My friend Ron handed me a little article out of the Los Angeles Times from Friday, June 25…just a couple of weeks ago. It says, “A Delta II rocket carried a NASA telescope off Cape Canaveral Thursday on a three-year, 204 million dollar mission to try to discover the origin of the universe.” Now that’s 204 of your million dollars, and mine, to try to find out what’s in the first chapter of Genesis. Amazing.
Satan is the archenemy of God. Satan is an incurable liar and a deceiver and the Bible says he’s the father of lies. Satan hates the truth of God. And he dominates the world that he rules with falsehood. In fact, Romans 1 says that civilization in general has exchanged the truth of God for the lie. In other words, the world lives under pervasive deception and falsehood. And Satan’s lies literally pervade all human thought, governing all intellectual work, all science, all philosophy, all sociology, all psychology and everything else.
But there are two lies in particular that provide the basic paradigm for modern culture, two lies. Lie number one is that life is random. That is that the way things are is just the way they kind of happened with nobody planning and nobody carrying it off, it just sort of evolved that way. Life is random. There is no purpose to it. There is no reason for it. There is no sovereign unfolding plan being carried out by a designing and powerful creator. Life is just random.
To put it another way, the universe as it exists was not created by God, nor is God the authority over this creation. It’s just a matter of chance, random chance.
Second lie…first one, life is random…second lie, truth is relative…truth is relative. The Bible is not the Word of God. The Bible does not give us the truth about right and wrong, life and death, morality and immorality in the past and the future. There is no authority beyond yourself. Life is random, truth is relative.
Now those two lies are so established in our society that people hate the Christian world view which opposes those lies. We don’t believe life is random. We believe the universe as it is right now was created by God and is sustained by God and ruled by God. We do not believe the truth is relative, we believe truth is absolute and it is absolutely revealed on the pages of Scripture, which is the revelation of God.
To say that life as we know it, the universe as we know it, is the work of the creator God who is its sovereign and its sustainer and who as He began it will bring it to its end is to go against the grain of our culture. To say the truth is absolute and the truth is as revealed in the Bible is to generate the hostility of the society around us.
Two great ideologies rule. No creator and no moral law. And that dispossesses man of any accountability.
Now in this series we are looking really at both of these lies because the lie that life is random flies in the face of Genesis chapter 1. Genesis chapter 1 does away with all evolution, establishing the fact that God is the creator of everything as it is. And we also by accepting at face value the teaching of Genesis chapter 1 are countering the attack on the Bible as the Word of God. We believe the Bible is the Word of God no matter what it says, whether it’s talking about history, morality or creation.
These two lies go together. Evolutionists who reject the idea of a creator God, therefore reject the idea of the Bible as an authoritative document written by that creator God. But beyond that, evolutionists, both theistic evolutionists–those who say that evolution occurred but there is a God, He sort of launched evolution, and those who are atheistic or humanistic evolutionists, in any case any evolutionist at all whether he believes there’s a God or not in order to espouse evolution has to deny Genesis chapter 1. He has to deny then that God created the universe as it is and that the record of that creation as contained in Scripture is infallible, inerrant and true.
So we’re really running across the grain of these two great deceptions because Genesis 1 affirms God as the creator and it affirms that the account of that creation in the Bible is in fact infallible, inerrant and true. The truly Christian view is that the Bible is the Word of God and God exists and has in Scripture revealed Himself. The truly Christian view then is that God is the creator, God is the moral lawgiver, and the universe around us is the work of His creative hand and the Bible is the revelation of His moral and spiritual law.
We believe that what Genesis 1 says is as true as any other part of Scripture. Genesis 1 is just as true as Exodus 20 which gives us the Ten Commandments. It’s just as true as Isaiah 53 which describes the suffering servant who would be the Messiah and bear our iniquities. It’s just as true as Matthew chapter 1 which indicates that Jesus was to be born of Mary and to be the Savior of the world. It’s just as true as John chapter 3 which says you must be born again. It’s just as true as any other and every other part of Scripture. There is no basis for tampering with, questioning, or denying the veracity of Genesis 1 anymore than any other part of Scripture. In fact, any disbelief in or tampering with or altering of Genesis 1 is an act of rebellion against God and His Word. It’s a serious thing to do that because like any other such rebellion, one who attacks the veracity of God and the Word of God brings upon himself the threat of divine judgment.
Listen to the words of the last chapter in the Bible. Revelation 22 verse 18, “I testify to everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book, if anyone adds to them God shall add to him the plagues which are written in this book; and if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part from the tree of life and from the holy city which are written in the book.” The bottom line, the Bible ends with a warning that you better not tamper with Scripture. And anyone who tampers with Scripture, to add to it or take away from it, brings himself under divine judgment.
So we could readily conclude that altering the Scripture, tampering the Scripture or just flatly not believing the Scripture is unthinkable for a faithful, wise believer. It’s unthinkable. It is only reasonable that an ungodly and foolish unbeliever would attack the testimony of Scripture, and they do that all the time. That’s just a way of life with them. For a believer to assault the veracity of Scripture is an unimaginable thing. And yet there are many so-called Christians who do that. They wouldn’t deny the morality of the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20, they wouldn’t deny the…they wouldn’t deny the prophetic testimony of the coming suffering Messiah in Isaiah 53. They wouldn’t deny the virgin birth of Jesus Christ. They wouldn’t deny the gospel of grace and the need for the new birth. They wouldn’t deny other things in Scripture, but they do deny the clear teaching of Genesis chapter 1.
Why do they do that? Why do so-called Christians bring themselves under such jeopardy, under the threat of the closing portion of Scripture which says their names could be taken out of the book of life and from the holy city and the plagues that are written in Scripture could be pronounced upon them as divine curses, why would people jeopardize themselves by tampering with Scripture in the light of such warnings? Do they do it because they desire to please evolutionary scientists rather than holy God? Do they love the…do they love the applause of men? Do they love the reputation of academics more than God? Do they seek the approval of departmental committees more than the holy God of the universe?
Fair questions, aren’t they? It’s unthinkable to me that so-called Christians would deny Genesis on the basis of what? This is the Word of God.
“This article originally appeared here at Bible Bulletin Board.”