Albert Mohler - Missing the Mark?

In his recent post, Values and Moral Truth are Not the Same, Albert Mohler discusses the transition in our society from one of morals to one of "values". Quoting Mohler:

"Values reflect only a subjective dimention with no objective moral truth. A generation raised in the incubator of moral relativism is groping for enduring truth in the moral wilderness."

Now, I agree completely with Dr. Mohler on this issue. Where we fall down is on where we place the blame for this societal decline. He cites an abdication of moral leadership of Christians as a root cause of this shift. I would argue that an abdication of the specific authority of the Bible to teach in all areas is the root cause here. What do I mean? Well, in particular, Genesis chapters 1 through 11 specifically address all of the areas specified by Dr. Mohler: life, sexuality, family, marriage and moral responsibility.

Once the "church" decided it was ok to throw out the first portions of the first book for the Bible given secular scientists "discoveries" about the "actual" age of the earth, we completely lost our moral footing. Gone is the very reason for life (to love and worship God who made us in His own image), sexuality (man created male and female, the man leaving his family to cleave to his wife), family (established for man to be fruitful and multiply), marriage (between one man and one woman alone) or moral responsibility (yes, you are accountable to a just God for your actions). Without a solid foundation in the first 11 chapters of Genesis, it's not surprising that the postmodern philosophists in our society are winning.

It's instructive to view how first Peter and then Paul framed their sermons to different groups in the book of Acts. In Acts chapter 2, you have Peter speaking to Jews in Jerusalem at Pentecost.

"Men of Israel, hear these words: Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs that God did through him in your midst, as you yourselves know -- this Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men. God raised him up, loosing the pangs of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it...This Jesus, God raised up, and of that we all are witnesses. Let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified." Acts 2:22-24,32,36 (ESV)

That's a pretty straightforward gospel message being preached. Now, contrast that with Paul, preaching to the Athenians at the Areopagus in Acts chapter 17:

"Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, To the unknown god.
"What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands as though he needed anything since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined alloted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each of us, for in him we live and move and have our being; as even some of your own poets have said, For we are indeed his offspring.
"Being then God's offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man. The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance ot all by raising him from the dead." Acts 17:22b-31 (ESV)

Is it not interesting to note that Paul does not primarily preach the gospel message to the Athenians, he preaches Genesis 2, 3 and 11 before even mentioning, in his final 2 sentences, the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ? Paul sets his moral authority by declaring that there is, indeed, a God in heaven. This is the God who formed each and every one of those listening to him, and that one day, God who will, one day, judge the world in righteousness.

Our culture is much more like the Athenians than it is the Jews in Jerusalem. We have lost our own "moral absolutes" by allowing secular society to chip away at the very foundation of the gospel message. If Genesis 1-11 is not true, if it's not history, then how can anyone be certain of Matthew, Mark, Luke or John? What of Romans, Galatians?

"If the foundations are destroyed,
what can the righteous do?
The LORD is in his holy temple;
the LORD'S throne is in heaven;" Psalms 11:3-4a (ESV)

Dr. Mohler, as the leader of the pre-eminent Southern Baptist seminary in the country, please stand up and proclaim the truth of the Bible from the very first book! Genesis desperately needs to be preached to our nation.

And the first animal was. . . .

And the first animal on Earth was a... from PhysOrg.com

A new study mapping the evolutionary history of animals indicates that Earth's first animal--a mysterious creature whose characteristics can only be inferred from fossils and studies of living animals--was probably significantly more complex than previously believed.

[...]

I think the first sentence of the attached article says it well. "Earth's first animal...was probably...more complex than previously believed."

Actually, this article is so riddled with careful language and unsubstantiated, unproven presuppositions, it's hard to see how a journalist would even print this stuff as factual. Let's quote mine. . .

"The tree of life is a hierarchical representation of the evolutionary relationships between species that was introduced by Charles Darwin."

Presupposition: All life evolved from a single form of life at some time in the past.

Fact: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth...And God said, Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures...So God created the great sea creatures and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm...And God saw that it was good."

Discuss: Since we're dealing in this article with aquatic life, I think it's of some worthy note that God created the "great" sea creatures along with the microscopic life with which the seas teem.

