The
Lord God formed man. — Gen. 2, 6.
“CLOSE your eyes and think of
some muddy gutter or frog pond full of stagnant water, with a scorching
sun glittering down on the green slime which floats among the bulrushes
and swamp weeds. These cesspools” — I am quoting verbatim from a
current popular account of the origin of man — “were the cradle of life
on earth.” For millions of years, to cite the opinion of another book,
which for many months was a best seller throughout the country, this
jellylike mass floated about aimlessly. Some of its cells preferred to
move about and became fish. Some of the fish gradually adapted
themselves to live on land, and they became the first reptiles. Some of
the reptiles began to live on the tops of trees, covering themselves
with feathers. They developed into birds. But other reptiles adopted
hair instead of feathers and became the first animals. And now the
climax, which I quote from the bland statement of the original: “One
animal in particular seemed to surpass all others.... This creature,
half ape and half monkey, was your first manlike ancestor, a very ugly,
unattractive mammal. His head and most of his body was covered with
long, coarse hair. His hands looked like those of a monkey. His
forehead was low, and his body was like the body of a wild animal.”
There you have the modern, popularized account of the origin of the
human race, an account which is essentially the same as that which has
been taught to most of the army of young people who in these weeks
graduate from our American colleges.
THE
BIBLE CLEARLY AND REPEATEDLY
ASCRIBES OUR CREATION TO GOD.
As contrary to
this as any two irreconcilable extremes may be, we have this simple,
but sublime record of the Scriptures, which tells us that the Lord God
formed man.” This is the revelation of Heaven, which assures us that
the human race was called into existence by a very direct act of God,
so that you and I must trace the beginning of human existence, not
along the path which leads from some primitive life cells upward to the
bleary-eyed, coconut- munching, trapeze-swinging baboon, but directly
to the creative hand of God, who formed man as His masterpiece, in His
own divine image.
In acknowledging confidently and gratefully, as we
do, this revealed truth, we are, of course, not unaware of the fact
that the animal origin of man has been announced to the world as an
established fact. We know that the curator of our National Museum at
Washington unhesitatingly claims, “It has been definitely established
that man originated from the anthropoid [manlike] apes,” and that a
German authority, with equal positiveness, asserts, “We do accept the
theory of evolution now as the foundation of all our teaching of
biology and social psychology.” But such confident pronouncements,
intensify them as you will, cannot decide the issue. Produce all of the
endorsements for this frightful insult to God that you can; compile all
possible statistics showing the number of teachers in our American high
schools and colleges who accept evolution; bring on all the
reconstructed ape-men, these exotic masquerades of scientific madness,
— and all of this, multiplied to the thousandth degree, cannot begin to
outweigh this divine summary of revealed truth, to which the Scriptures
repeatedly lend such pronounced and emphatic endorsement, The Lord God
formed man.” This is the conviction of the psalmist, who declares, Know
ye that the Lord, He is God; it is He that hath made us.” No room for
natural selection there nor for the theory of oozy life cells clinging
to a rock in mid-ocean! This is the humble confession of the
evangelist-prophet Isaiah, We are the clay and Thou our Potter; we all
are the work of Thy hand.” No accidental origin and ape ancestry in
such statements! This is the unwavering assurance of St. Paul, who says
that Adam was the first man, not the Java ape-man, that mythical
missing link reconstructed from two mysterious bones and two equally
questionable teeth found at different times and different places and
withheld from scientific men m a most significant manner; nor the
Southwestern Colorado man, built up three years ago from part of a set
of ancient teeth, but torn down again when it was found that the teeth
were those of an old horse; nor the more formidable Hesperopithecus
Haroldcookii, built up from that notorious million-dollar Nebraska
tooth, which distinguished scientists described as the molar of an
American ape-man, but which is now admitted on all sides to be part of
the dental equipment of a wild pig. That sublime truth, that the Lord
God formed man,” is finally crowned with the endorsement of the highest
of all authorities, my Lord Jesus Christ, who in the nineteenth chapter
of St. Matthew directly declares His Father to be the Creator of both
man and woman in the beginning. And Christ’s Word, even in things
scientific, is always the unimpeachable truth of heaven.
