What is Theistic Evolution?

Zach Mabry | Breakout

Zach Mabry explains the dangers of ascribing to Theistic Evolution and its divergence from scriptural truths.

What is Theistic Evolution? (Full Transcript)

Dear gracious, heavenly Father, thank you so much for letting us be here during this time. I pray that right now you’ll help us to think clearly regarding your word in this world that we live in. I pray that you’ll help us to defend your Scripture. I pray that you’ll help us to represent you well in this world that you’ve allowed us to live in, and that our goal will be to proclaim your excellencies and the salvation that you’ve given to us. I pray that you’ll help us to see, the academy and the secular world in the right way, knowing that you have redeemed us, and that you’ll again redeem this creation and that you’ll be honored and exalted in this time. Blessed Christ’s name, amen. Okay, we’re gonna talk about Theistic Evolution and I’ll go ahead and let you know well, let me, first off, I’ll say this.

The reason why I think it’s important to talk about theistic evolution is that I think theistic evolution, the idea of theistic evolution, which is basically, that the, that God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit created the universe and life in an ordained, sustained and design reflecting evolutionary process. That’s gonna be our definition that create that, that theistic evolution claims that the Father, son, and Holy Spirit created the universe and life through an ordained, sustained and design reflecting evolutionary process. I believe that this idea is spreading throughout Christianity right now. That it’s fascinating. We don’t ever really claim to be on the cutting edge here. But this past fall and spring, you’re just hearing some things about theistic evolution.

We thought maybe it would be a good idea. This might be something that people are dealing with. I first really became acquainted with it because I was reading a book called The Reason for God by Tim Keller that came out, I think in 2008. And in it just in passing, he talks about how, and by the way, I think it’s a, for the most part, it’s a fantastic book. And I think Tim Keller does awesome, is doing awesome things for the Gospel. He is a pastor of a church in, New York City. And so reading this book, I thought, this is great, and I actually taught, a couple breakout sessions based on the arguments in the book in a couple years ago, it was great. But in reading this, he just mentions, well, that naturalistic evolution has done such a good job of proving that evolution exists, and we just have to, we understand that God created evolution and just reading through it, I was like, well, that’s kind of weird, I’ve never heard that before.

And then, shortly after that, Snowbird always goes to a bunch of different conferences. Some of you guys, we may have actually seen you there, but we went to the Youth Specialties Conference, and at the Youth Specialties Conference, there was a guy named Francis Collins who was teaching. Francis Collins is a Christian Guy. He’s written a book called The Language of God. He was also, I mean, he’s a doctor, like two or three times over. He is a medical doctor and a geneticist. And he’s one of the main proponents of theistic evolution, which he has termed Biologos. There’s three different names that theistic evolution will go by. Theistic evolution is the most popular one. Evolutionary creation is one. And then this third idea is Biologos is something that Francis Collins is trying to put together because he doesn’t want to have the name evolution in it.

He wants to talk about how God brings life through the word, and he wants to talk about the process of that takes place as you know little tiny changes over millions of years. And so, one, I mean, we’d heard a lot about that, and then I just, I felt like where I was studying in Scripture didn’t really line up with that. And so I started to prepare this. And it was really encouraging because in May of this year World Magazine or May or June, I think it was June, in June of this year, World Magazine, I don’t know if you know anything about World Magazine, it’s a pretty, it’s a Christian, a pretty conservative Christian publication. And every year they give out a book of the year, and this year they gave out two books of the year.

And both of them were published. I mean, this one was published in June. So it just been out long enough to get voted book of the year. Both of them, they’re dealing with theistic evolution, and specifically that theistic evolution is going to be, and they even say this, that theistic evolution is gonna be the battle that just this generation of Christianity is fighting. And I think that’s fascinating. And it was really encouraging for me because reading through this is one of them. It’s called Should Christians Embrace Evolution? And reading through this was really encouraging for me because I’d been teaching the breakout session for, three or four weeks, and then I hear a bunch of guys who really agree with a lot of stuff that I’m saying, which I think is really encouraging. In fact, I wanna start off by reading, basically, I’m gonna read two paragraphs out of the foreword to this book because, it’s by a guy named Wayne Grudem, who’s a lot smarter than I am.

And he says this, he says, it may first seem easy to say that God simply used evolution to bring about the results he desired, as some are proposing today. This view is called theistic evolution. However, the contributors to this volume, both scientists and Biblical scholars, showed that adopting theistic evolution leads to many positions contrary to the teaching of the Bible, such as these, one, Adam and Eve were not the first human beings, but they were two neolithic farmers among about 10 million other human beings on Earth at that time. And God just chose to reveal himself to them in a personal way. Two, that other human beings had already been seeking to worship and serve God or Gods in their own ways. Three, Adam was not specifically formed by the dust of the ground, which Genesis 2:7 says, but had two human parents. Eve was not directly made by God out of the rib that the Lord had made and taken from the man from Genesis 2:22. But she also had two human parents.

