Stand on the Trustworthy Word

STAND ON THE TRUSTHWORTHY WORD

A Reflection on Scripture, History, and Science

By Pastor Brian Wilbur

Date: February 13, 2022

Series: The Book of Genesis

Note: Scripture quotations are from The ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard   Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

INTRODUCTION

The last two Sundays we looked at Genesis 1:1-2:3. Lord-willing, next Sunday we will take a close look at Genesis 1:26-31 in order to understand what it means that mankind was created in the image and likeness of God.

But in today’s sermon, I want to step back and help us to think biblically about the Bible, history, and science. My purpose is to give you some basic perspectives that will help you stay faithful to Scripture, which is an indispensable part of loving the Lord your God with all of your mind. You simply cannot love God well if your mind is at odds with His mind. And God’s mind is revealed verbally and propositionally in the words of Holy Scripture.

My aim is that you have a deep conviction and unwavering courage to stand on the trustworthy Word of God. For some of you, this message will function mainly as a reminder to remain faithful. For others – for newer Christians and for young parents and for youth – this message has the potential to equip you to see the universe through a Scriptural framework.

REALITY CHECK

Let’s begin with a reality check. It is important to say at the outset that the perennial human problem, starting in Genesis 3 and continuing down to the present day, is that we have a grave tendency to disbelieve and reject God’s words. Psalm 1 sets forth the alternatives:

“Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers; but his delight is in the law [the instruction] of the LORD, and on his law [instruction] he meditates day and night.” (Psalm 1:1-2)

Jesus talks about the same reality in Matthew 7:

“Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock…. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand.” (Matthew 7:24, 26)

What we ought to do is delight in the Lord’s words, ponder them daily and be shaped by them, and then actually put them into practice. But foolish sinners are proficient at doing the exact opposite.

Now Scripture not only sets forth this contrast, but also makes it clear that every single one of us is on the wrong side of the contrast unless and until God graciously rescues you: “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). In Ephesians 4, the apostle Paul gives an overview of what stuck-in-sin people are like:

“Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity.” (Ephesians 4:17-19) 

Unconverted sinners are in a bad way: they have hard hearts that are resistant to God’s will, and the result is that their minds are enveloped in darkness, they are totally disconnected from life-giving fellowship with God, and all this shows up in their actual conduct. Do you get the picture? Hard heart, dark mind, spiritually dead, morally bankrupt. Such people do not want to deal honestly with truth, which is why Paul tells us in Romans 1 that one of the qualities that characterizes ungodly men is that they “suppress the truth” (Romans 1:18). Instead of being truth-receivers, sinners are truth-rejecters and truth-suppressors.

Such people have darkened hearts and their intellectual activity is an exercise in futility from God’s point of view, but they often hold influential positions in society. They lead institutions, own publishing houses, occupy teaching posts in the academy, write books, propose theories, run media companies, and function as the political and bureaucratic elite. Because of God’s common grace, these people are capable of doing some good things, but at the most fundamental level their outlook and their activity are at odds with God’s wisdom.  

Except in cases where the Lord’s grace has shown up to rescue a sinner out of the domain of darkness, people are fundamentally fools. They may be very bright fools, but they are fools nonetheless. This is basic Christian doctrine, and this basic teaching about the folly and futility of the sinful mind should have been enough to steer us clear of the suspect and misguided theories that foolish people promote. But one of the saddest things in the history of the world is how easily and quickly God’s people capitulate to the intellectual fashions of the age. ‘Capitulate’ means to ‘give up’ or ‘surrender’. Instead of “[holding] firm to the trustworthy word” (Titus 1:9), we give up the store and then congratulate ourselves on how clever and smart and up-to-date we are.

Israel was supposed to be holy and thus a witness to her pagan neighbors, but instead Israel envied her pagan neighbors and became like them. The church is supposed to be holy and thus a light to the world, but when the church craves the world’s acceptance and adopts the world’s agenda, it becomes just like the world. When this happens, you have a truth-suppressing world and a truth-suppressing church. And then some fine church folks might complain about the church’s lack of influence!

