“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters.” (Genesis 1:1-2)
As many of you know, every once in a while I like to “push the envelope” a bit and touch upon some of the more contentious discussions about the Bible. So please bear with me as we look at Genesis and why some people do not believe we should interpret these literally, and why I believe we should.
It can be a long, drawn out and somewhat complicated subject for this type of format. So I will try to keep it as short as possible and will break this up into three separate posts. Please feel free to comment and ask any questions you wish. I will try my best to answer them. I pray God will use this to open our eyes to the truth. And that He will increase our understanding of, and faith in, Him and His word.
Allow me to begin by stating I am NOT a Young-earth creationist. To an evolutionist this would be like saying, “I’m an anti-science mystic.” And I don’t want you to think this is only about the scientific evidence for the age of the earth. When in fact, the main issue is our starting point for interpreting the evidence—either fallible human opinions or infallible Scripture. (See Psalm 119:160; 2 Timothy 3:16) So what is my starting point? I consider myself a biblical creationist and I believe in the inerrancy of Scripture. I also strongly believe that it is a serious mistake when Bible-believing Christians compromise with the great ages demanded by the evolutionists.
As I mentioned there are two starting points that exist: man’s opinion or God’s Word. Compromising positions happen when Christians start from man’s opinion of long ages and then reinterpret Scripture to fit the uniformitarian beliefs of God-rejecting naturalists. 1.
Dr. R. Albert Mohler, Jr, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, points out how uniformitarianism and evolution don’t mix with the Bible: “The entire intellectual enterprise of evolution is based on naturalistic assumptions, and I do not share those presuppositions. Indeed, the entire enterprise of Christianity is based on supernaturalistic, rather than merely naturalistic, assumptions. There is absolutely no reason that a Christian theologian should accept the uniformitarian assumptions of evolution. In fact, given a plain reading of Scripture, there is every reason that Christians should reject a uniformitarian presupposition.” 2.
Throughout the ages, Satan has worked overtime to undermine God, His Word, and His Work. One of the main areas in which Satan is waging a distressingly successful assault is in the area of origins. Many, intelligent, sincere Christians have been lured into doubting the credibility of the Creation account as recorded in Genesis. Many evangelical leaders today, unfortunately, have surrendered to the evolutionary timescale of modern unbelieving geologists and astronomers. They feel that they must somehow reinterpret the Genesis record of creation to allow for billions of prehistoric years, which the evolutionists must have in order to make cosmic evolution and biological evolution seem feasible. This compromise is necessary, they say, in order to win scientists and other intellectuals to the Lord.
Their reasons for rejecting a literal Genesis are questionable at best. Even though they may be sincere in their efforts to reconcile Scripture with scientific evolution, they undoubtedly are sincerely wrong. It is important at the foundational level of Christian theology and Christian living to take Genesis literally. Believe it or not, real science does not in any way disprove a literal Genesis. As the church, it would be beneficial to examine our stand on this issue if we want to remain healthy and become vibrant witnesses to the reliability of Scripture and of God’s grace in our lives.
Hugh Ross is a powerful example of a sincere person unwittingly swallowing the Kool-Aid of doubt in the literal interpretation of the Genesis account. Ross is a professional astronomer who currently directs the efforts of an organization called Reasons to Believe. A big part of Ross’ ministry is to try to convince Christians that we should not take the unscientific view that the earth is only a few thousand years old. He believes that taking this view will not only turn away unbelievers, but it is equivalent to tossing reason out the door.
Among his many ideas, he strongly advocates that the earth is billions of years old, that the creation days of Genesis were long periods of time, and that Noah’s flood was not global. Is he alone in this thinking?
A short list of other big names in the Evangelical community, and their endorsements of one of Ross’ books, Creation and Time, include William Lane Craig, Research Professor of Philosophy, Talbot School of Theology 3., Wayne Grudem, General editor, The ESV Study Bible; author, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine. 4., Norman L. Geisler, Dean of Southern Evangelical Seminary 5., Dr. Gleason L. Archer Professor of Old Testament and Semitic Studies at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School 6.., and Chuck Colson, conservative evangelical founder of Prison Fellowship Ministries and host of the radio program BreakPoint. 7. These are only a few of the many names that, as you can see, are within the evangelical community who do not take Genesis literally.
Why are these men, who seem to have a genuine love for the Bible, afraid of interpreting Genesis literally? People often refer back to the disagreement between Galileo and the Church of his day. The argument goes something like this, In the 17th century, Galileo, representing the scientific community, showed evidence that heavenly bodies did not orbit around the earth, but on the contrary, the planets, including the earth, revolved around the sun. The church ousted Galileo on the grounds that he was teaching something that contradicted the Bible.