Many human beings both then and now are not descended from Adam and Eve. That’s five. Six, Adam and Eve’s sin was not the first sin. Seven human physical death had occurred for thousands of years before Adam and Eve’s sin. It was a part of the way living things that always existed. And eight, God did not oppose any alteration in the natural world when he cursed the ground because of Adam’s sin. It’s fascinating. He goes on to say what is at stake? A lot, the truthfulness of the three foundational chapters of the entire Bible, belief in the unity of the human race, belief in the ontological uniqueness of human beings among all God’s creatures, belief in a special creation of Adam and Eve in the image of God, belief in the parallel between condemnation, through representation by Adam and salvation, through representation by Christ, belief in the goodness of God’s original creation, belief in the suffering and death are the result of sin and not a part of God’s original creation and belief that natural disasters today are the result of the fall and not part of God’s original creation, belief in evolution erodes to foundations.

Yeah, this is the standpoint I’m gonna go by. I just read him because he says it a lot better than I do. And we’re gonna go into detail. We’re gonna spend the first half talking about science and the second half talking about theology. Specifically, he’s referring to a lot of the theology behind it. And I think that’s, I mean, to me, that’s the thing that drew me into this the most. ‘Cause specifically studying, looking in Romans 5 where it talks about a parallel between Adam and Jesus, it seems to be saying that Adam was a real historical character, and that sin and death entered the world because of Adam. And the problem when you get into the theistic evolution, worldview or mindset, Adam and Eve are no longer allowed to be historical creatures who were made of special creation by God.

Because if God has entered into this evolutionary process, then it’s no longer evolution anymore. It’s God creating a special creation. And so much hinges on that. And the thing that I wanna get across today is the weight of believing in evolution. Whether it’s naturalistic evolution or theistic evolution in regards to our understanding of Scripture, that it seems to me that the people that I’ve read who are Christians who embrace evolution are shortsighted, and they don’t realize the consequences of believing in evolution for a Christian. Does that make sense? So that’s what we’re gonna talk about today. I also, I wanna talk about a couple things. One is that the prose to believing in theistic evolution, because the idea, this is the mindset that our culture has. I believe that our culture has a mindset that says that evolution is completely and totally accepted in the academic world.

The academy embraces evolution. So Christians, if they wanna look smart, need to embrace evolution as well. In fact, I’ve felt this battle, even in my own thinking in my own mind, where I’ll talk about God creating out of nothing. And I’ll refer to Adam and Eve and often like I find myself thinking that sounds almost silly, this is, I’m not talking, my fear is that Christians will think about using the terms Adam and Eve in the same way that they use, the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus and I believe the reason for that is because the spirit of this world, the enemy of Christ has convinced this world, this generation specifically has been deceived into believing that evolution not only is true, but is the smartest thing to believe in.

And we feel unintelligent by saying Adam and Eve, and that God created everything. And so, yeah. So I can see the draw to theistic evolution. I can also see the draw on theistic evolution, because naturalistic evolution, that, meaning completely natural, no supernatural at all, naturalistic evolution doesn’t have a foundation to stand on. Because most scientists today will agree that the universe had a beginning, it had some sort of origin. Well, Christianity has a great answer for that. Well, God started it, if we’re gonna believe in evolution, of course, we’re gonna believe God started it. He put it all in motion because then there’s an answer for the beginning. You don’t have to go long reading and in, naturalistic science to know that they don’t have an answer for the beginning.

If anybody watched that movie Expelled, which you should, I think it’s really well done. When he’s interviewing two really smart evolutionary scientists, one guy just goes off and says that the answer for the beginning of everything was crystals, which he’s just like, oh, okay. And Ben Stein, the narrator is like, okay, I’m sorry, what exactly what did you say? And the guy gets agitated and he is like, I told you already, it’s the crystals. And you’re like, Hmm, okay, that’s the best you can offer. And then like, Richard Dawkins, who you know, right? Richard Dawkins is the coolest, he’s evolution’s poster boy. He gets up there and he is like, well, there it could, I guess it could be proven that there’s intelligent design in the universe.

And if so, we know that it wasn’t God, but it had to have been seeded here by other life forms. And you’re like, okay, what do you mean by that? And he is like, oh, yeah, you know, aliens. And I’m thinking the best thing that naturalistic evolution has to offer for the origin of the world, everything that exists is either crystals or aliens. And I think that it sounds just as silly to say crystals or aliens started this world. It seems that we know, you’re like, oh, aliens, oh, well, if he said aliens, that makes sense. We’ll just write that. I mean, it’s just, yeah. So theistic evolution obviously sounds better than that. For some reason, it’s okay to have an impersonal God who wound the clock of this universe and put it out there that sounds more intelligent than a God that just created everything out of nothing.

