172. 15 Reasons Why Young Earth Creation Is The ONLY Biblical View

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The clarity of the text is not the problem. It's the cowardice of men who think that, oh no,

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I don't want to offend the science because I don't want to look stupid. Well, let me just tell you this.

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I would rather offend a scientist than offend a holy God. I would rather say that my

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God is infinitely more intelligent than the scientific community. So I'm going to go with what he says.

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If he says it clearly, I'm going to believe it. I don't care if the scientists disagree. If God says it clearly,

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I'm going to believe it. I'm going to go with him. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the podcast where we prod the sheep and beat the wolf.

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This is episode 172, 15 Reasons Why Young Earth Creation Is the Only Biblical F -

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Oh! Welcome back to the podcast.

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My name is Pastor Kendall Lankford, and I am the pastor of the Shepherd's Church, which is a reformed

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Presbyterian church in Chelmsford, Massachusetts. And by Presbyterian, I do not mean the lesbitarians down the street, and I certainly don't mean the

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PCUS gays. We are a church that believes what the Bible has to say on every issue that it speaks.

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God wrote a book, and God is infinite. I'm not, neither are you. So when

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God writes a book and he's infinite, then we ought to take what he says in everything and not what we think.

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So that's who we are. We want to preach the Bible, preach what it says, and preach it in a way that confronts the idols of our age.

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And that's honestly why I started this show. Also, if you're new to this channel,

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I am the husband to one of the wisest and most loyal people that I know, my wife,

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Shannon. We've been married for now 15 years, going strong at this point. So I'm a husband.

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I'm a pastor, I'm a husband. I'm also the father of six wonderful children who I'm not gonna dox them on here.

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I am also a JRR talking nerd, and it's one of my dreams to one day speak the fairest of all tongues known as Quenya, the high and majestic tongue of the firstborn children of Iluvatar who awaken under the stars of Varda Elantari, and after voyaging across the great and perilous

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Western seas, well, they basked in the mingled glow of the silver and golden lights of Telperion and Loralen, which illuminated the blessed realm of Valinor.

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And you're like, what is he talking about? Well, that's in the Silmarillion. It's one of the best books ever written. Highly recommend it.

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But that's not why we're here. Today, I wanna do something a little bit different.

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If you've been here for some time, you know that we've been going through the book of Revelation. And the way that I wanted to do that is

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I wanted to go through that book in a super deep kind of way. I wanted to chase down every single image and vision and reference in the book, and I wanted to fully uncover what the book of Revelation is all about so that anyone who follows along with that series, that you're gonna be well -equipped to understand the book of Revelation and to see it not as this doom and gloom novel of apocalyptic fear, but as a book of great joy, as a book of the kingship of Christ, and as a book of the dominion that he's gonna bring to the world through his church.

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That's what the book's about. But today, I wanna do something a little bit different, because there's another biblical doctrine that I'm really super passionate about.

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I'm passionate about all biblical doctrines, but there's one in particular that has captivated my heart for a very long time, and that is the doctrine of creation.

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You see, in my simple kind of country boy way of thinking, if you don't get the beginning and the end of the story right, then you're gonna ruin the whole thing.

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You can't understand anything that's going on in the middle of an epic novel, at least not well, if you don't understand how the story begins and how it ends.

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That's the two most important parts of a book is the beginning and the end. So over the years, it's sort of been my passion in biblical studies to really understand the beginning of the

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Bible and the end, to understand both the doctrine of eschatology, which is last things, and the doctrine of creation, which are the first things.

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And over the years, I've seen in so many ways how the Lord has blessed that effort and brought understanding to me and really unified the entire

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Bible, because the whole Bible is one unified, integrated, beautiful, glorious story for the glory of Christ.

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So that has been super helpful for me. But today, I want us to, instead of continuing in Revelation, which is talking about the end, at least of the first world of the old covenant world, today,

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I wanna talk about why creation is so unbelievably important.

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And specifically, I wanna talk about why young earth creation is the only biblical view.

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And by that, I mean that the world that we live in is a young, recent earth, not a millions and billions of years cosmic accident that we just so happen to end up on.

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I wanna show you how the young earth creation view is the only view that can be biblically faithful.

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So that if you hold to evolution or old earth or the gap theory or day age theory or any other theory that is trying to account for billions of years of random chance and death before sin and all of it, if you hold to that, what you're doing is you're accusing

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God of lying to us in his word when he says six days, and you're effectively following the serpent whose very first question in the

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Bible was, did God really say? So today, we're gonna ask that question, what did

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God say? And it's very clear that he created the world in six literal days.

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That's the only tenable and the only biblical position for men and women who are

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Christians to hold every other position is unfaithful. I'm not saying you're going to hell if you believe a different position,

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I'm saying you're being unfaithful. I'm saying that you're not believing rightly. I'm saying that you're believing a lie.

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I'm saying that in that area, you're believing heresy. So I want us to do that and I want us to do it well.

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And the reason why I wanna do this today is because we have an exciting opportunity that's coming to Massachusetts that's coming up in October.

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I'm a part, by the Lord's grace, a leadership team for an amazing organization called

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Refresh Ministries. Refresh Ministries is a Christian 501c3 organization that hosts top -notch conferences and brings men, women, children, families, and churches together so that they can seek the truth from the word of God and hear it from top -notch speakers and it's just great.

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So this October the 5th coming up in Burlington, Massachusetts at the Marriott in Burlington, I'm pleased to announce that we're going to be bringing author, scientist, president of Answers in Genesis, Dr.

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Ken Ham to New England to speak about why a six literal day creation is essential for Christians.

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Dr. Ken Ham is one of the most important men in the world who's working on this topic.

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His organization Answers in Genesis has been supremely helpful for me and my family over the years.

