God's mighty hand: Creation vs. Evolution

Isaiah chapter 40 verse 12. Isaiah chapter 40 verse 12. Who hath measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, meted out heaven with a span, comprehended the dust of the earth in a measure, and weighed the mountains in scales, and the hills in a balance? Who hath directed the Spirit of the Lord, for being his counselor hath taught him? Look back at verse 10.

Behold, the Lord God will come with strong hand. My little message tonight really is summed up in those three words. With strong hand.

Look back in Job chapter 12 of the book of Job. Verse 7 of Job 12. But ask now the beasts and they shall teach thee in the falls of the air, and they shall tell thee, or speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee.

And the fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee, who knoweth not in all these, that the hand of the Lord hath wrought this, in whose hand is the soul of every living thing, and the breath of all mankind. I would like to read in the gospel of John in the New Testament, chapter 20 of the gospel of John. Verse 24, just to get the context.

But Thomas one of the twelve, called Didymus, was not with them when Jesus came. The other disciples therefore said unto him, we have seen the Lord. But he said unto them, except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails.

Put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe. And after eight days again his disciples were within, and Thomas with them. Verse 27.

Then saith he, that's the Lord Jesus, to Thomas, reach hither thy finger, behold my hands, and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side, and be not unbelieving, but believing. And Thomas answered and said unto him, my Lord and my God. I would like to read one more verse, please, in Psalm 31.

Psalm 31 is a very beautiful verse. I just am interested in the first line of it. Verse 15.

My times are in thy hand. My message tonight is, with strong hand. And in that hand is creation.

And in that hand is your breath. And in that hand is a nail. And in that hand are held all our times.

Satan has done a masterful job in modern society. God has been dismissed from his own universe. The very creatures of the hand of God deny that he made them.

That is common. It is everywhere. In fact, in 1987, the Supreme Court of the United States, in a plea from the state of Louisiana, declared that it was illegal to teach creation as an alternate for evolution in public schools.

And of course it is claimed that to teach creation is to teach religion. But to teach evolution, is it not religion? I can assure you it is. In fact, those who believe it, believe it because it dismisses God.

Very strange that such a fairy tale should be believed by the most of society. I can only tell you that it is a powerful evidence that the God of this age has blinded the minds of them which believe not. Even people who, and by the way, let me give you some simple facts.

90% of people in the United States believe that God is the creator. But of that 90% of people, so evolutionists really haven't done too well, have they? They've really only convinced about 10% of the people. Although we are told again and again that the whole entire world of science accepts evolution, yet they've only convinced about 10% of common people like us.

But of the 90% who believe in the God of creation, about 45 of them believe that God used this evolutionary process to bring all things into being. And they believe it. Why? Because it is solid fact, because it is proven beyond the shadow of a doubt, just the opposite, the very opposite.

I'm going to say some very simple things in a very quick way, so please forgive me for the shortness of what I'm saying. There is not one ounce of evidence in the fossil record to show one single transitional form from one species to another. What does that say? Briefly, what does it say? It says that in all the sedimentary rock of earth, there is not one shred of evidence that one kind ever mutated to be another kind.

But the evidence is that every kind began in its fully developed form, just as Genesis 1 tells us it did. After its kind, every creature, even every plant, God made them to produce seed after their own kind. It's a very strange thing that so much of the world believes in a theory that does not have evidence to support it.

And of course, what is generally believed is that what could not have happened in a short period of time, such as two million years, could possibly have happened if you can multiply that by a hundred or two hundred or three hundred, until finally you get up to a period of twenty billion years for the universe since the Big Bang, and about five or six billion years for our world, and a very minimum of one and a half to two million years for man on the earth. Is there evidence of all those vast ages of time? I had a unique privilege one day some years ago. I was invited to a leading university, and I was given the opportunity of sitting down with the faculty of the School of Natural Science in that university.

Those particular men, those professors, they do teach, but they spend most of their time in research, so they are geneticists for the most part, and they work constantly, day by day, as researchers. The first day that I went, there were only twelve men. The head of the Graduate School of Natural Science kind of led the discussion.

I learned a lot from those men. I learned that those men who are true scientists are not nearly so positive as a poor unbeliever you might meet in the street. And they allowed me to question them.

The first question I asked was, do any of you men believe that matter, material substance, is eternal? They didn't respond too quickly, so I went around the circle. I asked them one by one, do you believe that there is a possibility that matter is eternal? No. No.

No. No. No.

All the way around the circle, twelve men. I said, well, if matter is not eternal, then what existed before matter? They said, energy. Good.

