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Want to be a Survivor? Take the test below to find out if you have
what it takes! 1. I
would like to be a survivor: Y N (circle
one) 2. Please
circle your general health: Excellent
Good Fair Poor 3. I
think I will die in: 5 10 20 30 40 50+
years. 4. Check
the appropriate box (or boxes) that best describe your beliefs and compare
your response to the answers on the back to find out if you have what it
takes to survive: q
1. The
Bible was written by a group of well-meaning guys. They made up heaven, hell, the Day of Wrath and Book
of Life. I believe there is
a god, but all religions are equal. q
2. Since
we got here through evolution, there is no need to survive, when we die, we
cease to exist, end of story. q
3. This
life is just one of many steps toward becoming perfect. When we die, we get reincarnated
again until we learn from our mistakes.
Therefore, there is no desire to survive the big test this time. We all get there in the end. q
4. The
wrath of God will only come to those who are not good people. I believe I am a good person and a
God of love would not put His wrath on people like me who have never killed
anyone. q
5. My
name is in the Book of Life; therefore I will survive. q
6. I
hope my name is in the book of life, I go to church and try as hard as I can
to be a good Christian/Catholic/Mormon/etc., but I am not sure I am good
enough. q
7. Other
- Please explain: Rev 6:17 "For the great day of His wrath has
come, and who is able to stand?" (NKJ) Will
you still be standing? How can
you know for sure? ANSWERS FROM THE
BIBLE 1. The
Bible clearly says (1 Peter 1:10-12, Hebrews 1:1-2, 2 Timothy 3:16) that God
inspired the words that were written by the Prophets of the Old Testament and
the Apostles of the New Testament.
Saying the Bible is inspired because the Bible says so would be a very
weak argument if not for the prophetic nature of the Bible. Only a supreme being who stands
outside of time can know the future absolutely (Isaiah 46:9-10). God inspired the men who wrote the
Bible to make hundreds of prophecies in order to validate the message as
being from God and not from man.
Most of these prophecies have already been fulfilled in exacting
detail, while the others remain to be fulfilled in the Last Days. No other “holy book” includes
prophecies by which the validity of divine authorship can be tested. The Bible stands alone in this area,
and thus the future Wrath of God, the judgment, and the Book of Life, as
described in the Bible, should be considered as spiritual reality by a
rational thinker. Therefore, if
your name is not written in the Book of Life (see answer to 6 below), then
judgment awaits. You are not a
survivor. 2. Consider
this: The information necessary
to make your physical body is contained in the nucleus of all 60 trillion
cells of your body. It took many
years, several billion dollars and the most brilliant scientists with the
most powerful computers on earth to finish deciphering the lettering of the
human genome. This feat was
completed about two years ago, but does not begin to scratch the surface in
understanding all the information contained in the human genetic code. Information comes from intelligence,
and the information contained in all the life forms found on Earth testify to
the fact that there must be a supreme intelligence, beyond human
comprehension. (See this and
other articles on evolution at the table, and refer to #1 above) Psalms 14 says, “The fool has said in his heart,
‘there is no God.’”
Therefore, you are not a survivor. 3. See
answer to 1 above and then consider that Hebrews 9:27 says, “And as it is
appointed for men to die once, but after this the judgment.” This verse and others teach that we
have only one chance to “survive” the judgment to come. There are no second chances. Therefore, God has spoken and
declared that reincarnation is a lie.
If the Bible is from God, then you are not a survivor. 4. Please
read the answer to 1 above. The
Bible does teach that if you are good enough, you will survive (Matthew
5:20), but the standard is very high.
