Ask Pastor Mike Fabarez

Speaker 1

Some folks embrace the creation story. Others are staunch evolutionists. But can intelligent people find a balance between the two? Well, sit tight. You're about to find out on today's edition of Ask Pastor Mike, right here on Focal Point.

And welcome. We're glad to have you with us on Focal Point, your host, Dave Drouy. Today, Pastor Mike enters the fray of the heated battle between those who hold to the scriptural account of creation as it's told in the Bible and those who believe in the tenets presented in the theory of evolution.

Can we strike a happy middle ground? Well, let's join executive director Jay Wortin and Mike Fabarez right now for an enlightening conversation inside the pastor study on this explosive topic.

Speaker 2

Thank you, Dave. Pastor Mike, today's question is on evolution and creation. A listener asks, is it possible that God used evolution in the modern sense to bring about creation? Could God have used evolution to create?

Speaker 3

Yeah. No. I'm gonna say no because when we talk about evolution, I mean, it is a construct of how things came to be that's based on an assumption. I mean, it's a philosophical assumption, a foundation that says that the world is self-created. And just by the nature of what we believe, that is not self-created, but it's divinely created. Those two foundations are in conflict.

So you've built an entire construct, a theory on self-creation, and now you're trying to say, well, what if we believe in divine creation? Can't we just go over and borrow that construct of self-creation? I just say it doesn't make any sense. And it never really fits. Certainly, it doesn't fit the evidence of the Bible. And by that, I mean the historical record of Christ coming as the God-man and doing what is claimed to have happened in Genesis 1.

And that is, he comes on the scene and creates things out of nothing. He speaks into existence the fibers in a paralyzed man's legs or, you know, the rods and cones and lenses and corneas in a blind man's head. He creates those things instantaneously by the word of his power, which is the claim throughout the Bible. It's the claim about the eschaton, about how things are going to end. The word of his power does things, and they impact the natural.

Right? That's the supernatural impacts the natural with natural results that have an instantaneous appearance. And that whole appearance of whatever the instantaneous natural thing is has, if you now examine it, an appearance of a history and an age that it never had. And that's all I'm saying. You could sit there and have a guy who just came from seeing Jesus turn water to wine or heal the blind man, and you could say, well, I just saw this happen. I was there, I witnessed it.

And then someone, as he hears that secondhand who didn't see it, may come up with a theory of how that happened on its own naturally, right? There's the true naturalist. Well, maybe he was blind, but he became seeing through a natural process. And you're saying no, no, no, I saw him do this. He spoke a word and it happened instantaneously.

You've got to make a decision whether you believe in this natural process, in that case of self-creation from blind to seeing, or in supernatural intervention, that there is a supernatural being who speaks something and creates something in the material world that has an appearance of history and age that it never had. That is so important for us to distinguish.

And I should say this, when it comes to supernatural, people don't like that in discussions of science, right? Well, everything about the scientific theory of a 13 billion year old explosion still begs, it needs necessitates a supranatural thing. I mean, there's something there in the singularity as they call it, this infinitely hot mass of energy, the singularity.

You have to have something that does not obey the laws of nature. It is not natural; it is beyond the natural laws. The laws of physics don't apply there. So they're already talking about something that because of what they see and theorize about, they say, well, there was a certain supranatural cause, right? There has to be somebody that does not obey the laws of physics.

And all we're saying is we know what that supranatural cause was because he came, put on flesh, dwelt among us, and did the very things that we see happening in Genesis 1.

Speaker 2

And they would theorize other things as that supranatural cause, whether it's aliens and spaceships and seedings and things of that nature.

Speaker 3

Right? Well, but they don't. I mean, when you really talk to an evolutionist, right, a professor or whatever, those are areas they say, well, we don't have answers for that. We don't have anything to go by, you know, because it doesn't apply to the laws.

We'll just talk about how we believe the laws were created and what millisecond after the Big Bang these things came to be. But it's all a fanciful world of imagination, and it will continue to change. And all I'm saying is let's not work that way.