Then I said, I have another question. You men spend your life in the research of these intricate systems within systems that we call nature. And I said, do any one of you believe that that energy could be mindless? You've heard of the plan of salvation.

I'm talking to you about the plan of creation. I said, are there any of you who would believe that that energy that preceded matter, that it had no plan? That it was mindless? That it was unintelligent? Here are twelve scientists. What are they going to say? I must confess I was surprised.

Every one of those men said, and this is the cosmological argument, they said, it is impossible to have these interwoven systems that correlate, that work in such harmony and precision, and to think that it came about by mindless chance. I was there for a long time that first day, and I thought that was the end of my ordeal. I just got through the first session, and the man who was the head of the School of Natural Science said, will you come back next week? The next week when I went there were thirty, and the next week I went there were forty.

And I listened to those men. I said to them, could you men really give me any evidence of evolution at all? Because you see, science, dear young man or young woman here tonight, let me tell you what science is. Science is an observable fact, and to prove that you observed it correctly, it must be able to be repeated.

So is evolution science? No, it isn't. It's never been observed, and it certainly can't be repeated to prove the truth of it. So I said to these men, can you men really give me any scientific evidence that evolution has ever taken place? A doctor who sat right beside me, a Hindu, said, I see the evidence of evolution every day in the lab.

I said, would you like to explain it to me? He did a very strange thing. This man is a geneticist working in plant cultures. Cross.

Maybe you don't know what triticale is, but it's a particular wheat product that Canada has been trying to produce for a long time, and it hasn't worked in the field. It works in the test plots, but it doesn't work in the field. And this man was the head of this program, and he said, well, he said, I think he thought he would really show up, this poor gospel preacher, so he used some very technical terms and told us a great deal about transmutation and Drosophila and so forth.

The other men around the table began to smile. When I said to the man, you've used an external force to cause mutation in the genes of these Drosophila, and what has it produced? They were smiling at the beginning of the conversation. Now they were laughing.

And when the doctor beside me didn't reply very quickly, some of the other men said, tell him. Well, actually, what he had produced were wingless fruit flies. Great advance, isn't it? Is that natural selection? Is that evolution? I said to him, doctor, I am puzzled.

Why did you move out of your own field to give me evidence of evolution when you say you see evolution every day in the lab? I just read something that staggers me. This is a description of the Big Bang Theory. A speck about the size of the head of a pin, and that speck of matter contains all the matter that is in the universe.

15 to 20 billion years ago, that little speck existed. Where did it come from? Ask them. You know what they say? Before the speck, there was no before.

What does that mean? They're almost saying that that little speck is God. And they tell us that this speck exploded. And all the systems of stars, the planets of our solar system, and every in our world came about by a random, chaotic explosion without plan, without purpose, without meaning, without design, without anything.

Why? Why? Because men do not want to admit the hand of the Creator. Dr. Julian Huxley, Sir Julian Huxley, he said it is impossible to prove evolution. It cannot be proven as a fact.

But the only alternative is unthinkable. What was he saying? He was saying, if we don't believe in some kind of a theory like this, we have to admit that God is. You see, these men begin with the premise, with the presupposition, God is not.

And then they have to find some substitute for God. The substitutes have been very, very poorly chosen. Do you know that the simplest life form, I'm talking about a single cell of life, a living cell, that cell is made up of as many as one to a power of 450 different molecules.

If you were to take any part of your body that is living, even a skin cell, in that one living cell is the entire program that tells what height you are, what color of hair you have, what color of eyes you have, how you walk, how you speak. Your entire being in a little cell, a simple life cell. Is it simple? It's not simple at all.

Dr. Edmund Conklin of Princeton University made a statement that I often quote. He said, to suppose that even the simplest life form came into being by chance plus myriads of time is the same thing as to suppose that Webster's unabridged dictionary was produced by an explosion in a printing shop. That's how complex one single life cell is.

I heard another explanation of that from another professor just recently. He said, if a tornado hit a junk pile and produced a 747, a Boeing 747, that's about the same thing as to suppose that even the simplest life form came about by chance. You see, in the days of Charles Darwin, he wrote The Origin of the Species in 1859.

I had to read that in school. I had to wade through it and a good many other such works, too. Well, when Darwin wrote The Origin of the Species, it was believed that there was such a thing as spontaneous generation.

You know what that means? Well, you leave some food out exposed in the refrigeration and it's not very long until it breeds living things like maggots. And it was believed at that time that they just appeared, were spontaneous. Life forms came from nothing.

That's spontaneous generation. That was before the late days of Louis Pasteur. And Louis Pasteur taught the principle that is believed by all science today, biogenesis, that life produces life.