However, this was an embarrassment to the church, since Galileo was proven to be correct. So, the church today must not make the same mistake as the church in Galileo’s day. There is so much evidence that all animals and plants have developed from a common ancestor, and it is an established scientific fact that the earth is nearly five billion years old. Therefore, we need to take a second look at the early chapters of Genesis, interpreting them in light of these scientific facts.
However, this is a wrong interpretation of history. The Galileo episode was certainly not simply a case of science versus the Church. The heliocentric (sun-centered) system, although proposed by Copernicus in the 16th century, was opposed by the majority of the scientific community: they were following the teachings of Aristotle and Ptolemy. On the other hand, the church was initially open to Galileo’s discoveries. 8. Nevertheless, many church leaders took the side of the scientific majority opinion, and tried to find scriptural support by employing some suspicious ways of interpreting the scriptures.
They claimed, for example, that since Moses wrote about a rising sun (See Genesis 19:23), and a sunset (See Genesis 28:11), this meant that the sun (and other heavenly bodies) traveled around the earth. It was these church leaders who, trying to apply their understanding of science to the Bible, were the ones who opposed Galileo. 9.
Is there a lesson we can learn from the Galileo incident? Yes there is. Today, the scientific establishment holds stubbornly to naturalism and long ages. 10. It is taken as fact that the universe originated billions of years ago by a big bang. Evolution from a common ancestor is not questioned. Many church leaders have gone along with these ideas. Yet, the Bible is clear that the earth is certainly less than ten thousand years old. 11., and that God created organisms fully complete, in specific categories.
However, people who believe this are laugh at. They are told, based on questionable interpretation methods, that the early chapters of Genesis actually support the idea of billions of years of God-directed evolution. I believe it is the compromise of Theistic Evolutionists, the Progressive Creationists, and so on, who did not learn the lesson from the Galileo controversy.
Clearly, the issue is not one of understanding what Genesis means, but whether we are willing to twist the text to fit so called facts of science, which are really not facts, but misinterpretations of scientific data based on evolutionary assumptions.
Next week, in Part-2, we will look at the inerrancy of God’s Word, and finally in Part-3 we’ll discuss the importance of taking Genesis literally. Looking forward to hearing from you!
1. The concept that the earth's surface was shaped in the past by gradual processes, such as erosion, and by small sudden changes, such as earthquakes, of the type acting today rather than by the sudden divine acts, such as the flood survived by Noah. (Genesis 6–8)
2. Mohler, R. Albert, Jr., “No Buzzing Little Fly—Why the Creation-Evolution Debate Is So Important,” Latest Posts from Dr. Mohler, January 5, 2011
3. Hallquist, C., William Lane Craig: Young-earth Creationism is an embarrassment, cited on the theologically liberal site patheos.com, 17 February 2013
4. James 3:17-18).”–Wayne Grudem: 1994, 307-08
5. When Skeptics Ask: A Handbook of Christian Evidence (page 22 9)
6. Archer G., "Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties", Zondervan Publishing House, Grand Rapids MI, 1982, pp. 59-60
7. Chuck Colson, July 2004
8. Grigg, Russel, “The Galileo Twist,” Creation, 19(4):30-32, September-November 1997.
9. Sarfati, Jonathan, Refuting Evolution, Master Books, Green Forest, p. 99-100.
10. The belief that everything can be explained by natural causes.
11. The Bible provides a complete genealogy from Adam to Jesus. You can go through the genealogies and add up the years. You'll get a total that is just over 4,000 years. Add the 2,000 years since the time of Jesus and you get just over 6,000 years since God created everything. The Bible does tell us, however, that the fossils we find could not have been buried before God created Adam. The animals whose bones became fossilized had to have died after God created Adam. That means those fossils must be less than 6,000 years old.
Here's why:
The animal has to first die. That's rather obvious. When did death enter the world? Not until Genesis chapter three when Adam and Eve disobey God. So up until that time neither people nor animals died. So, based on the Bible, there could not be any bones to create fossils until after the fall.
Here's another Biblical reason why the fossils we find could not have been buried before God created Adam:
When we examine fossils, in some of them we see evidence of sickness, disease and cancer. There is evidence of violence and of one animal eating another. So there were some problems. Not everything was good.
Yet, at the end of day six of creation, "God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning--the sixth day." (Genesis 1:31)
God didn't call His creation just good. He called it very good. A world with sickness, disease, cancer and violence is not good. So, the fossilized bones we now find had to have come from animals that died after God created Adam, and after the fall.
For an excellent study in this area, see Beechick’s article Chronology for Everybody (TJ, 15(3), 2001, p. 67-73). The thesis is that a chronology taken strictly from the Bible, results in a 6000-year-old view of the earth. We all need to believe all of the Bible, including the details of the chronology, regardless of seeming contradictory evidence from archaeology and secular chronologies.
I believe that placing the biblical chronologies on equal footing with secular chronologies is an attack on the veracity of the Scriptures!
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