Galaxies, Black Holes, and Creation

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galaxie picDr Markus-and-Sandra Blietz

Dr Markus and Sandra Blietz

 

Dr Markus Blietz was born in Germany in 1962, and studied physics at the Technical University in München (Munich). In 1994 he earned his Ph.D. in astrophysics at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching (near Munich). He now works in the semiconductor industry as a patent manager, helping researchers to develop and patent new ideas. In spring 2008, he was born again, and since then has been a keen supporter of Creation Ministries. Dr Blietz and his wife Alexandra have two children and reside in a small town in Bavaria (Germany), not far away from Salzburg (Austria).

The educational and media system often contrast ‘creationists’ and ‘scientists’. But in every issue of Creation magazine they prove them wrong with an interview with a highly qualified scientist who is also a creationist. Not too many of them have been astronomers or astrophysicists like Dr Blietz.

“My Ph.D. work was about a special class of galaxy called Seyfert galaxies. These contain active galactic nuclei—very bright, star-like centres. The most common explanation is a gigantic black hole in the centre of these galaxies.”

Unusually, Dr Blietz became a Christian quite late in life. He lost his father to cancer, and had a mental ‘burnout’, “so extreme that I could not even read one single word any more! Even the smallest decisions were too much for me. Basically my brain, the instrument which I trained all my life and which I was proud of, all of a sudden went out of operation.”

Secular science could not explain the clear reality of good vs bad. But this difference makes sense if there is indeed a Creator. Then he read the Bible owned by his wife, who was not yet a ‘born again’ Christian:

“I read the Gospel according to Matthew. Almost immediately I understood that Jesus was a real, historical person; that He came to fulfil a mission; and that I needed him urgently.”

Then a Christian friend lent him a small booklet that “explained the full plan of God, from the beginning of the creation, to the coming of Jesus on this earth, His crucifixion and resurrection, His second coming, the final judgment and the creation of a new heaven and earth. I knew this was the truth. In the booklet there was also a prayer, where one could confess his sins and give his life to Jesus. I did not hesitate a minute; I fell on my knees and delivered my life to Jesus.”

“If the Bible is not reliable in its historical statements, how can it be true in other statements? If Jesus didn’t speak the truth about Genesis, how could we trust what He was saying about sin, the cross, resurrection and everlasting life? Jesus Christ is the truth; and if He affirmed the literal creation of the world in six normal-length days, we Christians should do the same. If however we compromise and try to marry millions and billions of years with the creation account of the Bible, we may easily pull folk away from the truth of the Bible and the Gospel.”

“Science is a human endeavour to find the truth about the world of matter. It is not fully reliable, because theories and models change over time. Also, science cannot say anything about the big questions of ‘where do we come from, why are we here, and where do we go?’ Science is limited in its abilities and should not step over the clear limits which have been set by God.”

“Only belief in Jesus Christ can open our eyes and give us the correct view of our world. Before I was a Christian, I never felt really content with the evolutionary world view, which I had adopted. It produced too many contradictions and left open too many questions. Only the truth in the Word of God is able to give a full, comprehensive answer to our basic questions of death and life.”

Article Galaxies, Black Holes & Creation from http://www.creation.com

Gathering in China to embrace JESUS and HIS KINGDOM

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In these last days God has prepared the Chinese Church through their faithfulness and humility under persecution to lead the Church in this part of our end time journey. The Chinese Church has acknowledged God’s call to take the Gospel to the Nations on the three silk roads back to Jerusalem (Back to Jerusalem, Called to Complete the Great Commission by Three Chinese Church Leaders published UK 2003). Their freedom from fear of death, their humility and complete abandonment to the will of God is allowing the Lord to speedily bring them into unity with one another and alignment with His headship.

