Exploring the Intersection of Science and Scripture: A Journey Through Genesis & Theories of Creation

Well, hey, welcome to Madison Church Online.

My name is Steven Feith, lead pastor of Madison Church.

I'm so glad that you're joining us via YouTube or podcast for today I'm wondering if you have ever seen the movie Talladega Nights with Will Ferrell.

I'm not telling you that you should see it, I'm not even saying that it's a good movie.

I'm just wondering if you've seen it, because there is a scene when Will Ferrell's character, ricky Bobby, is having a lunch with his family.

He's got a couple of kids, his wife, his father-in-law's there and his best friend, cal.

Now, before they eat, they go into prayer and Ricky Bobby's the one praying and he oddly and repeatedly prays to the dear Lord, baby Jesus.

Dear Lord, baby Jesus, thank you for my family.

Dear Lord, baby Jesus, thank you for all of this food.

It's odd, but his wife calls him out on it while he's praying.

She says you know, jesus did grow up, right, ricky, you know that he grew up.

And Ricky says hey, when you pray, you can pray to grown up Jesus, but when I'm praying, I'm going to pray to a sweet little baby Jesus, and his best friend clearly not helping the conversation go anywhere productive says you know, when I pray, I like to imagine Jesus wearing one of those tuxedo t-shirts, because I like Jesus to be formal but also ready to party Again.

It just continues to go downhill from there.

The reason I thought of that when preparing for this message is I kind of wonder how you and I, we all see Jesus.

Do we see him as a little baby Jesus in the manger?

Do we see the grown up Jesus?

Do we have something comedic Jesus wearing the tuxedo shirt?

And to me there's only one right answer, and that is Jesus writing a dinosaur.

You know, it's actually hard to find a picture of Jesus writing a dinosaur without a lightsaber or an AK-47.

I found that out this week.

I just typed in that image Jesus writing a dinosaur for today to open it up with, and it was really hard to find just a nonviolent Jesus writing a dinosaur, and I guess that's how other people prefer to see Jesus.

He's writing the dinosaur with some sort of a weapon.

Now, all joking aside and I obviously mean no disrespect to Jesus, but there is a discussion.

I bring all of this up Jesus and dinosaurs.

There is a discussion about whether or not you and I, the people, can trust the validity of the Bible when compared to what we know about science today, can we trust the Bible?

Is the Bible valid with what we know today about science?

And out of all of the things that we've talked about the past few weeks, it's this topic of science and the Bible, or sometimes science versus the Bible.

It's this topic that really can lead other people to rejecting the Christian faith altogether, just altogether, because in their minds they have to choose.

It's either, or it's either, faith in the Bible or trust in science.

And so there are people who think, well, the Bible can't be taken seriously because of what we know about science today.

People will say we know that the earth wasn't created in six 24-hour periods, but that is how Genesis 1 describes creation occurring.

And if the Bible does teach that and if I trust the Bible and it's literal does that mean we have to believe that the earth is some six to eight to 10,000 years old?

And if the Bible teaches that the earth is six to eight to 10,000 years old and created in six 24-hour periods, does that mean that everything you're learning at school whether that's high school, middle school, college, postgraduate work does that mean everything you're learning about science and evolution is wrong or that, again, you have to choose.

And if I read, if I read, or if you read, the creation sequence as God creating humans and all of the land creatures in the same 24-hour period, does that mean that the Bible teaches that people and dinosaurs coexisted?

If the I mean if God created all people and all animals in the same 24-hour period, then that would seem to imply, would seem to state, that humans and dinosaurs walk the earth together and so maybe people did ride dinosaurs at one point.

How do we make sense of some of these passages in Genesis 1 and in Genesis 2?

Some of these passages throughout the Old and New Testaments that seem to put us, you and me people, in between science and the Bible.

It can really, at times, make it seem like we have to choose, and that's what we're going to talk about today in this fourth week of our study how not to read the Bible.

