SL Podcast - Ep. 004 | Creation and Evolution | Literary Styles

Intro

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Hello, hello! You’re listening to the studentlife podcast, where our goal is to help you know and follow Jesus, step by step. On this podcast, we take a dive into a recent topic from StudentLife Youth Ministry and look at how we can live it out. Studying what the Bible says helps us know Jesus, and finding ways to live it out helps us follow Him.

My name is Joe Farage and I’m one of the youth leaders at StudentLife. Let’s dig in!

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Recap

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Last week was week 3 of our tough questions series, and Olivia shared a message on creation and evolution. It was a great message and went beyond just the origins of the universe to look at how we choose to view our world in light of, and sometimes in spite of the Bible. Oftentimes people are in the mindset that science and the bible are mutually exclusive, that to believe in one, you have to ignore the other, but Olivia made the case that they can go hand in hand.

She started off sharing some of her recent google searches she’s done, including questions like, “How tall was Jesus?”, “how far does the water recede during a tsunami?” and others. It made me think of what my recent searches were so I checked out my search history, and some of my recent searches were about “the names of different types of clouds”, and “how they decide whether to put a stop sign or a stop light at an intersection”. Both of those were initiated by conversations with my 6 year old.

Personally, that alone was a great reminder to me to be curious and ask questions and find answers for them.

Olivia went on to share about some biomed classes she took in college and how they really challenged her faith. Her teacher made it clear that he believed that there was no room for the Bible or faith in a science class. Olivia felt called out and nervous about how she would go through the class when what she believed and what she was being taught were so divided.

She moved on to give a very high level view of how evolution is taught, that it’s the scientific theory that all species came from one species. And that totally new species were created over long periods of time. The theory of evolution pieces a bunch of fossils together to show that different species evolved from others.

She contrasted this to the Bible, where in Genesis, it tells us that God created the universe and everything inside of it in 6 days. There’s no explanation of how it happens, but it takes place over the course of 6 days and it’s all rooted in God, not in other species.

The fight between creation and evolution has been a huge point of contention between "big church” and “Big science”.

If evolution says one thing, and creationism says another, what’s true?

As we always should, when we have questions, we should turn to the Bible for direction. And if this makes you ask “well how do I know the Bible’s true?”, well I’m glad you asked! In 2 weeks I’ll be giving a message on that very question at StudentLife.

But anyways, Olivia referenced Isaiah 40:28 which tells us “The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the whole earth. He never becomes faint or weary; there is no limit to his understanding.”

He has no limit to His understanding, but we do. Think about that for a minute, God has no limit to what he can comprehend and understand, but we do. We have an upper boundary that we can’t even begin to know, let alone understand, what’s past that.

From here Olivia took the message in a really cool direction, she asked the question, “what if that missing piece to science, that gap in evidence, is God’s mystery? What if it can only be answered by faith?”

Faith fills the gaps that science cannot. We’re not meant to know everything.

in Ecclesiastes 8:16-17 the author explains “When I applied my mind to know wisdom and to observe the activity that is done on the earth, I observed all the work of God and concluded that a person is unable to discover the work that is done under the sun. Even though a person labors hard to explore it, he cannot find it; even if a wise person claims to know it, he is unable to discover it.”

We learn theories in school as if they are proven fact when in reality, both evolution, and creation as well are considered theories, scientifically speaking. No one living on earth today has seen or experienced what either of those universe creation theories propose.

What the author in Ecclesiastes is saying is that no matter how much time I spend searching the world to understand, there will always be parts I cannot figure out.

Specifically speaking for evolution, they have discovered a lot of fossils, but less than one tenth of 1% of all species ever lived have been discovered as fossils. So that alone tells us we aren’t seeing the full picture.

We’re not meant to know everything…

But God does, if God is the creator of the universe, and He gave us the Bible, the the logic follows that what the Bible says about science is true. I will couple this with the need to understand the type of literature you’re reading in the Bible, which is what I’ll be focusing on in a couple minutes.

Faith fills the gaps of knowledge God hasn’t revealed

God gave us curiosity, but we also have a limit on what we can comprehend.

Olivia related this to a small child and their parents finances. Parents generally don’t even talk to their small children about mortgages, and investments, and bills, and even if they did talk to them about it, the kids would have NO clue what they’re even talking about

God gave us curiosity to reveal Himself to us, and faith to fill in the parts that we can’t comprehend yet.

Hebrews 11:1 tells us “faith is the reality of what is hoped for, the proof of what is not seen.”

Having faith means to believe even if you don’t see. Even with an eye on faith, God still gave us much to base that faith on.

Psalm 19:1-2 explains that we see God through His creation “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the heavens proclaim the work of his hands.”

and spoiler alerts, if you’re listening back to this, yes this Psalm is poetry, and no the heavens are not verbally declaring or proclaiming anything. This is a beautiful way to convey the concept that we can see God in His creation.

