I believe the Bible so obviously tells us that Genesis is intended to be literal history that evolution believing Christians have to ignore or reinterpret whole passages of Scripture in order to make it fit with their secular understanding of our origins. A while back, I wrote a series rebutting a video titled, “10 Biblical Problems for Young Earth Creationism,” by a group called Inspiring Philosophy. It was actually one of many examples of similar claims, where old-earth, theistic evolutionists try to convince us that the Bible really doesn’t endorse a recent, miraculous, sudden creation.
To me, the fact that so many such claims exist are evidence that the Bible seems to plainly confirm a six day creation. It is only for that reason that evolutionists have to go to great lengths to explain why the Bible doesn’t really mean what it so clearly seems to say. Rather than waste my time rebutting any more of their questionable hermeneutics, I thought it would be fun to point out ten passages from the Bible that are extremely problematic to compromising Christians.
Let’s get to it. Here they are in no particular order:
#1: 2 Peter 1:20, “Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation.”
We see here, immediately, that the Bible was written to mean what it says. There’s no hidden meaning. There’s no secret code that can only be uncovered with scientific inquiry. The most obvious meaning of any passage is likely the intended meaning and there’s no need to look for a deeper meaning - especially a completely contrary meaning - every time a passage doesn’t comport with our personal beliefs.
When Jesus was criticized by the Pharisees, who would accuse Him with some minute point of the Law, Jesus often responded by saying, “Haven’t you read….” followed by a passage relevant to the subject at hand. In every instance, He relied on an ordinary understanding of the passage to prove His point. He never had to say, “What that really means is….”
Keep this first point in mind as you read through the rest of the verses on this list. You may have heard responses to some of these points before but maybe you will see how many sound like “private interpretations” of Scripture.
#2: Exodus 20:9-11, “Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates: For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.”
In the midst of the Ten Commandments, when the LORD gave the Law to Moses, He commanded that His people should observe the Sabbath. They should work for six days and rest on the seventh in the same way He worked for six days and rested on the seventh when He created the universe. Do you think the Jews had to stop and ask themselves, “How long does God mean by a ‘day’?”
To say this passage somehow means billions of years is the epitome of a private interpretation. A billions of years old universe is a relatively new idea, one that has only existed a couple of centuries. The modern methods evolutionists have used to guess at the age of the earth are methods that weren’t available to the ancients. Theistic evolutionists must believe in an interpretation of this passage that the first readers could not possibly have known.
#3: Genesis 1:29-30, “And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.”
To believe in evolution, a Christian must believe that death, disease, and suffering existed millions of years before Adam appeared. They mock creationists for believing the sharp teeth of T-rex would have originally been used to eat plants and not other animals. Of course, creationists believe this because that’s exactly what this passage says. God gave every single beast of the earth plants to be its food “and it was so!” It is not creationists who should be embarrassed for believing this; it is the compromising Christians who should be ashamed for denying the clear words of the text!
#4: Genesis 7:21-23, “And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, and every man: All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died. And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both man, and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven; and they were destroyed from the earth: and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark.”
Some evolutionists claim the Flood is a completely fictitious event. Theistic evolutionists, on the other hand, aren’t so quick to completely accept that such a vividly described account is mere storytelling. Instead, they assert that the Flood was a local phenomenon, limited to the Mesopotamian Valley. It was only “universal” in the sense that it killed all humans - because all humans lived in just that area.
I agree that if there were 1,000,000 people in the world, and they all died in a single catastrophe, you could say that event killed all the people in the world - regardless of how widespread it was. However, this same passage says every animal outside of the Ark also died. Did every beast and bird in the world also live in the Middle East? You can see how this seems to confirm that it was the entire world that was flooded.
#5: Genesis 47:7-9, “And Joseph brought in Jacob his father, and set him before Pharaoh: and Jacob blessed Pharaoh. And Pharaoh said unto Jacob, How old art thou? And Jacob said unto Pharaoh, The days of the years of my pilgrimage are an hundred and thirty years: few and evil have the days of the years of my life been, and have not attained unto the days of the years of the life of my fathers in the days of their pilgrimage.”
When Pharaoh met Jacob for the first time, he apparently took note of Jacob’s great age. At 130 years old, Jacob may have been one of the oldest people Pharaoh had ever met. However Jacob claimed his days were “few” compared to the long lives of his forefathers.
