The Creator Revealed

Good Creation and Natural Evil

Three Angels Broadcasting Network

Program transcript

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Series Code: TCR

Program Code: TCR180009A


00:31 Welcome to The Creator Revealed.
00:34 I'm Tim Standish and I'm a scientist.
00:38 Scientists are trained to observe things in nature.
00:43 And one of the things that we observe is evil.
00:48 Yeah, you know, last time we talked about
00:50 human in relational evil,
00:53 but this time,
00:55 we're going to talk about evil in nature, natural evil.
00:59 And we're so glad that you have joined us because,
01:02 you know, this is such an informative series,
01:05 and we're glad that you're enjoying it.
01:07 You know, before we actually go on,
01:09 I do want to point out that what we call evil
01:14 is really something that is subject to definition.
01:19 And we shouldn't be distracted by the evil
01:23 from all of that is wonderful out there in nature as well.
01:27 From the biblical perspective, we do acknowledge evil,
01:30 but we also recognize the good
01:35 and we believe that the good was created by God
01:40 at the very beginning.
01:41 Amen.
01:42 Moses wrote about this creation in this way in Genesis 1:31.
01:47 He said, "Then God saw everything that He had made,
01:51 and indeed it was very good."
01:53 Very good.
01:55 "So the evening and the morning were the sixth day."
01:57 So now they're going to go on into the Sabbath
02:00 and rest and spend that time together with God.
02:05 I can't imagine how beautiful the creation was.
02:09 And yet, we see things today that are the result of sin.
02:15 Those, sin is evil,
02:17 and the results of sin are evil consequences,
02:22 death, suffering, tears, pain.
02:25 So God cursed the earth because of the fall,
02:28 because of the evil.
02:30 Yes, Oh and human beings
02:33 chose the evil over the good.
02:37 It seems incredible,
02:39 in retrospect that would happen.
02:42 And yet,
02:43 I know that I've made that same decision myself on occasion.
02:48 But and, you know, when you think about deception,
02:51 sometimes people don't realize that what the devil hands us
02:55 can be in a shiny foil package with a beautiful bow.
03:00 And it's nothing more than gift wrapped garbage.
03:03 Unfortunately, that's the case of
03:05 and yet we go for it on occasion.
03:08 And in fact, I think we're going to talk right now
03:11 about some gift wrap garbage.
03:12 Okay. That's kind of harsh.
03:14 I believe that Charles Darwin was very brilliant man.
03:18 And that he understood the implications
03:20 of what he was saying.
03:22 And that's one of the things that we are contemplating now.
03:24 Because he, remember he had this
03:26 alternative materialistic conception of reality.
03:29 And he wrote this, he said, "From the war of nature,
03:34 from famine and death,
03:37 the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving,
03:40 namely, the production of the higher animals,
03:43 directly follows."
03:47 Wow.
03:48 Well, so what Darwin is saying is that thing that we all know,
03:53 in our hearts is awful, death, suffering, war,
03:58 those sorts of things,
03:59 that that is what produced the beautiful things.
04:02 Yeah.
04:04 Whereas the biblical view,
04:07 the reality that's actually out there
04:09 is that God created all of that beauty,
04:12 all of that wonder, and the death, the suffering,
04:17 that evil is an imposition
04:19 on God's originally very good creation.
04:23 So these are very, very different views of things.
04:26 Why would a Darwinist consider war and death to be bad?
04:31 It's a good thing.
04:32 It makes wonderful things like human beings,
04:35 and eagles and, you know,
04:39 all of those things that we kind of wonder about.
04:41 What a convoluted way of thinking though...
04:43 Well, it is. In my mind.
04:45 But you say that, because you're coming at it
04:47 from a biblical perspective, yes.
04:50 But from a Darwinian perspective,
04:52 you could not say that,
04:55 it's the only logical thing from a Darwinian perspective.
04:58 I mean, you just look at pictures
05:00 of what's going on in Syria, for example,
05:03 how can anyone say war is good,
05:05 how can anyone say something is resulting
