Last week I wrote about the academic and theological attack on the first three chapters of Genesis, especially on the persons of Adam and Eve. As I said this isn’t new and it won’t end until the end. But it is incredibly important.
Suppose you went to see a movie, but you came late and missed the beginning of the film. Cut off from the beginning of the plot or plots you would lack vital information to help you understand the rest of the movie. This is what occurs when we do not understand the purpose for the first three chapters of the Bible. We are missing important information about life: the purpose and meaning of life and why our world is in the condition it is in right now.
Genesis 1-3 gives us an account of the beginning. Everything we see is from the creative work of God. And His crowning achievement is the creation of man. When God saw everything He made, He observed that “indeed it was very good (Gen. 1:31). The first man and woman were created in the image of God (Gen. 1:26, 27). They were not brutish or ignorant beasts. They had understanding and reason and were given dominion over the whole earth. Most importantly they had an understanding of and a relationship with God.
In their dominion over the earth Adam and Eve were free, free to become all that God intended them to be. They were free to enjoy the Garden in which they were placed, free to enjoy one another and free to delight themselves in the Lord. There was only one prohibition. They were not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Scripture says, “Then the LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to tend and keep it. And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, “Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die (Gen. 2:15-17).”
This prohibition placed before man a choice: would the first two people be faithful to God and obey His Word? Would they leave to God alone the right to decide what is good and what is evil? Or would they take for themselves the right to arbitrarily decide what is good and what is evil? The bottom line question was and still is this: does theonomy or autonomy lead to happiness? Put more simply, does obeying God’s will or our own will lead to true happiness in life?
History and the tragic condition of the human race forces us to ask, “Why is the world in the condition it is in? Why is there so much suffering? Why are there natural disasters? Why is there death?” The Bible alone gives us a satisfactory answer: the fall of mankind into sin. But there is hope. Right after Adam and Eve’s fall into sin God promised a redeemer (Genesis 3:15). He has come. The Scriptures call him the “the last Adam” (1 Corinthians 15:45). He is Jesus Christ. And full salvation is granted from sin’s power and sins penalty to everyone who confesses him as Lord believing that God has raised him up from the dead (Romans 10:9, 10).
One final thought. Someone wrote to me that scientists believe that “mitochondrial Eve” and “Y chromosomal Adam” date back 200,000 years. The dating was based upon assumed mutation rates in the genes. This dating then would disprove the biblical account of the creation of Adam and Eve, because that is estimated to have occurred about 6,000 years ago.
But a team of scientists from Canada and the US did a study (1997, 98 – Science Magazine) to determine the number of measurable mutations from one generation to the next. The study was made possible by the major advances in the study of the human genome. It was discovered that about sixty mutations per generation are passed on from one generation to the next. This would then set the dates for “mtDNA Eve” and “y Adam” much closer to the biblical age of about 6,000 years.* Other more recent research has confirmed this finding.
Additionally, since evolution is based upon mutational changes one would expect some kind of significant changes to be taking place in humans. Yet, one leading evolutionary scientist, Stephen Jay Gould (died 2002) stated, “We’re just not evolving slowly. For all practical purposes we’re not evolving. There’s no reason to think we’re going to get bigger brains or smaller toes or whatever—we are what we are.”
We are what we are, but there is hope that we can change. Scripture declares “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new (2 Corinthians 5:17).”
* Gibbons A., Calibrating the mitochondrial clock, Science 279:28-29 (2 January 1998)
Does theonomy or autonomy lead to happiness? Well, that depends. How are you defining happiness? Does dependence on God lead to happiness? Does acknowledging the great things you and the rest of humankind have done of your own accord and your own volition lead to happiness? Happiness is different things to different people based on their worldview. There are isolated tribes in South and Central America and in Africa that I'm sure are extremely happy doing things the way they've done them since their tribes dawned. Their definition of happiness is going to be far different from mine, which I'm sure is different from yours.
ReplyDeleteAs far as your answer to why there is evil in the world...Why did God, an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent Being, not only cast people out of His paradise (omnibenevolent) for disobeying the one rule that he should have known they were not going to follow (omniscient), but then was required to sacrifice His Son, Jesus Christ, as the means for our redemption (omnipotent)? It seems like he could have cut out the middle man and just forgiven everyone, the way that Christ taught His disciples to. If God really is those things, it seems that he has really underutilized the powers that come along with them.
Lastly, the article I referenced about the mtDNA being 200,000 years old is from a 2010 article from Population Biology, an academic journal as referenced in Science Daily (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/08/100817122405.htm). Most articles I found said that it takes 6,000 years any level of mutation to occur; I think it obvious that there are tons of variations on the mtDNA strand today, far more than the 6,000 year time frame would allow. Otherwise, we'd all look a lot more similar. I think that the 2010 article is more likely to be true, since everything was obviously not cleared up with that 1997 article that seems to disagree with all the other studies on the subject.
On what grounds would we expect to see changes in humans at this point? We supplement everything with technology, antiseptics, etc. We don't need to be able to run faster because we domesticated horses, then created bicycles, then trains, automobiles, busses, and eventually airplanes and shuttles. On what grounds to you expect us to adapt to our environment, when all we have done for 4,000 years is make our environment adapt to us?
Thanks for posting these apparently clear questions. But I find you have answered everything but the biggest most important point, which is that God the creator of the universe in his loving wisdom; choose to leave it up to us to choose. So there by showing just how "universally big" his love and fairness really is. The answer is that God is fair to evil, too.
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