The Book of Hebrews - Colossians 2:8 No one will take your Kids captive - Part I
Colossians 2:8 · Vern Peterman · Jul 6, 2014
Hebrews, No. 59
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://www.hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/4926433326509

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

Good morning. Today's message is going to be a little different from the usual, in that typically what we're doing is going through scripture, in the New Testament particularly, and in shorter books, verse by verse. But because we've been going through this series on parenting, one of the things that we wanted to add to it, and I've decided actually to split it up between today and next Sunday, is to talk about an issue that increasingly is becoming something that both the church and parents need to pay special attention to.

This is the verse that Courtney just read for us, Colossians 2.8, see to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception. That, unfortunately, is what is happening largely through everything from the public school system to programs on TV and that sort of thing. And we're talking about essentially that a godless viewpoint in the world and the idea that everything just kind of evolved by chance.

Now there's not only the hazard here that was just read for us in Colossians 2, 8, but Colossians 4, 5, and 6 gives us the opportunity. Okay, so here's the opportunity, the flip side of the hazard. Conduct yourselves with wisdom toward outsiders making the most of the opportunity Let your speech always be with grace as though seasoned with salt so that you will know how you should respond to each person Okay, there's the opportunity before us here now So this Colossians 2 8 is see to it that no one takes your kids captive is the parenting. I Application here this word Translated captive means to be taken captive by pirates or thugs. Okay, that's the specific Word and it says in Colossians 2 8.

What are they going to do? They're going to use human philosophy and empty deception and we're going to see that here this morning Okay, the picture that today's aggressive skeptics paint Is that? The skeptic stands on reason and evidence and science, but the Christians just have groundless faith, even believing things in spite of the facts. It's science versus religion. That's how it's presented. But that is deceptive, as we'll see here this morning.

One of the points we made when we were going through Hebrews chapter 11. is everybody has faith. It is only a question of where you put it. Everybody has faith. It's only a question of where you put it. Here's how we've written Ephesians 4, 11 through 14, particularly with application for parents. So this is not pretending to be scripture, but it's taking the message accordingly. And Christ gave parents to bring up the children entrusted to them, through love and discipline, instruction, example, exhorting, encouraging, and imploring, for the equipping of the children for the work of service God has set before them, to the building up of your own family and of their families, each a part of the body of Christ, until we in our families and in the body of Christ all attain to the unity of the faith and to the knowledge of the Son of God, so that we bring up our children toward spiritual maturity as measured by the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ himself, to the end that our children will not be tossed here and there by waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, and by craftiness in deceitful scheming. There is trickery in what is being announced today. You know that these aggressive atheists are saying that for you to bring them to church like this and to teach them the Bible at home is child abuse. Yes, that's the claim they've made.

Some of the outspoken aggressive atheists out there are Richard Dawkins, I bought 17 of his books, so I'm going to pick on him this morning. Sam Harris is another one, and James Randi is another one. They each kind of have a little different emphasis. Richard Dawkins is the one that I'm going to be picking on, particularly because we'll be talking about creation and evolution.

There are even ex-Christian aggressive atheists. This fellow, Edward Babinski, I used to take note of little articles he would write back in the 1980s, and articles and, you know, little pieces that he would write when he was a Christian. And since then, he's left the fold, and he's compiled a series of testimonies of those who have left the fold. And what's interesting is in recent years, he's taken note of me. So anyway, fascinating. All right.

Now, we ask this question, is the skeptic secretly a believer? They don't like to claim it, but in fact they are. They are secretly believers. Now, it doesn't mean that they believe like you and I do, but they're secretly believers. Does the skeptic believe in things for which there is no evidence and even believe in miracles without a God?

Can the skeptic go back in time to verify any dates or processes or events from millions of years ago? Well, let's answer the first question. The answer to the first question, yes, the skeptic does believe in things for which there is no evidence and even believes in miracles without a God. The answer to the second question is no, the skeptic cannot go back in time to verify anything.

What happens is they don't really know about the past, they know about the present and then make assumptions about the past. Because we can never go back into the past to check anything, all we can do is observe and measure and look at the present and make assumptions about the past. That's it. That's as far as you can go. Now, we have this little chart here and before you think, oh no, Vern's got another chart.

