A “Prophetic” Message

When was the following written? The answer may surprise you:

Our declining society is an outward expression of an inward rejection of the Creator. And our freedoms are being eroded as Christianity is being slowly eliminated. Christians may wake up one day to find Christianity outlawed.

That certainly sounds like a description of America today, doesn’t it? But it was published 26 years ago—in 1988. The paragraph comes from page 97 of a book I co-authored as a companion to The Genesis Solution film that I recorded. The Genesis Solution was released in 1987, featuring a live presentation I gave that the Lord has used to build the Answers in Genesis ministry: we call it the “relevance of Genesis message.”

“Christians may wake up one day to find Christianity outlawed.”

Now back in the 1980s, I had been making the statement that “Christians may wake up one day to find Christianity outlawed.” It was a major part of the talks I was giving in churches in both Australia and the USA. Frankly, many Christians laughed at me for even suggesting that such a change could happen. I remember some Americans back then saying something like, “No, not in America—it could never happen here!”

At the time, I was also challenging the church in the USA and Australia concerning what would happen if God’s people continued to compromise Genesis with millions of years and evolutionary beliefs. For instance, I wrote this in The Genesis Solution book:

As “the Genesis connection” is increasingly removed from modern society and replaced by belief in evolution and secular humanism, we can logically expect various tragic results:

• Decrease in marriage (fewer people will bother with it).
• Increase in suicides, “mercy killings,” and euthanasia.
• Increase in promiscuity . . . and pornography.
• Increase in public nudity. (The only moral basis for clothing and modesty is founded in Genesis.)
• Increase in homosexuality. (The only basis for forbidding it is in the Bible, with Genesis.)
• Decreasing respect for law.
• Increasing government control. Examples: Questioning parents’ rights over their children; government legislation to “protect” children from their parents . . . increasing government control over education; stifling of religious liberty.”

In 1986, I gave a presentation on the relevance of Genesis to Grace Community Church in Tempe, Arizona. An organization called Films For Christ that specialized in producing 16-mm Christian movies (before the advent of video) filmed me giving this live presentation. The filmmakers added some animation (which was quite advanced for a Christian film back then) and turned my relevance of Genesis talk into a movie, The Genesis Solution.

This movie was shown in thousands of churches and other venues. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, saw this film and heard the relevance message. There’s no doubt the film had a dramatic impact on the church as it helped popularize the message that it was important that Christians stand on the literal truth of Genesis.

In some ways, the message I was giving in the ‘80s has been described as a “prophetic” one.

In some ways, the message I was giving in the ‘80s has been described as a “prophetic” one. Now, I am not in any way suggesting that we should be compared to the real prophets of the Old Testament. I’m using a well-understood definition of the word prophetic as it is known today. The Merriam-Webster online dictionary gives the following as one of the definitions of prophetic: “correctly stating what will happen in the future.”

I believe the prophetic warning the ministry of AiG has been proclaiming for decades is being realized before our very eyes.

For instance, here is a transcribed excerpt from the 1980s film The Genesis Solution:

Let’s sum all this up to see what we’re saying. If you remove a basis of the absolute authority from our culture, if you remove the creation basis, you would expect to see all the absolutes collapsing. And we do. We see the Christian ethic falling around us.

Christians are saying the world is getting worse and worse. What’s happening? Why is this so? Well, the more you remove the creation basis and the more you replace it with an evolutionary philosophy that says there is no God, the more you’ll see the increase in all of these issues we have been talking about.

People say to me: “But are you therefore blaming evolution? Are you blaming evolution for what’s happening in society?” The ultimate cause is rejection of God as Creator. But let’s be honest and let’s face reality. What has become the scientific justification for rejecting God as Creator? Evolution.

I also stated in The Genesis Solution:

I would suggest to you that the more people will reject Christian ethics, the more we will see a rejection of marriage, and all the things that are associated with Christianity—the more you’ll see an increase in abortion, homosexuality, pornography, lawlessness. Tell me, do you see those things? . . .

The more people are taught they’re just a product of random processes, and the more they’re taught that they have animal in their ancestry, the more we would expect to see them acting like that. The more they are products of chance, then “Why not do our own thing? Why not write our own rules? We can do whatever we want to do.”

