God of Creation: The Folly of Atheism

Welcome to the Preaching Cross Radio Podcast, featuring the radio ministry of Pastor James W.

Knox of the Bible Baptist Church of the Land of Florida.

Our prayer is that we have our Bible study programs to bring the lost to a saving knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ and enable the Savior to grow in the grace and knowledge of the Savior.

Now here's your host, Pastor James W.

Dox.

Very unusual tonight.

Second Corinthians chapter number eleven.

I'm going to talk to you about your if you're saved.

I'm going to talk to you about Mr.

Mr.

Wonderful.

I'm going to talk to you about your bridegroom.

Talk to you about your bridegroom.

I got studying this thing out, and we're going to talk about the bride of Christ.

And a very pleasant good day to each and every one of you.

I'm Brother James, and I greet you in the name of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.

And I welcome you to the preaching of the cross radio broadcast, thirty minutes, one half hour, presenting to you the truth from God's Word, the truth of God's Word, the truth that all men must face sooner or later.

You know the Lord Jesus Christ said in John chapter number 12, he said, Think not that I am come to judge the world.

There is one that judgeth.

He said, The word, this is in John chapter 12, verses 47 and 48.

John 12:47

He said, The word that I have spoken, the same shall judge him in the last day.

We're going to have to answer to this word of God.

We're going to have to answer to the God of the Word.

And so we try our best to spend all the time that God gives us on this radio broadcast presenting plain, straight Bible teaching, expounding upon God's Word, and hopefully preparing each and every one of you for the sure and certain judgment that you will face.

Now, this series of broadcasts entitled The God of Creation, in which we uh deal with, shall deal with, and will deal with many different aspects of the creation of God and uh how they evidence, how they manifest and set forth that there is a creator, there is a maker, there is a mastermind, and uh an all-knowing, supreme being behind all of these uh things that we see with our eye, all these things that scientists delve into and discover.

We marvel at the wisdom of God, we marvel at the power of God, we marvel at the grace of goodness, grace and goodness of God as we see it round about us in the world that God has created.

Now, we've had many talks about various scientific wonders, and I think it's time to survey the subject of atheism on the program today.

Seems that all our argument has been directed to the fact of a personal God, so if you will, uh, we're going to talk today on the folly of atheism.

You know, the most characteristic feature of this sin-stricken world is its refusal to acknowledge God.

This blasphemous attitude is not solely the prerogative of those self-styled atheists who blatantly and impudently deny the existence of any supreme being possess possessing personality, but it applies also, even if in a lesser degree, to the rank and file of humanity.

Judging from the abundantly available evidence at our disposal, the majority of mankind exhibit little inclination toward any real recognition or acknowledgement of God, and comparatively few desire fellowship with him.

Now, where can we find a nation that pays more than empty lip service to God?

I don't know of one anywhere in the world.

Confronted with the greatest crisis since the dawn of history and threatened with imminent destruction, the leaders of this world occasionally mention the name of God, but it's always in a hazy, indefinite, or apologetic manner, like they're afraid they're going to offend somebody or hurt somebody's feelings.

It's a futile gesture reflecting a somewhat disturbing and almost submerged conviction that somewhere there may be a supreme being, and it might be a good idea to speak well of him, because after all there are a lot of people out there that believe in him, and we might get some votes that way, but it it just doesn't ring true.

What a surprising shock it would be if any government official occupying high office would have the courage to say a word in behalf of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Wouldn't that just uh flip everybody out?

Why they'd go crazy and you know it.

The Bible speaks for itself regarding this matter, and it says some great things about well, simply about the existence of God.

But man having rejected the Bible, having rejected the Word of God, which never it's interesting, if you read your Bible from Genesis to Revelation, you won't find one argument anywhere in the Bible for the existence of God.

God just says, I am.

Moses said, Well, who are you?

And God said, I am that I am.

There's no argument about it.

God is there, he's real, he's true.

You know in your heart, you know in your conscience, you know in the depths of your soul there's a true and living God.

But men choose not to acknowledge it.

About the only time the world mentions God's holy name anymore is in swearing and blasphemy.

The only possible end of this defiant challenge to the Savior of the world is judgment.