So where did the first life cell come from? Do you not know, friend, that the hand of the Almighty God, the hand of the Creator, made it all with such wisdom, with such power, with such skill? No wonder it says in Romans chapter one, because the invisible things of him from the foundation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead, so that you are without excuse. Isn't it tragic that men look, look at the beautiful states you live in. I was amazed on Friday when I drove along your County Road S, about 25 miles of it, the beauty of the landscape, the beauty of the valleys and the hills.

God made it, friend. God made it. I want you to think of his hand just for a moment.

You know what that hand did? It says in Isaiah 40 that that hand measured the waters of the oceans. What a hand. Now size, bigness is really nothing to God.

So we don't want to get overwhelmed with size. Let's just think of the power of a hand that can measure the waters of the ocean. Something more about that hand that is even more staggering to my mind.

We are told here in this verse in Isaiah 40 that God measured space with the width of his hand. Don't people get overwhelmed when they talk about millions of light years? Yes, they do. The vastness of space, the tremendous galaxies, the blazing suns of the universe.

Listen, listen, there was a hand that measured it all and all it took was the width of one of his hands. What a God, what a creator. You see man demands modern science, evolutionary theories demand eons of time for this slow, slow process called evolutionary development by natural selection and so forth.

Do they have that kind of time? No, they don't. Everywhere about us is evidence of a recent creation, everywhere. If you just open your eyes, friend, just open your eyes.

When men landed on the moon, 1968, that first moon module had great duck's feet on it. They were huge things. They were designed and built at tremendous cost and it cost a great deal more to transport the moon module because of those duck's feet.

What were they for? They said the moon has been there for four and a half billion years and the dust that has accumulated is not eroded, it's not blown away, therefore it's all there. There will be 75 feet of dust on the moon. Was there? How much was there? Three quarters of an inch.

What a mistake they made, you see, because it isn't that old. I don't know if we all know this, but I didn't know it for many years. Rock flows.

Yes, the rocks from your hills here in Wisconsin, those rocks flow. So slowly you cannot see them flow, but they do flow. In fact, they flow at a rate that can be measured exactly by geologists.

When they took the moon rocks and measured the flow rate, they discovered the moon is about six to seven thousand years old. Charles Lyle, who preceded Darwin and taught uniformity in geology, he stood at the Niagara Gorge one day and he looked down into the deep gorge of the Niagara River and he gave the wonderful intelligent estimate that it took 7.5 million years for the Niagara River to cut out the gorge. And the Ontario Hydro Commission and the New York Power Authority wanted to build a new hydroelectric plant and they had to know exactly the rate of erosion of the Niagara escarpment where the water goes over the falls.

How long did you think they found that it took the river to cut out Niagara Gorge? 7.5 million? No, 7,000. What a difference. There are all kinds of evidences like that all around us in God's creation.

Oh, you say, what about radiometric dating? I mean, they use carbon-14, potassium, argon, lead and so forth. They use these great, great tools to tell how old rocks are and they're millions and millions of years old. Are they? It has been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that much of the radiometric dating is probably valuable for about 3,500 years and in some cases as far back as 6,000 years, but no ability beyond that time.

In fact, some coal was used to be measured recently and it was claimed that the coal was 600 million years old by radiometric dating, but when they adjusted their testing, they said the coal was 200 years old. What to me sounds kind of ridiculous was there was a snail and used radiometric dating on the snail and they said the snail was 27,000 years old. I don't think the snail knew that.

What are men doing? What is it all about? I mean, let me quote again the words of Huxley, to prove evolution is impossible, but the only alternative is unthinkable. What is the alternative? Hast thou not known? Hast thou not heard that the Lord, the Almighty God has created all these things? No wonder Job 12 says, ask the fish, ask the beast, ask the birds, they'll teach you, they'll show me. God made it.

These are the invisible things of him from the creation of the world that are clearly seen being understood by the things that are made. I don't usually preach like this. We've got to preach like this today because even people who do not swallow all that anti-God philosophy, their sense is dulled, their minds are blinded, and the reality that there's a living God that they must meet, the God of eternal power, the God of eternal wisdom, the God of infinite might, that he's the God.

Let me tell you this, friend, humbly, he's the God who holds my breath. He is the God who holds your breath. Think of your breath being in such a hand, your breath, as you breathe it now.

And before I mentioned that, you weren't even thinking of breathing, but you are breathing. And God gives you that breath to breathe. How long will he give it? When will he close his hand? You don't know.

This is the almighty God. This is the true God. And my friend, I would tremble to think that you would make light of the power and might of this God.

You must answer to him. You must give an account to God. You must meet him.

