First I have an exercise for you. Below you'll see a box. Inside of that box I'd like you to take a couple of minutes and draw a house.
On the link for this article you may have seen the house I drew, perhaps you drew something like it. A box, a triangle for the roof, some doors and windows or maybe you're an excellent artist and drew something that looked photo real. I found a book called Habitat for Humanity How to Build a House by Larry Haun and Angela C. Johnson. This book as indicated by the title teaches you everything you would need to know about building a house from the tools you need, to the type of ground you need, your utility set up and that's before you even start one wall. Building a house is complicated. You drew your house in a few minutes, I know I did. The first sentence of this book reads, "Building a house is a long journey..." From personal experience building a house takes anywhere from around a year or two to complete. And yet, you were able to draw a house in minutes, maybe even seconds. Why is that? Well it's because we know what a house looks like, we know what a house needs. A house is big, you need to be able to stand up in it and fit furniture, you know a house needs a door to enter, and keep the elements out. You know, though maybe not in your drawing, it needs water, electricity, some form of heating. And so when I tell you to draw a house you can and your stick person can adequately live in it.
God knew what we needed in a planet. He built this world to be a home for us. He is a God of science. God knew that if He created a 6 day old planet that it would be uninhabitable so He created a planet that in it's current state would be able to support life. In the book, one of the first steps after securing your location is to make sure all of your utilities are on the property. I know I didn't map out my plumbing, electic and gas as the first thing I drew, I drew the box that was my house. Genesis tells us the first day that God created the heavens and the earth which he spoke into existence. Verse 5 ends by saying, " And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day. What does this mean, the Hebrew day ended at sunset instead of midnight. What Moses is saying here in modern context would be along the lines of there was midnight and noon the first day. God knew what a habitable planet looked like, He knew what a solar system looked like, He knew what a galaxy and universe looked like, and as easily as we drew our house, He created everything. I don't know why He decided to make countless light years of universe. But I do know why Earth was created the way it was and how long it took.
How do Christians know how old the Earth is then? Anyone who has attempted to read the Bible cover to cover has probably come across genealogies, which are accounts of who gave birth to who. In the Bible this is important because it helps to show that Jesus is from the line of David, and from David to Adam and Eve, showing that God kept His promise to send their offspring to defeat Satan's hold over us. But we can also use that genealogy to make relative measurements to how long each person was alive for. All the way back to Adam. The 6000 is just an estimate, but even if we double everyone's lives, we're still short of billions of years.
So why does it matter how old the Earth is. Well it really doesn't I suppose. I don't think defending the age of the Earth against the Greeks was a concern of the Hebrews at the time. What it does do however is undermine God's power. As Christians we believe that God is omnipotent(all powerful) so when someone, especially the people we put in charge of our churches come out and say, "you know you're right, there's no way all of this could have been created in 6 24-hour days," we really throw God's power away don't we? To be honest I'm not really sure what God can do if He cannot create the planet on which we live. He's a God of science, but he's a God of miracles. If He only played by the rules of science then we'd have no resurrection of life on the final day, or even worse, we wouldn't have Christ's resurrection. If He was only a God of science, the Hebrew would have certainly perished in Egypt and we wouldn't even know of His existence, though we may not know of it at all since He doesn't live on this Earth, not in a physical manifestation anyway. At best a God of science is merely a casual observer and can offer no help to our daily lives.
However we know that God is all powerful and that he works all things to our good. Along with the idea that man evolved from animals then we are no longer His children. Best case scenario is that some amoebas are God's children and that they have all thankfully been judged and are home in Heaven or suffering in Hell. God took six days to create a planet yet only took one to create man. He used the dust of this Earth. He created Eve while Adam slept. After He created them He gave them reign over everything because mankind were created in God's image, meaning that they were perfectly Holy. We were like God before sin, the heirs of His six day labor.
The other problem when we disregard God's account is that we disregard His Word entirely. If we say that Genesis is a false account, then there is no Jesus. If we believe that man evolved from other species and the planet is millions of years old then we know that there was no Adam and Eve and there was no fall into sin which means we were never promised a savior and there goes almost the entire Bible. Think of the Bible as a blanket in which you pull a thread and suddenly the whole thing has unravelled. If we lose Jesus' chapters then we know the books of Acts and Revelation need to be thrown out as they were written by Luke and John respectively and if Acts is thrown out there go all of Pauls letters and we have no new testament. Apart from continuity we know that the genealogies discussed before are completely unaccountable so there's no point to believing anything else written in the old testament and we are left without a Bible.
It's another source of confusion for me, as Christians, we know we have the revealed knowledge of God through the inspired books of the Bible, so when Christians start taking things out of it, where does that leave us. I know that I am sinful because of the fall into sin as described in Genesis, I know I have a promised savior and that this has been fulfilled because of Matthew Mark Luke and John. I know my savior is coming again because of Isaiah, Mark, Acts and Revelation. Because of all these books and books not listed I know how to live a Christlike life and that I will go home to be with Jesus for eternity. So where does that leave Christians who pull at so called unsightly threads in the Bible. Perhaps the Bible calls out a specific sin that isn't popular in today's society. So you remove that from scripture. Perhaps something isn't quite believable, so you take it out of there. Perhaps the idea of being held accountable for your sins and being eternally damned does not make for a good bedtime story, you pull that out of there, and then perhaps you say, none of it happened, but it's a story of good over evil, so you throw the whole book away.
Well what is it? Do we have a God who has fully revealed Himself, or do we have a God who seemingly lies at times, or was only saying what was popular at the time of its writing. If you don't believe what the Bible says, then why worry about making God happy by living a Christlike lifestyle, especially one that doesn't coincide with what modern society says. Why worry about going to Heaven if there's no such thing as Hell? And if none of this matters, why worry if someone believes that the Earth is six thousand years old, if they don't want to listen to science, they're on par with people who can't add without a calculator. Could it be that we're scared that this is all there is? We're nothing more than a species that's around for 80-some Earth years and we float in the middle of our Solar system, somewhere near the edge of the Milky Way in an endless expanse. So we need a God that approves of us who will take us somewhere after what most agree are our way too short lives. So instead of working towards Him, we have someone who works for us. And if a group of people dare say this being, our salvation, doesn't like the way we're doing it, then we need to write it off.
I could end it there, but you should know that we do have a God who graciously works for us. He wants us to be Holy, so He did send His Son to take our judgement on Himself for when we fall short. And in return, we honor Him by living as He instructs, asking forgiveness when we fail and sharing the Word with others to improve their daily lives. When you're living for Christ, you live like Christ, and when you live like Christ, it's hard to not do good.
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