And it was based on a book by Dan Kimball, but it is also based on the Bible and we're not trying to tell you I'm not trying to tell you what to believe, but the goal of the series has been to say how can we help you read the Bible better between Sundays?

How can we help you read the Bible better, and so we've been giving out these tools like never read a Bible verse in all by itself, understanding the full context, understanding the Bible was written for us but not to us, and so there are a lot of things going on Now.

What prompts this series and doing it right now is that you might be a follower of Jesus and you might have found Jesus at Madison Church, or you might not have, but you're finding Jesus, you're following Jesus and as you read the Bible, you have some questions about some of the things that you're reading.

Now some of you might just skip those things, right?

I mean, if we're being honest, some of us we read something we don't understand and we just we keep reading, and for a while that might be okay, but at some point that list of things that we're skipping and ignoring for now really starts to add up.

So let's talk about that.

If it's in the Bible, we just shouldn't ignore it just because we don't understand it.

It could be that it's not so much that you have a lot of questions about the Bible, but it could be that the people you love, your family or your friends They've got questions about the Bible and with today's talk.

They have questions about science and the Bible, and because of that, they're questioning your faith.

How can you believe in the Bible, how can you believe in this God, when the Genesis one says that the earth was created in six days, some six thousand years ago and so?

And you don't know how to answer Because you don't know the answer, and so it could be something that's challenging their faith, making them question your faith, and so that's why we're doing this series.

Another thing could be the just that You're not.

You're not a believer, you're just kind of spiritually curious, or you have questions about Bible, jesus, you feel some sort of perhaps prompting To faith, and you're not sure why.

But you have questions and you're not ready to dismiss those.

And I have good news for all of you we don't have to dismiss our questions, we can seek out answers regardless of where you are at on your journey of faith, this journey of life.

We want to recognize that the Bible can be somewhat of a stumbling block too many, and particularly when we misunderstand it, and so we hope, I hope that in this series that we're able to help clear some of that stuff out, especially when we come to those crazy sounding parts of the old and new testaments.

Now Onto today, science in the Bible.

There are so many things, so many questions about science and the Bible.

But we've got less than 30 minutes now and so we're gonna spend today talking about the Bible's account of creation, the creation of the universe, of the earth and of people.

In Genesis again, there's a lot that we could kind of have science questions about the Bible.

But given the limited amount of time in this type of Setting, we're gonna focus on Genesis.

Now.

When you and I, when we read Genesis one, we just opened up to the first page of our Bible we immediately want the answers to our modern Questions about science.

Well, we want to know what the Bible tells us.

What does Genesis tell us about the age of the earth?

What does it tell us about Darwinism?

What does the Bible tell us about dinosaurs and etc.

But I want to begin today by just saying that Genesis and the Bible they don't set off to answer those type of questions.

When Genesis was written we got to consider who were the original audience receiving Genesis.

Now it's thought that Moses dictated the first five books of the Bible that he dictated.

He spoke it, he didn't necessarily write it and that over the course of time, that perhaps some editing went on all inspired, of course, but that some editing had gone on.

Now, in Genesis, what we see is that God chooses a man named Abraham and says look at the sky and and all of the stars in the sky, abraham, and I promise you in your old age that Someday these, this, your descendants, are gonna outnumber the stars in the sky, which was very overwhelming to Abraham.

I want to point out that at that point Genesis hadn't been written, but none of the Bible had been written.

When God has this conversation with Abraham now, abraham ends up having kids in his old age and they have kids.

Eventually we get to his grandson, joseph, and Joseph is sold into slavery in Egypt.

Kind of a Prank gone, really wrong.

They sell him into slavery and then all of a sudden, a famine hits the world.

Egypt is okay, because when Joseph is sold into slavery and In Egypt he has this dream that the famine, a global famine, is going to occur and he tells the Pharaoh in Egypt hey, start saving up food, because it's gonna happen.

So then people from all over the world, because they don't have grocery stores, they don't have modern agriculture, they're starving to death, and so they're coming to Egypt because they hear rumors that Egypt has food.