Do not wonder: where the fear of the Lord is replaced by fear of man, where trembling at the Lord’s words is replaced by trembling at the words of sophisticated academic elites or savvy podcasters, and where the desire to please the Lord is replaced by the desire to appear respectable in the eyes of your critics, the church’s saltiness is lost. No courage. No backbone. No ‘thus says the Lord’. No zeal for holiness. But at least we can have a nice relationship with the National Science Foundation and not be criticized too harshly by the sharp folks over at the New York Times. That ought to count for something, right?

A POSITIVE REGARD FOR SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

Before I say some sobering things about the church and her interaction with the claims and theories of modern science, I would like to first say that Bible-loving Christians have a positive regard for science and for applied science, engineering, and technological development. Remember what we learned last week: God put the heavenly luminaries in the sky for signs, seasons, days, and years. What this indicates is that God put regularity and predictability into the natural world. Genesis 1 testifies to the fact that God is a God of order and design. Plants, animals, and mankind have the ability to reproduce themselves. Plants and animals exist in various “kinds” and reproduce accordingly, each within its respective kind. Thus there is a context for categorizing the diverse plants and trees and living creatures. Further, God put the earth and the earth’s creatures under our dominion.

All of these things function as a green light to scientific endeavor – to study the world and uncover knowledge and systematize this knowledge into a transmittable form and use this knowledge in order to be good managers of the world that God put under our care. Accordingly, it is entirely fitting for Christians to pursue vocations as scientists, as engineers, as medical doctors, and as nurses – as long as they don’t sell their soul to any group that is under the control of hard-hearted, dark-minded, truth-suppressing men who want to co-opt Mr. or Mrs. Christian into their God-belittling agenda. But if you can steer clear of that big dark hole, then you are free to pursue a career in the sciences.

GETTING TO THE POINT

With that in mind, let’s get to the point, shall we? In particular, let’s take stock of Genesis 1-2.

God created the heavens and the earth in an undeveloped form on Day One (Genesis 1:1-2). God completed the creation project on Day Six (Genesis 1:24-31). The earth was created before the sun, the moon, and the stars. In fact, light was created before the sun. Plants and trees were created before the sun. Sea creatures and flying creatures were created before land creatures. The sea creatures and flying creatures were created on Day Five, and the land creatures were created on Day Six – all these were created according to their kinds within the space of just two days. None of these creatures evolved from any pre-existing creature, but were all created by the Creator’s direct and special action.

As for mankind, Adam and Eve were both created on Day Six. Adam was created first, being formed out of “dust from the ground” (Genesis 2:7), and then Eve was created out of “one of his [the man’s] ribs” (Genesis 2:21).

At the end of Day Six, with everything made and in its proper place, “God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.” (Genesis 1:31) The whole creation was beautiful, well-ordered, and at peace. Everything was right, and nothing was wrong, and there was no death. There was no death, no corruption, no predatory behavior among animals, and no shedding of blood anywhere on God’s good earth. Death, futility, and corruption did not enter into the world until Adam refused to live in accordance with God’s Word. When you refuse to live in accordance with God’s Word, you are refusing to live, and the principle of death is at work.  

All told, Adam lived 930 years (Genesis 5:5). And remember, God began His work of forming heaven and earth only five ordinary days before He made Adam. Now in Genesis 5 we have a genealogical record: when Adam was 130 years old, he fathered Seth, who lived a total of 912 years (Genesis 5:3-8). When Seth was 105 years old, he fathered Enosh, who lived 905 years (Genesis 5:6-11), and so on. This genealogical record takes us all the way to the Flood (Genesis 6-8), and subsequent genealogical records take us from Noah and his son Shem, both of whom survived the Flood, all the way to the birth of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ (in Matthew 1 and Luke 1). Jonathan Sarfati writes, “It’s notable that long before Darwin, scholars who calculated the earth’s age from the biblical data arrived at the same ball-park figure, of about 6,000 years ago.”[1] In the 17^th century, the famous Archbishop James Ussher calculated that the date of creation was 4004 BC.[2] In our own day, Jonathan Sarfati has calculated that the date of creation was around 4178 BC.[3] The genealogical information is not so air-tight as to give us an exact date, but it is sufficiently comprehensive to land us in the timeframe that Ussher and Sarfati and many others have calculated.