Let's go to see what that supernatural being is. He's revealed himself. He's proved it through a supernatural book that bears his marks of inspiration, through predictive prophecy and other things. And then he came and broke into time and space, lived among us, and then said, watch.

Watch me create things out of nothing with a word of my power. And that's the thing that the Old Testament had said from the beginning happened. He spoke the word, let there be light, and bam, it happened. And even that's metaphorical. He didn't speak. He doesn't have a tongue. He doesn't have teeth. He didn't move any airwaves.

Speaker 4

He has a purposeful thought.

Speaker 3

God is a God who has volition and will, and he willed reality. And it happened, right? That's what we see when Christ comes and wills something to happen and actually expresses that. So we can watch that he's willing that. He says, "Lazarus, come forth." He says, "Stand up, take up your mat and walk." He does those things, and they happen. They have physical elements and properties that, if you examine them—whether it's water into wine, which is the one I like to talk about when I lecture on this topic—there's no possible way we're going to say that that wine is an hour old or 20 minutes old when, in fact, it was H2O just 20 minutes ago or an hour ago. Every chemist is going to tell us that's impossible, but that's what we claim.

What I find is that people who want to say, "Well, let's just believe in evolution," do so because they don't want to be out of step with the Discovery Channel or the National Academy of Sciences. They want to be in sync with the natural museums that they go to. So they want to say God created with evolution. It's funny how they never bring that kind of thinking into the miracles of Christ. Maybe Lazarus came forth, but it really took, I don't know, 150 years, right? Maybe that's what happened.

And no, of course not. There's no time for that. You can't read the Bible that way. I'm saying you really can't read the Bible the way a lot of theistic evolutionists want to read it or the Framework Hypothesis guys want to read it. I just don't see it. We're trying to accommodate something that I think we're going to be embarrassed one day to find out we never should have tried to accommodate.

Speaker 2

That begs the question, then, how should we be Reading Genesis, should we read it as a scientific textbook, as a fanciful story? What should our approach to Genesis be?

Speaker 3

We need to read it as you would read any part of the Bible. Let it speak clearly through language and the basic rules of interpretation. We call it hermeneutics. And we just derive from the text. We believe God is a good teacher and we derive from the text what is being taught in that text. And it's clearly not a scientific textbook. But when it speaks, it's speaking clearly not to mislead us, but to give us the truth and the framework hypothesis.

Guys, I know I'm using, you know, theological words right now, but the guys that want to say this is nothing but an epic poem of some kind and they find, you know, symbolisms and patterns in there and they say, well, you know, but can't we fit the Discovery Channel data into that? That's my problem. It's all motivated by a need to get more time. Because if we talk to a geologist and we're talking about, you know, radiometric dating and we see isotopes decaying and we see a rate and we have to, we now need more years. Now we need millions of years. We need billions of years.

Well, if you start playing that game, you can play fast and loose with any part of the Bible and it becomes absurd. Then the Bible doesn't teach plainly, but the Bible teaches plainly. And I'm just saying, just wait. Their changing theories will one day, right? If not in this human history, they will eventually meet the one who speaks things into existence and speaks things out of existence with the word of his power.

Speaker 2

Well, thank you, Pastor Mike. That was a good conversation. I trust it was helpful for people. And we're going to listen to a part of that message which you talked about evolution and creation.

Speaker 4

What are the assertions in the Bible regarding our origin when we look at what God creates? The Bible repeatedly says those things. If you look at them, it should tell you something about the God who creates and has created.

It should be clear to you that there is a God of glory, of gravitas—kabad, Hebrew glory, the majesty of God, the creativeness of God. The heavens declare the kabad of Elohim, the weightiness, the gravitas of God. The sky proclaims his handiwork.

Even without a telescope, it speaks something of God's creative symmetry, beauty, glory, and power. Day to day, they pour forth speech.

Speaker 3

A night to night they reveal knowledge.