In His wisdom, God has positioned the Chinese in the natural realm, geographically close to India and the Arab Nations and to have favour among the Arabs as well as respect among the Jews. So the Chinese are able to go where the Western Church cannot. They are able to stretch their arms wide to embrace not only the sons of Ishmael and the sons of Isaac, but also the Western Church, bringing the whole Body together into one family.

Hopefully this video will give you a glimpse of the passion the Chinese have for our Lord.

http://youtu.be/oxLv5rL2zLk

Extract from article by David Demian “The Road From Asia to Jerusalem”

Pope Francis leading Catholics astray on evolution.

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Sadly Pope Francis on October 27th, 2015 in the Pontifical Academy of Sciences address in Italian clearly indicated he accepts evolution and the billions-of-years timescale. This is not surprising, since the Catholic church has accepted evolution for about fifty years now.

The Vatican quotes Pope Francis:

“When we read in Genesis the account of Creation, we risk imagining God as a magus, with a magic wand able to make everything. But that is not so. (Pope Francis is saying here that God is not able to create ex nihilo as He so clearly claims). He created beings and allowed them to develop according to the internal laws that He gave to each one, so that they were able to develop and arrive at their fullness of being. …(through natural selection, survival of the fittest, pain and death). And so creation continued for centuries, millenia and millenia until it became which we know today, precisely because God is not a demiurge or conjurer but the Creator who gives being to all things……..”

The Bible clearly states that the world was perfect when God created it with Adam and Eve present at the beginning of creation. There was no death in the world until Adam and Eve sinned. Pope Francis however contradicts the clear reading of scripture by accepting evolution’s death and suffering before Adam and Eve.

Unfortunately for Catholics, their sole authority isn’t Scripture, but the Church, which is the only ‘infallible interpreter’ of Scripture according to their theology.

And yet when we look to Peter who they consider their ‘first pope’, we see that his attitude toward the biblical account of origins is very different to that of Pope Francis his supposed successor.

“…scoffers will come in the last days with scoffing, following their own sinful desires. They will say, “Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation’. For they deliberately overlook this fact, that the heavens existed long ago, and that the earth was formed out of water and through water by the word of God, and that by means of these the world that then existed was deluged with water and then perished. But by the same word the heavens and earth that now exist are stored up for fire, being kept until the day of judgment and destruction of the ungodly” 2 Peter 3:3-7.

In Peter’s proclamation we see first of all a complete acceptance of the biblical history of the world. And Scripture is his starting point, not other ideas in the culture. Peter points us to Genesis which states that the world was created from water by the Word of God. The world was destroyed by God with a world-wide flood. We know from creation geology models that a catastrophe of this scale would account for the geological layers containing all sorts of fossils with evidence of carnivory, cancer and thorns – because it’s a record of the post – Fall world. And if a year-long global catastrophe explains the majority of the fossil record, there is no room for millions of years of earth history.

In contrast to Pope Francis, Peter stands on the firm foundation of Scripture. I hope you and your church do so as well.

Extract from article by :Lita Cosner on The Pope on Evolution 1st Nov 2014, http://www.creation.com

Reflections on The Gathering

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Gathering in Jerusalem

As mentioned in the previous report it is difficult to describe what God is doing with these Gatherings. They started in Canada with God raising up Watchmen for the Nations to gather a remnant from that nation to unite in John 17 unity to fulfill His purposes.

When Watchmen for the Nations began to prophesy that God was going to use Canada to bring healing to other nations particularly Israel, it seemed impossible, but then transformation began  with constant prayer being offered up in the nation’s capital.

The liberal government was replaced by the Conservative Party with Stephen Harper, a committed Christian as their new Prime Minister. A group from ICCC Canada also played an important role in bringing repentance and unity between the indigenous people’s – First Nations and the Inuits.

Stephen Harper initiated the nation to repent of turning away almost 1,000 Jews on the MS St Louis in 1939 and recently vowed to stand with the nation of Israel during their current trials.