05:08 that's good from that
05:09 when you see all the destruction and suffering?
05:12 God has built into us
05:14 that fundamental understanding.
05:17 Amen. It is evil.
05:18 And evil is a bad thing. It doesn't produce good things.
05:23 In fact the Bible, again, this is Paul writing,
05:26 in the New Testament, he says,
05:27 "The last enemy to be destroyed is death."
05:31 Death is not our friend.
05:32 Death is not our Creator,
05:35 or part of the process of creating us.
05:38 Death is the enemy.
05:40 And Jesus Christ, our Creator, of course, overcame death.
05:45 Now I want to address one of the arguments
05:47 that's commonly put forward
05:49 about the creation when we look at it.
05:52 Remember, this is what scientists do,
05:54 we look at things and as I said, you know,
05:56 I look at nature and I see evil things.
05:59 I see things that break for example.
06:03 And there is this argument out there because nature breaks,
06:08 it doesn't work the way we think it should do
06:10 that somehow or other that is evidence
06:13 so that isn't created.
06:15 However, that is a flawed logic.
06:17 This is a picture here that I'm showing of a Ford Pinto.
06:22 Was this yours? And no, it wasn't mine.
06:27 Now, Ford Pintos.
06:30 They frankly were terrible cars.
06:33 I think anybody who's had an encounter with a Ford Pinto,
06:35 though they're probably a few Ford Pinto fans out there.
06:38 I'm sorry.
06:39 But that they just terrible vehicles
06:43 and but nobody doubt, so they were designed.
06:47 And they were designed for a purpose.
06:50 That, so even bad design is still design,
06:55 it still requires a mind.
06:57 The question really is,
06:59 is the design a good
07:01 or is the design an evil?
07:04 Is God good when we see these broken designs?
07:08 So let's just take a look at some of these things.
07:10 Oh, this is my beautiful dog, Jack.
07:14 And you can see he was so intelligent,
07:16 so full of love.
07:18 What Jack's doing here is
07:19 he's actually climbing into my suitcase.
07:21 He knows you're packing and leaving.
07:22 He knows I'm packing.
07:24 He wanted to come home with me.
07:25 And only less than a year ago,
07:29 I held Jack in my arms while he died.
07:33 And that was an awful, awful experience.
07:37 In fact, just talking about it now,
07:39 it kind of, it makes me, it makes me profoundly sad.
07:43 What a wonderful, lovely creature.
07:45 How can it be that our bodies grow old and we die?
07:50 How can that happen?
07:52 Well, you know, the wages of sin are death,
07:54 we know that.
07:56 So, you know,
07:58 the Bible doesn't ignore this suffering
08:00 and pain that we're in.
08:02 In fact, in Romans, Paul also wrote this,
08:06 he said, "We know that the whole creation
08:08 has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth
08:12 right up to the present time.
08:13 Not only so, but we ourselves,
08:16 who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly
08:20 as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons,
08:24 the redemption of our bodies."
08:26 You see, the Bible provides hope,
08:29 the same God who created us.
08:32 Our Creator is our Redeemer,
08:35 and He adopts us, even though we rejected Him.
08:40 It's an amazing.
08:42 It's such incredibly good news.
08:45 It's rooted in our thinking about the creation.
08:48 And, of course, Paul also wrote this,
08:51 "Through one man sin entered the world,
08:53 and death through sin,
08:55 and thus death spread to all men,
08:57 because all sinned..."
08:58 This is in Romans 5,
08:59 he actually says the same thing over and over again,
09:01 so that we get it right.
09:02 We can't misunderstand here.
09:05 Death is a result of sin. Okay, and that's...
09:09 We can say, okay, that's a natural result.
09:11 You know, we separated ourselves from the life giver.
09:13 And it doesn't mean, you know,
09:14 I just want to say this in case there's somebody
09:16 watching who thinks, well, my two year old just died,
09:18 he didn't sin.
09:20 We're not talking about
09:21 the direct correlation of what you did.
09:24 I mean, maybe for the second death, yes.
09:26 But just that when sin entered the world,
09:30 everything started decaying.
