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Supreme court deciding on gay marriage laws this month. Ken Ham answersingenesis.org

Supreme Court to Decide on Gay “Marriage” Laws
This month the US Supreme Court is set to rule on gay “marriage.” So what is the best approach for Christians to take about this controversy, and how should we view the US Constitution’s guarantee of the “free exercise of religion”?
In addition, for the secularists who are often loudly proclaiming tolerance in the culture, will they be prepared to allow our free exercise of religion and tolerate our different view of morality? For example, will secularists tolerate pastors who refuse to perform same-sex marriages?
In many of my public talks, I quote Jesus in Matthew 19. This is where He taught the meaning of marriage: one man and one woman. Now, after some of my talks, someone may approach me and declare: “Well, I’m a homosexual and I believe in gay marriage. What do you have to say to that?”
In a recent live interview on Google Hangouts, I was asked several questions about the Bible. The last question was, “How can we be bold in our faith . . . without hurting people who strongly disagree with our viewpoint on gay ‘marriage’?”
Here is how I answered:
Let me give a practical answer to help people understand. If I have somebody come up to me at church—and I’ve had this happen when I’ve spoken in churches—and said “I’m a homosexual—what are you going to do about it?” I’m not going to stand there and say that it’s wrong, that it’s evil and against God and His Word. Now, I agree with those things, but I’m not going to say that right there, because I can’t impose my Christian worldview on someone if they don’t have the foundation for it.
So what I will say to that person is, let me tell you why I believe what I do. Then let me know why you believe what you do. It helps take out the emotionalism.
I’ll say, I start with God’s Word. Now you might say you don’t believe it, and I understand that. But I do believe [in one-man-one-woman marriage] because I start with God’s Word. And I do believe Genesis, even if you think it’s just myth. I understand that you do. But just understand where I am coming from, and because of that, that’s why I believe marriage is a man and a woman. And that’s why I would say homosexual behavior is wrong.
I understand you don’t believe Genesis. I understand where you are coming from [about gay “marriage”] because if Genesis is not true, why not accept homosexual behavior? Why not do whatever you want? I understand that. But my challenge to you is, why do you believe what you do, and where do you believe you came from? And what do you think is wrong with the Bible? Can we talk at that level? It really comes down to this: we have different starting points.
That’s what I did in the Bill Nye debate: show that it is really a worldview issue. It’s a starting-points clash. If you can take the emotionalism out of the argument and help people understand that . . . when it comes to our worldview, and interpreting what life is all about, that’s really the difference.
And so I think the way you approach things is not from the top down but from the foundation up.1
I pray the US Supreme Court truly upholds the Constitution this month and rules that gay “marriage” should not be forced on us to the restriction of our free exercise of religion. Gay “marriage” is wrong based on our religious beliefs founded in God’s Word.
Of course, it’s not the Supreme Court that has ultimate jurisdiction on what is true marriage. The real Supreme Court is led by the Supreme Authority to whom each of us is accountable and who is the final authority on what constitutes a marriage. He has already ruled:
Have you not read that He who made them at the beginning “made them male and female,” and said, “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh”? (Matthew 19:4–6) Yes, there will be people who will not be obedient to God’s Word concerning marriage and the natural order of things as God created (Romans 1:26). But I pray the US Supreme Court will rule to uphold our free exercise of religion and not discriminate against Christians who base their worldview on the words of the ultimate Supreme Judge.

Underground Christian Network smuggles refugees from North Korea from the NY POST

The underground Christian network smuggling refugees out of North Korea
If such a thing as a normal childhood can be had in North Korea, Joseph Kim had it. He lived with his father, mother and older sister in Hoeryong, a city that benefits from being the birthplace of Kim Il-sung’s first wife.
There, young families had normal goods and services: a grocery store, a barber shop, an ice-cream parlor. At the end of each day, the neighborhood children would gather around the television and gorge themselves on popcorn and candy.
What Kim’s family did not know was that Hoeryong was, and remains, home to a maximum-security concentration camp, one of six the country is known to run.
