Can’t you sympathize with rich eligible bachelors? Take for instance ‘Dreamboat Willy’, Prince William Arthur Phillip Louis Windsor. How is he ever supposed to concentrate on his studies while there is a gaggle of girls at St. Andrews University swooning over him in class? But looking over the longer term, how is anybody with wealth, popularity, intellect, and personality to distinguish the hangers-on from the committed? I think God has a similar problem! How is God going to select eternally committed people who love him? An early experiment was to create an archangel with beauty, knowledge, and power. But what did God get? Prideful Lucifer.
May I offer that the Bible is a cosmic love story? God is reaching out to us humans...but Lucifer feels jilted and does his best to break our relationship with God. Furthermore, what with the wide variety of means God has used through the ages, there must be something God is demonstrating in the crucible of time. Hence it is not only evil which threatens our relationship with God. There seem to be divine booby-traps to filter out the uncommitted as well.
Genesis 3:1-4 (New Living Translation) “Now the serpent was the shrewdest of all the creatures the Lord God had made. ‘Really?’ he asked the woman. ‘Did God really say you must not eat any of the fruit in the garden?’
‘Of course we may eat it,’ the woman told him. ‘It’s only the fruit from the tree at the center of the garden that we are not allowed to eat. God says we must not eat it or even touch it, or we will die.’
“‘You won’t die!’ the serpent hissed.”
Like a wheel in a wheel...this little exchange reported to have happened back in time is being repeatedly replicated in our day. Increasingly our love affair with God is being challenged by a mocking “Really?”.
In each age God’s courting of humans is opposed in unique ways, and two that I sense in our day are intellectual challenges: (1) whether we are even created by God and (2) whether we are responsible to heed ancient revelations.
By way of introduction, I appreciate that some of what I desire to share is controversial. But polemic is not the intent. The love of God is not very effectively communicated by abolishing the intellectual and spiritual environment of the ones He loves. Furthermore I don’t have the intellectual prowess to do it if I had to anyway! Remember what was said of Paul: “...they have stolen nothing from the temple and have not spoken against our goddess.” Acts 19:37
- Obstacles may be a sign of authenticity (Truth is stranger than fiction. Unique in perspective [God’s], the building up of anticipation for the ultimate revelation, the time span of consistent revelation, and the revealer’s lack of greed for political power):
- Abraham’s offering of Isaac (Genesis 22)
- Secret of birth in Bethlehem (John 1:46 “‘Nazareth!’ exclaimed Nathanael. ‘Can anything good come from there?’”)
- “Anyone who eats this bread will live forever; this bread is my flesh, offered so the world may live.” (John 6:51)
- “...shoulder your cross...” (Mark 8:34)
- “I am able to destroy the Temple of God and rebuild it in three days.” (Matthew 26:61)
- Hence, it comes as no surprise that another booby trap to faith has appeared in our day. God is not forcing our intellects to believe (although there is much to appeal to them), on many different stages throughout history he is offering to all of mankind the opportunity to deliberately choose to love him...against the odds.
- It’s a relationship...not just knowledge. Knowledge puffs up, being loved, despite our unworthiness, yields humbleness. And after the bit with Lucifer, isn’t humility one of the stellar prerequisites to becoming a committed lover of God?
- Reconcile six days of creation, 6,000-10,000 years of Biblical genealogies, 28,000 year old Cussac cave engravings, and hundreds of million year old dinosaur fossils time lines?
- We should not discredit the Biblical record of creation...when in fact our problem is with interpretations of it. There are four major types of interpretations (Blocher, p. 39+): (1) Reconstruction/Gap interpretation, (2) Concordist/Age day interpretation, (3) Literal interpretation, and (4) Literary interpretation
- Are the days markers/points of observation as some early church fathers such as Augustine believed (Blocher, p. 49)? “But you must not forget, dear friends, that a day is like a thousand years to the Lord, and a thousand years is like a day.” (1 John 3:8) Since days in the Genesis record were recorded before reference to the sun, could those days have been galactic days? Did the earth come into the sun’s orbit somewhere near the middle of the narrative?
- Have other creations been obliterated as God threatened at the flood (“Look! I am about to cover the earth with a flood that will destroy every living thing. Everything on earth will die!” Genesis 6:17), the giving of the law (“Now leave me alone so my anger can blaze against them and destroy them all. Then I will make you, Moses, into a great nation instead of them.” Exodus 32:10), and in Revelation (“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the old heaven and the old earth had disappeared.” Revelation 21:1)? (2 Peter 3:3-7).
- Henri Blocher focuses on a literary interpretation. The early Genesis record he claims is not essentially chronological; it is building two cases: (1) That God is the hands-on creator of order and rhythm and (2) That the essence of creation is not work...but rest in God (i.e., the sabbath rest).
- As lovers of truth [Truth!], Christians will not ignore the accumulating evidence that our creation appears to be much older than some earlier interpretations led us to believe. The speed and distance of the expansion of the Universe [“Big Bang”], the isotope decay rates, and the lack of human skeleton fossils among dinosaurs all encourage us to rethink our preconceptions/faulty interpretations.
- Synching with a shifting scientific understanding
- The early cosmology that Genesis refutes is of multiple gods being created and separately creating parts of the universe. God is apart from the creation...but artistically and lovingly involved with it.
