Sadly, some interpret it as a fantasy book both ironically and unironically. Though i do agree with it being meant to be read in the context of the real world.
Ha! Way more than once, and enough more that some are weary of it, I’m sure! XD
But now that you’ve mentioned it, it doesn’t look like I’ve posted it anywhere that @Matthew_Cserhati will have tripped over it yet 
, since he’s new here. So again, for his sake, one more time…
It’s a bit old hat, but the mon is described in the bible as a light. The moon does not generate or produce light, it reflects the sun. From a nonscientific and generally simple perspective, the moon looks like a light in the sky. The knowledge about the cosmos was not known. If you are going to take Genesis 1 literally then we have a flat earth with a dome over it. That is what it says and no wordsmithing or whatever else you want to call it will change that.
Richard
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Correct! How could it? It has nothing to do with electromagnetism or banking regulation either.
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This isn’t really the enterprise. The enterprise is understanding what Genesis meant in its original cultural context to its original audience so you can properly ascertain the truth God is revealing through it to us today. Doing this leads to an interpretation that doesn’t conflict with facts that scientific study has revealed about the world. So that’s nice, but trying to read science (evolution or old earth) into the Bible or trying to make the Bible teach science (the Bible measures the date of the earth, contains observational data about the beginning of the world) is concordism. Most people here think concordism is a deficient hermeneutic and the texts should be approached on their own terms in light of their cultural context.
This is a bare assertion that I reject as a given. Multiple Bible scholars dispute this based on the text itself, and knowledge of ANE literature and Hebrew, first and foremost John Walton with his functional origins ideas.
Christians must place themselves under the authority of Christ, who is Lord and rules the world and whose lordship is revealed in Scripture. What YEC believers tend to mean by being under the authority of the Bible is being under the authority of their teaching about what the Bible means and entails. This is actually just spiritual manipulation and using religion to prop up authoritarian leadership because you are telling people you have to accept my teaching or your soul is in danger. Jesus saves, not the Bible. Christians are justified by their belief in Christ’s resurrection and their profession of Christ’s lordship. Romans 10:9-10
9 If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. 10 For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you profess your faith and are saved.
Adding anything to this (i.e. you have believe there was no death before the fall, you have to believe Adam was the first Homo sapien, you have to believe creation happened in 6 24 hour days, you have to believe the whole world was destroyed in a flood, you have to reject millions of years and evolution) is adding to the gospel and including doctrines that have not historically been part of any creed of the Christian church.
It makes no sense to essentially say, “It is completely scientific because we don’t have to accept the scientific fact of common ancestry.” It’s not scientific. It’s a way of using scientific sounding jargon to describe something people made up out of their imaginations after running with their misguided interpretation of the biblical text. Bariminology is not biblical just because it uses a word found in the Bible and it is definitely not scientific just because it refers to speciation and genetics.
True. He can create life in whatever form he wants and diversify it through whatever process he wants, including evolution, because nothing is impossible with God.
The Bible is not a science textbook and this is concordism.
That is a subjective human judgment. Death and decay are also necessary for the nitrogen cycle, one of the many natural cycles that God has instituted to sustain the healthy flourishing of life on earth.
Which is why it’s really dumb to assume that people who accept evolution also accept a literal reading of Genesis with days that last a million years and everything emerging in the order of the creation week days. That is just your own misconception of what other people believe. Maybe you should take the time to actually understand the other position before arguing against it.
Why are you conflating deep time and evolution? Evolution is a model for the diversification of life. It has nothing to do with the Big Bang or cosmology or earth science. Evolution isn’t what you need to argue against “millions of years,” it’s physics, chemistry, and geology.
This is stuff you made up, not something the Bible teaches.
One could say the same thing about the alleged global flood, which God did.
Also, if “sin entering the world” and “mutations” magically converts herbivores to carnivores and introduces new species, maybe even a few new kingdoms of life forms, then evil is a personal entity with agency and creative power, which is theologically problematic. The only real option you have if you insist that all death and decay are post-fall is that God the creator created the bad stuff as a punishment.
Cutting and pasting some stuff I’ve written out before…
In the YEC scenario you have a ‘perfect’ world, but somehow Satan is on the loose, actively trying to ruin God’s creation. You have an entirely different creation than the one we have now, if there is no animal death and no animal predation or carnivory. (Leaving aside that such a world would be unsustainable and quickly become “imperfect” since the life cycles that keep nature healthy and population levels in ecosystems in harmony depend on death and decay as part of the cycle.) You possibly have no tectonic plate activity and a different weather system, since there would be no ‘natural evils’ like volcanoes, earthquakes, and hurricanes, which cause death. To get from that hypothetical ‘perfect’ world to what we see now, essentially, you have to posit a second, unrecorded, creation event where God recreates or un-creates many of the herbivores into carnivores and scavengers and invents crop blight and stinging nettles and malaria, just to punish humans and make their lives difficult. You have God instituting new natural cycles, changing the weather and geology, fundamentally altering the biology of creatures (carnivores have different teeth, jaws, and digestive systems than herbivores), and creating diseases, pests, and genetic defects.
In that scenario God is proactively creating every way the world is currently imperfect or contributes to death, and you have him going about the act of special creation in an apparently degenerate way, motivated not by love and holiness and artistry, but by the need to curse his fallen human children for their sin.
Theologically this sounds much more problematic to me than the idea that God declared ‘good’ a world that included death and disease as part of its natural order.
Some people make it out like God did not actively create these imperfect things, they just “happened” as a result of sin, but that in untenable in my book. God is the source of all creation. Evil and sin are not creators. When creationists insist that when Adam and Eve ate fruit there was this “change” that radically impacted the structure and function of all creation, either they are saying sin has “magical” creative powers (like in the Disney movies where the princess pricks her finger on the spindle of the spinning wheel and everything gets scary) or God himself purposely changed and redesigned his creation.
I affirm that God is the creator of all that is. I don’t know how anyone ascribes creative power to “sin.” Sin is a state of rebellion, not a personal entity with agency. Sin affects how created things interact, it doesn’t create new things. Thorns, malaria carrying mosquitoes, Ebola, poisonous snakes, these are all part of God’s creation. Sin did not design them or bring them into existence.
So that leaves us with God proactively re-doing creation to make it cursed. This brings in problems with the character of God. If natural evil is something God allows to exist in his creation, that is one thing. It has its theological and philosophical problems. (That’s why we call it “the problem of evil”) But if natural evil is something God did not intend for creation, but puts there on purpose, because he is forced to or because he wants to, all based on a human choice, that means either God’s hand is forced by humans or God created all bad things as a punishment. That is more problematic theologically and philosophically. That’s saying God imagined and purposely created Ebola, because …sin.
One of them. Jesus is also the perfect image bearer of God (Colossians 1:15) and his life mattered too, not just his sacrificial death. He came to model and teach how to bear Gods image faithfully as a human, and his Incarnation permanently united God with his creation. Jesus rules the world as a resurrected, glorified, human. He did not un-Incarnate after the work of redeeming sinners was completed. So that tells me that the atonement was not the only reason for the Incarnation. It is God’s intention to dwell with us as Emmanuel, through uniting us with Christ in his Spirit in the present and coming again to live with his people in the Eschaton.
Sinning “in Adam” is a big misunderstanding based on Augustine relying on a mistranslation by Jerome in the Vulgate.
That is all that is required.
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May I direct you to the new topic I was forced to create so that we can discuss this assertion of yours along with any underlying pre-requisites
Richard
What? Who told you that “Moses wrote Genesis 1”? What evidence of that did that person present to you? And why did you choose to believe that man-made assertion?
It would be most unwise to base your faith on the undefended assertion that “Moses wrote Genesis 1”.
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@Matthew_Cserhati, my brother the Bible clearly teaches that a Christian MUST never bend his/her knee to anything or anyone except God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In fact, the Jewish at the time of Jesus strongly believed in the Bible and followed its rules, but they did not follow Jesus Who is God, so they were lost.
In fact Jesus pointed out that the Bible is mistaken where it says that God rested after the sixth day of creation, because Jesus said that God the Father has never rested nor has God the Son. They are still creating, just as evolution is still continuing. See John 5:16-18.
John 1:1-2, 14. gives us the New Testament Creation story to help us understand Gen 1 & 2. Please learn Who Jesus, the true Word (Logos) of God is and how He makes all the difference in who we are and what we do.
I spent last weekend in intensive teaching about the Genesis. Lessons and discussions from early morning to late evening.
It was interesting to see what happened when a group with diverse opinions and varying background information were led inside the world of ancient inhabitants and culture of that region. The group became exited when they started to see how the first chapters of Genesis were connected to that world.
Differing opinions about the creation of the world according to Genesis 1 versus evolution became a non-issue as the group understood that the message was intended to answer questions that were relevant in that culture and to challenge the teachings of the prevailing religions. Genesis 1 was not intended to answer our questions and had nothing to do with the modern creation versus evolution debate.
After the weekend, the group was surprisingly like-minded about the way how Genesis 1 should be interpreted. There are of course differing opinions about the way how apparent patterns in the text should be interpreted. Yet, none of the group were anymore talking or even interested about the modern debate about evolution vs. creation according to Genesis 1.
A positive example of how diving into the world of biblical scriptures can change the thinking of believers. I recommend.
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The whole point of Genesis 1 is the affirmation of the Sabbath. To claim God did not rest is to misunderstand the whole thing.
Richard
I think what he means is that in genesis 2:2 where the sabbath of the first week comes up ( I’ll never understand why it did not extend 1 in the mind of whenever added the letters ) that the word for “ he rested / shabath “ is perhaps better understood as he ceased working. Sometimes people want to argue if god is all powerful why did he need to take a rest type of thing. They feel “ he ceased to stop working “ is better than saying “ he rested from working because they believe it implies he needed a break to recoup.
It would be comparable to Christ being baptised. He did not need it but wanted to show the necessity of it.
Richard
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I agree. I was just trying to show the argument I’ve seen arise concerning that word.
What is Genesis 1 about?
It is introduction to Genesis, so that is part of the question of what Genesis is about.
Is it a science textbook explaining the origin of everything we see? No it not. There is no similarity to a science textbook and that is certainly not the purpose of Genesis.
A “How to create the world for Dummies” book? No. Nothing in the Bible suggest that God has given us anything of the sort and the book of Job tells us the opposite. The implication is instead that we haven’t a clue how God created everything and it is even beyond our capability to understand. Considering all that we have discovered since then where so much defies the dictates of common sense, that is quite a reasonable assessment of the understanding of people at the time.
History? That is the general intent of the book of Genesis, yes. Not according to modern historical science of course. But certainly what passes for history from two millennia ago – which means it tells a story of things which happened. Yet this is a story highly focused on one people and nation and there is no effort to explain the history of all people on earth. But since this is a story of a relationship between a people and their creator, the author sees it as important to set stage with a story of that creation. But the point is not to tell us how God created but to tell us that God created everything we see and that includes everything that the people of the time were aware of and does not include a great number of things they were not aware of. That awareness extends only thousands of years in time and only thousands of kilometers in distance. There is no awareness of the earth as a globe let alone the vast size of the universe.
I don’t believe that and there is nothing in the Bible to support your claim. That comes from other religions and texts not accepted as authoritative in Christianity. What kind of parent keeps an evil servant around the house with their children, because that is what you are suggesting. I do not believe in a God with that level of irresponsibility and carelessness. No, the story is an explanation of the origin of evil including the origin of the adversary.
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Funny.
It actually comes from genesis 3*.
The serpent was already trying to deceive Eve before Adam or Eve sinned……
I mean how could you have misunderstood it? The serpent deceived Eve into sinning. Eve did not sin and then the serpent deceived them.
How did you come to your conclusion? What other texts are you looking at?
That is not in the text and I don’t believe it.
I think the angel was just doing its job to challenge living things so that they would learn and grow.
I came to my conclusion by reading what is actually there in the text rather than simply buying into what other people say is there.
But then trying to figure out where this other stuff came from, I traced it to the non-canonical text called the book of Enoch.
Is not Genesis 1 but Genesis 3-4 and has very little to do with Genesis 1 other than being lumped in with it. Genesis 2-4 (with the exception of the first couple of verses) is clearly a different narration with a different agenda. If you want to discuss the Garden create another thread.
Richard
You are right it’s genesis 3. Simple mistake.
However, if you read through the OPs first post
You’ll notice they bring up death and that there was no death or anything bad and the discussion moved into death and things that rot. So the discussion from the start goes into genesis 4 and even other entire books.
I strongly disagree. There is nothing there to believe that the serpent was just doing it’s job. If it was then why does it mention in genesis 3 that the woman said the serpent deceived her? Why was it punished? What kind of God do you worship that punishes things for doing His will? That is a god I cannot worship. I don’t accept it……