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May 18, 2014 |
| A Firm Foundation | ||
False teachings are growing in the church. This should hardly be a surprise; the Bible says it would be this way. Even while the apostles were spreading the gospel message false teachers were going around with a different message. In their writings, the apostles exposed these false teachings but some of those same teachings are with us still to this day.
But we have new false teachings now, or perhaps they are the same old false teachings wrapped up in new packages. Because we do not have anyone as authoritative as the apostles, the church is having trouble rejecting and ridding itself of false teachings. Some of these teachings are now widely spread within the church. For example many preachers are preaching "Prosperity Gospel" or at least a watered down version of it.
Some of these false teachings are focused on drawing individuals in the church away from God. They do this by appealing to the desires in these individuals, desires like greed and lust. But some of these teachings are focused on tearing up the foundations of the church and thereby destroying the entire church. They do this by appealing to the worldliness that is in the people of the church and they bring in false teachings to replace foundational teachings.
Too many people want to find some way to fit the world into the church. They are prepared to twist or ignore parts of the Bible to achieve this. But the result is that they lose their foundation and are soon blown around by every false teaching.
In this lesson we will look at some particular foundational teachings that are under attack right now - and in fact the war is being lost. The false teachings leading this attack have been taught in many theological schools for a long time and those schools are producing pastors who believe them and who teach them to their churches. These false teachings fall under the heading of "Old Earth" and are related to evolution and other teachings of the world.
The world teaches many things that are incompatible with what the Bible teaches. Here we will look at two of them:
Various Christian scholars have become so convinced that what science teaches must be true that they have tried to fit these teachings into the Bible. But because what the Bible teaches is not compatible with what science teaches there are many ideas on how to fit it in. This is a sure sign that there is a problem. When a lot of theologians have different interpretations of a passage of scripture, either the passage isn't clear or the theologians are trying to get it to say something it doesn't say. In this case the passages are crystal clear as we will see.
But before we go to that we need to understand something very important about science. Many people think that science can't be wrong because there are a lot of very smart people using the scientific method. The truth is that science has had its share of quacks and of former truths that they have now abandoned.
But more importantly there are two kinds of sciences, hard and soft. The hard sciences use the scientific method the soft sciences cannot and do not. The hard sciences are like physics and chemistry. The scientific method can be used here because the scientific method requires that it be possible to test a theory over and over and get the same result. So a chemist can mix two chemicals together in the same proportions and get the same result.
One major flaw in the scientific method and the sciences that are built on it is that they must assume that all that facts are available and observable. But often enough a single new fact can arrive that completely blows up the existing theory. And of course there is the one fact that they cannot observe or test and that is God.
The soft sciences like history and psychology cannot use the scientific method. Either a repeatable test is not possible or the test subject is too changeable to allow repeatable tests to achieve the same result. This is exactly the case with theories of the creation of the universe. In these fields researchers try to find as many facts as possible and create a story that links them together. But nothing about that story is testable. No researcher has ever made anything evolve into anything else.
Also these stories they create are subject to personal opinions, biases, politics and other factors.
As a result the findings of researchers in those fields cannot be trusted like the findings from the hard sciences. The hard sciences produce cars, airplanes, spaceships, cell phones and many other things. The soft sciences produce informed speculation. But the public are often taught that all the sciences are equally scientific, but this is not true.
The idea that the earth is very old comes from soft science. Christian scholars try to fit it into the Genesis creation account in various ways, as mentioned earlier. They do this by inserting the billions of years into the Genesis account at various places, but this is a difficult task. The Genesis account has been written very clearly so that the careful reader can know the truth. So these scholars rely on people accepting their education as being authoritative, soft science as being authoritative or on people not knowing their Bibles.
When Hebrew language scholars study the Genesis creation account they say that there is no other way to understand it than that the days are literal 24 hour days. Although the Hebrew word for "day" can mean various periods of time just as we use the English word for day, the context of the creation account makes it clear that 24 hour days are intended.
One of the contextual indications of this is that each day ends with evening and morning and then the number of the day, for example "And there was evening, and there was morning - the second day"1. Any attempt to add billions of years into a creation day must add trillions of evenings and trillions of mornings. That conflicts with the one evening and one morning that the Bible lists. Therefore because evening and morning are listed along with each day, it is clear that 24 hour days are intended.
Also, the first day is described slightly differently from the others. Unfortunately many translations don't translate it faithfully. For only the first day of creation, in Hebrew, the word for "first" is not used but the word "one" is used. When translated correctly that would be "And there was evening, and there was morning - one day". It seems that God has gone to a lot of trouble to make it clear that these are 24 hour days. The reason for that has to be so that we could stand firmly on his truth and not be swayed by false teachings at this period of time when they are under attack.