"This finding challenges the traditional view of the base of the tree of life, which honored the lowly sponge as the earliest diverging animal. 'This was a complete shocker...So shocking that we initially thought something had gone very wrong.'"

Presupposition: The tree of life, as written, is sacrosanct and correct.

Fact: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth...And God said, Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures..."

Discuss: Well, duh, Mr. Dunn. Something has gone very, very wrong. You have placed your own fallible mind and understanding ahead of God. You have fallen for the lie. And here you have evidence that the "tree of life" is no longer a Holy Relic to venerated, but merely a relic of man's own misplaced faith in himself.

"...We don't have fossils of the oldest comb jelly, therefore, there is no way to date the earliest jelly to determine when it diverged."

Presupposition: That it "diverged" at all.

Fact: "God created the ... sea creatures ... according to their kinds"

Discuss: The article goes on to discuss what happened "after diverging from other species." It is full of words and phrases like "probably", "likely", "going to" and "will." There is nothing new under the sun, it seems.

What's most troublesome about stories like this is the way in which otherwise intelligent people are blinded by the reality of their own presuppositions. Not once does it occur to PhysOrg, the NSF or Mr. Dunn himself to question the base premise of this study: that evolution is a fact, not a theory.

If you use a pure exegetical reading of the book of Genesis to inform your worldview, then it becomes clear that finds like this support and uphold the Genesis record. God created all of the original sea creatures on the fifth day. If you don't -- that is, if you rely on the fallible opinions of mankind, where you are boxed in by your own premises, then when a finding like this happens along, you have to invent a story of your own to make the finding fit. We have to 'rethink' the tree of life.

A Lesson In Scale

A few days ago, my twin sons were preparing a project for their Awana Truth & Training club. The project involved making a "model of the solar system" and was to include Psalms 19:1:

"The heavens declare the glory of God,and the sky above proclaims his handiwork"

Once they had completed their own projects, I thought it would be fun to do a kind of "family" version. So, I identified a section of wall about 10 feet in length and drew a horizontal line about 3.5 feet off the ground. I labeled the left end of the line "the Sun" and drew a pretty big semi-circle - probably with a radius of 6-8 inches.
I took a book we had on the solar system and determined that Neptune, at 30 AU, would determine the scale. Given about 100 inches to work with, I decide to make my scale 3"=1AU. So, we put a dot on our line for each planet:

• 1.2" (0.4 AU) - Mercury
• 2.1" (0.7 AU) - Venus
• 3.0" (1.0 AU) - Earth
• 4.5" (1.5 AU) - Mars
• 15.6" (5.2 AU) - Jupiter (quite a gap there!)
• 28.5" (9.5 AU) - Saturn
• 58.8" (19.6 AU) - Uranus
• 90" (30 AU) - Neptune

Ok, so after plotting these 'dots' on my orbital plane, I decided we should give a sense of scale to these planets. So, at a scale of 1"=50,000,000km, I determined the size of the circle I would need to draw for Jupiter, the largest planet.

0.00285 inches

That's the diameter of Jupiter on my wall. Not even 3 one-thousandths of an inch. Wow. Ok, so now I'm doubting my math, because I just sort of assumed that I could at least SEE Jupiter in my model. I mean, the pencil dot I'd placed on my line was perhaps an order of magnitude or two in size greater than the 0.00285 inches it should have been. Not just that, the line itself was probably an order of magnitude too big.

So, the next logical question is. . .how big is the Sun on this scale? I got out my trusty calculator. . .

0.02784 inches

Not even three HUNDREDTHS of an inch? Remember - I'd drawn my "model" sun with a diameter of maybe EIGHT inches - 287x too big!! The dot I'd placed for the Earth was probably only half that size! At this scale, the solar system has a radius of nearly 10 feet, but you can't actually SEE any of the planets to scale! You can barely even see the Sun itself!!! And we're only talking about OUR solar system? Neptune, after all, is only 30 AU from the Sun! Alpha Centauri, our closest neighbor, is 277,600 AU. Or roughly 41,500,000,000,000km. On my scale, I'd have to put Alpha Centauri 830,000 inches away. That's 69,167 feet. That's 13 MILES away.