Now one response to what I just shared is: ‘So you’re one of “those people” who take the Bible literally?’ “Those people” is in scare quotes, by the way, because apparently people who take the Bible literally are supposed to be feared. In this mindset, the notion of ‘taking the Bible literally’ is given an entirely negative connotation. The critic thinks that it is a bad thing to take the Bible literally, and the person who does take the Bible literally shows all the signs of a narrow-minded gullibility that is blinded by hate. However much I would like to answer my critic, those of us in the church need to face up to the fact that massive segments of the church have dropped the ball on this. I wish I didn’t have to say that, but not saying it wouldn’t make it untrue.

Jonathan Sarfati writes, “After the rise of long-age ideas in the ‘Enlightenment’ of the 18^th century, many conservative biblical exegetes were intimidated by ‘science’. So they invented various schemes to squeeze billions of years into Scripture.”[4]

Here are some of the misguided schemes: Let’s insert a long gap of time between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2 or between Genesis 1:2 and Genesis 1:3. Or let’s say that the days of Genesis 1 aren’t ordinary days at all but are actually long ages. Or let’s assert that Genesis 1 isn’t a historical account at all, but rather is just some theological artistry that tells us very little about what really happened. Or let’s assume that God used the process of evolution to bring about the world as it now is.

Douglas Kelly writes, “It is not always realized how rapidly much of the Christian church accommodated its teaching on origins to nineteenth-century theories of evolution and the vast ages required for it to take place.”[5]

Nigel Cameron writes, “As the new scientific thinking, first in geology and then in biology, began to take hold in the nineteenth century, biblical commentators hastened to accommodate their interpretation of Scripture to the latest orthodoxy in science.”[6]

Phillip Johnson writes, “Many of Darwin’s early supporters were either clergymen or devout laymen…. Supporters of “evolution” included not just persons we would think of as religious liberals, but conservative Evangelicals such as Princeton Theological Seminary Professor Benjamin Warfield.”[7]

Douglas Kelly writes, “A large percentage of conservative evangelical scholars refuse to interpret the Genesis text in its plain historical or literal sense in order to accommodate it to the premises of the reigning world view concerning origins.”[8]

Richard Belcher writes, “… many evangelical and Reformed biblical scholars have accepted evolution as the method through which God produced the first humans.”[9]

One notable pastor has remarked in reference to creation and evolution, “There is hardly a more controversial subject among evangelical Christians.”[10] If his remark is even close to accurate, I would simply say that the very fact that such a thing is controversial among evangelical Christians goes a long way in explaining why evangelical Christianity is so weak and tepid. A church that doesn’t take God’s Word seriously when it comes to the creation of the world and the creation of mankind also won’t take God’s Word seriously when it teaches us about manhood, womanhood, marriage, and sexuality. It is no surprise, therefore, that you can open up your Christian Book Distributors catalogue and find all kinds of resources that undermine sound doctrine. As Scripture says: be on your guard!

THE CHURCH’S BEAUTY AND POWER

Let me just remind us that the church has no beauty and power of its own. God didn’t set His affection on us because He thought we would be valuable contributors whose natural talents would get God’s work speeding ahead in this great big world. God didn’t bring us together because He saw that we have the wits and savvy to increase His market share. Remarkably, immature Christians get the wild idea that if we accommodate our thinking to the ideas and theories that are coming from the hard-hearted and mind-darkened pagans, that somehow our playing nice with them will win them over to our side. But it’s too late: they won us over to their side, and they don’t care a lick that the Lord regards us as a compromised or lukewarm church. They would say to us what the religious leaders said to Judas: ‘That’s your problem!’

