Dealing with Skeptics

I vividly remember arriving at a church in Melbourne, Australia, one Sunday night several years ago to preach on the relevance of creation. As the congregation and I entered the church, we were greeted by vocal anti-creationist skeptics who were handing out flyers denouncing me as not being a real scientist.

Why? You see, I wasn’t a true scientist because I believe the Bible and therefore teach that the earth is young and that its geology was shaped by the global Flood cataclysm.

When I stood to preach on “Creation and the Scoffers” (from 2 Peter 3), the skeptics were sitting in the pews right in front of me! Undeterred, I went straight into the sermon, pointing out how we can identify who the scoffers are that the apostle Peter prophesied would come in the last days.

These scoffers would be those who would deliberately reject the geologic evidence that the world was destroyed and rebuilt by the global, mountain-covering Genesis Flood. They would instead believe that only present-day slow and gradual geologic processes could have shaped the earth and deposited the fossil-bearing rock layers over millions of years.

Of course, there were howls of protest from the skeptics when I identified these last-days scoffers as the uniformitarian (millions-of-years evolutionary) geologists of our day.

A lesson I had learned years before was powerfully reinforced that night. We had a question time after the church service. Not surprisingly, these skeptics took this further opportunity to denounce me as a fraud. They pointed to supposed scientific evidence that “proved” it had taken millions of years for slow geologic processes to deposit the fossil-bearing rock layers.

I already knew, however, that no amount of counter evidence would convince them. Just as I had preached from 2 Peter 3, these scoffers were willingly ignorant of the overwhelming geologic evidence for the Flood. Their root problem was instead spiritual. They did not want to “retain God in their knowledge,” so their “foolish” hearts were “darkened, professing themselves to be wise, they (had become) fools” (Romans 1:18–32).

Thus, the answer to their problem was not to try to somehow convince them with more scientific evidence. Instead, they needed the Holy Spirit to convict and convince them of the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, our Creator and Redeemer. Only then would they accept the authority of God’s Word in every area it teaches on, including the earth’s origin and history.

All of us need to be constantly reminded that what we see and experience in the world around us only makes sense—and can only be truly understood—in the light of God’s Word. Man is finite, fallible, and ever learning. But God has always existed and is infinite and all-knowing. God’s Word, the Bible, is His eyewitness account of the earth’s history. The geologists weren’t there when God judged the whole earth with the Flood.

Thus, ultimately I know without a doubt that the global Flood cataclysm really did occur—because God’s Word says it did! Even if I couldn’t see any evidence, I would have to accept God’s Word for it! Of course, God has left us with so much stunning evidence for the Flood all around us, but it can only be seen through the “biblical glasses” we acquire when we totally accept the authority of God’s Word.