Sermon Tone Analysis

Pray

“Oh Really?

Did he really?” the sceptic would say, “cos I’ve been taught that once upon a time there was a big bang in space and out of that came the solar system…and over millions of years plants and animals have evolved through genetic mutations in each generation, and as a result we have what we have today - millions of species of animals and plants and it’s all evolved over millions of years.

And like I said last week, when science removed God from creation it removed the ‘necessity’ of God from humankind.

Because now EVERYTHING has a scientific explanation - and if it doesn’t, one day we will find an explanation.

And if science gets it wrong, that’s ok - cos science doesn’t claim to be absolute truth and it can change it’s view on any given thing at any given time as new research comes to light.

And that’s the way science works - science doesn’t NEED to know all the answers - science is always on a quest to FIND all the answers and it knows that there are things that can’t yet be explained, but it doesn’t worry about that, because so many things HAVE ALREADY been explained through science...

Including the origin of species...and it ain’t God.

And yet we have this book, claiming to be written by God that says that God created the world and he did it in 6 days.

And yet, on the other hand, the atheistic evolutionist says that the world exploded into being, and everything in it evolved over millions and millions of years without the need for God.

It just happened by chance and survival of the fittest.

So who’s right?

This is the BIG QUESTION…

WHO…IS…RIGHT?

In this war over the origin of humankind, who wins? Cos the bible says one thing and science says another thing?

So Who’s right?

Pause

Well, we’re going to look at that in a second, but first let’s look at an incident where science and scripture collided - a couple of hundred years before Darwinian evolution was even thought about.

This is the story of Galileo and how the church handled him when he brought a challenge to the bible.

We need to go back to the 15th century.

Back then, everybody thought that the earth was the centre of the universe.

The earth was stationary and the sun and moon and everything else moved around the earth.

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So the earth stood still and the sun moved around the earth, just like it says in

So if the SUN rises and goes down, the bible clearly talks about the SUN doing the moving.

Add to that

You’ve got a pretty open and shut case, according to the bible, that the earth does not move - it is stationary and the sun moves around the earth.

And the bible is the word of God so it can’t be wrong, can it?

Pause

Then along came a man called Nicolaus Copernicus, a scientist who proposed that the sun was the centre of the universe and NOT the earth.

And interestingly, after his death and before Galileo came on the scene, there wasn’t much opposition to this thought.

Not many held to it, but there was no real rebuttal.

Then came Galileo a few decades later and that’s when the church started to take notice.

Galileo promoted Copernicus’ sun-centred universe and the church took offence at that for the reasons stated earlier - namely, the bible says that the earth is not movable and that the sun does the moving.

Galileo went on trial and was put on house arrest afterwards as a result, and it wasn’t until last century when pope John Paul II publicly apologised to the Galileii family for the way Galileo was treated.

Pause

But science said one thing and the bible said another thing.

So, once again, who was right?

Who won that face-off?

Now, it LOOKS like science won, because we all know that the earth is a sphere and that it is the earth that moves around the sun to give us the seasons, and it also spins around its own axis and THAT’S why we have night and day.

And it’s the sun that is fixed and central.

So how can you trust the bible when it is so obviously scientifically wrong?

And to make matters worse, what about that battle in Joshua chapter 10, when God stopped the sun for 24 hours to allow more light during a battle?

Cos for the sun to stop in the sky, since the sun doesn’t move and it’s actually the earth spinning that makes it LOOK like the sun moves, for the sun to appear to stop, the earth would have to stop spinning, and if the earth stopped spinning gravity would cease and everyone would float away - so how can that happen?

Could it be that the bible isn’t describing science?

But what happened back then is exactly what is happening today with evolution.

And once again, how do we trust the bible when science is giving a completely different alternative to how we came about?

Well, various approaches are taken.

First of all, there those who believe that the world was created in 6 24-hour days, out of nothing, just as the bible says.

There are many Christians who believe this and to be fair, there’s no reason why God couldn’t do it that way.

That means that if you take the genealogy of all the people of the Bible, from Adam to Jesus, and the length of years each of them lived then the earth is between 6-8 thousand years old.

