in the beginning

Death before Sin: Darwin and The Origins in the Bible

“In the beginning God [had] created the heaven and the earth. And the earth [became] without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep” (Gen.1:1).

or

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. Now the earth had become without form and void..."

This is how Charles Spurgeon translated the first verse of the Bible in order to make room for what he saw as incontestably true in Darwin’s account of the origins of the world: the fossil record going back millions of years. He says:

We know not how remote the period of the creation of this globe may be—certainly many millions of years before the time of Adam. Our planet has passed through various stages of existence, and different kinds of creatures have lived on its surface, all of which have been fashioned by God. But before that era came, wherein man should be its principal tenant and monarch, the Creator gave up the world to confusion. He allowed the inward fires to burst up from beneath, and melt all the solid matter, so that all kinds of substances were commingled in one vast mass of disorder. The only name you could give to the world, then, was that it was a chaotic mass of matter; what it should be, you could not guess or define. It was entirely "without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep."

“Years ago we thought the beginning of this world was when Adam came upon it; but we have discovered that thousands of years before that God was preparing chaotic matter to make it a fit abode for man, putting races of creatures upon it, who might die and leave behind the marks of his handiwork and marvellous skill, before he tried his hand on man."

In other words, there was an earlier Creation (and massive death and destruction) before the one we see in the Bible, unknown to man until Darwin revealed it. The fossil record reveals that God had created a previous world, but for some reason it “became without form and void,” and God started all over again with a newer Creation, when oops, the Serpent showed up, and here we go again.....And all that right in the first verse, plain as day. According to Darwin, Spurgeon's earlier (who knows how many others there were) Creation lasted 13.8 billion years minus our 6000, which means that "when we've been here ten thousand years, we'll only have just begun." Assuming that 13.8 billion is the new normal going forward. But the sheer crushing weight of human history makes the world already seem as old as Methuselah, who lived one sixth of the world's time-frame. The majority of the people who have ever lived would not like to see the world go much further beyond that, being old and full of days long ago. But if Spurgeon is right here, Methuselah would have more than 2 billion years to go before he gets to "lie silent in the grave." Once you introduce the words million or billion into human affairs you have done no more than reinvent the wheel, the wheel of pagan reincarnation of endless misery. For Spurgeon to pry open an endless pit of foul bones to herald the Creation is baffling. The Angels would have had to hold their noses as they sang.

1. Would you ever in a million years think a 13.8 billion year gap existed in 1:1? Does it make sense? Does it seem contrived? If you can do this here, where else in the Bible could you not do it? Did Moses know about this earlier Creation/Death when he wrote Genesis?

2. What would have caused death in the previous Creation (biologists tell us we are now in the Sixth Extinction--who knows how many there were)? In our Creation, death came through disobedience. But how do you account for it here, because Spurgeon tells us these long-fanged fossils existed before sin. Did this Creation also groan because of "man the creature's sin?" Were there moon and stars in this period, or a "firmament," because God created new ones on the fourth day afterwards. Why Spurgeon allowed himself to be drawn into this snake-pit, unless the offerings were coming in below budget. He built the biggest White Elephant in London.

By neatly tucking the fossil record into Genesis 1:1, Spurgeon was able to accommodate what he saw as undeniable in Darwin’s account: the fossil record. He could not just hunker down like an ignorant Bible-thumper while the fashionable gentry talked of nothing else. With that out of the way, he was now at liberty to take the rest of Genesis literally, as a day by day account of the newer Creation and dismiss the rest of Darwin’s book as purely speculative. But the fossil record he was unable to deny, and found a place for it in the very first verse. The age of the Universe in verse 1 then, according to the record, would be 13.8 billion years, minus the 6000 years since (I have been sifting those 6000 years for many years now, and as I said before, I decided not to become a billionaire when someone told me I could never count to a billion in my lifetime). The famous Fundamentalist B.B. Warfield, however, saw the rest of Darwin as equally undeniable, and set about to show how the whole process was guided by God for his glory. With these two stalwarts on board the evolutionary bandwagon, Darwin now became much less threatening to people who had feared that Evolution would show Genesis to be just another variation of the numerous religious creation myths of the ancient world.

