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Creation: important to Christians

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Blake's Image of Creation and creationism should be a warning to fools who deny God and His creation narrative. Or those who presume to judge God with theological questions about which they know little themselves. Some dire predictions are also possible today. Creation also answers a great many questions about who we are and where we came from.

The Bible begins with creation. Yet most churches today, and even most Bible-believing churches, don’t want to talk about creation. They’re making a mistake. Bible-believing Christians should talk about creation, to strengthen their own faith and to be better witnesses to God’s sovereign – and awesome – power.

Creation according to the Bible

The Bible starts with these words:

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. [Genesis 1:1]

Or in the literal Hebrew, the skies and the land.

The rest of Chapter One, and the first three verses in Chapter Two, describe that creation in greater detail.

But the Bible mentions creation many other times.

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For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and made it holy. [Exodus 20:11]

That explains the Fourth Commandment. (And in Hebrew, shabbat comes from the same root as sheva, meaning “seven.”)

Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? [Job 38:3]

That you have forgotten the Lord your Maker, Who stretched out the heavens And laid the foundations of the earth, That you fear continually all day long because of the fury of the oppressor, As he makes ready to destroy? But where is the fury of the oppressor? [Isaiah 51:13]

In fact, Isaiah mentions this “stretching out” three times, and Jeremiah twice. And they usually talk about God laying the foundations of the earth, too.

So the Bible does not mention creation once only and then forget about it. The Bible mentions creation many times. Why?

  1. To lay the foundation for Divine Sovereignty, and the Authority That goes with it.
  2. To remind us that God blesses us every day by keeping us at the center of His Attention.

Why do churches ignore creation?

Blake's Image of Creation

William Blake’s (1757-1827) image of creation. “Urizen as the Creator of the Material World”, from “Europe, A Prophecy”. Lambeth: Printed by W. Blake, 1794.

Churches ignore creation today for one of three reasons:

  1. They do not accept the Biblical narrative as true. They let the white-smocks tell them what they believe is silly.
  2. They fear the creation narrative will chase people away.
  3. They believe even trying to lay an evidentiary foundation for any part of the Bible, will undermine faith.

If any of that sounds familiar, it should. Reason #1 sounds like something a Sadducee would say. The Sadducees did not believe in anything they could not see or hear or smell or touch. They didn’t accept the resurrection, for example. Reason #3 sounds like something a Pharisee would say. “If you need something to prop up your faith, then you’re not taking it on faith.” Reason #2 is neither. It is the kind of thing that any “political consultant” likes to say.

But when you ignore creation, you diminish God. The obvious problem is that if creation is not true, then God has told a lie. God cannot do that, or else He is not God. But aside from that, if God did not make the world just as He said He did, then He loses all basis for His authority. Then, too: how glorious can He be, if He acted no differently from how the wild would behave, without any interference from Him or anyone else?

Refuting reasons to ignore creation

Let us refute those three reasons, in reverse order. First: did the Apostles avoid using evidence to show the Jews that the “Jesus Christ” they spoke about was the Messiah that the Old Testament predicted? No. (Or as Paul of Tarsus often said, Mé genoito! “May it never be!” “God forbid!”) The Apostles referred repeatedly to the Old Testament. As did Jesus Himself. And the Evangelists. That was evidence that a major event, that the Jews looked forward to for thousands of years, now had come to pass.

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Some will say that Scripture is one thing and extrabiblical evidence is another. But Paul told his acolyte, Timothy:

All Scripture is inspired of God and beneficial for teaching, for reproving, for setting things straight, for disciplining in righteousness, that every man of God may be fully equipped for every good work. [2 Timothy 3:16,17]

So anything we see in nature that confirms something the Bible says can only be a good thing.

Creation isn’t the only example in this context. The Assyrian Empire, mighty as it once was, sank so low that historians literally forgot all about it. Forgot, that is, until one brave archaeologist set out to find Nineveh, the ancient capital city, when all his colleagues scoffed and said no such place ever existed!

As to the second reason: Jesus once said if anyone was ashamed of Him, He would be ashamed of that person. [Mark 8:38] The same holds true of creation.

And so we come to the first reason: that people believe what the white-smocks tell them. Well, then! Jesus Himself would likely ask:

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Whom will you believe? Me or the false prophets of science?

What is a prophet? One who says something ahead of others. (Greek prophétés, from pro- before, ahead of and phémi I say.) It could mean one who says something will happen before it happens. But usually it means one who gets out in front of others to say something.

And very often it means one who says something before he can show it adequately. And maybe he thinks he’ll be able to show it – and in that he is vastly mistaken.

Mistaken – or deliberately lying. Who can forget Piltdown Man? Those who “discovered” it, actually glued it together from the bones of several primates, chiefly an orangutan. Decades later, the National Geographic Society would eagerly embrace another “missing link,” called Archaeoraptor. They would learn, to their shame, that Archaeoraptor was no dinosaur, but a composite, like Piltdown “Man.” Most of the bones came from an ancient bird, they later admitted.