Please take our Ten Commandment test to see if you are good enough to
survive this test. 5. The
Bible teaches that if your name is in the book of life, then you will
survive, and the second death has no power over you (Revelation
20:56,15). To have your name in
the Book of Life you must have admitted/confessed to God that you are a
sinner (Romans 3:23). (Refer to
#4 above to see if you are a sinner or not) and recognize that as a sinner
you deserved to go to the lake of fire (hell) as just punishment (Romans
6:23). After humbling yourself
before a holy God, then you must accept the fact that Jesus took the judgment
that you deserved when HE suffered and died on the cross for your sins and
rose from the grave to prove that HE defeated sin and death. In accepting this, you believe Jesus
cleansed you of sin by His grace, and that He will give you life everlasting
as a free gift for your faith in believing in Him. If this is what you believe, then you will be a SURVIVOR,
thanks be to Jesus (Romans 10:6-11). 6. See
answers to 1, 4 and 5 above. The
Bible teaches that God wants us to KNOW that we will SURVIVE (1 John 5:13). Rev
20:12 And I
saw the dead, small and great, standing before God, and books were opened.
And another book was opened, which is the Book of Life. And the dead were
judged according to their works, by the things which were written in the
books. ----------- 15 And anyone not found written in the Book of Life was cast
into the lake of fire.
(NKJ) Is your name
in the Book of Life? How can you
find out? Check out
www.calvarypo.org or call pastor Kevin Lea at 360.876.7288 for further info! The Ten Commandments Test
Are you good enough? The following are the Ten Commandments that the Lord God gave to Moses on Mount Sinai, in Exodus 20. There are many more laws that God gave, but these will be a good test of whether you are good enough to get into heaven.
Have you EVER violated ANY of these Ten Commandments?
Be
Honest! You may be able to fool yourself, but you
can never fool God! If you said no, then have you ever
violated them in your thought life?
Jesus said that if you have hatred in your heart against someone, then
you have committed murder (Matthew 5:22), or if you have lusted after a man
or a woman in your heart, you have committed adultery (Matthew 5:27-28). If your answer is still no, then consider
reading the rest of the laws contained in the Old Testament (613 of them in
all) to see if you have violated any of them at any time in your life. If you have not, then you are saying
you have lived a perfect life without sin. If this is the truth, then you are good enough to go to
heaven (Matthew 5:20).
However, the Bible says that no one is good, and that all have sinned
and fall short of the glory of God (Romans 3:10 and 23). If you said yes,
then the Bible says that you are not good enough to go to heaven (Gal
3:11-12). God’s standard is
perfection and you will be judged for your works and then be sent to the Lake
of Fire, unless your name is written in the Book of Life (Revelation 20:15). God made it possible to have our name
written when He sent Jesus into the world. Jesus was the only one to live a perfect life, and
therefore He did not deserve to die or be judged. But Jesus offered up His life, to die on the cross, and He
took the judgment that we deserved so that whoever believed in Him would not
perish but have everlasting life.
Please consider giving up trying to establish a righteousness of your
own and accept the righteousness of God that comes by faith in Jesus Christ
(Romans 10:2-4). We Care About You! If you are concerned about your
eternal destiny, then please call us at 360-876-7288 or visit our web site at
www.calvarypo.org Divine Engineering Recent
research into the structure and workings of genes and DNA has revealed
incredible evidence of God's wonderful design. Dr. Jerry Bergman,
professor of science at Northwest College, Archibold (Ohio) has recently
published an excellent technical paper in the Creation Ex Nihilo Technical
Journal,
1 detailing how genes manufacture plants and animals. We have
excerpted portions of his report for this article. Vast
Databases At the
moment of conception, a fertilized human egg is about the size of a
pinhead. Yet it contains information equivalent to about six billion
"chemical letters." This is enough information to fill 1000
books, 500 pages thick with print so small you would need a microscope to
read it! If all the
chemical "letters" in the human body were printed in books, it is
estimated they would fill the Grand Canyon fifty times!
2 This vast
amount of information is stored in our bodies' cells in DNA molecules and is
coded by four bases-adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine. The key to
the coding of DNA is in the grouping of these bases into sets that are
further sequenced to form the 20 common amino acids. Together, these genetic
codes form the physical foundation of all life. We've all
been exposed to the basic concepts of DNA and its double-helix structure in
our high school biology classes. Perhaps you remember being taught that
cells divide through the "unzipping" and subsequent replication of
the double helix. In all likelihood, though, the incredible evidence of
design in this process was not discussed. A Complex
Engineering Puzzle Suppose you
were asked to take two long strands of fisherman's monofilament line-125
miles long-then form it into a double-helix structure and neatly fold and
pack this line so it would fit into a basketball. Furthermore,
you would need to ensure that the double helix could be unzipped and
duplicated along the length of this line, and the duplicate copy removed, all
without tangling the line. Possible? All this DNA
must be packed so the regulator proteins that control making copies of the
DNA have access to it. The DNA packing process is both complex and elegant
and is so efficient that it achieves a reduction in length of DNA by a factor
of 1 million.