This is called young-earth creationism, and Answers in Genesis are a Christian body who promote this.

You may have been to seminars by Ken Ham - he came to Great Victoria Baptist about 20 years ago and did a seminar there.

I loved that man and the way he taught.

He’s very easy to listen to, but he categorically refutes evolution - to him and other creationists (as they are also called) - evolution is a load of tripe.

The bible clearly states how God created things out of noting in 6 literal 24-hour days, and it’s there in black and white - evolution is wrong … and they use other sources of science to try to disprove evolution.

So that’s one approach…and it’s a very popular approach among conservative Christians.

Pause

Another approach is that people try to marry the two - to bring science and the bible together and try to fit evolution into the biblical narrative.

In other words, people try to see how a theory of evolution can be read into the BIBLICAL TEXT so that creation and evolution can co-exist without any issue.

So for example...

Some people say there is a gap of millions of years between and .

And during this time evolution occurred.

This is called the Gap-theory.

It allows for the biblical account to exist and also allows for science to have it’s place, placing the theory of evolution at the start of the bible - the millions of years of struggle where the dinosaurs etc. existed and THEN starts to tell how everything else came into the form that we know today.

The argument against that is that it puts death and decay, which is a result of sin, BEFORE the fall of Adam, which goes against the order of things.

Especially when God says, after each day, that it was GOOD.

Their argument is, how can God call millions of years of death and suffering GOOD?

Some people think of each day as as an age - an expanse of time rather than 6 24-hour days, during which evolution took place until the end result is mentioned in the bible.

So after millions and millions of years of evolution, we have birds…after millions and millions of years of evolution we have land animals, and so on.

That’s called the Day-Age theory.

They deny that the days are literal 24-hour days.

Now, creationists would argue against this saying that the Hebrew word for day - YOM, accompanied by the words, ‘morning and evening’ - always means 24 hours.

And that’s hard to argue with.

And says...

Same word - YOM - here, but different meanings other than 24 hour days.

Pause

So, what’s happened is that some people say that the bible says NOTHING about evolution and therefore evolution MUST be wrong.

Others say that you can fit evolution into the bible and they spot places where you can shoehorn evolution in so that it doesn’t contradict the bible.

Pause

Back to Galileo for a second - today we don’t argue about whether the sun moves around the earth, because that’s a generally widely accepted scientific ‘truth’ - now not everyone believes this.

A good friend of mine who used to be a doctor and is now finishing a masters in physics - so he’s a smart, well educated guy…he believes the earth is flat and the sun actually DOES move around it - and there are many like him.

But the point is, we widely accept that the earth revolves around the sun and it spins on its own axis to give us night and day.

But what about those passages in the bible that talk about the sun moving etc. - what do we do about them, cos the bible says that the sun rises and sets?

Why is there not the same concern for these passages as there is for the opening chapters of Genesis?

Well, Calvin answered that for us when he wrote that...

God accommodates his language to our tiny minds.

In other words, we can’t understand HOW God does things and HOW things work - at least, not like God can... so when the bible was written, God watered-down things that were just too mind-blowing into stuff that we would understand - hence, the statement that the sun rises and sets is because that’s what we APPEAR to see when we’re looking at the sky.

Now THIS is the main point here… That verse in

ecc 1:

...is part of a longer portion of scripture.

That verse is NOT biblical proof that the sun is the celestial body that moves - it’s a part of a BIGGER THEOLOGICAL point - it’s not in any way concerned with the motion of the sun.

It’s point is theological, NOT scientific.

And in the same way, Genesis is NOT concerned in any way with the scientific means by which human beings came into existence - it’s part of a BIGGER THEOLOGICAL point.

In other words - the bible is not a science text-book, it’s a theological book - it tells us about God and points us to Jesus, not to science.

Another thing to note is that the bible is NOT a scientific document - it’s a theological document - it tells us about God and points us to Jesus, not to science.

Pause

And here’s where, I believe, we come to an understanding between the bible and science...

The struggle that people have is trying to fit science INTO the bible - and with every new scientific breakthrough that challenges the words on the pages of scripture we try to figure out a way to make it fit so that the bible isn’t contradicted.

That, I believe, is our mistake...