Sure and terrible, when God's wrath breaks on a Christ-rejecting universe.

The extent of the permeation of our higher institutions of learning with atheism was shown by Dr.

James Luba, L.

B.

A of Brynmark College.

He put out a book some time ago called Belief in God and Immortality, and it contained the results of a widespread questionnaire sent by him to hundreds of college professors and an equally large number of students.

His statistics are probably near to the truth, and if so, they're tragically suggestive as to the elimination of God by these men and their students.

Of the great number of replies received, he found the following percentist of avowed atheists.

Now these are not agnostics that say I just don't know anything, I'm stupid.

These are not people who say I just don't care, I'm indifferent.

These are this is the percentage of respondents who profess no belief whatsoever in God.

Psychologists, eighty six percent said we don't even believe in God.

And you're gonna go to them and they're going to help you with your problems.

Biologist, eighty-two percent of biologists said we don't believe in God.

Sociologists, eighty-one percent of the people who are studying how to make the human race better.

How in the world could you study history and miss God?

Physicists, sixty-six percent, no God.

He also found that between forty percent and fifty percent of the students on graduating from college in the United States of America reject the idea of God.

Now it's easy to understand this wreckage of faith after four years of teaching by men who make no secret of their atheism.

Because God cannot be seen by mortal vision, men are prone to conclude that he does not exist.

Certain sophisticated individuals proclaim vehemently that they will believe only what they can see.

Uh Landell, the astronomer, once said, Quote, I have swept the entire heavens with my telescope and I have found no God.

Therefore, he argued, there is no such being.

Now, you've got to admit it's awful foolish to draw any such inference from the very limited evidence supplied by a telescope.

God cannot be discovered by any such mechanical device, but the eye of faith will find him in a moment.

The unbeliever depends trustfully on the scope and accuracy of his five senses.

He attributes to them great powers.

What they reveal he will accept, what they do not disclose he will reject.

One thing that strikes me forcibly is that the skeptic must have acquired a pronounced faith in the clarity of his intellect and the infallibility of his senses.

But when we examine them we discovered their obvious limitations.

Now we have eyes.

Well, what do we see?

The range of visible light is very narrow.

Our eyes can run the gamut from the short waves of violet to the long waves of red.

There are waves beyond violet and waves beyond red which are invisible to us, two infinite worlds of color above and below these points that are completely hidden from our gaze.

Shall we dare to say they do not exist because we cannot see them?

Our sense of sight then is far from being infallible.

There is sound.

We have two ears, but we catch just a little of it.

The ear can hear vibrations as musical notes only between certain limits.

A single vibration produces the sound of a tap or a blow, and each vibration is heard as a separate tap or blow until sixteen more occur in every second of time.

Then a continuous sound results, the vibrations of which are not separable to the sense of hearing.

The lowest note in the organ is usually produced by a pipe sixteen feet long, which gives thirty-two vibrations per second.

This note is named C.

An eight-foot pipe gives its octave with sixty-four vibrations, C.

The double octave C has 128 vibrations in a second, and so on.

The highest audible note is said to have about 40,000 vibrations a second, but it's too feeble to have any musical value.

So we hear sounds produced by vibrations of twenty to forty thousand per second.

But beyond this, at each end are vast worlds of silence, to you and I, there are untold numbers of sound waves that our ears cannot detect despite megaphones and amplifiers.

Our ears then are far from being infallible guides to sound waves.

The senses of touch, taste, and smell have the same marked limitations, the existing faculties scarcely touching these vast shores.

Our minds cannot grasp the mysteries of time and space.

We are totally unable to understand eternity, that actually time had no beginning and will have no ending.

Our imagination staggers when we think of infinite and immeasurable space.

If we are to find God with these senses of ours, then we shall be doomed to failure.

There are other phases to this discussion.

We're endowed with appetites and longings.

We are hungry, there is food.

We have an instinct to love, there are those to love.

We are eager for power and wealth.

They are to be had.

For every single desire there is a possible fulfillment.

Put a potato plant in the dark cellar.

It is born with the instinct that there is sunlight to be found, and so there is.

Accordingly, the vine searches until it finds the rays of the sun, the rays necessary for its life and growth.