3 When the
cell needs to divide, the entire length of DNA must be split apart,
duplicated, and repackaged for each daughter cell. No one knows exactly how
cells solve this topological nightmare. But the solution clearly starts with
the special spools on which the DNA is wound. Each spool
carries two "turns" of DNA, and the spools themselves are stacked
together in groups of six or eight. The human cell uses about 25 million of
them to keep its DNA under control.
4 (As shown in Figure 3 on the previous page, DNA is wound around
histones to form nucleosomes. These are organized into solenoids, which
in turn compose chromatin loops. Each element in this complex, yet
highly organized arrangement is carefully designed to play a key role in the
cell replication process.) Cell
Replication The details
of cell replication are too complex to be described in detail here. A
simplified outline is given below to illustrate the incredible process
involved:
5 Replication involves the
synthesis of an exact copy of the cell's DNA. An initiator protein must
locate the correct place in the strand to begin copying. The initiator
protein guides an "unzipper" protein (helicase) to separate the
strand, forming a fork area. This unwinding process involves speeds
estimated at approximately 8000 rpm, all done without tangling the DNA
strand! The DNA duplex kinks back on itself as it unwinds. To
relieve the twisting pressure, an "untwister" enzyme
(topo-isomerase) systematically cuts and repairs the coil. Working only on
flat, untwisted sections of the DNA, enzymes go to work copying the
strand. (Two complete DNA pairs are synthesized, each containing one
old and one new strand.) A stitcher repair protein (DNA ligases)
connects nucleotides together into one continuous strand. Read and Write The process
described above is only a small part of the story. While the unwinding
and rewinding of the DNA takes place, an equally sophisticated process of
reading the DNA code and "writing" new strands occurs. The
process involves the production and use of messenger RNA. Again, a
simplified process description:
6 Messenger RNA is made from DNA by an enzyme (RNA polymerase).
A small section of DNA unzips, revealing the actual message (called the
sense strand) and the template (the anti-sense strand). A copy is made
of the gene of interest only, producing a relatively short RNA segment. The
knots and kinks in the DNA provide crucial topological stop-and-go signals
for the enzymes. After messenger RNA is made, the DNA duplex is zipped back
up. Adding to
the complexity and sophistication of design, the genetic code is read in
blocks of three bases (out of the four possible bases mentioned earlier) that
are non-overlapping. Moreover,
the triplicate code used is "degenerate," meaning that multiple
combinations can often code for the same amino acid-this provides a built-in
error correction mechanism. (One can't help but contrast the
sophistication involved with the far simpler read/write processes used in
modern computers.) A Common
Software House All living
things use DNA and RNA to build life from four simple bases. The
process described above is common to all creatures from simple bacteria all
the way to humans. Evolutionists
point to this as evidence for their theory-but the new discoveries of the
complexity of the process, and the fact that bacterial ribosomes are so
similar to those in humans, is strong evidence against evolution. The
complexities of cell replication must have been present at the beginning of
life. A simple
explanation for the similarities of the basic building blocks can be found if
one realizes that all life originates from a single "software
house." He is awesome indeed! [Ed Note: Dr.
Jerry Bergman is a professor of science at Northwest College, Archibold
(Ohio) and is working on his third Ph.D. in molecular biology. He also has
degrees in biology, psychology, and evaluation and research.] This article was originally
published in the Creation Ex Nihilo
Technical Journal,
PO Box 6302, Acacia Ridge D.C., Queensland, 4110, Australia.