Watchmen for the Nations next call was to China and the first Gathering took place in 2010 with 3,000 in attendance in Hong Kong, 6,000 attended in 2011, 12,000+ in 2102 and 24,000 in 2013. Through the “Kingdom Come” DVD’s and CD’s (www.asiagathering.hk), you can experience the journey of the 2012 Gathering. God has led believers from more than twenty nations to affirm the leadership role He has called the Chinese to play in His end time purposes on earth.

Chinese Christians believe God put them through over 40 years of persecution under Mao to prepare them for a final three Silk Roads evangelism effort back to Jerusalem. These evangelists  go as Jesus sent his disciples just one pair of shoes. The passion Chinese Christians exhibited at The Gathering in Jerusalem put me to shame.

The Gathering in Japan in July was another watershed event with 3,000 in attendance. The Japanese Christians believe that God sent many Christians from other nations to break open the demonic stronghold over Japan. They saw themselves as the lame man who was lowered down in front of Jesus after they had broken open the roof of the house. The timing of the Gathering – 70 years after the end of World War 2 was also considered significant. The Japanese Christians now believe that God has finally released them to take part in the final evangelism effort being launched by the Chinese. A friend of mine reported that a breakthrough was achieved on the second night with the praise and worship reaching new heights.

Where will the next Gathering take place? I can now confirm that the next Gathering will be in Kobe Japan in 2015 to follow up the one in July of this year. I am still praying that God will bless Australia with one.

A GOOD GOD & A WORLD OF DEATH & SUFFERING?

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lambs

One of the most common questions asked of Christians is some version of: “If God is so loving, why are there bad things in the world?” The implication being that if God created this world in the state it is in, He can’t be ‘very good’ Himself. This is sometimes used as a reason to reject belief in God.

If God created everything in 6 days when exactly were ‘bad things’ created?

The first thing we need to understand is that God wasn’t surprised by the Fall of Adam. God is all knowing and so knew that a punishment would have to be meted out following Adam’s (and his offspring’s) rebellion.

According to Scripture, at the time of the Fall the environment changed and there were changes in the physical construction of some things as well. For example thorns appeared where there were none before. Some might ask ‘Doesn’t that mean God must have created new genetic information for these things at that time where there was none before?’ Not necessarily, because ‘hidden’ genetic information can lie dormant within living things and be activated under certain environmental conditions.

For example up to the 1920’s, scientists used to classify grasshoppers as a separate species to locusts. However, researchers have since determined that they are actually the same creature. Under certain (laboratory reproducible) circumstances they exhibit a sort of Jekyll/Hyde transformation that is truly startling!

Behavioural differences happen immediately at the transformation, with physical changes appearing in subsequent generations. The difference in behaviour (grasshoppers are solitary, locusts swarm), and morphology (locusts have smaller legs, wings and bodies but have a 30% larger brain than grasshoppers) is significant and changes neural, muscular and exo-skeletal expression. And the transformation from grasshopper to locust can also be reversed back again. Yet the DNA of the two creatures is identical.7

This ability for DNA to express different programming from the same source code under different environmental conditions is actually fairly common. The epigenetic code, a set of switches that turn genes on and off (e.g. in response to environmental stimuli) is a main contributor to this ability of the ‘finished product’ to vary despite the same DNA ‘instructions. This is known as ‘phenotypic plasticity’.

Not only is the discovery of latent genetic information an incredible challenge for evolution to account for, and a tremendous evidence of design (because it exhibits all of the characteristics of foresight and pre-planning in the genomes of creatures around the world), but it also helps answer the supposedly unanswerable question of how ‘bad things’ appeared after the Fall if God’s creation was completely finished by the end of the sixth day of creation.