If you don't meet him now, honestly, and face the reality, you'll meet him in the day of his wrath. And what if, oh, what if, my friend, he were to close his hand upon that breath of yours, and your poor soul will go out from time, fixed to the goal of your chosen track, no room to repent, no turning back, then we'll be thee if Christ you lack. Five minutes after you die, what an awful tragedy.

To dismiss God from your mind, to dismiss God from your thoughts, to dismiss God from your life, and suddenly wake up, I must meet God. That's what we're trying to preach. This is the God.

You must deal with. You must meet God. Oh, my friend, you have sinned against that God, as you've heard tonight.

Thank God for what my dear brother preached. Sin is the problem. Sin is the problem.

You've sinned. Behold, you have sinned against the Lord. And be sure, your sin will find you out.

In the book of Numbers chapter 16, sin is described as being against others. We do sin against others. Yes, we do.

In thought, if not in word, and not in deed. But oftentimes in all three. In thought, in word, and deed, we sin against others around us.

We sin against our own souls. Every sin that a person commits is like an added weight to their soul, sinking their soul down to hell, and finally to the lake of fire. You've sinned against your own soul.

But, oh friend, all sin is against God. Behold, you have sinned against the Lord. You know, the only one who can forgive is the one who has been wronged.

If someone were to wrong you, maybe do something that harmed you, that hurt you, that caused you pain and suffering. And I say to that person who has done you that wrong, I forgive you. You know, the first thought would come to your mind is, what kind of nonsense is this anyway? How can he forgive somebody who wronged me? No, I can't.

The only person who can forgive is the person who has been wronged. Why does it say then, in the gospel of Mark chapter 5, that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins, because He is God, and because every sin you have ever committed is against Him. His hand created the heavens.

His hand made the earth and every intricate system that is on it. His hand holds your breath at this moment, and He could close it, and you'd be in eternity. I'm awfully glad to preach what is so much greater delight to my heart, was a nail in that hand.

You know, I used to say this when I preached, that probably it was a jagged piece of iron, that very likely there were not nails manufactured in those days such as we know, and therefore they would get a piece of iron that was jagged and misshaped, and they would use that to drive into the hands and feet of the Savior. I didn't know. I was in Scotland some years ago, and two dear men took me to a dig, an archaeological dig, and I will never forget what I saw there.

I'll never forget it. A building was being constructed, and the excavation struck a clay room buried under the ground, so formed, so manufactured, that inside that clay room it was totally dry, and inside that clay room were nails. Not just a few, hundreds of nails.

That room came from the Roman occupation of Britain. That room was built in the very first century, and the nails in that room were manufactured in that very first century when the Lord Jesus was crucified. When I saw those nails, I must confess that tears flooded my eyes.

I didn't expect it. They were great nails, some of them 16 and 17 inches long even, some of them a lot smaller. They didn't have a smooth shaft like nails we have.

They had a rough, rough shaft. They had a point at the end just like our nails, and it had a head, but the head was unlike any nail I've ever seen. That the head was battered on.

In other words, this piece of steel, and some of them were steel by the way, which surprised me tremendously. Some of them were iron, but some of them were steel. It was put into a kind of a jig, and some heavy instrument was used to batter the end of it.

It broke the metal and flattened it so that the head of every nail was distinct and different. Broken, jagged metal. I looked at those nails, and I thought, they nailed my Lord upon the tree and left him dying there.

Great nails to his hands and his feet. That room where the disciples were gathered on that first day of the week, the Lord had appeared the week before, and now a week has passed, and Thomas has said, except I shall see in his hand the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe. And on that day, I love to look at this.

Excuse me for a little imagination here. I don't think it's far-fetched. I can see the disciples gathered around, and suddenly the Lord Jesus appears in the midst of them.

He looks around the circle. His eyes fix on Thomas. He said, Thomas, reach hither thy finger, and behold my hand.

Do you see the Lord Jesus holding out the nail-pierced hand? Said Thomas, reach hither thy hand and thrust it into my side. If you've ever been in Newfoundland, Canada, you have seen the hands of fishermen. I've never seen men with hands like that.

These men have worked all their life with nets and ropes in the cold, icy waters of the Atlantic. You should see the hands of those men. Maybe the hands of those disciples from Galilee were not that huge, but I can think of a big fisherman's hand.

And the Lord said, reach hither thy hand and thrust it into my side. What a wound, what a gaping wound. Thomas looked.

Did he touch him? Not that day he didn't. How do I know that? Because the Lord said to Thomas, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed. And what did Thomas say? He saw a man standing before him with the wounds of death upon him.