So I see the draw, and I can understand that, but once again, I come back to the fact that I don’t think it adds up with the science, and I don’t think it adds up with Scripture, specifically Scripture. As Christians, we can look at this world, and as Galileo who talked about there are two God left us two books. He said that he left us nature and he left us his word. And I think there’s good reasoning in that except for the fact that we need to understand that throughout the course of human history, the word has always triumphed over nature because nature is the, our science and our understanding of nature is continually changing. And I think that that’s another thing we need to understand. We don’t need to put all of our faith into the science of today, because the science of today will not be the science of tomorrow.

It’s always changing. And I mean, we can see that back through history. The only way that we could understand that, or that we could accept the science of today is to say that, we’ve finally made it. And I don’t, I mean, I think it’s naive to say that we finally thought of everything there is. I mean, otherwise, there’d be no more research going on today. And then also I want us to understand that this, at its core is also a, it’s a worldview issue. Specifically, as a Christian, if somebody has accepted naturalistic evolution, then when they look at the evidence, they’re gonna see the… They’re gonna be able to make the conclusions they want to for naturalistic evolution. That in Christianity, or I would say in Christianity, in Biblical Christianity, believe in creationism, we can look at the same evidence and have those lead us to believe in creation.

The evidence itself isn’t substantial to lead us towards evolution. And it isn’t to lead us towards creation. The way that the evidence is handled is what leads us to the conclusions that we’re talking about. Specifically, I think in theistic evolution, when Francis Collins looks, Francis Collins, the reason he believes in theistic evolution specifically is because of his genetic research. He was head of the Human Genome Project, and he comes to conclusion, he realizes this might be staggering to you, that he comes to the point where he is like, 98% of the chromosomes that human beings have chimpanzees also share. All right? At first that could be staggering because you think, well, that must lead to evolution. Well, it depends on your worldview, your mindset, the presuppositions that lead up to you understanding that because for one, for one person who believes in naturalistic evolution, they might see the fact that we share 98% of our genes with chimpanzees. And they might say, okay, they’ll have to have a common ancestor. We have to have a common biological ancestor.

And that’s the conclusion you come to with a naturalistic mindset. But me, when I look at that from a creation mindset, and I see that humans and chimps share 98% of their biological makeup, I just think the same God created them both out of the dust of the earth. I mean, the stuff of life, that’s just the same, the same mind behind it. And what, ’cause see, there again, we’re just, this is a worldview issue, not just an issue of the scientific facts. And to use an illustration of this that I think is, shows the danger in this way of thinking is, let’s say that I’ve got two different paintings up here. Let’s say I’ve got two different Picasso paintings.

I’m not really into painting, but I know that Picasso was a painter. And let’s say that you can look at him and you’re an art critic, and you think, okay, yeah, I can see that because of his use of shading and his use of color and light, that this really resembles this painting here. And my mindset, I would say, oh, that’s because Picasso painted them both. I mean, if I knew that, and then someone else might say, well, naturally this one has evolved from this one, that this one came into being after this one was around for 1000 million years. And I think obviously that’s a false analogy because it’s, they’re not living creatures, but it’s the same idea. We see two similar things, and instead of saying the same person made them both, we say that one evolved outta the other.

That’s just fascinating. Anyway, so I can understand that. I can understand theistic evolution, I can see the mindset, but I think it fails scientifically and it fails theologically. So I’m gonna look at the science real quick. I don’t wanna spend a lot of time on the science. But I think it’s important, because that’s half of what we’re talking about. We’re the Christian who believes in theistic evolution has to already have assumed that evolution is true. And so I’m gonna buzz through a couple things, hopefully, and then we’ll talk about the Bible and we’ll talk about theology, ’cause I like that more than evolution. The first thing I wanna talk about is that we need to make sure that if we hear people talk about evolution, that we make sure that they’re not doing what’s called equivocation.

Equivocation just means changing the definition of a term. Like in the same conversation. And this happens a lot with the term evolution, that sometimes evolution means this process where little tiny changes throughout millions of years has led to slow evolving, progressive evolution from one species to another species. And we would call that macro evolution, big changes. But what the confusing thing is that a Christian or anybody who looks at science and looks at and studies nature, we do believe in a type of evolution. We would refer to it as micro evolution, which is on a smaller level or adaptation or just variation in species. All of the dogs that are around could have come from two different dogs, but they look completely different because of the way that all of their genetic makeup has changed through the interbreeding. And we see the thing that Charles Darwin saw originally with the finch, who its beak would change from being short and stubby to long and narrow because of the food source that was available to it.