09:31 It is going to be recreated.
09:33 That's right.
09:35 And this is one of the reasons that death is so awful
09:37 because it's so unjust.
09:39 Yes.
09:40 The righteous die
09:41 and the sinners die, everybody dies.
09:43 I mean, you know, this is,
09:44 we know this is not the way it should be.
09:46 Right.
09:47 But there's another kind of evil out there.
09:49 And I'm illustrating it with this viper here.
09:52 It's a rattlesnake, obviously.
09:54 And when we look at them,
09:56 when we look at their system of envenomation,
09:58 it looks like it's designed.
10:00 How do we account for that as Christians?
10:05 And the truth is, we don't know.
10:09 We don't know how that system
10:12 that has only one purpose and it is to kill.
10:16 How did that come into being?
10:18 The problem is that
10:20 we have too many possible explanations.
10:23 Yes.
10:24 Some people say the devil did it.
10:26 Some people say it's just sort of some kind of
10:29 natural consequence of things breaking down.
10:32 Some people even say God did it,
10:34 you know, God, somehow or other
10:36 when He cursed the earth and certainly
10:38 He specifically cursed snakes.
10:40 Maybe that was it, we don't know.
10:45 It's a mystery.
10:46 It is a mystery,
10:47 but what we do know is that
10:49 there is still an awful lot of beauty and goodness
10:53 that is evident in the creation.
10:55 And, oh, we also know, by the way,
10:58 that snakes are not alone.
11:00 I like tarantulas,
11:02 it kind of like a story things.
11:04 But they do have venom and they can inject it into.
11:08 So you do have to...
11:09 Don't go and pick up every tarantula out there
11:11 as I'm doing in this photograph.
11:14 But just understand, hey, you know,
11:16 there's lots of this that we see out there.
11:19 But here's what the Bible tells us.
11:22 This is Paul again, he's writing to Timothy,
11:24 my namesake.
11:26 And he says, "Here is a trustworthy saying
11:28 that deserves full acceptance:
11:30 Christ Jesus came into the world
11:33 to save sinners of whom I am the worst."
11:37 I could say the same thing about myself as well.
11:40 Yes, and that's really what the Bible brings to us
11:44 the promise of a solution to this problem.
11:46 It recognizes the problem and provides a solution.
11:50 And what the solution is, is the new creation.
11:54 And we have this wonderful view of the new creation in Isaiah,
11:58 the Book of Isaiah, which talks a lot about creation,
12:00 by the way.
12:01 Here, he writes,
12:03 "The infant will play near the cobra's den,
12:07 the young child will put his hand
12:09 into the viper's nest."
12:10 Why?
12:12 Because there will be no death, no suffering,
12:14 that's all going to be eliminated
12:16 in God's new creation.
12:19 Amen.
12:21 I'm just struck by the hope that the Bible gives.
12:27 It's not a book of sort of idealism or made up stories.
12:34 It is a book about reality,
12:36 the real things that are going on in the world
12:39 that we observe all around us,
12:41 but it is also a book about the reality that is coming.
12:47 It tells us what the solution to what we know is wrong is.
12:52 Amen.
12:54 So what does this natural evil tell us about the Creator?
12:58 Well, there are a couple of things
12:59 that are important points so we can pull out of this.
13:01 First, His selfless sacrifice
13:05 to overcome the impact of sin on His creation.
13:11 The evil makes that whole the more meaningful,
13:13 he suffered as we do.
13:15 And it also tells us about His original plan for His creation.
13:20 Remember, he had a plan of salvation
13:22 that again reveals his selflessness.
13:25 So the created things made evil by sin,
13:28 reveal the Creator's selflessness.
13:32 And that always blows my mind
13:34 when I think about the fact that He knew
13:37 before He created us,
13:39 with His foreknowledge, things were gonna go south,
13:42 and yet He planned before He even created us
13:47 to come down here, become a man and save us.
13:51 Ooh! That's amazing.
13:53 Well, we are going to take just a moment's break
13:56 and come back with a very interesting guest.
13:59 So please stay tuned.


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Revised 2019-04-15