The Bible attests to extremely long-lived people from before the Flood. Genesis 5:27 tells us of Methuselah, for example, who lived to be 969 years old. Theistic evolutionists claim these seemingly long lives are actually symbolic numbers that convey some deeper meaning (i.e. some private interpretation). In this passage, Jacob seems to confirm they’re meant to be literal. He is saying his actual age of 130 was small compared to the antediluvian saints who lived for several centuries.
#6: Luke 3:23-38, The genealogy of Jesus
There are two genealogies of Jesus given in the Bible. Most scholars agree one is maternal and the other paternal (by Joseph, the husband of Mary). The genealogy in Luke traces all the generations of Jesus back to Adam, “the son of God.” If the generations are meant to be consecutive (which I believe they are), it would be difficult to stretch them out a couple hundred thousands of years to when evolutionists claim the first modern human appeared. Besides that, though, Luke is confirming that Adam was a literal person, created by God. He had no ancestors before him.
Here’s the real problem that Luke’s genealogy brings to old earth interpretations of the Bible. Most critics claim many figures of the Old Testament were fables or symbols. My question, then, is when did these generations stop being myths and start becoming real? Was it Adam, Noah, Abraham, or David? Were they all myths all the way down to Jesus? If that were the actual way to understand the Bible, how could I be sure Jesus was a real Person? He could have been a “mythical character used to convey some deeper meaning!” I have to shake my head.
#7: Mark 10:6-8, “But from the beginning of the creation God made them male and female. For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and cleave to his wife; And they twain shall be one flesh: so then they are no more twain, but one flesh.”
When asked about divorce, Jesus answered the Pharisees by quoting from Genesis. Not only does He talk about Adam and Eve as though they were real people, Jesus also asserts they were made at the beginning of the creation. Adam and Eve were made during the creation week and marriage has continued since then for all of history.
According to theistic evolution, the universe has existed for billions of years and the first humans appeared only 100,000-200,000 years ago. In other words, the “creation” happened a long time ago and humans only arrived at the tail end of history. This secular idea is in direct contradiction to the plain words of Jesus.
#8: Romans 5:12,17, “Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned... For if by one man's offence death reigned by one; much more they which receive abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness shall reign in life by one, Jesus Christ.)”
The Bible is clear that death is the consequence of sin (Romans 6:23) and that sin entered the world by one man, namely Adam. Death has reigned since Adam but Christ has conquered death and we shall reign with Him in life in the New Jerusalem. Amen!!
According to theistic evolution, death was in the world long before Adam. It was not the product of sin but the deliberate method that God used to create everything. Death reigned long before Adam because that was how God wanted it!
These two views are diametrically opposed and we must decide which is correct. I will side with the clear words of the Bible.
#9: Acts 17:24-26, “God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands; Neither is worshipped with men's hands, as though he needed any thing, seeing he giveth to all life, and breath, and all things; And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation;”
According to the evolutionary idea of human origins, there was no literal Adam. Homo sapiens are an evolved group that descended from a “not quite human” species of Homo and no single being could be identified as the ancestor of all modern people.
When Paul was speaking to the Greeks on Mars Hill, he was preaching to them about the one, true God. In this passage, he seems to confirm the creation account - that God made the world and everything in it and that all people of the world have descended from a single man.
#10: Genesis 1:5b, “... And the evening and the morning were the first day.”
In the entire first chapter of Genesis, the Bible punctuates each day with a similar phrase - it was evening and it was morning, the first day and et cetera. Some critics will claim the word day can mean something other than an ordinary, 24-hour day. That’s true, but when it’s modified by the words, “evening and morning,” as well as with ordinal numbers, “first day, second day,” it becomes extremely difficult for day to mean something other than an ordinary day.
Consider 1 Samuel 17:16 which says, “And the Philistine drew near morning and evening, and presented himself forty days.” What can this mean except that Goliath came out every morning and evening for forty days? Consider, too, the reverse; what would the terms “evening and morning” mean if the days are meant to represent long periods of time?
To suggest the days of Genesis are meant to be anything other than ordinary days is a textbook example of assigning a “private interpretation” to the passage.
CONCLUSION
Just as Jesus said to the Pharisees, I say to you now. Read these passages for yourself and ask yourself what they mean. I’m not claiming there is a secret meaning. I’m not telling you there’s a different way to understand the plain words of the Bible. I’m telling you the Bible speaks for itself.
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