Doug, let's go back to the text itself and kind of walk
through some of these passages
that have been raised as issues and problems and so forth.
So let's begin with Genesis 1:1.
What do we see here that we look at it and we say, you know,
if we lose this from a historical perspective,
what happens?
I'm going back to Wolfgang Capito
and his Hexameron,
in the 1530s in Strasbourg, Calvin's friend.
And he said Creation,
Genesis 1:1, is the head of the divine philosophy.
Basically, it shows us
that God is the maker of all things out of nothing.
Originally it was nothing but God — the Father, the Son,
and the Holy Spirit.
There was no Sun, Moon, stars, dust,
atoms… and all of that comes,
as Capito has said,
the head of the divine philosophy is a Triune God
speaking these worlds
into existence and then shaping them in the direction
that He wished them to go.
So, there is some shaping that God does.
He creates and then He begins to work as a craftsman.
Yes, yes.
That's right.
You know, the word in Greek, [greek], kind of move things.
And so, we see in the six days of Creation,
there was an act of original,
true creation of all things out of nothing on the first day.
And then much of the rest of the time it is shaping.
Sometimes it's by separating, say, light from darkness,
Earth from water.
So separations to make it a habitable world
and then additions — Sun, Moon,
stars, the Luminaries added on the fourth day.
And then later we get the sea creatures, the birds,
and then on the sixth day, the land animals.
And finally, the crown of Creation, mankind.
So, it's additions.
It's separations.
It's not always true creation.
Part of it is relative creation.
But there are places of true creation.
Both there?
Both.
So, after Genesis 1:1 are we left as some people think,
are we left with some chaos
which would lend to the Gap Theory?
No, not at all.
There's not a bit of suggestion of that in Holy Scripture.
I can give you the background on it and it came
from a very fine man.
I mean, I think a lot
of theistic evolutionist are very fine people,
except at that point perhaps.
Dr. Thomas Chalmers was the leader
of the evangelical forces
and the Church of Scotland in the 1830s and ‘40s
and ultimately into the disruption and development
of the Free Church out of the Church of Scotland.
And he was very much concerned with the intellectual movements
and the culture.
And he was alert
that the geologists were saying the world is very,
very old — millions of years old or more.
And that lots
of fossils actually proved the age of the earth,
it had to be millions
or hundreds of millions of years old,
maybe even evolution.
So, he came up with a novel way
to approach it to keep the Gospel and keep much
of the value of Genesis by saying there's a gap,
an imagined gap with this good man,
between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2.
So, God made an original Creation.
Everything was fine.
Then there was the fall of Lucifer
who becomes the devil.
And in that fall of Lucifer,
there seems to have been a damaging,
almost destruction, of the created order.
And then vast amounts of time later,
there comes to be a new restoration
and then he puts in Adam and Eve
— and that's preposterous.
Something that important would have been mentioned somewhere
else in Scripture — it never is.
Now, you do have, I believe it's Isaiah 45,
that the world was not created “tohu”,
that is it was not created to be empty and uninhabited.
But there's nothing there about a supposed prehistoric fall
before man was created.
It’s a desire,
part of the post enlightenment response
of evangelical Christians to the theory,
which they didn't say
it's a theory, they say it's empirically proved,
that the world is
hundreds of millions of years old and the fossils point
to that and also point to evolutionary development —
which actually they don't.
So, he was trying to respond to that.
It's interesting to study because what we mustn't do,
we must not import
into the text something to make our message more palatable,
more acceptable to secularists.
We mustn't do it.
He meant well, yes, he did.
But it's not the thing to do.
What is the role of general revelation?
They were looking at geology.
They were looking at rocks and then supposedly
the scientific theory comes to rise
that there are millions of years as evidence in the rock.
What is the proper hermeneutical approach
to general revelation and then this special revelation?
Ok, I think you
would certainly want to go to Romans 1 and Romans 2,
Psalm 19, Psalm 8,
and the nature Psalm
65 and such… and say there are two things
that we learn about God
from being part of the created order —
from general revelation.
Namely the generality in nature.
First of all,
by being part of the created order we know there's a Creator.
You cannot have these things unless something made it.
One of the early church writers, Tertullian,
says in one of his writings
that basically every child comes here believing in Creation,
that there is a Creator
because they see how amazing it is,
it had to be a big God.
And he says that's
what everybody accepts uless the philosophers get hold of you.
And he is writing that in the 3rd century.
Tertullian.
So, first of all from general revelation,
creation says there’s a Creator.
Secondly, generally we have a conscience.
It's a moral monitor inside of us,
either our thoughts excusing us when we did well or accusing us
when we did wrong,
which shows there is a moral lawgiver to whom we're bound.
And some say “religio”, religion, means “bound ”.
So, therefore,
in general revelation you have the sense there's a Creator
and there's a moral lawgiver
and I'm bound to Him.
However, I don't know
how much further you can go than that
with general revelation for this reason:
Romans 1:18 says that because of the Fall,
because of Adam rebelled against God and then
what it did to the nature of his children,
all who would be descended from him which includes we
who are talking today…
that they suppress the truths they already know.
It says… it uses in Greek [Greek],
which means mankind holds down
or suppresses the truth in unrighteousness.
King James says “holds”
but that's not as good a translation.
It should be “holds it down ”, “suppresses it
”.