God’s word is true

Foreknowing the Fall of man,9 God created the features of a post-Fall world in latent form within His very good world. They only became activated when God cursed the creation as punishment for Adam’s transgression. And the entire creation groans because of that Curse and is evidence that something is desperately wrong with this world. If God had not caused our physical environment to change at the time of the Fall, we would be lost without Him, bound for Hell but still in a virtual paradise. How would we know there was anything wrong and that we were in need of our Saviour

extract from article “The good, the bad and the ugly ….” by Calvin Smith on http://www.creation.com

 

Author Went From Atheist to Christian while writing book on Horrors of 20th Century

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jason-jonesthe-race-to-save-our-century-by-jason-jones-and-john-zmirak

Author, Jason Scott Jones; atheist turned Christian in the process of writing the book.

The Race to Save Our Century, authors Jason Jones and John Zmirak argue for five core principles to prevent the catastrophes of the previous century from being repeated in the next century. In a video interview with The Christian Post, Jones explains how he became a Christian in the process of writing the book. Check out the video interview on The Christian Post website.

The idea for the book came when Jones was an undergraduate at the University of Hawaii. He pitched the idea for a video to encourage his fellow students to major in political science to the political science department.

“I just wanted to pour the horrors of the 20th century into two minutes,” Jones said, “to create an urgency among young people at my school, and why they should major in political science, because ideas matter.”

The idea was rejected by his “leftist faculty” and the video was never used, but in putting together that video, Jones explained, he discovered the “focus” for his life. Set to graduate at the turn of the century and looking back on the previous century, Jones decided he wanted to help create a world in which the next 100 years would avoid the horrible crimes of that last 100 years.

The process of researching and writing the book changed Jones. When he started the project, he was an atheist and a libertarian. By the time he finished, he was a Christian and a conservative.

In the book, Jones and Zmirak argue that the horrors of the last century stem from five evil ideologies — 1. racism and nationalism, 2. militarism and “total war,” 3. utopian collectivism, 4. radical individualism, and 5. utilitarian hedonism.

These ideologies can be avoided, they say, by advancing five core principles — 1. the unique and absolute value of every human person, 2. natural law (a transcendent moral order), 3. subsidiarity (the defense of civil institutions that lie between people and government), 4. solidarity (which is embodied by The Golden Rule), and 5. a humane economy.

Jones is also a film producer. His credits include “Bella” (2006), “The Stoning of Soraya M.” (2008), and “Crescendo I” (2011). There is a link, he explained, between the ideas found in the book and his films.

 

 

Worldviews – battle rages

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GIANT’S CAUSEWAY & CAUSEWAY COAST

No matter what part of the world you live in, there will be rocks in your locality that were formed during the Flood of Noah’s day. It is time to increasingly ‘take them back’, renouncing the millions of years and the naturalistic interpretations attached to such formations, and explaining their true origins and spiritual significance. Obviously this will require careful study of the local rocks from a biblical geological perspective, but for those who are serious about making the effort, Tas Walker’s ‘Biblical Geological Model’ is a good place to start.

The Giant’s Causeway, Heritage Site in Northern Ireland has been subject of much debate in recent years concerning how and when the 40,000 interlocking basalt columns were formed. The debate regularly sees calls to censor any creationist interpretations of the site, and attracted world attention in July 2012 when the new Causeway tourist centre included a small reference to the existence of this alternative viewpoint. Secularists were quick to mount a noisy objection. CMI has published a number of articles explaining, for instance, how the Causeway would have formed during Noah’s Flood and the significance of the reddish inter-basaltic beds at Giant’s Causeway.

In the current battle of worldviews we need to take back the history of these stones. As with all rocks that were formed during the Flood they are not just a ‘pile of stones’, but have a huge spiritual significance. As a visible demonstration of God’s judgement on mankind’s sin, the stones give us the opportunity to tell our children and many other people of God’s actions in history.

