Doug when we talk about some of these really major theologians
that we respect and they wrote wonderful,
wonderful things and yet
in this area accepted the scientific theory almost,
you know, carte blanche.
And then moved in that direction.
What do we see happening theologically in the church
in that time frame?
Rather than just
Creation-evolution which is kind of the front point,
the juggernaut,
there was a much larger tide sweeping
in to supplant the authority of traditional Christianity
with the European Enlightenment values of
what the elite leaders were thinking at that time.
To do that you had to evacuate the authority of Holy Scripture.
And so, they did
that by the theory of higher criticism
which I could take five minutes to go in to, I won’t do it.
And that is you subject
the Scriptures themselves to evolutionary development.
So, it's not really
and truly a Divine Revelation of the Will of God
or the Word of God.
It may be the human spirit reaching out towards it
but you cannot rely on it particularly for information
about history and science.
They were willing to say you could rely on it for religious
or spiritual information,
but then who can separate the two.
So, I think it was a much broader issue
than just Creation —
that was the top of the iceberg, yes.
But it was a whole view against the Trinitarian God,
against the authority of Holy Scripture,
against the mode of salvation,
sanctification as believed by the church for 1750 years, 1800.
It wasn't that Creation- evolution caused all that,
it was part of that.
Well, that whole era of,
as you were saying,
an undermining of the authority of Scripture,
takes us back though to the Scripture itself.
And that's what I'd like to address
for a few minutes with you.
What are the evidences
that we have internally in the Scripture
that the writers in the Old Testament,
the New Testament were looking back
at those first chapters in Genesis and writing
as if they were really history?
Can we walk through that briefly?
Yes, certainly.
Been believed traditionally in the church
that Moses was the author
of most of the first five books of the Bible,
Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and so forth.
And that God,
we believe, inspired Moses to start the Bible,
Genesis 1:1 with the doctrine of Creation.
You know, in Hebrew [Speaks Hebrew]
In the beginning,
God created the heavens and the earth.
That's absolutely foundational.
And then in the Septuagint,
which is the Greek version of the Hebrew Old Testament,
Breshit it's En Arkhei — in the beginning.
And then John 1:1 picks that up [Speaks Greek]
In the beginning was the Word, and Word was with God,
and the Word was God.
So, this thing of Creation by God making all things
by the Word of His power is in Psalm 33,
out of nothing —
Ex Nihilo — is crucial to the beginning
of the Old Testament.
And throughout the New Testament,
it's the basis of all reality.
A Triune God, spoke it into existence.
And in John we're told the Father,
as it were,
it comes from Him through the agency of His Son
and the perfecting
and finishing of it
by the Holy Spirit as St. Basil the Great discusses in his book,
De Spiritu Sancto —
On the Holy Spirit.
So what one of the Friends of John Calvin, Wolfgang Capito,
did a book also called Hexameron in the 1530s.
Well-worth reading.
It's never been translated out of Latin.
If I were going to live another 30 years I might do it,
but I'm not gonna live that long.
And he says,
Caput Divinae Philosophiae — Creation is the head
of the divine philosophy.
That Creation is foundational,
God starts his book with Creation.
Everything flows from a God who spoke worlds into existence
and the rest of the scriptures are the outworking of that.
Obviously, by the third chapter of Genesis,
you've got the Fall.
So, Scripture's primarily the book of redemption,
but redemption has no context
except you have a Creation that was fallen and condemned
and the prophets are announcing One
who would come to restore it.
So, you've got Genesis 1 and 2, the Creation.
Then you have the Fall in Genesis 3.
And then Genesis And then Genesis 6-9, the Flood.
And then 10-11,
the spreading of the tribes into nations and Babel
and so forth,
the confusion of the tongues, it's why we have many languages.
And then throughout the rest of the Scripture,
both in particularly
the prophets and the wisdom literature,
how very often it is alluding
to the basis of everything is a God who created
what He created.
And, you know,
in Proverbs 8 that He created by means of wisdom — one
of His attributes.
