Posted on 03/26/2009 7:20:22 PM PDT by GodGunsGuts
‘But the New Testament does not make a big deal out of the Age of the Earth…’
by Peter Milford
...
The issue of the age of the earth parallels circumcision. In my experience, the first response from Christians who do not accept the age of the earth that the Scriptures indicate, is to say something like “The New Testament does not make a big deal out of the age of the earth” or “It is not the purpose of the Bible to give the age of the earth”. Their point is that (1) the issue of the age of the earth is a non-essential, and (2) therefore not something we should argue about. They believe we are free to hold whatever view our conscience permits. They are right in the first part. In and of itself, the age of the earth is not a central focus of Scripture. But the distortions a long-age view brings to the gospel message make them wrong on the second part...
(Excerpt) Read more at creation.com ...
Because believing in God isn’t enough - you have to believe the exact same way they do.
Don’t understand it myself - but that is what it looks like to me.
However, it does make a big deal about Adam. Christ is the new Adam. And Eve. The relationship between Adam and Eve is made the model for marriage by Christ. one of the most positive changes made by Jesus in human morality. Even if one tries to make it a metaphor, the moral unity of mankind does not mesh well with Darwinian theories of the origin of man.
Certainly no more ridiculous as Richard Darwin’s statement that life was planted on earth by aliens from outer space. Even the replication of a process of making dead matter into life must make use of information produced by human intelligence. By design, in other words.
P personally have no problem with evolution provided that we understand it to be mysterious, like our financial systm.
Not only that, Jesus Christ tells us that in the beginning He made us male and female. That would be kinda hard to do if in the beginning we were nothing more than pond scum :o)
Whether you believe Earth is five thousand years, a few million years, round, flat as a pancake, center of the universe, or backwater corner, honestly doesn’t make a difference to salvation in the belief in Jesus Christ.
I was always really good in school with concepts. I dropped out of my economics class in college while I was getting a pretty solid "B" in the class. My professor asked why I was dropping out when I was doing so well, and I responded that "none of this stuff makes any sense to me at all."
I realize now that with that statement I was apparently fully qualified to run the Treasury Department.
That he doesn’t tell us HOW we came from pond scrum does suggest that that information is not of cardinal importance. Human nature is pretty much a given. Even if we are in the lineage of pond scum, we ought not behave as if we were.
LOL!
Thanks for the ping!
True. However, both sides feel that the other weakens the gospel message. As such, it is worth debating to see which side has God’s approval.
See, 1 Corinthians 11:19
Doing right indeed, and it is why Genesis mentions after each act that God saw that it was good. Historic credit makes revisionism a nono, not in terms of time lines but of fundamentals of how things are. We are good or we are bad, it does not matter who started a fight, the importance of the mind in crisis in the end does not stop once that issue is “resolved”.
Because he or she started it is not the issue, but the inherent nature of a heart of adultery in each. To be tried either by Satan at the tree directly or by a tainted Eve biting it is a great error since to Eve the tree was made by satan to look familiar and not strange just as Eve became an incidental instrument for Satan, same difference except of an efficiency and shrunken time.
The world can be inflated or deflated indefinitely depending on the will of the heart. Just as a circle of infinite radius is a straight infinite line, faith is meant to straighten the line instead of curving it on ourselves. Perhaps it is how the Red Sea seemed to appear being parted or that Jesus appeared to a blinded Earthen eye to walk on water, just as a jet oriented on the horizon appears to go straight up or down.
The importance is the sequence: Genesis indicates that Cain did not want to wander without a mark. It means people were already around as well as so called “times before” perhaps.
What if God makes the Earth and man and woman. Despite all precautions, man can choose to implode or to expand either way. We do not need to go over and over the exercise over eons or not to figure that out. It’s a fundamental nature of the situation of Creator vs. Created. This is reflected back to Christ where He says basicaly during the “educational example” of the Jews of freeing the soul from sin is what Moses really established metaphoricaly by being given flight and freeing from an Egypt which owned the world but either shrank or good not prevent an inflation from itself. Essentialy the parting of the sea is related to the new land, both appearing miraculously.
