1689 London Baptist Confession (part 10)

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Father in heaven, thank you this morning for the Lord Jesus Christ, for his faithfulness in light of our faithlessness.
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We confess our dependence upon you in all things, particularly when it comes to your word,
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Father, how it reveals who we actually are in spite of who we think we are.
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Lord, would you bless us as we look to your word, as we look to what it says? Would you teach us to trust your word?
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And even as we say we trust your word, Lord, I pray that you would reveal to us any areas where we don't really trust your word.
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We believe, Father, help our unbelief, we pray in Jesus name.
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Amen. Well, been gone for a couple of weeks. It seemed like a true confession when
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Janet and I were driving to church last week. We're driving along and I'm telling you, it felt like the first time going to Bethlehem Bible Church.
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I wanted to ask her directions. It felt like we've been gone so long. And I'm just like, how long we were gone?
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It was three weeks. It seemed like we missed you guys. So we're doing the 1689
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London Baptist Confession of Faith. And I'm digging through my old notes here before I get to the new ones.
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Because I thought just talking about, we've talked about God and his decrees, which is where we were.
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We were talking about how God doesn't allow anything to happen, but he causes all things to happen.
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And I mean, I have a list of some of the things that he does that are in the Bible. And I'll just run down those things real quickly because I want to get to the other things.
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Sometimes we say that God is sovereign. It's funny because I've been talking to somebody who says,
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I can't believe that God would allow this to happen. And I'm like, allow this to happen.
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Let's just, here's a list of the things that God permits, as it were.
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Actually, the Bible says he causes good and evil events. It says that he's involved in sinful acts.
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I mean, let's just think of Genesis 5020. What is
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Genesis 5020? Everybody knows it, even if you don't know the address. What's Genesis 5020?
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I'll give you a hint. The person speaking is Joseph. And what does he say?
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You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good. What was it that he's talking about? His brothers selling him into slavery.
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Right? I mean, they trapped him. They sold him into slavery. You, his brothers, meant it for evil.
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God meant it for good. Well, what does that mean? Did God just passively allow it to happen?
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You meant it for evil. God meant it for good. God is sovereign.
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Man is responsible. Nothing happens outside of God's decree.
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But in such a way that he is not responsible for sin.
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He uses the free will of man to accomplish his purposes.
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You know, our free, and let me just qualify that, said it many times. There's no such thing as free will.
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You act according to your nature. Right? But if you are unsaved, you can only act as an unsaved person.
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If you are saved, then you can act sinfully or righteously. But you can't, as an unsaved person, act righteously.
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You can do righteous things, but without a righteous motive, ultimately it is sin. Author of Hebrews says, without faith it is possible to please
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God once in a while. No, it's impossible to please God. Let's see.
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God also acts sovereignly through the supposed free acts of men. He is in control of so -called chance occurrences.
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You know, we see lots being cast in the Bible. Well, you know, if you, you know, should
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I roll, or should I marry Sally or Beth? You know, I'm going to roll the dice and see, you know, which one comes up.
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That would be wrong on many levels. But when that happens in the
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Old Testament, when lots are cast and everything, God is in control of those things. He's involved or controls the details of our lives, the affairs of the nations.
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You know, when you read the Old Testament, it says He, what, sets up kings and He takes them down.
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He sets the borders of the nations. He's sovereign over all these things. He's also sovereign over the final destruction of the wicked when
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He comes back to judge them. There are no conditions on God's decree except, of course,
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God, whatever He decides. Any questions about the decree of God or God's will in that sense, that He's sovereign over all details?
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There's one last aspect of this I want to touch on briefly before we move on to creation, which is chapter 4 of the
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Confession. Waldron says this, talking about God's decree, and he says,
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If calling, meaning being called effectually, having
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God, the Holy Spirit, convict you, regenerate you, calling you in time, if that is individual, personal and specific, he says, then so must the election of which it is the historical manifestation.
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That's kind of convoluted writing. What does it mean? Anybody? Was anybody listening?
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Throw me a lifeline. Phone a friend. 50 -50. Yes. Okay.
