My beliefs are rooted in the Book of Scripture and the book of nature. These two revelations cannot disagree and be untruthful because they are from God. I believe in the very words of the Bible right down to the word structures, meanings, and definitions. I don’t believe in evolution. I’m not the son of Carl Sagan.
Question, if creation was not a big deal with my church, why is YE preached as if it were a core value? Many get the impression without reading them that this is what the Church stands for. This is such a touchy point that when anyone writes a letter, why does the senior pastor see a need to remind the church of this pseudo value? This to me is evidence the Church has been hijacked and 10s of thousands hearing the message get it! Why not go for it and make it a true core value? I’m glad that has not yet happened.
Mark Ashion said, “If somebody comes in at the front end and says that in order to believe Jesus you need to believe that the earth is also a younger earth, what that does is it puts up one more intellectual barrier that they have to overcome in order to become a Christian. Oftentimes for people, that barrier is a harder barrier for them to overcome than a belief in Jesus, that God became a human being and that he died on the cross to pay for our sins that he resurrected from the dead. For some people, a young earth is a harder thing to swallow than that.” When pseudo values take root in the minds and hearts of members of the Body, the issue becomes a salvation issue! We are in great danger when we keep the “seeking ones”, the unsaved ones from coming to Jesus. Every time there is a big deal about young earth, the pastor is effectively placing this pseudo core value in the way of salvation for many. The message is loud, clear and often.
Now here is the rub, God gave me a life of science and engineering, a testimony if you will, and that is being attacked and diminished through this rhetoric. It is not through my effort but a gift from God that is driving me. We will always have opposition to the gospel, but it should not be fellow Christians who do this. Many are confronting me on this issue without testing the spirits to see if the Bible and nature are true. Why do people wish blindness on themselves by not looking?
I had a couple confront me at the end of a Sunday school class. I could see necks turning red, their faces were ready to explode, their eyes darting, their voices trembling and filled with anger from their heart, and saying “how in the world can I not believe in the creation of 6,000 years and the 6 day/24 hour creation?” They were saying in effect that I don’t believe in the Bible! I said that between the word phrase of “heavens and earth” which means “universe” in Geneses 1:1 is approximately 9 to 10 billion years. How could I believe such a thing? My answer was “because; the general revelation of God cannot lie for God cannot lie.” It is as if they were asking “how can I call myself Christian?” There seems to be a little tension there.
Let us take a step back and imagine an elder’s meeting in the Church and have this issue come up. Having people on this side of the issue (YE) and people on that side (OE) and they both say “how can you be on that side and still say you love God and be a Christian?” What the Church is tempted to do is to not bring up anything about creation. Some would argue that it has nothing to do with salvation so we don’t deal with the problem. But that is far from the truth. It has everything to do with the salvation for those who know general revelation of God and are not saved.
All Churches will always be imperfect because they are run by people. But the fabric of the Body of Christ is, He has divinely established it by the Holy Spirit and its God in us and by divinely establishing the Body, he wants us to submit to His authority given by God. The goal is to be the very best follower and disciple of Jesus as possible until or unless that Church demands obedience and citizenship that would violate primary directives of free salvation, our purpose, and submission to God. This is a matter of “conscious” and the Holy Spirit on how we should serve Him. We must be pure in our motive of service and worship.
The Church is ordained by God to make disciples. The Church is ordained by God to bring about internal transformations of individual lives that in turn transform cultures and transform societies. This is not the role of government. Jesus does this transformation through grace and salvation. It has to go in and come from within. The Church is given Mathew 28: 18 19. “All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”
GO AND MAKE DISCIPLES! If we limit the “how” one becomes a follower of God by setting up pseudo or false barriers, then we should be very worried for ourselves because we are not doing the work and will of God.
Pursuit For Truth 