“If God wanted, He
could make a tree grow up big and tall right in front of you. A scientist would come along, cut the tree
down, count its rings and tell you it was 80 years old.” Ed spoke those words to me as we made the five
hour trip from Oxford Shaker Heights
I once heard a
preacher say, “How you approach this book [the Bible] will determine how you
live your life.” I’ve found that to be
true. I’ve also found the opposite to be
true, “How you live your life will determine how you approach the Bible.”
I find it
tempting in our modern way of life to explain away creation. I often hear phrases like, “God made it all,
but it wasn’t a literal seven days.” Or,
“We know the sun must have been created before light existed, so the writer of
Genesis is speaking metaphorically.”
I myself
believed many evolutionary theories for a long time. It took me a while and a lot of searching to really
change my views at their core. I can say
now that I chose to believe the writings of Scriptures on creation as they were
written down.
You might ask how
I came to that position. I believe the
writer of Genesis was Moses, and I believe he talked with God on a daily basis
as he wrote Genesis. In my opinion, he
got the straight scoop, and the theorists behind evolution have yet to discover
the real truth. Consequently, I believe the
world was created in seven days and in the order Genesis presents it.
I believe God made
the world the way the Bible says He made it.
All arguments aside, He is God and He can make it any way He wanted to. I don’t get much more complicated than that. Perhaps your beliefs conflict with this
view? No problem, you may still get something
out of this.
So, why do I bring
up Creation? The Creation as recoded in
Genesis is a central theme of the message I put into my pocket.
I believe when
God said to Abraham, “upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee
of.” He was talking about a mountain of significance, not only in
the creation story, but in man’s story as a whole. It is a central piece behind a powerful message
in the Bible that is often overlooked, simple though it may be.
***
I’ve spent my
life in a variety of churches and Christian movements. When it was up to me, I chose the churches I
attended based on how closely they aligned with the writings of the Bible.
In College I was
swept away with various fundamentalist movements. Being fundamental about what you believe can
be good, being caught up in it is bad.
Let me explain.
By the age of 24
I found myself as Paul says in Ephesians 4:14, “tossed to and fro, and carried
about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness.” My typical mode of operation was this:
A feeling of emptiness and a time of
searching, followed by…
An experience of enthusiasm from the
charisma of a great message, followed by…
A period of obsession
about that experience, followed by…
A discipleship and proselytize-ation of
others, followed by…
A rude
awakening to the weakness of the movement, followed by…
A feeling of emptiness and a time
of searching, followed by…
An experience of enthusiasm from the
charisma of a great message, followed by…
You may
recognize that cycle in your own life or in the lives of others around
you. I think this is what Paul was
warning us about. It’s not the way the
Christian life is to be lived.
After about the
third such experience, and feeling the tug of a new movement, I decided to put
on the brakes. After all, the various
movements I involved myself in couldn’t all be right. The things they said usually conflicted with
one another. I figured I had been duped
somewhere along the line.
I made up my
mind to not let it happen again. Modern
day Christianity is rife with this tug and pull of various movements. How can a Christian be “stedfast, unmoveable,
always abounding in the work of the Lord,” as Paul says in I Cor 15:48? I didn’t know, but that became my
prayer.
I figured what attracted
me to the various movements of Christianity was the Biblical basis and the
fundamentals of it. I decided to turn my
focus to the Bible and away from the movements.
I stayed in church,
and would encourage anyone reading this to do the same. I augmented church with intensive Bible
study.
If the Scripture
was true, “So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not
return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall
prosper in the thing whereto I sent it,” (Isaiah 55:11) I had nothing to
lose.
If I wanted to
truly be fundamental about what I believed, I needed to get back to the
fundamentals. Those are found in the
Bible.
Becoming,
“stedfast, unmoveable, and always abounding in the work of the Lord,” became my
goal. The Bible became my venue.
I found when I
focused on God’s Word in the pages of Scripture, I found peace. Along with that came understanding and
knowledge. The roller-coaster ride of
movement Christianity ended.
Through my
intensive Bible study sessions, I began to learn the importance of that simple
message I didn’t preach. As the pages of
Scripture turned, and as I grew more solid in Bible learning I began to see the
profoundness of the message I had stuffed back in my pocket.