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His Noah's Ark theme park and creation museum represent the largest Christian theme park of its kind in the entire world and Ken Ham is working tirelessly to help

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Christians not to compromise on those earliest chapters of the Bible because if you compromise there you're gonna compromise somewhere else and I am beyond excited that we get to have

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Dr. Ham come and share and I'm gonna be sharing more information on this event as we get closer to the date.

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I hope you'll look at it, I hope you'll register for it, I hope even if you're not in New England that you'll come and you'll visit us.

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Come worship with the Shepherd's Church. We meet at Sunday at 10 o 'clock in the morning, the conference is gonna be

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Sunday evening so come visit the church, worship with us, go hang out with Dr.

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Ham, hear about all of the cool things that he's saying, it's gonna be great. So I would highly encourage that.

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I'm gonna give more information. I'll probably even throw a link in the show notes below so pay attention to that and with that now let us jump into this topic today and we're gonna be talking about 15 reasons why the young earth creation position is the only biblical view and we're gonna start out by asking a simple question and that is why is it the only view?

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Literal six day creation is not merely a theological preference, it's the only biblical position.

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It is neither negotiable or peripheral. It is the bedrock truth that undergirds every single doctrine of scripture.

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When you forfeit a literal six day creation, you compromise the integrity of God's word and you dismantle the very foundations upon which your faith even rests.

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To yield here in creation is not merely to reinterpret a chapter or two of the

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Bible but it's to topple the entire theological edifice upon which you stand.

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Every critical doctrine in the Bible, that means creation, the fall, covenant theology, redemption, resurrection, dominion, final judgment, all of it depends fundamentally upon Genesis one and that chapter being literal, historical and even recent.

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If the clarity and the authority of the first chapter of the Bible are surrendered, the reliability of every subsequent chapter collapses into obscurity.

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If you cannot confidently trust God's declaration about how he began the world, then you have no rational basis to trust his promises concerning the middle or the end of the world.

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In that sense, any divine truth is now suspect because you've compromised the beginning.

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This is not merely a scientific debate. It's an issue about who or what has the ultimate authority.

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This is not some kind of meaningless skirmish. It's the primary battlefield on which the integrity of scripture in our generation is gonna be decided.

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The church can't afford ambiguity here and we certainly can't afford compromise here.

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Because why? The scientists said it because they said the earth is millions and billions of years old.

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They also are the same people who called you grandma killers during COVID because you didn't wanna get a vax because the government was like forcing it down your throat.

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That's the people. That's the Tony Fauci's and all of the other ones.

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That's the group of people that are saying millions and billions of years. And you're gonna believe them?

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When the Bible says that the earth was created in six literal days in a very recent event?

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I mean, our witness as the church and our faithfulness and our very existence don't depend upon what the science says.

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It depends upon what God says in his word, in his unwaveringly, unswervingly truthful revelation.

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And today in this episode, I wanna demonstrate unapologetically and conclusively how literal six day creation is the only faithful, righteous, consistent and intellectually coherent position for all who name the name of Christ.

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And I wanna give you 15 reasons for that. And I wanna begin with reason one, exegetical.

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Now to be a Christian is to believe what Christ believed. That's what in a sense exegesis is.

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It's you trying to determine what the author of scripture said. And we know that ultimately the author of all scripture is

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God. God through Christ by his spirit inspired the writers of holy scripture to write these words and whatever he says about these words is what we ought to believe.

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So when we look at Jesus and we see what did Jesus believe about the book of Genesis? He believed that it was literal.

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He didn't take it metaphorically. He didn't take it allegorically.

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Jesus believed it. When he was questioned about marriage, he didn't go to Roman law or Jewish tradition or psychological compatibility or any of the self -help marriage books of his day.

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He went back to Genesis. He said, have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female?

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Matthew 19 four. So Jesus is grounding his marriage theology in the historicity of Adam and Genesis.

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And we have to as well. Genesis is not written as poetry, as myth, as parable, or as some kind of coming of age

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Jewish tale. It's historical narrative. It's the same genre as most of the other books in the

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Old Testament like Exodus and Numbers and Joshua. It follows a clear pattern where God speaks, things happen.

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There's evening and morning. The next day begins six times. I mean, every

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Hebrew scholar who is worth their salt, whether they're liberal or conservative, admit this.

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The days of Genesis one have evening, morning, and a number. It was evening, there was morning the first day, evening and morning the second day, evening and morning the third day.

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And wherever the word yom, which is day, shows up with a number in the

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Bible, it means a literal, normal, 24 -hour day.

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And that is the same Hebrew structure that we find in every other historical text.

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To pretend otherwise is to twist the text for your own convenience and to support your own a priori assumptions.

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Just means assumptions you bring to the table beforehand. It's you reading into the

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Bible what you want it to read instead of reading out of the Bible what it intends to say. If we can't trust

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Moses when he says six days, then why should we trust him when he says, you shall not commit murder,

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Exodus 20, 13? If God couldn't communicate the timeline of creation clearly, then what makes us think that he communicated anything clearly?

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To deny six -day creation is to start our theology by saying, well, God's word doesn't mean what it says.

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Well, at least not in the beginning. That's not interpreting the Bible. That's rebellion dressed up in some kind of scholarly short skirt and it's rebellion.

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That's reason one, exegetically. Now, reason two, hermeneutically.

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Every time Genesis is treated like an allegory or a metaphor or some kind of mythic tale, it's not because the text demands it, it's because you want to escape its implications.

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Genesis one is structured like history. It uses the vav, consecutive verb pattern that is very typical for Hebrew narrative.

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It's not allegory, it's not metaphor, it's not poetry. The days are numbered.

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They're repeated markers of time, evening and morning. That's not linguistic, that's not a linguistic indication that it's shifting into some kind of poetic figurative language.

