No commentary I have ever read agrees with you Martin. Matthew used “Kingdom of Heaven” instead of “Kingdom of God” because he was a Jew writing to a primarily Jewish audience and heaven was a euphemism to avoid using the name of God, which Jews avoided out of respect. Even conservative Bible scholars acknowledge the “already/ not yet” presence of the Kingdom of God on earth. It is the “inaugurated but contested, unconsummated Kingdom.” (That’s D. A. Carson of TEDS and you don’t get more mainstream Evangelical than Carson, though I’m not going to bother to look up the citation)
Ok,it may then be the many believers on earth before they get to heaven.it has to be something,
{This is the way i believe}. i would rather take the bible as accurately as possible and to do that i feel i must take it as literally as possible the parts that can be taken that way.I feel if i get to heaven doubting a lot of it Or taking it less seriously than I should and i find that Jesus did NOT mean for me to take them as allegory. then I will stand at the judgement doubting Gods word as true.I would rather believe it all factual {the parts that are} and have Jesus tell me they are not, than doubt they are real and find out from Jesus they are and that i was wrong for thinking they were not.(i would rather be safe than sorry in other words). If that makes any sense?. Many may not believe that way,They may doubt the bible and believe mans word over it.If the Bible that they doubt just happens to be true however,then the grits are going to hit the fan {so to speak)I’m afraid.
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while i do agree we need to consider the audience he was talking to at the time , I think we must also not count it out for us today. i believe that Jesus was fully God< divine > and fully man. i think the flood was worldwide{ for me to think other wise in my opinion} would be for me to doubt the Bible as true.
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Fair enough. But that is kind of a sad view of God’s character. What loving Father is just waiting for his children to screw up and not believe right so he can punish them? We aren’t justified because we believe the right things hard enough. That just makes faith into a human work. When we stand before God, his grace will be abundant enough to cover all the places we were mistaken or faithless or unfaithful, and there will be no condemnation for those who are in Christ. The beauty of redemption is that it deals with all our failures and all our misguided ignorance.
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What I meant to say is that deriving a scientific account of origins from the Bible is fundamentally a mistake. This is independent of the content of that scientific account. So whether someone tries to use it for supporting common descent plus deep time (within a hypothetical young earth society) or uncommon descent plus a young earth (within a society that accepts evolution and deep time), both are (mis)using the Bible for things which is was never meant to provide.
I wouldn’t tie the Bible to evolutionary theory or young earth because the Bible is not a scientific textbook. Although I believe the evidence for evolution and deep time in God’s Creation is overwhelming, scientific theories still allow for change and improvement over time.
However beautiful or well-supported some scientific theory is, we shouldn’t tie God to it. Newton believed that the notions of absolute time and absolute space in his theory of classical mechanics expressed the eternity of God. Later, Einstein’s theory introduced relative notions of time and space. Does that disprove that God is eternal? No, the elegance of Einstein’s theory of relativity can still be an expression of God’s creativity.
God’s Word stands forever 
.
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However at least for me personally, their is a great deal of difference between intentionally mistaken because I listen to mans idea of evolution and mistaken because I believed the Bible and did not correctly interpret what was written because of confusing text. the first case would be sinful and the second case would simply be a mistake or error.
when Jesus prayed the Lord’s prayer he said “our father who art in heaven” so heaven can not be on this earth or unconsummated. it has to be a different place.
What about a third case, being mistaken because you listen to man’s ideas about the Bible? I find that too many people are listening to YEC dogmas that actually aren’t in the Bible. For example, I still didn’t succeed in finding God’s appendix to the Bible in which He states that the Bible is meant as a science textbook.
By the way, I really appreciate your respectful tone. This is how all of us can have a real conversation. Keep it up!
Thank you very much for turning me on to D.A Carson. I looked him upon you tube and his sermons are right up my ally!
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I went to the TEDS website and I read the WHAT WE BELIEVE page and I can say I am in 100% full compliance with it.and agree with it 100%. thank you for turning me on to it.
2nd timothy 2:15 explains it well. It is our duty to search out the scriptures to find out what they say. and pray in the spirit and ask for God’s guidance and help to interpret them.And one of the things i do is if i find myself at a point to where I am really stuck, I ask a pastor for his understanding on it. then after my pastor lets me have his ideas from his study in the word, I then feel I can find pretty close to the original meaning of the text.{I do not understand Greek or Hebrew and some times that is surly needed} and on the other note thank you I am working hard to keep from “screaming” as they call it. also the internet is a great place to go for info. One more foot note; before I would ever just doubt the text was Truth i would just sleep on it a while and ask the lord to show me and he will.