Such real life geological examples can then be used to orientate and point people to the truth of the Bible and the need for their salvation which can only be found in the Lord Jesus Christ—see Acts 4:12. There is overwhelming evidence found in the stones all around us, consistent with a worldwide Flood at the time of Noah; for examples see polystrate fossils, fast octopus fossils, hundreds of jellyfish fossils, flat gaps and much more at Geology Q&A’s. God has not hidden from view the evidence of His previous judgement of sin. It is also an important reminder of God’s coming final judgment of sin at the prophesied end of this cursed earth and heaven.

Extract from article by Phil Robinson http://www.creation.com

Iraqui Jihadist declares a new Caliphate

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Alleged ISIL leader appears in video footageJihadist map of Muslim Caliphate

 

On Friday, July 4th, a 42-year-old Iraqi Jihadist leader who fights under the name Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi appeared in a mosque in the city of Mosul, which his group ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) had seized weeks earlier, along with swathes of Iraq and Syria. Al-Baghdadi, dressed in long black robes delivered a sermon announcing that he would henceforth be known as Caliph Ibrahim, emir of the faithful in the Islamic state.

A caliphate is an Islamic state – and then some. In theory, a caliphate is more than just a country that happens to be officially Muslim; it is supposed to encompass every Muslim on earth. The last time that sort of caliphate existed was many centuries ago. But the word caliphate still evokes the idea of a glorious and unified Islamic civilization.

What does a caliph do, exactly?

Originally, the caliph was the person who took over Mohammed’s (1) rule over the unified Islamic state and (2) responsibility for all Muslims. Over the next seven hundred years, Mohammed’s memory obviously faded, but those remained the two defining responsibilities: rule over a unified Islamic state and bear responsibility for the community of all Muslims, or the ummah.

The present-day Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, in declaring himself a caliph and his terrorist mini-state a caliphate, is communicating that he believes he is fighting on behalf of all Muslims worldwide (he does not count Shia Muslims in this, only Sunnis) and that he is the representative of God on earth. He is also sort of suggesting a desire to continue ISIS’s advance until he has conquered all Muslim-majority lands, which is an aspiration that’s hinted at frequently in jihadist maps of a unified Islamic empire – see map above.

Could this man lead the armies in the battle of Gog and Magog referred to in Ezekiel 38 & 39 which occurs about the middle of The Tribulation?

Human Genome Decay supports Biblical History

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Recent reports on the human genome provide powerful support for the Biblical history of Creation and The Fall.

In his landmark book Genetic Entropy & The Mystery of the Genome, geneticist Dr John Sanford clearly demonstrates that human genomes are decaying at an unstoppable rate.

Dr Sanford became famous back in the seventies when he jointly invented the “Gene Gun” which enabled scientists to genetically modify fruit and vegetables.

An even more important development occurred with Sanford and colleagues release of a powerful computer simulation programme Mendel’s Accountant. It allows greater refinement in predicting the fate of mutations in populations and the results agree with Sanford’s earlier work. There are no realistic evolutionary models in the scientific literature that contradict these results. This overwhelming negative evidence clearly contradicts Darwinian expectations, but clearly and dramatically fits the Biblical record of Creation and The Fall.

‘The Darwinian claim – that life could have started with low fidelity self replicating molecules – is exposed as culpable foolishness. The ‘RNA world’ scenario collapses into error catastrophe so quickly it is scandalous that such nonsense can be taught as a realistic model of origin in our school and universities.”

This article was extracted from a paper in Journal of Creation Vol 28 (1) 2014:  Human genome decay and the origin of life by Alex Williams.

The book Genetic Entropy & The Mystery of the Genome can be obtained from http://www.creation.com

 

 

JESUS said My Father’s House is a House of Prayer

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Call upon me and I will answer says the LORD.

So vital and so simple and yet do we pray? Call a pray meeting at your church and see how many turn up. The only channel for us to get God to work is prayer and He says all you need I have so why don’t we pray. I have already posted “How to be a Person who Changes the Course of History” (Derek Prince on prayer)” but if you want more encouragement/inspiration to get into prayer listen to the sermon below by Jim Cymbala.