I was listening to Dr. James White’s podcast the other day and heard him defending the Calvinist TULIP and criticizing other floral acrostics attempting to provide a contrasting view of salvation.  I’ve always disagreed with the doctrines of Calvinism, but I’ve never attempted to organize my disagreement into a simple acrostic which could stand toe-to-toe with the TULIP.  That is, I’ve never done so before now.  While listening to Dr. White’s podcast, I came up with a simple acrostic that I think defeats the TULIP with ease.

The idea that the lost will suffer eternal punishment has often been questioned by Christians who doubt that a God of mercy would condone such cruelty.  Instead, they often come up with other ideas about the punishment of the lost such as the idea that they will simply be annihilated or that they will only suffer for a period of time before being given another opportunity to turn to God.  There are several logical problems with attempting to reconcile either of these views to the accounts of Scripture, but in order to see that, we must actually know what the Scripture says about the punishment of the lost.  Unfortunately, I have discovered that very few Christians have ever actually studied this aspect of God’s Word.

According to Genesis 11, Abraham was born approximately 250 years after the flood.  However, the accounts which are recorded in chapters 10 through 25 of the book of Genesis seem to describe a region that is heavily populated.  There are dozens of cities or nations mentioned by name in these accounts, and many of them are described as having their own cultures, governments and infrastructures.  I have had several skeptics point out to me that it is not possible for a population to increase from just 8 individuals to a size large enough to support so many separate cultures.  In fact, at the current average growth rate of 1.14%, there would only have been 136 people on earth at the time that Abraham was born.  That’s certainly not enough to account for all the cities mentioned in these chapters of Genesis, and this is often cited as evidence against the biblical account.

The solution to this contradiction involves two simple observations of the record given in the book of Genesis.  First, the generations close to the flood had longer lifespans than we do today.  And second, these generations had higher birth rates than we do today.  When we combine these two observations, we can easily see the possibility that the population at the time of Abraham would be significantly higher than just 136 individuals, but the Bible actually gives us enough information to make some very reasonable estimates of just how much larger.

If you want the local church to engage in apologetics, then you have to make it both affordable and accessible.  That has been my experience over the past several years.  If I tell the average Christian layman that he should attend a particular apologetics conference or purchase a DVD set from one of the various apologetics ministries, I usually get some sort of half-hearted promise that he will "look into it."  But if I invite that same Christian layman to a free Saturday conference, then he becomes very interested.