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True, right? Atonement not being exactly the same as election, but if election...
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Well, let's just go back from the... Well, before the beginning. If we look at Ephesians chapter 1, it says,
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Before the foundation of the world, God chose us, right?
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Did He choose us as a unit? Did He choose us individually?
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I think the argument can be made, and I don't really want to go into the specificity, but the argument can be made, in my mind, that it absolutely has to be individual on many bases.
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But individual. And so in that same sense, did Jesus die for a blob of people?
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Or did He die for individuals? He died for individuals. And in the same sense, what
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He's saying here is, if calling, in other words, if the effectual call of sinful people, the elect, when
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He calls them, if that has to be individual, and it is, right? They don't all respond at the same time.
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Then He says that election must have been also individual, and I believe that to be the case.
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Any thoughts or questions about that? Wes is looking very puzzled. Well, one of the things that people try to do, like with Romans chapter 9, specifically, is they try to say that this refers to...
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What's the word I'm looking for? I think I want to say it's like collective election.
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That Esau and Jacob refer to groups of people, not individuals, and they try to make this whole argument that God elects a group of people.
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And there's a reason that they want to do that, because they want to leave the purpose of the atonement to be sort of nebulous, so that Jesus didn't necessarily die for individuals, that He died for a group of people.
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Therefore, you can preach that it's for the whole world kind of thing. All right, on to chapter 4 of the 1689, which is speaking firstly of creation.
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And this is interesting, because I think this is very applicable to where we are today, especially if you're involved in education or homeschooling or anything of that sort.
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Listen, this is 1689. In the beginning it pleased God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit for the manifestation of the glory of His eternal power, wisdom, and goodness to create or make the world and all things therein, whether visible or invisible, in the space of six days, and all very good.
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Now why would that be of interest to us today? I guess it's too easy.
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Okay, listen to Waldron. He says, If anything should be obvious, it is that this chapter assumes a very literal understanding of Genesis 1 and 2.
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A very literal understanding of Genesis 1 and 2. He says,
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To state the matter succinctly, the only sound interpretation of the Bible is the one which understands it to teach that God did indeed make the world in a literal week of creation.
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Now is that important? Why? Go ahead,
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Gary. Millions and billions of years or whatever.
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Now it's interesting. Anybody know when Charles Darwin lived? Okay, the 1800s.
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This was written in 1670 -something, in spite of the fact that it's 1689.
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It's almost like they knew this was going to be an issue. Or maybe it's just that they understood the
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Bible the way it's supposed to be understood and then these new issues came up. Waldron goes on to say,
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Two classes of interpreters have departed from this idea of the six -day creation, the literal understanding, which is the historic position of the
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Confession. In this way, they have attempted to accommodate the Bible to the great age of the earth proposed by modern science.
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Aren't you intimidated when somebody tells you that the age of the universe is billions and billions and billions and billions of years old and that if you don't believe that, what are you?
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What's that? An idiot. I mean, that's just the truth, right? How can you be so?
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Here's a comment, and I'm not joking. Steve, you seem like a nice guy and reasonably intelligent.
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How can you possibly believe this? How can you not believe? Have you ever heard that?
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Anybody ever say that to you? How can you be so gullible?
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How can you be so stupid? How can you ignore the facts? Yes, yes.
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I bow before your facts. So, Waldron says,
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People want to accommodate the Bible to scientific facts, right? They want to adjust our understanding of the
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Bible so that it can take in evolution. Or it can take in what archaeologists say.
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Or it can take in what anthropologists say. Or it can take in, you know, it has to adapt to, you know, new discoveries that the world makes.
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What's the overall problem with that? And then we'll get into the specifics. What's the overall problem with accommodating to, you know, discoveries?
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Go ahead, Erickson. Those discoveries may not be true, or they may change.
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You know, I mean, one of the phrases, and I don't want to go deeply into this, but one of the phrases that just ought to offend everyone's sensibility is what?
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Here, let's see if you've heard this. The science is settled. I mean, there's something really wrong with that.