Such crude forgeries, evolutionists will readily admit to. They won’t admit to the more subtle frauds and forgeries that underpin their narrative. For a century and a half the scientific community have deceived themselves about how the universe, the earth, and life came to be. Christians, and especially their clergy, must take no further part in this mutual self-deception.

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Terry A. Hurlbut has been a student of politics, philosophy, and science for more than 35 years. He is a graduate of Yale College and has served as a physician-level laboratory administrator in a 250-bed community hospital. He also is a serious student of the Bible, is conversant in its two primary original languages, and has followed the creation-science movement closely since 1993.

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[…] Creation: important to Christians | Conservative News and Views. […]

[…] Creation: Important to Christians […]

Rod Martin, Jr.

You make some really good points, but there remains the danger of missing a bigger issue, here.

You say quite wisely, “They do not accept the Biblical narrative as true.” But what happens too often is that we confuse what is said in the Bible with what is interpreted as being in the Bible. Truth and understanding are not always equivalent. Our mortal understanding can fall far short of God’s Truth.

In fact, that may well be the cause of the rift between science and religion. Some of us in religion forget our humility. Also, we forget the wisdom of 2 Corinthians 3:6.

What if there were an interpretation far closer to Truth that delivered to us a timeline compatible with those of science?

After all, both science and the religious are searching for answers to the things God has created, even if some scientists do not acknowledge God as source. We are all in the same “business.”

If science were doing such a shoddy job, then I would think more of our technology would not work as well as it does. In fact, in most areas, science is batting over 900 (where 1000 in American baseball is an indication of perfection). How many of our church leaders today are walking on water?

What if your interpretation of the Bible is wrong? The Bible still holds Truth; that remains unaffected by our shoddy interpretation.

I have discovered a great many things in the Bible that I find nowhere else in the literature. That is why I’m writing, “The Bible’s Hidden Wisdom, God’s Reason for Noah’s Flood.”

link to genesiscode.net

There really is a biblical timeline compatible with those of science. And it reveals the culprit behind God’s need for Noah’s Flood.

Rod Martin, Jr.

Lovely point about covering up their lifestyle choices. Hilarious and true.

But don’t lose sight of the fact that not all biblical interpretation is right. In fact, all of it can be wrong, including yours and mine. Only God has perfect Truth. If we are humble enough, we might learn some of it.

You use the term “Origins Science” but that’s a misnomer. Most of the science that gives us very large ages for the universe and the things in it have nothing to do with origins.

The universe taking shorter or longer has no bearing on the fact that it had a non-physical source (God). The universe exists, therefore He IS. Simple. Guys like Hawking claim that all the universe needed was gravity in order to form. I can’t believe a guy with his IQ would be so clueless to miss the fact that all things in the universe require a cause, including gravity, space and time. You can’t have gravity without these things, especially a cause. And, of course, the ultimate cause is our Father in Heaven.

The universe really is very, very old. And God did it. Scientists cannot get around this fact.

But what we can do is look to the Bible and see how the reality found by scientists is already there in our Holy Book. You merely need the right amount of humility and a hunger to know the wisdom therein.

As one who hungers to be close to God and also a scientist, I have seen some of the flaws of scientific logic and ego, but I’ve also seen some of the flaws of “belief.” Believing something does not make it true. Truth is truth, no matter what we believe it to be.

Interpretation is fallible belief. Archbishop Ussher was a consummate researcher. I feel that, if he were here today, he would reject his biblical timeline of 1650. Sir Isaac Newton created his own biblical timeline and I’m sure he would reject it today, if he knew what we now know. The Flood could not have occurred when Ussher said it did, because too many things were happening in the world during that time. There were too many people in the world when supposedly Noah and his family should’ve been the only ones.

There are clues in Genesis to the answers. We can take science back from the humanists, but we have to be worthy of it, first. We have to be able to see how the Bible matches reality and Truth, not how reality and Truth conform to our preconceived notions about the Bible.

Did you know that Methuselah, the man, did not live to 969 years, but that Methuselah, the tribe, lived for far longer? Some of the clues are Gen. 5:2, Numbers 14:34, and the “days were years” wording throughout Genesis 5. We find other clues in the hidden relationship between Genesis 4 and 5 and in the finding of the Kabbalists’ “Tree of Life” embedded there. We also find clues in Genesis 1:26, 2:7 and 6:3 that clarify the identity of the “sons of God” as different from the “daughters of man.”

Noah’s Flood occurred 27,970 BC, by the best calculation I’ve found. And looking in science, we find the identity of the “daughters of man” — wiped out 28,000 BC — wiped out by the Flood. And we find out the real reason why the Flood occurred.

Answer me this: Why was the Flood necessary? Why was God’s creation suddenly “not good?”

From Genesis 6, we get a generality of wickedness, violence and a corruption of flesh. But what do these mean?

It startled me when I realized that something was wrong with this picture. God promised that He’d never again use the Flood, because the Flood had done its job. The Flood had cured man of the crimes of wickedness, violence and corruption of flesh. Do you see the problem? Of what was man cured? Certainly it could not have been the garden variety wickedness and violence that has given us 70 million dead in World War II alone.

The Bible really does have answers — answers that will blow your mind, if you take the time and garner the humility to look.

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