Elegance by Accident? The Myth of
our Age Jesus warned
us, "Take heed that no man deceive you." 1 And we do,
indeed, live in the Age of Deceit. Our entire society is totally driven
by many myths, none more basic or insidious than the convictions of
Evolution, the religion of our age. (Dismissing for this discussion the
observations of microevolution, the variations within species, but rather
using the term in its connotative sense, referring, in fact, to biogenesis:
the notion that we are all the result of a series of cosmic accidents.) The ancient
cultures worshiped gods of wood and stone. It is difficult to
comprehend the insanity of paganism: who can tally the blood that has been
spilled on the altars of the gods who are not and the demons who are!
We, however, in our contemporary paganism, have invented the most insulting
"god" of all. Instead of ascribing the awesome magnificence of the
Creation to any of the false gods of the past, we have chosen to ascribe it
all to randomness, or chance. That has to be the most insulting ascription
of all: we have decided that no Designer was necessary - it all "just
happened." "First there was nothing. Then it
exploded!"2 The premise
that we are all simply the accidental result of random chance underlies our
entire culture, not just biology: the fields of psychology, our social and
political sciences, our media, our entertainments, and, of course, the forced
inculcation of our children in the government schools. But there is
a glimmer of good news. The Death of
Darwinism The good
news is that there is a rising awareness that Evolution is bad science.
Science purports to follow the evidence, relying on empirical verification
for its conjectures. And it is increasingly evident that the evidence
is mercilessly denying randomness as an explanation for the elegant designs
embodied in the machinery of the universe. The writings of Denton,
Behe, Johnson, Dempski, and Meyer have turned the thinking world upside down.3 The rebuttals
have come from virtually every field of science: paleontology, physics and,
quite conclusively, microbiology. Interestingly, perhaps the most
compelling refutations come from one of the newest of the sciences: the
information sciences, the field which has given us advanced communications
and computers. The Spectrum
of the Possible William
Dempski has exquisitely profiled the spectrum of possibilities from
certainty, "a probability of 1.0," to impossibility, "a
probability of 0." (All events, by definition, lie between these
two boundary conditions.) Figure
1 summarizes this spectrum: When events
are characterized by a high degree of certainty, we call them
"scientific laws," such as gravity, etc. Most events,
however, are characterized by some level of uncertainty, and the exploration
of their likelihoods occupy the attention of statisticians, businessmen, and
professional investigators dealing with the circumstances in the "real
world." When we
encounter events that are extremely improbable - that is, highly unlikely to
have occurred by unaided chance alone - we attribute them to deliberate
design. If we walked into the kitchen and found a scattering of
alphabet soup letters on the floor that spelled out a meaningful sentence, we
would recognize that it was the deliberate handiwork of someone doing the
spelling. Cryptography is also an example of exploring discoveries
which are highly improbable to be attributed to chance as the rival conjecture.
If we
encountered a series of ostensibly "random" letters, but discovered
that some systematic transformation rendered them into a meaningful sentence,
we would infer that someone had hidden that message there deliberately.
Random chance would be deemed too unlikely to have caused that unaided. The forensic
debates in a courtroom also typically deal with rendering random chance as
the unlikely contributor to the evidence which points to deliberate intent or
design. The
discovery that our DNA codes are three-out-of-four, error-correcting codes,
which are stored, retrieved, copied, and processed to instruct machines to
fabricate the complex proteins that make up living organisms, has rendered
any attribution to unaided chance as absurd in the extreme. (For those of our
readers with advanced technical aptitudes, we strongly recommend the writings
of William Dempski listed in the bibliography at the end of this article.) Irreducible
Complexity Michael Behe
has upset the comfort of the Darwinists by highlighting a design attribute
that he terms "irreducible complexity." Consider, as an
example, the familiar household mousetrap in figure
2. This simple
device consists of five essential parts: (1) a platform which holds (2) a
hammer driven by (3) a spring when restrained by (4) a holding bar until released
by (5) a catch. This basic design has defied attempts to simplify it
further, or to reduce its complexity. The significant feature is that
with only four of the five parts one cannot catch 4/5ths as many mice!