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Because science is not, it's never settled.
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It's always changing, even if it's only by this much. Because what is science? Science is, it's based on observation.
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It's knowledge, right? I mean, if humankind, generally speaking,
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I mean, we could get into the scientific method, but that's not what I'm specifically talking about right now. If humankind is going to continue to grow in its knowledge of the universe, and by the way, what
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I really enjoy is when they, you know, I read this a couple months ago, when they've discovered a new human organ.
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I mean, they've always known it was in the body, but now they recognize it as being an organ. So I'm like, okay, when they're discovering new things about the human body,
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I'm not really interested that they can tell me how the universe started. I mean, they have bodies that they can take apart, right?
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And yet they're just going, oh yeah, that, that's an organ. Or, oh yeah, that, we just discovered that new creature, you know, in the ocean or whatever.
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I'm like, they don't understand our earth and how it operates. So please don't tell me how the universe, which you weren't here to observe, came into being.
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Anyway, I digress. Waldron, he says there are two ways that people basically try to accommodate evolution.
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There are the day -age theorists. These interpreters have resorted or have asserted that the term day, used in Genesis 1 and 2, has the figurative meaning age.
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Okay, so when you see in Genesis 1, Genesis 2, you know, on the first day, it's not really a 24 -hour day.
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It could be how long? It could be a thousand years. It could be billions of years.
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It doesn't really matter because it's all just a metaphor. It's all just meant to give us the idea that, you know, some time passed.
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So that's one way that they do it. There's a second class of professed evangelical interpreters who have simply denied the historicity and factuality of Genesis 1 and 2, and indeed all of Genesis 1 through 11.
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At best, such interpreters speak of Genesis 1 to 11 as symbolic or interpretive.
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Now, what's the problem? I mean, can you think of some problems with that? Genesis 1 to 11 being figurative or interpretive?
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Is there a problem? What's that? Okay, so then it becomes subjective, right?
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Okay, let me take that answer and just kind of morph it a little bit.
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If we're to understand Genesis 1 to 11 as being non -literal, as being figurative and everything else, why do we start at Genesis 12 taking that literally?
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When should we start taking it literally? At what point do we go, oh, yeah, that's true, that's not.
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And there are a lot of, well, go ahead, Erickson. It makes
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Jesus Christ to be a liar. That's a problem. You have a real problem as a Christian. And because we can point to a number of places where he refers to creation and we would have a real issue.
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It also undermines John 1 and the whole identity of Jesus, yes, which is an excellent point because ultimately, and let me for the purpose of the tape, let me just refine that just a little bit.
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The Bible says that death is what? An enemy, right? It says that Jesus Christ defeated death and that death in the end is going to be thrown into the abyss, into hell, right?
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Evolution says death is our friend. Death is what has gotten us here because without the death and the death and the death and the death and the new birth of new things and all that, but death ultimately is creative because it leads to the next generation and the next generation and the next generation and to where we are now.
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Without death, we would just be little one -cell animals, still living, never changing.
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I mean, there are all kinds of problems.
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I mean, for example, the whole Noahic flood. I mean, the number of problems with Genesis 1 to 11 being figurative or something else is just, it's pretty big.
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And again, I'm just like, well, okay, when exactly? I think it was MacArthur was the first time I ever heard somebody say this.
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He's like, if you don't take Genesis 1 to 11 literally, then when do you start? Why? Okay, so Waldron.
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Both classes, however, failed to do justice to the clear teaching of Scripture. The claims of the second class, that is to say that you take it as symbolic or figurative, are the focus of the following considerations, but several of them also indicate the fallacy of the first class, the day -age theory.
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He says, however, any unbiased literary analysis of Genesis 1 to 11 will convince the reader that it bears all the marks of historical narrative.
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He says, if we take Genesis 12 and following its historical narrative, and it would be a radical position to deny the historicity of Abraham, your children of Abraham, you say your children of Abraham who never existed, then it cannot be doubted that Genesis 1 to 11 is to be understood as such.
