THE AGE OF THE EARTH – DOES IT MATTER?
By Terry Mortenson 2005 (Part 4 of a 5 part CD series called Standing Against the Myth.)
Introduction
Before I joined Answers in Genesis four years ago, I worked for Campus Crusade for Christ from ’75 till ’01 right out of college, and spent much of that time serving in Czechoslovakia and Hungary before and after the fall of Communism.
And I’ve had a chance to speak on the creation issue for all of those decades, in America, in England, in most countries of Eastern Europe, and I have found that 100 % of the Christians that I have ever talked to believe the first verse of the Bible: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” It’s a unanimous belief in the body of Christ worldwide.
But what percentage of the Christians do you think believe this statement: God created the universe and everything in it about 6000 years ago in 6 literal days of creation and then he judged the world with a global catastrophic flood at the time of Noah? What percentage of Christians worldwide believe that statement without hesitation? I would say on the basis of my experiences, far less than 50%; in some countries less than 5% of Christians believe that statement.
But it has not always been that way. Up until the beginning of the 19th c., almost all Christians believed that without hesitation. Something happened in the early 19th c.
If you want to learn about that history, you can get the tape from my talk “Noah’s flood, rocks and fossils.” In the early 19th c, late 18th c., the deists and atheists began to develop new geological theories for the history of the earth and said the earth was much, much older than the Bible said, that Noah’s flood was not responsible for the geological record of sedimentary rocks and fossils.
And so Christians began to scramble to reinterpret the Bible to fit what the geologists had proven was true.
So they had to do a number of things: First of all they had to come up with re-interpretations of Genesis 1. The traditional view in the church for 18 centuries, was that these were literal days: 24 hour days, like our days today.
1. “Gap theory”. But in the early 19th c., some Christians began to advocate the “gap theory,” that there was a gap of time, of untold ages, millions of ages between Gen. 1:1 and Gen. 1:2. And the geologists could put all of their theories between those verses, and then we have literal days of re-creation and we solve the conflict between the Bible and geology. How many of you have heard of the gap theory? It’s a 200 year old theory.
2. “Day age theory”: In the 1820’s, an evangelical Anglican minister said, “No, that’s not a good way to harmonize geology with the Bible. If we just make each of the day long ages, figurative days, then we can harmonize the Bible with the geological ideas. Now that idea was not original with him, but he developed and advocated it. It was not popular initially because the Christian geologists said there is a stark difference in the order of events in what we view as geological history and the order of events in Gen. 1. It didn’t become popular till it was promoted about 30 years later by a Christian geologist.
3. “Day-gap-day theory” Then there has developed in the 20th century the day- gap-day theory. How many have heard of that? Not many. The day-gap-day theory says that the days are literal but there are gaps of millions of years between the days.
4. “Theological framework” And then there is the theological framework view. This is becoming rather popular among evangelical theologians. This view says that Genesis one is not really history. It is a theological framework, a literary framework for teaching theology. So we shouldn’t even try to harmonize Gen. 1 with what science is saying. This is really just a very tricky way of saying that it is mythology. But evangelicals don’t like to say that anything in the Bible is mythology. So they say it is a theological framework.
5. “Promised land” Then there is the promised land view. This is a view of one of my OT professors in seminary, that Genesis 1:1 is talking about the creation of the heavens and the earth, everything; but from verse 2 on, where we see the word “earth” it should be translated “land” and is referring to the promised land. So this is the creation of the promised land and the atmosphere above the promised land, and the things living in the promised land. That’s a really interesting one.
6. The liberal view. And then the liberals say, “You’re all wrong. This is mythology. It never happened. If you believe in Santa Claus and you believe in the tooth fairy, you can believe in Genesis 1, but it is mythology.”
Not only did people have to reinterpret Genesis 1, they also had to reinterpret Genesis chap. 6, 7, 8, and 9, the flood account.
The historic view of the church, virtually unanimous, was that this was a historic global catastrophe. It happened in time-space history, it covered the whole planet and it was unimaginably destructive. And it was responsible for the fossils that we see in the rock layers in the earth.
But in the early 19th century as they abandoned belief in the Biblical chronology and as they abandoned the geological significance of a global flood, some began to say “No, it was a historical local catastrophe. It was actually a flood in the Mesopotamian valley of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, modern day Iran and Iraq, and it is just described in Genesis in exaggerated language just to emphasize things.