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That's just how the book is moving naturally as a historic narrative. The book moves seamlessly from Genesis one to Genesis two and Genesis three and beyond, traces genealogies and geographies and historic people, none of which makes sense if chapter one is purely myth.

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Moreover, every biblical writer from Moses to Paul reads Genesis as literal history.

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Paul argues about sin and he points out Genesis as literal history, Romans five.

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He talks about gender roles as if this were literal history, first Corinthians 11. He talks about marriage as if this were literal history,

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Ephesians five. All of the writers of scripture that point back to Genesis one are depending upon a historical

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Adam and a historical Eve and a historical garden that happened in the near recent past, not millions and billions of years ago.

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To read Genesis as a symbol is to tear the spine out of the

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Bible storyline and then to think that it'll still hold up. Allegorical readings may feel sophisticated when you surround yourself by a bunch of egg -headed scientists who hate

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God, but all of that ends in theological collapse. It's like taking the spine out of your back and thinking that you're gonna walk upright.

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You've cut yourself off. The clarity of the text is not the problem.

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It's the cowardice of men who think that, oh no, I don't wanna offend the science because I don't wanna look stupid.

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Well, let me just tell you this. I would rather offend a scientist than offend a holy

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God. I would rather say that my God is infinitely more intelligent than the scientific community, so I'm gonna go with what he says.

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If he says it clearly, I'm gonna believe it. I don't care if the scientists disagree. If God says it clearly,

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I'm gonna believe it. I'm gonna go with him because the scientists have been wrong about everything.

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Scientists today are now saying that steak and eggs is one of the most unhealthy meals you could eat.

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No, it's not. I've been eating meat and eggs now for a couple weeks and I've lost weight,

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I feel better. I don't believe anything the science says, at least recently, because it's weaponized propaganda.

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Go with what the Bible says. If it says it, believe it. And if someone disagrees with it, they're the moron.

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That's reason number two. Reason number three, it's rhetorical.

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There's a rhetorical reason. The entire Bible's a story. Genesis one through three is the beginning of that grand epic narrative.

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And if you ruin the beginning of the story, then you're gonna ruin the rest of it. It's like one domino that falls all the way down to the very end.

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Genesis one tells us what God did in the beginning. Genesis two tells us where and who is the one who is doing it.

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Genesis three tells us what went wrong. Every single doctrine that you hold fast to, that you believe, that you need as necessary to be a

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Christian, doctrine of sin and the fall, salvation, redemption, atonement, judgment, glory, all of them are built upon the edifice of Genesis chapter one.

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If they crumble, then so does everything else. If the days of Genesis are not literal, then how do we interpret the resurrection on the third day?

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If Adam's not historical, then what does it mean that Christ is the last Adam? Does that mean that he's the last metaphor?

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If Adam was a metaphor, so is Christ? If creation wasn't good, then what exactly is

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God restoring it back to if it wasn't originally good or if there wasn't a fall?

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The Bible doesn't start with these kind of abstractions. It starts with action. It starts with God speaking and things happening, creating, naming, shaping, blessing, declaring.

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If you edit the book of Genesis, you're not just touching some kind of peripheral doctrine that doesn't matter.

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You're tampering with the grammar of the gospel. You're messing with the words of God that brought creation into existence, and I don't think that is a small thing.

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That's reason number three. Reason number four is anthropological, which just means the study of man.

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The question of human identity is not answered in a psychology textbook, but in Genesis chapter one.

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Let us make man in our own image, Genesis 1 .26. That verse grounds human worth, human identity, not in our intelligence, not in our ability, not even in our genitals, but in our created status as being image bearers of Almighty God.

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And we're not evolved animals, according to the Bible. We're not the result of random chance and random mutations and survival of the fittest and that kind of micro evolutionary adaptation.

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We are not bags of biology with delusions of grandeur. We are the deliberate artistry of a personal

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God who knelt down and crafted man in the sand, breathed life into his nostrils, and then put him into a deep sleep and made woman from the man.

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When you compromise that six -day creation, you muddy the doctrine of man.

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You erase the distinction between the creature and the animal. You confuse the boundaries of gender and you sabotage the gospel, which requires a real man made in God's image who really fell, who needed a real savior.

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The world says that you and I are a cosmic accident and we have no intrinsic value.

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That's why they murder millions of children and they mutilate children to make them transgender

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Frankensteins or Mr. and Mrs. Potato Heads, lopping off organs just to make them into some kind of freak show.

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That's because why? They don't see any value in human life and they don't see us as being created by a holy

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God. Genesis says that you and I are the crown of God's creation.

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We are the vice regents of his creation. We are the pinnacle of his creation and only a literal six -day historical

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Adam, Genesis 1 being scripture, not allegory. That's the only view that can sustain a

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Christian view of justice, dignity, and future salvation. All of these views are built on top of Genesis 1 being literal.

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We can't compromise there because then we ruin and we lose even our anthropology.

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We lose even understanding who we are. That's reason number four. Reason number five is covenantal.

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Covenant theology rises and falls on Adam. If he was not real, then neither is the fall.

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If he's just a myth, then the fall is a myth. It's just a clever story to help explain why we sin or why we break the rules or why we fail to do what we think we ought to do and we do the things we don't want to do.

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It's just a clever myth that's describing the human condition, not prescribing what

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God did. If Adam wasn't the first man, then he can't be our federal head.

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If he was not historical, then Christ is not necessary. The covenant of works actually depends entirely on a real

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Adam and a real garden with a real command, a real test and a real consequence for a real fall. Genesis two and three aren't parable in that way.

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It's the preamble to the entire redemptive story. Paul says it plainly. As through one transgression, there resulted condemnation to all men, even so through one act of righteousness, there resulted justification of life to all men,

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Romans 5 .18. If one man didn't bring death, then the one man actually didn't bring life.