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Furthermore, if Genesis 1 to 11 is a kind of literature, not intended to be taken literally, one is baffled by the constant impression of plain historicity which the chapters give.
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I want to kind of move on here to this. Okay. He says, in the second place, we may address the more radical idea that many of the historical details of Genesis 1 to 11 are simply what he calls packing material and not divine revelation.
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In other words, they're fluff. They're not really all that important. The New Testament doctrine of Scripture does not allow for the possibility that parts of the
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Old Testament may be packing material. Why does he say that?
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Because all Scripture is God -breathed, right?
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So that would include Genesis 1 to 11. Now to digress from Waldron for a moment, because this just is amazing to me.
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I mean, some of you may be Tim Keller fans, and I apologize to you ahead of time.
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No less than Tim Keller has suggested that Genesis 1 may well be poetry.
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And this is an article he wrote on the BioLogos website. Tim Keller says, in my estimation, what current science tells us, and notice even that phrase, current science, that's what
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I'm saying. It's going to change. Dare I say that science is going to evolve. Thank you.
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Current science tells us about evolution, or what it tells us about evolution, presents four main difficulties for Orthodox Protestants.
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Listen. The first is in the area of biblical authority. To account for evolution, we must see at least
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Genesis 1 as non -literal. I'm going to say that again. To account for evolution, we must see at least
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Genesis 1 as non -literal. The questions come along these lines.
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What does that mean for the idea that the Bible has final authority? If we refuse to take one part of the
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Bible literally, why take any parts of it literally? Aren't we really allowing science to sit in judgment on our understanding of the
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Bible rather than vice versa? Now, that's a quote from all of that,
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Tim Keller. In other words, he's saying, he's taking the position that I would take, which is we ought not to let science sit in judgment of our understanding of the
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Bible, and he says that's one of the issues with taking Genesis 1 non -literally, but he's going to explain how to do this anyway.
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The conclusion, we may read the order of events as literal in Genesis 2, but not in Genesis 1, or much, much more likely, we may read them as literal in Genesis 1, but not in Genesis 2, but in any case, you can't read them both.
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I'll just paraphrase it this way. He says there's a conflict between Genesis 1 and 2. Why does he say that?
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Is there a conflict between Genesis 1 and 2? But things are, it's like Genesis 2 is almost kind of a professional tip.
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Make sure your shoes are tied before you get up to teach. Is there a conflict between Genesis 1 and 2?
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Why would somebody even say that? Okay, I think that's right, because they believe in evolution.
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I mean, why do people say that there are errors in the Bible? Because they have a presupposition to say that it was written by men instead of God.
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Why do they say there are conflicts between the Gospels? Because they have a presupposition not to believe it.
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On the other hand, there are men who are, I'll just say, a lot smarter, who've written things called harmonies of the
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Gospel, where they reconcile these two. And there's nothing in Genesis 1 and 2 that necessarily conflict.
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They're just written from, they're written to present different truths.
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Let's just put it that way. But they both are, they're in harmony with each other. There's no conflict with that.
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But he says, if they are both to be read literalistically, in other words, if we're to take them as they're written, why would the author have combined the accounts, since they are incompatible?
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Now, see, I just think on the face of it, okay, what are you trying to say, Tim Keller?
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If you say that Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 are incompatible, you can blame that on Moses, but ultimately, who are you blaming?
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You're blaming God. You're blaming the Holy Spirit. You're saying, the Holy Spirit, you know, either the
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Holy Spirit isn't the author of the whole book, or, you know, somehow or another, error crept in there.
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Okay, what incompatibilities can we see between Genesis 1 and 2, theoretically?
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Okay. So, I mean, there might be a difference in the order of creation. I mean, some people even go so far as to say, you know what, how can you believe this because light exists before the sun?
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Well, I mean, is that a problem? Is there a problem with day existing before the solar system exists?
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Well, why not? And, you know,
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I could just summarize it. We could give all the reasons, you know, and it's true, because 24 hours still constitutes a day, whether the sun exists or not.