What we're saying here is there are different gradations of science and history. Right here, this is the optimum, this is the shaded area, this is the optimum realm of science where it's presently observable, where it's repeatable. You have controlled inputs and controlled outputs. This is the ideal realm of science with those processes. Now, let's take it for instance. If I came along and I said water freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit or zero Celsius. You could check me on that. Take a thermometer, put it in, and find out when does water freeze. What temperature does water freeze?

And we could have various people check on that, and it's a repeatable event. And we can have a number of people check on it. It's a repeatable event. You can go back and one person can look at it, another person can take a look at it and check it out. That's the optimum realm for science. You don't find people arguing and having great big discussions and publishing books arguing about what temperature water freezes at. It doesn't happen. Why?

It's because it's repeatable. Anybody can check out, right? When we go back into history, we do have human record, sometimes multiple human records of events and processes and whatnot, but we can't repeat it. We can't repeat it. Can't go back and check on something. Let's take it for instance. Can we go back and ask the signers of the Declaration of Independence any questions? Is the event repeatable? Well, no. You can't go back and ask questions.

The event's not repeatable. So history, even though it's recorded, history is of a different character than present-day repeatable science. You're starting to step outside of the optimum realm of science. Next, you get into the past non-historical processes. There's no human record of it taking place. You're stepping even farther outside the optimum realm of science. Can you go back and repeat something in the past that's not recorded? No, you cannot. Can you go back and check on it and make sure you're drawing the right conclusions? No, you cannot.

Here, for example, is a trilobite fossil. It's one that I hunted some decades back in Antelope Springs, Utah. Antelope Springs, by the way, is about 49 miles off the paved road. This is one that they say is about half a billion years old. Can anybody go back and check to make sure that it's a half billion years old? No, you cannot. Can I repeat it? No, I cannot. So all I can do is I can look at the present and make assumptions about the past. That's the way the unrecorded past is. That's what it is by nature.

So let's allow for a moment. that the universe is billions of years old, we're not going to argue that point, and that the dating system for that long age of the Earth is valid. We'll allow that for the moment, for this morning. Assuming those ages of time, let's examine what's supposedly known about ancient life on planet Earth. We'll only look at a sampling of the evidence. Obviously, we're going to keep things within reasonable time, so you won't be going home at three o'clock. That'll be good.

So we'll keep it limited. Now, what you have is miracles without evidence and without God. Given decades of time, and I mean a number of decades of time, and a great number of master of science and PhD scientists with multi-million dollar laboratories, no one has yet observed a living cell being generated from non-living material. Hasn't happened. There's not one. Nobody's observed that.

In 1953, oh, about the time I was that age, the Miller-Urey experiment produced over 20 different amino acids. That's all. And they keep referring to this experiment after decades have gone by. All they produced was amino acids. Are amino acids a cell? Amino acids are not a cell. Amino acids are not a cell. There is much more than just having a mass of amino acids.

The skeptic believes that life evolved from a single-celled organism that came about by chance alone, without any scientists, or multi-million dollar laboratories, and without any, as in none, scientific evidence that this can take place. Under the most ideal conditions, scientists have not been able to make a cell out of non-living material. Hasn't happened. If scientists can't do it under the most ideal conditions and with a great deal of training, what are the odds that that's going to happen by chance? Not great.

In order to demonstrate that life could have, notice that, could have come from non-living material, it would not be sufficient to have produced a living cell from non-living material. Why? The single cell that was produced from non-living material would also have to be sustainable. In other words, it wouldn't do to just come up with a cell that just falls right apart, right?

And it would have to be able to reproduce by itself without any help or guidance. No scientist nudging it along. It would have to meet all those requirements. A living cell, sustainable on its own, reproducible. We've never come even close. The best we've been able to do with PhD scientists and multi-million dollar laboratories is produce some amino acids. Not one living, viable, reproducible cell.

If this, however, were achieved in a laboratory, would that mean that it in fact did happen out in the world billions of years ago? It would not. Even if you were able to make that happen, and they have not, even if you were able to make that happen, it wouldn't prove that that's how it happened back then.

