about it for just a moment. Why?

Suppose a man came home with flowers for his wife. She, in surprise, says, “Oh, how thoughtful of you! Thank you! That’s so sweet that you were thinking of me!” Suppose this man said in response, “Well, it’s my duty, I’m you’re husband.” Or, what if he said, “Well, I thought you needed it.” Or better yet, how about this response: “Oh, they were real cheap, it was no big deal.”

I don’t think this flies real well with the wife. But how come? Do you think this woman even wants the flowers now? Why not?

We tend to do a lot of things for strange reasons. I give 10% of my income, and rightfully so. I go to church. I dress a certain way. I try to live holy. But why?

God, in his word, states that we were created “for his pleasure.” Does it really please God that we do so many of these religious rituals because we’re “supposed to.”

In Matthew 23, God rebukes a group of people, religious leaders, no less, for thinking that the outward actions were what mattered, and told them that after searching the world over for converts, they make one twice the child of hell as they are! Jesus seemed to disregard deeds done based on “duty” and not on love. I can almost see Jesus telling the Pharisees, “I don’t want your flowers.”

I can do very nice things for those I love, and they accept them with true love in return, because they believe it came from a heart of love. Christ just wants the same. He doesn’t want your income “because you’re supposed to” give it. In fact, he says in Corinthians to determine in your heart what to give, and do it out of cheerfulness. Why? Because God doesn’t need your money! He needs your heart!

Why do you give to missions? Because God needs it? God tell us in Psalms 50, “If I were hungry, I would not tell thee. The world is mine, and the fullness thereof.”

Jesus was truly angry with the religious leaders who had all the rituals down, but missed the message of God in the incarnation of his Son. He ignored their rituals.

Let’s not be polished on the outside, so that we can be in the right place, at the right time, dressed the right way, to be seen by the right people. Let’s show God love out of a pure heart. And do live holy, and be in your place, and give what God says to give, and do right….because of love!

Why? Because I love Christ!

You Were Created

The following is a speech I gave at Gulf Coast Community College on 12/2/10. The pictures were my visual aids. Enjoy!

Look at these magnificent works of art! If I were to ask you how these works came to be, I might get a variety of answers. However, you would most likely say the first came about as a result of a master architect, a building contractor, construction workers, and the necessary tools. You would probably say that the second piece of art is a result of an artist who had spent much time and effort to develop the skill that is necessary to draw this wolf. But what if I told you that this magnificent structure was the result of an explosion at a brick factory, or that this beautiful drawing was the result of a dynamite pencil that randomly exploded and spread the lead on a page in this way? You would think I was crazy!! Yet when looking at the magnificent world around us, the complexity of human life on earth, and the interconnectedness of our entire universe, some would say that this is the result of pure accident and chance. I, for one, do not believe that order comes from chaos. First, I will state my case. Then, I will tell you the erroneous  philosophies being taught at the highest level of education.

    Before beginning, I will give a challenge to everyone in here that just wrote me off as delusional and unscientific. Open your mind to facts, and think critically about everything. That’s all you must do. If you’ve done that, I can respect whatever conclusion you come to about this topic. You need to know, though, that there is an entire body of scientists nationwide who believe in creation, and they are scientists. It’s not just radical Christians that support this worldview. 

    Let me state my case. First, I take the position that the earth was created in 6 literal 24 hour days. I believe the scientific evidence supports this view. Based on this belief, I can make a few predictions:
 

   1. The earth show signs of order and intelligent design.

    2. There will be thousands upon thousands of symbiotic   relationships.
- Every organism, in one way or another is dependent on other organisms. These are symbiotic relationships.

    3. There will be limits to the variations life forms are able to produce.

- The Bible says that organisms will reproduce “after their kind” (Genesis 1:25). You may get a big dog, a little dog, or a wolf, but you get the same “kind” of animal (Bible, Genesis 1:25). There are limits to the variations. There are lots of dogs in the world. They may have a common ancestor--a dog. Just because there are variations of dogs does not prove that the dog came from a rock 4.6 billion years ago.
  