Others said, “No, it was a historic and global flood, but it was tranquil. It left no geological evidence. It was so peaceful, the water rose up, didn’t damage anything, but it killed all the people, they all drowned, and then it all went back down again.
Nobody holds the global tranquil flood view today that I know of, because it is an oxymoron. It is like talking about square circles. There “ain’t no such thing,” as tranquil floods. All floods are destructive; all floods erode; all floods carry sediments and drop these sediments someplace else. There is no such thing as a flood that does not leave any evidence.
And then of course the liberals say,“It’s mythology.”
Now, out of those reinterpretations we come to the beginning of the 20th c. and there are basically three views of earth history in the church.
1. There is the Biblical creation view, the young earth creation view, which says that there was a supernatural creation week of 6 literal creation days and one literal day of resting from creation, followed by a flood about 1600 years later, bringing us up to the present. And all of that is 6 to 10 thousand years old in the young earth view. There is not complete agreement among young earthers about whether there are any gaps in the genealogies of Gen. 5 and 11. But there’s thousands of years.
2. Then there is the theistic evolution view, the view that says the “Bible tells us that God created, science tells us how God created.” And evolution: 1)cosmic evolution, the big bang theory, 2)geological evolution of how the earth gradually changed to become the inhabitable planet we live on, and 3)Darwinian, biological evolution: that’s how God created everything. And so in this view 15 billion years and evolution is a fact; the “whole 10 yards.”
3) Then there’s another group that have various views, and they are what we call progressive creationists. And they believe in billions of years, they accept the big bang theory, they accept earth history as evolutionists present it, but they reject Darwinian evolution. They say, “No, no, you can’t explain how all these complex living creatures, that are so wonderfully designed, evolved from one common ancestor by natural selection and mutation.” Yesterday we looked at the problems of biological evolution on my first talk.
So they believe that every so often, over those billions of years, God stepped into time and supernaturally created new kinds of creatures. So he created some fish and they evolved a little bit for a while, and then God wanted some reptiles so he supernaturally created reptiles, and then they evolved among themselves to get different kinds of reptiles, and then to get mammals, he had to supernaturally enter into the situation and create mammals. And then a few million years later he supernaturally created man. That’s progressive creation.
Now, one thing you need to understand is that evolution is a three part theory.
It is 1) astronomical evolution, the theory of how the cosmos came into existence, how the stars and the galaxies and planets came into existence by time and chance and the laws of nature.
2) Then there is geological evolution which picks up the story when earth is a hot molten ball, which had condensed from the solar gas cloud that became the solar system, and then by time and chance and the laws of nature over millions and millions of years, the earth slowly developed a crust, then localized seas, then eventually became the habitable planet we live on.
3) Then biological evolution picks up the story when you had an earth ready for life and by chance a spark happens that causes non-living matter to change into the first living cell which then reproduces and mutates to become all the different kinds of plants and animals, including us, that we see on the planet today. That is the theory of evolution.
Now the theistic evolutionists, I call 3/3rds evolutionists, because they believe in all three strands of evolution.
Progressive creationists will often say, “We don’t believe in evolution.” What they mean is that they don’t believe in biological evolution. What they do believe in is geological and astronomical evolution. So I call them 2/3rd evolutionists.
I’m a 0/3rds evolutionist, the whole thing is false.
Now I want to talk to you about some reasons why I believe the age of the earth is important, because most, if not all, theistic evolutionists and progressive creationists in the church today are quite emphatic in saying: “The age of the earth doesn’t matter. It’s a side issue. It’s not that important. What we really need to do is fight Darwinism. What we really need to do is fight philosophical naturalism.” But if you listen to the two tapes that I gave yesterday, you’ll see that geological evolution is philosophical naturalism just as much as biological evolution is. So we’re not really fighting naturalism if we don’t deal with the age of the earth.
So let’s look at Psalm 11: 3. It says, “If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do.” Here’s a typical house in England where I lived for 10 years. It’s a beautiful house. It has square walls, well most houses in England don’t have square corners, they have so much subsidence. It has square windows, a nice roof, it’s water tight. Inside is carpeting, wallpaper, furniture. It’s a beautiful house. But there’s one thing about this house you don’t see: the foundation. And if the foundation is not good, it’s only a matter of time before that house looks like that. If you don’t worry about the foundation and you get ready to sell the house, you won’t sell the house, if the perspective buyer comes in and sees cracks in the foundation, rising damp, (a problem they have there), or subsidence. So foundations matter, even though foundations are rarely visible.