And this includes Joseph's siblings, the one who sold him into slavery several years ago.

Joseph welcomes them in and then, all of a sudden, now Abraham's descendants, these Hebrews, the Israelites, find themselves in Egypt.

Now we still don't have Genesis, we still don't have the first five books of the Bible.

Another four hundred years goes by and all of a sudden, in Egypt we have a race based slavery, and that race was the Hebrews.

If you were a Hebrew, born into the Hebrew Family, the culture of the society, you were now a slave in Egypt, and this was very terrible, horrible slavery.

God eventually hears these people, abraham's Descendants, crying out every day and God says I hear you and I'm gonna free you.

These plagues happen, some weird and odd things occur, but God eventually leads the people, the Hebrews, out of Egypt.

A couple close calls.

They get to the edge of the Red Sea and there's no way through it.

And then God parts the Red Sea and they're able to walk through it.

They're in the wilderness, they're hungry, food falls down from the sky and they're being led by a pillar of smoke, which is God, and so a lot of weird things happening now.

This is around the time that Genesis Was written.

This was around the time that those first five books of the Bible Were written, and so when we think about the original audience, the original Hebrews they're in the desert.

They get Genesis.

Think about the questions that they would have had in the desert Are we gonna survive?

That was probably in the front of their mind.

Parents had kids.

Are we going to survive?

Elderly people are we going to survive?

Is there really only one God?

Because back in Egypt we learned about lots of gods gods of the stars and the sun and the moon.

Is there really only one God?

Is the God who rescued us still here?

We saw the Red Sea part.

That was crazy.

We saw food from the sky.

That was crazy.

But is God still here or is he over there?

Or is he over there?

Did he leave us or did we leave Him?

Is he still here?

How do we make this God happy or unhappy?

Because we don't want Him to leave us here.

So how do we make this God happy?

And this was a regular mystery to everyone in the world.

They didn't know what made the gods angry.

Do we still worship the sun and the moon like the Egyptians?

In the story the Egyptians had about creation, they said that there was this God that made the sun and held the sun up, and there was this God that made the moon and held this moon up.

Is that really how things came to be, and where does our God come into all of that?

If the Egyptian gods created everything, where does our God come into that?

Now, remember, there was generation after generation after generation, 400 years of Hebrew people enslaved in Egypt.

They were very indoctrinated to that culture, to that religion.

It would be actually foolish of us.

I think that we read Exodus now and we read about the Old Testament.

Let's assume that if you were a Hebrew, you believed in the Christian God, and I don't think that that was true.

I think that there were probably some who did.

I think that there were probably some who didn't, and I think that there was probably a large group in the middle that said, yeah, both hand.

The Egyptians seemed pretty sure, but we've seen the Red Sea parts, so we're pretty sure.

And so they were like both hand.

And so when we read Genesis, when you read Genesis, you open up the first page of the Bible, understand that this is the beginning of a story of God telling people who he is, who they are, where they came from, and that he loves them.

And this would have been so clarifying to those people in the desert scared for their lives, running from the Egyptians believing in some sort of a promise land.

God wanted people to know I'm here for you, I love you, I'm the one and only God, and that my presence is with you here and now in the wilderness, and it will be with you then and there when you get to the promised land.

God says I created everything by myself.

There were no other gods, it was just me.

God communicated that, unlike these other gods, these Egyptian gods, I am personal, I'm compassionate, and that I've established a covenant with you that there are things that you'll do and in return, there are things that I will do.

And there are things that I will do and in return, I want you to do these things.

God teaches them through Leviticus how to worship.

So you think about the original Hebrews and the wilderness, the questions that they had, and you think about the God who comes and presents himself in Genesis and answers those questions.

Contrast that with our questions today, with your questions and with my questions.

When we read Genesis, how old is the earth, god?

Was there really a talking snake like Ka from the Jungle Book Word there?

Dinosaurs on Noah's Ark?

If God created Adam first, did he have a belly button?

You know really deep stuff here, theologically deep stuff.

Those questions, our questions about science, I mean Genesis just was not written to answer.

And if we look at the original reason, the original purpose behind the chapters in Genesis, we see that it's quite clear God wasn't setting out to answer our 21st century questions about modern science, but rather it was to communicate his love and desire for his people.

Now, some of you you might be familiar with, like the epic of Gilgamesh and that we have some creation narratives and you might say well, you know, our creation narrative in the Bible sounds a lot like these other ones from Egypt and Mesopotamia.

There are a lot of similarities, but I want to point out very key differences, because I think that what could happen is we could read Genesis and say, oh Well, we stole from someone or someone stole from us, and and how does this work out?

So let's talk about the key differences.

One God claims that he is the one God, I am the one God and All of these other religions were claiming to have a lot of gods and there was a God for everything.

They were kind of just like managers of every different department in all of creation.

You had all of these gods.

God says that he cares about people.

God says I want a relationship with people.

God establishes a Covenant with people and contrast that with religion back then and the gods that they believed in.

Their stories reveal that gods don't care about people, that they weren't Caring, that they didn't love them, that oftentimes they used humans to get back at other gods, that they were upset about very petty stuff.

God and trust humans, were told that God and trust you and me to care for Creation.

God shares responsibility, says fill the earth, rule the earth, co-manage this with me, whereas the other gods were Created people to serve them.

And then Genesis God didn't need assistance.

But in almost every other story of creation we see that multiple gods needed assistance, that one again took care of one thing while another took another one.

I want to point out a couple Hebrew words in Genesis now to further Clarify some of the things that we read in the creation account, just because we understand the context.

Now let's understand what's being written.

And so if we're going to Genesis 1 and in the first sentence of the Bible we read that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth and if you're following along, you're listening, you have your own Bible with you why don't you go ahead and highlight or make a note about heavens and earth?

What we translate as heavens could also be translated as skies, and what we translate as earth Could also be translated as land, just the land.

I'm standing on, the land I can see outside.

Why this is really important is because the Hebrew Understanding of the world was that there wasn't a planet earth.

That's not how they understood the earth at all.

When they said earth, they're talking about the land, literally just to the horizon, as far as they can see, and when they're talking about the heavens, they were talking about the space beyond the sky.

They believed that the earth was flat, and that becomes very apparent in Genesis 1, 6, when God said let there be a space Between the waters to separate the waters of the heavens from the waters of the earth.

Now I've got this image, I'm gonna show you.

And if we just literally read through Genesis 1.

This is what is described in Hebrew, this image here.

So you'll see that what they believe.

When they said the spirit was hovering over the water, they believe that the earth, that the world, that the universe has.

They understood it was just a blob of water, and so God's hovering over that blob of water and then God comes in and he creates the skies and he creates the land.

But then God has to create a dome because everything is submerged.

See, that's where they believe rain came from.

They believe that it was just kind of like cracks in the dome and that the rain Came down from there.

And this was very, very similar to how other cultures and societies Understood the world.

I mean, we have to remember that up until almost, I think, a hundred years ago, less than a hundred years ago, we didn't even have a picture of the planet, picture of the planet earth.

And there are still YouTube YouTubers and people who are convinced that the earth is flat, even with all that we know.

And so when this is being written, when Genesis is being written, were described Flat earth.

And I found this Personally particularly challenging when I'm studying and preparing for this talk, because I was wondering, you know.

Why didn't God?

God is talking to Moses.

God knows the universe and all the galaxies because he created them.

Why didn't God just tell Moses, hey, talk about the earth as like this planet, or that you know there are lands, lots of lands, all over the galaxies, far beyond like.

Why didn't God Correct them?

God knows science, god was there, he created everything.

Why didn't God Tell them that?

And it just becomes more apparent to everything that we've been talking about so far, which was that God wasn't set off to answer their questions about science in the material world.

He didn't set out Genesis to explain that.

And again I caught myself as like oh yeah, that's right, even as I'm studying and I'm wondering why, god, why didn't you correct these people?

But I reminded that that's not why Genesis came to be.

God wasn't correcting their science.

God was communicating something about himself, the world and people.

So you have the heavens, which is the skies, you have the earth, which is the land.

That's how they understood it.

It was flat.

But there's something else that I wanna point out, and this is the Hebrew word for day and day.

This Hebrew word yom could actually mean a lot of things, like where you and I, we have days, weeks, months, years, decades, centuries.

We have language distinguishing A yom.

That word day could be used to describe half a day, a week, several months, eternity, a lifetime and, randomly, 40 days.

And so when we read yom, it could mean a lot of things.

Now, in Genesis chapter one, it's probably okay to read it as 24 hour periods.

Why?

Because he says in this yom I created this, and in this yom I created that, and in this yom I created that.

And then at the end of the yom, I took a break and this was another yom, which is a week, and so we're like well, there's seven days and a week.

This makes sense.

It's a good translation.

I'm not trying to get you to doubt that, but I do wanna point out that a yom could mean a lot of things, which gets us in to Genesis chapter two, in which God says in the yom the day or the week, or the month, or the 40 days, or the life, or the eternity or this unspecified that God creates a person in the planet out of the mud.

And this was really important, because if you read Genesis one, literally you read that God creates everything and then he creates a man.

But in Genesis two, we read that God creates the land and then the person and then everything.

Now, for you and I, we're just to literally read this and we're thinking that God's communicating science.

We see right away, within 500 words of the Bible, there's aria contradiction.

In Genesis one it's everything man rests and in Genesis two it's God creates the land, he creates man and then he creates everything else.

There's a contradiction, but it's not Because one, it's not about science, and two, yom can mean very different things.

So what does this mean for us today?

It means that you and I, we don't have to choose, based on Genesis one and two anyway, between science and faith or science and the Bible.

One, we recognize that Genesis isn't even talking about those things, but two, that it is possible, it is completely possible, for you and I to affirm science and faith in several different ways.

And so I've got a few different viewpoints, a few different perspectives in terms of faith, the Bible and science that believe that the Bible is the infallible, inspired and authoritative word of God, but has a different understanding of then the creation narrative.

And so I wanna explain just a few of those briefly with you.

One is the young earth perspective, which is the view of the church that is probably most popular, gets the most attention, and that it does interpret that God created the earth in six 24 hour periods, and it uses genealogies from Genesis all the way to Matthew, to determine that the earth is somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 years old.

And this view does maintain that humans and dinosaurs would have walked the earth together.

Now, the big thing for this group, if you're a young earth, what you're saying is that God can do anything, and we wanna record as the yeah, god absolutely can do anything, including creating the earth in six 24 hour periods 10,000 years ago.

Now, is there a little bit of rub with what we know about science today?

Yes, there would be, but the point is is that this is a view that you might have, but it's not the only view that you can have.

So hang in there with me.

There's another view, which is the appearance of age.

It agrees with everything about the young earth, except they add that since God created Adam, a full grown man, why couldn't God create a full grown universe?

So God creates, in one day, a full grown man.

Adam isn't a baby, he's a full man.

Why couldn't God create a universe that is in the appearance of 3,500 billion years old, a full grown up universe, if you will.

That's another view that you could have when you respect the Bible, which are coming in and respecting the science as well.

And then, finally, there's this view of an evolutionary creationist.

Now I know you're used to hearing the word evolution and you tend to think of atheism or agnosticism and that evolution is random and everything came by chance, natural selection, and there was no God involved in the process.

But an evolutionary creationist believes that God used the evolutionary process and that God guided the evolutionary process, that the world came to be through that process.

But it wasn't just random, it wasn't just by chance, it wasn't just by natural selection.

God was very involved and God led the process.

This is not Darwin's evolution.

This is God's intelligent design guiding the universe to where we are today.

And again, this view completely accepts the infallibility, the authority and the inspiration of the Bible, but it recognizes that, like the other views, that Genesis isn't necessarily speaking to the views.

But we still hold a high view of the scriptures.

But here are a couple of different ways that we can interpret then the science that we're given.

And so, no matter where you're at today.

I'm not trying to tell you what to think about science in the Bible, but I am trying to present to you a couple of different ways in which you can have a high view of the Bible and a high view of science and have a response to the people who say well, wait a second.

Isn't Genesis like telling us this and we know this about science?

You now can have an intelligent conversation with them.

And those three viewpoints that I just described are not the only three viewpoints there.

Actually I think nine or 10, I found that scholars and scientists or theologians have kind of come to be, but those are the three most popular.

As we end, let's go back to this idea that it's all about Jesus.

Everything in the Old New Testament points us to Jesus, and so we got to talk about some of the miracles, because sometimes science can't explain what happens.

We read some things in the Bible like Jesus walking on water, jesus healing the blind, healing people who are paralyzed.

We see Jesus raise himself from the dead three days after he was killed.

Usually doesn't happen.

These things aren't supported by science, but we read it and I want to say that we can believe that and it's okay, because God exists outside of creation, and if God limited himself to only doing things that were acceptable in creation, he wouldn't be all-powerful, he wouldn't be able to do all things, and so sometimes what we see in Jesus and with God is we do see the miracles, and it's God's reminder that he is all-powerful.

I can walk on water you can't.

I can raise people from the dead you can't.

I can heal people with blindness and modern medicine.

We're starting to do some of those things, but again, god was able to do a thousands of years ago with just the snap of a finger.

It happened, and it reminds us that in some cases, yes, science helps us understand the Bible better, helps us understand the world better, but other times, we're just reminded that we serve an awesome God who can do all things.

And so what are we going to do with this information now?

Well, I want to invite you to continue to join us for the rest of this series.

We've got a couple more weeks.

We're going to continue to talk about different topics, again not telling you what to think, but how to think about the Bible.

How do we read the Bible?

I want to challenge you to read the Bible this week.

Don't just listen to this message and move on.

But every day this week, in between Sundays, take a little time to read the Bible, but not just one verse, the sentence, the paragraph that it's in the chapter.

Perhaps if you're reading a small book like Philemon or Jude, you can just read all of that one sitting.

If you're diving into Isaiah, that might be hard to read the entire thing in one sitting, but you get the idea.

Try to read a little bit more than just the verse to understand the context.

If you need a Bible, download the Bible app.

It's absolutely free.

You version Bible app or come to Madison Church on Sundays and we have Bibles that you can take absolutely for free.

Now, as I close this, I just want to point out that by studying the Bible and asking questions, it doesn't mean that you mistrust the Bible.

We're not being irreverent toward the scriptures by doing this series, and it's actually a pursuit of truth which God tells us to have.

It's by asking these questions that our faith actually becomes richer and more vibrant and deeper and better.

Again, studying the Bible and asking the questions that we're asking and critically going into it like we are, that doesn't mean that we mistrust the Bible.

I'm not trying to create doubt in your mind about the infallibility or the authority of the biblical text, but rather I'm trying to get you and our community to read the Bible more often, more seriously and better.

I don't want us to be just a group of people who read the Bible mindlessly because we're supposed to, and I don't want to feel guilty, but I want us to be people who read the Bible because we take life so seriously and we take God so seriously that we read the Bible so seriously and we go into understanding the context, the culture, the language, to whom the Bible was written these books in the Bible were too and why they were written.

This is a commitment to truth, and I want to point out that if you're reading an English translation, it was translated by theologians who were asking questions.

We wouldn't rebuke them and say how could you question the Bible?

How could you question those words?

You have little faith.

I think that a lot of us who have a good English translation, we appreciate that there are people who are smarter than us, who have dedicated their lives to studying these texts so that we could have a Bible that is reliable in English.

I wanted to end right there to reassure you that in this series, how Not to Read the Bible, we're learning how to read the Bible, not just for the information, but for life transformation.