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The Evil of Allegorizing the Genesis Account of Creation
William Diehl
Those like Des Ford who teach the error of "Progressive Creationism" and who deny the historicity of the Genesis account of creation are offering an allegorical interpretation which is completely theologically unsatisfying and reflective in content of those liberal Protestant theologians who have taken over the mainline denominations which were once the main-stay of Biblical gospel teaching. It only takes one or two generations of "parablizing" the Genesis account of creation until the entire apostolic Pauline gospel is reduced to a mere ecumenical humanistic moralism and social gospel as we see today in the Wesleyan, Calvinist, and Lutheran religious streams today.
 It seems like a very small and insignificant departure from the "faith once delivered to the saints" to allow an allegorical or metaphorical interpretation of the Genesis account to be taught along side of the evangelical gospel, but with the passing of time this small departure from the word of God will widen more and more and become like the proverbial snowball rolling down a hill which gains in size and momentum as it rolls along. Who would have guessed 100 years ago that the mainline evangelical denominations would today be openly advocating Neo-Darwinian evolution and millions of years of death and suffering as the means that "God used to create all the life on Earth"? Who would have guessed that they would be advocating a humanistic moralist view of why Christ died on the cross and deny that our Lord Jesus Christ was the eternal creator God incarnate? Who would have guessed that the truths of the Bible would be so compromised so as to allow all the mainline Christian denominations to seek reunification with the unbiblical and mythical religion of Papal Rome? How do they all fit Darwinism into the Christian message? By declaring that God at some point in the evolutionary process put an "immortal soul" into the evolved human animal and thus made man in the "image of God".
Where did all this departure from the faith begin? It all began with the denial by the leaders of these denominations of the literalness of the Genesis account of creation, the fall of man, and the entrance of sin and death as found in the Bible. Without this historical foundation for the Christian faith, the entire structure falls down like the tower of Babylon. With the first question of whether the Serpent in the Garden was "real" comes the next question of whether the Devil and his demons are "real". Then the next question is whether the Garden was "real" or even if Adam and Eve were "real"!!!
It is for this reason that the seventh day Sabbath will be a test of loyalty for the entire world in the last days. The Sabbath is the lynch pin which holds together the entire foundation of the Christian plan of salvation. Without a literal six day creation of which the Sabbath is a memorial, there can be no meaning to the message of the salvation of death-deserving sinners by the unmerited grace of God alone through faith in the sinless life and atoning death of Christ alone as revealed in the Bible alone.
The Protestant Reformation will push onward and be brought to its conclusion regardless of those who wish to compromise on the fundamentals of the Christian faith. Give it the demeaning label of "fundamentalism" or whatever some choose to call it, without a firm stand upon the literal creation account of Genesis, the Christian message will lose its power to save and will open the world to the deceptions that will shortly overtake all the peoples of the world who love a lie rather than the truth.
The challenge as to whether the Bible account of creation is "scientific" and the suggestion that it is merely "theological" in nature is not a new challenge. The simple answer to this challenge is that the Bible account is "scientific" if by that term we mean that the Genesis account relates literal events which factually took place in time and were recorded by God's prophets historically and accurately.
Of all the four "solas", Sola Scriptura is the most fundamental and important of all. Without a high view of the Bible and the Genesis account of creation, Sola Fide, Sola Gratia, and Solo Christo become mere sentimental drivel of a by-gone era and something to be looked back upon with a warm fuzzy glow like the belief in Santa Claus.
This sentimentalism is the mind set of many former Christians who have given up faith in the word of God as it reads. Many have lost their firm hold upon their faith in the Bible as the true word of God and the Protestant movement as the final restoration of all the truth that the Antichrist has cast to the ground. They have become so involved and distracted by the politics and side issues within their religious communities that they fail to see the forest because of the trees. They so pick and pick at the immature theological and character flaws of the pioneers of the Protestant movement that they faint along the way and lose their faith. They fail to see that there is within this movement a God-ordained purpose being fulfilled. The true evangelical apostolic gospel of Jesus Christ is being recovered and being proclaimed just as surely as within the Jewish nation of the first century God was moving and acting to bring forth the everlasting gospel to take to all the world.
