"Too Young to Understand"

by Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis

Many of you will recall the situation a few weeks ago resulting in AiG and me being disinvited from a homeschool convention in Cincinnati. The bottom line is that I stood publicly (in my previous blog posts and at similar conventions prior to the Cincinnati meeting) against the teaching of Dr. Peter Enns of BioLogos. Not only is his teaching concerning God’s Word heterodox in many areas, he is also producing a homeschool curriculum for children called Telling God’s Story (published by Olive Branch Books, Charles City, Virginia—the religious instruction imprint of Peace Hill Press). This curriculum was (and still is) a great concern for me, knowing that there is a concerted effort by BioLogos to promote what Enns believes to generations of homeschool students.

Because of these events, a group of homeschooling students decided to attend a lecture by Dr. Enns, and then speak with him afterwards. I met these students who, by the way, came across as very gracious but very sure of what they believed. I asked them to send me a written report on what happened with their interaction with Dr. Enns. Because of notes they had taken, and I believe the integrity of this group, they were very careful to send me what they believe is a very accurate account of what happened.  As you read this report, you will be saddened by the answers given by Dr. Enns but encouraged at the stand this next generation of homeschool students has on the authority of God’s Word. I do pray their witness to Dr. Enns will be used of the Lord to convict him concerning believing God’s Word as he should. Read their following account:

My family and I went to the Creation Museum Saturday evening after our time spent at the Great Home School Convention in Cincinnati.  We wanted to support you in your efforts to stand firm on the doctrines of our faith, particularly in regards to the teachings of Dr. Enns and the Convention organizers. While at the museum my family and I were able to talk with you about my encounter with Dr. Enns at the convention.  You asked me to email you with information about this experience.  The following is a description of my encounter with Dr. Enns.

Before going to the Great Home School Convention my friends and I had heard that you and Answers in Genesis had been uninvited to speak and to set up an exhibit booth because of the stand you took against the teaching of Dr. Enns. While at the convention, I and a group of seven other friends decided to go and listen to a lecture given by Dr. Enns so that we could know first-hand what he was teaching and so that we would be better informed when we went to discuss his beliefs with him. Since we went into Dr. Enns’ lecture with every intention of talking to him afterwards, we were all taking notes. After his lecture, we left for a few minutes to discuss what we had heard and to make sure that when we went to talk to him we were doing it for the right reasons and not just to attack him.

When we went back into the lecture room we made our way to the front and stood waiting to ask him our questions. At that time we asked him if he believed the Bible to be the true inspired word of God and if He believed it to be completely true, because he had said in his lecture that the books in the Bible between Genesis and Revelation were just trivial details. He told us that He did believe the Bible to be the true word of God and that there were no mistakes in it. We also asked him if he believed Adam, from Genesis chapter one, was a real man. He told us that he believed Adam was metaphorical.

We left to go to lunch after asking those questions. While at lunch we discussed what he had told us about Adam being a metaphorical man and decided that since we didn’t understand how that could possibly work that we would go to his booth to ask him some more questions.

When we went up to Dr. Enns’ booth in the exhibit hall we asked him if he had time to talk to us, when he said yes we started what would end up being a 45 minute discussion. We started the conversation by asking him why he believed that Adam was a metaphorical man. He told us that he actually believed that all of Genesis 1-11 was a metaphor. He told us that this metaphor was written to ancient people who could not understand science and religion as we did because their culture was so infused with idolatry and mythology. Genesis 1-11 was written in such a way that these ancient people would be able to understand how one God made the world and how sin came into existence. It is not to be taken literally though.

We then asked him how he knew that Genesis 1-11 was a metaphor and that the metaphor ended right at the division between chapter 11 and 12 of Genesis. He told us that he knew Genesis 1-11 was a metaphor because of science and archeology.  He did not tell us how he knew that Genesis 12 on was non metaphorical. After this statement we asked how science and archeology had proven that Genesis 1-11 was metaphorical and he told us that it was because of how long it would have taken the world to come into existence and from the fossil record. One of my friends then asked him how he believed the world came into existence at which time he told us that he believed in Theistic evolution, millions of years, and that man had evolved.

After hearing this we asked him if he believed that there was death before sin, because we all believe that death is a direct result of sin. He told us that there had been death before sin, because that is just the way our world works. Next, we asked Dr. Enns if Adam and Eve were metaphorical, and the garden of Eden was metaphorical, if that would mean that Adam and Eve didn’t fall since they never truly existed.  So our question is, if that is the case, where did sin come from?

He told us that we were too young to understand the theological implications of that question, and that philosophers have been pondering this for years.

In reply we stated that we did understand that by not taking all of Genesis literally he had gotten rid of the creation of the world, the creation of man in the image of God, and the entrance of sin into the world.  We also said that if he didn’t know that sin existed then we wouldn’t know that we were sinners and thus wouldn’t know that we were in need of a savior. He then tells us that we all have an innate knowledge that we are sinners and that we cannot know where sin came from. At this point one of my friends said that she knew where sin came from and she opened her Bible to Genesis and showed him.