Romans 1:20 goes so far as saying that because of how evident God’s hand is in the universe, people who choose to ignore it don’t have an excuse. It says that “God’s eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen since the creation of the world, being understood through what he has made. As a result, people are without excuse”

Olivia closed by saying that there shouldn’t be such a divide between science and faith. God gave us science, but He also gave us Faith. She reminded us that we worship God, not science. If we lived a life needing to know every single answer, we’d be living without faith.

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TRANSITION

So in a minute, I’m going to dive into the writing styles and classifications of the Bible. I promise it’s more interesting than it sounds and I really believe it’s crucial to a better way of understanding the Bible when we read it. Before that though, we have our next “meet the leader” segment

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Olivia interview

TRANSITION

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Deep Dive

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have you ever gone to see a movie that was so good that you wished you were in the movie?

or like when you’re reading a really good book and you get swallowed up in the story. There have been a small handful of books that I’ve been so immersed in reading, that when I stop, I need a minute for my brain to adjust back to the real world. I know the book’s not real, but it’s written so well that it almost tricks me into thinking it’s real. No one reads Lord of the Rings thinking that it’s real, like you’re not going to read it and go looking for hobbits under every hill, because you know it’s fictional writing.

Or if you’re reading your social studies books for school, you know it’s a history book, so it’s about stuff that happened in the past. You’re not reading it then looking for Attila the Hun or Napoleon to come invade Buffalo.

As every good English class teaches, you can learn something from pretty much every piece of literature you read, but it’s important to understand the TYPE of literature so you know the context for what you’re reading.

Usually this isn’t something we think about consciously. We just kinda know whether what we’re reading is current happenings, like the news, something that happened in the past, like history books, or writing to share insights about the world, like poetry or fiction.

Knowing the literary type of what you’re reading is necessary with reading the Bible too. The problem is that it’s not as natural for us to sub-consciously know what type of text we’re reading when we open the Bible to read it. Even in our English translations, it can be difficult to decipher what type of writing specific verses are and how we’re supposed to interpret them. This leads to a lot of misunderstandings where people read verses and assume it’s one style, when it’s really totally different. So we’re going to break down the 3 main literary styles we see in the bible then look at some examples.

depending where you look, you may find more than 3 literary styles described, but they can all fit into these categories.

Narrative

Poetry

Prose or Discourse

So what do each of these mean and what are some examples?

Narrative

simply put, narrative writing is writing that takes place in the form of stories. These can be historical narratives, which are stories that actually happened, they can be parables, which are created stories used to show a lesson or teaching. Then there’s also biographical narratives, which are when the lives of people are recorded in story form, like the Gospels.

So historical narrative is like what we see in Joshua and Judges, where the stories of the Israelite’s entering and living in the promised land take place.

Biographical narratives I mentioned already, are like what we see in the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

BUT, we also see parable narratives in the Gospels as well. Usually these stories are pretty well labeled in our Bibles, with a nice bold heading that says “The Parable of the Lost Sheep” or something, but the transition between literary styles isn’t always that obvious. We’ll circle back to that.

Poetry

Poetry uses creative, colorful language to paint a picture for us. It’s written to bring about emotion, and challenge us to view the world in a different way than we currently do. Sometimes this is done with a rhyme scheme or other meter, but sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it’s just through more exaggerated colorful language to draw our minds to what the author is trying to show us.

We see poetry throughout the Psalms and in Proverbs and a handful of other books too. These books are often referred to as “Wisdom literature”, and much of that wisdom is conveyed through poetic forms.

Prose Discourse

Prose Discourse just means it’s conversation or explanation written in normal form, without any rhyming scheme or other format on it.

This category would include many of the letters in the New Testament. For example, in the book of Romans, Paul puts forth a logical argument for Jesus Christ as the Messiah. He writes in Prose Discourse.

So Narrative, Poetry, and Prose Discourse sum up the writing styles found in the Bible.

Where it gets tricky is that sometimes, these literary styles can change very quickly and subtly, so we can’t just assign a literary style to each book and call it good.

Like we looked at in the narrative section, the gospels are narratives, but contain biographical and parable narratives. They also have some poetry in them as well, like sometimes when the Old Testament is quoted.

Daniel is another great example. The book of Daniel has 12 chapters, the first 6 are more narrative, historical style writings, but the last 6 are written in an apocalyptic or prophetic writing style, similar to The Revelation. (quick side note: apocalypse just means a revealing or uncovering, the original meaning and use of the word had nothing to do with global destruction)

So we can’t always list each book as a specific literary type because it does change chapter to chapter, and sometimes even paragraph to paragraph or verse to verse.

Before I wrap up I want to look at Psalm 104 quickly. Psalm 104 is poetry, but if you read it as fact, you could end up with some skewed understandings.

Psalm 104:3 says that God “lays the beams of his palace on the waters above (meaning the sky), and makes the clouds his chariot”

God’s “palace” isn’t a physical place that needs to have beams to support it. Even if you argue, well it’s like it’s in a different dimension, so it’s still up there in the sky, it’s just not in this dimension, then it still wouldn’t need to have beams in this dimension. Heaven and Gehenna Hell aren’t physical places that you can fly up to or dig down to.

