Does the Bible regard the Creation Account as actual history?
Evidently! Even the New Testament affirms the historical fact that God spoke
everything into existence:
·
For God, who said, “Let light shine out of
darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the
glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. (2 Corinthians 4:6; ESV)
If God didn’t historically say this, then there is no reason
to believe that He also “shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge
of the glory of God.” The NT uniformly regards the Creation Account as
historical:
·
By faith we understand that the universe was
created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things
that are visible. (Hebrews 11:3)
·
…God in whom he believed, who gives life to the
dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. (Romans 4:17)
It wasn’t just the first life that God spoke into existence
but all life forms.
Did He create man or evolve Him as He had evolved everything
else? Evidently, the creation of man is set apart from the creation of
everything else so as to make us a special creation:
·
With it we bless our Lord and Father, and with
it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God. (James 3:9)
·
For man was not made from woman, but woman from
man. Neither was man created for woman, but woman for man. (1 Corinthians 11:8-9)
·
Thus it is written, “The first man Adam became a
living being”; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. (1 Corinthians 15:45;
quoting Genesis 2:7)
·
For Adam was formed first, then Eve. (1 Timothy
2:13)
All of these NT quotations affirm the historicity of the
Genesis account. In addition to this, the history of the Bible cannot be
separated from the theology of the Bible, no more than we can separate the
theology of the Cross from the historical fact that Christ died for our sins.
For example:
·
He [Jesus] answered, “Have you not read that he
who created them from the beginning made them male and female [quoting Gen. 1],
and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast
to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? [quoting Gen. 2:24] So they
are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let
not man separate.” (Matthew 19:4-6)
Had God not historically made the two one, Jesus’ argument
would have fallen apart. Consequently, divorce would not violate what He had
historically accomplished.
Peter argues that we have to take the promised coming
judgment seriously. Why? Because if God had judged in the past, then it is
likely He will judge in the future:
·
For if God did not spare angels when they
sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to chains of gloomy darkness
to be kept until the judgment; if he did not spare the ancient world, but
preserved Noah, a herald of righteousness, with seven others, when he brought a
flood upon the world of the ungodly; if by turning the cities of Sodom and
Gomorrah to ashes he condemned them to extinction, making them an example of
what is going to happen to the ungodly…then the Lord knows how to rescue the
godly from trials, and to keep the unrighteous under punishment until the day
of judgment. (2 Peter 2:4-9)
If these Genesis judgments had not actually happened, but
had been no more than allegories, then there would be no reason to believe that
the coming judgment is any more than an allegorical warning.
To deny the historicity of the Genesis account is to
recreate the Bible into the image of Darwin and to incur the wrath of God.
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