Thank you Ethan,
yes, I know it was Jesus, I would not be here but for Him.
Although I know that am not worthy of His love, I am indeed fortunate and have been so blessed in my life, the Lord has work for me to do, before I go home. Praise His glorious Name forever and ever!!!
You are so right, it is our dear Lord and Saviour, Jesus who we all need to keep our minds eye steadfastly fixed upon.
I’ve always marveled at the profound understanding that Hebrews 11:1-3 gives us about what faith is.
Since the fall in the Garden of Eden, the world has had an enormous amount of inequity, sorrow, pain and suffering that continues to this day; it is hard to watch the daily news reports of those poor souls in countries ravaged by so much affliction, war, persecution and starvation.
I know without any doubt whatsoever, that there but by the grace of God go I.
Faith leads us to the Truth, Hope conquers darkness, and His Love is victorious over death.
We are all in His presence constantly, yet at times we can lose sight that He sees all, and knows every thought of our heart.
We are all related, every man woman and child on Earth are one family, we all go back to Adam and Eve. If only the many different families of man would see that and comprehend we are indeed all brothers and sisters.
HALLELUJAH! King of Kings, Majesty! Thank you Lord Jesus! HALLELUJAH!
Hi Roymond, unfortunately, and I’m sorry to tell you this but this quote requires a response as it has the potential to mislead many.
A lot of what you have written here is strange but to save time, I will dismiss as unfounded and move on, but we will most definitely NOT "be judged on how well we “imaged” God." That is not the Truth, it is a false teaching.
8 For by grace you have been saved through faith; and this is not of yourselves, it is the gift of God;
9 not a result of works, so that no one may boast. Ephesians 2:8-9
We have been saved by His grace. His grace means that He loves and Saves us through His work on the cross. We are not capable of ever being good enough to earn our own Salvation; it is only because of Jesus taking the penalty of death upon Himself (that we deserve) that we are saved.
Of course that doesn’t mean we should do nothing! When we are saved and are guided by the Holy Spirit, we are transformed becoming a new creation; and we wish to do works that help to spread the gospel throughout the world and help people in need, be they hungry or sick or in need in anyway.
Thus we do works from a correct heart that is right before God, not to earn Salvation, which is not possible, but because we love the Lord and our fellow brothers and sisters in humanity, that we desire to see saved and put right before the Lord God who is our Creator.
Where is that in the text? Nothing in either Creation story says the words were given by God, not even as visions or dreams. I know it’s a popular conjecture that’s meant well, intended to shore up confidence in the words that start out Genesis, but since it isn’t in the text we shouldn’t be claiming it.
There is need to ask, which YECists refuse to do, instead arrogantly claiming that they can tell the genre just by reading a translation. The Holy Spirit’s intention was to communicate with the people at the time – not to us; we are reading other people’s mail – and so He would have picked a writer who was good at the language, good at the literary genres available, and good at making use of common tropes in the culture to get the message across to his audience.
They translate the words. They cannot translate a literary genre because that is cultural.
Your two clauses are not logically connected. It’s perfectly possible to correctly translate an ancient text, say one in Akkadian, and do a supreme job at it, but totally fail to convey the meaning because there are assumptions in the culture where it was written that are needed to know what the words conveyed.
By your standard that “it reads like history”, the Baal cycle and other ancient near eastern writings must also be history, as must almost all modern fiction.
And what do you do with those who found deep time in the text of Genesis? How do you deal with the fact that the first description of what we now call the Big Bang was set down by a Hebrew scholar as coming from the text of Genesis 1?
You talk about worldviews, not recognizing that yours has a massive hole in it because you only have two categories: those who are YEC, and those who follow evolution. You have no space for those who actually study the text in the original context and come to conclusions of deep time from that and not from any influence from science – especially when some of those scholars come from before the invention of the telescope! So in order to maintain your worldview you have to pretend that these people either don’t exist or are caught up in some conspiracy . . . even though a good number of them wrote before your conspiracy could have begun.
His mental model doesn’t have room for YECers who don’t think the days are meant literally.
Nor do they have the ability to grasp that there is no literary type from today that would have been understood back then – the cultures are just that different.