And this just happens. I mean, we can’t, it, we, it happens to finches, you know, that happened. In fact, what’s crazy is that about 30 years ago the same finches that Darwin had studied at his time, had been evolving back, you know, or it, at adapting back to the, because the food source has changed, which is just fascinating. So, you know, as Christians we can say that, yeah, there is a type of evolution we believe in, we would just refer to as variation or adaptation. Another thing we need to look at is, I think that this is the, this is one of the biggest deals for me personally. There’s two things I think are super important. One, I’m gonna talk about is called the idea of irreducible complexity. And two, is the nature of the fossil record.

First, I’m gonna talk about what a guy named Michael Behe, Christian Scientist, geneticist, he talks about irreducible complexity. And what he means by that is that there are some genes, or there’s some, there’s so much complexity in the design of, in the natural world that it doesn’t make sense for the naturalistic evolution, naturalistic evolutionary process to put together such complex things by the rules that evolution is set out for itself. The rules that evolution is set out for itself is that everything changes based on need. Does that make, you know, does that make sense? That’s what Darwin said. He said that everything would go little, tiny changes over with the right amount of time, you know, a thousand millions years, and it would change. And I think that’s and that is the core of evolutionary thinking. That’s what Darwin believes, and that’s the foundation.

Those are, I would like to, I just say those are the rules that evolution goes by. Now, Michael Behe has talked about the fact that there are some things that are so complex in nature that can’t be explained by those rules. They just can’t be. And I’m just gonna read from him because it’s a whole lot easier than trying to explain it myself because he talks about stuff I don’t understand. He talks about a tiny acid driven motor that powers a bacterial flagellum. All right? So we’re talking about a little tiny motor on the back of a bacteria that has all these component parts that we would see in, like, in a motor that we would make like for on a boat motor. I mean, it says that it’s got some 40 protein parts, including things that resemble a rotor, a stator, bushings and a drive shaft.

Okay? Behe argues that the absence of any one of these protein parts was, would result in the complete loss of the motor function, the process… This little motor functions as a motor. And if any one of those 40 parts were taken out of it, it wouldn’t function as a motor anymore, and it would be obsolete and unnecessary. And, okay, so that is, the motor is irreducibly complex. It is a single system composed of several well-matched interacting parts that contribute to the basic function wherein the removal of any one of these parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning. Does that make sense? All right. Now, the problem with this is it doesn’t match up to the rules of evolution. In the rules of evolution. Things only will evolve in terms of need, and all of these are only needed if they’re together. Does that make sense? 

And so it would, it would have to have, the evolutionary process would have to have so much foresight that each one of these parts would evolve over time, not being, not having a need at the time, but knowing that there was gonna be a need for it in the future. I mean, that go, and it, that’s, I mean, just goes against the premise behind evolution, in fact, to explain away these things, scientists have to take a huge leap into saying that each one of these protein parts formed by a need that we don’t see anymore. And then after they had all formed, then they realized that they could form a motor in themselves, and then they formed this motor, even though we don’t see the need for which they formed originally. I think that’s a huge leap. In fact, what’s crazy is that that Charles Darwin understood this as well.

In fact, in the origin of the species, he said, and this is a quote from the origin of species that blows me away. “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.” This is what Charles Darwin said. This is, he’s the guy that we are basing all of naturalistic evolution on what he says and his process. And he says that if it could be proved that something could be this complex and couldn’t have been formed by little tiny changes over lots and lots of time, then his theory would break down. And a Michael Behe goes into extreme detail to say, okay, this theory is broken down. In fact, this theory breaks down in a bunch of different ways. And I would say secondly in the fossil record, because what’s fascinating to me is that in the fossil record, if it’s true that everything that came about, everything that exists has taken little tiny changes from one single celled organism and then multiplied out to where we are now, then there should be an exponentially amount, an exponentially higher amount of transitionary phases than final forms.

Does that make sense? It just makes sense. If we’ve been around for billions and billions of years, we should have tons and tons of fossils that show the intermediates, you know, the intermediate stages between species. And what’s fascinating is that we don’t have any, we have zero, none. In fact, when you look at the fossil record, the fossil record seems to show that some, in the fossil record, that species will show up out of nowhere, and then they’ll be erased out of nowhere because, and I mean, and so scientists will look at this and they’ll say, okay, well, the only answer for this is a different form of evolution that would say that everything stayed the same for a long period of time. And then there were huge changes and then stayed the same for a long period of time, and then huge changes.