Thomas said, my Lord and my God, oh my friend, I thank God tonight he was wounded for my transgressions. He was bruised for my iniquities. The punishment of my peace was upon him, and by his stripes I am healed.

I've been saved for 60 years, but it's real to me tonight that that Savior went to that cross. The centurion had four soldiers nail him to the tree, and he watched, and he had never seen a sight like it in all his days. Victims who were crucified would fight and curse and do everything they could to prolong their life.

And here's a victim. He puts out his hand for the nail. The Bible says he gave his back to the smiters.

He gave his cheeks to those who plucked off the hairs. He hid not his face from shame and spitting. He was led as a lamb to the slaughter.

No resistance. As a sheep before her shears his dung, so he opened not his mouth. Do you see that silent sufferer? Do you see that crucified Savior? Why was he there as the bearer of sin? Why did he suffer so? It wasn't just the nails.

It wasn't just the thorns. It wasn't just the lash. It wasn't just the blows and the rod and the spittle.

What was it then? It was the fierce wrath of Almighty God. For when men had done their worst and could do no more, the Son's light failed, and upon that sinless holy Savior, God poured out the fierceness of His almighty wrath. Oh friend, He died for me.

I discovered that on a Friday night in the year 1938. He died for me. What a Savior, that He would love me so.

Someday I'm going to see Him like Thomas saw Him. I'm going to see the wounds of His hands and feet and the wound of His side. The Savior was wounded for my transgressions.

Have you trusted Him? Have you believed on Him? Have you taken Him as your own Savior? I know a young man who's not so young anymore. In Canada, this man lives. We'd been preaching for about seven weeks in a tent.

It was 1959 and God saved so many souls that some of the dear brethren in that part of the revival, of course it was no such thing, but God did save a large number of souls among the men like Paul Kember and Steve Kember and Phil Kember and numbers of others who spent their lives and have spent their lives preaching the gospel. However, this young man went out of the door that last night in the tent and I said to him, Lord, after all the Lord Jesus suffered, you've never even thanked Him. He dropped his head, went out of the tent.

The next morning I went around to the farmhouse. He's a great big man. I heard him coming down the stairs to open the door.

He flung the door open and he said, Mr. Crawford, I've thanked Him. I've thanked Him. He really did die for me.

Have you thanked Him, friend? Have you received Him? He that rejecteth me, the Savior said, and receives not my word as one that judges him, the word I have spoken, the same shall judge him in the last day. The very hand that measured the waters of the ocean, that measured the vastness of space, bore a nail, was wounded that you might be saved. Your times are in His hand.

This is a beautiful verse for Christians. My dear mother who went to heaven many years ago, she loved this text. And at her funeral we sang, my times are in my hand.

Jesus, we wish them there. The hands, our many sins have pierced, is now our guard and guide. Beautiful truth for Christians.

My times are in His hand. Whatever comes, whatever there is, my times are in His hand. Can I change this a bit tonight for you who are not saved? Your times are in His hand.

This is the time to be saved, friend. This is your time. Behold, now is the accepting time.

God's time, right now. Your times are in His hand. Oh, may you not miss Christ.

May you not miss this golden opportunity. May you not pass by that great provision God has made in Calvary. That Savior who was wounded and bruised, God grant you will trust Him tonight.

And not miss heaven. And not stand as a trembling soul before a holy sin-hating God and discover it's all real after all. It's true.

And I am lost forever. May God save you. Shall we pray? Our Father, bless Thy Word and use it for the glory of God.

We thank Thee for the answer to the great problem of sin. There's only one answer, and that answer was Calvary. The suffering Savior, the crucified Christ, the blood of the Lamb alone can cleanse from sin.

And our God, we humbly pray that some soul might accept the Savior tonight, this man, our Lord Jesus Christ. We thank Thee for all who have come to the Gospel meeting tonight in Blue River. God bless each one of them.

And may the Word of God have a lasting effect upon every heart. For what we have been trying to preach tonight is real. This is eternal truth.

Oh, that some soul might understand it and be saved. We ask and give our thanks in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

While Mr. Fraser was preaching tonight, I kept thinking of it is number 178. Fairest of all the earth beside, chiefest of all unto thy bride, fullness of wine in thee I see, beautiful man of Calvary. I wish you could sing this in truth, friend.

Sixty years ago, when I first understood that he died for me, the love sprang up spontaneous in my heart that I couldn't force before. And for the first time in my life, I could truly say I love him because he first loved me. That man of Calvary has won my heart from me and died to set me free.

Blessed man of Calvary. Thank you for coming. May God bless this word to every heart.

Let us just sing the three verses, 1, 2, and 3, and the course of 178.