So what does all of this mean? In his book Taking Back Astronomy, Dr. Jason Lisle says:

"...the vastness and beauty of the universe declare God's glory. God could have chosen to create only the earth, sun and moon, and life would have been possible; but instead He chose to make a universe immense beyond imagination to give us just a small taste of His incredible magnificence." (emphasis mine)

What else is there to say on this, but:

"The heavens delcare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork."

Did God Really Say. . . .?

It is the height of irony that so many Christians have succumbed to the attacks by the secular-humanist society around us when their game plan has been

"clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world....So [we] are without excuse."
Romans 1:20 (ESV, paraphrased, used out of context for a point)

What do I mean by that, exactly? Well, from the very beginning, the attack on humanity has been rooted in the subtle words of the serpent in the Garden:

"Did God actually say..."
Genesis 3:1 (ESV)

You see, the attacks on our faith today are just as subtle now as they were then. And believers everywhere have fallen for it, including many evangelical leaders! The world has taken fallible Man's interpretation of the things around us and tried to force it to fit the biblical account! And over time, likely in order to keep the proverbial door open to discussions about the Gospel, we've acquiesced on these foundational principles of our faith.

For example, Oxford Hebrew scholar James Barr, in a letter to David C.C. Watson, April 23, 1984, wrote

"...probably, so far as I know, there is no professor of Hebrew or Old Testament at any world-class university who does not believe that the writer(s) of Genesis 1-11 intended to convey to their readers the ideas that: 1. creation took place in a series of six days which were the same as the days of 24 hours we now experience; 2. the figures contained in the Genesis genealogies provided by simple addition a chronology from the beginning of the world up to later stages in the biblical story; 3. Noah's flood was understood to be world-wide and extinguish all human and animal life except for those in the ark."

Naturally, Barr doesn't believe Genesis, but he understands the writer's intention. Consider Exodus 20:11, which often gets overlooked any debate on what the writer of Genesis meant to say:

"For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day, and made it holy." (ESV)

The appropriate hermeneutic for Scripture in general, and Genesis in particular, should be exegesis, not eisegesis. God has revealed Himself to us through His word. I do not find the need to force it to say what I find to be more "reasonable" in light of what origins science, rather than observational science has determined about the "truth" of history. Genesis is God's first and best source of information with regards to the beginning of history as He was the one and only eye-witness to the events contained within it.

So yes, God really did say...

Why Genesis? Part Deux

A recent comment on my "Why Genesis?" article read:

Ok, so what if God (assuming He exists and is, in fact, the Creator) kicked everything off with the Big Bang and just let it all simmer until conditions on Earth were ready to support homo Sapiens. What if He then created the Biblical Adam and Eve and placed them here in a special event. The rest would then be Bible history. Kind of.

This would allow us to worship at both alters, right?

This is a question which has driven many many Christians to attempt to somehow square the Biblical record with more recent scientific "findings". Some of the more well known attempts are:

1. Day-Age - The days of Genesis 1 are not to be interpreted as literal days. Instead, the author simply used the word day to mean "an indeterminate but finite length of time". This is like saying "Back in my grandfather's day. . ."
2. Gap - This theory purports a "gap" in time between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2. In other words, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Some unknown length of time later, probably billions of years in fact, the earth was without form and void..."
3. Theistic Evolution - God created, setting "things into motion" and natural processes took over, resulting in the eventual rise of Man.
4. Progressive Creation -God created this, then He waited. Then He created that and waited some more. Finally, after billions of years (4.4 or so billion of them), He planted "a garden in Eden, in the east, and there He put the man whom He had formed [very very recently, but late in the created order of things]."

So, the comment above is sort of an amalgam of Theistic Evolution and Progressive Creationism. Let's examine WHY these modes of thinking contradict the Bible.