And for the clouds as God’s chariot, if He’s truly omnipresent, meaning he can be everywhere at once, He wouldn’t need a chariot as he’s not having to go anywhere.

Psalm 104:5 “He established the earth on its foundations; it will never be shaken.”

This verse is NOT meant to be a scientific explanation for how the earth is suspended in the cosmos. This is poetic writing, otherwise we wouldn’t have earthquakes, since it can’t be shaken. Without going too much into it, I believe this is pointing to the laws that govern the universe, the scientific laws that we as humans have only started to grasp. The “foundations” aren’t physical pillars or something, it’s the spiritual, metaphorical basis for everything that is, that no matter how much we do, we can’t change those.

Psalm 104:13 “He waters the mountains from his palace”

God’s not up there (again, viewing God as residing up in the sky) with a watering can pouring rain on mountains. We know that the water cycle takes water up through evaporation, condenses in clouds, and gets heavy enough to fall back to the earth. But that scientific fact is NOT in disagreement with this verse of poetry. This is a beautiful way to metaphorically view God’s hand in providing for His creation.

So when reading Psalm 104, we need to read it with poetry in mind, not fact. This may seem like an obvious example, but it’s just one of many that I’ve seen people misinterpret because they don’t pay attention to the literary style of the scriptures they’re reading.

Takeaway

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So why did I talk about literary styles after a recap about creation and evolution?

Reading and studying the Bible is one of, if not the best ways to learn about Jesus and what His plan for you and me is. But if we are just reading it like it’s a history book, we’re missing so many beautiful details. And if we read it like just one big story, we may not fully realize the authenticity of what actually happened during that time.

I encourage you to check out the links in the show notes to learn more about the literary styles and how to understand which type of style you’re reading.

But at the very least, I want to challenge you, much like Olivia did, to open up your eyes to what you’re reading. Don’t just read the Bible like a self-help book, trying to find that next verse to help you make it through the day. Look to understand what the authors are trying to tell you. How are they explaining it to you? What other Bible accounts does it make you think of? On Life Church Buffalo’s social media, they posted a video about using the SOAP method to study the Bible. That’s Scripture, Observation, Application, and Prayer. I encourage you to try it out for a couple weeks and see what new things you learn about the Bible and your relationship with Jesus.

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Announcements

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This week is our FIRST Q and A session AND it’s AS One, which means Wednesday night is open to Middle Schoolers and High Schoolers! If you have questions about one of the messages, or a tough question in general, you can text it to 716-464-2276. We’d love to get your thoughts so we can answer the questions YOU have!

The week after that, on October 4th, I’m sharing the message on “How do we know the Bible is true?” I’m excited to share about that so join us to check that message out too.

Through October we’re continuing out series on Tough Questions, so if you have a question that hasn’t been talked about yet, join us Wednesday night, tune into the podcast each week, or send the question via text so we can try and answer it during a Q&A.

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Closing

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That’s another episode in the books! Huge thanks to Olivia for the interview and great message, encouraging us to look where Faith can fill the gap between science theory and scripture truth.

Remember Jesus loves you and we do too!

Outro

On behalf of Pastor Jordan and all the StudentLife Youth Leaders, thanks for listening and we hope to see you at a StudentLife event!

StudentLife is a ministry of Life Church Buffalo. The High School group meets Wednesday nights at 7pm, and the Middle School group meets Sunday mornings at 11:15am. You can find StudentLife on Instagram and TikTok.

The original music for this episode was by Blakeis, you can find him on Spotify.

All those links and more are in the show notes.

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Show Notes

This week we take a look at creation and evolution. More specifically we look at science and scripture and how they’re NOT mutually exclusive! Knowing the literary styles of what you’re reading in the Bible is a huge help when looking for how the Bible and science can fit together. And any unknown gaps between the Scripture fact and scientific theory is filled in by faith in God who created it all.

SOAP Bible Study Method: https://fb.watch/nfmkstzaQE/

BibleProject Series on Literary Styles: https://bibleproject.com/explore/video/literary-styles-bible

Scripture References:

Psalm 19:1-2

Ecclesiastes 8:16-17

Isaiah 40:28

Romans 1:20

Hebrews 11:1⁠

StudentLife is a ministry of Life Church Buffalo. The High School group meets Wednesday nights at 7pm, and the Middle School group meets Sunday mornings at 11:15am.

Check out StudentLife on Instagram (@lcbstudentlife https://www.instagram.com/lcbstudentlife/) and TikTok (@lcb_studentlife https://www.tiktok.com/@lcb_studentlife).

You can find Life Church Buffalo online at www.lifechurchbuffalo.com (https://www.lifechurchbuffalo.com).

The original music for this episode was by Blakeis, you can find him on Spotify (https://bit.ly/blakeis).

Check out all these links and more at https://bit.ly/m/studentlifepodcast

Have a question you want answers to? Or do you want more information about StudentLife? Text 716-464-2276

Text <a href="”sms:[phone]"">[phone]</a>