“But,” some
one says, “is it not true that the theory of man’s animal ancestry,
accepted by some of the greatest scientific minds of our age, rests
upon convincing evidences and demonstrations of fact?” In answer to
that challenge we simply declare: The history of human research is
replete with similar enthusiastically accepted theories, all heralded
as proofs of Biblical inaccuracy, which have become mere punctured
pretenses. When God has spoken, men’s contrary guesses cannot disturb
us. When the Word of God is contradicted by the word of man, it does
not matter how important or authoritative that man may be; his theory,
even if it has the endorsement of learned societies and scientific
bodies, is unprovable. Every argument ever advanced to show ape
ancestry, — the argument from the similar skeletal structure of animals
and men, from fossil remains, from the developing embryo, from blood
tests, from geographical distribution, useless organs, transmutation of
species, — these and a host of other theories, drafted for the defense
of this godless doctrine, have been considered by reputable and
internationally known scientists, and their repeated verdict has been
decidedly negative. It is usually the second-rate mind, the blatant
atheist, the cynical scoffer, who rushes in where more conscientious
investigators fear to tread, the dubious D. D., who, preaching in a
pulpit erected by Christian faith, calls evolution “God’s way of doing
things” or poetically insists: — Some call it evolution, and others
call it God.
But among the
very greatest of the great, a formidable number of truly scientific men
have bowed reverently before the truth of our text, The Lord God formed
man” and declared, in effect, with Pasteur, “Posterity will some day
laugh at the foolishness of modern materialistic philosophy. The more I
study nature, the more I am amazed at the Creator.
When a long list of experts, eminent in the scientific world, denounce
the claims of this delusion that is being taught to our boys and girls
in tax-supported institutions of higher and lower learning, intelligent
Christians dare not accept blindly the unguarded statements that slip
into our Sunday newspaper supplements and our popular magazines and
that repeat, parrotlike, the unfounded fiction of the master minds of
misrepresentation. This is tragic evidence of a human perversion, which
dissipates its energy in the futile task of shooting infidel peas
against the Gibraltar of this divine dictum, The Lord God formed man.
ONLY
FAITH IN OUR DIVINE ORIGIN
INTERPRETS HUMAN PROBLEMS ARIGHT.
No, the truth
of our text remains; and what a world of moral and spiritual strength
the belief in this divine origin must produce in every human heart! It
means, first of all, that you and I are not the mere results of
inexorable fate, that we are not here by animal chance, but that we
have consciously been placed into the world by the loving- kindness and
far-sighted providence of a heavenly Father, who doeth all things
well.” Humanity is not an accident, a chemical coincidence, but it is
God’s supreme masterpiece, created after a counsel of the divine
Trinity.
And the natural conclusion which every child of God
is entitled to draw from such conviction is this: If God made me and
all creatures, if in Christ I can truly call Him my Father, then surely
all the changing fortunes of human existence, all my own questions and
doubts and the sorrows of life may safely be entrusted to Him. He would
not have given me, His child, life and existence only to desert me and
to permit me to fall victim to the overpowering odds with which my life
is surrounded. — For, while the delusion of man’s materialistic origin
leads to the blank, insurmountable walls of despair and so frequently
produces suicide, the acknowledgment of God’s creative love is the
pledge to every one who believes it that no battle in life will be too
hot and hard, no combination of misfortunes too crushing and
calamitous, to destroy the relation that exists between a loving Father
and His beloved child.
We believe in
our divine origin because that belief, and that alone, shows us our
individual moral responsibility and our duties to our fellow-men. If
there is nothing divine in man, if he is only a refined form of the
beast, then all the ideals of clean, constructive living are shattered.
