Monday, September 06, 2004

The Order of the World


This Labor Day found me at home eagerly anticipating the final round pairing of Tiger Woods and Vijah Singh in the Deutsche Bank Golf Tournament. Tiger had held the #1 ranking for over 5 years, 264 weeks to be exact coming into this tournament. If Vijay finished higher than Tiger in the tournament, he would overtake Tiger for the #1 spot. Tiger's streak on top of the world is a remarkable feat within itself, but you have to give the big Fijian his props, Vijay has been balling out of control these past 2 years and his notorious marathon practice sessions have been paying off in the fruits of his labor. Labor Day is also the last holiday of the summer, playtime is over, and it’s time to get back to work. Kids have to go back to school, parents have to get back into the routine of pickups and drop-offs and the college crowd is heading on back to campus to get deep into the semester (or quarter).



That college experience can be an eye-opening event, because the college environment will bring you in close proximity with other folks from diverse cultures and backgrounds. Since I grew up in a traditional Southside Baptist household, going away to college was my first intimate experience with atheists. Most folks on the Southside are Baptist or Methodist, Catholic, Church of God in Christ, Jehovah Witness, Muslim..something. Even the folks who didn’t go to church believed in God, or so I always assumed. But once I got into a highly pristine intellectual learning environment, a lot of the things that I was raised to believe were brought under attack by scientific theories and archaeological facts.



C’mon now, how can you believe the Bible when it says God made everything from nothing in 6 days??



If God created Adam and Eve, then where did Cain’s wife come from??



Dinosaurs lived millions of years before man!!



Man wasn’t always thinking creatures that walked upright, we evolved from a common ancestor with chimpanzees.



All those questions and ‘facts’ that ‘reveal’ the errors and inaccuracies in the Bible really started making my head start swirling for a while. What if these ‘scientists’ were right and the Bible was wrong?? What if I had blindly believed the Bible my whole life ‘just cuz’ and now I’ve got all these ‘facts’ in my face discrediting Biblical accounts of creation. Where DID Cain’s wife come from?? Did God make some more people along with Adam that He just didn’t tell us about in the Bible??


It is at this point that many people who were raised in a certain faith ‘break away’ to some extent and dwell in the realm of agnosticism. Sometimes people have to do this ‘on the cool’, because if they told their families that they no longer believed that the Bible was the inerrant Word of God, then they’d have to deal with being preached to and prayed over in an attempt to be ‘saved’ everytime they came around the family. Everybody will want to talk to you and try to talk some sense into you.



Boy have you done lost yo mind?? You go give yo mama a heart attack with worry with all this talk about man 'evolved' from some monkey!! If your grandma hears this she might fall down dead on the spot…you messin up boy.



I don’t know what’s wrong with him, all I know is that we didn’t raise him to be like that..he won’t even take his children to church so they can learn about the Lord..I don’t know what’s wrong, I’m just go pray for him and move on, because I know that we trained him right and the Bible say to train up a child in the way that they should go, and when they grow old, they will not depart from it. So we just have to pray that the Lord pricks his heart and calls him on in before it’s too late.



I think it’s important for every person to step outside their spiritual comfort zone and sincerely examine their faith. Because no matter WHAT you believe in, you’re going to have to believe in SOMEthing if you’re going to make it in this world. I had my own voyage out into this world of agnosticism and confusion about the nature of God. It’s easy to dissociate yourself from any form of organized religion and just try to mind your business and take care of your own. Focus on that paper chase or just have as much fun as you can everyday. The fact is, no matter what a person believes about God or the Bible, there’s nothing you can say to them to make them believe if they don’t have a teachable heart. Some folks are so wrapped up in reasons on why they don’t believe the Bible is the literal ‘Word of God’, that no matter how many ways you counter their accusations that discredit the truth of the Bible, they won’t believe.