And Proverbs is really trying to come into terms
with what God made us to be in His created order.
And sin affects that, and so,
how we can reverse it.
So, the various writers in the Old Testament,
the proverbs that you
were talking about, are assuming the historicity of Genesis.
What do we see, now,
when we move into the New Testament?
I was always referring to John 1,
identifying Christ as Eternal Son of the Eternal Father.
One God yet distinct.
And this Christ was the agent of Creation.
All things are made through Him
and without Him was not anything made
that was made.
And the life was the light of men and so forth.
And so this Christ comes
to redeem what He was the agent of the Creation.
Saint Athanasius says in his De Incarnatione,
the only person
that would be great enough to redeem
the created order would have to be the Creator Himself.
So, he ties together Creation and redemption,
as all the orthodox fathers did.
That is very important.
It's God Almighty in human flesh.
True eternal God.
True temporal human that He takes on,
the humanity in the womb of the Virgin Mary.
He alone could redeem what He had created.
And so, the identity of Christ is very important.
Identified in terms of the act of Creation.
And so, in Jesus' ministry,
as for instance teaching on marriage, you know,
how many times could you divorce your wife and things like that.
He says from the beginning, it was not so.
God created Adam and Eve, one man, one woman.
And wherever there's references
to the first 11 chapters of Genesis in the New Testament,
at least 150 direct references to somewhere
in the first 11 chapters of Genesis in the New Testament
plus several other allusions,
but of the 150 direct references
there's never once the slightest implication
that it's not historically true,
to be taken as read, historical literal reading.
And that much
that is advanced
in the New Testament is based upon the relevance
and the veracity of the Genesis account of Creation.
You know, how St. Paul in Corinthians II 4,
God calls the light shine out of the darkness
and the old creation.
When you become a new creation, a new birth,
then God shines the light, the face of Jesus,
into you — making you,
as it were, a new creature, a new creation.
And you go through… that’s assumed in, say,
Revelation 4:11 — praising the Lamb
and saying all things were for thy pleasure created.
So, throughout Revelation,
the Tree of Life and the Rivers of Living Water,
it's taking us back to an Eden,
but to improved Eden.
So, all through there's never slightest suggestion
that Genesis 1-11 is not literally, voracious,
thoroughly true and quite relevant to understanding
what God is doing between now and the end.
What about the passages that we see in Romans?
When Paul is addressing the notion of what happened
at the Fall through Adam?
That's another example, is it not?
Very much so.
Central to the plan of salvation would be the two Adams.
First Adam and last Adam.
Romans 5:12-21 and in certain passages in Corinthians I 15,
the great resurrection chapter,
you know, as in Adam all die,
even so in Christ shall all be made alive.
So, in Romans 5:12-21 you have a comparison and contrast.
The first Adam disobeyed.
Everybody was in the first Adam
as all the believers will be in the last Adam.
And it's covenantal headship
as the first Adam was the head of all
who are descended from him,
so the last Adam is the head of all
who will ever be united to Him by faith in the Holy Spirit,
that is the elect.
So what the first Adam did affected directly the lives
of all his people to the end of time.
What the last Adam did affects directly the lives of His people
to the end of time.
The great Scottish preacher,
rural Pastor, tremendous intellectual, great Hebraist,
Thomas Boston is discussing the contrast
between the two Adams — first Adam and last Adam.
And he says you could bring up a moral issue,
an ethical issue and say,
“Wasn't it unfair
that we are born into a fallen race as Romans
5:12-21 clearly teaches,
because of what our ancestor did?
Our representative in the covenant, namely Adam.
That's why we get sick and die.
How fair is that?
” And then he said, “
Yes, it's fair because that's who we really are.
He had his children after he had fallen.
They carry his corrupted nature,
but we gain far more than we lose
because the last Adam represents us in the covenant.
” As by one man sin entered the world
and sin brought guilt and death,
so by one man there's righteousness of God,
His obedience and forgiveness and life eternal.