Because many Christians do not read or know the truth or because they want to find peace with the world, they are deceived into believing a lie. It's plain that Jesus and the apostles believed the universe was created by God and that it was created in six 24 hour days.
Most Christians for most of 2,000 years have also believed they were 24 hour days. Even in the earliest days of Christianity, though, Greeks were bringing in ideas about an old earth.
The seven days, 6 of creation and 1 of rest, are foundational to other teachings such as the seven day week and the Sabbath.
In these verses we can see the parallel that is being drawn - the days of our week are the same days as the days of creation. The verse wouldn't have the same meaning if it said "in six unequal periods of time the Lord made the heavens and the earth …".
Note: God could have created the universe and all life in one day, or ten days but he chose 7
The Old Earth idea is based on geology and the fossil record as it is called. But the fossil record does not match what the Genesis account says, even if you lengthen the days into billions of years. The order of some things is different. Therefore most of the Old Earth Christian scholars find themselves forced to adopt some version of evolution instead.
This causes even more problems with fundamental Bible teachings. The idea of two real people called Adam and Eve becomes a problem. Even if it was possible for man to evolve from a monkey, which it isn't, there would have to be a mother and father for Adam and Eve.
This means that what the Bible says about Adam being created from the dust would have to be wrong and also woman being created from man's rib. Being made as perfect people made in the image of God also becomes impossible.
The concept of original sin would also have to be wrong because there was no original man and woman. Without that perfect original state between God and man and the fall from it due to sin, many things by many Bible authors wouldn't make any sense. Luke's account of the lineage of Jesus in Luke 3:23 would have to be wrong.
With the Old Earth idea, it is necessary to have animals that lived, ate each other and died before mankind existed. This is based on the fossil record seen in the earth. But this contradicts what the Bible says.
The Bible says that the disobedience of Adam allowed sin to enter the world and that brought death to mankind and to all of creation.
The Bible also says that all life ate green grass and they did not eat each other until after the flood.
The Biblical concept of marriage would also be wrong. If Adam and Eve were humans who evolved, Adam and Eve would have to have been born from other humans, parents who were obviously married.
The Old Earth idea also has a major problem with Noah. If water gushed up from the surface of the earth in a great flood and covered the entire earth that would destroy the fossil record and distort geology, which are the foundations for the Old Earth idea. Therefore Christian scholars who believe in the Old Earth have to believe that the flood was just a local flood, not a global, worldwide flood. But this goes against the very specific words of the Bible.
That seems pretty clear. "All the high mountains … were covered" and "Every living thing was wiped out". Yet there are Christian people who want to call it a local flood.
If you accept the Old Earth idea then you are pretty much forced to accept evolution. An old earth and evolution fit together. In fact evolution requires an old earth. But neither idea fits with the Biblical account. When you begin to accept the smallest part of these ideas, it becomes necessary to accept more and more to have a consistent viewpoint. Therefore the Genesis creation account must be rejected, including Adam and Eve. Noah also has to be rejected.
By rejecting these accounts it is necessary to reject the fundamental ideas described in them. Things like Perfect Creation, Original Sin, Fallen Man, Woman Made from Man, Marriage, Cause of Death, Salvation, First Promise of a Messiah and on and on must be rejected.
By rejecting these you also have to reject what other Old Testament and New Testament authors have said about them. In doing that it is necessary to reject the idea that the words they wrote were guided by the Holy Spirit.
Given time to work its way through, it becomes a complete rejection of God. It shakes the faith of those who believe. If God lied in Genesis what else did he lie about? If God didn't author the books of the Bible, through the Holy Spirit and human authors, then how can the Bible be trusted?
One author who supports the Genesis account says he believes that people who believe the Old Earth and Evolution ideas are still Christians and saved by faith. I doubt that. If they had faith they would believe what God said no matter what man or the science of man said. If they had faith their works would not consist of falsely teaching other Christians. Consider these verses.
Luke 12 45 But
suppose the servant says to himself, 'My master is taking a long time in
coming,' and he then begins to beat the other servants, both men and women, and
to eat and drink and get drunk. 46 The master of that servant
will come on a day when he does not expect him and at an hour
he is not aware of. He will cut him to pieces and assign him a place with the
unbelievers.It is possible for a believer to do so much evil that he will be treated as an unbeliever.
1 Genesis 1:7 NIV