Most of the Jews never knew that the day of their visitation had come and gone without their having even recognized its passing. They were so involved in the distractions of the day and the politics of the day and the popular personalities of the day that they did not notice that the day of their visitation had passed. Their humble unrecognized Messiah had come to them born in a stable and recognized only by uneducated shepherds and despised Gentile pagans coming from distant lands with their gifts and worship. Their King proclaimed to them the free gift of eternal life and the forgiveness of their sins, but they chose Caesar as their only king and elected to nail this "imposter" who claimed to be God to a cross. When Jerusalem their holy city was destroyed thirty-nine years later they were amazed and never knew why God had finally forsaken them. They had allowed their false prophets and false messiahs to drown out the simple gospel message that had been proclaimed throughout their city by an unpopular "sect" that was despised by the liberal Sadducees who called them "fundamentalists" and the conservative Pharisees who called them false prophets of "cheap grace".
The comparison of the literal creation account of Genesis to the medieval error of the flat earth as the center of the universe is ridiculous and is a mere straw-man argument. The fact is that the Darwinian theory of origins and the big bang theory are on shakier scientific ground than they have ever been. The scientific community is frantically seeking to prop these theories up with more and more incredible mathematical gymnastics and distorted interpretations of fossil finds, but their mythologies are sounding more and more like drowning men grasping at straws. The very derisive labels with which these secular humanists are painting the young-universe Biblical creationists are falling back upon their own heads as events such as the eruption of Mt. St. Helens are blowing to pieces the revered theories of all the cosmologists in archeology, geology, anthropology, biology, and physics. With each new discovery of the scientific community the simple historical account of Genesis 1-11 becomes more and more believable and logical to the honest inquirer after truth. God Himself is verifying His word and is confounding all the pride and unbelief of the world's great men of science falsely so-called.
In the final days of this earth every lie of the Enemy will be exposed and God's word will be validated as true for all men of true faith and then the end will come. There will be no fortress of lies in which to hide. The Jericho walls of liberalism, neo-orthodoxy, ecumenism, and post-modernism are and will continue to come tumbling down. God is looking for men and women of faith who will join the march around the city whose foundations are lies and whose founder is the father of all lies.
Blessings to all on this blessed Sabbath day,
Bill
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The fact is that those who are so ardently pushing evolution down the throats of the Christian community as is Ervin Taylor who is closely associated with the quasi-Adventist publication, Adventist Today will eventually forsake faith in Christ as Savior. In fact most who are embracing evolution and who yet continue to call themselves "Christians" have already diluted the definition of the life and death of Christ to a mere moral influence and a mere model for good moral living. The Biblical emphasis of Christ dying to propitiate the justice of God for all repentant sinners is ridiculed as a barbaric remnant of old myths about appeasing angry gods. Paul the apostle is viewed by these humanist "Christian" evolutionists as merely a product of the ignorant superstitious times in which he lived. Thus they reject all that Paul taught about the Biblical teaching of the vicarious atonement of the Son of God upon the cross of Calvary for the sins of the world. Paul's epistle to the Romans which clearly teaches us that the justification of death-deserving sinners is by God's unmerited grace alone through faith in the atoning shed blood of Christ is relegated to the trash heap of "old world" religion.
The truly frightening thing about the atonement-denying teachings that are found among both liberal and conservative factions in Christendom is that these false doctrines are secretly held by most of those who are in high places of the seminaries and universities and administrative positions in the majority of the Protestant denominations today, including the Seventh-day Adventist. It is no accident that the "theistic" evolutionists, women's liberationists, the moral influence theologians, and the "Christian" humanists all unite to oppose the clear word of God and reject the gospel that the apostles preached to all the world. They cleverly twist the scripture and give it a "new" and "more enlightened" meaning. Rejecting the Genesis account of the seven day creation and the world wide flood as being a divine act of judgment upon the antediluvian world is only the tip of the iceberg of a disaster that is quickly bearing down upon the evangelical Christian denominations. When the foundations are abandoned, the rest of the building will quickly crumble and fall. Our only refuge in these times is to trust only in the word of our Creator and Savior who calls all repentant sinners to be justified by the unmerited grace of God alone through faith in the sinless life and atoning death of our Lord Jesus Christ who died in our place upon Calvary as revealed in the Bible alone.
Let the world ridicule and jeer and label the word of God a mythology of by-gone era. When the Son of Man comes will He find faith in the earth? Believe the word. Trust only in the blood. Be filled with the Spirit of truth.
The spirit of prophecy is not dead in the Adventist movement today. It continues, but very few are willing to listen.
The enemy of truth is already a defeated foe. All those who love a lie will perish with him who was a liar from the beginning.
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