Speaker 4

A six septillion ton rock called the planet spinning at a thousand miles an hour. Orbiting the sun at a thousand miles per second in a 580 million mile ellipse around the sun, giving us seasons.

The idea here is all you have to do is look in any direction, even without a telescope, and you start to recognize the reality of God's glory.

Speaker 3

In all of this.

Speaker 4

God is a God that creates and says, you should be able to look at what I created and see things like my invisible attributes, things about me that are not visible.

This unknown person, even without a Bible, should come alive to you just by looking at the things they've made. His invisible attributes, his eternal power, his divine nature.

They've been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world, in the things.

Speaker 3

That have been made so that people.

Speaker 4

Can’t sit there and go, I didn't know there was a God. I didn't think God was a God of beauty, symmetry, order. I didn't know he wanted my life to be beautiful, symmetrical, and orderly. These are all things that no one will be able to stand before God and say, I didn't know.

The Bible says, because we should be able to, through natural theology, understand that just by giving it a little bit of thought. God creates things personally and instantaneously and directly. He creates things that in his creation are done with an expression of his will, by His Word. They highlight his attributes, the things that he has made.

And yet with all of that, because you weren't there and I wasn't there, and the prophets that speak to this in a book that predicts the future, even though it has the imprimatur and signature of God, still requires an informed.

Speaker 3

Intelligent faith, an informed trust in the.

Speaker 4

Details of this, because only God could tell us how this happens. Hebrews chapter 11, verse 3 says, "By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible." He creates something out of nothing. And we have to understand, as any theory of origins does, that there is some mystery to that that we're left with as we stand here as mere mortals without the tape to look at, that we trust God and take his word on how he did this.

All right, with that said, you can see I'm not very neutral on the topic, but there are a lot of religious attempts at neutrality. Let me go through this really fast. Theistic evolution. Theistic evolution is the worst kind of attempt at collaboration and neutrality and hybrid theories, because basically it concedes everything, including the kitchen sink. They say basically everything you hear on the Discovery Channel is absolutely 100% true. They believe that evolution in every way is true. It's just that behind it all, God was kind of overseeing it, as we would say in our church, a GT2. God providentially oversaw all the process of evolution. So I'm throwing out everything in the book that God wrote. I don't believe any of that. What I believe is what they tell me. And again, I always ask, which theory are you buying? Today's theory, last year's theory, or tomorrow's theory? Well, I'll believe whatever theory is out there because I'm a theistic evolutionist.

Well, that's one option. Another attempt at neutrality is what is called progressive creationism. Progressive creationism is not quite as giving and generous as theistic evolution. They believe that whether it's the Cambrian explosion or any kind of, you know, because we have such a scant and paltry fossil record for humanity, they say, well, the reason for that is kind of like the old theories of punctuated equilibrium, which is these kind of things happened at various stages. That's when God stepped in with GT1s. It's a God thing. One when he supernaturally blew these creatures into reality. Now, it happened the way the evolutionists say in terms of chronology and time. It's been billions of years and it started with a big bang. But those things that needed to happen, that seen beyond reality and beyond chance, that was God, and he stepped in and supernaturally did it.

Now, the evolutionists laugh at that because they have already decided there is no personal intelligent being that sits outside of this all. But the creationists here, they call themselves progressive creations, believe that God created. We can still fit the time frames of the Discovery Channel and the history museum, but it's not GT2s, it's GT1s. There's the day age theory. The day age theory is, well, you know, there is that verse in second Peter chapter three.

Speaker 3

This is thousand days like a day.

Speaker 4

And days like a thousand years. God, you know, his days are really long. So that whole Genesis chapter one thing about the six days and then the seventh day, those things were super long. And that's what helps me sit back and feel like there's no conflict when I watch the Discovery Channel because you know what, the world must be 13.7 billion years old. But all of that in Genesis, I still believe that, but the demarcation of times, that's just a way to speak of these really long epics of time. Day age theory, six days, I believe that it took, but that really, you know, it comes down to 13.7 billion until they change that. And when it changes, I'll change my view on the day age theory.