The truth is that the beauty and power of the church is a gracious gift from God. And the way that you receive the gift, and the way that you steward the gift, and the way that you abide and grow in spiritual beauty and spiritual power, is by letting God’s Word save you and shape you, rescue you and renew you, define you and direct you, establish you and strengthen you. In Genesis 1, God created the world by means of His powerful Word. By speaking, He brought things into existence, told them where to go and what to do, and gave them their name. And the big question that faces this church and every church is: will we let God’s Word tell us who we are, tell us where to go, and tell us what to believe and say and do? Either we are going to stand in the bright light of Holy Scripture, or we are going to stumble around in the darkness.

And remember this: people in this world are perishing, and perishing people don’t need a clever church that is trying to toe the line on politically correct viewpoints and trying to soften the pointy edges of biblical truth. What perishing people need is a faithful church that is proclaiming God’s message in God’s power; what lost sinners need is a courageous church that doesn’t bend in fear when the Goliath State taunts us and threatens to eradicate us. If your knowledge of God doesn’t put courage in your bones, then I’m not sure that your knowledge of God is worth having or sharing.

BIBLICAL PERSPECTIVES FOR NAVIGATING THE BIBLE, HISTORY, AND SCIENCE

So, with that background in mind, I want to share with you several basic biblical perspectives that we must keep in mind when we are reading the Bible and thinking about the Bible in relationship to history and science. 

First, the natural world testifies to the reality of God. Romans 1:18-20 teaches us that God shows us “his eternal power and divine nature” (Romans 1:20) through the things that He made. The basic idea here is that a person’s handiwork tells us something about the person who made it. A product tells us something about the manufacturer. In the case of creation, the natural world tells us something about the Creator. And at an even more general level, the natural world tells us something about the way the world is.

Think about it like this. You look up into the heavens, and you see immensity and glory. You look all around, and you see beauty and complexity and order and design. You look at mankind, and you see personality, moral consciousness, and capacity for loving relationships. It is absurd to believe that the ultimate explanation for this immense, glorious, well-ordered, personal, moral, and relational world is lifeless chemicals that were moving about in a primordial soup. Chemical elements don’t account for immense beauty. The impersonal doesn’t account for personality. The random doesn’t account for intelligent design. Dirt doesn’t account for moral duty. The mundane doesn’t account for love. Instead, we listen to the testimony of creation and learn that the Creator is there. And we reason that since God made the kind of the world that He did, then He must be immense and powerful and wise, as well as personal and relational and moral.     

Second, our perception of the natural world is clouded. Although creation stands forth as a witness to the Creator, we human beings are hindered in our capacity to receive it. After telling us that God’s “eternal power and divine nature” are “clearly perceived… in the things that have been made” (Romans 1:20), Paul goes on to say that instead of being good stewards of this perception, we have actually turned ourselves into fools. Paul writes:

“For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.” (Romans 1:21-25)

Do you see the problem? Instead of responding to the glory of creation as truth-receivers who worship the Creator with grateful hearts, sinners have rejected the testimony of creation and gotten muddied in our thinking and darkened in our hearts. Under the guise of wisdom we played the fool. We rejected God’s glory and exchanged it for idols. We rejected God’s truth and exchanged it for a lie. As long as sinners remain in this condition, we don’t draw the right conclusions from the natural world. By way of application, this also implies that our philosophical reflections and our scientific investigations and our historical studies will also be severely handicapped, because we are looking at everything from the wrong vantage point.

You can imagine that if you are flying a plane, and you mistakenly start your five-hour flight a few degrees off course, then after five hours you are going to be far away from your intended destination. A critical error at the beginning sets the stage for additional problems to arise and pile up later on. When human beings followed the course that Paul describes in Romans 1, they ensured that all their future endeavors would flow downstream from the wrong starting point. The right starting point is to be a humble creature who stands in the light and who worships the Creator in spirit and truth. The wrong starting point is to reject the light and invent your own version of reality in which it makes sense to bow down before a golden calf or marvel at the words of Charles Darwin.

