Satan’s shadow on our education

There’s a power in the world which is trying to make you not believe. His name is Satan or the devil, and he has a strategy from the beginning: to cause people not to believe.

He’s very active in our society, telling people not to believe the things which I just read. Not to believe in the creed, especially about God as the creator.

If you go to school today, you’re going to be taught evolution, you’re going to be taught that there’s no God. You are going to be taught all sorts of other things which contradict the Bible.

If you come to believe in the Lord, then, you see that there is something different.

I used to work as a schoolteacher. And I worked as a schoolteacher I taught English. I also taught R.E. (Religious Education). In the course of teaching R.E., I used to have lots of discussions with the kids.

I was probably much more evangelical than you’re allowed to be today. In fact, in the 1970s, I was teaching at a place called Tulse School in Brixton.

It was a very rough school. The discipline was terrible. It was a bit like urban guerrilla warfare when you went in. But I had a good time.

I remember one of my first lessons. I started teaching there in the Summer Term, so it was towards the end of the school year. I had one class (I think they were fifth form) who were about to leave school. They had no interest whatsoever in R.E. They had no interest in being there. They couldn’t care less.

I went into the classroom and the students were playing cards. I suggested they shouldn’t play cards. They told me to go away (not quite in those terms), and there was nothing I could do about it because they would not be going to detention, they’d given up on school, so they were just playing cards. And I thought, ‘This is a bit of a raw deal. What can I do about it?’

So, I went and I got some Chick Cartoon booklets (you know, those little booklets with a cartoon with a Gospel message in it). As they were playing cards, I said, ‘You might like to have a look at one of these‘. They said, ‘Absolutely’.

They said ‘Oh these are good little books. Can you get us some more of these books sir?‘

By the end of it, they were all reading cartoon books and we had good discussions about Jesus, and we ended up having a Christian fellowship in the school and all that kind of thing.

A lot of them asked questions about God and the basic question: ‘Do you believe in God?’ even. ‘Do you believe God is the maker of heaven and earth of all things visible and unseen?

Now, when you look at the Bible, it never discusses the existence of God, it assumes there is a God right from Genesis through to the end. It also assumes that God made us. In fact, if you go through the argument about whether God made us, you’ll find it not just in Genesis, it is in the Psalms and the Prophets, in the Gospels and the Epistles. Even in the last book of the Bible, in Revelation, it says that God has created all things ‘for your glory they were made’.

So, the Bible assumes that there is a God but a lot of people say there’s no God, they’re called atheists.

The Bible is not very complimentary about atheists, it says ‘the fool has said in his heart: there is no God’. Because it is foolish, when you look at all the things that exist, to imagine that they came out of nothing. But that’s what a lot of people believe.

I’ve had kids who said to me, ‘if you can prove that God exists, I’ll believe in Him‘. Have you ever said that can you prove that God exists? Now, I can’t prove that God exists.

I can give you evidence that God exists and if you’re looking for proof before you believe it’s the wrong way around.

When you believe, then, you have the evidence and even the proof that God exists. So, you have to believe first and then you get the evidence. You’ll never be convinced if you’re just looking for the proof that God exists, you have to believe first and then He will show you.

There’s a good reason to believe, that God exists. In Hebrew it says,

Therefore, we have faith to believe that God made everything.

Also, people, our kids ask the question ‘who made God?‘ Have you ever asked that question? So, if God made everything, who made God? The answer is no one made God.

God has always existed from eternity to eternity. Now, just ask yourself for a moment: ‘Can you conceive of a being who has always existed with no beginning and no end?‘ Can you? It’s very difficult to, even to get that idea into your head, isn’t it? That someone has always existed. God has always existed.

And yet the Bible tells us that He has. Because we are what we call ‘finite’, we think in terms of time and space, it’s something which we find very hard to understand, the God who is eternal, who has always existed. Yet, we know so, that the universe is eternal, it goes on and on, it doesn’t have a beginning, it doesn’t have an end, and it is always there.