I was wrapped up in a lot of these doubts and questions about how the Bible actually matched up to hard scientific facts that I became a Creationevolutionist..I wasn’t sure how, but I knew that God created everything, whether it was the Big Bang or whatever that got it started, God made it happen. But then when you start learning about Darwin’s theory and what it really means in the Biblical context, you realize that if the theory of evolution WAS true, and man evolved from a common species as monkeys..then the Bible is erroneous.



When I set out on my soul searching voyage of truth, the main thing I needed to know was exactly what was the Bible saying..and to really KNOW for myself, I had to read it for myself..from Genesis to Revelations. It took several months to do this, but when I did read the Bible in it’s entirety for that first time…something clicked inside me..I got it…I understood the Plan. Of course, I don’t understand EVERYTHING in the Bible, that’s why I diligently study it and meditate on it daily. But once you open your heart and allow your soul to be nurtured by the Word, then you will become strengthened in faith such that even when people put ‘facts’ in front of your face that say things that refute the historical accounts of creation found in the Bible, you know that God’s plan is still in action…no matter WHAT they may say.



To some, this approach of blind faith may seem ‘ignant’ or ‘fanatical’, kinda like a child sticking their fingers in their ears and screaming, “I’m not listening to you!!’ over and over in their attempt to mute a voice of reason. These ‘voices of reason’ will pop up quite often along the Christian path and it is during these times that a person’s faith will surely be tested. Take for example an article I read in the newspaper last week entitled, 'Pre-humans walked 6 million years ago'. It went on to talk about a fossil thighbone found in Kenya that was shaped in such a way that they can tell that the chimp sized ‘human ancestor’ walked uprightly. Before this recent find, the earliest known ‘human ancestor’ that walked on 2 legs was Lucy, and she was supposed to have lived 3 million years ago. So now this most recent find is saying that man has been around for over 6 million years. This is all some pretty heavy stuff when you realize that the Biblical history of man points to the creation being thousands of years ago, not millions.



Our Sunday School lesson this week covered the creation of man, it’s titled ‘From the Dust of the Ground’. When you read in Genesis, God created Adam from the dust of the ground and He breathed life into his nostrils and man became alive (Gen 2:7). You can rack your brain and go crazy trying to rationalize and figure out how these ‘facts’ fit into the Biblical account. But no matter how deep you get, there’s always going to be places of confusion and contention because man just isn’t meant to understand and know EVERYTHING. The secret things belong to the Lord (Duet. 29:29). What my rational mind tells me and what my heart believes, is that man was made as a thinking and rational being. I can’t ride with that ‘we came from monkeys’ and evolved to our current state of socialization over time. Nahh podna..Darwin, Asminov, there’s a lot of smart folks who have spent their entire lives discrediting Creationist and the Bible, but what they’re ultimately doing is discrediting the power of God.



You really have to be careful when you discuss these types of things with people, because some folks really get offended (or offensive) when you start getting in to that ‘real’. I don’t have all of the answers and I don’t understand how all the pieces ‘fit’ when you start talking about what man ‘knows’ and what the Bible depicts. All I know is that God is on that other level..and the things that He’s done and the thing’s that He is currently doing, is not something that we can just grasp fully and say, ‘Oh..okay, I understand all that’ because it’s just not like that. There are a lot of things that we have to go out on faith and believe. It can be real hard being ‘out there’ on that faith when you have non-believers constantly pushing these ‘facts’ into your face..but sometimes you just have to know how to tune them out and rely on what you KNOW in your heart. In this case, I KNOW that God made man as a thinking creature, Adam himself named all of the animals and plants (Gen 2:20)…monkeys can’t do that.



The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork. 2 Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledged. 3 There is no speech nor language where their voice is not heard. 4 Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun. – Psalms 19:1-4



For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and divine nature; so that they are without excuse. – Romans 1:20



If I have told you earthly things, and ye believe not, how shall ye believe if I tell you of heavenly things? – John 3:12