From a physical geology perspective, either the world is at least millions of years old or whoever made it is a deceiver. This cannot be avoided since the results have nothing to do with any assumptions or with ‘historical science’, they have to do with repeated measurements in laboratories, measurements that are repeated numerous times every year as geology students (including grad students) do the lab work to understand the measurements by making them themselves.
Good point: when you have two propositions that are not compatible, it is necessary to do outside tests to determine which is the dangerous one, the possible lie. With YEC and evolution, I observed such ‘tests’ among university students and found that when students abandoned Christianity the most common factor by far was that they had come from YEC-teaching churches.
Thus logically if there is a lie it is to be found in YEC.
The problem is that you were actually accepting a cultural view of Creation and the Flood, not what the text actually says.
This is a good reason to not surf in storms! In normal weather it’s possible to read the waves and know where the undercurrents are that can drag you out, and where the neutral places are, and where the few inward currents are flowing; I remember riding a longshore current once and assuring my friends that if we waited just a bit there would be a current helping us shoreward, and everyone cheering when a bit later we intersected it. But on that same stretch of beach I would never dare to even jump waves in stormy weather because the storm surge drives more water shoreward in the upper portion of the surf and can turn the entire beach into a zone with outward-flowing undercurrents.
In lifeguard training we were taught how to deal with outbound undercurrents, so of course one day in the summer at the beach I had to try it so I walked right into an outflow spot and got tugged under. I’m not sure how long I was under, but I wasn’t worried because back then I could hold my breath long enough to swim two hundred meters under water; but I had the same experience – I popped up a lot farther out than I’d started. But I knew what to do; I swam parallel to the beach for maybe twenty-five meters and tried swimming in, and that worked as I caught an inward-bound current.
Rogue wave. We learned in oceanography that theoretically these waves could be predicted if wave patterns could be viewed over a large enough area, but it took until this year for someone to figure out the math! But even with the math you’ll never figure out when one is coming while standing on the beach, it has to be viewed from above and the different wave patterns out over five miles accounted for.
This is one of those miracles where people argue whether it was a miracle of timing, that the particular wave that lifted you was always going to come at that moment but God got you there at just that moment, or if He gave just the right push in the wave pattern to cause it when you needed it.
Flashback . . .
“Screaming lungs” is a good description of what I remember from being the lifeguard on a river float trip when a kid didn’t maneuver when told to and ended up being sucked down under a fallen tree, and I went after him. Others told me I wasn’t down there more than forty-five seconds, but oxygen burns fast with adrenaline and I was biting my tongue on the way up once I’d gotten the kid, in order to keep from trying to breathe water.
And of course you didn’t know that the entire Creation.com organization regularly publishes false material.
And the worldview of those who argue for science and point out that Creation.com is lying is to hold to honest measurements.
Besides which the text does not say “the second day”, it says “a second day”, which means the text is not telling about consecutive days – so “then the second Day started” is incorrect.
The YECists engage in selective literal reading and mixing in of science, unless they want to say that the Earth was just drifting in space until God gave it the sun to orbit!
The term does not mean that God supplied the words – and if it does, then you have to believe that He first provided the words to the Egyptians but let them put in the wrong gods.
What there’s no need for is forcing the text to fit a modern worldview, which is what you’re doing when you say " a child can understand the text" – the child’s understanding is shaped by his/her modern scientific worldview, which happens to be the wrong worldview for the text since it is ancient literature written under a very, very different worldview.
That doesn’t mean you get to invent your own way of reading the text. The way to read any text is in its context, both literary and cultural. You assume that God spoke according to your worldview despite the fact that the writer and his audience would not understand that worldview in the least.
You are disagreeing with Paul in at least four places, also with Peter, and even with Jesus – they all say we will be judged by our works.
Try Romans 2, 2 Corinthians 5, Colossians 3, Revelation 20.
How do you think the author of Genesis could write the Creation account?
The author wasn’t there, in fact in the beginning, for the first five days Adam didn’t exist either, thus the only way that the writer was able to write what happened was through God, and Scripture is God breathed as 2 Timothy 3:16-17 tells us: 16 All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, 17 so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.