And I don’t understand how they don’t realize that that goes against the actual premise behind evolution itself. It’s fascinating to me, and this is what’s accepted in the academy, you know, and this is what Christians are afraid to talk about. This is what Christians are afraid to read up on and afraid to defend against. I mean, it goes against its own rules. And the last thing I’ll say is that as far as science is concerned, is that one of the biggest issues right now has to do in the realm of genetics. And that is this guy, Francis Collins also is, he’s the one who’s talking about this the most, is that there’s appears to be so much, what he calls junk DNA, that there’s a lot of DNA that we don’t understand what it’s used for.

And so he would say that this is stuff that has existed from a common ancestor that we’ve ceased to have a need for anymore. But what’s fascinating is that, I mean, he wrote that maybe about three or four years ago, and there’s been so much science, so much study done in genetic research now that the more and more we study, the more and more we find that there are actual reasons for this DNA that was once considered junk, DNA. And so even then, his theory is starting to break down in that area. And which I would recommend this should Christians embrace evolution book because the last half of it deals with science that’s so far above my head. It’s not even funny, but it’s really good if someone is really smart and you can show it to them. So then let’s look at theology.

This is the part I like the most and I appreciate the most. And just like I read on that forward, I think that we have to give up a lot from Orthodox Christianity if we’re gonna accept theistic evolution. First, I think we have to give up the Bible. If we, what we have to do is to explain, and this is just something I was just thinking about this morning. I was thinking about this breakout session. Do you got, I mean, to me it’s crazy that why would God, if he’s recording scripture to us, that he knows that we’re gonna have for thousands of years for his people, his word to his people. Why would he seem to record the beginning of the, of time and the universe in a way that is completely opposite of the way that it actually happened? 

That’s what doesn’t make any sense to me. You know, because we try to reason it. And every theory that comes around to try to make the first couple chapters of Genesis fit into an evolutionary model breaks down. Everything breaks down. And it’s fascinating to me because even Bible scholars who will talk about the first couple chapters of Genesis, they’re, they contradict each other, ’cause you’ll find some that will say that this is, the first couple chapters of Genesis. This is, this was written as a history. This is written so that we can know exactly how the world came into existence. And, but then they’ll say, but you know, there’s this huge gap between Genesis 1 and Genesis 1:2. We don’t really know that about that. And or they’ll say something like in the beginning, God created heavens and the Earth, Genesis 1:1 and 1:2.

That was all of the world and God did that through a slow evolutionary process if he wanted to. And then he’ll start in 1:2 and say, this is specifically God preparing the promised land for His people. But I mean, there’s so many inconsistencies with that. And then, or they’ll say that every day is, you know, an age of thousands, of millions of years. Well, there’s inconsistencies with that too, even in the order that things have come about. You know, ’cause sun, the sun, moon and stars doesn’t come around till, you know, thousands, millions of years after plants. Well, then we’d have to say that God had to sustain, you know, photosynthesis somehow some, and then like an insects didn’t come around till after plants, but there’s a lot of plants around today that require the cross pollination of bugs to… For them to reproduce. So God would’ve had to sustain that. I mean, we’re still asking a lot out of God. That’s miraculous, even if we try to accept other forms of, you know, trying to jive the Bible and evolution.

But I would say specifically we are going against the clear teaching of scripture. I mean, we’re just going against it. And we’re believing that God deceived us. We’re believing that God intentionally deceived His people for, you know, however long, thousands of years until he decided to use Charles Darwin in the 1850s to reveal his way of the creation of the universe. It just doesn’t make sense. And so let’s look specifically ’cause a lot of people will say this is, this is the most common, the most common theory is that the day is a lot longer. Right? That God created. Because every one of us realizes that the word day could mean a bunch of different things, right? Like if I talked about back in the day, you know, I’m referring, I don’t know what I’d be referring to, maybe high school, college, I don’t know. Or if I referred back to my grandfather’s day, I’m referring to an entire generation, you know? 

So obviously, in context, if I said, well, in my grandfather’s day, such and such happened, you know, you could go to the movies for a nickel and still have 2 cents left over. Right? You know. Obviously, you know, I’m not referring to a one 24 hour period, right? That’s just, that’s the way we use that. Well, and so people will say, well, you know, and they’ll even get real technical be like, well, you know, the Hebrew word YOM could be used for a bunch of different reasons. Like the day of the Lord. You know, that might not be, that might be the reign of the Lord. It could be a long, that’s a long period. We don’t know that. And so, and then they’ll say, you know, in the New Testament that the Bible says that a day is like a thousand years, a thousand years is like a day, you know? And so you’re like, oh, wow. Well then it must be a that God created in 6,000 years. Because if the Bible says that, then it’s gotta be true.