- The shifts and turns of scientific ideology should leave us wary of throwing our lot in with the current wave of science too quickly. Examples of earth-centric planetary rotation, determinism, and Freudian psychology are but a few. Disastrous wars have periodically destroyed the recurrent ideology that mankind is getting better and better.
- Scripture already carries a warning about science falsely so-called.(I Timothy 6:20-21) How valid is a science that refuses to accept evidence? that insists that all things continue as they were?
- It is not odd that a theory that presupposes everything must be explained without recourse to God’s intervention would then conclude that life did not come from God. It is tautologous, it is begging the question. For a proof based on a false assumption validly concludes anything...including that which is false.
- A study of the history of science shows that those who go an opposite direction from the current bandwagon are ridiculed and isolated. On the other hand, those who confirm the current conceptions [prejudices] are rewarded handsomely. Is this an environment to nurture truth and justice?
- Let us deal with that one materialistic theory of the origin of life commonly focused on Charles Darwin:
- It assumes that through random mutation and selection the whole plant and animal kingdom came to be.
- It assumes that all life came from one cell because the biochemistry of all life (plant and animal) is so similar
- Because all is random, whatever order exists is by chance. There is nothing normative. The philosophical consequence of this was not lost on Huxley nor much of society. With no stable morality: greed, sefishness, exploitation divorce, sexual promiscuity, abortion, euthanasia, and anarchy [alternating with totalitarianism] dominate society with a certain claim to legitimacy.
- The biological complexity of inheritance and information theory was little understood when Darwin wrote...but manifests incredible odds against random-ness.
- The theory is unreproducible but projects missing links by the multitude which have not been found.
- Charles Darwin’s Christian beliefs collapsed not on the basis of evolution, but on his offense at God’s sense of justice. (http://www.update.uu.se/~fbendz/library/cd_relig.htm)
- The concept of ‘word’ is full of meaning in the Bible. But empty flattery carries no weight.
- “Then God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.” Genesis 1:3
- “The grass withers, and the flowers fade, but the word of our God stands forever.” Isaiah 40:8
- “In the beginning the Word already existed. He was with God, and he was God.” John 1:1
- “And I tell you this, that you must give an account on judgment day of every idle word you speak.” Matthew 12:36
- “Then he said, ‘When I was with you before, I told you that everything written about me by Moses and the prophets and in the Psalms must all come true.’” Luke 24:44
- “I assure you, until heaven and earth disappear, even the smallest detail of God’s law will remain until its purpose is achieved.” Matthew 5:18
- “So why do you call me ‘Lord,’ when you won’t obey me?” Luke 6:46
- “Do you still think it’s enough just to believe that there is one God? Well, even the demons believe this, and they tremble in terror!” (James 2:19)
- By negating verbal revelation, by depriving that revelation of meaning in our time, we depart from the accountability demanded by Scripture and come up with little more than amorphous feelings. God does not expect us to be before him like amorphous jelly...he expects us to dialog and obey:
- “Brace yourself, because I have some questions for you....” Job 40:7a
- “Then he said to Thomas, ‘Put your finger here and see my hands. Put your hand into the wound in my side. Don’t be faithless any longer. Believe!’” John 20:27
- “A cosmic philosophy is not constructed to fit a man; a cosmic philosophy is constructed to fit a cosmos. A man can no more possess a private religion than he can possess a private sun and moon.” G.K. Chesterton
- If we do not accept the Creator God or his revelation...what is the alternative?
- “...the sabbath sums up the difference between the biblical and the Marxist visions. The essence of mankind is not work.” (Blocher, p. 57)
- “The pursuit of sin also seeks frequently to abolish [God’s] pattern, in its general effort to abolish divine ordinances; a ‘dissolute’ life dissolves the difference between day and night, between light and darkness.” (Blocher, p. 58)
- “When we study non-biblical religions, we constantly discover a fascination with intermixture and a kind of longing for a universal dissolution of differences. ... plunging [the world] back into the creative chaos.” (Blocher, p. 72)
- “Liber, from which comes the word ‘liberty’, was the Roman god of chaos!”, (Blocher, p.72)
Let us identify with Peter when he writes, “You love him even though you have never seen him. Though you do not see him, you trust him; and even now you are happy with a glorious, inexpressible joy. Your reward for trusting him will be the salvation of your souls.” (1 Peter 1:8-9)
Henri Blocher, In the Beginning: The Opening Chapters of Genesis. Leicester: Inter-Varsity Press, 1984. UK ISBN 0-85111-321-4; USA ISBN: 0-87784-325-2.
Phillip E. Johnson. Testing Darwinism: An Easy-To-Understand Guide. Leicester: Inter-Varsity Press, 1997. ISBN 0-85111-198-X
Michael J. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box : The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution . Simon & Schuster Trade Paperbacks, 1998. ISBN 0684834936
Ernest Lucas. Genesis Today: Genesis and the questions of science. London: Scripture Union, 1989. ISBN 0-86201-534-0 (out of print?)
http://directory.google.com/Top/Science/Anomalies_and_Alternative_Science/Criticism_of_Darwinism/
http://www.webcom.com/~ctt/hway.html
http://www.christian-thinktank.com/
http://www.reasons.org/resources/apologetics/designevidenceupdate1998.html
Comment, critique (please indicate if we may post your comment anonymously or otherwise on this site; last modified 28 July 2001)? Please email bauhahnm@clara.net