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But here's an even easier answer, because God says so. I mean, you know,
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I don't want to get too just simplistic, but ultimately, God put this together. God created everything, and now we're going to stand here and say,
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God, you just didn't know what you were saying when you wrote this and when you wrote that. And, you know,
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God, you made some mistakes in all this. No, I mean, our job is to understand what he said, not to question it.
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And so I'm going to argue that the presupposition of all this is that Scripture is subject to error.
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Scripture is not comprehensive. It doesn't accurately describe how everything, you know,
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God didn't mean it to describe how the world was created. Okay, well, then
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I guess he wouldn't, in my mind, he wouldn't give us Genesis 1. Keller goes on, he says, the best answer is that we are not to understand them that way, that we're not to understand them literalistically.
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In Exodus 14 and 15 and Judges 4 and 5, there is an historical account to a more poetical song that proclaims the meaning of an event.
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Something like that, listen to these words. These are very important. Something like that may be what the author of Genesis had in mind here.
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Maybe. That's his hypothesis. So what does this mean?
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It means Genesis 1 does not teach that God made the world in six 24 -hour days.
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Of course, it doesn't teach evolution either because it doesn't address the actual processes by which
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God created human life. However, it does not preclude the possibility of the earth being extremely old.
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We arrive at this conclusion, not because we want to make room for any particular scientific view of things, but because we are trying to be true to the text, listening as carefully as we can to the meaning of the inspired author.
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Sorry, I don't believe that. And finally, I quote him here. These are all available on the
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BioLogos website. If you Google BioLogos, Tim Keller, he wrote like six essays about this.
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He says, Belief in evolution, and to me this is maybe the most telling, belief in evolution can be compatible with a belief in an historical fall and a literal
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Adam and Eve. There are many unanswered questions around this issue and so Christians who believe
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God used evolution must be open to one another's views.
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And one of the reasons why I'm not a Tim Keller fan is because I think that, first of all, undermines the authority of scripture, but secondly,
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I'm like, let's say that Tim Keller, for the sake of argument, is orthodox, that he proclaims the accurate gospel and everything like that.
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What he's doing here is sowing the seeds for the next generation and the next generation and the next generation to just go like this.
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And that's what they're going to do. Erickson. Well, would I fellowship with Tim Keller?
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Should we separate from Tim Keller? Yeah, that's an interesting question and really not one
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I'm ready to answer here. What I would say is, I just don't agree with him on this.
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I would not go to his church if I lived in New York City for a variety of reasons, but this is one of them.
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I just have some real issues because if you don't believe in the literal interpretation of scripture, and I mean from Genesis 1 to Revelation 22, unless there's something specific and not just the fact that it makes you uncomfortable and makes you feel stupid and you're in New York City and you want to create a church that has a lot of people in it, so you can't just rule out evolution because a lot of people believe in that.
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To me, that's pragmatic and not where we ought to be.
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If you're embarrassed by evolution, if that concerns you, then what are you going to say about every other modern trend?
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It's interesting to me, I was just reading this thing about, how many of you are familiar with, I think it's called
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City Church in San Francisco, a church founded several years ago by someone who learned from Tim Keller, and a few years ago, they were rethinking their approach to homosexuality, and it had nothing to do with the fact that, by the way, there's such a concentration of homosexuals in San Francisco, but there were so many
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Christians who were struggling with this that it caused them to wonder if maybe they were viewing it wrongly, and now, of course, they've affirmed homosexual marriage, and so what
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I'm saying is, my point isn't that Tim Keller subscribes to any of these things, my point is, when you undermine the authority of scripture, when you say, well, it could be this, or it could be that, or you don't have to take
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Genesis 1 literally, then you are on, not just a slippery slope, but you're on the downgrade.
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There's just no two ways about it. Other thoughts or questions? Back to Waldron, he says, another objection to the packing material view,
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I don't know why he chose that wording, I'm not really, you know, he's just like, I guess basically, we could say that this
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Genesis 1, or Genesis 1 to 11, that that material is not, not that important, and I'm like, well,
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I don't, well, can you think of any important truths in Genesis 1 to 11?
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How about, I'll just throw one out here, how about the gospel? Isn't that what happens?
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In Genesis chapter 3, when God is pronouncing the curses and everything else, what does he do? He promises the seed to the woman, right?
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He previews the whole gospel, it's what's called the proto -gospel, right? The gospel in essence.
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I mean, some people have said that, you know, the first, the first five books of the
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Bible, the books of Moses, the Pentateuch, you know, basically, the rest of the
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Bible is a commentary about those five books. So if you're going to take Genesis 1 to 11 and just say, you know what, could be true, might not be true, you know, it's packing material, then you've got a real problem.
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You know, what about the flood? I mean, does that play any kind of part? Well, yeah.
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I mean, we do have the Noahic Covenant. I mean, if we can't take
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Genesis 1 to 11 literally, then every time it rains, you should be worried, right?
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Why not stop? And I think there are a number of other things that we could develop, but let's move on.
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According to this view, the seven -day structure of Genesis 1 versus 1, oh,
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Genesis 1 -1 through Genesis 2 -3 is merely the story element, the literary framework of the real message.
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One would expect, therefore, that the rest of the Bible, or that in the rest of the Bible, it would fade into significance.
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Interestingly enough, instead, we find that the creation week has continuing and enlarged significance attributed to it.
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Yahweh Himself, in no lesser place than the Ten Commandments, attributes significance precisely to the seven days of creation.
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The weekly day of Jewish worship, the Sabbath, is to be the seventh day because six days, the
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Lord... I mean, let's just go to Exodus 20 since we haven't even opened the Bible here. Genesis chapter 20.
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I'm sorry, Exodus chapter 20. Don't ask me why, but when
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I was in seminary, because you had to memorize, you know, where certain things were, and I was like, Exodus chapter 20 is where the
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Ten Commandments are. I don't know why. Twenty. Second book of the
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Bible. I guess. There you go. Second book of the Bible. Twentieth chapter.
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Ten Commandments. So, two goes into twenty. How many times? Ten. Oh, yeah. Okay. Math helps me.
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Okay. Verses 8 to 11.
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Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work.
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But the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall do, you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter, your male servant or your female servant or your livestock or the sojourner who is within your gates.
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For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day.
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Therefore, the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. Apparently, you can get the memo about the packing material stuff, you know, in Genesis.
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We're not taking it literally. Yahweh insists that He made everything in exactly six days.
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That's just a statement of historical fact. Further, if the seven -day structure of the creation is merely a literal framework, why does
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Yahweh Himself attribute such significance to it? A related problem is that Yahweh identifies the seventh day.
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Okay. The second part of the verse 11, a close... Okay, we got all that.
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Now He says, Notice the relevance of these considerations against the day -age theory.
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In other words, the idea that one day in Genesis 1 could be a thousand years, it could be longer.
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It is inconceivable that a Hebrew listening to the words of Exodus 28 -11 would have concluded that God was speaking of figurative days, which were really long ages of millions of years.
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Also, against the day -age theory are the morning and evenings of the six days of creation mentioned in Genesis 1.
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Are we to think of these mornings and evenings as ages? Furthermore, the meaning of day is defined in Genesis 1 -5 as composed of periods of light and darkness, like Charlie said, as well as evenings and mornings.
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The idea that such language is figurative is exegetically incredible.
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In other words, just looking at the text, you would never come up with that idea. So what does that tell you? If your understanding of Scripture is not driven by the text, then what is it driven by?
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It is artificial, man -made idea. It is a presupposition that you are coming to the text with and saying, okay, how do
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I make this work? How am I going to make evolution work given what I have in Genesis 1?
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And you come up with the day -age theory or you come up with a non -literal understanding. And it doesn't matter how contradictory your ideas are to the text because, excuse me, because you just say what?
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Well, it's not to be understood literally anyway. In fact, one of, and I thought
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I had cited this part, but one of the things that Keller does ultimately is say that Genesis 1 basically is poetry.
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I think I mentioned that briefly, but that's one of his fundamental things is he says, you know what, it bears all the hallmarks of poetry and we don't do any damage to scripture if we just treat it as poetry.