You are welcome. Here is another book you might like. Gordon Fee’s How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth
It has been used for decades (I think its in its fourth edition now) at conservative Evangelical colleges and seminaries to help people learn how to get the most out of reading Scripture. It helps a person understand the interpretive process. And don’t worry, there’s nothing in there about evolution. 
Thank you
A post was split to a new topic: Did a Global Flood really happen? If not, why does the Bible describe one?
With what you finally said, I have no disagreement whatsoever. But you also said that no scientific theory should be tied to God or the Christian bible, but this is exactly what BioLogos is. Its mission-statement is of course, “BioLogos invites the church and the world to see the harmony between science and biblical faith as we present an evolutionary understanding of God’s creation.”
You’re clearly affiliated with BioLogos, and you presumably support its mission-statement. How do you reconcile this? Make no mistake here: in my brief correspondence with you and others here, I find everyone to be quite sensible.
More to the point, though, you also apparently believe that the consensus in modern science in its current interpretation of various aspects of reality is basically correct. I’m not so sanguine as you are, and I suspect that much or even most of scientific consensus is flat wrong. Why do I believe this? In controversies between those who give credence to evolutionary theory and those who do not, ultimately, the following charge is made. It’s either, “You do not understand evolutionary theory,” or, “Do you really believe that so many fields of science that independently confirm evolutionary theory are wrong?”
For the former, I’m aware of arguments in favor of deep time and biological evolution. Yes, I’m aware of ERV’s, pseudogenes, putative transitional forms and so forth. I’m also aware of many fundamental problems with evolutionary theory itself. For the latter, this question of course suggests that this is IN PRINCIPLE impossible. But it’s not at all. In fact, I can name a major branch of science that explains certain phenomena in a manner that I can demonstrate is absolutely, fundamentally incorrect and backward. This is a field of science that was established early in the twentieth century, and there are very few dissenters from the consensus (though they do exist). But those who do not dissent are all wrong–and demonstrably so. The theories that are presented to explain the phenomena under study are plausible, but they’re still absolutely incorrect. This doesn’t prevent tens of BILLIONS of dollars annually from being squandered in research to chase solutions that will never be found. It also didn’t prevent these utterly flawed explanations from being established in the global consciousness. But it’s still dead wrong. This is not a rejection of modern science. It’s instead a (learned) skepticism of modern science. The reality is that humanity is shipwrecked in time, and we don’t really understand so much as we believe that we do.
Now, just because one major field of science is fundamentally incorrect does not mean that they ALL are of course. But the fact that explanations of modern science, wholly incorrect, in this field have been swallowed whole by the world despite the fact that they’re absolutely wrong is shocking and proves (for me) that modern science is not the ironclad expositor of truth that it presents itself to be. I do not purport to know how life arrived on earth. I do not purport to know how old the earth is. For me, they’re both mysteries. I have no trouble admitting that.
It’s good that you ask this question, Joseph. There is an important difference between (1) tying a scientific theory to God or to the Bible and (2) claiming there is harmony between a given scientific theory and biblical faith.
The mission statement of BioLogos refers to a harmony that can be found between science and biblical faith. So it’s not about deriving a scientific account from the Bible and not about adjusting the Bible to fit with the scientific consensus. It’s about letting both science and the Bible speak for themselves, in their own respective contexts.
This is the analogy of the two Books (see this BioLogos series). God reveals Himself specifically in the Bible and generally in His Creation. If we believe that the God of the Bible created everything, we expect to find coherence between Creation and the Bible. If such coherence is lacking, something is probably awry with the ways of interpreting either Creation (as you imply), the Bible (as I imply), or both. But if the scientific theory collapses for some reason, it won’t do harm to the Bible because it was never “tied” to that theory. Just the harmony between them had been demonstrated.
I accept the overall picture of the current scientific consensus as plausible mainly because I have experienced it from the inside. I am a graduate student of astrophysics and neuroscience, which makes me familiar with the inner workings of these fields. Also, I didn’t experience any cognitive dissonance when reading the Bible and studying science. Only when other people (atheists and young earth creationists) started telling me that it doesn’t fit, I became aware of the missional importance of this topic today. But it didn’t differ one cent for my personal encounter with Christ and my subsequent faith relationship with Him.
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