Now, the next thing we come upon is what's called the Cambrian explosion. What you have in the fossil record is all of a sudden a great many different kinds of multicellular creatures that are very complex all of a sudden show up in the fossil record. And this is again assuming the dating system is correct. Every existing phyla, that's a major biological category, shows up in that Cambrian period.

Complex structures such as the eyes of shrimp and trilobites come on the scene with no previous fossil record. Suddenly it's there. Here is a close-up of a trilobite eye. Very complex. They have two of them and they've got a brain that knows how to interpret all that.

That came about supposedly by pure chance and it shows up suddenly with no development in the fossil record. Evolution of these creatures without any fossil evidence is faith in miracles without God. It's miracles but without a God. To all of a sudden have an eye form, a complex eye like that form, and in fact there's a great deal of complexity that suddenly shows up.

Here's an artist's rendering of some of the different creatures that show up in that little Cambrian era. Here is the Cambrian explosion with all the different groups that are generated all at one time. At this place that I went, the Wheeler Formation in Utah, that's one of the places. The Burgess Shale and the Marble Canyon, just announced within the last year, are another place and there's also another place over in China. I won't try to pronounce it. My Chinese is beyond rusty. Okay.

The transition from water to land. In order for an aquatic vertebrate, that's basically looking at a fish, to successfully colonize on land, the animal must, four things, withstand the effects of gravity. You see, fish are designed to be suspended in their entire bodies, not point support. The structure of fish is not designed for that. The transition to land has to involve a structural change that allows point support instead of the overall support that a fish has.

It has to be able to breathe air instead of getting its oxygen from water. It has to be able to minimize water loss. When the fish is in the water, plenty of water, no problem. Once it comes out, It has to be able to minimize water loss and keep from getting dehydrated. Next one, it must adjust senses so they're suited for the air, not the water. So there are differences there. All those things have to take place.

So is there a fossil candidate for the transition from water to land, from fish to amphibian? Does that candidate have what it takes to meet the four requirements? Well, Coelacanths, that's how you pronounce that, okay? Coelacanths have been found dating from supposedly 400 million to about 70 million years ago.

And at one point in time, this was looked upon as a transitional species. Why? Because the fins, instead of being real skinny, actually have some substance to them. They call them lobe-finned fishes, okay? And so the coelacanth was looked at as a candidate. It would be a transitional fish, then come out of the water supposedly. Here are the worldwide locations of the fossil finds. A number in the United States, but also other places. Basically every continent except for Antarctica. They've found these coelacanth fossils.

But in 1938, a number of coelacanths, that was the starting year, we found a sense, have been caught or seen underwater at depths of 450 to 600 feet. Is a fish that lives at 450 to 600 feet a good candidate for going up on the land? No. And it's one of the reasons why once they started finding all these coelacanths, they said, no, it's not a good candidate. It doesn't even come into shallow water.

So these fossil coelacanths have been found dating from 400 million to 70 million years ago. We got another question. How come in the last 70 million years there's no fossils of them? But, but, now we find a whole bunch of them living off the coast of Africa and in the Indian Ocean all the way over to Asia, right? Doesn't quite make sense. Something's wrong with the system, it might seem.

Well, so now, Then along comes 2006, the first Tiktaalik, there's another creature, a fossil was found, and they've since found some more. So Tiktaalik was looked upon as, oh, this is our missing link, we've finally got it. One guy even wrote a song about this fossil. I mean, he really got excited about it. Okay, so what you have is this portion of it here in your handout. Now, so September 2009, Richard Dawkins, I told you I was going to pick on him, published the greatest show on earth, The Evidence Revolution.

In that, he says, in almost every particular, Tiktaalik is the perfect missing link. Perfect because it almost exactly splits the difference between fish and amphibian, and perfect because it is missing no longer. We have the fossil! All right! Exciting stuff. Problem.

Four months later, an article was published in Nature, January 2010, footprints 18 million years earlier than the oldest Tiktaalik fossil. So that means that this footed creature had already developed and already gotten on land 18 million years earlier than Tiktaalik. So do you think that that's made them give up on Tiktaalik? No. National Geographic published an article on Tiktaalik in January of this year. They're still keeping it up, even though this has disproven it. Here the footprints found another shot, and you've got this one in your handout there.