Well, the problem is, is that the context is we’re taking the Bible out of context. And in the… That passage where the day is like a thousand years comes out of the book of 2nd Peter, where in 2nd Peter the reason he says that is he is using a figure of speech, basically. He’s saying if, and just so you know, the context behind this, ’cause this is very important when we’re talking about the Bible context, is super important, right? And he’s talking about God’s judgment on the earth. He’s saying that God’s gonna judge that specifically false teachers are gonna be judged and God is faithful. He condemns the guilty and he rewards the righteous, and God’s gonna do that. And that’s so encouraging for us. And what, but some people are like, well, you know, everything’s just been going on like it has been since creation is God, is God really gonna help us? Good luck. Thank you for coming. Don’t get too wet.

They hate this breakout session. They’re really offended. There were commissions and they have to leave early for breakfast. I’m really offended. And I don’t know what I was talking about. Oh, okay, so God is faithful. That’s what I was talking about. And so he uses the phrase, God is, you know, God is not, I mean, God is faithful and he is not slow in fulfilling his promises. But then you have to realize that for God, a day is like a thousand years. And a thousand years is like a day. If I told you, Hey, I’m gonna do this tomorrow. Or actually if I said I’m gonna do this right now, you could probably trust me to do it, you know, well, with God, if he says he’s gonna do something tomorrow, he’s gonna do it. If he says he’s gonna do it in a thousand years, he’s gonna do it.

That’s the point. It’s… The point isn’t to put a mathematical equation on the word day. That one day, whenever you see it in the Bible equals 1000 years. You know, that’s ridiculous. When we see that Jesus was in the grave, you know, for three days, we don’t think, well, that’s three indeterminable periods of time. We don’t know. It could be thousands of millions of years. You know, we don’t, that we, we don’t say that. You know, that’s not the clearest reading of scripture. And then I would say specifically, if we’re doing a word study in the Bible, this is just a side note, but you know, we don’t, the, we can get into danger when we cross different authors. In fact, if we want to know, if we wanna do a word study specifically, the best way is to do well, how does this author use this word? 

That’s the best way to do it. So let’s look at, I believe that Moses wrote the first five books to the Bible. If you disagree with that, that’s a different conversation we can talk about some other time. But I believe that Moses, let’s just say conservatively, Moses wrote the first five books to the Bible. Well, in Genesis, it’s pretty clear he talks about days and he uses the word day and he says evening and morning. So it makes it kind of look like 24 hours. But you know, we’re not sure, right? So we get over to Exodus, which Moses I believe also wrote Exodus 20, in the giving of the 10 Commandments. He says this, remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God.

On it you shall not do any work. You or your son or your daughter, your male servant, your female servant, your livestock, your, the sojourner who was in within your gates, okay, for just verses 8, 9, and 10, it’s clear. Oh, he’s talking about 24 hour periods, right? He says, he’s talking about how you should work six days, take a rest on one day. Pretty, I mean, that’s clear. He even refers to the Sabbath day. That’s the same word as was used in Genesis, but that’s fine, whatever. The Sabbath day, he’s referring to a literal 24 hour period. And then in verse 11, he grounds his argument. He says, four in six days, the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in them and rested on the seventh day and then back to the first. Therefore, the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.

I mean, it seems to me that Moses who wrote Genesis is under the impression that just like God created in six days and rested on the seventh, so you too are to work six days and rest on the Sabbath day. Now this is fascinating to me because, if I’m, if, if we’re confused on the creation account, then so is Moses. All right? We need to understand that, then either Moses is confused or Moses is deceived. Now, it gets bigger than this to me because to, to hold the theistic evolution, we pretty much have to give up Adam and Eve as historical people. We just have to. Either that, or we have to believe that Adam and Eve were just one or two. Well, there were just two of anywhere between 1,010 million, you know, Homo sapiens walking around.

But Scripture seems to have Adam and Eve as historical creatures, you know, real life people. And, and this is fascinating to me because it’s not just in Genesis 1, 2, and 3, but throughout the Scriptures, like for instance there’s genealogies, right? A lot of times reading through the Bible, we get really bogged down with genealogies and we just kind of skip over them, which is understandable. It just happens. But they’re there for a reason. But in Genesis 5, we have pretty much the summation of all the people up to that point, going back to Adam and Eve, okay? In 1st Chronicles, everybody that was alive up until then, going back to Adam, and then in Luke 3 in recording, Jesus’s genealogy, who, it goes all the way back to Adam, who, and he, they say, who is the son of God? That’s what Luke says.