Its function depends on each of its essential elements, each of which involve
substantial precision in their specification. "Natural
selection" cannot operate until there is something to select from. Behe then
presents an example of "irreducible complexity" from nature by
reviewing the tiny motor that powers the flagellum, which propels a bacterium
through the water: Figure
3: This tiny mechanism, positioned to penetrate the bacterium's
protective outer membrane, consists of over 40 parts - each of which are
essential to its functioning. Figure
4 presents a functional equivalent: with any of its 40 parts missing,
this mechanism would not be functional and would be a casualty in the
processes of "natural selection" postulated by the
Darwinists. The bacterium, dependent upon its locomotion, would be
likewise. So how did
it come about? All the Darwinists can do is assert rather than explain. The Miniature
City Darwinists
love to postulate the "simple cell." With the advent of
modern microbiology, we now know "there ain't any such
thing." Even the simplest cell is complex beyond our imagining. As Michael
Denton has pointed out, "Although the tiniest bacterial cells are
incredibly small, each is in effect a veritable microminiaturized factory
containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular
machinery, made up of 100,000,000,000 atoms, far more complicated than any machine
built by man and absolutely without parallel in the nonliving world."4 The
"simple cell" turns out to be a miniaturized city of unparalleled
complexity and adaptive design, including automated assembly plants and
processing units featuring robot machines (protein molecules with as many as
3,000 atoms each in three-dimensional configurations) manufacturing hundreds
of thousands of specific types of products. The system design exploits
artificial languages and decoding systems, memory banks for information
storage, elegant control systems regulating the automated assembly of
components, error correction techniques and proofreading devices for quality
control. All by
chance? All without a Designer? (How do you define
"absurd?") When I was
at the Ford Motor Company, one of our proudest assets was the famous River
Rouge Plant in Dearborn. It was the largest totally integrated
manufacturing facility in the world. With 97 miles of railroad within
the plant, raw iron ore and limestone entered one end; the necessary steel,
glass, and paint were manufactured within the facility. The entire cars
(including the engines on automated lines) were fabricated within the plant,
and new Mustangs came out the other end. Yet this entire complex pales
in comparison to the elegant high order of design demonstrated in the
simplest cell, which can also replicate itself in a matter of hours. The Darwinian
Bankruptcy An elegant
design is more than the parts themselves: it involves information. It
requires information input external to the design itself - and the deliberate
involvement of a Designer. The
Darwinians cannot explain the origin of life because they cannot account for
the origin of information. The technology that provides language -
semantics and syntax, for example - is quite distinct from the technology of
the ink and paper it may be written on. The physical features of the
circuits in a computer provide no clue about the design of the software that
resides within it. It is profoundly significant that the Title of the Creator
is the Logos - The Word: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and
the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things
were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was
made. - John 1:1-3 This article
was excerpted from our featured Briefing Package, In the Beginning There Was...Information. Sources:
This article was originally
published in the Notes:
THE REALM OF THE LIVING CELLApril 25, 1997TRANSCRIPTDavid
Gergen, editor at large of U.S. News & World Report, engages Boyce
Rensberger, science writer for the Washington Post, author of Life
Itself: Exploring the Realm of the Living Cell. JIM
LEHRER: Now a Gergen dialogue. David Gergen, editor at large of "U.S.