1. First and foremost, there are other words in Hebrew for "a long period of time". For example dor means just that: "an age". If God had intended for us to think it took Him a long period of time, he could very easily have said so. He did not. He tells us it took Him only 6 literal days.
2. The genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11 give very detailed information, allowing us to accurately determine the amount of time which passed between Adam and Abraham. The genealogies of Matthew 1 are clearly intentionally abbreviated, as their purpose is to show the ancestry of Jesus rather than the ancestral line of Jesus. The genealogies of Genesis are clearly and specifically delineated to provide for us the ancestral line of mankind.
3. For every argument over the meaning of the word day in Genesis, Exodus 20:9-11 makes it very clear that the true intent was to communicate six literal days:"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, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy." (ESV)
4. Jesus himself taught the historicity of Genesis. He referred to Adam, Noah, Lot and his wife, Moses and Jonah during his ministry as real, historic figures. In Mark 10:6, Jesus was addressing the issue of divorce and said "But from the beginning of creation, God made them male and female." Now, if you accept a 4 billion year history for the Earth, with Adam and Eve being either specially created or fully "evolved" within the last, say, 100,000 years, you have a problem. See, the last 100,000 years, if we assume the total 4 billion years as one 24 hour day, they only account for the last 2.16 seconds. That's hardly the "beginning of creation," is it? But, if we go with the Bible, and compare the last 6000 years as our 24 hour clock, day 6 happened only one quarter of one second from the first creative act. That fits nicely with the words of Jesus, doesn't it?
5. To believe in millions or billions of years is to believe in the existence of pain, death and suffering prior to the Fall. Genesis records that all living creatures were initially created vegetarian. Scripture refers over and over again to the "restoration" of things: Acts 3:21, Colossians 1:20. This restoration will things set back to their original state, which Revelation 21:3-5 clearly indicates NO disease, suffering or death.
   
6. Circular Reasoning. Initially, the *illions of years were proposed by eighteenth and nineteenth century geologists. Using uniformitarian assumptions about erosion rates, etc, and starting without a biblical worldview to account for what they were seeing, they "determined" the age of the Earth to be significantly longer ago than the Bible clearly indicates. In fact, even today, fossils are dated according to which layer of sedimentary rock they are found in. This is the classic "geologic column." But they prove the ages of these rock layers, since none of them come with dates attached, by seeing what fossils each layer contain. That is classic circular reasoning, which should lead you, as it does me, to question the validity of either the age of the rocks, or the age of the fossils within them.

All this points to the fact that there is only alter to worship on. Genesis provides us with a very firm foundation on which to build the story of the redemptive work of Jesus Christ of Nazareth on the Roman cross nearly 2000 years ago.


If you've never trusted Jesus as your personal Savior, I urge you to do so. There is a God in heaven who is responsible for your being here. He wants you to love Him, and it hurts Him deeply when we choose to disobey the things He has commanded for us. This is called sin. The Bible records that "the wages of sin is death." This means that, when someone sins, then someone needs to die. He loves you so much, though, that He was willing to step into history and bear your sin and pay your penalty. Paul says in the book of Romans:

"There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit." Romans 8:1-4 (ESV)

God Bless and good night.

Pre-Clovis Breakthrough or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Radiocarbon Dating

Pre-Clovis Breakthrough

Ok, so this archaeologist has discovered human feces that radiocarbon dating has pinpointed as being 14,300 years old. Hrm.

That doesn't seem to square with a literal interpretation of the book of Genesis, does it? Radiocarbon dating has long been used to determine the age of organic materials recovered by archaeologists.

Now, not to get too technical, but Radiocarbon dating compares the amount of C¹⁴, or Carbon 14, a radioactive isotope of carbon with a half-life of only a bit more than 5000 years, with the amount of C¹² in the same sample. The problem here lies in the assumptions of those doing the testing. By determining the C14:C12 ratio and comparing it to the C14:C12 ratio in the atmosphere today, they can determine how much C14 has decayed away. Since they know the half-life of C14, they can then determine how long it's been since the organic specimen was alive. The problem, of course, is that we have no way of knowing what the C14:C12 ratio was 1000, 2000, even 3, 4 or 5000 years ago. In fact, it is possible, even likely, that the biosphere contained significantly more carbon in living organisms prior to the Deluge. In "Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth, Vol. 2", published by the Institute for Creation Research, J. Baumgarder stated:

If that were the case, and this C-14 were distributed uniformly throughout the biosphere, and the total amount of biosphere C were, for example, 500 times that of today’s world, the resulting C-14/C-12 ratio would be 1/500 of today’s level....