Now, let's talk rodent to bat evolution. We've brought this up previously. We're not even talking rodents of unusual size, okay? Okay. Okay, in the past, We presented the supposed evolution of rodents to bats, and it goes like you see in the diagram, and you also have it on your handout there, where there would be from rodents to bats, a gradual transition, right?

Now, there are about 1,250 species of bats worldwide, and about 1,050 species of those use echolocation to orient themselves, and most of those also to hunt down their food, okay? The evolution from rodents to bats would mean that the bodies, and not just the physical features, and the brains, right? Anybody see any flying mice?

So, the bodies and the brains of the bats evolved to allow multiple new capabilities, but no fossils support this. The fossil support from the rodent to the bat is non-existent. It doesn't exist. Nothing. Belief in evolution of these creatures without any fossil evidence is faith in miracles, as we'll soon see, without a god. Here's an example.

This is the largest bat, the flying fox. It weighs in as much as three and a half pounds. It has a wingspan just shy of my arm span. So this is a very large bat. The smallest bat, however, on the other end of the scale, This is a penny to scale, right? Smallest bat weighs two grams. A penny weighs two and a half. So quite a range in these creatures. And you have this on your handout here.

Insectivore bats, those bats that eat insects, they produce ultrasonic that's above the human hearing range. They produce ultrasonic Little noises that they use for echolocation. They're brief. It's measured in thousandths of a second. Milliseconds. The echolocation sounds increase in frequency as the bat gets closer to the target. In this picture, maybe a moth. These bats have four stages. First, they search and then they begin their approach. They track and then there's the terminal stage when they have very intense sounds in order to make sure that they grab hold of the moth or whatever the insect is. From the time they find the insect, let's say a moth, till the time when they capture it is one second.

What you see in this diagram is each place the bat is shown in the picture is a tenth of a second. And then what you'll see is these little hash marks across there, the bat's making an echolocation sound. So within two echolocation sounds, the bat goes from, I found you, to I'm starting to change my course.

And at that point in time, he has already made a projection of the speed and the direction that the moth is headed. and he's begun to change his course to intercept the moth. Okay, this is some very complex mathematics. As he gets closer, he continues to monitor the speed and direction of this moth. And then when he gets into the last tenth of a second, he lets out a great number of these echolocation sounds and captures the moth. All this happens from search and all this course correction, all within one second. Now, that's pretty amazing, isn't it? Does that happen by chance? Not so much.

Near New Braunfels, Texas is the Bracken Bat Cave. Home to the world's largest colony of bats, estimated to have 20 to 40 million bats in one cave. These bats are amazing. The estimates vary widely. I was very astounded to see how much they vary, but the middle of the estimates is that these bats here at this cave eat 100 tons of insects a night. Lots of insects.

When the bats leave and enter the cave, they all make these echolocation sounds by the thousands. And do you know what? They each can identify their own sound in the midst of this din of echolocation sounds. And they don't get disoriented and they don't bang into each other. Isn't that astounding? It's amazing. Now, Here's the journal of mammalian evolution, fossil evidence and the origin of bats. Here's this scientist Gunnell and Simmons.

They said the phylogenetic and geographic origins of bats, chiroptera, that means hand wing, by the way, remain unknown. That's code for there is zero fossil evidence that rodents evolved into bats, none. Now some have said of those larger flying foxes that they descended not from rodents but from primates, but there's no evidence for that either. There is no evidence for any evolution into bats, but suddenly they have this amazing ability to fly and this amazing ability to use echolocation to orient themselves and to hunt down their prey with some very complicated mathematics built into their instinct.

In Nature, February 14, 2008, these same authors reported a new find. A fossil supposedly two million years older, 52 and a half million years old in Wyoming, is supposedly the oldest fossil. The oldest known bat fossil looks like a bat. That's as old as it gets. That's it. It's a bat.