But then how does one account for the specifics of Genesis 1 and 2? Take your pick (once you abandon the literal, they all serve the same purpose):

1. Genesis is a religious and not a historical or scientific document. It’s purpose is to show that God is sovereign over all that is, and that He has a purpose for everything that is. That sounds pretty bland, and you don’t come to church to hear that, and you certainly aren’t going to open your purse for the Temple treasury for that. Moses knew people have itching ears, and they love a good yarn, so he added the “after its kind,” the birds and the bees, the plants and planets, etc. It’s all window dressing to flatter your preconceived notions of superstitions handed down from your fathers--who is he to correct you. Here’s what it all boils down to: God started and controls everything there is. That is all. But you wouldn’t read the Bible if it talked like that, would you. So Moses had to add the nursery rhymes, the shakes and rattles just to reach those itching ears. But keep science out of it, or history, or reality--Moses is doing theology here. Keep it religious, and keep it out of the classroom. Moses is not teaching facts here. He does not touch on science. He is not giving you a history lesson. He is doing strictly theology. Period. Full stop. End of argument. A parable is one thing. A pyramid on the ground another. But you don’t use a parable to build a pyramid. Genesis teaches nothing about the Universe except that God controls it. Let the scientists do their thing, and the theologians theirs. This is how they talk. Or they say:

2. Genesis is a form of poem like the 23 Psalm or a parable such as the “vine and the branches.” Are you a sheep, or a branch? Of course not. But then you are not taking the Bible literally, are you? Or as the Germans would cry in horror “Buchstablich.” Germany’s churches are completely empty, but nothing frightens them more than a reporter returning to tell them that the Americans still read their Bibles “Buchstablich” (horrors), because no German (or European), we are led to believe, reads his Bible “Buchstablich.” That being the case, all the talk of fish and fowl, the moon and the stars, creeping things, man in God’s image---all that is mere window dressing to express the simple truth that God is in control and that he has a wonderful plan ahead for the whole business. All that, you say, for just that. All that, for just that. Imagine all the poor souls who spent endless months memorizing verse after verse, now to be told, you needn’t have bothered. It’s no more than a bag of literary tricks to make it all more interesting. Today the writer would save us the trouble and paper by just giving it to us in two simple sentences: God started it all from a single atom, and he controlled every stage, atom by atom. That’s the grown up version. If you need bells and whistles in your crib, keep the rhythm and flow, the days and years, day and night, evening and morning, until you are able to throw off the chains of your self imposed tutelage, keeping in mind that some have moved on from nursery rhymes. "Strong meat belongeth to them that are of full age."
   
   3. Genesis can be taken more or less literally, if the word “day” is taken figuratively, as in “one day with the Lord is as a thousand years.” Thus at the end of the third day (an epoch that would have lasted two billion years), all the plants are fully mature, and we are ready to move on to the next epoch (Epoch 4), the business of organizing the light fixtures. The writer almost misses the better part of the Universe when he almost forgets to add “he made the stars also.” Now you see the problem. This scheme gives us plants before planets, turnips before tides (there was no tide the first Tuesday). Darwin was not amused, which is why Warfield had to ditch it. Because how do you pollinate on billion-year Tuesday, when the swarm only shows up on billion-year Thursday?
   
   4. Build your own, as the car dealers say. Gap Theory, Framework Theory, Poem Theory, Theology Theory, Old Earth Theory, Theistic Theory, Mystic Theory, Literary-Device Theory, and all the other doctrines of devils. Once you let Darwin in, you can’t get him out. You only "have to pitch your tent toward Sodom," in order to ultimately "sit in the gates of Sodom." Because, until Darwin:

1. People assumed they were reading as they normally read, as they would read a business letter. At the end, you know perfectly well that if the document says you owe $6000 you are not to wonder if indeed the real amount may not actually be $6. But now suppose I come along and suggest a rather more broad view of the business at hand (for a fat fee of course) and show you how to leverage down to suit your purpose. People have done this, and still do. It's called fraud. The biggest frauds are people who pretend that Genesis intends to say anything other than what it says literally. Spurgeon would not have tried to pull this stunt with his banker. What he does in verse 1 is pure counterfeiting. His banker would have had him arrested had he tried to pull this stunt with his accounts. It's called cooking the books. Spugeon is cooking the books here. Counterfeit money is still, in the end, called “money,” isn’t it. The paper itself is worth at least something. And some people actually get some comfort walking around with pockets full of counterfeit money. But until Darwin, people read, pored over, and memorized Genesis as if they were themselves witnessing the very Creation itself “when the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy?” And now it can all be boiled down to “God started and guides it?” You just memorized the first two chapters of Genesis. Congratulations. How hard was that? But see my book on memorizing the entire Bible in ten minutes.