With Christ, from material example, things become mathematical or more “abstract”/general. No longer do we have real life quasi-historic examples of tribulations as in the book of Daniel, but we have “simple” illustrative parables of how it works. These are prophecy tools for whomever as a heart which puts the world and not God as an incidental of our lives, because an incidental God to our material lives becomes forgotten as it all shrinks out and degenerates into perversions.
People who say they “believe in science” merely admit their perversion and constant state of wish to be “teleprompted” because their mind is in a state of permanent chaos and crisis they seek to avoid as, otherwise, death is to be faced. They hope it to be cadenced like the spin of the stars in the sky without afterthought, callously consuming and consumed by animations. As the world shrinks and loses in enthropy it shrinks and the cycles increase in dizzying pace. It’s a state or path of information implosion, truth destruction, revisionism, lies, rationalizations, misrepresentations, false witnessings, brutalities and even denial of scientific achievements for self and others etc.
Christ reinforces and validates the message of Genesis and does not take away nor adds to it, divided, as the Koran or questions/denunciations takes like that seem to intimate. He reflects on it as per the “intentions” of God being more important than the detail timelines and moneys which preoccupy the ambitious Judahs and accusers of this world.
Great post on Job angle, a most difficult book.
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. 2. And the earth was without form... (Genesis Chapter 1 (KJV))
Seems to me it says He created "the earth" (the particles which compose the mass of the globe) and not "the Earth" (the globe). And if the particles which compose the mass of the globe (the earth) was "without form", I don't see how the yet to exist globe (the Earth) could have been rotating.
It was on the third day that (I'm skipping some parts) "God called the dry land Earth" (the globe).
I think the answer is “it depends”. If it is an issue that is being used to undermine the inerrancy of the bible, to lead people away from trusting the bible by using it to sow doubt into people’s minds (”If the bible is wrong here, then why should I trust it there...”), then it becomes something essential.
OK, then how could there have been an evening and a morning on Day 1? Isn’t the obvious conclusion that the earth, which was “formed out of water and by water” was rotating in God-created light?
>Does it hurt you if I believe that God created the heavens and the earth and all that is in them in 6 days?
>
>Do you believe in miracles?
I DO believe in miracles; and no I believe that God could create the universe in 6 seconds, six minutes, sis years, or sixty trillion years. In other words, this account could be taken as literally six 24-hr days... or it could be metaphor.
In the creation story, Adam is created first then, after naming all the animals and failing to find a helpmeet, God creates a woman for him. Later on in the bible, Jesus says “Do you not know that in the beginning God created man and woman, male and female, He created them.”
Is Jesus misinformed, or lying then? Or is the point not that there was some time elapsed between the creation of the male and female of the human species, BUT instead that GOD created them, together in the sense of meaning to complete each other?
Also, remember that God created woman for man BEFORE the fall — that even though man was at the time sinless and had an only imaginable [now] personal-face-to-face relationship with God — and He said “It is not good that man should be alone.”
And then there’s the actual problem of implementation. If time is NOT constant (as relativity indicates) then time could speed-up/slow-down. Now this is not a problem [linguistically] if everything is uniform, like the TV screen when you play a DVD at 1/2 speed, 1x, 2x, 64x... etc. However, how would you describe it if it was NOT uniform? If portions of the screen ran at 1/4 speed, while others zoomed at 64x, and others played at 2x and some at normal speed? In the Hebrew, a portion God’s work of creation is worded as “stretching out” the heavens so it is not unreasonable to think that as these edges stretched out they followed a different “speed” of time... just like under the theory of relativity says should happen when comparing time from a stationary point and a moving point.
I’m not saying that God didn’t or couldn’t create the earth in 6 literal days... but what I am saying is that maybe the WHOLE truth of the creation works of an infinite and omnipotent God would be too difficult for us understand.
God did not rush his creation.
He took his time.
He took SIX DAYS.
“OK, then how could there have been an evening and a morning on Day 1? Isn’t the obvious conclusion that the earth, which was “formed out of water and by water” was rotating in God-created light?”
Sometimes things don’t come across the way we intend when we are posting, so please don’t take it by my posts on this thread that I’m purposely being a smart aleck or anything, but: I don’t know the answer to your first question and as to your second question, what might otherwise be an obvious conclusion is argued against in my prevous post.
Perhaps we are not meant to know yet.
He took His time...nice one :o)
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