Those who have gone down this errant path – and everyone has, as Romans 3:10-18 teaches us – the people who have gone down this path need a profound renewal to take place at the level of their heart and mind.

Third, God renews the hearts and minds of stuck-in-darkness sinners through His Word.  The natural world witnesses to us about the Creator – and we can call that witness ‘natural revelation’. Natural revelation is good, but we are hindered in our ability to receive it. Therefore, we stand in need of ‘special revelation’. Special revelation is a way of referring to Holy Scripture. God has spoken words into this world, and He caused these words to be written down for our instruction. Without these words, we remain in the darkness. But if we have these words and the Holy Spirit impresses their meaning upon us, then everything changes. As David said in Psalm 19:

“The law of the LORD is perfect, reviving the soul;

the testimony of the LORD is sure, making wise the simple;

the precepts of the LORD are right, rejoicing the heart;

the commandment of the LORD is pure, enlightening the eyes.” (Psalm 19:7-8)

When God’s Spirit who hovered over the face of the waters (Genesis 1:2) hovers over you, then God-spoken words that are written down in the Bible will revive your soul, convey wisdom to your mind, gladden your heart, and enlighten your eyes.

A sinful man, unaided by special revelation, will misuse natural revelation and go down many wrong paths. But a redeemed man who is indwelt by the Spirit and instructed in the Scriptures, although he is far from perfect, will increasingly see the world as it truly is and will increasingly live according to God’s design.

Fourth, the Bible, which consists of God-spoken words which God uses to renew us, is a serious historical document. The Bible is not a non-historical collection of spiritual musings. The Bible is not an elaborate fable peppered with some cute moral lessons. The Bible is not ancient myth that is supposed to stretch your mental horizons with timeless religious expressions. The Bible is not a spiritual metaphor about your soul’s journey toward God.

Instead, the Bible brokers in real history, involving real people at real times and in real places. If the God of the Bible is not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; if the God of the Bible did not rescue Israel out of the land of Egypt and bring them into the land of Canaan; if the God of the Bible did not entrust the kingship of Israel to David, the son of Jesse, from the tribe of Judah; if the God of the Bible did not hand unfaithful Israel over to the Assyrians and unfaithful Judah over to the Babylonians; if the God of the Bible did not send His own divine Son into human flesh as the descendant of David, the descendant of Abraham, the descendant of Adam; if Adam was not the first man from whom God made every nation on earth; if Jesus, God’s Son, was not crucified for your sins on a cross outside the city of Jerusalem, and if His dead body was not placed in a tomb, and if He didn’t rise again in His body on the third day, and if He didn’t ascend bodily into heaven in order to sit down at the right hand of God; and if the exalted Lord Jesus Christ did not lay hold of Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus and transform him into the apostle to the Gentiles who preached the gospel around the Mediterranean world and wrote thirteen New Testament books; if these things are not so, then you are wasting your time with any so-called spiritual musings of Scripture. There is no blood-bought grace apart from the biblical account of what God has done in actual history.

You simply cannot read the Bible and be indifferent to history. God puts Himself on the line by acting and speaking in real space-time history, and by making claims about what He did, and when He did it, and where He did it, and why He did it. The Bible is an amazing book, the most published book in the history of the world, and the most critiqued book in the history of the world. If it were laden with historical errors, it wouldn’t be taken seriously and shouldn’t be taken seriously. But when you open up your Bible and read it, you realize that God is doing things and saying things that pertain to the history of this world, and as such it begs to be taken seriously.

So, the Bible is a serious historical document. It recounts real history. Of course, it is not mere history. It is history with theological explanation and theological application. But the theology is tied to the actual events that took place in this world. The Bible is God’s testimony to His actions in our world.