Yes, the lowly potato plant responds to the invitation of light and reaches up to contact it.

The result of this meeting is life and growth and progress.

The Bible calls our attention to the light many times.

Psalm twenty seven, verse one.

The Lord is my light and my salvation.

Whom shall I fear?

The Lord is the strength of my life, of whom shall I be afraid?

In Psalm eighty nine and verse fifteen, Blessed is the people that know the joyful sound.

They walk, O Lord, in the light of thy countenance.

Proverbs 4, verses 18 and 19.

Proverbs 4:18

The path of the righteous is as the dawning light that shineth more and more under the perfect day.

The way of the wicked is as darkness, they know not at what they stumble.

Isaiah 9 2.

The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light.

They that dwelt in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath a light shined.

There is a word from Jesus Christ Himself to which we must listen.

John chapter 8 and verse 12, Jesus says, I am the light of the world.

John 8 · chapter mention

He that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.

Now how did the world act toward Jesus Christ?

The Gospel of John has much to say about it.

Why, in the very first verse, in the beginning was the Word.

The Word was with God, and the Word was God.

In him was life, and the life was the light of men, and the light shineth in the darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not.

The world of the first century that turned away from this great light is no different from our world.

This age of ours is steeped in darkness, the utter blackness of sin.

Light is available, but men and women prefer to walk in darkness, stumbling and falling and refusing the hand that is held out to them.

In the vegetable world we have seen the effect of light, and how in this realm all living things bend every energy to reach its rays.

But man, willful and sinning, refuses the only way out.

What will the end be?

Why, you know as well as I do, our age is heading for the abyss.

And there's but one remedy.

This remedy is not man made.

No League of Nations, no United Nations, no peace pacts, no summit conferences, no effort which does not take God into account will ever succeed in bringing order to this chaotic universe.

God has a plan for the world, one that will work.

He offers it, but his offer is spurned.

It is rejected because it involves subjection to the Lord Jesus Christ.

It seems that the patience of God is just about exhausted.

If the world refuses to listen, the world is going to get hurt.

And who will dare to say that this punishment is not deserved?

As with nations, so with individuals, my friend, salvation is a very personal thing.

Every one must for himself make the decision.

This decision is either for or against the Christ of Calvary.

Before you and I can get to heaven, we must be clothed with righteousness, and we have none of our own.

That is the law of God.

I'm very sure I cannot make myself righteous.

I know you cannot make yourself righteous.

What are we going to do about it?

Well, the Bible says in Romans chapter 4 and verse 5, To him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is reckoned for righteousness.

Romans 4 · chapter mention

Now I don't know about you, friend, but I've believed.

I believed on the Lord Jesus Christ, his death, his burial, his resurrection.

I've received him as my personal Lord and Savior.

And my righteousness is not my own puny uh do goodding.

My righteousness is the righteousness of Jesus Christ given to me as the gift of God.

You say I don't even believe in God.

Oh you just aren't wise.

You just aren't thinking properly.

You're deceived by the devil.

You know there's no savage tribe or civilized race that is not searched for God and long for immortality.

It is the earliest, deepest, and most passionate desire of mankind, and all other desires and instincts have an answer.

Will this innate consciousness and longing for God be forever denied?

It seems incredible.

This instinct, this emotion, this belief, call it what you will, it's more powerful than any other.

It has conquered love and even the fear of death.

It has built civilization, it has set the spires of churches in the valleys around the world.

If this be a fable, it's a mighty tough one to kill.

They wrote it off the books during the French Revolution, but it soon sneaked in at the back door.

They tried to liquidate it in Russia, and just this week we received a letter from Siberia from a woman eighty years old.

She said, Dear Saints, thank you so much for ministering to us in all the years of persecution and torment.

We kept the faith.

We kept the faith.

Now you know something?

They buried it in the catacombs of Rome, but it escaped and soon covered the earth.

They crucified it.

It was born again, rising in a newness of life and vigor, victorious over death and the grave.

Why I've got volumes out here in my library, a thousand pages apiece, listing all the martyrs of the Christian faith, all the attempts to exterminate Christianity from the nations of the world.

How do you deny a true and living God, provoking such genuine faith and love and adoration and power and strength in the hearts and lives of those that believe in him?