On the other hand, we understand that when it comes to these issues of homosexuality, drugs, abortion, infanticide, pornography, violence, divorce, promiscuity, and so on, they are not the results of animals in your ancestry. They are the results of sin. And as a result of sin, they should not be coddled and justified on the basis of evolution, but they should be condemned and judged, if not first repented and forgiven.

As I recently watched The Genesis Solution again, and re-read the companion book, I realized that this “prophetic” message of the 1980s was being realized before our very eyes today! Because God’s Word does not change, and the heart of man is sinful from conception, the message of The Genesis Solution is just as relevant—if not more so—in today’s culture.

In a sense, I believe God has raised up AiG to be one of those “watchmen” much like the one described in Ezekiel 3:17: “Son of man, I have made you a watchman . . . give them warning from Me.”

It’s a warning that many people in the church are now heeding, as they recognize that by compromising Genesis with man’s fallible ideas of evolution and millions of years, they are undermining the authority of the Word of God. Such compromise has contributed to generations of people leaving the church!

We must teach the current and next generation to defend the Christian faith and build their worldview on the authority of the Word of God.

I believe God has called AiG to a special mission—not only to proclaim the gospel and stand unashamedly and uncompromisingly on God’s Word beginning in Genesis, but to warn the church (as Ezekiel warned Israel) of the dire consequences of compromising God’s Word. We must teach the current and next generation to defend the Christian faith and build their worldview on the authority of the Word of God.

AiG continues to stay true to its mission! If anything, I believe we have become stronger in our presentation of “the relevance of Genesis” and with our warning to the church. I believe that’s because we have become more intensely burdened than ever to do what we can (with the Lord’s direction) to wake up Christians to what is going on in our anti-Christian world!

And despite opposition from many compromising church leaders, we will continue to sound the warning bells in this increasingly secularized church and culture.

As I was writing this letter to you, an article came across my desk. It brought my mind back to the quote I used at the beginning of this letter from the 1988 book The Genesis Solution: “Christians may wake up one day to find Christianity outlawed.”

The Chronicle of Higher Education is highly respected within academia. In a commentary written in the June 2014 edition, the author calls for the following: if a Christian college makes its faculty sign a statement of faith indicating that they believe in the historicity of Scripture, then that would be grounds for losing academic accreditation in “respectable” society. The author also stated the following:

Let me be clear. I have no particular objection to like-minded adherents of one or another religion banding together, calling their association a college, and charging students for the privilege of having their religious beliefs affirmed. However, I have a profound objection to legitimizing such an association through accreditation, and thereby conceding that the integrity of scholarship and teaching is merely negotiable.

The retrograde battle that religious fundamentalists are waging against science has become a melancholy fact of our contemporary cultural life. Legislators around the country conspire to find academic room for the oxymoronic charade called “creation science.”

On the very same day, I read a news item in the Huffington Post that stated, “Senate Democrats are expediting legislation that would override the Supreme Court's decision in the Hobby Lobby case and compel for-profit employers to cover the full range of contraception for their employees, as required by the Affordable Care Act.”

Secularists who are opposing the Christian worldview are becoming increasingly intolerant of Christianity—in fact, trying to outlaw the Christian worldview in many places.

Yes, that “prophetic” message of the 1980s is being realized before our eyes! I thank you for your prayers and support as we carry out our mission of waking up Christians to what’s happening in our world.

We are now offering The Genesis Solution DVD in our web store. Yes, you will see a much younger Ken Ham, with dark brown hair and a strong Aussie accent—and some classic animation of the famous “castle” diagrams. Most of all, you’ll see the “prophetic” nature of the AiG message.

I urge you to help spread the message of the relevance of Genesis to the church and culture, and to enable you to share this message and support AiG’s vital outreaches, you can watch my Relevance of Genesis video on YouTube of the kind of talk that I give today:

Watching the Relevance of Genesis video will, I pray, stimulate you and others to take on the important task of being a “watchman” to call the church and culture back to the authority of the Bible. Please show this video to your church, friends, and family.