Beware the temptation to 'please man'

I remember all too well my transition to “enlightened” college student. A season when, in the face of a torrent of academic challenges to the “faith facts” of my childhood, I tragically opted in many areas to compromise God’s inerrant, infallible, inspired Word.

One such area of compromise was my conclusion that perhaps the theory of evolution reflected God’s means of establishing this world and its inhabitants.

So wrong, as reflected in the following excerpts from an article by the late Dr. Henry M. Morris, Ph.D.

Scientist Morris warned that “interpreting” scripture to make it fit secular scientism (“old earth evolutionism”) inevitably leads to a disturbing chain of questions/conclusions, such as:

1) If the Bible is wrong on these important matters of science and history, how can we trust it in matters of salvation, heaven and everlasting life, which we have no means of verifying scientifically?

2) Why would a loving God who termed His creation “very good” design an evolutionary system marked by violence, pain and death – long before sin came in?

3) The Bible teaches that Jesus was our Creator before He became our Savior (John 1:1-3, 10). If Jesus was present at the beginning, why would He say of humans: “God made them male and female” … “from the beginning of the creation?”

4) If God’s word was wrong about creation, do any of its prophecies and promises have value?

Is there any reason to believe in God at all? Would a “personal, loving, omniscient, omnipotent, holy, righteous God” create an “old world” filled with suffering and death from the outset? If suffering and death in the world are not the result of God’s judgment on sin, “then the most reasonable inference is that the God of the Bible doesn’t exist.”

Morris, founder of The Institute for Creation Research, wrote: “No matter how convenient it would be to adopt the ‘old earth’ approach or the ‘it doesn’t really matter’ approach, we (Christians) can’t do it.”

“We would do well to continue to believe His word just as it stands,” Morris wrote. “God forbid that we should ever ‘love the praise of men more than the praise of God’ (John 12:43).”

(Note: Dr. Morris stated in this same article: “No true evolution from one kind of organism to a more complex kind has ever been observed in all human history, and there is no recorded history beyond the 6,000 or so years of biblical history.” To read this article in its entirety, or to read more from the Institute for Creation Research, visit www.ICR.org.)