Fifth, the Bible should be understood in its plain and straightforward sense. In other words, we should take the Bible at face value. God’s will is to ‘make wise the simple’. God’s will is that ordinary people read the Scriptures, or hear the Scriptures read, and understand what it says. You don’t need a special course in decoding the secrets of heavenly speech. Are there illustrations and metaphors in Scripture? Of course. It doesn’t require vast knowledge to understand that when Jesus said it is better to gouge out your eye on route to heaven than to continue in lust and be thrown into hell, he wasn’t counseling people to actually gouge their eyes out (see Matthew 5:28-29). He was utilizing hyperbole to press home a simple idea: don’t spare any expense in getting sin out of your life. It doesn’t require a Ph. D. in communication to recognize metaphors, since metaphors are in normal usage among human beings. But when Scripture recounts history, we shouldn’t go hunting for a metaphorical explanation. When the Bible tells us what happened, we should take it as a reliable record of what happened.

The Book of Genesis is manifestly a historical book. It tells us about the creation of the world, and what went wrong, and how things went from bad to worse. It tells us about the calling of Abraham and God’s plan to set the world right again, and how that plan got worked out over the course of a few generations downstream from Abraham. The entire scope of the book – from Adam being created on the sixth day to the death of Joseph down in Egypt – is accounted for by way of detailed genealogical and biographical information that is given in Genesis 5, Genesis 11, and in other places along the way. Genesis tells us what happened and when it happened in relationship to the life spans of key people identified in the book – and we should take its narrative of what happened at face value, and therefore as real history.

Sixth, the Bible is the only perfectly trustworthy document in the world – and therefore you should receive all of it as truth from God. The apostle Paul teaches us in 2 Timothy 3: “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching” (2 Timothy 3:16). If you believe that the entire Bible is God’s Word and is therefore backed by the trustworthiness of an all-knowing and faithful Father who wants His children to be established in the truth, then I want to remind you of an important implication: you cannot choose to receive some parts of Scripture but to set aside other parts, because you cannot view the Bible as a book that is a mixture of truth and error. If the Bible is a mixture of truth and error, then its authority is done away with. If the Bible is a mixture of truth and error, then the Bible itself is not the standard of truth. If the Bible is a mixture of truth and error, then who gets to decide what parts are the true parts and what parts are the faulty parts? Why not you, right? Either God has spoken truthfully and clearly, or He hasn’t. If He hasn’t, then we’re all just grasping at straws. But if God has spoken truthfully and has caused His utterly reliable Word to be written down without error, then our job is to close our mouths, open our ears, and learn from the mouth of the Almighty. And be sure of this: God Almighty is not amused when human beings twist what He said or charge Him with error.    

Seventh, the Bible speaks truthfully about everything it addresses. Sometimes you will hear people say that the Bible isn’t a scientific textbook. Of course it isn’t a scientific textbook, or an economics textbook, or a political science textbook, or a military history textbook. But whenever the Bible reveals information about something, it is revealing true information. Pontius Pilate was the prefect of Judea, he presided over the trial of Jesus, and he authorized the crucifixion. Peter and his friends caught 153 fish in John 21. The flying creatures were created before the land animals, without any chain of evolutionary descent. The Bible is not just giving us theological truth, as if what matters is the theology and not the history. If the Bible tells us what happened, then it happened – and the One who is telling us that it happened knows more about geology, biology, astronomy, and physics than the combined expertise of every scientist on the face of the earth. Do you believe Him when He speaks?

Eighth, the most reasonable course of action for a historian or scientist or anyone is to trust what God has communicated about the world, and to pursue further information on that solid foundation. The wise scientist will say, “I don’t know what my experiments will uncover. I don’t know if my hypotheses will turn out to be accurate. I don’t know if and when I might discover plausible theories about this thing or that thing. But I can be sure that Scripture gives me a solid foundation upon which to build a reliable system of knowledge.”