There’s a verse in Ecclesiastes that says,

We can’t fully understand God. We can know God, we can know about Him, but we’ll never understand everything about God because God is different from us. We have to know it.

Other things the kids also said to me: ‘God didn’t make me, my mommy and daddy did‘.

Well, yes, in a certain way you wouldn’t be here except for what your mummy and daddy did, to bring you into the world. But they didn’t set in the process to cause you to come into the world; God did.

And of course, the other thing which people said was ‘Evolution has disproved God‘, and I guess that’s the biggest thing in the world today.

All of our education system teaches evolution. All the nature programs on the telly teach evolution. All the museums teach evolution, it’s considered to be a fact that, in the beginning, there was nothing and that ‘nothing’ exploded and that became the universe.

I don’t believe it; I believe that ‘In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth’.

It’s the first verse of the Bible.

He created that universe. There’s a picture of the universe, a multitude of stars.

He created the Earth, the Earth which is our home, beautiful Earth, with land, sea, light, and darkness.

All things that can support life, whether it’s the air we breathe, the food we eat, the water we drink, the soil we grow the plants in, it all works together for good.

It’s an amazing construction. When you look at the Earth, you’re bound to ask: How did it come about? He also made the sun, and the moon, and the stars.

And He put the earth in exactly the right place, in the solar system. A bit nearer to the sun and we would fry, a bit further away and we would freeze! We’re in the right place, at the right time, and we have everything necessary for life. It all come about by accident!

You have to have a lot of faith to believe that!

The Bible says that God made the days of creation,

He made the light, the dry land, the seas, the trees, the vegetation, the sun and the moon, the sea creatures, the birds, the land creatures, human beings (man and woman).

One thing it says in the first chapter of Genesis is,

Every living thing has a seed within it with which it is able to reproduce. And when it comes to the animal kingdom, it’s able to reproduce because God made them male and female. God made man in His own image.

That doesn’t mean that we look like God, or that God looks like us. It means that we have a spirit part of us which is able to communicate with God. He made us different from the animals and the spirit part of us is able to relate to God.

God made man in His image, He made them male and female.

Another loopy thing they teach you in school now is that you can change from being a boy to a girl if you feel like it or from being a girl to a boy.

This is such an abomination to God! It goes right against what God says.

You can’t. You’re either male or female. If you don’t like being male, well, you have to live with it, you’re not going to change because that’s how God made you.

You’ve got a whole lot of different characteristics from a woman and you can’t change them. In fact, you don’t want to change them because that’s how God made you.

And the idea that you can teach kids that they can change their gender is horrible.

It’s being taught in our schools today and it’s absolutely awful. It’s one of the reasons why our society is in such a mess, because we’re going right against God.

Coming back to Genesis, God says ‘He made them male and female’. Being male and female is important because when the male and the female come together in sexual union, they’re able then to bring forth a child which is how the human race is propagated, so we carry on as part of God’s creation.

Every aspect of this creation is incredibly complicated. It all fits together.

Now I’ve got a computer here. This is my laptop.

It does all sorts of clever things for me. I can type my sermons into it and read out the notes. I can upload the pictures I’m putting in here, I can communicate with people through emails right across the world through the Internet, even communicate with you through Zoom meetings.

If I was to tell you that this computer and everything to do with it came about by some cosmic accident in which all the parts came together at the right time and produced this machine, you would think I was crazy, wouldn’t you?

Yeah, because, obviously, somebody made it, somebody programmed it, somebody put the information into it so that it can function as a computer. It didn’t just come about by accident.

You and I are much more complicated, much more complex, and much more wonderful than this computer.

And, above all, you and I have life, which gives us something which makes us independent of one another, which gives us the power to live our lives differently.

Everything is incredibly complex and it all fits together.

How could it come about without a designer? Somebody had to design it, somebody had to create it.

Now, what about evolution? It’s taught in schools, it’s taught in the TV, it’s taught in the museums.

There are a lot of scientists who do dispute this. We are not told that, but many scientists don’t recognize that evolution is possible.

