Family Apologetics
"Give ear, O my people, to my teaching; incline your ears to the words of my mouth! I will open my mouth in a parable, I will utter dark sayings from of old, things that we have heard and known, that our fathers have told us. We will not hide them from our children, but tell to the coming generation the glorious deeds of the Lord, and His might, and the wonders that He has done" (Psalm 78:1-4).
My family and I just returned from the Defending the Faith family apologetics conference put on by Answers in Genesis. While I expect it will take me several weeks to process all I heard and learned, let me simply share some initial thoughts:
1. Wow! Those guys and gals at Answers in Genesis really know how to put on a conference. The information was spot on and very practical, not to mention tremendously challenging. And, there were sessions for children, teens and women.
2. Parents had better wake up in the American church. If you are a parent and you simply cannot make a powerful argument for the literal six-day creation taught in Gensis 1-2, using the Bible first and science second, then you had better start making time to educate and arm yourself. Otherwise, how will you equip your children to defend the biblical accounts against the unending onslaught of Darwinian evolution? You do want to raise, equip, and train your children, right?
3. The myriad ways Darwinian evolution is peddled to children and adults today is mind-boggling. Every conceivable media source inudates our culture with the deceitful, bad science of evolution, not to mention the public school textbooks. Add Oprah Winfrey's voice to the lovers of Darwinian theory, narrating nature films and promting them wildly, and we have the makings of a total war.
4. What is really at stake in this clash of the titan worldviews (Bible v. Darwin) is the authority and sufficiency of the Holy Scripture. Once the church (yes, the church is the guilty party here) began to do interpretive gymnastics to try and accomodate Darwin's theory into the biblical revelation, what really happened is the church substituted man's ideas for God's Word. The locus of authority shifted. We, dear Christians, must recover the Reformation principle of sola scriptura!
5. The symptoms of prattling away biblical authority in the matters of creation, origins and age of the universe and world are haunting us daily. They include: gay marriage, normalization of homosexuality, radical feminism, pandemic divorce, single-parenting, intentional childlessness, racism, infanticide (abortion), euthanasia, abandonment of the elderly, apathy towards orphans, genocide, and matriarchy in the home, church, and nation, to name a few.
Friends, may God open our eyes to see where neglect of the absolute authority of His Word is leading us. May we rise up in our homes and churches and schools and cities to once again proclaim "the glorious deeds of the Lord."
Darwin and his followers have sold us a pack of lies, beatifully packaged in the wrappings of so-called "science." I will have much more to say on these issues in the weeks ahead. For now let me just remind us all that this war of worldviews actually started back in Eden:
Now the serpent . . . said to the woman, "Did God actually say . . ?"
Satan is not all that creative. Apparently he doesn't have to be. He just changes the instruments he uses to get people to doubt the Word of God.
What of you? What of your children? Can you all really defend the Word and contend for the truth effectively? Are you all armed with true, Bible answers for the plethora of questions being asked to challenge the Word? If not, or if you simply need to shore up some things in your lives and homes, may I suggest a dual emphasis as a starting point:
First, read and study Genesis as a family, and let the text speak for itself. God's Word will not return void!
Second, purchase the series called Answers from Answers in Genesis. The series consists of four children's books, three adult books, and three DVDs. This series will put you on the path to being a family of Contenders for the Faith.