Next, we asked him about five times if he would give us the names of some other people who believed the same things he did so that we could read some of their articles before he finally told us to look at biologos.com.

I don’t believe that our questions persuaded him to alter his personal beliefs.  However, our questions did confirm for us that we know what we believe and that we can stand on the truth of God’s word.  I want to thank you and Answers in Genesis for aiding us in understanding the truth of the biblical teaching found in the first eleven chapters of Genesis.

Please pray for more young people like these who graciously and thoughtfully challenged a PhD Christian academic concerning his compromise on God’s Word. They were certainly not “too young to understand.” Their understanding of God’s Word was way above this academic.

Also I wanted to bring your attention to the fact that in this account, it is reported Dr. Enns said he believed the Bible to be the true word of God and that there were no mistakes in it. But then, as the students questioned further, what he meant by this statement was not what people would normally think concerning the meaning of what he claimed.  In the new AiG book to be released May 1 (entitled Already Compromised), we discuss what we call “Christian newspeak”—Christian leaders are saying things that make it sound like they believe God’s Word, but in reality, their words don’t mean what they would mean in the past. Such “Christian newspeak” is pervading Christianity, including churches, colleges, and so on. I encourage you to preorder Already Compromised.

Thanks for stopping by and thanks for praying,

Ken

A Christian Response to Earth Day

by Doug Phillips of Vision Forum

For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse. (Romans 1:20)
A Christian Response to Earth Day

All men are religious because all men have an object of worship. All men have faith in something. In the end, men will either worship and serve the creature, or they will worship and serve the Creator. But they will worship something.

In the 18th century, many began to worship the mind. The religion of that day was rationalism. In the 19th century, this god morphed into scientism. But science failed to provide the answers to ultimate questions. The men of the 20th century looked for a more immediate solution to the problems of humanity — they chose to worship the State. This failed. Statism proved to be a harsh taskmaster. In the absence of any real solutions from rationalism, scientism, and statism, men fixed their attention on a new god — or rather, an ancient God that just needed a new facelift.

That god is the earth.

21st-century men are earth worshippers. They are sanitized pantheists. Of course, they don’t call themselves pantheists or earth worshippers, but religious devotion to the material world is the essence of this modern faith.

This religious devotion to the material world as god comes in many shapes and sizes, but it has become ubiquitous in our culture. The new pantheism is at the heart of the green movement. It is reflected in the priorities of Hollywood, in the agenda of politicians, and in the curriculums of the government schools. It is found in the marketing campaign of Madison Avenue, in the reality TV shows of cable television, and sadly, even in pulpits across the nation. The worship of the creation has become a defining undercurrent in our culture, even as it is reshaping many of the cultures of the modern world.

And this is one reason why this Friday, April 22, millions of people (perhaps billions) representing the countries of the United Nations will stop to celebrate the high holy day of this religion as they pay homage to the earth God. Of Earth Day, evolutionary anthropologist Margaret Meade once explained that:


EARTH DAY is the first holy day which transcends all national borders, yet preserves all geographical integrities, spans mountains and oceans and time belts, and yet brings people all over the world into one resonating accord, is devoted to the preservation of the harmony in nature and yet draws upon the triumphs of technology, the measurement of time, and instantaneous communication through space. EARTH DAY draws on astronomical phenomena in a new way — which is also the most ancient way — by using the vernal Equinox, the time when the Sun crosses the equator making the length of night and day equal in all parts of the earth. To this point in the annual calendar, EARTH DAY attaches no local or divisive set of symbols, no statement of the truth or superiority of one way of life over another.

Should Christians care about the earth? Not only must we care about it, we have a holy duty to engage the earth. The difference between the objectives of biblical Christianity and radical environmentalism can be found in the religious assumptions of both groups.

Four Lies of the Radical Environmentalist Movement

With Earth Day comes billions of dollars worth of environmentalist propaganda driven by their religious worldview. Some of the themes you can expect to hear repeated this year include the following:

1. The Earth Is Our Mother: The very expression “Mother Earth” is popular parlance in our culture and reflects the old pagan longing to worship the physical world. Modern environmentalists, with their devotion to the idea that man is just another life-form to spring from the womb of the earth on the evolutionary journey of life, speak openly about earth being the mother of man.

2. Human Life Has No Greater Intrinsic Value Than Animal Life: The notion that man is an insignificant blip in the universe and that our planet is almost as insignificant as man is an oft-repeated concept of the modern environmentalist movement. Radical environmentalists complain about the carbon footprints of humans, and the sin of “Speciesism” — man discriminating against lower life-forms.

3. The Greatest Crisis Facing Humans is the Despoiling of the Earth: From the media campaigns of former Vice President Al Gore, to the film agenda of Avatar, radical environmentalists want you to believe that the single greatest problem facing humanity is the environmental destruction of earth.

4. Absent a Radical Shift in Private Practice and Public Policy, the Environmental Crisis Will Lead to the End of Life on Earth: Modern pantheists care deeply about the future. One thing is clear: Radical envioronmentalists have their own eschatology. They see the end of the world coming because of nuclear waste, global warming, the loss of rainforest in the Amazon, or any of a host of perceived environmental hazards.