In the crisis of life, men turn instinctively toward God.

There's not an atheist in this world that doesn't cry, Oh my God, when the car goes off the bridge.

Several months ago, Brigadier General William R.

Arnold, I should say several years ago, chief of the chaplains of the Army of the United States, released a story from his files, and he produced evidence of the reaction of a soldier to the screeching shadows of death flying from the skies.

He tells of the experience of Lieutenant uh Colonel Warren Clear on the baton.

The Colonel, who was never a churchgoer, leaped into a foxhole in the midst of an intense bombardment from the air.

The sergeant squeezed over to make room.

When explosions opened the earth and ripped trees round about, the noncom prayed aloud without any shame.

Words forgotten since childhood soon came to the officer's lips as he echoed his companion's prayer for divine protection.

After the enemy planes had passed over, Clear remarked more to himself than to his companion, We prayed.

Yes, replied the other quite casually, we did.

There are no atheists in foxholes.

Amen.

This is but an echo of the statement of Psalm 14, verse 1.

Psalms 14:1

The fool had said in his heart, There is no God.

The fact of God is the basis of all logical thinking, the foundation of any rational conception of the origin of things, the only hope for individuals or nations in time or eternity.

God is the only scientific and satisfying explanation of the universe and all things therein.

An infidel science boasts that it needs no God.

In his place it places evolution, which satisfies neither mind nor spirit.

It answers nothing.

The believer in creation and God is sometimes ridiculed because he accepts the supernatural.

The sophisticated scientific infidel professes to reject anything which savors of miracle and confidently appeals to natural law.

Will he then be good enough to explain to me, by natural law, how I can send an electric current through a copper wire at sixty degrees below zero, and at the other end heat a platinum wire to thousands of degrees?

Where was that heat?

Where did it come from?

What is the electricity?

A storage battery weighing fifty pounds fully charged, will do work in lifting one hundred pounds until its soul has been discharged.

Still, the battery has lost none of its fifty pounds.

Why?

How?

Explain.

You say I don't believe in the supernatural.

You believe in the supernatural, you practice it every day of your life.

There's no end to questions like these, revealing that we are compelled to accept many things contrary to reason and law as we understand them.

Actually, however, an evolutionist proclaims his faith in the most amazing miracle, and yet can suggest no power or method that could possibly perform them.

We do believe in miracles, and we have a miracle working God.

He spake and it was done.

He commanded and it stood fast, the Bible says.

That certain laws operate in the universe is obvious.

Behind the law must be a law giver.

We observe plan and design everywhere requiring a designating influence and a designing influence to bring them into action.

To persist in affirming that no God is needed to account for the intricate and exact operations of nature is to deny the irresistible logic of our reasoning faculties.

A multitude of great scientists have thus been compelled to admit the existence of a supreme personality.

There is no other adequate solution that can satisfy our minds questioning.

Dr.

Robert A.

Milliken wrote the in the commentator Everyone who reflects at all believes in God.

To me it is unthinkable that a real atheist should exist at all.

If you in your conception identify God with nature, you must attribute to him consciousness and personality, or better, superconsciousness and superpersonality.

You cannot possibly synthesize nature and leave out of it its most outstanding attributes, nor can you get these potentialities out of nature no matter how far back you go in time.

In other words, materialism is commonly understood as an altogether absurd and utterly irrational philosophy, and is so regarded, I believe, by most thoughtful men.

Now this affirmation of faith by Dr.

Milliken is important.

Many other scientists hold the same opinion, but it must be granted that they are in the minority.

There is not the same gross materialism which has so vocal uh was so vocal twenty-five years ago, but everywhere there is hesitancy in admitting what seems to be obvious, namely that all the proven facts of science indicate the necessity of a supreme creator, and that evolution has been proven to be a complete and total farce.

Why the evolutionists now are looking to the outer space and hoping to find a Space Brother UFO god that they can blame on kicking the apes over the hump.

Because Charlie Darwin's monkey man just hasn't held water.

This creator must have personality.

In other words, the Bible antidated by many centuries this great discovery that scientists are just now having to face up to, somebody had to bring man into being.