Fascinating. So if theistic evolution is right, Adam and Eve aren’t real historical people, then you know, the writers, the writers of Scripture are wrong. Even the writers of the Luke, the author of the Gospel of Luke, he’s wrong, he’s deceived or he is confused. But then also we look in the New Testament, specifically. We like the New Testament. We study it most probably, we all study the New Testament more than Old Testament. It’s just a fact we do. Genesis 1 through 11 is referenced 107 times in the New Testament. That’s pretty important. Jesus himself talks about those, the first 11 books of the Bible. First 11 chapters of the Bible, he refers to them 25 times. That’s fascinating to me. Okay, so if we’re wrong on the creation account, then so is Jesus. So is Paul. So is Moses.

So is Luke. We’re all wrong. We’ve all been deceived. And I’m not trying to oversimplify this. I mean, this is just the fact because the Scripture is consistent in this. And even specifically, this is awesome. Paul, two times, once in 1st Corinthians and once in 1st Timothy when talking about the gender roles, he talks about how God created Adam first and then Eve from Adam. This is fascinating. Paul is convinced that Genesis one and two are historical like history. Like this is, this is what really happened. It’s not in some sort of allegory, some, it’s not some sort of like Hebrew poetry. This is what Paul believes really happened. And I, we have to, we need to own that and realize that’s really important. And then also I think I’m running out of time and I apologize in Romans 5.

I’m just gonna read Romans 5, not the whole thing, just part of it. There’s a couple things we need to draw out here. In Romans 5, we believe that Paul, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit wrote, I’m gonna read, starting in verse 12, “Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, so death spread to all men, because all sin for indeed sin was, in the world before the law was given, the law of Moses. But sin was not kinda where there is no law, yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those who’s sending was not like the transgression of Adam, who was a type of the one to come.” Then he talks about that, the type of the one to come, but the free gift is not like the trespass for if many died through one man’s trespass must, much more have the grace of God and the free gift by the grace of that one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for the many.

And the free gift is not like the result of that one man’s sin for the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brought justification, that because of one man’s trespass death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in the life through that one man, Jesus Christ. Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification in life for all men, for as one man’s disobedience. And many were made sinners, so the one man’s obedience and many will be made righteous. Now this is fascinating because what Paul is saying here is he’s saying that sin and death came into the world through Adam, through one man, Adam. All right, so two things we need to think about here, one, is that he’s once again validating the Genesis account, Genesis 3, right. But he is also saying that sin and death wasn’t a part of this world before Adam’s sin, because he believes, Paul believes in a historical fall that Adam was created morally right, and that he sinned and brought sin and death to all of us.

And he’s saying that by this, we would assume that he’s inferring that Adam is the biological head of all humanity and that in him, ’cause it’s the same type of language is used here that it, that we sinned in Adam, because we all came from Adam. I mean, that’s huge. And so he’s saying that sin came through Adam, that sin is the biological head of all of us. And that sin in, that death wasn’t around before Adam sinned, before the fall. Now, what’s fascinating by that is that evolution itself, even if we’re gonna bring it into the Christian worldview, it has to have death to, I mean, to continue, in fact, it’s based on death, right? It’s a cycle of life and death. And we would say, “Okay, it looks like death just came in through one man, through after Adam, that evolution, if evolution exists, it had to be after Adam,” right. Well, that doesn’t make sense because death couldn’t be here till after Adam.

We, I mean, that’s huge. You can’t have it both ways, you can’t. And then we think about this, what about the fact that God, when God created specifically at the end, he said, “This is very good.” All right? Now, are we saying that death was a part of that beforehand? Well, if death is the last enemy that’s to be destroyed at the end, death is not a good thing. When Jesus sees Lazarus dead, I mean, he’s weeping, death is not good, it’s not natural. Death is a result of the fall. And we can’t, why would God call this good beforehand? And that’s what’s fascinating to me. There, I mean, there’s so many different strands of people who are trying to rationalize the Scriptures with evolution. And it’s just not happening. You because we, have to give up and we have to give up a basis of Scripture, our foundation of Scripture, I really believe that because if all of all throughout the Old Testament and the New Testament, the first couple chapters of Genesis are quoted, and we say that the first couple chapter of Genesis, they’re just allegory; they’re not historical.

Well then we’re discounting all of Scripture. I mean, that’s huge. We’re discounting, we have, we no longer have a, an orthodox understanding of mankind because mankind is no longer a special creation, created in the image of God. There’s no longer a distinction between human beings and animals, there’s just not. There’s in fact, we should all be just as grieved and mourn and have, and mourn when an animal dies, that’s when a human being dies because we’re all still the same here. They’ll, evolutionary creationists will try to, they’ll try to sneak in there, Oh, well, we know, we believe that Adam has created an image of God, because God chose to have a relationship with him.