As he writes in his new memoir, “Under the Same Sky: From Starvation in North Korea to Salvation in America” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), Kim and his family believed that they wanted for nothing. “We were all alike,” he writes, “one big North Korean family, or so it seemed to me.”
The great famine
Arid farmland west of North Korea’s capitol Pyongyang in1995.Photo: Getty Images When Kim was nearly 4 years old, his father, a respected member of the Workers’ Party of Korea, was so successful that he was able to build a house for his young family. It was 1994. Kim was enrolled in kindergarten, which children attend for two years. There, he learned about the Great Leader Kim Il-sung, and the importance of constant, daily worship. Every North Korean was to have a framed picture of Kim Il-sung and his wife in their homes. “You could be sent to a prison camp for allowing dirt to gather on Kim Il-sung’s portrait, or for putting it behind cracked glass,” Kim writes. The first thing his father did every morning was to carefully clean those frames. The children also learned about America, mainly through illustrations. Teachers showed their students drawings of American soldiers spearing pregnant North Korean women with bayonets and marching them into gas chambers. “I held my breath,” Kim writes, “as the teachers explained that Americans had come to our country to massacre Koreans for no other reason than they liked to . . . the only people who stopped the Americans from coming to my country, our teachers said, were Kim Il-sung and the soldiers of North Korea.” On July 8 of that year, Kim Il-sung died, and not long after — unbeknownst to North Korea’s citizens — Russia stopped subsidizing the nation with food and fertilizer. Then, in 1995, biblical rains and flooding washed away what few crops grew. What little there was of the electrical grid went out. The nation plunged into a great famine. Within weeks, Kim’s father was unable to feed his family, and his mother was ripping up any plant she could find, edible or not, and force-feeding it to Kim and his sister. “Your body knows when it’s eating something that’s not food,” he writes. “Your belly is temporarily full, but you can tell no nutrients are flowing to your limbs, that there’s no fat to make your taste buds happy.” The deprivation was sudden and severe. A next-door neighbor’s grandfather died of starvation. His parents began fighting brutally over how to get food; his father refused to engage in bribes or the black market, believing such things morally wrong. His mother was in agony: “You’re sacrificing your own children!” She sold her wedding dress to buy what little food was available. “We were dying,” Kim writes. “Our eyeballs pushed from their sockets, or so it seemed. Really, our faces were just growing leaner. We had little energy for playing or reading books or anything else.”
By spring 1996, the family’s lone daily meal was a handful of weeds, but some days, they only had tiny sips of water.
Kim’s mother went to stay with her own parents. His father decided their best hope was with his brother, who lived near Pyongyang and was a major in the Korean People’s Army.
They traveled by train, and a journey that should have taken less than 10 hours took them three weeks, each car stuffed with the starving and unwashed, no room for anyone to move.
“People lay in the aisles of the cars, too weak to lift their heads for morsels of food; others were taken out to the fields on either side of the railbed and left to die,” Kim writes. “As we passed stations, I saw corpses piled up outside them, people who’d been waiting and had expired in the heat.”
The escape
A barbed-wire fence separating North Korea from China.Photo: Reuters
The family, whether together or apart, was never welcome at one place for very long. As food became ever more scarce, extra mouths were a potentially fatal liability. Kim writes of seeing one relative, an older woman, sneaking some of the very little food in the house and begging Kim not to tell — her own son had once caught her in the act and nearly yanked out her teeth with a pair of pliers.
Dogs vanished from the streets; so did rats. After even vermin became scarce, stories spread about people killing and eating their own infants and selling their children for food — stories Kim believes to this day.
Kim’s father sold half of the house for a week’s worth of cornbread, and after that ran out, he walked six hours to beg a cousin for food. The cousin refused.
That was the end for Kim’s father. He began decompensating rapidly, screaming all day and all night in agony. Doctors were selling their meds on the black market, and they wouldn’t treat patients unless they were given a full meal.
