Blog

by Charlie Wolcott

Having a false view of sin has devastating consequences. Over the last few weeks, I’ve showcased what happens when one takes sin lightly, changes the terminology, changes the effects, and changes the point or purpose of the cross. In a very brief nutshell, the consequence of taking such an approach is going to Hell, but there is much more to it than just that. I mentioned early in this series that there is no sin that just affects us. If we get sin wrong, it affects much more than just our theology and our destination.

I’ll return to origins because this is where I believe the lynchpin lies over the whole issue of sin. While there are Old Earth Creationists who do correctly define sin as knowingly and intentionally going against what God said, they have already lost the battle on how that applies to every person. While there are Old Earth Creationists who do understand the plan of salvation despite getting Genesis wrong, because they get Genesis wrong, they are preaching a confusing and incoherent message that has enabled the liberals to do what they do anyway. John MacArthur points out the problem here:

"What old-earth creationists (including, to a large degree, even the evangelical ones) are doing with Genesis 1-3 is precisely what religious liberals have always done with all of Scripture--spiritualizing and reinterpreting the text allegorically to make it mean what they want it to mean. This is a dangerous way to handle Scripture. And it involves a perilous and unnecessary capitulation to the religious presuppositions of naturalism--not to mention a serious dishonor to God."
~John MacArthur, Think Biblically!, pages 62-63

While proclaiming conservative evangelicalism, what Old Earth teachings have done is strip away the Bible’s authority on defining sin. This has enabled liberal ideas to so completely infiltrate the conservative church that the few churches who are still faithful to the truth essentially no longer have a voice that others are respecting. While this is a severe issue in terms of general approaches to the Bible, what many Old Earth Creationists do not understand is that their view is not just a liberal approach to Genesis; their models also directly deny the Gospel because they have a false view of sin and its origin. I keep addressing this issue because what I keep seeing in the teachers and promoters of Old Earth theology (not talking about the laymen who do not see what is going on behind the scenes) are the consistent marks of the false teachers that Scripture readily offers us. These teachers will play the “unity” card, however they are the ones bringing teachings that were contrived intentionally to deny and refute the Gospel without directly attacking it. The central issue is: What is sin and when did death enter this world?

When you use the current observations of how science operates TODAY and then extrapolate that as far back as you can (requiring there be no change in how the region, let alone the world, operates), you are using observations of a sin-cursed scientist and a sin-cursed world, with thousands of years of buildup from said corruption. These models reject the Biblical account of creation as written and the historical event of the Flood. The Old Earth Creationists then try to come back and insert these accounts into their already established models that were designed without the Bible’s input. As a result, they completely change the account to where it is completely unrecognizable to the original text. What does this have to do with sin? Everything.

When one assumes a “Deep Time” paradigm, no matter what flavor it takes, a KEY assumption behind all those dating methods and processes is that the present is key to the past – that what we see happening today is how everything has always happened. One argument made is that “God made the laws of physics, and God does not lie or change, therefore the laws of physics don’t change.” That is totally ridiculous because that put the creation at the same tier as the Creator and gives the creation the “incommunicable” attributes of God. This is important.

We are observing a sin-cursed, broken, breaking down world. If the laws of physics as we know them today reflect this, and this is a reflection of God, then this is actually an attack on who God is. Think about it. These creation models call for a corrupt creation from the start; thus by equating the creation to the Creator, they call the Creator corrupt. There is a group with an origins model that matches this precisely: the Gnostics (established heretics). They do not believe that corruption came from man but from a corrupt creator, the Demiurge (basically, the Biblical Satan). They think man’s problem is not sin but lack of knowledge (hence the name Gnostics, which comes from the Greek word for knowledge). Take notice of the primary approach that Old Earth Creationists take to solve man’s problems: it’s not the Gospel, it’s “science.” There are Old Earth Creationists who do proclaim the plan of salvation, however that plan of salvation and the Gospel message have no relationship whatsoever to the Old Earth models they teach. They directly contradict each other.