News & World Report," engages Boyce Rensberger, science writer for
the "Washington Post," author of "Life Itself: Exploring the
Realm of the Living Cell." DAVID GERGEN: Boyce, you’ve been covering science for over 30 years,
and in your book you seem absolutely fascinated by what’s going on in cell
research. What brings this passion out in you now? BOYCE RENSBERGER, Author, "Life Itself": Well, to me, it’s
just the most fascinating thing there is. If you stop and think about what we
as human beings are, we are some kind of machine in--this miraculous machine,
marvelous machine. What is it that’s inside us, that makes us able to do such
a simple thing as move, or a more complex thing like to think? And I just
can’t think of anything more fascinating than to know how that works. DAVID GERGEN: What have we learned now? Crick and Lotts when they won
their Nobel Prize for the double helix in DNA, that was about 30 years ago,
35 years ago, what have we learned in the last 20 or 30 years? BOYCE RENSBERGER: Oh, my God, we’ve learned most of what we know
about cell--how life works has been learned since then. I mean, what they
showed was the double helix structure of DNA. What was learned subsequently
was what does that double helix structure do? You know, what do the pieces of
that, of the chromosome do? We learned much more about what the cell does
with that information? You know, there’s more to life than just DNA. We hear
all these stories about finding the gene for this or for that, but there’s--a
gene literally does not do anything, except just sit inside the nucleus of
the cell and let the rest of the cell’s machinery read its message and act on
it. And all the work is done by other things. And what we’ve learned is a lot
of that other stuff. DAVID GERGEN: About the cells, themselves. BOYCE RENSBERGER: About what the cell does. I mean, a gene is to a
cell as the software on a disk is to everything that a computer can do. It
just sits there. You need all the rest of that hardware to make the--to make
the software do anything useful. DAVID GERGEN: Right. BOYCE RENSBERGER: And we need all the rest of the cell to make the
gene useful. DAVID GERGEN: Right. Let’s talk about the cells, themselves. You said
in the human body there are about 60 trillion cells. BOYCE RENSBERGER: Sixty trillion. That’s 60 million million cells. DAVID GERGEN: Right. BOYCE RENSBERGER: That’s a lot. DAVID GERGEN: Now, I’ve always assumed they are quite small, but you
said there are some cells which are actually very large. BOYCE RENSBERGER: There are some cells that are large. The largest
one in terms of length--those are the cells that are the nerve cells that run
from the base of your spinal column out to the farthest point from that,
which in most people is the tip of the big toe, so that’s a distance of
several feet. DAVID GERGEN: That’s one single cell. BOYCE RENSBERGER: One single cell stretches that whole length. There
are many more cells running parallel to it, and bundled up, they make a
nerve. DAVID GERGEN: Fascinating. Now, the ordinary cell, how many can
fit--we used to talk in the Middle Ages about how many angels can dance on
the head of a pin. BOYCE RENSBERGER: They’re bigger than angels. Well, I don’t know about
the head of a pin, but if you look at say the dot on an "i" in a
piece of newspaper or book type, about 200 cells can be fitted side by side
on that circular dot. DAVID GERGEN: Now, what’s really interesting about your book was how
much was going on inside that little, little tiny cell. BOYCE RENSBERGER: It’s incredibly tiny. Most of them are not that
long. They’re much smaller. And we used to say that what was inside a cell
was protoplasm, and today that’s an extinct term. There is no such thing as
protoplasm unless you mean that’s everything that’s in there. Now that we’re
able to look very closely at going inside the cell and see what’s there, we
see it is--every cell is jam-packed with machinery, with molecules that are
doing jobs, that are moving around. There’s a transportation system inside
cells with a network of tracts, with containerized cargo that’s hauled around
on those tracks by little molecular motors. You know, your genes tell certain
machinery in the cell to make a protein of a certain kind. They do that. The
protein may belong in some other part of the cell, or it may be that it’s
supposed to go to a different part of the body entirely. It gets
containerized and hauled off to those places. All this stuff is going on
simultaneously. If you get down and look at it, it’s just a chattering
factory-like environment. DAVID GERGEN: Four or five centuries ago, as you write, people
thought that the soul actually made things move within the cells, made the
body move, sort of these vital forces in the body. What really makes it move?
BOYCE RENSBERGER: What really makes it move is a type of molecule
that--you call them molecular motors, motor molecules, that can actually
swivel. When they get with a certain other kind of molecule--a phosphate binds
to them. This is the way energy is carried around inside the body. When they
get a little piece of that to them, they flex. And our cells like muscle
cells are built so that they have lots of these motor molecules in long
parallel strands. And one reaches out and grabs the other and pulls on it.
When you want your muscles to work, that’s what happens. DAVID GERGEN: Right. BOYCE RENSBERGER: Millions of times. And it pulls, and it’s just like
pulling on a rope hand over hand. DAVID GERGEN: What is magical to me is that it all works. It’s so
complex, the complexity. BOYCE RENSBERGER: It is incredibly complex. And yet, the more you
know about it, the more wonderful it seems, just the more astonishing. |
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