Category: Bible

Is Young-Earth Creationism Another Gospel?

But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed.

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The Ham/Nye debates were my introduction to Ken Ham (and to Bill Nye for that matter). I wanted Ken Ham to be my champion of a biblical view of science, but I just came away unsettled. (See Debriefing the Nye v. Ham Debate)

As I’ve admitted before, I am decidedly not a science guy. I tend to put these things on my back burner and let them simmer, and that is what I did with the debates. Quite some later I came across Hugh Ross and Reasons to Believe.  He made sense of the science and the biblical creation account in Genesis. He still does to me, though I tend to take all of these things with a grain of salt because I still don’t know what I don’t know.

I have consciously avoided criticizing Ken Ham because so many Christians love him. And again, I don’t know what I don’t know about the science. But, I am changing on that score too. It isn’t the science that I am chiefly focused on at this point, but something far more fundamental to the Christian faith – the Gospel.

Reading through An Extended Analysis of Ken Ham’s Book “Six Days” (Part 1: Blame the Satanic Christian Academics) by Joel Edmund Anderson on his blog, resurrecting orthodoxy, I came to a realization – Ken Ham is anchoring his faith on something other than the Gospel. In Paul’s words, he is preaching a different gospel.

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Where Do You Stand in Relation to God?

If we choose to continue to go our own way, and insist upon our own values and ends, God will let us go. Love does not coerce or force itself upon another.

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We live in a world that defies God. That is the point of the Adam and Eve story. The temptation to go our own way is great. In fact, like sheep wandering without guidance, ignorant of the dangers that lurk around us, we have all gone astray. That is our lot.

From Adam and Eve, throughout all of the Old Testament, this is the story of the world. This is the world into which God came, having reduced himself from the greatness of being our creator[1], to become one of us, in the form of the man Jesus[2].

That God loves us could not be more intimately or completely demonstrated for us than in the life of Jesus. Though he was God[3], he did not hold on to His privilege and power over us. He emptied himself for us. He came humbly and obedient to his own purpose, which was to lay down his own life for us[4] in a demonstration of love and compassion the world had never seen before and has never seen since.

God came into the world, and the world did not recognize him or receive Him[5]. Yet God was faithful to his purpose. He was faithful in his love for us. He was faithful to fulfill what he came to accomplish, which was to redeem us.

He came while we were yet sinners[6]. He didn’t wait until we became holy, righteous and good. He would have still been waiting. He came to heal us from all that makes us broken, which is our innate inclination to separate ourselves from God and to go our own ways.

This is the world and the reality in which we live. The world sets itself in opposition to its creator. Many people pay lip service to God, but their hearts are far from Him[7]. They deny Him in the way they live their daily lives. Though they honor Him with their lips, their actions belie them.

The good news, which is what Gospel means, is that God loves us anyway. He came for us while we were in this very condition, knowing the worst of us. God became man and lived among us knowing how corrupt we were, that we would reject him and knowing that we would attempt to put him to death. He came anyway. This is the extent of God’s love for us.

Our choice of how we will live in this world has consequences because of God’s love and the fact that He made us in His own image, to love him back. We are not compelled to love Him, but we are given the freedom to love Him. We are not robots or automatons who have no choice. But our choice is eternally significant.

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God Talk about Guns

I don’t see anywhere in the teaching of Jesus or of the apostles the principle of defending each other by force.

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As time goes on, I have been more diligently and more earnestly aware of the assumptions we tend to make as Americans, and as American Christians, that may not supportable biblically. We tend to make certain assumptions, but we don’t question those assumptions or test them against Scripture. If anything, we work to make Scripture support our assumptions, rather than subject our assumptions to Scripture.

This is a human tendency, of course. I am not picking on Americans. I am one. I just know more about how Americans think than other people, so I can speak to it more definitely.

On the issue of gun control, I am finding a distinct disconnect between the popular Christian responses, the realities and what Scripture suggests. The popular Christian responses, at least among white evangelicals, of which I am a member, is something like this: guns don’t kill people. We don’t need more gun control; people need God (among other things).

That is a truism of course. People do need God, but that doesn’t really help to address an obvious issue that is utterly unique to our country of all the countries in the western world. We have a problem, and we should be able to acknowledge it.

As Christians, we could also say that it isn’t a gun problem; it’s a sin problem. That is right as well, but that also doesn’t help us. Does that mean we should ignore it? Condemn it but do nothing about it? (After all, people are getting what they deserve because all have sinned.)  Do these responses seem right to you?