4. There will be a purpose to life. You have a purpose; I have a purpose; we all have a purpose in life.
   

5. There will be non-material things that cannot be explained by natural means or science such as love, justice, mercy, innate knowledge of right and wrong, and absolute
truth.
   

6. There will be a way to find the purpose of this Creator figure, maybe through a messenger. He might even write a book telling us how he created us and why.
   

7. I predict there will be an afterlife where you face the Creator to give an accounting for everything you’ve ever said or thought or done.

I further believe there was a literal, worldwide flood where a canopy of water which was protecting life on earth from harmful sun rays fell down and destroyed everything that creeps on earth besides one man and his family. Before the flood, the average life of man, according to the Bible, is 912 years old (“Bible” Genesis 1-5). What predictions can we make based on this teaching?
   

1. There will be legends of a creation and a “golden age” in every ancient civilization that reflects this time before the flood.

- And there are!
   

2. There will be skeletons found that show signs of people who were very aged compared to us, like larger brow ridges, and bigger jaws.
   

3. There will be biological problems for people today, such as wisdom teeth for 50% of the population, that suggest we don’t grow as old or big as we once did.
   

4. There will be a general “longing” for things to be restored  to peace as it was in the garden of Eden.

- Just about every culture on earth has stories about a heaven or place of rest, where you can go after this life.

What difference does it make if evolution is true? Well, if evolution as we know it is true:    

1. How do we tell right from wrong?
2. Death is the hero. Death brought man into this world. In order for evolution to work, something has to evolve into something better, and the rest have to die.
   

I believe that the flood happened and the entire earth was covered by water about 4400 years ago (King James Version). From this belief, I can make a few predictions.
   

1. There will be hundreds of layers of strata.
   

2. There will be billions of fossils located in those layers including oil and coal.
   

3. There will be deltas and canyons showing evidence of rapid erosion.
   

4. There will be legends of this world-wide flood in cultures all over the world.    

- And there are!
   

5. There will be vertical trees in the upright position, running through many of these strata layers at once. And sure enough, we have thousands of them.

Anyone that tells you that those layers are millions of years apart are either ignorant or they are lying to you, because if you can show me a tree that stands upright for millions of years while the layers form around it, I’d like to see it.
   

Now we need to define some terms. Let me point out something you hear all the time, and show you how it is misleading. “Evolution is a fact” –this is a mantra! You hear this all the time! Well, micro-evolution is a fact. Microevolution means variations within species, kind of like my dog example that I talked about earlier. But evolutionists today take micro-evolution and use it to prove macro-evolution. Macro-evolution, however, which is one plant or animal changing into another, is NOT a fact! Dogs do not produce non-dogs. If you want to believe they do, that’s fine; believe what you want, but don’t call it science, and don’t charge tax dollars to pay professors to teach it to helpless kids. We’ve never seen any organism produce organisms not of it’s own kind. Macro-evolution is not science.

Pease do not confuse evolution with science. The evolution being taught in the Natural Science building across the yard is religious, not scientific. When I refer to evolution, I am not talking about variations within a species. I’m talking about the macro-evolution that is being widely taught as scientific fact. Evolution is mixed in with science, true. But that does not make it scientific. Beer is advertised at football games. This does not make beer athletic by association. Evolution is not science. It’s a religion.
   

Evolution teaches that 20 billion years ago nothing exploded; 6 billion years ago the earth cooled down, and then it rained on the rocks for millions of years and turned it into soup, and then the soup came alive 3 billion years ago. This is what the books teach. I read one book when I was in school that said, “progress from a chemical soup to a living organism is very slow.” Sure is; it’s never happened! This is one of the most unscientific ideas in history of  the world! Inorganic matter never has become organic matter. Evolutionist are 200 years behind science! We knew 200 years ago that inorganic matter doesn’t create or become organic matter! But evolutionary scientists believe it did! Are there variations of dogs? Sure are. Does this mean that it all started with soup 4.6 billion years ago? Absolutely not! This process of chemical soup turning into organic life is ridiculous. Something is only science if it has been reproduced in a laboratory or observed in nature—neither have ever been done. There have been rumor of some claims that it has been “very close” to being done in a lab. I have never seen evidence of this, but even if the report is true, it still admits that it’s not being done. And even if it is done, what do you suppose has been proved by a bunch of intelligent scientists getting together to make soup turn into organic proteins? That it takes intelligence to make life, that’s what it proves! The Bible says, “Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools” (“Bible” Romans 1:22). If you think your great, great, great, great, grand-daddy was a rock, I think you’re a fool. But at least stupidity is curable! We’re here to help.