There are five foundational reasons why I believe this issue is so important.
I. First, the Bible’s teaching is clear and church history confirms it.
The Bible’s teaching about the days of creation and the global flood and that this all happened a few thousand years ago is crystal clear.
I want to mention 7 reasons why we should believe the days of creation are literal days.
1. The Hebrew word for day is “yom” and appears almost 1600 times in the OT. In the vast majority, over 95% of the cases, it means a literal day, and it is obvious from the context. So we should assume a literal day as we come to Genesis one, unless there is something that is in the context that indicates that it is one of those figurative, non-literal uses of ‘yom”. When we come to Genesis one, we find that there are plenty of reasons in the context that this is a literal day.
2. First of all it is defined in verse 5. The earth was shrouded in darkness, and God made the light and said the light was called day and the darkness was called night, and there was evening and morning one day. So there “yom” is the light portion of a light-dark cycle, and the whole light-dark cycle, the two literal meanings of day that we use. We are having a meeting right now in the day, and you’re going to go through this meeting and go home and wake up on the next day. It’s the same in Czech, German, and every language you’ve heard of. Those are the literal meanings of day.
3. Then we see in Gen. 1, that day is defined as with an ordinal adjective: “first day, second day, third day, fourth day.” Everywhere without exception, where “yom” is used with a cardinal number in the rest of the OT, it means a literal day.
4. Then there is “yom” used with evening and morning. “There was evening and morning the first day” “evening and morning the second day” “evening and morning the third day”. Everywhere without exception, where “evening and morning” are used in conjunction with day it means a literal day. In fact everywhere where evening and morning are used together or separately, it means a literal evening and a literal morning.
5. And then if we’re still not certain, “yom” is defined again in verse 14 in reference to the heavenly bodies. God said he made “the sun moon and stars so that we could measure seasons, and days, and years.” The years are literal, determined by the heavenly bodies, the seasons are literal determined by the movement of the heavenly bodies, and the days are literal.
6. Then it’s the order of creation. A lot of old-earthers will say, especially if they are in favor of the day-age theory, “If we just made the days into long ages, we resolve the conflict between Genesis and science,” which really means between Genesis and evolution. Hugh Ross is a famous proponent of this. But this view reveals either an ignorance of what the Biblical text actually says, or an ignorance of what the evolutionist say is the order of events in history. Here are 4 contradictions between the Bible and evolution.
a)The Bible says all land plants were created on day three, fish were created on day five. But according to evolution fish evolved 4 to 6 hundred million years ago, then cone bearing trees evolved 125 million years later, but not all plants evolved at the same time. They evolved over hundreds of millions of years. That’s the exact opposite order of Genesis.
b) The Bible says fish and birds were created on the same day. According to evolutionists, fish were evolved into existence, hundreds of millions of years before the first birds.
c) Here’s a big one. The Bible says the earth was created first and the sun moon and stars were created on the fourth day. It’s just exactly the opposite, not by millions, but this time by billions of years.
d) And then the Bible says there was a universal ocean on day one, and then the dry land appeared. The evolutionists say that the earth was initially a hot molten lava ball which developed a hard crust, and eventually developed localized seas. According to evolution theory there has never been a universal ocean on this planet. According to the Bible there have been two: the first two days of creation and Noah’s flood.
Throwing millions of years in Genesis one does not harmonize Genesis with evolution. So what do you have to do? You have to play fast and loose with the text. So day-agers will start to say, “Well, the plants were not actually created on day three. That’s when most of them were created; but some were created before, some after on day four and five. And the sea creatures were primarily created on day 5, but some were created on………..” No, that’s just cutting and pasting. That’s not Bible study.
7. Lastly, is Jesus’ teaching about the age of the earth. It’s amazing that Jesus deals with all the issues that skeptics today have the most problems with. In Mark 10 Jesus is confronted by the Pharisees with a question about divorce, and He says in His answer, “But from the beginning of creation, God made them male and female.” From the beginning of creation” He’s talking about Adam and Eve. He quotes from Genesis 2 in the next two verses. In Jesus’ view Adam and Eve were at the beginning of creation, not billions of years after the beginning. They were at the beginning.