I'm going to pick on Richard Dawkins again. Richard Dawkins wrote the greatest show on earth, The Evidence Revolution, and he talks about bats and he shows bat skeletons and goes on and on and on. He really talks about a lot. In The Blind Watchmaker, he goes on and on and on for dozens of pages about bats, and he returns to talking about bats.

Nowhere does Richard Dawkins tell the reader that there is no fossil evidence whatsoever to support the evolution of bats from rodents. Nowhere. Empty deception, Colossians 2.8. Go on and on, tell you the bats evolved, but nowhere disclose that there is zero fossil evidence to support it. On page 174 of The Greatest Show on Earth, He writes, as the giraffe's neck slowly lengthened over evolutionary time, from an okapi-like creature to a giraffe, but there's no clear undisputed fossils to support this supposed lengthening over evolutionary time. None. They don't exist. In Climbing Mount Improbable, Richard Dawkins gave these illustrations of a giraffe and an okapi, saying that the giraffe evolved from the creature much like the okapi, basically an okapi-like creature. Now, problem. See the size of that okapi? That's not scale. That's the size of the okapi, okay?

And he didn't mention that there's no clear undisputed evidence. I'll let you decide whether that's deceptive for him to put the copy in a larger size. This tells you the magnitude of the problem with no fossils between. Turtles, same thing. This was from May of last year, current biology. There is a lack of clear transitional fossils. That's why there's all this disagreement. There's no transitional fossils to support the evolution of turtles.

We mentioned previously, this is from an April article that said that there are 338 species of hummingbirds. They're thought to have evolved from the pterosaurs, that's the flying dinosaurs. But there's no clear undisputable transitional fossils there either. Some of those flying dinosaurs have a wingspan of as much as 30 feet.

The hummingbirds here are... By the way, a hummingbird is not to scale with a pterosaur. But the hummingbirds are tiny, tiny, tiny little creatures, very delicate. And we mentioned this bee hummingbird weighs less than two grams, even as an adult. It is shown there to scale with a penny. It's a very tiny little bird. The evidence that it evolved from a pterosaur is not there. None at all.

Now, let's talk about human evolution. Some of the names that you'll see is Neanderthals or Neanderthals, actually in the German pronunciation. And you might think that this guy is some sort of a mock-up of somebody who is Kind of an early man, right? But actually, this is a Russian boxer. Nikolai Valuev, okay? He's a Russian boxer. He was actually twice a heavyweight champion. By the way, he claims to be a Christian. Has a wife and three kids and lives in our era. I mean, he's alive now. Next month, he'll be 41. But his appearance is very much like some of these so-called primitive people, but here he is alive right now.

Now, the other one you may not have heard about, Denisovans, right? So it's like Denise in ovens, right? You get that? So Denisovans, that's the name. Now, it was at one time presented that Neanderthals or Neanderthals were another species related to humans that became extinct, okay? That's the way it was presented. With the discovery of the Denisovans in 2008, so very recently, there was a question as to how they might be related to modern human beings.

So guess what? They found DNA of a Denisovan and DNA of Neanderthals. You know what they found out? Both have interbred with humans. And it very much fogs the line between these particular finds, the Neanderthals and the Denisovans, and modern human beings. Some modern human beings have as much as 3% of Neanderthal or Denisovan DNA. So what you'll see is charts like this, but Instead of the Denisovans and the Neanderthals, you know being a line that ends we find that no in fact They're a whole lot more like us.

Okay, they're basically humans and So here's the way that the fossils all settle out when you look at them. You've got fossils that are human and you got fossils that are some kind of a hominid and and you don't really find a basis for human evolution in the fossils. Human evolution has not been confirmed, except like this. Okay, that we confirm.

Now, there's another term that comes up. I found this very interesting. I noticed that a lot of these articles in the scientific journals have more complex than previously thought. And it comes up quite a bit. There is more complexity than people would or scientists would expect. So more complex than previously thought is a phrase that keeps showing up in the scientific journals and books. In the internet search just a couple days ago, I got, for just that set of words, 762,000 hits, many of which were from scientific articles.