AND Scripture Cannot Be Broken:
32 Jesus answered them, Many good works have I shewed you from my Father; for which of those works do ye stone me?
33 The Jews answered him, saying, For a good work we stone thee not; but for blasphemy; and because that thou, being a man, makest thyself God.
34 Jesus answered them, Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods?
35 If he called them gods, unto whom the word of God came, and the scripture cannot be broken;
36 Say ye of him, whom the Father hath sanctified, and sent into the world, Thou blasphemest; because I said, I am the Son of God?
37 If I do not the works of my Father, believe me not.
38 But if I do, though ye believe not me, believe the works: that ye may know, and believe, that the Father is in me, and I in him. KJV John 10:32-38
thus why is it that you are saying what you are saying?
Why is there a need to ask?
It is not I or other people who believe the Bible that are being arrogant!
You say, “The Holy Spirit’s intention was to communicate with the people at the time – not to us;…”
do you really believe that?
Do you truly actually believe, that the very ONE who made the Sun, the Earth, the Galaxies, the heritable DNA information storage system (the densest information storage system in the universe by many orders of magnitude), who made all the beautiful creatures on Earth was doing so to only inform the relatively small number of people who lived way back then?
God is not limited, He knows the future from beginning to end, He has given us the Words of Scripture so that we may know how we should live, how we came to be in the condition we find ourselves in a fallen world, and through prophecy what we shall see come to pass in the future, and most importantly how we must be saved.
God is NOT incapable of such a small thing as to be communicating to all of humanity through the Bible; that’s why He made it to be compiled! The writers of each of the Books of the Bible were inspired by God, a simple fact that appears to elude you. The writer of Genesis for example, wrote of things he could not have known about except he was inspired by God. There is NO other possibility.
Again, it appears you believe that readers of the Bible have to be able to determine the ‘literary genre’ of the text before they can know what God is plainly telling us. If that is true, then why don’t the 63+ painstakingly carefully translated Bibles say what you claim is being meant in the original Hebrew texts?
The reason is that the meaning is so abundantly clear to everyone including children that it is not necessary to read into the text anything more than what is so plainly written.
The translators had scores of scholars working on each of the translations for decades, yet you’re asserting they didn’t get it right.
If taking the literary genre into account is so vitally important in your view, then I see no reason why the literary genre of each Book would not have been taken into account when the translations were performed.
The end result of those 63+ carefully translated Bibles are there for all to read, yet they all say that God created in six days, normal days, because they had evening and morning which in God’s foreknowledge of what Theistic evolutionists would claim, made it abundantly clear that the days were normal days, that we presently know as 24 hour periods of time.
God could of course have made the Creation in an instant, but He took so long, a full week to teach us about how we should live, work and rest with the seven day week. The billions of years is fiction.
Your opinion of what our Lord God is capable of, appears to be restricted to a narrow interpretation that results in adding billions of years into the text that plainly do NOT exist!
If God took billions of years of misery, suffering and death to arrive at an ape that then gave birth to a human, and then said that what He had made was good and very good, then that God would be a deranged maniac.
But fortunately for us all, we do not worship that false god, we Worship the Living God, He is Gracious, Merciful, Loving and Good, He is perfectly Just and Righteous, and Loves us all.
He would not under any circumstances call the abomination of evolution good!
That reality is so absolutely clear to me that I cannot stress it enough.
Why do you not understand?
Please, please ponder on that, consider why would God call the Creation good and very good if it involved so much pain and suffering and DEATH. That just doesn’t make a skerrick of sense at all.
DEATH is not good! Surely you can see from the Scriptures that death is not the normal state, but is an intruder that will be eliminated from the Creation in the future.
The Creation was originally good, there was NO Death! Then Adam sinned and you know the rest.
Yes that’s my assumption of what is in the YEC pov, Terry.
I think, in the YEC’s pov: the creation of heaven,earth and light happen like Jon say:
So, I apply YEC’s pov sequence based on “it is likely”:
Darkness
Rotating earth created (the first hour of the whole earth Day-1 begin in the dark → evening)
While earth rotates, Light created. Earth continue to rotate…
after 12 hours has elapsed, it reach morning time (the separation of light and darkness)
Earth experience day time, still rotates for another 12 hours…
then finally earth reach back to a dark condition.
So… I guess, that is when YEC say that “24 hours has elapsed” (and it was evening and it was morning). Earth Day-1 started in the evening, 12 hours elapsed, day time, 12 hours elapsed, ended in the evening.
In my OP, I don’t agree with YEC’s pov, because based on my knowledge that day&night happen simultaneously on earth, then #4 is incorrect which consequently #5 and #6 also incorrect.
Then Jon gave me “it maybe”:
So after I apply bold to YEC’s pov sequence, but the result is still the same thing (incorrect), because eventhough when light created at the same time the earth rotates, it still can’t be that “the first hour of the whole earth’s Day-1 started in the evening”
No matter how many variant of the sequence I try to make regarding Gen 1:1-5, I never able to reach that “the first hour of the whole earth’s Day-1 started in the evening”. EXCEPT I change my knowledge, from a spherical earth shape into a flat earth shape.
Then Jon say:
That’s confused me. Because if YEC don’t know when “the first hour of the whole earth’s Day-1 started” then how YEC calculate the 24 hours ?
Just for illustration:
There are 100 boxes where each box contains how many balls is unknown.
If later on Mr.X say : “all those 100 boxes contains 24 balls in each box” then it means Mr.X MUST have had open all those 100 boxes, counting the balls in each box, beginning with the first box he open.
Jon say he doesn’t know when, but the link from YEC show they did know when the first hour of the whole earth Day-1 started :
the text I underlined, it’s just like someone in my illustration say that he already open 99 boxes and each box did contain 24 balls. Then he say “the last box certainly also contains 24 balls, because the 99 boxes I’ve checked contain 24 balls in each box”.
1000 times I ask him to prove that “the last box contains 24 balls”, then 1000 times also he say the same thing: “the last box certainly contains 24 balls, because the 99 boxes I’ve checked contain 24 balls in each box”.
Then to me, there is no evidence that “the first hour of the whole earth Day-1 started in the evening”.
Yes… to me, I face a “dead end”, I will never be able to get a logical answer from the YEC. The text I underlined in the quote above is similar with that someone in my illustration say “I don’t need to open the last box to know how many balls inside it”
Yes I understand and realize about that, Terry.
But because I want to focus about Gen 1:1-5, so I put my position to accept whatever YEC other explanation regarding light/sun/moon/stars.
Yes… I also understand that. I deliberately disregard that “it need human to perceive Sunday, Monday, etc”.
Same, I also understand and realize that. But I deliberately ignore it. So I just accept whatever YEC say in Light Before the Sun in order I can focus on what Earth experienced in Gen 1:1-5 according to YEC.
That’s what I mean, Jon.
To me, to declare “this is the end of the day”, then it need the starting point about when the day begin.
As you can see from the above picture, in my country, the starting point is 12 midnight. So the picture above show that “it is almost the end of the day” —or— it also maybe “it’s almost 12 hours has passed”. Now, imagine that I don’t know when is the starting point, I can never count how many hours have elapsed .
So, when the whole earth ordinary day begin ?
It appears to commence in the evening
Is the whole earth ordinary day begin in the evening ?
Hi Reko,
the important thing in the Genesis Creation account for me is that God said what He did on the first day, the second day, the third day, the fourth day, the fifth day and the sixth day, then He rested on the seventh day to give us a pattern for the working week.
Of course God knows the Earth is a sphere, as He created it.
I do not know whether God was describing each day from a particular stationary point or the whole Earth, as He is everywhere in the universe and outside the universe at the same time.
But as the whole purpose of the Bible is to inform humanity, it may be reasonable to conclude that precisely because God is relaying an account of His actions to be understandable by people of all times in history, it is likely to me at least that He made the historical account understandable for people by making the reference frame the same as what people plainly understand a day to be, in their daily lives, thus I suggest He may be referring to an evening and a morning from a single reference point as each person knows a day to occur from where they are physically at, and the text states that God was hovering over the surface of the waters, thus for the purposes of conveying the history of Creation to us all, He was at a finite position perhaps for our sake so that us mere humans would be able to understand, though of course He would have been Omnipresent everywhere else too, such is the Majesty, Power and Glory of our Creator.
Of course I may be wrong too, the text doesn’t tell us any more than what it plainly does.
So I am content to accept God at His Word that He made the Creation in six days, I don’t need to know exactly when each day commenced from the point of view of the standardised convention of time we use at present, it just isn’t important.
Our understanding is very limited, we don’t even know what time is, we can measure it but what it actually is, we just don’t know, similarly we cannot comprehend eternity, nor do we understand what gravity actually is, we can describe that mass exerts a gravitational force on other objects with mass, but what the stuff of gravity is, we simply don’t have a clue! The same applies to light, we can describe it in quantum theory as particles, discrete packets of energy we name photons and/or as an electromagnetic wave form of energy, and study its properties, we use it in so many ways, but what the stuff of light is, again we don’t really know.
Thus even though many people believe that science has worked everything out, the Truth is we are all like children in a kindergarten, just starting to learn about the world around us, which is why it is so important to trust the Bible as it is faithful and true and doesn’t change like the wind.
It may be long overdue - but it seems that nothing new has been written in this thread for quite some time, and people have just been endlessly repeating themselves for quite a few cycles by now. So perhaps it’s time to mercifully for all parties involved bring this thread to a close in the next day or two - or after you’ve had a chance to get in any last bits of things that you may feel are new (or at least haven’t already been addressed multiple times already).
@karma , this being your thread I guess you could appeal or ask any new questions that might be still lingering for you if you wish. Probably no need to keep repeating the same challenge that has apparently gone unanswered for you for many response cycles by now.
From The Bible For Normal People, Peter Enns and Jared Byas’ Interview with Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Brettler: “How Jews & Christians Read the Bible Differently”:
Jared: … But maybe let’s take a step back and just talk about what you mean by an interpreted Bible and how that impacts how we come to the text.
Marc: Well, there’s no such thing as an uninterpreted Bible.
AJ: Unless it just sits on your shelf, right, for decoration. That’s an uninterpreted Bible.
Marc: Yeah. There’s a wonderful story of a Hebrew Bible colleague of mine, Ed Greenstein. He taught for many years at Jewish Theological Seminary then at Tel Aviv University and Bar-Ilan University in Israel where his students – I’m going to get this story almost right – where his students used to complain that he cared too much about theory and that they just wanted to hear the text speak. But one day he came to class, he walked in at the appointed hour, he opened his Bible and went silent for five minutes. The students, you can imagine, were getting more and more perplexed. Then finally he explained, well, I was trying to let the text speak for itself.
…
Jared: So Ben, what, … what allows–so I’m trying to , kind of channeling a lot of the Christian tradition where the authority of the text starts to break down if you allow for this the fact that the text itself is debating this ambiguity is built-in–so what kind of components of a Jewish faith whether it’s Conservative, Orthodox, or otherwise, allows for celebrates or promotes this idea that the text can still be central, meaningful, authoritative, and yet have these disagreements built into them and …"
Benjamin: Gotcha! You don’t. To answer that, let me step back for a second, and point out really a core difference between a Jewish conception of the Bible and a Protestant conception of the Bible. And this is going to be true of really of all Jews. It’s certainly very, very true of Orthodox Jews; this one is not specific to one movement or another, and in Judaism the Bible is sacred alongside a whole additional set of books—a whole additional literature that you might refer to as being tradition—and the Bible and tradition worked together to be the sacred literature of the Jewish people. We don’t have any idea of Sola Scriptura. For us, tradition, in particular, the works of rabbinic tradition, books like the Talmud, the Mishnah , there’s a whole other set of bookshelves. Those are also sacred and authoritative. So, in this regard, Jews are much much more similar to Catholics and to Eastern Orthodox Christians, for whom tradition—whether it’s Aquinas or Augustine, or Chrysostom are very, very important, alongside the Bible. Similarly, for Jews, the Talmud is enormously important right alongside the Bible, and the truth of the matter is that, on a practical level, the way we observe Judaism is much more based on the Talmud in rabbinic literature than on the Bible. A lot of the specific laws, especially that Orthodox and Conservative Jews obey, are actually spelled out in Talmudic literature much more clearly than they are in biblical literature and some of them aren’t found in biblical literature at all. So for us, for Jews generally, you might see … I don’t know, you really could almost say Scripture includes not just the Bible, but a whole lot of other later works written by the classical rabbis, that, if scripture is what is sacred and authoritative in Judaism that’s not just the Bible. That’s, that’s also, and, in some ways, even more so, rabbinic literature. So, somebody said that maybe we should pause here, but I had to kind of get that piece of information out there before responding to your question, Jared. But maybe I should pause and just see if you want to follow up on this this one point before I go on to your question. I just want to make sure you don’t miss that second point, but if people … go ahead … Peter: Nope my point can wait. Benjamin: Good. So, oh yes, … so going to, so going to that question: “What allows us to hear debate in the Bible, …here, disagreement in the Bible, and not get all freaked out?” Well, here, first of all, here, I am going to go back to answering more from a specifically Conservative point of view. I think many Orthodox authorities would say that: “No, the Bible–especially the five books of Moses come from heaven. Therefore, they don’t engage in debate, because debate is, in some sense, is a sign of fallibility, right? You don’t debate something unless you’re not sure, and presumably, God was sure. So for Orthodox Jews who believe that at least the five books of Moses–and to some degree the rest of the Bible—was really written by God, then they’re not going to necessarily be happy with the idea that the five books of Moses have more than one author, and debate with each other and, therefore, betray a certain human side, insofar as they’re unsure about some things they’re fallible about something. So, at this point, I’m going to go back to give you a more specifically Conservative answer. I think that for—at least for myself, as a religious Jew—the reason that I’m not really upset by the idea that the Bible debates with itself, … that biblical authors disagree with each other, is that most Jewish sacred literature is found in rabbinic text, … is found in the Talmud and related rabbinic works, and rabbinic literature is famous for constantly being full of debate and argumentation. I mean, there’s the famous, you know, the famous idea that if you’ve got two Jews in a room, you’ve got three opinions–the Jews love disagreeing with each other—that you know, if a Jew is stranded on a, …on a desert island, at last they find him, you know, twenty years later, he kind of shows them around, and like, shows what he’s built: and there are two synagogues; and they ask: “Well, why did you build two synagogues?” And the guy says: “That’s the synagogue I pray in and that’s the synagogue I wouldn’t step foot in if you paid me.”
============================
Jeremiah 17
Thus says the Lord,
“Cursed is the man who trusts in mankind
And makes flesh his strength,
And whose heart turns away from the Lord.
“For he will be like a bush in the desert
And will not see when prosperity comes,
But will live in stony wastes in the wilderness,
A land of salt without inhabitant.
“Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord
And whose trust is the Lord.
“For he will be like a tree planted by the water,
That extends its roots by a stream
And will not fear when the heat comes;
But its leaves will be green,
And it will not be anxious in a year of drought
Nor cease to yield fruit.
Woops. I tried to turn the last exchange here between @jammycakes and @Burrawang here into a private message, but I botched that. Oh well. I’ll just remove these last few posts - people can read further up to see how you’ve both already answered each other. I’m really just waiting for @karma to weigh in with some conclusion or new question since it’s his thread. Others of you here, unless you find a different drum to bang on, I’ll probably just keep hiding your stuff until the thread likely just gets closed soon. Feel free to private message each other if you feel strongly led to keep at it.
Hi Reko, Mervin has shut this topic down so we are unable to post on, so I think this is a private message.
1 In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
2 The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.
3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. 4 And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.
God does not say the whole Earth, He just tells us, “there was evening and there was morning, the first day.” so that is all we know.
I really don’t understand why it matters; I just accept that the first day was a day. It doesn’t matter when because we calibrate our time by the night and day cycle but at the very beginning there wasn’t even light, then God created light, so time in the real sense at creation would be meaningless, thus to say “there was evening and there was morning, the first day.” is perfectly correct and to be expected as time had only just commenced at that point too.
LOL, I realize that
1000 times same question from me, 1000 times same answer
While with my parents, it is enough a few times explanation from me, they can quickly realize that it is impossible God say that “Day-1 of the whole earth started in the evening”
Thank you Mervin for the advice. Yes… I will end my thread now.
Thank you very much for all my responders who already spare their time to participate in this thread.
.
.