That's the day age theory, by the way, in Second Peter chapter three, the reason the statement is made about a day is a thousand years, and a thousand years is a day is because God is making a promise. And they're questioning whether or not God has forgotten about the promise or he doesn't remember the promise or in some way that promise isn't binding because it was a long time ago. And the point is, when God makes a promise, time is no issue. This is not a little key in the corner of the Bible to say every time I see a day, I can make it a thousand years. And if that's the case, 6,000 years isn't long enough anyway for the Discovery Channel.

So day age theory, I'm not keen on that framework hypothesis. Framework hypothesis is usually done by these Hebrew professors at seminaries that don't believe in literal creation. They believe in the framework hypothesis and they'll say, this is purely an exegetical exercise. We're just looking at the Hebrew text in Genesis chapter one, and we're seeing the six days. And here's the nifty little thing we found that really gets our minds opened up and that is day one, let there be light, has a parallel to day four, the sun and the luminaries at night. The day two has a parallel to day five, the waters. And then you have the expanse of the water separating. And then day three has a parallel to day six. You've got the vegetation, the ground, you got the things teeming in the water and the land and people and lizards and all that.

So all of these things seem to show a parallel because I built a parallel between day one and day four, day two and day five and day three and day six. I think that symmetry makes me think this is just a really nifty poem. And that makes me think that these aren't really meant to be taken literally. That is the framework hypothesis in a nutshell. If you hold that view, it's a literary arrangement that's not at all historical. Therefore, I can believe the world's 13.7. All right, you know, the universe, the explosion 13.7 billion years ago, and the world can be millions and billions of years old. And I don't know how it all works because this doesn't really tell me really stops recognizing the rest of the Bible on the matter as well.

Gap theory, this one you hear about still also called, by the way, the ruin reconstruction theory, and that is that in verse number one you might remember it says in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, period. Verse 2 says, and the earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the water. And then off we go in the days of creation. Let there be light. Well, what's with that statement up at the top? God created heaven. Sounds like it's all done by the first verse. And then you get all this information in the second verse and it looks like it's really messed up. Formless and void, without form and void.

This is a creation like most of these creations in the minds of people who look at the Bible and want to somehow reconcile the text with millions and billions of years. And so they said, I know where the billions of years can go. Between verse one and verse two God creates. And then somewhere between verse one and verse two he destroys. And in verse two we have this formless dark thing going on. And that's just the remnants and the debris from this ancient primordial world. That's why the rocks look so old. And that happened. And then God created in six literal days. But that gives us some time ruin. Reconstruction theory, gap theory, that's the gap theory.

By the way, it doesn't take into account what's called literary recapitulation. In the scripture, particularly in the books of Moses, we have statements about things being done and then they're unpacked. Even in Genesis chapter two we have the whole discussion of the six days and in Genesis chapter two, we have an almost a rediscussion of it all, including the details about Eve being made. And it's like, well, Eve got made in chapter one. This is literary recapitulation. We see it even in chapter five. It starts over. The point of this, I think ignores some basic things in Hebrew literature. And it's very speculative. And it only grew out of the concern about people saying your Earth is too young to match with our science.

Intelligent Design. This has been real popular lately, popularized by those in what's called the Intelligent Design movement. I know some ID guys that are really smart and they're great in terms of what they demand. And that is that the evidence does not support a chaotic non-guided construction of things. We have irreducible complexity. That's the key core word of the ID world and that is that intelligent design, you see things where you cannot reduce them to any form that would still be usable and useful. Therefore these things have to be created as whole entire systems. Whether it's the eyeball or the arch in your foot or whatever it might be. These things cannot happen in part; the sexes, the complementary. These things can't, you can't slide into these. This has to be designed.