Then, when I was that age, a couple of guys named Watson and Crick announced that DNA was a double helix. They announced that back in 53. Since then, There have been all sorts of discoveries, even to the point now where this DNA study is being used in everything from criminal studies and that sort of thing, used in medicine, used in finding people's ancestry, and it's also used on fossil material if they can find DNA to work with. If you have more complex than previously thought, and then put DNA after that, six million hits.

I was rather astounded by that. DNA is extremely complex and the more we learn about it, the more complexity we find. The ongoing discovery of greater and greater complexity in the natural world, DNA, we talked about the bats and their echolocation system, would seem to make it less and less likely that this universe came about as a result of a series of totally random processes.

It's really not science versus religion. It's one faith versus another faith. Skepticism requires that one have faith many times over. that even though we have not one transitional fossil between the mice, the rodent, and the bat, that evolution still took place anyway. Faith that the Okapi-like creature evolved into a giraffe, even though there is not one piece of evidence to support that. So skepticism does require one have faith many times over, often when there's no evidence to support it.

I'm not talking this sketchy or minimal evidence. I'm saying none. None. In general, there are hundreds and hundreds of transitional fossils missing. Just like the examples I gave here with the bats and the turtles and the giraffes and all that. There are a great number of transitional fossils completely missing. So it's not a matter of science versus faith, but of one faith with no God versus another with faith in God. It's one faith versus another.

And this is something to get across to our kids. This is something for us to get across in church because the attack is coming intensely. And accusations are being made that are teaching our kids the things that we teach here and the things that you teach at home is child abuse. That you ought not to do that.

The skeptic believes in multiple miracles without a God and without revelation or evidence. But the Christian believes in multiple miracles by God as revealed by him in his written word. So, are your children taken captive? This world system, Ephesians 2, 1 through 3 describes it, is increasingly attempting to take your children captive.

The world does so by presenting a deception, science versus faith. It withholds the absence of transitional fossils. So I've rewritten Hebrews 11, 1 here. Now faith is the assurance of fossils hoped for, the conviction of links not seen. The truth is modern science was first established by Christians in that earlier era of Galileo and Isaac Newton and Bacon and those guys. Modern science was established by Christians.

Oh, they weren't all of the same stripe. I'll grant you that. But they had a concept of here is a God who is consistent and orderly, and therefore he created a consistent and orderly universe with a set of laws that can be discovered. That was their starting assumption. Today's aggressive skeptics believe in miracles. Life just comes out of non-life, right? They believe in miracles without a God and take people captive by deception. Oh, Richard Dawkins, don't you dare tell them what fossils we don't have, right?

Colossians 2.8 warns of this very hazard, but Colossians 4.5 and 6 tells us about the opportunity. We do have an opportunity. And with Jude, verse 3, we have an exhortation here that fits.

Beloved, while I was making every effort to write to you about our common salvation, I felt the necessity to write to you appealing that you contend earnestly. That's an intense athletic effort. An intense athletic effort for the faith, which was once for all, that means once done, perpetually valid, handed down to the saints. That's the challenge we have before us. And with our kids, it's important to get these things across. It is also important for us to get these things across to other adults. I've talked to a number of people, and not just here, but across the country, even over in the Czech Republic.

Christians who are pitching their faith because they think that Christianity is just exactly as these aggressive skeptics, aggressive atheists have described. It's just religion in spite of the facts. And they claim to have science behind them. In fact, no, it's an alternate faith. It's a faith in miracles. Miracles without any evidence to support it. and without a God. But guess what? It's not going to work. These guys keep dying. Christopher Hitchens is an example. Died not too long ago. He was in a competition to find out whether cigarettes or alcohol would kill him first. Anyway, he didn't find out how it ended. Okay, so let's take a moment to pray. Lord, we pray, we've kind of taken a different path here this morning than usual, and yet we do see the challenge, and it is big. It's one that Christian parents face. It's one that churches face. And in fact, what's been done is both the skeptic and Christianity have been misrepresented.

And we know that the truth is that you created heavens and the earth in six days just like you revealed. And that the evidence that we do have supports that. We would expect to find no fossils between the mice and the bats. And that's what we do. We thank you, Lord, that you've laid out what's true in your word, and we thank you also that we have information available to check these things out, to find out what is indeed true. We just pray in Jesus' name. Amen.