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Old earth views and allegorical readings collapse the structure of Genesis.

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They insert death before sin. What do I mean by that? Well, in the old earth view, humans are around for a long time before God chooses one of them,

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Adam, sort of as a mascot rather than our federal head and he puts him into a garden, breathes life into him, all of that.

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Well, that view assumes that there's death that's happening a long time before God takes that one man,

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Adam, and places him into the garden. This leaves us with a gospel that is unanchored in history.

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This leaves us with an Adam who is the recipient of death, who is the beneficiary of death.

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It places the entire story in a theological pretzel.

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If Adam wasn't a special creation, our representative in the

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Garden of Eden, then how can we have any confidence that Christ is our representative on the cross?

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That's reason number five. Reason number six is eternal.

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Jesus did not die for a metaphor. He died for real sin. He died in real space and time.

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He died as a real man. The gospel assumes a real historical fall and Jesus having to come to make payment for that fall.

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Paul's entire argument in Romans 5 hinges upon the first Adam bringing death and the second

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Adam bringing life. If the first Adam is symbolic, the second Adam is irrelevant.

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And in that sense, evolutionary views and old earth compromises places death before Adam, millions of years of death before Adam.

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And that turns the gospel into a solution in search of a problem. They make death a part of the design of the world instead of the result of disobedience.

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And in that sense, the cross makes no sense unless Genesis is literal.

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The atonement becomes unnecessary if sin is a mythic fiction and Christ's obedience is hollow if Adam's disobedience was somehow allegorical.

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Only a real fall can explain a real cross. And that's reason number six.

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Reason number seven is judicial. Romans 5 .12 is clear.

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Through one man, sin entered the world and death through sin. The logic is inescapable.

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Death is the direct consequence of a real Adam's disobedience. First Corinthians 15, 21 through 22 confirms it.

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By a man came death. In Adam, all die. If death existed before Adam, then these verses are false.

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They lied to us. And if scripture lies about death, how can we even possibly trust it to tell us the truth about life?

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Old earth models and evolutionary theories demand that death existed for millions of years. Death is the engine of survival of the fittest and of how mutations actually end up creating these creatures that have adaptability and progress.

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The engine of evolution is that speciation and that all of these things that are happening actually create more genetic information when actually the scientific, the real scientific data on this is that mutation actually creates less genetic data.

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So when you believe that, when you believe that death has existed for millions of years before man ever appeared, then you're not just making some kind of small adjustment, you are introducing a theological disaster.

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You're making death the tool by which God used in his creative arsenal to bring about Adam and to bring about creation.

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Rather than a curse for Adam's rebellion, you make death the very thing that blesses the world by giving us

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Adam. It turns the wages of sin into the pathway of progress.

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And it puts death before the fall, which means that Christ died for something that God used to make the world.

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When God says that he looked at Adam and Eve and said that they were very good, you would have to say that he would say death was very good because death was the engine that brought about the

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Adam and the Eve. That's blasphemy. That slanders the character of God.

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It accuses him of calling millions of years of death and suffering very good. But brothers and sisters, scripture's unambiguous on this.

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Death is the enemy of man. 1 Corinthians 15, 26. It is a curse upon man.

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Genesis 3, 19. It is a violation of the created order. Romans 8, 20 through 22.

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It was introduced only after Adam sinned. It was the result and the consequence of his fall, not the engine of creation.

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Jesus did not come to redeem a world that God made through the instrument of death.

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He came to destroy death. He came to make death his greatest enemy and to kill death.

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Jesus in his death on the cross was killing death. In that sense, the cross makes no sense unless death was the result of sin.

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And sin makes no sense unless the creation account is literal. Any doctrine that puts death prior to Adam turns the gospel into a cure without a disease and a savior without a need.

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The cross only matters because the curse was real and the curse is only real if Genesis is literal.

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That's reason number seven. Reason eight, cultural.

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Every cultural battle that is being fought today is a Genesis battle. Gender confusion, sexual deviancy, abortion, euthanasia, environmentalism, transgenderism, feminism, racial division.

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They all trace back to our understanding of creation. Genesis one through three establishes identity, male and female in the image of God.

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It establishes marriage as one man and one woman. In the words of my former pastor when

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I was a young man, God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. It establishes marriage, one man and one woman.

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It establishes dominion, men over nature, not man as nature's slave. It establishes justice.

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Obedience brings blessings. Rebellion brings curses. It establishes our purpose to multiply, to fill and subdue the earth under the command and blessing of God.

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The moment the church surrendered Genesis, the culture claimed everything else and it's not an accident.

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If the foundation is destroyed, the whole building is gonna collapse and that's what old earth views, day age theories and allegorical interpretations, don't just tinker with the timelines, they surrender the war.

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They cede the ground that we need to be fighting for to secularism. They offer the world the equivalent of a theological

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Switzerland, a non combative faith content to spiritualize history while Satan is reclaiming everything else.

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If we wanna win the culture, we have to actually fight the right war and the war is being waged on the soil of Genesis.

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That's our beachhead. That's where we need to fight. And that leads us to reason nine, which is educational.

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Genesis one is not only the beginning of scripture, it's the beginning of education. It teaches us who

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God is, what the world is and what's wrong with the world that we live in and what is

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God's purpose in history to redeem and restore it. It's the first page of God's curriculum for who he is and what man is.

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Before Mount Sinai, before Psalms, before the parables and the gospels, before Paul, before the book of Revelation, there was creation.

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And that's why mothers and fathers, a faithful education must begin with Genesis one.

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How do you expect your children know who they are if they don't know who God says that they are?