Our presuppositions about the universe shape the way that we study, the way that we reason, the way that we draw inferences and propose hypotheses. The astronomer who begins from the vantage point of unbelief in God, and who believes that there must be a completely naturalistic explanation for the origin of stars, and who will only allow theories that agree with his naturalistic and God-ignoring assumptions, is conducting his entire research on a faulty foundation. And you expect me to take his theories seriously?

In truth, the most unreasonable course of action for a historian or scientist or anyone is to reject what God has communicated about the world, and to pursue all of your information without the solid foundation that God has given. This unreasonableness is especially relevant when it comes to the effort of some scientists to attempt to figure out how old the world is. If you assume that the way the world functions now is the way that it has always functioned, and if you do not believe what God has told us about the beginning of the world, then you look back down the corridor of time and see vast dark space. And you’re attempting to date things by working backwards in a world where God is a non-factor. All of your reference points are material reference points. You attempt to interpret all of the physical phenomena in terms of physical causes and physical effects over the course of an indefinite time period (which you understand to be billions of years), and yet you are leaving out the most important information in the universe.

If I had the ability to create a beautiful, fully operational, well-furnished mansion with exquisite grounds and gardens and fountains and streams and walkways, and I had the ability to create it by speaking it into existence in the space of a single day, and that’s what I did and I told you that’s what I did, and you chose not to believe me, and then you set about to determine the true age of the mansion and grounds on the basis of your understanding about ordinary causes and effects, your entire project is based on a prior rejection of the truth.

Now I don’t have the ability to speak such a world into existence, but God does. And that’s what He did, and He told us that’s what He did. God is the One person in the universe who is properly situated to tell us how the world actually began, because He was there and the whole thing is His doing. If you don’t believe His testimony, don’t expect me to believe your theories which you have built on the wrong starting point.

From a biblical perspective, it is simply wrong to believe that the world has always functioned as it always has. Of course, the world didn’t function at all before it existed. Physical matter is not eternal. It didn’t exist, and then – no thanks to the laws of physics! – God brought it into existence.

Further, the world didn’t become hospitable for life because of chance developments that took place over so many eons of time. God created the world fully functional and fully operational and fully habitable in six days. If we could drop in on Adam on his second day of life, we would have seen an intelligent man who had the ability to communicate. And yet he was only two days old! No infancy, no toddlerhood, no childhood, no schooling for Adam! God made Adam a fully functional and fully operational man – and likewise for Eve – in a fully functional and fully operational world.

If I’m going to attempt to date the age of the earth by analyzing the amount of some material that is now known to decay at a certain rate, I have at least two huge problems: first, I can’t know for sure that the decay rate has always been the same; but the second and far more serious problem is that I don’t know the amount of material that was present when God created the world.

The creation of the universe is nothing less than the miraculous work of God. And it happened once. The creation of the world is not a repeatable event. How do you investigate a unique, miraculous, unrepeatable event? Reasoning backwards from subsequent causes and effects doesn’t cut it. And attempting to find a purely physical explanation for what happened is utter nonsense. The most reasonable thing to do is to trust the testimony of the One person who was there.  

Now the miracle of creation isn’t the only massive, unrepeatable, and unique event in the Book of Genesis. The fall of mankind in Genesis 3 was a massive, unrepeatable, and catastrophic event in which a very good world which was not subject to corruption and decay began to experience corruption and decay. Then in Genesis 6-8 there was a massive, unrepeatable, and catastrophic flood that engulfed the entire world. The flood destroyed the world as it then was, sweeping away and burying – in a very short amount of time – a massively large number of living things and cultural artifacts in the depths of the earth. Wise geologists and wise archaeologists will trust God and will pursue their studies with this important information in mind. But if you reject God’s testimony about these things, then you are rejecting the reliable foundation of knowledge about the world that we inhabit.

AN IMPORTANT WORD TO MY FELLOW BELIEVERS

However, if you do believe God’s testimony about the creation of the world and about His design for the world, then you are standing on solid ground. But be forewarned: believing God puts you wildly out of step with the unbelieving world. They will scoff and taunt and laugh and look down at you. And if you crave their acceptance, if you strive to be known as someone who is socially and intellectually respectable in the eyes of the world, then you will cave. But if you keep your eyes on Jesus, then you can discover what it means to take up your cross and suffer for His sake.