They shouldn’t! Yes, people need God, and the root of all human problems is sin, but we can set back offering nothing but sayings and platitudes and be considered followers of Jesus who had a reputation of getting into right into the place where people lived, right in the middle of the ugliness of sin, and engaged people where they were, healing and delivering people as He went. If Jesus is our example, we can’t sit on sidelines without doing something.

“What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him? If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace, be warmed and filled,’ without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that? So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.”[1]

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The Spirit and the Living Word

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Christianpics.com

While non-Christians may provide many explanations as to why they discard the Bible, the actual reason they don’t believe is that God hasn’t spiritually awakened them. Scripture is very clear on this. “Jesus said, ‘I praise You, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that You have hidden these things from the wise and intelligent and […]

via Why do non-believers reject the Bible? — The Isaiah 53:5 Project

I am reblogging this piece to comment on my own experience, which is something I know many believers relate to. It’s the before and after story of those who know what it means to be born again. Before that time, the Bible seemed to be dead, and after it came alive!

Being born again is experiential and relational. It’s relational in that the experience is intimately connected to God and the Bible, His revelation to us handed down from people who had similar, relational experiences with God. Our relationship and connection with God can be measured, and one of the measuring devices is the Bible.

The writer of Hebrews says that the word of God is living and active. This is the experience of the one who has been born again. The Bible comes alive. When this happens for the first time, it is an experience like feeling the wind whip up. We can’t see it, but we know it.

Paul says that God’s Spirit testifies with our spirit. This is the intimate, relational experience we have with God, though we often confuse it with feelings. Feelings come and go. The spiritual connection is there regardless of the feelings; sometimes it’s there in spite of the feelings!

But, even those who have been born again, can fall away, chasing after feelings and things that distract our attention from the One who loved us with the sacrifice of shedding his glory to become one of us, proving that love to the point of death for us. The Spirit is a still, soft voice, easily shouted down, crowded out and left behind. But He is persistent. Thankfully!

The surest way to connect, or to reconnect, is open the Bible and do it often. Jesus said that man doesn’t live by bread alone, but every word the proceeds from the “mouth” of God. The Bible is our lifeline.

Sometimes our experience wanes. Like a marriage, we lose the spark, but we press on in the commitment to which we have given ourselves. The feelings come and go. The spark will come and go, but out commitment is the constant. And as we devote ourselves to God in prayer, the preaching of the Gospel, reading of the Bible, fellowship and repentance for our shortcomings, we regain that connection that we sometimes “lose” in the crowded, preoccupied and loud recesses of our hearts.

Righteousness By Faith

Faith and hope of the kind Abraham had that was counted to him as righteousness isn’t real unless it changes us and our outlook on the world and becomes the driving force of our lives.

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Abraham believed God, and God “reckoned” that faith to Abraham as righteousness.[1] When God told Abraham to look at the stars and said to Abraham that he would bear offspring and have descendants like the stars in the sky, Abraham believed God.  What does that really mean?

We get a bit of a clue by looking at the Hebrew word translated “believe”: āman. It means to confirm (support), as when putting confidence in something that is supported (trustworthy).[2] The Hebrew suggests that Abraham confirmed, affirmed, supported, or had confidence in what God was telling him.

But there is more to it than that. The word, āman, as used in this passage, is in the hiphil form. The hiphil form suggests an act of intentional interaction with a subject.

This suggests Abraham didn’t just stare at the stars, daydreaming. He consciously and intentionally engaged with God and what God was saying to him. He affirmatively confirmed, supported and put his confidence in what God was saying to him in some interactive way.

Faith/belief is a key concept and critical characteristic of the follower of Christ. Abraham is held up as the prime example of faith. Abraham is the father of faith.[3]

Paul says that Abraham was “fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised.”[4] This active faith, trust and confidence in God that Abraham demonstrated is what God “counted to him as righteousness”.[5] Faith is interactive trust.

This same faith, Paul says, will also be counted to those of us as righteousness who “believe in him who raised from the dead Jesus our Lord, who was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification.”[6]

In one sense, Abraham didn’t do anything to earn God’s favor but believe God, and God attributed righteousness to him in return. Such a simple thing! On the other hand, Abraham’s faith was not just intellectual ascent; he lived his life in the light of that faith.

And that is what we must do to be counted as righteous in God’s sight today – to believe in the one God sent to us, Jesus Christ, who suffered, died and was buried for us, and who has risen from the dead establishing the promise of God to us that we will be risen to in newness of life. If we truly believe this is true, it will become the pivotal point, the centerpiece and the hope of our lives.

This seems so very simple that we are tempted to think we need to do more. We are tempted to think we must do more to be counted as righteous. It isn’t quite so simple as we suspect, but we have to keep our eyes on what is important.

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