Somebody had to give life to man as we know him.

So rather than give glory to the true and living God, they're trying to contact some uh bald headed fella in a one-piece jumpsuit with three fingers, flying around in a in a metal trash can.

In spite of this corroboration offered by reluctant modern science to the accuracy of the scriptural description, of the s God of the universe, the current references to him are extremely hazy and indefinite.

Why should this be?

The answer's not hard to find.

If there is a God, such as the Bible writes about, then follow other inescapable implications with the s which the scientists just don't want to face up to.

For instance, if there is a personal God, possessed of omnipotence and omniscience and omnipotence, he must have had the ability to transmit to us his revelation regarding his purpose in the creation of man, including the startling truth of man's fall and God's plan for his redemption.

This revealed plan involves not only recognition of the existence of God, but it necessitates a surrendered will to Jesus Christ God's Son, the divine substitute for mankind who died on behalf of doomed humanity, sentenced because of sin to eternal death.

And more than this, God's word says there is no other way to eternal life but this one way, this one way of faith in the Son of God and submission to him in all things which constitute our daily living.

Here's where the real difficulty lies.

Jeremiah tells us that the the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.

This tremendous fact is hardly realized until we're face to face with the necessity of making a decision which involves the acceptance of a righteous Savior and a change of life habits.

It is then that man discovers that all his natural tendencies are evil and he finds himself rebelling against this enmity with God.

Finding he has the power to defy God without any immediate result decides that he may continue this attitude and in some way more pleasing to himself and apart from God ultimately get to heaven.

But as sure as God is real and personal, so is the devil.

This great enemy of God is a religious enthusiast.

He's a fanatic it is commonly thought that he specializes in making men immoral and debased so that they become beasts and depraved, ending their career in the gutter, but this is far from being true.

What the devil most desires and labors ceaselessly to do is secure a host of followers who will be outwardly as moral and excellent as the true disciples of Jesus Christ, but who will refuse to acknowledge the claims of Christ.

Thus Satan sets himself in opposition to God, builds for himself a widespread kingdom as he attempts to dethrone the creator God.

He appeals to the pride of man and declares that man has in himself that spark of divinity which is the same as that possessed by Christ.

He urges us to remain masters of our own fate, to think positively, to find God within yourself.

He argues that it is humiliating to think that we must place ourselves in the power of another such as Jesus Christ.

That this is a very potent and persuasive line of reasoning is easily seen.

It's very popular among ministers falsely so called of our day.

It agrees with our natural inclinations as human beings it enables us to enjoy pride of accomplishment and discovery without any abject surrender of our wills and selfish desires.

And so the great men of the world for the most part turn away from acknowledging God, repenting of their sin, and receiving Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Savior.

They prefer to maintain what they think is control of their own wills but in reality they become slaves to God's arch enemy the devil.

Now let's make this matter real personal Every one of you is a bond slave to the Lord Jesus Christ or a bond slave to the devil.

You are not free.

You belong to one or the other.

Who is your master it's a glorious privilege to line up with God, receive his Son Jesus Christ, be sure of eternal life in heaven, knowing the present blessedness of the man who fellowships with God and walks with him.

And to those that have received Jesus Christ as their Savior they face the future unafraid with a sure expectation of glory that will never end.

I tell you the Lord Jesus Christ is a wonderful Savior.

He's the only Savior the only one provided by God.

Jesus Christ said of himself I am the way the truth and the life no man cometh unto the Father but by me.

But him that cometh unto me I will in no wise cast out.

Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest.

I am the light of the world he said I am the bread of life I am the resurrection I am the true vine I am the bread of life I am the living water Jesus Christ the Savior of the world is he your Savior?

There is no excuse whatsoever for not believing in God.

There is no excuse whatsoever for not receiving Jesus Christ as your personal Savior other than pride and rebellion.

Humble yourself please before it's everlastingly too late.

Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved thanks for tuning in today.

Join us every weekday for another episode of the Preaching of the Cross radio podcast for hundreds of hours of in-depth expository Bible teaching please visit our YouTube channel James W.

Knox Sermon, our sermon audio page Bible Baptistland or our website BibleBaptistoland.com until next time and throughout eternity may Jesus Christ be praised