It took two and a half months for Kim’s father to die. At his burial, Kim’s mother announced that she and his sister would be going to China; she had hired a broker to smuggle them out. His mother would eventually be caught and put in prison, and he later learned that she had sold his sister to a Chinese man.
Kim was 12 years old. He spent the next three years bouncing between various relatives, but at times he lived on the streets or in a detention home for young boys and girls, where he would hear the screams of children being raped by the guards.
Yet security was lax, and after several months, he successfully ran away. With no family and no food, he did what had previously been unthinkable: One cold winter night, he snuck across the frozen Tumen river into China — one of the most common ways North Koreans attempt to escape, and one the government tries to discourage by telling its citizens that the water is laced with 33,000 volts of electricity.
Sold by Stallone
A concrete bridge stretches across the narrow Tumen river towards North Korea from Yanji, China.Photo: Getty Images
Once Kim crossed the river, he hid in an abandoned house for six days. Finally, he found a church — an elderly Chinese woman told him to look for crosses, because those were markers of safe places. Kim didn’t know what a cross was or what Christians were, but he did as he was told, and he wound up at the Tumen City church.
There, he was plugged into an underground network of Chinese Christians, headed by a pastor who helped North Korean refugees make it out of China.
The pastor became one of the first people Kim truly trusted. He helped Kim stay out of sight, bought him new clothes so he wouldn’t stand out and placed him with an older woman who needed help around her apartment.
After a few months, a missionary came to the church with a special offer for Kim.
“Would you like to go to America?” she asked.
“My immediate response,” Kim says today, “was ‘NO.’ I was so brainwashed that it came out of my mouth immediately.”
He knew little of what was going on in the world. His understanding of 9/11: “I heard that two really tall twin buildings collapsed. I knew it was in America, but I probably didn’t know it was in New York.”
Still, Kim was encouraged to reconsider. He was shown a Sylvester Stallone movie and couldn’t believe what he was seeing: “Stallone…opens the refrigerator and takes out bread and a bottle of wine. He eats the bread and drinks the wine and gets up and leaves. This was astonishing. America was so advanced, he didn’t have to wash his own dishes,” Kim writes. “America was limitless, I decided. I wanted to see what it was like.”
Kim was taken to a shelter in Yanji that was partly run by an American nonprofit called LiNK (Liberty in North Korea). After two months, a young American man named Adrian introduced himself to Kim and explained that he would be taking Kim and two other boys out of China and helping them get to America.
First, Adrian had to make the boys seem more Chinese — aggressive, rowdy, modern — than the deferential and scared North Koreans they were. He taught them how to roughhouse, how to use slang. He took them out to fast-food restaurants. He exposed them to Western culture and humor.
“You know how you look, Joseph?” Adrian asked one day.
“Trendy,” Kim said, gesturing to his suit jacket with cotton pants.
“No, you look like a North Korean refugee.”
“I was shocked!” Kim writes. “This was my coolest outfit.”
Adrian bought the boys new clothes and told them to stand up straight — they had spent months hunched over, trying not to be noticed.
And then, suddenly, Adrian hustled them in a taxi; they spent days on the run, hopping from hotel to hotel until finally, one night, Kim found himself driven not to the airport but the US Consulate. He would live there for four months before making to America.
If he can make it here…
Joseph KimPhoto: Anne Wermiel Kim was met by a social worker when he landed and placed with a foster family in Richmond, Va.; Catholic Charities sponsored him. He was 17. He barely spoke English, and in the cruelest of ironies, his foster family had unusual and strict rules when it came to food: They kept the refrigerator empty, locked everything up and forbade anyone from eating except at regular meals.
“I couldn’t understand why I’d traveled from China,” Kim writes, “only to end up starving in America.”
He called his social worker; horrified, she immediately placed him with another family. On his first day with his new foster mother, she opened her fridge and said to him, “Joseph, this is your home and you can eat whenever and how much you want.”
Kim assimilated remarkably quickly, and after graduating high school at 21, he decided to move to New York. He has heard that his mother remains in prison for attempting to escape North Korea, and he has no idea where his sister is. “I do hope my mom is still alive, and I hope my sister is somewhere in China with a great husband,” he says.