Four Christian Assumptions About the Earth
1. The Earth is Witness to the Power and Authority of God the Creator Who Alone May Be Worshipped: The Bible teaches that the very existence of the earth is a reminder to all men of the eternal power and Godhood of Christ, so that they are without excuse (Romans 1:20). It reminds us that as long as the earth continues, the promises of God will remain faithful (Genesis 8:22; Deuteronomy 7:9). Significantly, the Bible warns us that the consequence for man rejecting the witness of creation is that he worships creation itself (Romans 1:22-25).

2. The Earth Was Made for the Glory of God and the Benefit of Man Who Was Made the Pinnacle of Creation and of Infinitely Greater Value than Animals or the Earth Itself: Man is the pinnacle of creation and has more eternal value than the earth or any of the creatures who live on it (Psalm 8:5). Man is not a carbon footprint; he is the image-bearer of God. This means that the most “insignificant” human life (insignificant only in the eyes of man) is of inestimably greater value than that of a blue whale, a snail darter, a spotted owl, a mountain, or a tree.

3. The Earth Has Been Placed under Man who Has a Moral Obligation to Subdue it and to Exercise Wise Stewardship over the Earth: Man is God’s appointed steward on earth, and his core mission is to be His agent of dominion over it. Toward this end, God has placed all things under man to be used for his benefit and to be carefully stewarded and cultivated for God’s glory. “Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet” (Psalm 8:6).

4. The Earth is Not the Problem: The reason why the earth suffers is because of man’s sin that has plunged the earth into judgment. Man brought death and judgment to earth. In fact, the whole creation is groaning and waiting redemption (Romans 8:22-23). Despite the righteous judgment of God on earth, He is merciful and promises the continuation of the seasons and the fundamental stability of the planet until the end of time (Genesis 8:22), at which there will be a new heaven and new earth (2 Peter 3:13).

Conclusion

All men are religious because all men have an object of worship. In the end, they will worship and serve the creature, or they will worship and serve the Creator. But they will worship something.

Earth Day, and the radical environmental movement that spawned this high holy day of pantheism, are at war with the Gospel because they perpetuate false worship. The Christian response to the idolatry of Earth Day might be reduced to this simple thought: Jesus Christ is the Creator, and He alone is to be worshipped. He created man as the pinnacle of creation and determined that humans would be the only part of creation to be made in the very image of God, and that man as the image-bearer of God would rule over the earth.

On a practical level, this means that Christians need to stop allowing the radical environmentalist movement to define the issue. We must cease from being the tail and become the head on the question of our duties, privileges, and responsibilities vis-a-vis creation. The Bible has a great deal to say about our use of the resources of the world and our relationship to the earth. Of all people, Christians who honor the Creator should have a passion for creation. We are losing the debate through subversion, silence, lack of vision, and because of the Christian community’s fear of the God-ordained, perpetually valid, creation precept called “The Dominion Mandate.” This mandate directs man is to rule over the earth, subduing it and taking dominion over it for his benefit and for God’s glory. Implicit to the Dominion Mandate is the duty of man to cultivate, wisely manage, and carefully steward the planet.

Finally, man’s problems will never be solved through the elevation of human reason, the power of science, or the interventions of the state. Nor will rescuing the biosphere of planet earth save man or ensure him a future on this planet. You cannot save the earth. But human beings can be saved. And the only hope of salvation is found in Jesus Christ — the Creator! It is this Creator through whom we live and breathe and who by the very power of His word holds the worlds together. He will someday establish a new heaven and a new earth and will bring all of His people into Glory.

Indescribable

Here is another set of videos by Louis Giglio on the awesomeness of God.

How Great Is Our God

Watch this awesome message by Louie Giglio on how great our God is. You will learn things about the universe that are so awesome and just go to show how wonderful our God truly is and that He is truly the Creator and thoughtfully hung the stars and universe in place.

Happy Creator's Day

Exploring the Evidence for Creation

by Henry Morris III, D.Min , The Institute for Creation Research

"Wisdom enables us to understand reality. Through wisdom we have discovered a set of scientific laws that elegantly express reality in the language of mathematics. Whenever man learns the logic of the universe, man is (in essence) "thinking God's thoughts after Him." A correct "understanding" of understanding, therefore, is that we humans discover (and implement) wisdom; we do not invent it.

In particular, the cause of our universe coming into being, and of its continuing to operate as it does, is a dynamic display of the Creator's wisdom, some of which we can scientifically discover and understand. When we do, it is like walking in the footprints of someone who previously walked through a snowdrift."

Morris III, H. 2010. Exploring the Evidence for Creation. Acts & Facts. 39 (3): 4-5.

To read the article in its entirety, go to Act & Facts.

I believe. Do you?

The Mysterious Islands

Go to this website The Mysterious Islands and view a trailer for an upcoming video filmed on location on the Galapagos Islands. It is stunning.