Then in Luke 11, Jesus is talking about the blood of all the prophets which was shed “from the foundation of the world, from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zacharias.” According to Jesus Abel was the first prophet, he prophesied by his life and his actions. And Jesus says that “Abel was at the foundation of the world.” Now Abel was probably conceived just a year or a year and a half after they were created, because they had no reason to wait for kids, so they got pregnant, I’m sure, right away. Cain was born and as soon as they nursed him, they had another one. There was no world government, no UN saying “We’ve got to control the size of families”. So from Jesus’ perspective, 4000 years later, Abel is at the foundation of the world. A year compared to 4000 is at the foundation.
So let’s grasp it this way. The evolutionist is saying that the cosmos has been in existence for about 15 billion years and man has only been in existence a few hundred thousand at most: “homo sapiens sapien”. So if we made this 15 billion year time line into 24 hours, then man appeared on the scene less than one second before midnight. Most of the history of the cosmos was before man came into existence. From our perspective we would have to say man came into existence at the tail end of creation. Jesus says, Adam and Eve were at the beginning of creation; Abel was at the foundation of the world. Jesus was a young-earth creationist. And really the whole argument can be stopped right there. If I’m a follower of Jesus, and Jesus is my Lord, I dare not have a different view of this subject than my Lord has. But most old earth creationists as I have studied this, never pay any attention to what Jesus said about this subject. They only look at Genesis one.
We talked about Noah’s flood yesterday. I won’t go through that. I encourage you to get the tape about the reasons why we believe in a global catastrophic flood. If Noah was describing a local flood in the Mesopotamian valley or Moses was recording that, he could not have been more misleading. Put it another way, if the flood of Noah was a global catastrophe, Moses could not have been more clear. He is emphasizing in numerous ways that this was a global catastrophe.
Why we believe in a young earth:
I. Because the Bible tells us. The genealogies in Genesis 5 tell us how many years it was from Adam till Noah. And chapter 11 tells us how many years it was from Noah to Abraham. And from other passages in the Bible, we can get a pretty accurate date for the life of Abraham up to the time of Christ. So Bishop Usher back in the 16th c. was not the bumbling idiot that he is often presented as. He was one of the most brilliant scholars of his day. And 4004 B.C. is probably not too far off.
And this is the belief of the church until the 19th c. Even old-earth geologist, Davis Young at Calvin College in Michigan, who has influenced many seminary professors and other Christians to doubt the Biblical teaching about the flood and the age of the earth, says, “It cannot be denied, in spite of frequent interpretations that departed from the rigidly literal, that the almost universal view of the Christian world until the 18th c. was that the earth was only a few thousand years old.” He’s just slightly off on his history. It’s really the 19th c. when the church abandoned this belief.
Now we don’t believe something just because the majority of the church believed it. But if our exegesis, our interpretation of Scripture, leads us to believe that the Bible is teaching something, and most of the church also believed that, we dare not ignore the history of the church.
Why old-earthers do not believe what all of our forefathers believed before the 19th c.
Well, the old-earthers make it very clear, and we could multiply quotes like this. Paddle Pun, professor of biology at Wheaton College: “It is apparent that the most straightforward understanding of the Genesis record, without regard to all the hermeneutical considerations suggested by science, is that God created heaven and earth in 6 solar days, that man was created on the 6th day, that death and chaos entered the world after the fall of Adam and Eve, and that all of the fossils were the result of a catastrophic universal flood which spared only Noah and his family and the animals therewith.” (He has it a little distorted here. Young earth creationists have never believed that all of the fossils are a result of the flood. Most, the vast majority are, but some are pre-flood and some are post flood. ) But notice, why doesn’t he believe this obvious straightforward reading of the text, (and it is obvious and straightforward in English or Czech or German or Hebrew.) It’s because of all the hermeneutical considerations suggested by science. No, not science, evolution. He has swallowed evolutionary thinking.
Now Paddle Pun does not believe in Darwinian evolution. He is a progressive creationist. In his own field of study, he rejects evolution. But in the fields where he does not have expertise, where he is just a layman like all of you, geology and astronomy, he blindly accepts what the scientists tell him about geological and astronomical evolution.
