I don't think His message was to tell people whether or not Genesis was literal or not. His message was that God created everything.
Later Biblical authors referred to Genesis in a literal manner, and Jesus twice mentioned the first male and female as being made in the beginning, which is the opposite of evolutionary teaching.
I look at it like this: Jesus healed the leper. Now, with the gifts of wisdom, intelligence, and through hard work, we can heal lepers. We can heal fevers and can even sometimes make the lame walk. Jesus could have just explained how antibiotics, aspirin, and autologous stem cell transplants work, but humanity was not ready for that.
Well, it would be if He had chosen to do it that way, but He clearly didn't. And I don't understand how creating everything in six days is any less awesome and majestic...to me, it's much more so.
Humanity was not ready for what we'd eventually come to know about the Earth - that it is not 6,000 years old, and that it took much longer; in the same way explaining those things above. Genesis is true, because God doesn't lie, but who knows what God's days are like?
We were given intelligence and the desire to learn by God. Rejecting science is like rejecting medicine and doctors, and demanding that Jesus heal us. Sometimes, he uses doctors. Sometimes he doesn't, but it isn't our place to deny the gifts of intelligence and wisdom that He gave only to humanity.
We have vestigial traits like the Plica Semilunaris and muscles behind our ears that serve no purpose, except in lower species. God isn't in the business of fooling us, and He isn't in the business of being told what He can and cannot be or do.
Six Days would have been awesome, but scientific evidence doesn't point in that direction. My belief in evolution has never, not even once made me question my belief in God or Jesus or the Holy Ghost. Not for a second. The idea that Creation unfolded over eons and ages, and that God knows everything, every grain of sand, every cell, every creature, since the dawn of time, leaves me in awe of His majesty and love for us.
Psalm 33 says "He spoke and it was done."
But He also said that all would not be told to those who couldn't understand.
Matthew 13:10-13:
10 And his disciples came and said to him: Why speakest thou to them in parables?
11 Who answered and said to them: Because to you it is given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven: but to them it is not given.
12 For he that hath, to him shall be given, and he shall abound: but he that hath not, from him shall be taken away that also which he hath.
13 Therefore do I speak to them in parables: because seeing they see not, and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand.
Yet you seem to believe His message was to not take it literally. Genesis reads in a straightforward manner. There's no need to root around and try to dig some hidden meaning out of it. If God can create everything out of nothing, surely doing it in six days isn't beyond Him. Right?
"I look at it like this: Jesus healed the leper. Now, with the gifts of wisdom, intelligence, and through hard work, we can heal lepers. We can heal fevers and can even sometimes make the lame walk. Jesus could have just explained how antibiotics, aspirin, and autologous stem cell transplants work, but humanity was not ready for that."
That response completely ignores the fact that, as I posted, Jesus referred twice to male and female being made at the beginning. Just read the words. Did Jesus lie?
As for what you posted, are you saying that Jesus's healing powers weren't divine, that He just had advanced skills we're now attaining?
"Six Days would have been awesome, but scientific evidence doesn't point in that direction. My belief in evolution has never, not even once made me question my belief in God or Jesus or the Holy Ghost. Not for a second. The idea that Creation unfolded over eons and ages, and that God knows everything, every grain of sand, every cell, every creature, since the dawn of time, leaves me in awe of His majesty and love for us."
I feel like a parrot repeating myself here, but you can't believe both. Either you believe evolution's ages of suffering and dying, and the recent arrival of man, or you believe that pain and death came after the fall, and man was created at the beginning---as Jesus twice confirmed. The two are completely contradictory.
The fact that God created everything in six days in no way lessens His infinite knowledge, and for the life of me, I don't understand that way of thinking. It makes no sense.
Evolution was, and still is, celebrated among atheists as a way to explain our existence without bringing God into the equation. Yet some Christians fight on the same side as the atheists.
"13 Therefore do I speak to them in parables: because seeing they see not, and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand."
Not applicable. Genesis wasn't written in the style of a parable. The principle people and events in Genesis are referred to throughout the Bible as real people & real events, by the prophets, and by no less than the Lord Himself.
Unless Genesis is an account of historical events, then much of the Bible is meaningless, including Christ's redemption of the human race. If there was no Adam, no fall, no entrance of sin into God's perfect paradise on earth, then there's no need for atonement.
Paul knew it. He wrote:
'For as by one man's disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous'
Romans 5:19
And:
'For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive… And so it is written, The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit' 1 Corinthians 21-22; 45.
One man's ---Adam's---disobedience.
Adam---the first man, by whom came death.
It's clear.