It is a scary thought to me to hear that Christ-followers don't believe their whole Bible as 100% true. Adding to that, many believe that the Bible is to be seen as a book of theoretical things and myths.
Many Christians, seem to take the word of textbooks over the Bible. I think we have seen in our modern-day, that textbooks, news, websites, and other outlets can be extremely skewed and can be used to give us what the author is trying to tell us rather than tell us the facts.
We won't believe the Word of the Almighty God, but we will believe what Anderson Cooper, Megyn Kelly, Shawn Hannity, and/or Bill O'Reilly tells us. We listen to college professors and scientists who use a science to tell us our earth is millions upon millions of years old, and we scoff at scientists in the same fields who tell us our earth is around 6,000 years old and use the Bible to back it up. We laugh when our pastors or friends tell us something about the Bible that we don't see as important to our faith, but we are the first to retweet "prosperity pastors" who tells us everything's gonna be okay and God's gonna give us money.
What's got me motivated?
Answers in Genesis
My church, FBC-Henderson, hosted a Creation Conference this weekend put on by Dr. Tommy Mitchell from Answers in Genesis, based out of Kentucky. Last spring, our church had a 7-week discipleship class over the same subject of Creation. These are not just "let's look at our Bible and see the cute artist's renderings of Genesis," these are "let's take our Bible and let's take Science and apply it to what we read in the Bible, and what others are saying, and let's use it to prove the Bible is 100% truth."
For years, the church, as a whole, has taken themselves out of the science conversation. Oh, yeah, we post random articles on Facebook about how Noah's Ark has been found or things like that, but we don't get to the meat and potatoes of our faith.
What I mean is, we are okay with the Bible when it leaves us in the status quo, but we are afraid of the Bible when it pushes us out of the line. People may think we are crazy. We might make someone upset.
Jesus talked to us about that when he told us in Matthew 10 that we would be hated for His name's sake, or maybe if you don't believe the Bible is 100% true, you don't believe Jesus meant what He said. I know one thing He didn't say, "Hey guys, do everything you can to stay out of the line of fire. Don't do anything to rock the boat."
That's how we live our lives in today's society. We are scared to ruffle feathers, we don't want to rock the boat. Well, to borrow from the rapper KB...
So here's the thing. This subject I'm discussing, I feel, is paramount to your faith.
You cannot take the Bible and pick and choose what you think is true, and what you think is myth. You have to take the whole Bible as 100% true or not.
I think what has happened to us is, we have taken the Old Testament and put it away. By that I mean, we ignore it. The only exception to that rule is for Sunday School classes for kids under the age of 10. We teach them all the little Bible stories (mind you, without equipping them) and we ignore them after we get into youth group.
The Bible has to be taken as 100% truth by every Christ-follower, or it has to be thrown out. If you see the story of Adam as a myth, then you may as well call the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ a myth as well.
I hear many adults ask "What happened to the truth?" Well, I would venture to say, the truth you're looking for is left back in the "good ole days" and wasn't much of the truth at all if we cannot assume that you take the entire Bible to be literal.
When the Bible says that God created the world in six days (in Hebrew "yom" יְוֹם), take that for what it means six literal days. Before you come with the multiple meanings of yom in Hebrew, the specific way it is mentioned in Genesis in the Creation narrative points us to the literal meaning of a day. Not an age, not a million years, not a time period...one day!
Besides that fact, if you trend towards believing the Million years theory (that each day in Genesis represents a million or more years), which was something I trended towards through high school and college, then help me understand this:
God created the world. On the first day, He created the Earth, space, time, and light. I don't think anyone would disagree with me. The second day, He created the vast expanse, the atmosphere. On the third day, He brought the dry land from the water and created the plants that grew there. On day 4, He created the sun, moon, and stars. Day 5, the creatures of the sea and the bird of the air. Then Day 6, the land animals and man. On Day 7, He rested. After each day, God looked back on what He created and called it bad...NO, he called it GOOD! Right? Tracking with me?
Now if you ascribe to the million years theory and thereby agree that's how we got what is now our fossil record (the exact thing I believed as a high school and college student), then explain to me how there was death in the midst of those six days in order to create those fossils. We could all agree that death was not in God's plan, therefore that would make death something that is not good. Right? Aside from the fact that land animals and man were all made on the same day. And if you roll with that, you're saying death occurred between the creation of land animals and man, and so why would God call that good?
Death does not occur until Genesis 3:21 when God makes Adam and Eve garments of skin and clothes them. The only way for that to occur is for something to die. Death arrived on earth because of sin. Therefore, sin is something that goes against the will of God and can therefore be labeled as bad, or something God would not call "good."
This conclusion should lead us away from the theory that the 6 days of Creation actually stretched out over millions of years, leading us to the fossil record we have. This can't be because death would have to be present in God's perfect creation, and we know that it was not until the Fall of Man that death reared it's ugly head.
So, what about the fossil record?
Tune in next time.
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