II. So that leads me to my second point, that science has not proven that the earth is old. Contrary to what we’ve been led to believe, science has not proven that. ( explained in parts 1,2,3 in this series of 5 CDs)
III.The third reason why this issue is foundational and why we cannot compromise on the age of the earth is because belief in millions of years assaults the character of God.
And the evolutionists see this more clearly than most Christians. Here is a statement by a philosopher writing in the British journal, Nature, the leading science journal in Great Britain. It’s in a book review of a book attacking Darwinism purely from a scientific perspective. And this is what this atheist philosopher says: “The problem that biological evolution poses for natural theologians is the sort of God that a Darwinian version of evolution implies. The evolutionary process is rife with happenstance, contingency, incredible waste, death, pain, and horror. Whatever the God implied by the evolutionary theory and the data of natural history may be like, he is not the Protestant God of waste not, want not” (that’s not quite an accurate description of God, but if we put the real description of God in here, the quote is even more powerful), “He is also not a loving God who cares about his productions. He is not even the awful God portrayed in the book of Job. The God of the Galapagos” (the Galapagos Islands where Darwin birthed his theory) “is careless, wasteful, indifferent, almost diabolical. He is certainly not the sort of God to whom anyone would be inclined to pray.”
Now why would he say that? Because he understands that the theory of evolution is not just about time. It’s about what happened in all those millions of years. And it was evolutionary dead ends, mass extinctions. According to the evolutionists all the dinosaurs were wiped out about 65 million years ago by a massive asteroid impact. It’s a story of carnage. And if you are a progressive creationist and you believe that God supernaturally created the different kinds, you still don’t erase this problem of the carnage and the dead ends, and the non-functioning nature of the creation. If that is the process that God used in creation over millions of years, He must be a wicked bumbling idiot, not the wise intelligent creator revealed in Scripture.
Bertrand Russell was the 20th century’s most famous atheist. He gave a lecture in London in 1927 entitled, “Why I am not a Christian” and it was published as a book. And this is one of the reasons he said he is not a Christian. “When you come to look into this argument from design, it is a most astonishing thing that people believe that this world with all the things that are in it, with all its defects, should be the best the omnipotent and omniscient God is able to produce in millions of years. I really cannot believe it.” You see what he is saying? He is looking at the world’s defects, mutations, mistakes, and he is saying, if this is what God made, what kind of a God is it? I can’t believe in that kind of a God.
Carl Sagan put it this way, (he’s the famous atheist cosmologist who died a couple of years ago) “If God is omnipotent and omniscient, why didn’t he start the universe out in the first place so it would come out the way he wants it? Why is he constantly repairing and complaining. No there’s one thing the Bible makes clear. The Biblical God is a sloppy manufacturer. He’s not good at design. He’s not good at execution. He’d be out of business if there was any competition.”
That’s what the world thinks.
Over the last 200 years the church has compromised with old earth geology, old universe astronomy, and said: “It doesn’t matter. You can believe that. Just believe the Gospel.” And what has happened over those 200 years? Has the non-Christian world said, “Oh, this makes the Gospel a lot easier for me to believe.”? No. They say, “If your God made the world the way we say it happened, I don’t want to know Him.”
IV. Belief in millions of years
I. not only contradicts what the Bible says,
II. not only is it contrary to science,
III. not only does it assault the nature of God,
IV. belief in millions of years contradicts the Bible’s teaching on death. And this follows on from the point that I just made. But I want to drive this home.
Charles Darwin wrote this at the end of his Origins book:
“Thus from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object that we are capable of conceiving, namely the production of the higher animals, directly follows.”
In Darwin’s view, the process of death is what brought man into existence.
You see evolution, and creation-and-the-Bible, have a completely different view of death. In evolution, death over millions of years, bloodshed, suffering, disease, and extinctions led to man’s existence. And even if you are a progressive creationist and believe that God supernaturally created different kinds, you are still accepting the history. And so you are accepting that there was a history of death and bloodshed and violence even if God created supernaturally the reptiles, and supernaturally created the first birds.
The Biblical history says God created a perfect creation, man rebelled, and that brought sin and death and disease and suffering into the world, just the exact opposite.
As we talked about yesterday, the fossil record is a record of death and violence and struggle and extinction and disease. And that’s where they got the idea of millions of years: from the fossil record. For the evolutionist, this has always been the way it has been. Nature has always been “red in tooth and claw”. It’s “the survival of the fittest.” And it applies to every level of the biological tree. “It’s a dog eat dog world.” It’s an amoeba eat amoeba world. It’s a dinosaur eat dinosaur world. And it’s been that way from the beginning.