Today, Kim is 24 years old, and though years of malnutrition set him back academically, he’s just been accepted to Bard and American University in DC. He loves red meat and whiskey and Tinder. He would like to someday work for an NGO and help other North Koreans but hopes always to stay in New York, which he chose for a very specific reason.
“I was afraid that I couldn’t stand on my feet in American society,” he says. “I was pretty spoiled: I had food and clothing provided. All I had to do was go to high school. But at graduation, I was doubting myself: Did I have the skills to survive? And someone told me, ‘If you can survive in New York, you can survive anywhere.’ ”

Death is not good answersingenisis.org

Death Is Not Good
Many pastors and theologians today believe that the earth is millions or billions of years old. But based on my reading and interactions, it is clear that most of them have never really considered the theological implications of allowing animal death, disease, predation, and extinction prior to Adam’s sin in the Garden of Eden.
Are you prepared to answer Christians who say the age of creation isn’t important? When challenged about this seeming inconsistency, they usually point to the “overwhelming scientific evidence” and say or imply that their perspective is easy to harmonize with the Bible and it doesn’t significantly affect any important doctrines. This attitude is being promoted in theology textbooks widely used in conservative evangelical seminaries, colleges, and churches.
An example is Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology (1994). This work is helpful in many ways and immensely influential, having been translated into at least eight major languages. Like many other evangelicals who reject the young-earth view, Grudem believes that the Fall had an impact on the whole creation. And he teaches that when Jesus returns and renews the creation, “there will be no more thorns or thistles, no more floods or droughts, no more deserts or uninhabitable jungles, no more earthquakes or tornadoes, no more poisonous snakes or bees that sting or mushrooms that kill” (p. 836).
But this outstanding, highly respected theologian apparently does not see how the concept of millions of years of deah before the Fall destroys the Bible’s teaching about the goodness of the original creation, the prospect of goodness in the new heaven and earth, and the goodness of God Himself.1 Are you prepared to answer Christians who say the age of creation isn’t important?
The Goodness of the Original Creation
As with any theological discussion, the place to begin is God’s Word. We all need to work hard to set aside our personal agendas and let Scripture inform us. When we examine Scripture closely, the timing of animal death directly impacts at least three critical doctrines.
The timing of animal death directly impacts at least three critical doctrines. First is the goodness of the original creation. Genesis 1 says six times that during Creation Week God called the creation “good.” When He finished creating on Day Six, He called everything “very good” (Genesis 1:31). This weighty term is clearly chosen to emphasize “goodness,” a core concept of Scripture.
In creation’s initial “very good” state, God’s Word says that man, land animals, and birds were originally vegetarian (Genesis 1:29–30). Now we find creatures fossilized inside the stomachs of other creatures. So this carnivorous behavior must have occurred after the “very good” creation was cursed (Genesis 3).
Goodness Lost
Another key doctrine is the nature of the “goodness” lost at the Fall and needing restoration. Creation was once harmonious, but that is gone. Adam and Eve’s sin resulted in God’s judgment on the whole creation, not just man. The well-being of both is intimately linked throughout Scripture. Instantly Adam and Eve died spiritually; their relationship with God was broken (Genesis 3:8). They also became mortal so that their eventual physical death was certain (Genesis 3:19; Romans 5:12 and 1 Corinthians 15:21–22).
God’s judgment affected other aspects of creation. The serpent, which Satan used to deceive Eve, was cursed, resulting in a physical transformation of some kind, as it began to crawl on its belly (Genesis 3:14).
Since the verse says that the serpent was cursed “more than” or “above" all other animals,2 it is reasonable to assume that other animals could have been altered, either morphologically or at least behaviorally. Also, God cursed the ground itself, resulting in thorns and thistles (Genesis 3:17–18), a fact well remembered by Noah’s father (Genesis 5:29).
