Aug. 7, 2005

Pentectost 12

Matthew 14:22-33 (NLT)

Immediately after this, Jesus made his disciples get back into the boat and cross to the other side of the lake while he sent the people home. ²³Afterward he went up into the hills by himself to pray. Night fell while he was there alone. ²⁴Meanwhile, the disciples were in trouble far away from land, for a strong wind had risen, and they were fighting heavy waves.

²⁵About three o'clock in the morning Jesus came to them, walking on the water. ²⁶When the disciples saw him, they screamed in terror, thinking he was a ghost. ²⁷But Jesus spoke to them at once. "It's all right," he said. "I am here! Don't be afraid."

²⁸Then Peter called to him, "Lord, if it's really you, tell me to come to you by walking on water."

²⁹"All right, come," Jesus said.

So Peter went over the side of the boat and walked on the water toward Jesus. ³⁰But when he looked around at the high waves, he was terrified and began to sink. "Save me, Lord!" he shouted.

³¹Instantly Jesus reached out his hand and grabbed him. "You don't have much faith," Jesus said. "Why did you doubt me?" ³²And when they climbed back into the boat, the wind stopped.

³³Then the disciples worshiped him. "You really are the Son of God!" they exclaimed.

Sermon: Creation/Evolution: Why Jesus Could Walk On Water And Darwin Couldn’t

In Ericson Hall on the “I need- I have” board, under “I Need” someone wrote:

“$1,000,000- TJ” Way to go, TJ. Think big!

Why could Jesus walk on water? Because He was more than man. As St. Paul put it, “All things were created by Him, through Him, and for Him.” That includes you and me. The reason for our existence is all about Him. As Rick Warren, C.S. Lewis, and countless other Christians through the centuries have said, you will not find the purpose of your life by seeking it. You will find the purpose of your life by seeking Him. He IS the purpose of the whole creation. It was made by Him, through Him, and for Him. The miracles of Jesus constantly illustrate His lordship over the creation.

He made the fig tree. He can enjoy its fruit, prune it, cultivate it, or curse it if that suits His purpose in teaching us something.

He made water. He can drink it, baptize with it, wash His hands in it, walk on it, or turn it into wine.

He made the ocean for His own purpose. He can swim in it, He can part it and walk through it, He can walk right over it, HeHeaor He can evaporate it into a desert if He so desires, and the book of Revelation tells us that is exactly what He will one day do when the day for the earth’s judgment comes. In the mean time, it serves His purpose to do with His creation exactly whatever He wants.

In the first reading for today, St. Paul said of Christ, “And he is God, who rules over everything and is worthy of eternal praise! Amen.”

You will never embrace the sovereignty of God over your life if you cannot see it in the creation! And you will not see the power of God in creation until the Holy Spirit has renewed your mind. You cannot judge the purpose or the operation of the creation apart from the wisdom that only the Holy Spirit can give.

This was the error of Charles Darwin, and it has spawned a whole generation of people who cannot comprehend the majesty of God, or the true purpose of the creation. What could cause a person to be so misled, and to mislead so many others? It all began with the most familiar of all human questions, the question about suffering, but in Darwin’s case the answer he proposed led in a tragically mistaken direction.

Many thanks to Professor William Krewson who helps us put Darwin’s life in perspective.

Darwin struggled with the reality of suffering. Growing up in a nominally Christian environment he was well acquainted with the Bible, but he had not been powerfully changed by the Holy Spirit. He remained only intellectually aware of what the Bible said. And to his mind it didn’t make sense.

Look at Darwin’s testimony about himself:

“There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have intentionally created the Ichneumonidae bacteria with the intention of it feeding on the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with a mouse.”

In a letter to an old man in ill health he gave this denunciation:

“Science has nothing to do with Christ, except in so far as scientific research makes one cautious of admitting evidence. For myself, I do not believe that there has ever been any revelation. As for a future life, every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities.”

Darwin went on to describe quite eloquently the process that led him to renounce any faith in God:

“By 1836 I had gradually come to see that the Old Testament was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindus. I gradually came to disbelieve in Christianity as a divine revelation. Thus, disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress.”

But do not think that Charles Darwin was not a man of faith. There is no such thing. Truly, we human beings are incapable of living without some kind of belief in something beyond ourselves. The need to believe in something is so strong as not to be denied.

To resolve this tension, Darwin chose another answer. If the God of the Bible could not be real, there must be something else that is. In a letter to a friend he revealed his true god, and named it with capital letters: “My deity is Natural Selection.”

“Evolution’s god is the awesome force of nature that supposedly drives all life forward in gradual steps of progress. This deity is impersonal, undemanding, and detached from the constraints inherent in a personal relationship. One does not pray to the god of natural selection.” 1.

In less than a century Darwin’s new religion had become formalized in the statement of the “Humanist Manifesto” which declared:

Humanists still believe that traditional theism, especially faith in the prayer-hearing God, assumed to love and care for persons, to hear and understand their prayers, and to be able to do something about them, is an unproved and outmoded faith. Salvationism… still appears as harmful, diverting people with false hopes of heaven hereafter. Reasonable minds look to other means for survival. No deity will save us; we must save ourselves.” 1.

This new religion has infiltrated every sector of our society, especially our educational system and our legal system. You see, in the absence of relationship with a personal, “prayer-hearing God” morality, like life itself, cannot exist on the basis of any objective standard of right or wrong. “It can only evolve through the same process of natural selection. In the struggle to survive, the fittest win merely because they display moral values, not necessarily right values. Morals are therefore dependent on a situation and have no external basis of right or wrong.” 1

Perhaps we can forgive Darwin for his errors on the simple basis of timing. You see, Darwin’s biggest problem is that he was born too soon.

“When Darwin was releasing his Origin of Species, Gregor Mendel had not yet published his work on the laws of heredity and genetics which said that the characteristics of offspring are passed on from parents according to precise mathematical ratios, not by some chance random process that Darwin called “blended inheritance.”

“In Darwin’s day James Joule, R.J. Clausius, and Lord Kelvin were just developing the concepts of thermodynamics, the first law of which states that energy can neither be created or destroyed (so much for the universe creating itself) and the second law which says that the material universe is proceeding in a downward degenerating direction in which matter becomes spontaneously LESS organized, not more so.

“The work of Louis Pasteur with microbial life, and the mathematical laws of probability had not yet shown that the probability of life occurring spontaneously is effectively zero.

“Molecular biology had not yet revealed that even a single cell organism is so enormously complex and chemically balanced that it could not conceivably have come into being spontaneously any more than a brand new Cadillac could spontaneously emerge from a pile of scraps metal.

“And most importantly, in Darwin’s day, the fossil record had not yet been investigated sufficiently for paleontologists to say, as they are saying today, that chains of so-called “intermediate links” simply do not exist, and that all evidence shows that the number of species on the earth is now and has always been decreasing, not increasing.” 1.

The most remarkable thing about the theory of evolution is that it continues to be taught as fact by our pseudo-scientific educational system when the real facts of science do not support it at all, and literally thousands of credentialed scientist have repudiated it entirely in recent decades, and have become believers in “intelligent design”, or some process of “special creation.” That’s PC talk for “God.”

1. William L. Krewson, “Evolution’s Deadly Theology” printed in Israel My Glory July/August 2005.