But that is absolutely contradictory to everything the Bible says about death. In Genesis one it says that God “saw all that He had made,” (after the 6th day), “and behold it was very good.” That’s a Hebrew way of saying it was perfect. It was just the way God wanted it.
But something happened, because two chapters later we find that Adam and Eve have sinned, God has judged the serpent which had physical implications, he judged Eve which had physical implications, he judged Adam which had physical implications, and in Gen. 3 it says He also judged the ground. “Cursed is the ground because of you.” God judged not only man spiritually at the fall, he judged man’s domain.
And in Genesis 5:29 when Noah was born we see the impact of this curse on the minds of people living 1600 years later, because Noah’s father named him Noah saying, “This one shall give us rest from our work and from the toil of our hands, arising from the ground which the Lord has cursed.” And then at the end of the flood, Noah comes off the ark, and the Lord smelled the soothing aroma of the sacrifice that he had made, and the Lord said to Himself: “I will never again curse the ground.” He cursed it at the fall, he cursed it the flood. And the geological record is a record of the curse of God on this earth for sin.
When we go to the NT, Paul summarizes this teaching in Romans 8 where he says that the whole creation is waiting eagerly for the revealing of the sons of God, for our final redemption. The whole creation was subjected to futility. The creation itself will also be set free from its slavery to corruption. The whole creation groans and suffers. God didn’t make the creation like that; it became that way because of God’s judgment at the fall. And it will be set free from that corruption when our redemption is completed and Jesus comes again.
In Acts 3:21, Peter preached that Jesus went to heaven and now “heaven must receive Him until the period of the restoration of all things.”
In Colossians 1, Paul talks about “the Father’s good pleasure for all the fullness to dwell in Him (Jesus Christ) and through Him to reconcile all things to Himself, whether things on earth, or things in heaven.” Jesus’ redemption was not just about saving us spiritually. It was about redeeming the whole creation, which is under the judgment of God.
And in Isaiah, we get a picture of what that redeemed state will be like when he says that “the wolf shall also dwell with the lamb, and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The little suckling child will play by the hole of the asp.” Creatures which are now dangerous to man, which are carnivores, will one day be completely harmless and herbivores, just like in the garden of Eden, when all the animals and man ate plants.
And then we come to the last book of the Bible, Revelation, and it says that there will be “no more death, no more tears, no more sorrow”, and what does it say? “No more curse.” From Genesis to Revelation, the Bible is absolutely consistent. Death came because of sin. Evolution says: death was always here.
If we really believe in the geological ages, then we have a problem because if God cursed the earth with thorns after Adam sinned, and that’s what Gen 3:18 says, then why do we find fossil thorns in rocks that are supposedly millions of years old before man? And we do. We find fossil thorns in rocks that “are” hundreds of millions of years old.
You know what else we find? We find disease in the fossil record. Here’s a record of the diagnosis of the first dinosaur tumor in a dinosaur fossil of “100 million years old”. And he says here: “diseases look the same through time.” It makes no difference if it is now or 100 million years old. They found cancer and arthritis in dinosaur bones. There’s a whole field of science that developed called “paleopathology,” the study of disease in the fossil record. If the fossil record is all before man, then what did the curse cause? Nothing. But that’s not what the Bible says.
Here’s a picture of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, a rare photograph. And Eve says to Adam: “Oh, what a perfect world.” “Yes Eve it’s very good just like God said.” But what Adam and Eve didn’t know, if the earth is really millions of years old, is, that under their feet, under the grass of the garden of Eden, were thousands of feet of sedimentary rock containing billions of fossils of former living plants and animals that had all died before they had been created. That is not what the Bible teaches. That is absolutely contradictory to what the Bible teaches. Those fossils are the result of Noah’s flood 1600 years after Adam and Eve sinned, not billions of years before they sinned.
So this issue of the age of the earth is a battle between two histories of death. The Bible says no death in the beginning; man sinned and rebelled against God, and that brought death into the creation. The Bible consistently teaches that death is temporary. It is an intrusion into history, and it will one day be done away with. But evolution says death has always been here. It has always been part of the process. As long as there has been life there has been death, and as long as there will be life there will be death. It’s not an intrusion, death is a permanent part of history. And if we believe in millions of years, what we’re really saying is that for millions of years before the fall of Adam, there was death and God called that very good. That’s just not what the Bible teaches.
