I dreamed I was sitting front row and center in what I knew was a roomful of people, though I never actually turned around to look. Apparently we were there to hear the speaker, a man behind a podium with a large word displayed on the wall behind him. The word was in Greek–I knew that much–and the only letter that immediately stood out for me was the first one, which looked like a “Y”.
The speaker asked if anyone in the audience knew what the word on the wall meant, and then he looked down at the podium and waited. I can’t read Greek, so I had nothing to say. I wasn’t the only one. The room was silent for several seconds, until a man further back in the room called out, “Written.” The speaker looked up from the podium, gave one slow nod, and said, “It is written.”
I woke up.
My father was a Christian, but he was also a theistic evolutionist. He believed that when God started from scratch, He began with something unimaginably small that required an unimaginably long time to produce a human with a brain large enough to come up with a theory like that. Dad used to confuse me by one day telling me to read the Bible, the next day telling me we evolved from apes. No one in my Sunday school classes ever mentioned that, but it’s what my father taught me, so I accepted it. When I showed him once how I could pick up a pencil off the floor with my toes, he laughed and said that was proof. He told me it was a leftover ability from when humans were more… apish… with more flexible feet. He was serious. I loved my father, and I know He loved God. But I know there’s far more evidence that he was wrong.
Parents do a disservice to their children by teaching them that the Bible doesn’t mean what it says. If God truly inspired the writing of the Bible, then we ought to rest in knowing that He also oversaw it for accuracy.
We don’t need to know the precise mechanism of how we got here. Do we? Could we ever really comprehend that? The fact is, we’re here, and even the most outspoken atheist and biologist can’t explain the complexity of our DNA, saying, “There is enough information capacity in a single human cell to store the Encyclopaedia Britannica, all 30 volumes of it, three or four times over.” Science, which constantly corrects itself, is used as a weapon against what God has spoken–a ridiculously uneven match.
People call what they can’t explain in the Bible allegory. Not parables. I mean what’s been written down as historical fact. It should be taken at face value. God’s thoughts are higher than our thoughts, His ways higher than our ways–a LOT higher (Isaiah 55:8-9). Those who claim that certain Bible accounts are just human fancy are left with nothing but someone’s interpretations of them, and that inevitably turns truth into a giant smear of varying opinions. I don’t think God’s favorably impressed by that.
We don’t have to understand how Noah’s ark could possibly have stayed afloat. If God gave specific instructions on how to build it, then we ought to accept that it did float. God created DNA. Can’t we simply trust that He’s capable of designing a seaworthy watercraft? Were dinosaurs on the ark? Young ones sure could have been, but I wasn’t there, so I don’t know all the details of how it worked. God said it worked, so I say it worked.
It took me a while to pull my preconceived notions away from Scripture to see what I was left holding. My place isn’t to pridefully ignore what at first glance doesn’t seem feasible, or to label it as an ancient fairy tale. My place is to trust God, completely. Trust and faith go hand in hand. My faith grew exponentially when I took hold of the Bible as it is written.
http://biblehub.com/greek/1125.htm
God points us to Scripture again and again. Jesus laid it out clearly for Satan when He was being tempted by him in the desert. What was written is the final authority.
Heaven and earth shall pass away: but my words shall not pass away. (Luke 21:33)
goldfishwitness.com 