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Creation is the first doctrine that a child must learn. In the beginning, God. And that's not just the start of the book.

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It's the bedrock of all reality. Everything that exists is downstream of in the beginning,

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God. All knowledge, all ethics, all epistemology and philosophy, all available information that you can understand with the synapses of your brain is downstream of in the beginning,

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God. This answers the question that everyone's asking.

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Who am I? Who is God? What's my identity? What about authority?

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What about morality? What about purpose? To compromise in Genesis one is to begin instruction and education on a cracked foundation.

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If Genesis is metaphorical, then the classroom can all but become relativized.

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If the days are somehow figurative, then the commands of God can be too. If Adam isn't real, then neither is sin.

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And if children aren't taught truth from the very beginning of their lives, then they're gonna build their lives on some form of a fiction.

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You cannot catechize a generation on compromise and expect them to stand firm with integrity.

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Six -day creation gives children a world that makes sense, a

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God who speaks it into existence, a world that he designed with order, a world where chaos is the enemy and God has called us to subdue it, a humanity that was made in dignity and royalty, a purpose that is rooted in design and not random chance.

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Genesis one equips children not to reject truth, but to reject lies and foolishness and to refute the errors of our days and to rejoice in the truth of God.

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Every Christian parent and pastor and teacher must see

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Genesis one, not as optional, but as essential to the discipleship of Christians.

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It is the beginning of wisdom. It's the cornerstone of our worldview. You don't need a seminary degree in order to raise strong Christians.

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You need Genesis one and the courage to believe what it says and everything that follows after it.

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That's reason number nine. Reason number 10 is sabbatical.

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The fourth commandment's not based on a feeling. It's based on a fact. For in six days, the Lord made the heavens and the earth and the sea and all that is in them and rested on the seventh day,

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Exodus 20, 11. The weekly rhythm of work and rest is modeled after God's literal work week.

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I want you to notice this. In the 10 commandments, God says that in the beginning,

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God made the heavens and the earth and all that is in them in six days. You can try to spiritualize

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Genesis one if you want. You can try to make Genesis one metaphorical, but what about in Exodus?

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What about in the 10 commandments? Because if you try to spiritualize it there, then you're saying that the

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Sabbath is also a metaphor. And then if you say that, then what are we talking about?

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Are we supposed to work for six long epics and then rest for one? Is that what a day is?

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If you spiritualize day in Exodus 20, 11, then you lose the 10 commandments. You lose the

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Sabbath. If we believe that God set up a work week, six days of work, and on the seventh,

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God rested to show us what it means to rest in him, we lose that entirely if you turn that into metaphor.

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If all of our weeks are allegories, then the logic of the Sabbath collapses. If the days of creation are not real, then neither is our rest.

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And if Jesus is the Lord of the Sabbath, he's Lord of some kind of metaphor. See, the point is the

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Sabbath is not just about rest. It's about time. It's about dominion. It's about worship. It's about our covenant identity to this

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God. It marks us as a people who are set apart as distinct. It trains us in obedience.

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It anticipates eschatological glory, and it points typologically forward to Christ, who is the

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Lord of the Sabbath. To confuse the foundation of six literal days is to confuse the function of the 10 commandments, especially the

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Sabbath. To compromise in Genesis leads to confusion in the Christian life. Our weekly rhythm becomes detached from redemptive reality, and worse, it teaches our children that God's word can be twisted and pretzeled and spiritualized whenever we don't like it.

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It's foolishness. That's reason number 10. Reason number 11 is providential.

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Genesis is not just about chronology. It's about the character of God. God said, and it was so.

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That's the rhythm of the first chapter of the book. That's the point. That's the power behind it.

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That God speaks and it happens. Six -day creation teaches that God's word is effectual, that he didn't stutter, that he wasn't stammering, that he doesn't speak and wait for billions of years for something to happen.

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God spoke and said, let there be light, and it happened a couple billion years later.

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God is infinitely powerful, and he doesn't have to wait for his will to crawl forward at some point in the distant future.

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When God speaks, galaxies leap into existence out of nothing.

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When he commands molecules, they move. That's the foundation of God's providence, that God, who made the world by fiat, governs the world by the same sovereign voice.

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He upholds all things. He in the heavens does whatever he pleases by the word of his power, and that power was first revealed in six ordinary days.

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There was evening and there was morning, the first, the second, the third, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth day.

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Compromising that creation structure undermines the entire

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Bible. Old earth and evolutionary views insert lag and progress and weakness into God's speech.

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They make him sound like a process manager rather than a cosmic king.

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They turn his fiat into foibles. If we can't believe that God created the world exactly as he said he did, then why should we believe that he governs it exactly as he says he does?

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It's a really important question. That's reason number 11. Reason number 12 is

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Christological. Jesus is not just our redeemer. He is our creator.

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John 1, verse three says, all things came into being through him.

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Colossians 1, 16 says, by him all things were created. Hebrews 1, 2, through whom also he made the world.

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So these verses don't just point to metaphors. They don't point to a figurative Adam. They point to the literal formation of the cosmos by Jesus.

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And Christ is not a poetic origin point. He is the sovereign agent of all.

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He is the one who made the world. To soften Genesis is to diminish the glory of the son of God.

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To believe in an old earth is a Christological heresy. It makes

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Jesus into the metaphorical craftsman of a mythic world. One through whom life spring forth and oceans divided and mankind was formed out of the dust.

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That's the truth. So if you believe in old earth, you believe that all of those things were somehow metaphor for a big bang and metaphor for adaptation and progress.

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You're accusing Christ of lying that he is the author and the creator of all things.

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Christ redemptive work is tied to his creative work. The one who spoke light into being now speaks life and light into the dead center's heart.