Well, what happens to the other 1,000 or 10 million Homo sapiens that are around that are still a part of this evolutionary process? I mean, think about it. What happens, I mean, ’cause then now, what about now” What if, let’s be conservative, let’s say that Adam and Eve were two of 1,000 neolithic farmers that were around, that God chose to have a relationship with. And that because of their sin, everybody after them is sinful. But what about the rest of them? What about the other 998 human beings, Homo sapiens are around that continue to have kids and kids and kids, who’s to say that whether we’re descended from Adam or we’re descended from those other ones, in fact, most likely, percentage wise, only 1/500th of the people around here would be under Adam’s curse? 

And if Romans 5 is correct in applying and in saying everyone under Adam’s curse is available for the atonement in Jesus, then only 1/500th of us needs to have the Gospel preached to us. Because those are the only people who are under the curse of Adam. And those are the only people who, that the atonement is reserved for. I think that’s really important. I mean, we’re losing the atonement. We lose, there’s so much we have to lose in holding onto theistic evolution, not just with the science, but with the theology behind it. We have to believe that God intentionally deceived his people for thousands of years until Darwin came up with the idea of how we’ve all got here to being. We have to give up the Bible as a source of any type of authority and history and inspiration and narrative, stuff we, I mean, stuff we fight for. We have to give up an, a view of humanity that is special, that is man created in the image of God. We have to give up our orthodox understanding of sin and of death. We have to give up our orthodox understanding of the atonement.

I mean, this is huge. I, and I really, I’m so confused ’cause I see really like guys that I look up to and I respect who are holding onto these things, Tim Keller, I think awesome, Godly dude doing so much for the Gospel, but in this area, I think he’s just shortsighted. He doesn’t see the consequences for what he believes in. And that’s huge. And then the last thing I’ll tackle real quick, this will just take a couple seconds, this is just a side note, the biggest thing that we’ll come up with or, we’ll, the biggest confrontation we’re gonna have is gonna deal with the age of the earth. And here’s, this is what I think about. One is that no age, no dating system that we’re using has proven to be consistent. And that’s, I mean, that’s just a fact of the matter. Two, that our dating systems go against the scientific method, which is based on observation and replication in experiments. I mean, that’s what it’s based on. We haven’t been, I, it’s the truth of the matter. We haven’t been studying how things decay long enough to predict how they’re gonna decay over millions of millions of years. We just don’t know. We, I mean, we just have no clue. And so everything in the dating system is just guesses, when we look at the different strata of the earth and try to pull out fossils from different strata, it’s inconsistent.

So with that, I think our dating, the dating method is shot. And it’s, and I think we’ll probably have more and more progression in this. But we, it’s still, it’s inconsistent. It’s, everybody’s contradicting each other, the different methods contradict each other. And it’s not based on observation. And then the last thing is that however old the earth is, that if we believe the Bible, the earth is going to look older. Does that make sense? It’s all, it’s going to look older than it is, and the reason why I say that is because we believe that God created a mature creation. When it talks in the scriptural account we talk, it talks about trees that are bearing fruit after its kind. Well, you don’t plant a tree and hope for it to bear fruit immediately, it just doesn’t happen. So maybe it’s five, 10 years old. Maybe the earth appears five or 10 years old.

We look at Adam and Eve. We, Adam and Eve appear to be made as mature adults. So 20, 30 years old. So that the earth is gonna look 20 or 30 years older. And then also we have every indication of the beliefs when God created the sun, moon, and stars, that they were visible at that time. Well, now we know that it takes light years for light to get from a star to here. Well, my, I mean I might be naive, but I just believe that when God created the stars, he also created that light beam from there to here so that we could see it. I mean, ’cause we’re still discovering more and more stars that were the lights finally getting to us. So however old the earth is, I would say that even from the Bible, we would say that it’s going to appear older than it is.

And so, I mean, it takes a lot of wind outta the sails of someone saying, how old you think the earth is? And I really don’t know how old the earth is. And to me, that part doesn’t really matter to me, ’cause there’s obviously, there’s a bunch of people who disagree whether even as Christians who will accept creation, whether the earth is millions of millions a year old, or whether it’s 10,000 years old. And I’ve got no clue. And I, and that part to me doesn’t matter as much. The part that matters to me are the implications that an evolutionary understanding would have for the Theology. So I’m gonna pray and we can go to breakfast and I’ll be up here if you wanna talk about things.

Dear gracious father, I do thank you for this time that we’ve had with each other. And I just pray that you will help us to think clearly regarding both nature and Scripture, and that we will not hold contradictory views, but that you’ll give us your wisdom, your insight. And be with us this week, I pray that you’ll speak to the hearts of these churches, of these youth leaders and of the students that are here, that you’ll make yourself big to them and that you’ll be honored and exalted in Christ’s name. Amen. All right.

2025 SUMMER CAMP

Romans 8

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