I’m giving you one or two reasons why it’s not possible. There are a lot of quite complicated reasons. These are quite simple ones:

First, in the beginning there was nothing and ‘nothing’ exploded.

Out of that explosion – ‘the Big Bang’ which happened 4.5 billion years ago – all the planets in the universe out of that explosion.

So, in the beginning it was ‘nothing’, and ‘nothing’ exploded. Out of the explosion of ‘nothing’, a vast universe with millions and millions of galaxies and stars came into being including our planet, our Earth.

A couple of problems with that, aren’t there?

• One: What was there before the big bang? ‘Nothing’ How can ‘nothing’ explode? Nothing comes out of ‘nothing’.
• And: What caused the explosion out of which these millions of galaxies and stars came into being?

I haven’t heard anyone who can give you an answer to that. I’ve never seen anybody give an answer to it. None of the scientists, not Richard Dawkins, nor anybody else.

And it doesn’t matter how many billions of years you put into it, you’re still left with a problem: What was there before it began? And how did an explosion bring order out of chaos? How did this beautiful Earth in which we live,

at just the right time, in just the right place, with just the right conditions for life, come into being out of an explosion?

That’s a picture of some flats in Ukraine two weeks ago.

Nice flat, in summer probably. Quite nice to live there!

That’s a picture of them today. How did they get from that first picture to that second picture?

There was an explosion, a Russian missile hit them. Has that improved the flats? Has it made them better? No.

Is that going to evolve into something which will now be a nice flat again? No.

An explosion does not create anything except disaster after disaster and you can look in the world today, at the universe, and the research says that things are wearing out, they’re not coming together, they’re not becoming more uniform or ordered, they’re going from order to disorder.

For the Big Bang to work, you’ve got to go from disorder to order. There’s no evidence anywhere in history that that has happened or that it can happen.

One of the things which Darwin taught was that in the beginning there was a simple cell which was just a blob and that, out of that simple cell, the blob evolved into more complicated creatures until you went up, and up, and up until you eventually got to human beings.

He thought that the simple cell was that just that, a simple cell, that it came about by some kind of magical process in which some electricity hit the water and out of such ‘explosion’, somehow, something living came into being.

Are there any problems with that? You are telling me there are problems with it!

One of the big problems is that there are no simple cells.

Every living thing that exists, from the simplest cell to the most complex being which is human beings, has billions and billions of pieces of information in it.

In fact, I’m told that even in a simple cell like that, there is more information than there is in this computer.

How did he get there? Somebody must have programmed it. That somebody must be God.

‘Nothing’ comes out of ‘nothing’ and life does not come out of ‘non-life’. It’s not possible.

The only way that life can come into being is if something which itself has life gives it life so that it can exist.

The other point is that, even if this cell with that kind of complexity and what’s inside it, even if that cell does come into being, let’s say by evolution, it has got to be able to feed itself. It has got to be able to breathe, it’s got to be able to reproduce. Otherwise, it’s a dead end.

It might come into being and then it’s finished!

Therefore, unless it has all those qualities right from the start, it’s a waste of time for it to come into being.

One of the interesting things in Genesis is that it says that ‘every living creature has its seed within it’.

If you look at every living creature, whether it’s the vegetation, or it’s in the animal kingdom, it all has a seed within it.

You might like eating peas, but the peas are the seed inside the pea pod which is going to produce the next plant.

Every living creature has got some kind of seed within it. The potato is a seed you can plant it and then, another potato will grow from it.

When you come to the animal kingdom, all animals all creatures have a seed within them with which they’re able to reproduce.

According to the Bible, each creature reproduces after its own kind. Therefore, cats give birth to cats, dogs give birth to dogs, humans give birth to humans, apes give birth to apes, etc.

You have varieties of species like variations within the species. You’ve got different kinds of dogs, you’ve got humans with different skin colours but they’re all humans.

There are variations, but they’re all the same genetic format. And apes cannot mate with humans, cats cannot mate with dogs, they’re different.

Every species reproduces after its own kind.

You’re probably familiar with the ‘ape to man image’ which is in the textbooks and in the museums, which shows the progress from the ape walking crouched to the man walking upright.