V. The next reason that this issue is so foundational is belief in millions of years undermines the proclamation and belief in the Gospel. And the evolutionists again see this more clearly than many Christians.
I want to read a quote by Thomas Huxley. He was the bulldog defender of Darwin in the 19th c., a close personal friend of Darwin. He was one of Britain’s leading biologists. And more than any other single individual, he was probably the most responsible for the success of evolution in the minds of people in Great Britain, and especially in the church. And yet he had no respect for the Christians who compromised with evolution. And he wrote a book called “Science and Hebrew Tradition Essays.”
This is what he said in 1897: “I am fairly at a loss to comprehend how anyone for a moment can doubt that Christian theology must rise or fall with the historical trustworthiness of the Jewish Scriptures. The very conception of the Messiah is inextricably interwoven with Jewish history. The identification of Jesus of Nazareth with that Messiah rests upon the interpretation of passages of the Hebrew Scriptures which have no evidential value, unless they possess the historical character assigned to them.” Those early chapters are historical. He goes on and gives examples of his reasoning: “If the covenant with Abraham was not made,” (if that really did not happen in history), “if Abraham was more or less a mythical hero such as Theseus, if the story of the deluge is a fiction, if that of the fall is a legend, and that of the creation the dream of a seer, if all these definite and detailed narratives of apparently real events have no more real value as history than the stories of the regal period of Rome, what is to be said about the Messianic doctrine, the Gospel, which is so much more clearly enunciated in the Old Testament.”
He goes on: “And what about the authority of the writers of the books of the NT who on this theory have not only accepted flimsy fictions for solid truths, but have built the very foundations of Christian dogma upon legendary quicksand.”
Do you see what he is saying? If Christians don’t believe the early chapters of Genesis, they have just destroyed the whole foundation for believing the Gospel and everything else that the Bible teaches. And I would submit to you that over the last 100 years since he made that statement, that is exactly what has happened in the Western world that was once heavily influenced by Biblical Christianity. And you see it most clearly in Britain and America where the Gospel made such an impact through the Great Awakening at the time of Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield and the Wesley brothers.
The world is looking and they are saying, “You Christians don’t believe the early chapters of Genesis? Why should we believe the rest of it that is built on the foundation of the early chapters of Genesis?”
Here is an atheist saying the same thing, almost 80 years later. “It becomes clear now that the whole justification of Jesus’ life and death is predicated on the existence of Adam and the forbidden fruit he and Eve ate. Without original sin, who needs to be redeemed? Without Adam’s fall into a life of constant sin terminated by death, what purpose is there to Christianity? None.”
And that’s how most of the world today thinks, because they have been brainwashed with the lie of evolution and the lie of millions and billions of years.
The Bible traces the genealogy of Jesus in Luke all the way back to Adam
And it gives us the names of those people, so that we know that Jesus was a real person in time-space history. And he was a real descendant of Adam to solve the problems that Adam caused. But if we don’t believe the early chapters of Genesis, then what we are saying is that Jesus is a descendant of a metaphor, of a myth.
In I Cor. 15, Paul says that Jesus is the “last Adam” “For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.” Can you have the Gospel without Jesus? Of course not. But you can’t have the Gospel without Adam, because Jesus died to solve the problems that Adam caused. And if Adam didn’t really exist, or he didn’t really sin as the Bible says, then Jesus died for a mythological problem. And if Jesus died for a mythological problem, then Jesus is a mythological savior. And if he is a mythological savior, then He has promised us a mythological hope. The whole Gospel message collapses.
As I said yesterday, Michael Denton, an agnostic, author of “Evolution, a theory in Crisis” (1985), said this: “Today it is the Darwinian view of nature more than any other that is responsible for the agnostic and skeptical outlook of the 20th century.” And what was the foundation of Darwin’s theory? His theory would have never been born if the geologists had not already given him, supposedly proven, millions and millions of years.
Here’s a statement by a former Baptist who is now one of the leading opponents of Christianity at Harvard University, a professing atheist, a senior scientist there, E,O, Wilson. He wrote in the Humanist Magazine in 1992, “As were many persons from Alabama, I was a born-again Christian. When I was 15, I entered the So. Baptist Church, with great interest in the Fundamentalist religion. I left at 17, when I got to the University of Alabama and heard about evolution theory.”