2. Was Moses (there is no evidence, outside of the Bible, that Moses ever lived), aware of all this tomfoolery when he wrote Genesis, or was he also tricked into believing that the old wives tales handed down to him were actually true? Was he also deceived like the people who read him for 3500 years until Darwin unwooled their eyes and revealed the truth? Because he writes like a man who takes a cow for a cow, and a day for a day on such and such a day. When he asks you to show up on day three with six cows in hand he doesn't mean three million years from now with six million cows. I’ll be glad to promise you a billion dollar return tomorrow for $1000 in hand today, remembering that one day with the Lord is as 1000 years. If you read monetarily when you should have been reading quantitatively you may end up with a pig in a poke. Remember Genesis wants you read theologically, and not literally, or historically. And it teaches not a word about science or biology. I memorized Genesis 1 and 2 with great toil long ago and now this? I feel like the chief captain who answered, “With a great sum obtained I this freedom. And Paul said, But I was free born.” But this is why people have stopped memorizing the Bible. But there it was, all those years, 13.8 billion years sandwiched right in the middle of the first verse. How's that for a fresh start? But Spurgeon wants you to see a huge pit of old decrepit bones right at the entrance. More like a wake in Tophet than the song of angels on that glad morning.

Here’s how people have drawn comfort from Spurgeon’s views:

“What this really shows is this...it doesn't matter what you believe about the age of the earth. Spurgeon didn't care if you believed it was millions of years old. The great preacher realized that this is not a key doctrine of the Bible.”

“If you are not a Christian, and you have been holding out on making a decision for Christ because the Church always preached a message that was contrary to what you saw in the scientific world, then rest assured that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God, and you can believe in Christ and receive salvation, while still believing in an old earth.”

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Augustine, Spurgeon, Warfield, and C.S. Lewis are held up as examples to show that you can be both Christian and Evolutionist. It matters little to what degree they embraced Darwin. What matters is that they gave him legitimacy by making room for him in the Bible. It wasn't until Darwin, that people began questioning the way people had been reading Genesis, and by hook or by crook, began looking for ways to accommodate him. Spurgeon's novelty in Gen. 1:1 is pure hucksterism which other will use to carve out space for Carbon-14, expansion of the Universe, DNA--all of which a literal reading of the Bible compresses into 6000 years. He knew he was trifling with major doctrines in doing so--notably death before sin--and tampering with the most sacred feature of the Bible: its straight-forward integrity and plain reading. If anyone can come along and cry "allegory" when the literal makes perfect sense, then every verse in the Bible is up for grabs. "Let God be true, and every man a liar."
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1. Evolution as a belief is no stronger today among ordinary people than in the early days of Darwin. Like refined vice, it thrives only in the upper echelons, and in Evangelical seminaries who have to mind their scholarly P's and Q's in order to get their worthless books published. The Commons will have none of it, and their embrace of the qospl of Q bears testimony to how much they detest what they hear from the pulpit.

2. There is no middle ground between 6 day Creationism and full blown atheist Evolution. Francis Collins is mocked for "halting between two opinions," which is why he is at pains to distance himself even from Intelligent Design, which Atheists argue (rightly) as an attempt to get God in through the back door. When Howard Van Till of Calvin College published his book on Theistic Evolution in 1989, he was the subject of lengthy heresy trials (why they needed trials when he says outright that Darwin was the best idea God ever had). Click their Department of Biology statement and you will see the camel is fully inside the tent now. Van Till is now a pantheist. The Evolutionist Rev Tim Keller's mega-church will shrivel to a few Unitarians within a decade. There remains no place to halt between God and Mammoth. The cheapest real estate in Europe is empty churches, Darwin's greatest legacy.

3. The majority of Evangelical leadership sits in half-way houses, unable to embrace the traditional (literal) reading of Genesis, but afraid of being blindsided as Evolutionists go from victory to victory in banning Creation from the public square. Their own theologians are telling them that the point of no return is near. Here is Hebrew of the Hebrew Bruce Waltke:

"If the data is overwhelmingly in favor of evolution, to deny that reality will make us a cult ... some odd group that is not really interacting with the world. And rightly so, because we are not using our gifts and trusting God's Providence that brought us to this point of our awareness."

Many like Waltke have already made the leap. The rest are in the no-man's land of "don't ask, don't tell," afraid that the word will call them "fools." To preach a 6000 year old Universe with enthusiasm would set the Republican Party back 1000 years. In white collar professions it is considered a serious question mark on your judgment.