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The one who fashioned the world, not just used evolution as his creative engine, not just used the big bang, not just stood aloof from his creation and watched it from afar like a watchmaker who wound it up and set it off on its course.

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No, he personally with his own hands fashioned the world from nothing.

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And he's now the one who fashions new hearts in his elect.

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You cannot exalt the cross of Christ while tampering with his creation.

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You cannot praise the second Adam while doubting the historicity of the first.

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You cannot magnify the word made flesh while minimizing the word that actually was used to make flesh.

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The glory of the cross begins with the glory of creation. And the creator wore a crown of thorns in order to redeem the creation that was fallen in a real historical

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Adam, a creation that he once called very good. And now he's making it again into a very good creation.

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It's what Romans eight is all about. That's reason number 12. Reason number 13 is missional.

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The gospel does not begin in Matthew. The gospel doesn't begin in Isaiah.

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The gospel begins in Genesis. When Paul preached to the Gentiles in Acts 17, he didn't start with Abraham, Moses, or David.

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He started with creation. He said, the God who made the world and all things in it, since he is

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Lord of heaven and of earth, Acts 17 24. Why? Because before you can call people to repent, you must tell them who they are and who they're accountable to.

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Creation establishes the creator -creature distinction. It defines his authority.

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It grounds and helps us understand the fall and sin. It makes repentance intelligible.

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If God did not create us, or if he stood aloof from it and allowed it just to work itself out over millions of billions of years, then he has no personal claim over us.

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If we're just the product of time and chance, then evangelism is nonsense. The Great Commission assumes a great creation, and not just any creation, a specific, sovereign, six -day creation that declares

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God as the immediate and rightful ruler of all mankind. The gospel call is to bow before Christ as Lord because he's

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Lord of all creation. That makes no sense apart from him as creator.

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Any doctrine that tries to reimagine Genesis or undermine the first parts of the

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Bible, it actually undermines missions and evangelism at its very root. It dulls the urgency of repentance.

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It softens the edge of judgment. It turns evangelism into a lifestyle suggestion rather than a royal summon by the king who's coming to remake the world.

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If Genesis is softened, the gospel is silenced. You can't preach

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Christ rightly if you don't preach him as creator. You cannot call men to be reconciled unto

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God unless you first declare that he's the one who made them. He's the one that they've rebelled against. Missions begins with a

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Genesis foundation. You deny that, and you destroy the message of the gospel. That's reason number 13.

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Reason number 14 is eschatological. The new creation is modeled after the old.

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Revelation doesn't paint a picture of an ethereal realm of disembodied souls and spirits.

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It pictures Eden restored. It has a tree of life in the very end of the book, a river of life that's flowing out of the city.

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No more curse, no more death, a new heaven, a new earth. To deny the literalness of Genesis is to distort our eschatological hope.

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If Eden was not real, then how can we believe in a real future paradise to come?

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How can we believe that God is gonna restore the earth? If the first creation was a myth, then maybe our future is a myth as well.

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Post -millennial hope, which is the eschatology that we believe on this channel, depends upon Genesis.

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It sees the trajectory of human history not as a descent into chaos, but as an ascent into glory by a

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God who will redeem us from the pit to return us back to what was lost in Eden.

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That only makes sense if Eden was real. The gospel begins in a garden. It ends in a garden.

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Christ raises out of a garden tomb. He's mistaken as a gardener when

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Mary sees him. And Christ now, this gardening king, is restoring all that Adam forfeited.

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We look forward to the day when the knowledge of the Lord covers the earth as the water covers the sea, where his life is poured out all over the face of the earth, where the deserts are now blooming, where the world is restored back to its

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Edenic paradise. You can't long for that restoration if you don't believe in the literalness of creation.

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That's reason number 14. Reason number 15, our final reason, it's polemical.

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Genesis was not written in a vacuum. It was written as a declaration of war.

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Every pagan nation at the time, whether it be Canaan or Babylon or Egypt, they all had a creation story that was twisted and broken.

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And Moses, he didn't accommodate those myths because they were false. He obliterated them by the

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Spirit's power, through the Spirit's revelation, he obliterated them because Genesis 1 is a polemic against all of the ancient

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Near Eastern garbage that had grown up. I want you to think about it like this. When Noah and his family got off the ark, when they got off the ark and they started settling in the area of Ararat and making families, and those families had families and those families had families,

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Noah and his family was the only people on earth who had the story of creation memorized.

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Everyone else died. So along the way, if you've ever played the game telephone, you tell something to someone, they tell something to someone, and eventually the story gets twisted and marred.

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You get all the way to the Tower of Babel. That's Noah's offspring, that's his descendants.

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They gather at the Tower of Babel and God confuses their languages. So now they not only have a story that is in the process of change, they have new languages that now bring new meaning to some of those stories.

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That's why when you study all of the ancient creation myths, they all are very similar.

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There's minor differences because they all result from the same original story that came down to us through Noah, through oral tradition.

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But here's why the Bible is better because the Bible doesn't depend merely upon oral tradition.

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We can look at, we can see that the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the

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Hivites, the Jebusites, all of them, we can see that all of them had a creation story that was oral tradition that went all the way back to Noah.

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We can see that, we can prove that. We can prove that. But what happens with Moses is not oral tradition.

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The Holy Spirit of God reveals to Moses what actually happened in the beginning.

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So then in that way, Genesis 1 is a polemic against all of the telephone changes that happened to the creation story since Noah all the way to Moses.

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In the creation story in the Bible, it dethrones the sun and the moon and the stars as gods, but it makes them lights as God originally intended.

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It doesn't name the sea monster, it tames it. It doesn't glorify man as divine, it declares him as God's servant.

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Genesis was written by God to intentionally crush the lies of the ancient world and to establish

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Israel as a people who were set apart by truth. It's not a myth that was repackaged. It was truth revealed in a world that had fallen into error and lies.

