Blog

by Steve Risner

[This blog post is part of a series. The previous one is here, and the next one is here.]

Without the creation account being a real set of events and without Adam and Eve being two real people as they were described in Genesis, there is literally nothing that follows in the Bible that matters. This is the basic idea of today's blog post. Everything has a foundation. If you remove the foundation, you are left with something very unstable. Every doctrine we find in the New Testament is rooted in a literal Genesis account. We’ve spent the last few weeks looking at theistic evolution. The theistic evolutionist has absolutely no basis for their theology whatsoever and they have 2000 years of church history to undo. This is a fact that I have not seen adequately answered by a theistic evolutionist. The truth of the matter—the ultimate crux, I guess—is that creation and redemption are inseparable, but the theistic evolutionist disassociates them. They will call one a myth while they hold on to the other as a fact of history. What a gigantic contradiction!

The issues with rejecting the creation account as a literal history are exceptional. Truly, if we reduce Genesis to a myth with an opportunity to teach us something true (which is strange since God told us this story as though it were an historical account, although it is essentially not true according to theistic evolutionists), we lose every major Christian doctrine and we reduce Gospel to Jesus just teaching us to live right and other such nonsensical ideas, an exquisitely watered down Gospel. Lowering the account to mythology creates more questions and more problems than it answers or solves. When confronted with the decision—is the Biblical account of creation true or is the ever changing, currently popular story told by my culture true—we must have faith in our Lord that His Word is true. Had Darwin never written On the Origin of Species, no one would have any reason to suggest that the creation account is anything but a literal history. In fact, for centuries, this was the commonly held belief. We cannot find just cause in church history or in the Bible itself to suggest what theistic evolution demands. It's really that simple. It's man's attempt to meld secular humanism with Christianity, and our witness is destroyed.

Do you believe that creation and redemption are linked? How frequently have we heard the Gospel start with the creation account? We start with creation, move to the fall, and proceed to Jesus Christ. This is basic Christian teaching. If the fall is figurative, why do you need salvation at all? If Adam, repeatedly referred to as a real person throughout Scripture, is a mythical figure that never existed, how did sin enter the world? If sin entered through the one man who didn't exist, why would we then conclude that the salvation granted by the One Man is real? If Adam wasn't real, Christ, by necessity, couldn't be real either. The nonsensical nature of theistic evolution theology and its clear departure from Scripture is hard to miss.

At what point does the book of Genesis become historical? Does it at all? When was mankind formed in the image of God? Why is Adam referred to as the first man—from the beginning even—if he wasn't? If we are just animals that evolved a little smarter or more complex than other animals, are we different and why? Why do we even need the cross or the resurrection if the fall didn’t happen? What about the crucifixion? What about the resurrection of Christ? What about the ascension? Holy smokes! Gandhi and Buddha taught people how to live. But they did not offer the restorative work that Jesus Christ provided on the cross, in rising from the dead, and in ascending to the Father. If the fall didn't literally happen, then who cares about the rest of the story? Why does it matter? Paul even said if the dead are not raised, then our faith is in vain and we're to be pitied above all others. The Gospel is so much more than Jesus showing us how to live! It's the power over death, sin and the grave! The theological implications here are astounding.

If the creation account is a myth, are we then waiting on the new heavens and new earth for nothing? If perfection wasn't in the beginning, what’s the deal? The Word of God clearly tells us all things will be restored. Restored to what? They would have to be restored to the way they were prior to the fall and curse. Tyler keeps saying these stories are just to teach us something. He neglects to tell us what and he hasn't, that I have seen, explained the rest of Scripture in light of what I will deem his perverted view of the Gospel.

The Bible says many times that each day of creation was “good.” What does this mean? What is the standard by which this creation is being held up against? It's the nature and character of God, of course. At the end of the creation week, we not only see that God believed His work was “good” but we find it was “very good!” This, I believe, is an unimaginably glorious state we will never know until we see Christ face to face as He's seated on the Throne. Theistic evolution paints a very different picture. If the creation is “good” using God as the standard, the entire nature and character of God is nothing like what the Bible paints for us. He would be calling death, mutation, suffering, sickness, struggle, and decay “very good.” How does this work? How is a God that is love and perfect and holy able to see all this and call it “very good”? Would you serve a God that believed death and suffering were good? Is He going to restore all things to a state where death and suffering reign? I sure hope not.

If the creation account and the Flood are mythical and didn't happen, what other supernatural events recorded in the Bible are not real or are mythical? Did God allow Sara to give birth to a child when she was almost 100 years old? Did Joseph really have the ability to interpret dreams that resulted in the saving of a nation and eventually, the saving of his family? Was there a burning bush? Did God send 10 plagues on Egypt? Did He push back the waters of the Red Sea to allow the Israelites to cross on dry land? There are hundreds of supernatural events recorded in God's Word that demand an answer; did they happen? Were the miracles Christ did during His earthly ministry real? Does He do miracles in the lives of His people today? Is salvation—the restoration of man to God—a miracle? Is it real?

I have really only scratched the surface here on this idea that creation and redemption are not intimately connected. The theistic evolutionist may claim they believe the two are connected, but the reality is clear they do not. How can an intelligent person hold such inconsistent and nonsensical views? I really would like an answer to this question.

To further demonstrate what I see as the resounding nonsense of theistic evolution, I will quote Ann Lamont:

“When I became a Christian at the completion of my Bachelor of Science degree, I had very little understanding of Christian teaching and had very little knowledge of the Bible, but I had been taught evolution as fact since high school and I had never doubted that it was true. I initially saw no conflict between Christianity and the theory of evolution, but, as my knowledge of the Bible grew, I came to realize that Christian beliefs and the theory of evolution were incompatible. I also came to realize that, despite having become a science teacher, I was not differentiating between facts (measurements and observations) and interpretations inferred from those facts (e.g. evolution or creation). I then realized that evolution should be rejected.
Unfortunately, when many theistic evolutionist Christians recognize this contradiction, they do not reject evolution. Instead, they lose confidence in the historical accuracy of the Bible and assume that the early chapters of Genesis must only be symbolic. However, once one part of the Bible is re-interpreted to fit in with secular thinking, no part is safe from re-interpretation—not even the message of salvation or Christian moral values (1 Timothy 6:20).”

It's painful to see brothers and sisters in Christ so blindly follow humanist philosophy. It's heart wrenching to watch as they so willfully slide down the slippery slope of secular ideas, reducing the Gospel to “right living” rather than an answer for our lostness, brokenness, and despair.

This is a great resource for more on this topic: http://creation.com/creation-why-it-matters.

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