The Fall is the first of many examples where God judged (or threatened to judge) the non-human creation because of man’s sin: during the Flood (Genesis 6:13), as a result of Israel’s disobedience (Deuteronomy 28:15–68; 2 Chronicles 7:12–14), and as a consequence of Nineveh’s evil (Jonah 4:11).
In the New Testament, we see again this connection between mankind’s sin and redemption and nature’s corruption and liberation. With Adam’s Fall in mind (Romans 5:12), Paul tells us in Romans 8:19–25 that more than mankind was affected. The whole creation groans in slavery to corruption and futility, waiting for Christ’s final redemptive work at His Second Coming.
advertisements Scripture depicts this corruption as a bad thing, an imposition on the proper order of things. Yet those who believe that life has been around for hundreds of millions of years must believe what the evolutionists claim, namely that five major mass extinction events preceded mankind’s arrival on the planet. At each of those times, they say, 65–90 percent of all species on earth went extinct. If this is true, what impact did the Fall have on creation? None.
In fact, if death, disease, and extinction really did occur for millions of years, then the “very good” creation of Genesis 1 was considerably worse than the world we now inhabit. The Curse should actually be viewed as a blessing, since the earth has not seen 65–90 percent of all species go extinct since Adam sinned. In this scenario, the post-Fall world is more creature-friendly than the “very good” pre-Fall world! So to what state will Jesus “restore” the “groaning” creation in the future?
The Good Character of God
The acceptance of millions of years of animal death, disease, and extinction is also contrary to the nature of God revealed in Scripture.
The Lord claims to be good (Psalm 135:3) and takes responsibility for all of His creation. God’s description of His creative acts in Genesis 1 and Psalm 33:6–9 clearly shows that His acts were miraculous. God spoke and things immediately came into existence. God did not speak and then wait millions of years.
If millions of years of history occurred before man, we must ask why a good God would create some things miraculously and then allow millions of years of animal suffering, death, and extinction before creating other things miraculously.
God also claims that His works are good, just, and wise (Isaiah 46:9–11; Deuteronomy 32:4; Romans 11:33). What kind of God would create and then destroy billions of creatures that man would never be able to rule over, as God intended (Genesis 1:26–28)?
Only young-earth biblical creation gives us a view that is consistent with all the good attributes of God—His glory, wisdom, power, holiness, truthfulness, and omniscient intelligence—revealed throughout Scripture.
Restoring Goodness in Heaven and Earth
For the reasons above, our confidence in God’s promise to prepare a better place in the future depends on a better place—without animal death—having existed before Adam’s sin. At Christ’s return, He will complete His work of redemption. Acts 3:20–21 and Colossians 1:15–20 teach that He will “restore” and “redeem” all things to a similar but even better state than the pre-Fall world. Sin will be no more.
Regardless of our differences regarding the correct interpretation of Isaiah 11:6–9, the principle expressed there strongly implies that, when Christ restores the creation, animals will no longer eat each other. Human disease, suffering, and death will cease (Revelation 21:3–5) because the Curse will be no more (Revelation 22:3). The Curse came upon creation at Adam’s Fall and will be removed when the Last Adam consummates history.
The cosmic impact of Christ’s final redemptive work has been the orthodox Christian view for the last 2,000 years, and it needs to remain so. The cosmic impact of Christ’s final redemptive work has been the orthodox Christian view for the last 2,000 years, and it needs to remain so.
As we have seen here, the idea of millions of years of animal death contradicts the Bible’s teaching about the nature of the pre-Fall creation and the present world. It also assaults the character of God. And it undermines the certain hope the Bible gives of Christ’s future redemptive work.
Could animals have died before the Fall? Absolutely not! To conclude otherwise is biblically unjustified and undermines a host of foundational doctrines, including the need for the gospel itself. Once this significance becomes clear, Christ-loving, Bible-believing Christians have only one choice: death—including death of animals—began after Adam’s Fall.3
Dr. Terry Mortenson is a well-known speaker and writer for Answers in Genesis–USA. He earned his doctorate in history of geology from Coventry University in England, and his master of divinity degree from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois.