Six thousand years!?

With a simple look through the Bible, a person would easily be able to conclude that the Bible claims the the Earth, nay, all of creation is a mere six thousand years old.  How does a Christian try to make all of history fit into a time frame with numbers like that?  What about the cavemen?  What about all of the rock layers?  What about the fossil record and all of the Dinosaurs?

First, please keep in mind that it is a feeble attempt to try to explain how all of history fits into the Bible.  Why do I say that?  Because it is already clearly explained in the Bible!  One must only look at the evidence without an evolutionary paradigm.

Okay, lets start at the beginning of mankind, which was only five days after the beginning of time.  Where are cavemen in the Bible?  I would say of course.  What do you think of when you think of a cave man?  Fred Flintstone, wearing an animal skin tunic, and what does Genesis 3 say God made for Adam and Eve?  It states he made them an animal skin tunic, the first sacrifice was made of an animal by God to cover the sin of man.  You later read that the second sacrifice was made of the Son of God by God to wash away the sin of man.  But, I digress. The Merriam-Webster definition of a caveman is "a cave dweller especially of the Stone Age."  Well, there have been cave dwellers in very recent history, even today as seen in the pictures.  Even King David is recorded as having lived in a cave for a time.  Some of the patriarchs could very well have been "cavemen" since the Bible never really describes their abodes.  In the post-flood world, civilization has been destroyed, trees will take years to grow to usable size again, some people become nomadic.  Why would many of these people not choose to use caves as their home or temporary shelter on hunting expeditions or the such, and then create drawings of the very game they hunted?

Another topic I would like to view when investigating a timeline of history is population growth for humans.   Dr. Henry Morris asked in his book The Bible Has the Answer whether it was more reasonable to think that the present world population came from the few people on Noah's Ark 4300 years ago, or the first “dawn man” a million or more years ago:

The present rate of population increase in the world is more than two per cent per year, and the population is now over four billion. [This figure was correct when Dr. Morris wrote this. It is now estimated to be 7 billion as of October 31, 2011.] However, the average rate would only have to be one half of one per cent per year to produce the present world population in 4,300 years.

To put it another way, an average family size of only 2.5 children per family would suffice to develop the present population in just the length of time since Noah, even with an average life-span of only about 40 years per person. These figures are very reasonable, and in fact extremely conservative, showing that the Bible chronology is quite plausible in every way.

On the other hand, this same very conservative rate of population growth (only one fourth what it is at present), if continued for a million years, would have produced a present population infinitely greater than could be packed into every cubic foot of the entire universe! This fact alone argues that the supposed million-year history of man on the earth is completely absurd, whereas the Biblical chronology is perfectly reasonable …

Even if, by some miracle, the population growth rates were slowed down sufficiently to produce a population of only the present figure of three billion people after one million years of human life on earth, this would still mean that over 3,000 billion individual people had lived and died during that period of time. It is therefore strange that it is so difficult to find human fossils! It would seem rather that human remains ought to be extremely abundant everywhere. And this should be even more true of the pre-human ape-men that were supposedly evolving into men during 60 or 70 million years of pre-history.

I realize there are many other topics that would need to be discussed to thoroughly investigate the age of time, and could fill volumes of books, and there is no way I could possibly cover all of them here.  However, continue following this blog and I will touch on many other areas in the future.

Never back down, never compromise.

For the Christian reader, I have had a recurring thought for the past few weeks, "Never back down, never compromise!"  At first I did not give much reflection to this statement, until it continued to be repeated in my mind.  And then I was still left without knowing where exactly to apply this in my life.  Then, I began to re-read the books of Numbers and Joshua, completing my reading over the past two days.  The phrase "never back down, never compromise," began to make much more sense to me, as this is what God was calling the children of Israel to do.  However, they backed down and compromised on so many occasions, resulting in military defeats, death by the hand of God, a delay in entering the promised land, and ultimately the loss of promised land.

Now, last night while I slept, I found myself on the witness stand in a court hearing concerning the request that I made to the local board of education requesting that my children, now in 5th grade and in pre-K, not be taught evolution, a history of millions of years or any other topic that would expressly contradict that Holy Bible.  In this court hearing, as I sat there being questioned by the opposing lawyer I could sense the presence of the Lord near me, urging me not to back down, not to give room for compromise in my answers.  I was being reminded by the Lord that I had said in my opening statements that I looked upon the Bible as divinely inspired by a perfect all knowing God and all that was contained in it must be truth.  At present, the lawyer was trying to find anything in the Bible that I would compromise on, thus showing that I did not give full credence to the Bible.  Question after question the lawyer asked, but each was given objection to by the judge because of the fact that all of the questions held presuppositions in them.  He asked "How do you place dinosaurs in the Bible?"  The judge allowed me to object to the question on the grounds that "I don't place dinosaurs in the Bible, God already has since they would have been created alongside every other land animal during creation as recorded in Genesis and then expressly seen in Job 40."  Then, addressing the lawyer I stated "It was not until 1841 that this word was used when the word was coined by Sir Richard Owen.  The King James Bible, being made in 1611 predates this word by 230 years, and one of my favorite English translations, the Geneva Bible, which was published in 1560 predates the word dinosaur by 281 years.  Now, may I ask, what word would the writers of this time use to describe what we now know to be dinosaurs?  I would pose that one word would be 'dragon' used more than twenty times in the Old Testament alone, while at other times they may be referred to more precisely by their type, such as the behemoth mentioned in Job."

The main point I saw from this dream is that the lawyer was unable to justly put my faith in question 1)because I steadfastly stood on the Word of God 2)because I was unwilling to show compromise in my faith and 3)because the lawyer, not being a Christian, was unable to move outside of his worldview in order to intelligently question me. 

Now, please don't misunderstand me in this.  I am not trying to boast about my faithfulness, because I am human and I am subject to waiver just as anyone else, but this dream of myself in court is a representation of what God is calling us to do, just as He called the children of Israel to do so many years ago. 

In Joshua 24:22 Joshua sates "You are witnesses against yourselves that you have chosen the Lord for yourselves to serve Him."  Relate that to what I have been describing here.  I feel that he is saying that if you proclaim to be a servant of the Lord Jesus Christ then by that very statement we are testifying against ourselves when we follow our ways and not the ways of the Lord.  Keep in mind though, we no longer live under the Old Covenant but under the new, their has now been made a living sacrifice that is able to wash away all our sins, so that we shall not receive the same fate as the unfaithful Israelites.

As in the time of Judges

When all that generation had been gathered to their fathers, another generation arose after them who did not know the LORD nor the work which He had done for Israel.  Then the children of Israel did evil in the sight of the Lord...  Wherever they went out, the hand of the LORD was against them for calamity, as the Lord had Said, and as the LORD had sworn to them.  And they were greatly distressed. Judges 2:10-15

I see a relation to today's times, where our forefathers wholly trusted in the Lord to defeat the greatest military power in the world at its time and to build a new country, a new government that would one day be able to lay claim to the greatest nation that ever existed, but now we are in a time where we struggle to find a leader who is willing to show such knowledge of and a fellowship with God.  America, and other great nations, seem to be "greatly distressed" in their current military efforts.  However good these efforts may seem to us, the Christian should pause to ask himself "are we doing this because we see it as good, or because we have been led by God?"  I am not anti-war, I simply urge our leaders in government to seek the will of the Almighty God in their decisions, it is only then that we can be confident in our success.

I would apologize for this post, as it is not of the typical style I foresaw for my blog, but I cannot.  I felt convicted to write as I have today, and even in reviewing I see what may be seen as rambling, but throughout the central theme I am led to stress is evident.  Never back down, never compromise the Word of God.