So therefore, there is a bias in human nature
that is not objectively open
to what we get in general revelation,
namely, there is a Creator that made this creation,
there is a moral monitor that makes you feel guilty
or good about what you do, so we have ways to suppress it,
to evade God.
And therefore,
general revelation will make you inexcusable on the last day.
That's the premise and Last Judgment.
God will not judge a person
because he did not believe the Bible if he
or she didn't have a Bible.
That is not what He does.
He only judges you in accordance to the amount
of light you have.
No more, no less.
Everybody has enough light
that they will enter into the Final Judgment
on creation and conscience.
Now, those that have had more privilege
will be judged more severely.
Namely, you have a Bible,
you have much more to answer for.
So, that's general revelation.
It won't take you very far
but it's the premise of the Last Judgment.
It's very important.
Now, you have to have special revelation,
God speaking to you,
in order to understand more about who He is,
how to be saved, and how He wants you to live.
So, the revelation that God
has given us in His creation around us is sufficient
for man to be without excuse.
Yes.
As Paul is saying.
Correct.
And it declares the glory of God.
So, it speaks truly.
It speaks clearly.
But what you're saying is in our fallen state,
we have a tendency,
if not an over-tendency,
to want to see it in the way we want to see it.
Yeah.
There's no problem with the radio station
sending out the message.
The problem is in the receiver in us.
Ok, so let's move a little further into the text.
In fact, let's just talk about the notion of “days”
here for a second
because we're at the point we're about to have
the first morning,
evening and morning.
Let's talk about that word Yom.
it's been examined and tossed back and forth.
And let's talk about that word for a minute.
In general, there was never any question as
to the meaning of “day” either among the rabbi commentators,
or Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox,
or Protestants until the rise
of the theories of historic geology
requiring vast ages and then evolutionary development.
Now, in the Bible itself the word Yom almost
invariably means a day either
of 24 hours or the daylight portion of that day.
There are very few instances
where it could say “in the days of the barley harvest”
or something like that.
Or a thousand years …
In Peter II, it's “with the Lord is a day.
” But there the immediate context says it's being used
in a different way from 24 hour day.
You know, some should say and in Hosea,
the third he raises up maybe is being used in a special way.
I could name the maybe three or four places
out of 150 uses, at least,
of Yom and it means 24 hour day or daylight portion there of.
And there's no problem with understanding
that from within the text.
The only problem is
if you import modern — when I say modern,
say 250 year old enlightment
and post enlightenment theories as to a massively vast age
of the universe
that would accommodate
the possibility for chemical evolution
and the biological evolution —
that's the only problem there is with understanding “day.
” It's clear to understand “day
”.
There's some things in the Bible much,
much harder than that.
That's clear.
Now, some people have attempted to try and criticize
the historical reading of the text by bringing up
what they would call inconsistencies
or issues or problems.
Let's deal with a couple of those.
One of those is the problem that supposedly is raised,
associated with the fact that the Sun was not created
until late in the period of Creation,
when we need light before that.
Yes, of course.
It's clear from the Genesis account,
the Sun as such was not created till the 4th day.
And yet there is light
because there's evening and the morning.
[Speaks Hebrew] — from day one.
I like what that wonderful Jewish commentator,
Umberto Cassuto, wrote in his commentary on Genesis —
he never lived unfortunately to finish the whole thing,
but he did several chapters and it is marvelous.
And he was what you call a Tanaedi Jew, I mean,
believes the Torah.
Not a liberal Jew.
He says that,
of course, there was light before the Sun was created
because God controls the light.
He says what happened on the fourth day,
and I love this almost poetic beauty of the word,
he said there was a crystallization of the light
into the Sun and the luminaries.
John Calvin says in his commentary
on Genesis, yes,
the sun was only created on the fourth day and that's
because God likes to keep the light
in his hand and to show
that the Sun is not needed
for there to be light because God is light.
Others have thought
that the light was there from the theophanic presence of God,
as in the desert, the firey-cloudy pillar.
Whatever.
God was not dependent on the Sun for the light
but the Sun had its purpose from the fourth day onwards.
That would seem to raise an even deeper problem for someone
who is trying to read Yom in a very long,
long period of time.
Now, we don't just have a few days between day 1 and day 4,
but now we have a very,
very long period of time, millions of years,
maybe in billions of years,
from the textual perspective of even having a Sun.
So, those who are trying to place a lot of time
in the word Yom also end up stumbling over the notion
that the Sun is not created until the fourth day.
Right.
Either you take in simple faith,
simple and profound and humble faith,
as a servant of God the Word of God as written.
You should take it whole and entire.
Or you don't take it that way
and therefore you leave yourself the authority
to get your bearings
from wherever the current intellectual culture is
at any one time,
such that you're not prepared
to accept a relatively short period of time
that the Sun has been here.
But then when you do that, you have real problems, I think,
with the lordship of Christ.
And I just can't do it
for that reason and see no intellectual reason for it.
Many of the problems raised in the first 11 chapters
of Genesis are only
because people start
with the current intellectual theories of the last 200
and some years of ancient ages of the Earth, evolution,
and so they almost make it arcane and difficult
so that it would look
like they are faithful believers as they deal with this text.
They may be true believers.
I don't doubt it.
But I don't think they're faithful.
I don't think they're humble if they give themselves
a right to correct a plain reading of Scripture.
I don't mean to speak judgmentally or harshly
but I honestly say as a humble Christian,
I have to say that.