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To reinterpret Genesis as poetry or allegory is to put it on the same level as the

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Babylonian myths and the Assyrian myths and everything else. It's to replace the revelation of God with the worldview of fallen man.

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And when modern Christians adopt old earth views or mythical frameworks, they're contextual, they're not contextualizing the gospel, they're capitulating to pagans, the same pagans that Moses and the

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Holy Spirit of God were refuting. You don't win the war for the world by adopting its own myths.

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You win the world by proclaiming God's word. And that leads us to now, just for a moment,

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I wanna talk very briefly. Now we've given 15 reasons on why this is the biblical view.

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Now I want to, for a second, just to talk about a few objections, and then I wanna close. The first objection is maybe someone would say to you, but science proves that the earth is billions of years old.

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And here I would say that science is not monolithic. It's a methodology that interprets data based on the assumptions that it brings.

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For instance, this is what science is. I'm gonna look at this Petri dish under a microscope, I'm gonna write down my notes,

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I'm gonna test it, I'm gonna repeat it, I'm gonna, after I see the results forming into conclusive kind of conclusions, then

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I'm gonna write down those and I'm gonna organize it into a theory. Science is about observing things in real time in the present tense, not about making assumptions about what happened in the origins of the world.

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That's not science, that's religion. Science becomes scientism when they try to tell you about what happened in the beginning.

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They can't. They weren't there to test it. They weren't there to repeat it. They weren't there to observe it.

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Therefore, you don't have the scientific method. You have philosophical naturalism as a religion.

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That's what that is. And if you assume naturalism, you're gonna get naturalistic conclusions.

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But the Christian faith starts with revelation, not with speculation. It starts with the

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God who was there in the beginning who has spoken to us and revealed to us what he did in the beginning of the world.

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We're the only ones who have the actual truth about how the world began because God, the very

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God who made it, the very God who raised Jesus from the dead is the one who told us about it. And his word is not subject to peer review.

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So that's the first objection. The second might be that, well, Genesis 1 and 2 contradict each other.

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So how can we trust either one of them as anything more than metaphor or myth? Well, the only way that you could say that those two things contradict each other is if you don't understand

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Hebrew narrative. Genesis 1 is a chronological overview using the word Elohim, which is

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God, the sovereign God over all creation. Genesis 2, however, is a retelling of the story with a different lens.

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For instance, if I take a camera and I put a 50 millimeter lens on it, which is good for portrait photography,

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I could take your picture. If you were five to 10 feet away from me, I could take it and it would be great.

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But if I put on a telephoto lens, it's the same camera looking at the same subject, but with a different magnification.

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So then I would be looking at the boogers inside of your nose if I had a telephoto lens.

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See the difference? Genesis 2 is the telephoto covenantal lens that's looking at who

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God is and how he is covenant God, how he personally makes Adam in Genesis 1.

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Genesis 2 uses the word Yahweh, whereas Genesis 1 uses the word Elohim. It's the same story told from different vantage points.

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It is day six. Genesis 2 zooms in on day six to give a theological emphasis on who man and woman is.

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It's not a contradiction. It is the design of a storyteller who is good and has given us different angles of viewing the same thing.

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That's the second objection. The third objection is, well, the word day can mean age.

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It can mean epoch. And yeah, I guess in some context you would be right, but not when the word day, yom, is used with evening and morning and a number.

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So for instance, the word day could be used as a metaphor when you say, well, back in my day, you're not talking about a

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Monday, you're talking about a time period long ago. Or you could say in the days of the

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Egyptians, and you're talking about an era at that point. You can use the word day in both

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English and Hebrew in that way. But when you say evening, morning, first day, you are talking about a literal 24 hour day.

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You're not talking about, well, back in the days of the Philistines, when you say evening, morning, first day.

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You're appealing to a 24 hour time clock. The burden of proof is on anyone else who would try to explain that one away because you can't.

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Here's another objection people will say. Well, many godly scholars believe in an old earth.

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And I have Christian friends who believe in an old earth. So, you know, it can't be that bad. They're certainly

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Christians, right? Well, many godly scholars and many godly Christians have been wrong.

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The standard is not how many Christians hold a particular view, but what scripture teaches.

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Our goal is not academic respectability, it is biblical fidelity.

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We don't need to know what another Christian says. We need to know what the scripture says.

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Here's another objection. Well, Genesis borrows from Babylonian myths. No, it doesn't.

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Genesis is not borrowing from them, it's battling against the errors and the lies that they are telling.

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Similarities exist to highlight where the differences are. See, where pagan myths depict chaos and gods at war and humanity as slaves,

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Genesis depicts God as bringing order and having sovereignty and man as not

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God's slave, but as his image bearer and as his helper in bringing creation into his design, into his will, into his image.

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It's not imitation that the Bible is doing, it's confronting where the pagan myths have fallen short.

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Here's another objection. Well, six -day creation is not a salvation issue, so why are you making such a big deal about it?

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Well, because I've already shown that it's a gospel issue. I do believe that you can have a wrong view on Genesis 1 and 2 and go to heaven, but I believe that you're borrowing from my six -day view in order to have your view, because you've undermined it.

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You've cut yourself off at the ankles. The gospel assumes a historical Adam who historically fell, a literal

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Adam, a real beginning, denying six -day creation may not send you to hell, but it hollows out your theology that makes it almost meaningless.

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Here's another objection. Doesn't nature reveal truth too? Yeah, we learn truth in the Bible, but scientists can look at general revelation and they can see things that are true.

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Yeah, of course, but general revelation never trumps special revelation.

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Let me put it to you this way. Finite human beings are looking at a creation and trying to ascertain what is being said, so we may get it wrong, but when

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God speaks very clearly such that a three -year -old can understand it, we don't need to question it because Scripture isn't trumped by someone's opinion of natural revelation.