So he says, “ What we gain,
if we're willing to believe in Christ,
in Him as the last Adam is so massively more than
what we lose in being connected to the first Adam,
let's be grateful for the principle of representation
that you have in Romans 5:12-21 and Corinthians I 15.
” So that's quite crucial to the two representatives
of the human race.
One of the English Puritans once said there are
only two proper men.
First Adam, last Adam.
It's like they have a belt
and the keys hanging around their belt.
All of them hang round the belt of either the first Adam
or last Adam.
When you believe,
when the Holy Spirit opens your mind,
you see and you become a Christian,
then your key is transferred from the belt of the first Adam
to the last Adam — or to use more scriptural terminology,
we're grafted from a condemned stock into a tame stock.
Were grafted from Adam into Christ.
And that's being used particularly
in discussion of Israel.
So, I would say that it's absolutely essential,
the two Adams,
to what it is to be a true Christian.
Now, one of the reasons
I've been willing to stand on this issue
since I was a student
in the seminary myself (and in a minority) was
if the first Adam is not real,
why are you going to have to say the last Adam isn't real?
He could also be a religious concept.
So, this beautiful truth associated with the fact
that God has sacrificed Himself to redeem us from the pit,
from the kingdom of darkness, all of that,
is hinged on the reality of
whether or not those first chapters in Genesis are
really historically true.
Is that how critical this is?
That’s exactly how critical it is.
The evil one particularly hates the Messiah
because He reverses his kingdom
and finally will put him into the lake of fire
according to Revelation 19.
In different ages, the devil's fairly clever,
he'll make a different attack from a different direction.
In the early years,
one of the attacks was Docetism — well,
Christ never became a man.
So, the devil can keep man.
And then other theories — Gnosticism and others.
You know, I don't know what — the last 250 years,
he has wanted to remove Creation and to do
that he has to denude
the authority of the first 11 chapters of Genesis
from being in the purview of what Christ has done.
Therefore, we don't understand what's happening.
We remove the church
from the context in which God put it —
was a reversal of the Fall
and the development of creational glory
for the Lord.
And therefore that cast aspersions on who Jesus is,
what he came to do.
So, the devil in the last two centuries
and a half has mounted the attack especially
through the doctrine of Creation
and the authority of the first 11 chapters of Genesis.
And now having done that,
I believe this is also
why we see in our culture a tremendous sexual attack
on God's beautiful plan
for marital sexuality between a man and a woman.
Now, if he removes Creation
from being taken seriously, let's say,
even by the Evangelicals,
then various forms of sexuality may be legitimate options.
Because you don't have creational order such as male,
female, family, children, Sabbath, church, state,
and so forth.
So, I think it all goes into that —
that you can't understand what's happened since the 1960s,
the moral revolutions of the 1960s,
particularly that's been the great emphasis on sex
and it's continuing —
that could not have happened
if the church — I’m not even talking about the world,
but the church had stayed
to a strong biblical doctrine of Creation.
That's how important it is.
That’s why I'll put my life on the line for it.
So, you're connecting some of these very critical,
burning issues that we have in our culture today,
you're connecting those back to the consequence associated
with turning those first 11 chapters of Genesis,
turning them from a historical document
to some sort of an allegory
that that has implications on even
how we view sexuality today?
Yes, that's right.
Precisely right.
And what it does is it leaves in the hands
of an intellectual elite
that are largely getting their values, I think,
from floating, changing,
secular ideas… it leaves them in charge of what is right
and what is wrong.
Which means, for instance,
in the 1973 Supreme Court ruling on Roe vs. Wade
that allows abortion,
it never once quotes the Holy Scripture anywhere.
Goes all over the place for different ideas,
it never refers to Scripture
which has been the basis of English common law
and then the basis of law in these colonies,
now this country.
Never referred to our basic law code.
They had to do that because it will take you back to Creation
which always takes you to the Creator
and His authority.
To get rid of Him,
even the courts have gone in that direction.
That's how serious it is.