    People are welcome, in our great land of freedom, to believe whatever they choose, but it should be illegal to use tax-dollars to infuse this religion in public schools, and evolution is nothing but a religion.

    Furthermore, I’m not against you believing a stupid theory, but don’t support it with lies. It’s not illegal to have a dumb theory, but it should be illegal to lie about the evidence to support the theory, and it’s even worse to accept tax dollars while I lie supporting this theory; and that happens on this College campus.
   

Darwin said in his book, “It is a truly wonderful fact that…all animals and all plants throughout all time and space should be related to each other…” (Darwin 170).

Darwin observed 14 kinds of finches on the Galapagos Islands, and he correctly concluded that they had a common ancestor--a bird. But then he incorrectly concluded that it was enough evidence to conclude that birds are related to bananas, which he says in his book, Origin of the Species, and what some of your Gulf Coast Community College professors believe. Now if you want to believe that birds are related to bananas that’s fine, but don’t call it science.

    There are numerous other examples of faulty evidence. For example the mutations of biological codes. Mutations do not add new information; they just scramble what’s already there. And you cannot find one positive mutation, cause nobody has ever seen one. One professor told me that a beneficial mutation example was that if you have sickle cell anemia, you can’t get malaria. That’s brilliant! That’s like saying if you cut off your leg you can’t get athletes foot. Sickle cell and Malaria are both negative! You think that process turns a rock into a human in 4.6 billion years? I admire your faith. I don’t admire your intelligence, but I do admire your faith. In order for evolution to occur, biological mutations would have to occur in which the gene code was made more and more complex, and this has never happened. In every case, the mutation always loses or scrambles the gene code, and never adds to it. You would have to believe that the gene code of a rock led to the creation of every gene code on earth today. You want to see a genetic bottleneck? Look at the gene code of a rock sometime.

     Then you have the vestigial structures argument. They say a whale has vestigial structures where his legs used to be, and that these are no longer useful to him because he cannot walk. For one thing, these vestigial “leg” bones are barely a few inches long, and if they didn’t have these bones, whales couldn’t reproduce. You see, it has nothing to do with walking. It has to do with making baby whales. They say your tail bone is vestigial and serves no purpose. If anyone present is willing, I will pay to have yours removed. I will not go into the grotesque detail, but there are some important functions that you could no longer perform without your tailbone.

Now, most of the professors that I have talked to tell me that I am resorting a “God-of-the-gaps” theory. In essence, this theory states that since I don’t know how it happened, God had to have done it. Well, I do believe that God created everything we know. But is believing that God miraculously spoke the world into existence any different than thinking organic matter came from inorganic matter, which is no less a miracle. Until evolution bridges this important gap, they believe in miracles. They say that they only accept what can be proven with physical evidence. But there is NO physical evidence to support that we came from a rock 4.6 billion years ago. That, my friend, is a miracle! And if you believe that, then you believe in miracle-of-the-gaps.
   

In conclusion, I would like you to ask yourself this question: are you going to allow the variations of species and that we observe, which is true science, to be extended and extrapolated to prove that all species came from one single cell. If you are, than I encourage you to observe the Critical Academic Literacy that this College has been trying to teach us, and think critically about what you’re being told. Thank you.

Works Cited
The Bible. King James Version. 1611. Genesis 1:25, Romans 1:22. Print.

Darwin, Charles. Origin Of The Species. XI. New York: P.F. Collier and Son, 1909-14.     170. Print.