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Romans 1 says that we suppress the truth of God in unrighteousness, that we need

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Scripture to clarify what we are, who we are, and why we are, or else we will fall into contempt.

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So that objection doesn't stand either. Someone might say, but what about dinosaurs and fossils? Well, they fit perfectly together within a biblical framework.

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Dinosaurs were created on day six with the animals and man. Fossils are the result of a global flood.

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There is no wonder why, if you look at the fossils, that the animals that go up in the fossil record are animals that are stronger and more developed.

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Why? Because when the floodwaters came, they were able to escape to higher ground. That's why you have single -celled organisms and stuff on the lower levels, and you have very big, gigantic, very special, very complex creatures on the top level because they escaped to higher ground.

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A global flood and a catastrophic amount of water freezing these animals in the fossil record explains this way better than gradual death.

01:00:10

Fossils are the result of a catastrophic event, not gradual time.

01:00:16

In that way, the rocks are crying out, and they're not contradicting Genesis. They're confirming what it's been saying all along.

01:00:23

Then maybe you would say, well, isn't this a secondary issue? Well, only if your foundation and your worldview and everything about the

01:00:30

Bible to you is secondary. Genesis isn't a side note. It's the very first note.

01:00:37

Compromising in the beginning compromises everything. You don't call the foundation of a house a secondary concern.

01:00:44

Imagine if you're building a home, you hired a builder to build the home, and the bathroom upstairs is immaculate.

01:00:51

The bedroom is beautiful with this massive king -sized bed, all the trappings, glorious.

01:01:00

But yet the foundation has holes in it, and it's falling apart. You would say, this house is not safe.

01:01:08

My foundation is bad. It doesn't matter if I have gold -plated toilets.

01:01:14

If the foundation is destroyed, the house is gonna be destroyed. That's what Genesis is. Another objection might be, well, why does it matter so much?

01:01:23

Why does this matter? There's people who are dying and going to hell. Why are we talking about this? Because God spoke.

01:01:30

This is his word. And when God speaks, we're not permitted to edit his words. The issue is not creation alone.

01:01:37

It's submission to his authority. Are you gonna submit to the authority of God, or are you gonna submit to the authority of man?

01:01:43

That is the fundamental premise at work here, and that is what we must be at war over.

01:01:50

And that leads us to our conclusion. After all the arguments have been laid down, the exegetical, the theological, the cultural, the polemical, the covenantal, the

01:02:04

Christological, the issue really isn't complex. It's not about confusion.

01:02:11

It's not really about science. The issue is authority. Do we believe the word of God, or do we not?

01:02:21

Do we sit under the word of God, or do we sit over it in judgment? Six -day creation is not an obscure doctrine buried in the footnotes of the

01:02:32

Bible. It is the first thing that God chose to tell us about. It is the starting point of redemption, and it is the foundation beneath every stone of Christian theology.

01:02:46

If you remove that, everything else underneath it begins to tilt and buckle and collapse.

01:02:54

This is why Satan aimed his first question at this target.

01:03:00

Did God really say that same question echoes in seminaries today, in pulpits today, in commentaries today, in classrooms today?

01:03:08

Because we don't want the answer. The answer must be the same today as it was all the way back then.

01:03:17

Yes, God really did say. He said six days. He said it clearly.

01:03:24

He said it repeatedly. He tied it to his law, to his gospel, to his son, and to his glory.

01:03:31

To deny six -day creation is to saw off the branch that you are sitting on and be confused at why you're falling to your death.

01:03:43

It is to reject the very structure that God has built to hold up your faith, and it is to replace divine revelation with academic speculation, with theological cowardice and cultural appeasement.

01:03:58

And I believe if you're ashamed of Christ and his word, he will be ashamed of you.

01:04:06

And it's high time that the church needs to return to Genesis, not sheepishly, but triumphantly, not defensively, but joyfully.

01:04:16

The doctrine is not a liability for us. It is our weapon. It is the first stone in the fortress of the new

01:04:23

Christendom. In six days, the Lord made the heavens and the earth because he said so, and that is enough.

01:04:34

Now, if this episode has stirred up your convictions or clarified your thinking in any of that,

01:04:39

I wanna personally invite you to this event that we're hosting this

01:04:45

October the 5th, or Sunday, October the 5th, in Burlington, Massachusetts, that is being put on by Refresh Ministries, where we're bringing in world -renowned author and creation scientist,

01:04:57

Dr. Ken Ham, for a one -day conference on why literal six -day creation matters.

01:05:03

And he's gonna go into way more detail than I did just now. He's gonna be able to answer questions that you have. It's gonna be a once -in -a -generation opportunity for New Englanders to hear directly from one of the most important voices in the modern creation movement, where he's going to equip families and believers and churches to stand boldly on God's word on this topic.

01:05:25

I heard a recent statistic that like 80 % of pastors in New England do not believe in a literal six -day creation.

01:05:35

I would challenge you, come to New England and listen. Come and hear what he has to say, and help us spread the word, because this is such a foundational issue.

01:05:45

It's so important to everything that we believe, and if you are resonating with that, or if you wanna come and be skeptical and just listen, come.

01:05:54

You can register now at www .refreshconference .org.

01:05:59

I want you to bring your family, bring your church, bring your questions, and I want you to come ready so that we can all stand firm on the word of God.

01:06:07

And until next time, I hope that God richly blesses you. I hope that you are basking in the grace and the peace and the love and the mercy of Christ.

01:06:18

I hope that you are pouring yourself into God's holy word, which never lies to us and is always true.

01:06:24

And until next time, God richly bless you. We'll see you again next week on the podcast, and until then, get out.