A lot of scientists are now saying that this is not true; it can’t have happened this way, that there are qualitative differences between apes and humans which are so vast that it’s clear that there is no connection between them in their coming into being.

It is disputed by scientists.

Also, you have an issue arising from what the Bible says, that man is made in the image of God which, of course, we believe.

This raises the issue called ‘irreducible complexity’. What does that mean?

It means that there is a complexity about everything that is made, which, if you remove it, that creature no longer has any likelihood of life.

If you think about it yourself, as a human being, you’ve got lungs, you’ve got a heart, you’ve got a bloodstream, you’ve got a brain. All those things are incredibly complex. They all must work together and if they stop working for one minute, you’re dead.

Therefore, if they never worked in the first place, you don’t have life.

For evolution to be true all these things have got to come together and to be working together for the creature to have life which proposition is impossible because they’re incredibly complicated.

Darwin once said that the human eye is so complex it could not have possibly come into being by itself, it had to be designed.

So, Darwin recognized that there was a complexity in the human eye.

Richard Dawkins has said that, ‘in over 50 000 generations, a perfectly formed fisheye could have formed’.

Richard Dawkins of course, is an atheist, evolutionist.

He didn’t explain how for fifty thousand generations the fish swam around with no eyes and couldn’t see!

Which is another problem. I don’t even believe that the fish could evolve but instead had to be designed.

However, the problem with evolution is that, if things are becoming more and more complex, they’ve got to become complex so that the creature can live.

And, if it doesn’t live, then it doesn’t live and therefore cannot evolve. It is as simple as that. Everything is incredibly complex.

That’s a picture of the ear. You have got all sorts of little, tiny bits in the ear.

If these bits don’t function together, you can’t hear.

I once had an ear test and went into the practice. The receptionist had this diagram on the wall, and I said that proves to you that there’s a God. Because that could not have come into being by accident, it had to come into being by God.

She turned out to be a Muslim and she agreed with me. But it sort of led into a conversation.

The fact is that everything inside of you is incredibly complicated and fine-tuned. You have all these little bits which must function together.

How could they have come about by a process of evolution? It’s not possible.

This is the biggest one of all, pregnancy, birth, sexual reproduction.

For sexual reproduction to work, there must be a man and a woman, a male and a female. You understand that? Yeah.

The male must be attracted to the female and the female must be attracted to male, and they must have sexual intercourse.

The seed in the man goes into the woman and fertilizes the ovary inside the woman. Out of that seed fertilizing the ovary, the child develops in the womb.

The baby develops over nine months. You know all this stuff. It has a cord which sets it to the mother so it’s fed by the mother.

After nine months, the baby comes up and is born and then feeds on the mother’s milk.

Can you tell me how that could have happened by accident, by evolution? It had to have the male and the female to start with, and they had to come together.

We are meant to have this incredibly complex procedure to come to live. It’s not possible! It can only come about through God.

Evolution says that these things happened over millions of years. The problem with reproduction is that, if it doesn’t work the first time, how many millions of years have they got? None! If it doesn’t work the first time, the creatures, the species is dead.

It must work the first time. Which means that Genesis, which tells you that God made all the creatures including humans with the ability to reproduce after their own kind, is the best explanation about how we come to be here.

Do you agree?

Absolutely! If not, have a chat with me afterwards.

Therefore, in my opinion, evolution is an act of faith which you must believe and it’s something which is impossible, not just improbable, it’s impossible.

Dawkins wrote a book called ‘Climbing Mount Improbable’. He should have written a book called ‘Climbing Mount Impossible’. And it becomes a basis for atheism.

It’s interesting that Richard Dawkins has said, and I quote:

Hey, you’re right!!

Dawkins has understood! He’s looking at the universe. He’s saying there must be something that you should worship: a creator. Then, he says,

So, science has now achieved the ’emancipation from looking at the creation and coming to the conclusion there’s a God’ to now saying that there’s no God and therefore, you don’t have to worship God.

Stupidity!

Romans 1.20 says: