Theistic Evolution

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A question was asked me during the break, what did you mean when you said that God the
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Father was present with Christ on the cross? I thought Christ was separated from God. Here's what I mean.
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We believe in three persons who are one God. And when God the Father was pouring out his wrath upon the person of God the
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Son, those two along with the person of the Holy Spirit were all the while one God.
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And there is one God who in his being did the whole work of the cross.
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And we may not ultimately isolate as we would between you and me, the works of the
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Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. They are all done by one God together. I hope that's a helpful answer. Well, I've been asked to speak on another topic that is surprising to me that this is a topic
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I've had to study up on and speak on. This is my first time speaking on this.
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No, it's my second time speaking on this subject, but I think I'm going to be speaking on it a lot more.
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And this is the embrace of theistic evolution by evangelical and reform theologians.
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And my text for this message is going to be, again, 2 Corinthians 4, 2, because that's what we're doing today.
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We're seeing why we need to take to heart Paul's word. These are just instances of it.
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We have renounced disgraceful, underhanded ways. We refuse to practice cunning or to tamper with God's word, but by the open statement of the truth, we would commend ourselves to everyone's conscience in the sight of God.
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What I more than anything else want to do is I want to critique these presentations of evangelical evolution in light of that teaching of God's word.
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So let's pray together. Father, help us now to do some harder work and let us do it in a spirit of joy and love, even though there's some alarming things to it.
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And I'm going to be critical, Lord, but we think of how Jesus had to do the same thing and we will have to do that.
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Paul warned us against it. Some of our own brothers who we love are involved in these things. Help us to warn ourselves and to warn others not to tamper with the word of God on so important issues like this.
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We pray in Christ's name, amen. The reformed world was rocked in a minor way a few months ago when eminent
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Old Testament theologian Bruce Waltke was fired from Reformed Theological Seminary.
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Many would consider him the finest technical Old Testament scholar in the reformed world.
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I sat under some of his lectures at Westminster Seminary and this guy is brilliant with an incredible knowledge of Hebrew and of the
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Old Testament, but Dr. Waltke went on a website called biologos .org.
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The Biologos Foundation is a well -funded movement to promote theistic evolution among Bible -believing evangelicals and he put up a video that said the scientific evidence for evolution is so overwhelming and so incontestable that for Christians to continue to deny evolution will be the death of our movement and will render us to be an irrelevant cult not worthy of consideration in our culture.
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That's how I felt. Say what? First of all, I actually wrote a piece, a couple of pieces on Reformation 21 about that and I was criticized for who are you to criticize so eminent an
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Old Testament theologian. My response was he's not arguing the Old Testament. He's arguing science at which he is no more qualified than I am.
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And the gist of his argument is that the science is right and the Bible is wrong. And I applaud the officers of Reformed Theological Seminary who after many years of fruitful relationship with Dr.
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Waltke, they found it necessary to ask for his resignation. Of course, he was quickly hired by another purportedly
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Reformed Seminary, Knox Theological Seminary, that couldn't wait to snatch up a guy because he's famous like that and has excellence in many ways even though he denies theistic evolution.
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Now, I am not here to argue with you the science of evolution, although let me just say
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I'm not qualified to do so. I'm a preacher of the Word of God, not a scientist. There's others who can do that better.
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But let me just say for my sake, I am not persuaded of Dr. Waltke's claim that the science of evolution is beyond contesting.
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I actually have come to the other conclusion, but that's not what I'm gonna argue. Now, more recently,
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Tim Keller from Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York published a paper that was also on biologos, which
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I hold in my hand, titled Creation, Evolution, and Christian Lay People. And many of you no doubt are familiar with Tim Keller, a very effective ministry of the gospel in New York City, and the growth of the
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Redeemer Network, which has done many good things. But this paper is promoting the acceptability of theistic evolution.
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And it's very interesting. I wanna work through his paper and critique it biblically as well as I can. And the first thing is
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I noted at the beginning of the paper he identifies the problem. And as Keller articulates the problem, it is this that we have in our churches, particularly in a sophisticated church like Redeemer in New York and downtown in New York.
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By the way, I have NASA scientists in my church in the South too. But he says, you know, these people operate in a scientific world where,
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I mean, if you don't believe in evolution, I mean, you really can't play in the scientific world. And so these people are, it's very hard for these people who have to embrace evolution in their secular world to be forced to believe a creationistic view coming out of a literalistic reading, also known as a reading of Genesis chapter one.
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And the problem is, how are we constructing the problem? The problem is not how to set forth the truth boldly in all its clarity, but that we've got a tension and the way to resolve the tension is we've got to find a way of giving equal space to the scripture and to the claims of science.
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Now we're already in deep trouble. If that's the purpose of our endeavor, and I don't think I'm misrepresenting that as the purpose.
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And Keller in this paper works out four issues that he sees as being a barrier to the acceptability of evolution as the explanation for the source of life within a theistic framework, also known as theistic evolution.
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You know, theistic evolution says, we believe there's a God, but we believe that God chose to use the biological processes of macroevolution in order to create the species and ultimately to create man.
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That is, thank you for that puzzled look on your face, because it's internally, evolution is a theory of replacing
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God. But the theistic evolution says that, well, no, there is a God and he created everything, but the way he created it is through evolution.
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Now, here are the four issues as Keller lays out, and he's writing in favor of theistic evolution.
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And I want to just kind of present his argument, then go back over it. First, he says, to believe in creation requires us to have a non -literal reading of Genesis 1, to believe in evolution.
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That's a true statement, that a literal reading of God created the world and all there is in six days and all very good is not evolution.
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And so if we're going to allow evolution, then we have to be willing to say, well,
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Genesis 1 should not be taken as being an accurate unfolding of the history as it happened.
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And here's his argument. He argues that Genesis 1 is not historical narrative, but it is poetry.
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Now, very interestingly, he admits that it does not have the structure normally associated with poetry.
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Hebrew poetry is not a random thing. It has a literary structure to it. The two primary things are repetition parallelism.
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Hebrew poetry will usually state something and then restate it in a different way.
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And a stair -stepping parallelism. Often there's a chiasm where it works inwards and works outwards.
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And he admits that that's how normally you have a Hebrew poetry. And that's not what you see in Genesis 1.
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But Genesis 1 is nonetheless should be considered not a literal historical account, but poetry because of the rhythms in it.
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Because it says, and there was morning and evening and day one and day two, and it was all very good.
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You see this repetition and then that is poetry, even though he admits that's not how Hebrew poetry works.
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I'm just presenting the argument. And he says, really what we ought to take it is, the term he uses is exalted prose.
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And he says, what Genesis 1 is really like, it's like the song of Deborah in Judges or the song of Miriam in Exodus 15.
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Open your Bibles to Exodus 15, just to get an example of what he's talking about. This is a song of Moses.
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I will sing to the Lord for he has triumphed gloriously. The horse and the rider he's thrown into the sea. The Lord is my strength and my song.
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He has become my salvation. This is my God, I will praise him. My father's God and I will exalt him. And he said, now that's the kind of literature that Genesis 1 is.
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Now, you may already have noticed that's not how Genesis 1 actually reads, but that's the argument.
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That it may not, it's not poetry per se, but it's a poetic expression of the theme and not an unfolding of the sequence of events.
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And he will argue based upon that, that we need to come to grips. And his thing is we're not replacing the
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Bible. We're reading the Bible as it should be read with sensitivity to genre and forms of literature.
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And he actually says in his paper, in fact, an honest reading of the Bible as it is does not allow a literal reading of it.
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It is wrong to take it literally. It is exalted prose in a way that is not unfolding.
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In fact, he argues that Genesis 1 is essentially agnostic. Basically, Genesis 1 does not address the issue of how the creation took place.
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Therefore, that being the case, it is not in conflict with scientific theories towards it because Genesis 1 is about theology.
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It's about God being the creator. It's an apologetic track. And this is all true, by the way. It's a theology of the land and the seed that's worked out in covenantally.
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That's all true, but he makes the claim that let's just say is not the traditional Christian claim, that Genesis 1 really is not telling us how things were made.
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One of the big arguments he will make, and others will too, is that Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 treat time differently. And he makes a big deal of, look at the opening words of Genesis 2, starting at verse five, really.
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When no bush of the field was yet in the land and no plant of the field had yet sprung up, for the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the land and there was no man to work the ground, and a mist was going up from the land and was watering the face of the whole ground.
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Now, he'll point out that that depicts a normal biological process of growth.
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There was no bush because there was no plant because there had not been rain and no one had planted it.
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And they'll argue, now see, that's showing a normal biological process, not creation by fiat.
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And so Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 present two different theories of creation.
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Therefore, the Bible is not, in fact, if we're gonna take either of them literally, we take, this is actually the argument he makes, we should take
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Genesis 2 as the literal account, and that should cause us to say that Genesis 1 should not be read literally.
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It's a poetic, exalted prose kind of celebrating God as creator but not telling us how it goes.
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And therefore, the educated and sophisticated exegete knows that theistic evolution is not in conflict with the
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Bible because Genesis 1 is not a creation account answering questions about creation.
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I'm gonna come back to that. On the other hand, he says, one of the problems is people associate, and I think there's some truth to this, of course, people associate evolution with the grand theory of everything.
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In the secular world, this is what we're used to seeing. You're Stephen Jay Goulds and you're Richard Dawkins and these people.
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For them, evolution is the theory of everything. And they explain everything with evolution, the grand theory of evolution.
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And of course, the grand theory of evolution is there's no God, it's all about there being no God. Life is meaningless, there is no morality, random events, chance and all that.
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And what Keller argues is, well, okay, we don't buy that. And one can believe in, what does he call it?
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He calls it evolutionary biological processes, EBP. You can believe that evolution does describe the biological processes of life without making that the grand theory of everything.
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Do you follow that? And he says, what we need to do is we need to avoid that. And so when we teach evolution, we should not make it the grand theory of everything because that's really against Christianity.
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But the idea that evolutionary processes is how God made things, that in itself is a valid biblical approach.
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That's the argument. Now, thirdly, Keller points out the argument that you would think would come up is, isn't it true that if we believe in evolution, that that is incompatible with the
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Bible's teaching of salvation and of the fall? And Keller argues, yes, that is true.
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And he basically argues, very interesting in his paper, that we cannot hold a view of theistic evolution that removes a literal historical
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Adam and Eve. Why? Because the New Testament plainly believes in a literal historical
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Adam and Eve. Romans 5 is a particular problem. There's no question that Paul teaches a historical
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Adam and Eve who is the first covenant head and Jesus is the second covenant, the second man, the new
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Adam, and a historical fall. I mean, you would think that if evolution is true, then there was not an original couple.
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This is what the evolutionaries say. And therefore, there wasn't an Adam. There was not a fall.
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Well, the problem is the fall in Genesis 3 is the problem about which Christianity is the answer. And it seems that you'd lose the whole religion.
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And Keller rightly says that that's not to him. Now, he makes the point that let's not make that an ultimate issue.
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And he points out that C .S. Lewis did not believe in historical Adam and Eve. Look, C .S. Lewis is great, but he's not our theologian.
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I mean, so let's not make it an ultimate issue. Well, I thought we just said it was an ultimate issue, but anyway.
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And Keller argues that the trustworthiness of Scripture requires a historical
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Adam and Eve. We will agree with that. That if there's no Adam and Eve, then the Bible is wrong like a lot, and not just in Genesis 1, and not just on the periphery of our faith, but at the center of faith.
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We agree with him. Secondly, he notes a thing that I think is very important and I'll come back to.
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Christianity is a historical religion. Unlike Buddhism, which is just ideas.
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I mean, who Buddha was and what Buddha did is irrelevant to Buddhism.
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It's just ideas floating in one's mind. But Christianity is a historical religion.
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We believe things are true because they happened. And we believe that there is a resurrection because Jesus was raised from the dead.
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And as Paul said, if Jesus didn't actually rise, if the historical fact is not true, then we are the most despised of all men.
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And so if we're going to drive a wedge between the history declared by the
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Bible and the theology related to that history, we lose the Christian faith. And that's one of the biggest points
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I wanna make. And Keller actually points out that that is true. So how then do you have evolution and an
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Adam and Eve? Well, you'd have to read it for yourself. What follows is a convoluted argument of remarkable special pleading, trying to make the
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Bible's account of creation, of Adam and Eve actually work out to evolution. In short, it works out this way.
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Genesis 2 .7, it is argued. We talked about this last night. "'Then the Lord God formed the man of the dust "'from the ground and breathed into his nostrils "'the breath of life, and he became a living creature.'"
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It says, now we assume, as I preached last night, that that's a special act of God, that God made
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Adam on day six. And God did what that said.
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They go, no, no, this is poetry, remember that. Although I thought Genesis 1 was poetry, but we're in Genesis 2 now. That's describing in poetic form the evolutionary processes that brought us to Adam and Eve.
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And they say, you know, we don't really know, but hypothetically, maybe there were, you know, starting with a snail and working our way up over millions and billions of years, and then you get closer to Adam, you got the
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Geico caveman guy, and he's not really man, he's getting close.
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And only when you get to Adam do you have man, and then God specially breathes the image of God.
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So when Adam and Eve, and then Eve, by the way, Eve is taken out of the,
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I mean, the Bible insists a historical account of an event that happened, that God took the rib out of the man, and fashioned it into a woman.
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This is not evolution. And they actually admit that, and we really can't get around that, but God, but there were women anyway.
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And by the way, they go, that's why there's all these, you know, when you get to Genesis 5, there's all these nations. Where'd they come from? Well, it's like cavemen.
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So we're not all necessarily descended from Adam and Eve, because there's this whole evolutionary process, but God just kind of decided that this couple would be the first.
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And an argument sometimes is made that, well, they were the first spiritual couple into whom God breathed their spirit.
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And even though they weren't the only sort of humans around at the time, God, by divine fiat, made him the covenant head.
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And when Adam fell in sin, then the whole sort of race fell with him. I, it's not working well,
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I know. The, now what's going on here? A desperate attempt to cunningly work the text of scripture so that it fits the secular theory, the point of which is that I'm God.
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Remember 2 Corinthians 4 .2? I don't think we can turn to 2 Corinthians 4 .2 and go, hey, we refuse to manipulate the text of the word of God, but we set forth the word of truth openly to the consciences of men.
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Notice the special pleading, the brilliant creativity. Actually, that's an argument proposed by the scholar
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Derek Kidner. And Keller said, maybe that's not right, but maybe it's, there's ways in which from the text of Genesis 1 and 2, we can make evolution fit with a historical
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Adam and Eve. That's his ultimate answer. So Keller's gonna say, yes, it's true that if evolution threatens
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Adam and Eve, we've got massive problems, that doesn't work. Christianity's overthrown then, but we can work it out.
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Maybe I haven't figured out how. Here's some approaches to it. And that was, that's what we're gonna say.
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Fourthly, it is argued against evolution that evolution involves a process in which death is creative and good.
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I mean, how does evolution die? The survival of the fittest. And so, you know, the race, the species moves forward because inferior models die.
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And so under evolution, God looks down, under theistic evolution, God looks down and says, everything is good.
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And one of the things God says is good is death, right? Evolution works by means of the creative power of death.
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So if God's doing evolution in Genesis 1 and 2, and if God says in Genesis 1 and 2, this is very good,
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God is calling death very good. What's the problem? That ain't what the New Testament teaches. Death is the enemy. The last enemy to be defeated is death.
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And death in the New, Genesis 3 says, is the result upon not just the race, but the cosmos as the penalty of sin.
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Death is not part of God's creation. I always preach when Jesus at Lazarus' tomb,
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Jesus wept. What's he weeping about? Why is he angry? The word means an angry passion.
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Because death is an intrusion upon the cosmos that he made good.
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Well, theistic evolution says, no, no, death is good. Forrest Gump, what did Forrest Gump's mother say?
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Dying is just a part of living. Christians don't believe that dying is just a part of living.
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Christians believe that death is an offense, an enemy that enters into living in a way that is the work of sin and Satan against God.
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Now, what Keller says, he admits that. And he goes, well, but want me to say that the fall is just spiritual death.
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So Adam and Eve suffer a spiritual death, and that's the way that sin relates to death.
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So that's the art. I'm giving you an example of a reformed evangelical pastor scholar of strong repute saying we can make evolution work out so our scientists aren't leaving our churches because they're persuaded that evolution is right, and therefore the
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Bible must be wrong. No, the Bible, evolution, we can make them equal sources. They can coexist. We will argue that Genesis 1 is not a literal creation account.
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We're not talking about a grand theory of everything, just evolutionary biological processes, that works.
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We can fit in a historical fall in Adam and Eve, and we can work out death so it's not that big a deal.
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That's the argument. Let me now attempt to critique it. Again, the problem is the way the problem is being conceived.
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We must not approach the word of God seeking ways to accommodate the culture around us.
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Nine Marks Ministries, Mark Dever likes to say that we are not to be shaped by the culture, but the church is to be shaping the culture.
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And what we see is the culture shaping the church, and the church, out of fear of the big bad world, we're gonna be mocked, we're gonna be called idiots.
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Right, get over it. Aren't you Christians? Don't you know, didn't you know that, that you're not gonna be able to be accepted as a sophisticate, that they're not gonna give you a seat of honor at Harvard and let you sip from the memorial tea glass?
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Didn't you know when you came to Christ that that was gonna happen? Because it's the truth. And we need it.
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The great tragedy of our day is that the evangelical leaders are going to curry the favor of the pagan world that increasingly hates the
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Lord Jesus Christ. The way we can, and now, I think what's really going on here is a well -meant desire to help people to remove obstacles from the gospel.
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I think what's really going on, particularly in this case, my opinion is, that we wanna talk about Jesus. This is keeping people from talking about Jesus.
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So let's just kind of, we'll compromise on this. We'll work it out. And then we talk about Jesus. But the price tag is,
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I think, way too high. Now let's go through these arguments. First of all, the argument is made that Genesis 1 is not to be taken literally.
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It is poetry. Let me argue again that if we're going to take the normal rules of exegesis, the normal rules of genre critique, overwhelmingly, the analysis of the
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Hebrew text of Genesis 1 is going to be historical narrative. There is a thing called the vav consecutive.
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I'm sure that's very helpful to you. Vav is the Hebrew letter V or W, which means and or but.
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If it's before a noun, it's but. You'll see it in Genesis 1 too.
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This is why the gap theory is wrong. Genesis 1, 1, though in the beginning,
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God created the heavens and the earth. The earth now, it's not and the earth was formless and outboard.
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It's but the earth. It's not talking about chronological progress. It's making a comment about it.
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Most of the vavs in Genesis 1 are called vav consecutives. It's a
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V before the word, before a verb. And it means this happened, then that happened.
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Then this happened, then that happened. When you see that construct in the Hebrew language, the genre is historical narrative.
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That is the way consistently the narrative accounts go. And it amazes me. Just open up to a
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Psalm. I'm preaching Psalm 42, Lord willing, tomorrow morning. Let's go to Psalm 42 and let's look at Hebrew poetry.
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As the deer pants for flowing streams, so my soul pants for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living
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God. Now there's Hebrew parallelism. A statement is made, it's amplified. There's a use of vivid imagery.
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There's a simile there. My soul is like a deer. And that's poetry. That's not what, that's not what's going on in Genesis 1.
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One of the scholars at Master's Seminary did a computer model on genre analysis. Have you seen this?
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I've got a copy, but I couldn't find it for this, but it's out there. Written a couple years ago to compute the scientific likelihood that Genesis 1 is
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Hebrew poetry, and it was like .0001%. Genesis 1 is one of the most clear passages in the
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Bible that is historical narrative. And it seemed to me, you say, well, no, it's like Genesis 15, the
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Song of Moses, Exodus 15. It's just not. The, you know, Exodus 15, the
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Song of Moses at the passing of the Red Sea. I will sing to the
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Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously. The horse and the rider, he has cast in the sea. Now let me read Genesis 1.
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In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. This does not sound like that kind of literature. So why are we saying that it is?
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Because it is a barrier to theistic evolution to believe that Genesis 1 is a historical account of creation.
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To me, for us to say Genesis 1 is more or less agnostic, that's my way of putting it, on the issue of how the creation happened, it introduces a willingness to abuse the plain meaning of the text that will destroy our faith.
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If we are willing to avoid a fight with the secular powers over evolution, if we are willing to say that Genesis 1 is poetry, then what are we willing to do in the rest of the
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Bible? Genesis 1, it clearly purports to be, now there's a lot of theology in Genesis 1.
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It's a richly theological text. It does set forth the Lordship of God. It is a polemic against the heathen religions of the other nations, but it does so in a historical account.
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Moreover, if you go back to the Song of Moses, it actually, even though that is a exalted song, it actually gives historical truth.
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I will sing to the Lord the horse and the rider he has thrown into the sea. Is that a historically true account of it?
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Yes, that is an event in the poem that happened. And so this whole notion that we can for,
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I don't mean that, I think with facile arguments that fall to the ground with any serious consideration, we are willing to say, so concerned are we to pick a fight with the big, bad secular powers.
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We are willing to say, well, we'll right away, Genesis 1 doesn't say anything about creation. Genesis 1 doesn't say anything about creation.
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I'll just say it right now. The secular powers are just as outraged over the resurrection of Jesus Christ as they are with six -day literal creation.
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And if we're willing to do that here, what's gonna keep us for doing it there? And Keller, to his credit, and look,
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I'm not trying to pick on him. He's written a prominent article that's gonna be used to advance this cause. I feel it's my duty to talk about it since I'm asked to talk about it.
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They're arguing for theistic evolution based upon these arguments. In fact, he says, well,
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I don't believe in it. I'm gonna hold fast to a historical Adam and Eve. Okay, but let's realize that the vast majority of the people, evangelical scholars,
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Reformed scholars, promoting theistic evolution, admit that there can be no Adam and Eve historically.
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Because, I mean, it's a ludicrous argument. These attempts to find, in Genesis 2, 7,
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Peter Enns, who taught me Hebrew at Westminster Seminary, after he was finally fired for saying that Genesis was a myth, he then wrote a series of articles on the
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Biologos website admitting that, you know, yes, Paul believed there's a historical
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Adam and Eve. You can't deny that. There's no way around that. And what can we say? Science has proven that Paul was wrong.
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Don't think badly about Paul. He's an ancient man. I mean, what, he didn't know. He didn't have a Hubble telescope. What are we doing?
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What about the word of God? And so I appreciate a man like Keller saying, look, we wanna make room for theistic evolution, but we don't wanna give up too much.
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Well, I'm gonna say, my friend, you are giving it up. And the logical consequence of these arguments are just too strong for your little seawalls.
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The waves are washing away. And most of the people you're hanging out with, they laugh at the idea of historical
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Adam and Eve because evolutionary processes do not and cannot create an Adam and Eve except by special divine fiat.
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But the whole point is that we're arguing against special divine fiat. If we were arguing special divine fiat, we'd believe six -day creation, which is what the
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Bible teaches. You say, now, how does, here's a principle of interpretation. We interpret scripture by scripture.
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Okay, so let's ask ourselves a question. Does the Bible itself tell us how we should take the
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Genesis 1 creation account? The answer is yes. Let's go to Exodus 20, verse 13,
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I think, or verse 11, the fourth commandment, where Moses makes a very helpful statement here.
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And he tells us how he understands Genesis 1.
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Starting at verse eight, remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a
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Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter, male servant or female servant, or your livestock and your sojourner who is in your gates.
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Verse 11, 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. And so Moses, it seems, believes that the
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Genesis 1 account, which God used him to write, so his opinion may be especially valid. He believes that it was a record, a historical narrative of what actually happened.
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And he bases his theology upon what actually happened. The Bible teaches that its view of Genesis 1 is not as poetry that should not be taken seriously, or as Tremper Longman, another one of my former professors said, you can, he did a video on the internet, you can, it's, don't look, it's worthless.
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He says, only an excessively literalistic view of Genesis 1 requires
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Adam and Eve. Also now believing the text the way Moses did is now an excessively literalistic view.
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Well, Moses seen, now some people will come back and they go, well, we admit that Moses, who God used to write
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Genesis 1, believed in Exodus 20, that Genesis 1 was a literal six day account, but Moses was limited, he's an ancient man, he just had his own cosmology.
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And so now we're gonna actually argue that what Moses wrote reflected what he believed to be true, but was not true, but God was using his false view.
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Our high view of the Bible is falling through our fingers like sand, and that is exactly what is at stake.
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It is exactly what is at stake. I actually came to six day creationism while I, because I was trained not as a six day creationist, and I was trying to explain to a younger man why
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I didn't believe in six day creationism, and while I was explaining why I did not believe in six day creationism,
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I stopped and repented because the things that were coming out of my mouth were too frightening to me. And I realized the implications of what
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I was saying, I was actually saying to somebody, I understand, Moses had his ancient cosmology, and yes,
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Moses wrote in the Bible how he saw things, that's not really true, but God makes it seem like it is true, and I'm just going,
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I need to repent. Because the scriptures plainly teach that Genesis one is historical narrative, that's an accurate recording.
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Yes, and they'll go, well, you're trying to make it answer all the questions of modern science. No, I'm not. I'm believing what it says.
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And frankly, the burden is not on me They say, well, what about the discrepancy, the apparent discrepancy between the way that time functions in Genesis one,
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God said and it was, versus Genesis two, where he talks about a process, how do you reconcile that?
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My answer is it's not my duty to reconcile it. Genesis one and Genesis two are talking about different topics. Genesis one is macro creation, this is the cosmos, the planets.
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Genesis two on the sixth day, which involves special providence, is God doing the human society?
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It's not my, I don't have the right to deny Genesis one because I don't understand how it fits with Genesis two.
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That's not how we do the Bible. Well, I'm gonna decide which parts are gonna be true and which parts are not gonna be true.
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That is the problem. Historical Adam and Eve. The fact is that those who embrace theistic evolution are not able to hold on to Adam and Eve and you cannot hold on to Adam and Eve.
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Here's one of my great objections. Let me go back to what Keller says, that Christianity is a historical religion and therefore we cannot allow a belief in theistic evolution to deny the historical claims of the
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Bible. Now, Genesis one's not making any historical claims, but Genesis two is about Adam and Eve. A, he's right, but he's wrong that you can hold them together.
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Let me just make the point. Actually, I have argued that the current embrace of theistic evolution is merely the effect of the prior embrace of what is called the framework hypothesis.
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Raise your hand if you've heard of the framework hypothesis. Good, not many of you have because your pastor's teaching you the Bible. But a lot of good reformed guys, it's really been popular in our day to believe that Genesis one is not a historical narrative, but it is a literary framework in which
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God uses to teach the theology of Genesis one. What Genesis one says happened, you know, the first day this and the second day that.
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God's not saying, it didn't really happen, but it's kind of the story that God writes so that he can get to the theology.
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Now, these are people who would deny theistic evolution, but they're opposed to six -day creation, mainly, I think, because it makes you look like an idiot to scientists today.
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What's the problem with that? We've already driven the wedge between the historicity of what the
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Bible says and the theology of it. And as soon, if we allow the interpretive principle that the historical claims may be false, but the theology of it, it can be right, we lose the
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Christian faith. This is what liberals argue about the resurrection. We don't believe that Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead because people don't rise from the dead.
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Have you ever seen anybody rise from the dead? Come on, we know that's myth, but it's teaching the theology is true while the history claims are false.
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Paul says, if Christ was not literally raised from the dead, we are to be despised. It's totally fraud.
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And I wanna say to my friends doing this, you are pulling a string that is gonna undo the whole Bible. And what they believe is, we'll kind of dabble at it, we'll give away creation, but we'll hold the line on Jesus.
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My response is you won't, because that is not enough of, it's just not enough of a compromise. So I would tell you, the secular powers are not going to accept, our proposal is this, okay, look, we'll give you creation, but we're gonna keep sin, judgment, wrath and atoning blood.
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Is that a deal? What are they gonna say? No deal. You gotta get rid of that Christ guy. You got one of those other theories of the atonement.
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How about the moral example theory? We like that. Get rid of wrath, get rid of retributive justice, get rid of sin, get rid of blood,
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God's love. So my response to my friends is, you just have to compromise more than you thought.
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Because I really think, and I don't know the motives of these people. I think in general, there's a desire to preach
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Jesus so we can be gospel centered, which we do, but therefore let's not argue about this stuff.
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Yeah, but you understand. If once we had said, well, the Bible, well, I mean, you know,
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Paul's wrong. Well, the question, what's the next question? You know the answer. Well, what else is wrong?
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And we go, well, we'll consult the scholars. And now we have the priesthood of the scholars. And I got a lot of things are gonna go.
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And what happens is the culture is going to dictate, the culture is dictating. This embrace of theistic evolution is not arising out of a sober prayerful study of God's word in a vacuum.
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It is an inability to absorb the animosity in the contempt of the world.
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Even the problem is constructed. Look, our scientists, you know, it kind of looks bad to believe in creation.
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Well, whoever wants to lead a godly life will be persecuted. We have got to be willing while we lovingly set forth the truth to be persecuted and held in scorn.
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Let's get to the last issue of suffering and death before the fall. My friends, you cannot separate physical death from spiritual death.
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The Bible does not do that. This is where we're becoming Gnostic. When the Bible says the last enemy is death, it's not just spiritual death, it's bodily death.
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Thank God that redemption is going to be the redemption of my body. I remember my father died of multiple sclerosis 10 years ago next month.
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And I mean, MS had ravaged his body in a hideous way. And after he died,
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I went in with the coroner. I didn't want my mom to have to go in there. And I stood in my father's bedroom with this really hideous corpse of my dear dad as they're putting his body in the bag.
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And with tears streaming down my face, I quoted from 1 Corinthians, where oh death is thy victory?
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Where oh death is thy sting? Because my father had embraced the blood of Christ about a year previously. And I stood there with the medics kind of going, he's having a hard time coping.
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And I said, I will see this body again in glory. And many times as a pastor,
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I've stood with crying children and brothers. And I said, you will hold these hands because death will not have the victory.
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And we're not going to say, I don't say to them, well, but you know, but there'll be a spiritual victory. No, no, there's going to be a bodily resurrection.
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And the death of Genesis 3 is not a nebulous spiritual death. There was no death prior to that.
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Evolutionary process is one that is opposed to the Bible's teaching. The Bible says that God is the
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Lord and the giver of life. And that death is the enemy. The last enemy defeated is death. And Christ, where oh death is thy victory?
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Jesus is angry at death at Lazarus' tomb. God did not say it was all very good and was speaking about death.
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I want to say to Bruce Waltke, that great scholar that he is, and I honor so much of these, and I'm not trying to pick on him.
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But when he says that we are going to be a dying church unless we embrace evolution, I want to say, no, we will be a death church if we do.
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Because Christians opposed, we will not exalt death. And of course, the logic thereof with euthanasia and all of that stuff that goes along with it.
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But let me wrap up with some general considerations. I have tried to, as accurately as I can, work through an evangelical trying to make room for theistic evolution and to show you how it does not work and the price tag is devastating if we do.
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How much better for us to go back to 2 Corinthians 4 and say, you know what? I refuse to engage in this creative special pleading to make the text fit the secular theory.
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What I'm going to do is God helping me in my weakness. I'm going to hold forth the word of God before the consciences of men and I'm going to rely on God sovereignly to change the heart, which by the way is how
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I was converted as an adult. Let me just some final things. The whole point of evolution, my friends, is to replace
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God. I mean, honestly, there's a reason why with the secular powers controlling the public schools, the media, the textbook, the majority of Americans still do not believe in evolution.
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Why? Because it is ludicrous. It is a ludicrous theory and the facts do not work.
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And you go, why then are we so committed to a theory that both prima facie and in the details is manifestly ludicrous because we hate
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God? And there's a desperate desire to replace God, but we need a plausible way to do it.
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I'm a living member of my family. I'm the only Bible -believing Christian and some family members will say to me, you know, you don't believe in evolution?
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And my answer is, I don't have enough faith to believe that. I mean, I commend you for, that's blind faith.
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There's Kierkegaard. If you believe evolution, you'll believe anything. Why? The whole point is the death of God.
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Because if God is the creator, then he has the right to tell us what to do. And he has the right to judge us.
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And we must come to salvation on his terms. And only in a godless, pointless, purposeless, immoral creation process can
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I do what I bloody well want with nobody telling me what to do. That is the point of evolution. Why would we pander with that?
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And science, in my view, does not prove macroevolution. A micro, sure, there's an adaptation within a species, but the
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Bible, macroevolution says the species came about through this process of bio, and the
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Bible says, no, God created the kinds. He created the species.
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Now, there's adaptation, you know, there's Chihuahuas and Great Danes. That's a lot of microevolution.
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There's a lot of, and it's to the glory of God, but they're both dogs, right? In all the years, all the centuries of special breeding of dogs, so this is not random evolution.
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This is interfering with it, to manipulate the agenda and the code. They have never bred two dogs and gotten something other than a dog.
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Thank you. We must not equate general revelation with what the scientists say.
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Keller makes the argument, it's an argument he frequently says, that says we must listen to God speaking in creation.
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We believe in general revelation as well as special revelation. Amen, amen.
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But what Time Magazine says is does not equal general revelation.
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And one thing we need to do, we're being very naive. We all need to go back and read some Thomas Kuhn and the philosophy of science that there are axes to grind.
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There are presuppositions. There are worldviews that are sifting the data. These scientists are not neutral people without an ax to grind, objectively looking at the data.
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Wasn't that funny with the climate change thing where the emails were found? That goes on all the time. And these are sinners like you and me.
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And so just because a scientist says so or the entire scientific community says so does not mean that God says so, speaking through the creation.
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Rick, come on. All truth is God's truth. But not all claims to God's truth are
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God's truth. And we must not, if the entire, how many, in fact, every time Time Magazine does a cover story on a new theory, they're saying that the entire scientific community was wrong until now about this and they'll be wrong again.
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Now that is not me disparaging science. But the Christian worships a
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God who knows, who has all the data, who is perfect, who is without bias other than the true bias of the display of his own glory.
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And he has generously given us his word. And where the word speaks to the subject, let
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God be true and every man a liar. Unless we say, here we stand, unless we're standing on the rock, my friends, we will have no place to stand.
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We must avoid hermeneutical Trojan horses. In my view, the framework hypothesis long accepted, probably the dominant view of reformed theologians today and pastors who don't wanna argue about creation and they don't wanna look like Ken Ham and they belittle answers in Genesis.
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Personally, I love Ken Ham and answers in Genesis. And I refuse to despise my fellow Christians in the media, even if he has a goofy beard and lives in Kentucky.
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My mama came from Kentucky, so it's okay with me. And we have scientists in South Carolina. Thank you very much.
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It was said to me, you know, Rick, it was recently said to me, we have a creation study group in my church and they're militant creationists.
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And they're like, you know, it's in South Carolina. The head of this was a NASA scientist who's still in his retirement is called upon to don't give me this use unsophisticated
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Dukes of Hazzard bumpkins. Because behind this is a love of urban sophistication to which we are so addicted that we will tamper with the word of God lest we should lose the credit of our sophistication.
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Do not embrace false hermeneutic approaches. I think the framework hypothesis introduced the idea that the history could be wrong, but the theology is true.
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And now, where do you stop then? Well, here it is. Five years ago, they just said, we'll never say theistic evolution.
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Now they're saying theistic evolution. We'll never deny Adam. Most of them are denying Adam. Oh, we'll never.
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Pete Enns once said to me, Rick, I've got a don't touch Jesus box. I'll never let it get to Jesus. I said, yes, you will.
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Because there's no reason to believe it if in your heart of hearts you don't believe it's true. And if your hermeneutic says, we don't have to believe that Jesus rose from the dead to believe in the doctrine of the resurrection, and then you will not believe in it and we will lose everything.
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Once the Trojan horse gets into the gate, the city falls. I fear that happening. We must not tolerate theistic evolution, even from friends we honor and love.
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We cannot isolate creation from redemption. Well, we're gonna hold on to Jesus, but we'll give them creation.
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You lose everything. Creation, fall, redemption, it's all one picture. Redemption is the restoration of creation.
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So am I running out of time for my next session? Not yet, okay. Because I don't want to. But we'll see that in the next subject as well.
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The gospel, we gotta be careful about what we mean today by being a gospel -centered church.
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It must not mean all we really hold on to is the doctrine of justification. We need the whole, what did
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Paul say? I taught the whole counsel of God, and yet I was Christ -centered. I wanna teach, yes,
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I can teach Genesis 1 in a Christ -centered way, in a way that teaches it as historical narrative, which it is, and upholds six -day creationism.
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And I can do those, that is not opposed, but to be Christ -centered does not mean giving away every part of the
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Bible that we don't think touches on Jesus. It all touches upon Jesus. And we must not have a
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Christianity that compromises on creation. Let God be true.
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Let God be true. Let's be willing. Let us not cultivate scorn.
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We don't get bonus points for being mocked. Let's not say inflammatory things, and I've tried not to.
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I hope I have not. That'll, we'll say, oh, look at what a great Christian I am. I'm being persecuted.
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I feel like a hero. Let's not do that. Let God be true. We really cannot afford these clever ways of accommodating the text to the demands of the world.
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Let me conclude where I began. Let us do 2 Corinthians 4. Having this ministry by God's mercy, we do not lose heart, but we have renounced disgraceful, underhanded ways.
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We refuse to practice cunning. We refuse to tamper with God's word.
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Well, then what are you gonna do? By the open statement of the truth, we would commend ourselves to everyone's conscience in the sight of God.
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And the word of God in the hand of God is sufficient to do the work of God by the power of God to the glory of the
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God in our generation as in the times before. Let's pray. Oh, Father, we just pray that you would give us discernment, not a bitter spirit.
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These are, everyone I've mentioned today is a friend I admire. But Lord, let us stand on your word.
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Let us not creatively find ways of accommodating attacks upon your sovereignty and your glory in our world.
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Lord, give us wisdom. It requires wisdom. We lack the wisdom, so we ask that you give it. But Father, let us never give things away.
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Let us not find clever ways of denying what the text of your word demands.
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Let us humble ourselves before your word and not lord over your word with our postmodern tools.
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Give us the grace and the power of your Holy Spirit that we would set forth your truth, simply, clearly, humbly, but in the power that you give to the glory of your name.