If, according to the materialistic theories of the origin of man,
millions of years ago (how many millions is not important in the lavish
recklessness that finds nothing easier than the production of
immeasurable aeons of time), that from which you and I are supposed to
have descended was a mere blob of protoplasm which came into existence
by accidental chemical action; and if, later, after the lapse of
myriads of other years, this ancestral blob, by the merest chance, be-
came a jelly-fish; and if this change has been repeated in an
interminable series of evolutions, each one an accidental process, so
that you and I can trace our descent, not from the creative hand of
God, but from the grinning gorilla, then the best philosophy of life
for you and me may be this, that we rob and steal and maim and cripple
and carouse and chase from the satisfaction of one lust to the
fulfilment of another vicious desire. If there is no God in heaven who
has placed you and me into this world for a high and holy purpose, then
down with law and order! Away with purity and honor and virtue! That is
the tragic, yet, logical consequence to which the doctrine of a beast
beginning leads. And if you wish to know the dire extremes to which
some apostles of evolution have descended, describing life, as they do,
as a fierce battle in which only the fittest survive, in which aged and
invalids are to be removed from the land of the living, then read
Nietzsche’s description of the superman, in which every vestige of
helpful and sympathetic regard for the needs of one’s fellow-man is
ruthlessly cast aside.
But because
God — thanks be to His holy name! — created man as a moral and
responsible creature and revealed His will to man in the divine Law,
you and I have a conscience, you and I know what is right and what is
wrong, you and I are aware of our duties to others, you and I know the
terror of sin and its devastating force in our own lives. Godless
writers can laugh sin away or brand it as an animal inheritance and
claim, as a recent writer did, that the tramp who meets a child on the
highway, murders her for the few pennies that she clutches in her
little hand, and then throws her body into the ditch is not responsible
for his fiendish brutality. Modern educators can continue to heap up
the iniquity of our present age by ridiculing individual responsibility
and making light of the moral breakdown in the present era of our
nation. The theory of chemical, mechanical, accidental human origin can
deny the depravity of the human race and claim that men are steadily
rising to higher planes and gradually approaching a gilded Utopian age.
We look into our own hearts and round about us, and we see, with all
the progress and advancement of our age, unmistakable signs of
degeneracy, unquestionable evidences of moral and physical collapse;
and knowing God as our Creator, we know by the plain statement of His
Word that we cannot avoid the responsibilities of meeting the demands
of His holiness and perfection and that at an appointed time all who
remain in their sin will be gathered around His judgment-seat to answer
the charges of a broken law.
But because
the God who made us is the God who does not delight in the death of
sinners,” because He is the Lord whose boundless mercies are fresh
every morning, the life that He bestowed upon man is so vital, so
priceless, so precious in His sight that He gave the only potent and
saving solution to the problem of sin that the world knows. He who
created us has not left us as staggering, perishing victims of our own
vices, but has given us — O precious promise of God’s unfailing truth!
— His own Son as the payment for the overpowering debt incurred by our
sins. He who created us, not as glorified animals and high- grade
simians, but as reflections of His own holy image, regards you and me
as of such surpassing importance that in order to restore that image of
holiness and reestablish the relation of loving Father and beloved
children, He paid the greatest price that earth or heaven could offer,
the holy, precious blood of Jesus Christ, shed, poured out, not for
descendants of apes, but for God’s lost children, to older to every
sin-harassed soul that may hear these words to-night the full and free
forgiveness of each and every sin that would separate it from God.
His Cross,
with everything that it implies, — a personal God, a loving God, a
forgiving God, a redeeming God, a dying, but also a victoriously risen
God, — is the seal and assurance of every other truth of Scriptures,
also of that truth which we gratefully acknowledge tonight in the words
of Martin Luther, “I believe that God has made me and all creatures;
that He has given me my body and soul, eyes, ears, and all my members,
my reason, and all my senses, and still preserves them.” Any other
conviction can produce only distrust and despair and look forward to
nothing but dismal annihilation and destruction. But with God as our
Creator, with His Son as our Redeemer, and His Spirit as our Renewer
and Sanctifier, you and I are invited to look for truth and beauty and
happiness here, in the assurance of our divine origin and hereafter in
the blessed promise of divine destiny, the new and better life created
by the same gracious Father. Amen.