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Waldron says, another devastating argument against this view, the day -age theory, is that the frequent literal use of the people and events of Genesis 1 to 11 in the
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New Testament. I mean, why speak of Adam? Why speak of Noah?
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Why speak of any of these people if they didn't actually exist in history?
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And he gives a whole list of places where they're mentioned. In fact, you know, that's an interesting one.
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Let's try, let's try Hebrews 11, which of course, Hebrews 11 being the hall of faith, and I didn't preview this, so I might be horribly disappointed, but let's just read
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Hebrews 11 verses 3 to 7. Oh yeah, we're not going to be disappointed. By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God.
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Hmm, not the big bang. So that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible.
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He didn't just reorganize things. It's an argument for ex nihilo, out of nothing creation.
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But look, verse 4. By faith, Abel, Abel offered to God a more acceptable sacrifice than Cain, through which he was commended as righteous.
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God commending him by accepting his gifts, and through his faith, though he died, he still speaks.
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Verse 5. By faith, Enoch was taken up so that he should not see death, and he was not found because God had taken him.
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Now before he was taken, he was commended as having pleased God, and without faith it is impossible to please him.
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For whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.
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Verse 7. By faith, Noah, being warned by God concerning the events as yet unseen, in reverent fear, constructed an ark for the saving of his household.
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By this, he condemned the world and became an heir of the righteousness that comes by faith.
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You have a real problem, not just in Genesis 1, but in Hebrews 11, and throughout the New Testament, if you just say
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Genesis 1 to 11 shouldn't be taken literally, well then, who was
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Abel? Who was Enoch? Who was Noah? And the list of problems goes on and on and on.
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Nobody should be mistaken here, and I'll take that comment and then we'll close, but nobody should be mistaken here to undermine
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Genesis 1 is to undermine the Bible itself. Go ahead, Nathan. Well, I think Waldron addressed that good question, but I think
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Waldron addressed that pretty well. Here's, what did you say that was, Isaiah 44? Yeah.
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Okay. So we'd look at that, we'd look at the language, and we'd say, well this is obviously figurative language. Okay. We look at Genesis 1, and we say, well there, what would be the reason for taking it figuratively, as taking it as poetry, or taking it as just imagery?
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And the answer is, there isn't any. You know, we don't have mountains singing, or trees dancing, or anything like that.
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Right? We don't have any anthropomorphic language. There's nothing to make us do anything, but read it and go, okay, this is how
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God created things. Day one, day two, day three, day four, day five. This is what he did. So, we can't, there are genres of literature within Scripture.
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Okay? But what we can't do is decide that something is a genre that we want it to be, so that it will fit our pet project.
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What we have to do is actually look at the language, and deal with the genre, and what we know about the genre, based on other examples of Hebrew poetry, for example.
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And Keller attempts to do that, but here's what I say, and I really have to close, but if somebody like Tim Keller, as smart as he is, he's a very smart man, if he says, basically,
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I've discovered that Genesis 1 is poetry, and, you know, men like B .B.
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Warfield, and, what's his name, from Massachusetts, out here, if, but the point is, for hundreds of years, the
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Lord has blessed the church with all these brilliant men, and he's kept the idea that Genesis 1 is poetry, secret, until Tim Keller came on the scene.
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We've got a real problem. Anytime somebody says, I have some new way of understanding
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Scripture, I'm like, well, that's really interesting, but I'm not particularly interested in that. I prefer something old.
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Because everything that we need to know has been revealed, it's not been kept secret from us. That's the whole point of Jesus coming.
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So, good question, but we have to close, because some of us have to go. Father, thank you for your word, thank you for the surety of it.
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Father, I pray that, as we look to your word, we would not bring our own faulty, sinful presuppositions to them, but Lord, that we would look to your word for assurance, for insight, for conviction about our own sin and our need to repent.
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Lord, let us, by your Spirit, learn to trust the
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Spirit -inspired word of God, written by men, moved by the
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Holy Spirit, God, you have preserved it against every predation and scheme of man.