An anvil is a heavy piece of solid metal on which a blacksmith hammers away at hot iron and shapes it into the thing he is making. John Clifford wrote a poem called “The Anvil”:

Last eve I passed beside a blacksmith’s door,

And heard the anvil ring the vesper chime;

Then, looking in, I saw upon the floor,

Old hammers, worn with beating years of time.

“How many anvils have you had,” said I,

“To wear and batter all these hammers so?”

“Just one” said he, and then, with twinkling eye,

“The anvil wears the hammers out you know.”

“And so, though I the anvil of God’s Word,

For ages skeptic blows have beat upon;

Yet, though the noise of falling blows was heard,

The anvil is unharmed – the hammers gone!”

As we sang earlier, “That word above all earthly pow’rs, / No thanks to them, abideth”.[11]

Friends, the eyes of the Lord scan the world of men to see if there is a man or a woman who humbly trusts Him:   

“Thus says the LORD: Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool; what is the house that you would build for me, and what is the place of my rest? All these things my hand has made, and so all these things came to be, declares the LORD. But this is the one to whom I will look: he who is humble and contrite in spirit and trembles at my word.” (Isaiah 66:1-2)

ENDNOTES

[1] Jonathan D. Sarfati, The Genesis Account: A theological, historical, and scientific commentary on Genesis 1-11. Powder Springs: Creation Book Publishers, 2015: p. 125.

[2] Ibid., p. 128-129.

[3] Ibid., p. 125-127.

[4] Ibid., p. 107.

[5] Douglas F. Kelly, Creation and Change: Genesis 1:1-2:4 in the Light of Changing Scientific Paradigms. Revised & Updated Edition. Ross-shire: Mentor, 2017: p. 63.

[6] Quoted in Douglas F. Kelly, Creation and Change: Genesis 1:1-2:4 in the Light of Changing Scientific Paradigms. Revised & Updated Edition. Ross-shire: Mentor, 2017: p. 64.

[7] Phillip E. Johnson, Darwin on Trial (Second Edition). Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1993: p. 205.

[8] Douglas F. Kelly, Creation and Change: Genesis 1:1-2:4 in the Light of Changing Scientific Paradigms. Revised & Updated Edition. Ross-shire: Mentor, 2017: p. 67.

[9] Quoted in Douglas F. Kelly, Creation and Change: Genesis 1:1-2:4 in the Light of Changing Scientific Paradigms. Revised & Updated Edition. Ross-shire: Mentor, 2017: p. 312.

[10] Todd Wilson, “Ten Theses on Creation and Evolution That (Most) Evangelicals Can Support.” Christianity Today, January 4, 2019.

[11] Martin Luther (translated by Frederick H. Hedge), “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arnold G. Fruchtenbaum, Ariel’s Bible Commentary: The Book of Genesis. Fourth Edition. San Antonio: Ariel Ministries, 2020. 

Russell T. Fuller, "Interpreting Genesis 1-11." The Southern Baptist Journal of Theology, Vol. 5, No. 3. Louisville: The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Fall 2001. 

Douglas F. Kelly, Creation and Change: Genesis 1:1-2:4 in the Light of Changing Scientific Paradigms. Revised & Updated Edition. Ross-shire: Mentor, 2017.

Vern S. Poythress, Interpreting Eden: A Guide to Faithfully Reading and Understanding Genesis 1-3. Wheaton: Crossway, 2019.

Allen P. Ross, Creation and Blessing: A Guide to the Study and Exposition of Genesis. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 1998.

Jonathan D. Sarfati, The Genesis Account: A theological, historical, and scientific commentary on Genesis 1-11. Powder Springs: Creation Book Publishers, 2015.

Andrew E. Steinmann, Genesis: An Introduction and Commentary (Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries, Volume I). Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2019.