There's a good article on C-14 dating over at Lambert Dolphin's Library.

Start with the Bible. It is a firm foundation!

National Geographic News Photo Gallery: Rare "Prehistoric" Shark Photographed Alive

National Geographic News Photo Gallery: Rare "Prehistoric" Shark Photographed Alive

Fascinating. Another "living fossil." Tell me, at what point is a creature evolved enough that it is no longer beneficial for point mutations to survive natural selection? I mean, we have the coelacanth, once thought to be an intermediate form of fish which had an actual, primitive, though non-functioning "lung." We have the horseshoe crab, which hasn't effectively changed in allegedly 425 million years. The cockroach, everyones favorite houseguest, has been with us in its present form for an alleged 350 million years.

Even in plant life, the Wollemi Pine was once thought extinct for over 90 million years was found thriving in the Australian outback.

With so many "perfect" organisms -- in the sense that no further natural selection was able to improve on the organism substantially enough to survive the original -- in full "bloom" so long ago, what's taking the rest of us so long?

Or, is it more possible that God actual did create the coelacanth, the cockroach, the horseshoe crab, the wollemi pine tree, you and me specifically?

Evolution can't account for living fossils. Genesis can.

Why Genesis?

Why is Genesis so important? Why do I believe it's necessary to take it so seriously?

Let's get one thing straight and out in the open first thing:

For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.

Ephesians 2:8-9 (ESV)

...at the name of Jesus, every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father

Philippians 2:10-12 (ESV)

If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved.

Romans 10:9-10 (ESV)

So a literal interpretation of Genesis is obviously not required for salvation. It is my belief that you can believe that the Universe is billions and billions of years old and still be saved. Your only real issue is one of consistency.

You see, without a literal, historical Genesis, it becomes almost insurmountably difficult to justify our faith. I mean, if the theory of evolution is in fact a fact, and if there was no first man and first woman who truly sinned by disobeying God, then why was it necessary for Christ to come at all?

Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned
Romans 5:12 (ESV)

For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.
1 Corinthians 15:22 (ESV)

The first man Adam became a living being; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit.
1 Corinthians 15:45 (ESV)

Clearly, if Genesis 1-4 is allegory, if there was no real Adam, then a universalist position that a real savior isn't necessary and the above passages are actually allegorical as well naturally follows. It's also clearly NOT what most Christians believe. Jesus was an historical figure. He did come and die on a cross to save us from our sins. He did rise again and ascend to the Father. And the Bible itself tells us that he did it because Adam did have a choice to obey or disobey God; and that Adam did choose to disobey; and that Adam did condemn us all to death.

Genesis is so foundational to the Gospel story, that, in order to be intellectually honest, I don't think you can cavalierly sweep it under the rug of Theistic Evolution or the Gap Theory.

In the coming days, I'm going to be post some thoughts on the first 11 chapters of Genesis. I hope you'll come back, read what I have to say, and leave your comments or thoughts!

In the Beginning. . .

Genesis [jen-uh-sis] - the first book of the Bible
Historicity [his-tuh-ris-i-tee] - historical authenticity
Genesistoricity [jen-uh-sis-tuh-ris-i-tee] - The historical authenticty of the Word of God from the very beginning

So. I've always thought about blogging. I read a few blogs with some regularity -- you can find those to the right of this post, I believe. But, I've not really stumbled upon anything that I felt passionate enough about to warrant some kind of on-going commentary.

Well, that's changed.

John 17:17 says "Your word is truth"

Why, then, do we compromise God's Word with man's opinion? Answering that question has been my quest of late, and this blog will be your window on that quest.

I mean, even the Baptist Faith & Message even says that scripture "...has God for its author, salvation for its end, and truth, without any mixture of error, for its matter. Therefore, all Scripture is totally true and trustworthy." You'd think they'd apply that uniformly. Not so, apparently. More on that tomorrow. . .