And they do it on a microbiological level. Most of that Behe and Denton and all these guys that made it popular. But what you need to know about the ID is the point of the ID was really generated out of the concern of people kicking creationists out of textbooks and schools. These guys said, well, let's not talk about God, let's not talk about creation, let's not talk about the Bible, let's just talk about the holes in evolution and that there must be some designer and design behind it all. So it's trying to be as broad a tent as possible. Anybody who even has any sense that there's problems with the evolutionary theory can join the ID movement. And we don't even, you know, get into any religious matters. We're just talking about the design that was intelligently put out there.

So theistic evolution, progressive creationism, day age theory, framework hypothesis, gap theory, even the presentation of the intelligent design theory, even though there's some biblical creationists in that group. These are all attempts at trying to not offend and fit in and connect. Okay, that you need to know.

Plain reading of Genesis 1 and 2. God is a good teacher. Let me just start with that. The text is presented as six. Let's add these words, 24-hour days, morning and evening, the first day, morning and evening, the second day, morning, evening, the third day. These morning and evening patterns, these connections to, for instance, ordinal numbers, let's call it this, six sequential days. When you talk about the first day and the second day, these ordinal numbers that give us an order to it show sequence, which the framework hypothesis guys don't buy, right? And they try to, they work hard to talk their way around that. But it seems like the plain reading of the text would say this is sequential. These are days.

There's a spinning planet, you've got light and dark, right? I know you got celestial bodies and fusion being created later in the sun, but you've got days that seem to work on the rotation of the planet. This seems to be six sequential 24-hour days. For six days God made the heavens and the earth and the sea and all that's in it. And he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day.

Speaker 3

And he made it holy.

Speaker 4

Six days. So that leaves us with a relatively young Earth. I don't believe that the world was created in 404 BC on October 10th or whatever it is. I do not believe that. I believe the reading of the genealogies gives us a lot more time than that. Just like King Hezekiah was considered the son of David, we know that wasn't one generation. There's a lot of opportunity to see a lot more time given throughout the genealogies. But I don't want to look for it. I don't want to force it.

But I'm not back to 4000 BC as all the people want to make a caricature of every creationist. But it is a relatively young Earth. Radiometric dating, by the way, dating the radioactive isotopes from one parent element to a daughter element does not convince me of the age of the planet. You know, you can get into all this, but the bottom line is I believe God created a mature Earth. I'm not convinced by that.

Expect opposition regarding a creator. And you know, this is an issue of the heart. The idea of denying God's involvement in things is often for the purpose of my own freedom from his morality and his judgment. And you should expect conflict within Christendom as an intramural debate regarding the plain reading of the text, which I think you know, right? A lot of people that name the name of Christ do not believe in a literal creation of a relatively young Earth.

Thousands of years, right? Not millions of years. It's not 6,000 years old. It's older than that. But the idea you get young Earth creationists, they're impugned regularly. Expect conflict because people want to fit in. Remember that we don't like to be called stupid. But you should understand that with all of the name-calling, the fluctuating theories and changing theories of our origins keep on being tailored to fit evidence that is interpreted in different ways.

I just think, don't worry, everyone will be a creationist, if not in this life, certainly in the next.

Speaker 1

Another fascinating topic today on the Focal Point. You're listening to our special weekly segment of Ask Pastor Mike with Pastor Mike Fabarez. The message you just heard was a portion of a series on fallen humanity called Evolution and Creation. Find the complete version when you go to focalpointradio.org.

Well, by now you know Focal Point never backs away from the hot topics people debate about today. Even Christians can't seem to agree on the nuances of the origins of life. But we believe the answers found in scripture hold the key to the full truth, as revealed by God. If today's program intrigued you, I invite you to search for this and other provoking topics on our website, focalpointradio.org.

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I'm Dave Drouy wishing you a restful weekend ahead. Pastor Mike Fabarez will return with more from our study in Luke, so be sure to come back after the weekend, Monday on Focal Point. Today's program was produced and sponsored by Focal Point Ministries.

Speaker 5

Sam.