Martin Lang is probably right when he says that “More cases of loss of religious faith are to be traced to the theory of evolution than to anything else. It has destroyed the faith of millions, literally, millions.” And we need to grasp the true Biblical history of creation, corruption, the catastrophe of Noah, the confusion at the tower of Babel, Christ’s coming. Why did he come? He came, born as a man, born as a baby, to live His life to show us what man was supposed to be, how Adam should have lived, and didn’t. But he didn’t come just to give us an example. He died on the cross to solve the problem that was started in the Garden. And he’s coming again to liberate this world from all the dark results of that sin.
SUMMARY
So reviewing,the theory of “millions of years” is not a scientific fact and if you have lingering doubts about that I encourage you to become informed with some of the literature out there.
Old earth thinking assaults the character of God. Old earth thinking contradicts the Bible’s thinking on death. Old earth thinking undermines the proclamation and belief in the Gospel.
I was talking to one of the most famous Christian leaders in America about a year ago. If I told you his name, I think most of you would know who he is. We were having a private conversation about this whole subject, and he said to me: “Terry, the age of the earth just doesn’t matter. I believe God could have created in 6 seconds, 6 days, 6 million years, it doesn’t matter. I believe God is a great God.” You know what he was really saying when he said that? He is a sincere godly man, who has led more people to Christ than I ever will. He was really saying: “It doesn’t matter what the Bible says.” Because the Bible says God created in 6 days, not in 6 seconds, not 6 million years, 6 days.
And so it does matter. It matters because God has spoken, it matters because he has told us the origin of death. It matters because he has explained the Gospel to us and shown us in the Word of God that the Gospel is based on Genesis, and the Gospel is taught from Genesis to Revelation. It matters. The real problem is that most of our theologians in most of our seminaries have bowed the knee to the authority of science, really the authority of evolutionists.
What’s our authority?
Is it the infallible Word of God who knows everything, who was there at the beginning, who always tells the truth; or is it the fallible opinions of sinful men,
who don’t know everything, who make mistakes, who don’t always tell the truth, sometimes deliberately telling us false things, and who are in rebellion against God and try to explain the world so they don’t have to be accountable to God?
For 200 years the church has bowed the knee to the scientist and not to the Word of God. The scientist says “The earth is billions of years old. Take my word for it.” God says “I created in 6 days. Take my word for it.”
In Isaiah God says this: “For my hand made all these things. Thus all these things came into being, declares the Lord. But to this one I will look, to him who is humble and contrite of spirit and who trembles at my word.” We need to stop trembling at the words of scientists, and tremble at the Word of God. And we need to call other Christians to do the same, including sincere, godly pastors, sincere godly OT scholars, sincere godly theologians who have been brainwashed through their education just like all the rest of us. And we need to call them back to the word of God.
And I submit to you that we are really not a humble person unless we humbly bow before the Word of God, not to worship the Bible, but to worship the God who has spoken in the Bible.
We’re in a battle; we’re in a huge battle. And for the last 200 years the evolutionists have been destroying the foundation of the church and they have built their humanistic philosophy of moral relativism on the foundation of evolution. There is no God, there is no one to whom we are accountable, there is no one who makes the laws. So you can do whatever you want. If you want to be married to a man if you are a man, that’s OK. If you want to rape someone, if you want to go into school and shoot someone, there’s no law of God that you will have to answer to. That’s the product of evolutionary thinking. So we have a battle, and we need to rebuild the foundations. We need to understand the truth that science does not prove evolution. What we actually know, and it’s increasingly becoming the case, that the scientific evidence fits what the Bible says. It does not fit what evolution says.
So we are in a battle. And if you’re going to win the battle, you understand that the battle is for the minds of men, because if you think wrongly, you live wrongly. And so we must get our thinking reoriented, and we have to learn answers. And there are a lot of resources out there. I encourage you, I plead with you to become informed.
30 years ago, I was converted to Christ at a university, and there were just a handful of books, maybe about 5, defending the truth of Genesis. And today there are 100 times that many, and not just in the English language. So please get informed. Read. Stop watching TV for a few months, and read some books, or buy some creation videos, and become informed. We are in a battle and we are losing in our church and in our culture. God bless you.