Why am I saying all this? Because of a false view of origins. All the Deep Time models have a false view of sin. They teach by practice that Adam and Eve’s sin ultimately did nothing to this physical world and try to reduce sin to be purely “spiritual.” Paul explicitly taught otherwise in Romans 8:19-23 AND in 1 Corinthians 15. I even had an Old Earther try to cite 1 Corinthians 15:3-6 to say, “Here is the Gospel and there is no mention of origins, therefore it’s secondary.” And I’m like, “Did you read the rest of the chapter?” Adam’s sin did cause spiritual death, but it ALSO caused physical death as well as every other kind of death. An animal had to die physically to provide clothes for Adam and Eve. Jesus’ death had to be physical. If it was just a spiritual issue, then why did Jesus have to die physically and historically? When asked this question, I have still yet to hear an Old Earther give any attempt to answer it out of their paradigm. Why? They can’t. If the earth is millions of years old, Jesus had no purpose in coming here as a man. If I have not made it clear yet: Old Earth ideas are antithetical to the Gospel because they fail to see what sin truly is and what it did. There are Christians who are Old Earthers. But don’t read what I’m not saying; they believe it out of deception, and I pray God frees them from said deception. But even the atheists understand that “millions of years” and “evolution” being true means the Gospel is dead.

"It becomes clear now that the whole justification of Jesus’ life and death is predicated on the existence of Adam and the forbidden fruit he and Eve ate. Without original sin, who needs to be redeemed? Without Adam’s fall into a life of constant sin terminated by death, what purpose is Christianity? None…
Christianity fought, fights, and will fight science to the desperate end over evolution, because evolution destroys utterly and finally the very reason Jesus' earthly life was supposedly made necessary. Destroy Adam and Eve and the original sin, and in the rubble you will find the sorry remains of the son of God. If Jesus was not the redeemer who died for our sins, and this is what evolution means, then Christianity is nothing!
What this means is that Christianity cannot lose the Genesis account of creation like it could lose the doctrine of geocentricism and get along. The battle must be waged, for Christianity is fighting for its very life."
~G. Richard Bozarth, American Atheist: The Meaning of Evolution, February 1978, page 30)

We cannot mess around with Genesis. So many in the institutionalized churches think that is perfectly admissible and that they should be considered “brethren” as they do so. How can anyone be united “in Christ” when one side denies the very reason why He had to come to begin with?

The consequences of getting sin wrong are devastating. I’ll expound on this further, but take notice what has happened to any church, denomination, institution, or ministry that started out as Christian then embraced Old Earth ideas any time between the 1850s to the 1950s. Where are they now? Look at Yale, Princeton, or Harvard – they all started as Christian universities. Look at many of the seminaries today. Look at the many denominations which embraced Old earth ideas. Where are they now? They are centers of liberalism. They are no longer conservative, and it could be debated whether they could be called “Christian” anymore. So much of what they teach is what a normal conservative evangelical today would call heretical. Just in the past couple years, the Southern Baptist Convention, known as the largest denomination in the US and knows as perhaps the last large bastion for truth embraced Critical Race Theory ideas. Where does that come from? Evolutionary and Marxist ideals.

“Millions of years” is a theory where death and decay are the creative mechanisms for bringing about life and the universe. And everywhere it has gone, it has produced death and decay. I will call belief in these models what it is: sin. It is specifically the sin of unbelief of God’s record in Genesis. It is the sin of believing pagan, ungodly men instead of Scripture. It is the sin of sitting in the council of scorners, mockers, and scoffers. It is the sin of elevating man’s ideals as equal if not higher than God’s standards. Ultimately, it is the sin of knowing God exists and rejecting Him as Creator. Next week, I will emphasize the Prosperity Gospel and Progressive Christianity and the devastating consequences of how those teachings get sin wrong, and then I’ll tackle Critical Race Theory and Liberation Theology.

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