Biblical Creation and Evangelism

Some folks may miss the important of the tree of life if they're quickly reading the Bible. (It's also very difficult to find a public domain image of it.) This tree first mentioned in Genesis 2:4, along with the one we've heard about quite a bit more, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. When Adam sinned, death entered the world (Gen. 2:16-17, Rom. 5:12, 1 Cor. 15:22). There are people who will agree with Satan and charge God with lying, because we read in Genesis 2:17, "...for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die", and Adam lived 930 years. That's one of the problems we have with translation, especially ancient Hebrew to modern English: meanings are difficult to communicate and still make the text readable. More literally, it reads, "dying you shall die". Adam and Eve were not going to die, but by eating the forbidden fruit, they began the dying process. Image credit: Pixabay / OpenClipart-Vectors God did not want Adam an

For Question Evolution Day , I thought it would be helpful to emphasize the importance of a strong position on biblical creation when presenting the gospel message. Some people claim that creation is unimportant in evangelism, it's just a side issue after all, and we should just focus on Jesus. Some who believe that Earth is old, especially theistic evolutionists, spread the falsehood that creation is a hindrance to the gospel. Not hardly! Yes, creation is a sort of " side issue ", but it is still very  important. Image credit: Pixabay / qimono When Peter preached in Acts, it was to monotheistic Jews. Paul preached to pagans, and went back to creation as the foundation. Creation evangelism is important on the mission field  and in paganized evolutionary cultures in western society as well as elsewhere. Genesis is the source of all major Christian doctrines, and it is the most attacked section of Scripture. Atheists and evolutionists have teams hitched up to their

Before we saddle up for the journey, I wanted to share some personal remarks from my history. Way back when, my father was the pastor in the liberal United Methodist Church denomination. He denied the inerrancy of Scripture, supported the ordination of women as pastors, and had other unsavory views. (Interestingly, he was against ordaining homosexuals, and was ready to resign if the denomination passed that in a vote. Sad that it was subject to a vote in the first place! He also rejected evolution, and that was before all the evidence we have refuting it and affirming special creation that we have today.) The UMC denomination has become far more liberal after his time. When I attended a Christian high school and learned the truth of the Bible, things began to get my attention, such as the phrase "reach the unchurched". Seemed to me that they were more interested in building up numbers than in reaching the lost with the saving gospel of Jesus Christ. Also, after I had left

Scoffers are fond of their own wisdom and knowledge, but that is based on worldly standards and comparisons to other people. They presume that the Bible is mostly (or completely) worthless, but therein lies the starting point of all true knowledge and wisdom. Image credit: pazham at FreeDigitalPhotos.net People who deny God usually have a materialistic worldview that has no room for the Creator that they know exists, but suppress that truth. If God did not exist and we were the product of time, chance, random processes and so forth, we would not be able to trust our own reasoning. How do we know that God exists and the Bible is His Word? Many people think God’s existence is just like any other truth claim—a hypothesis we can confirm or falsify by proper reasoning from more certain knowledge. Commonly, people start with the things they know for sure by their own experiences and then reach a conclusion about God’s existence. Perhaps their experience with cause-and-effect leads

One of the signs of the end times that Jesus warned us about is that the "love of many will grow cold" (Matt. 24:12 HCSB), due to the increase of false teachers and other things. I believe this applies to the disdain that many people have for God's Word, and the blatant compromise from various old Earth, "progressive creationist", and especially from theistic evolutionists. (Many TEs, I am persuaded, are actually Deists because of their low view of Scripture and their vicious temperament toward biblical creationists.) Love for Scripture, and a straightforward reading of it, has grown cold for them. Image credit: Pixabay / mary1826 Unfortunately, too many professing Christians succumb to the minatory threat of ridicule; they don't cotton to looking like "science deniers" or "stupid" in the eyes of those who hate God. So, they compromise with long ages and even with theistic evolution. TEs often link arms with atheists in their ridic

Nowadays, a person's name is simply a means of identification, perhaps only having significance for the family of a child ("You were named after your great uncle") but little more. Way back yonder, names carried deeper meanings. Just take a look in the Bible, especially the Old Testament, and you'll see that names were not casual (such as Gen. 5:29, Ex. 20:10). There are people who will react to anthropomorophizing God (assigning human attributes to him) in the Bible, such as arguing against the Bible's divine inspiration because God is described as having eyes, arms, hands, and so on . That's a cheap excuse. Something a mite more interesting, however, is the use of God's names in the Bible. He has several names, and the creation account uses more than one name for God. To some people, this indicates that there were several unnamed and unknown authors, others ignore common sense and claim that there are two contradictory accounts of creation. It'

Some folks don't cotton to God's plan for man and woman back in Genesis and elsewhere in Scripture, so they resent it and even rebel. Sometimes we hear things like, "Girl power!", as if women feel they have been made subservient to men. I'll allow that societies have treated women as second-class citizens, especially Mohammedan cultures, but that's not the way God planned it. Background image: Adam and Eve in Worthy Paradise , Peter Paul Rubens, 1610-1615 (cropped) There are roles that have been assigned, and this even applies in the Trinity itself . We see various roles in our daily lives: my supervisor is someone I need to obey, but that does not make her a better person than I am, it's just the way the job is structured. Unfortunately, men have abused Bible passages to force women to submit in a way contrary to God's Word and design. Men and women are different, there's no getting around that. Men are better at some things than women, and