A Fish Story Full of Holes?

Although most fishermen today use a rod and reel (versus the large nets used by the Galilean fishermen of that time), Jesus’ promise to make his disciples “fishers of men” is well known and easily understood.

Jesus often used examples from the ordinary occupations of the day to make his teachings relatable to his audience—and his analogy holds true to this day. Christians are commanded to cast out the gospel net by explaining God’s law and the reality of hell to people while proclaiming Jesus as the Savior of the world so that God may draw people into his kingdom.

“And going on from there he saw two other brothers, James the son of Zebedee and John his brother, in the boat with Zebedee their father, mending their nets, and he called them. Immediately they left the boat and their father and followed him” (Matthew 4:21–22).

Casting the Gospel Net

As mentioned, sharing the gospel effectively involves communicating two specific concepts: sin and grace.

The first is to explain Christ’s moral standard for everyone so that people can compare themselves to it; this always reveals their sinful state and their need for salvation from God’s judgment (an eternity in hell).

It doesn’t take long to see we’ve “missed the mark” when honestly comparing God’s moral laws to our own lives. How many people can justly declare they have never stolen, blasphemed, lied, lusted, or hated? The fact is that the human condition is unfortunately ubiquitous, just as God’s Word says.

“ . . . for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23).

In a manner of speaking, God’s moral law is like examining yourself in a mirror and finding out your face is dirty beyond cleansing. It reveals the “bad news,” the ugly truth that we are all sinners and have willfully broken God’s commandments.

Grace shows God’s mercy in that while we were still sinners, Christ died so that those who put their faith in him could be saved (the good news). Christ paid the penalty that we all deserve to pay. He is the only way to salvation.

“Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me’” (John 14:6).

Using Mended Nets

Now, the aforementioned verse in Matthew also alludes to two activities, (1) casting for fish and (2) repairing the nets. Obviously, uncast nets won’t catch anything. You have to put in the effort, or nothing will happen because fish won’t get caught if no one is fishing for them!

But nets with huge holes are of little use as well because while small batches might still be possible (a couple here, one or two there), large hauls will be impossible to land, no matter how much effort is put into casting. Obviously, any net riddled with holes is severely compromised and allows most fish to wriggle out through the gaps.

Similarly, a gospel net that is severely compromised won’t function well either. The sad fact is that the majority of Christians have been fishing for men using nets torn with disbelief, shredded with compromise, and tattered with disuse, which is why the church has seen very little results to show for all its efforts over the years.

Fishing with “Holey” nets

By far, the most corrosive and damaging ideology affecting gospel witness has been the story of evolution. It has provided many a “fish” the means to wriggle out of the enveloping truth by tearing holes in the sin and grace aspects of the gospel presentation through the diminishing of individual moral culpability and biblical authority. What do I mean?

Although there are many objections to the Christian faith, the most popular comes in some form of the question, “If God is good, why is there so much death and suffering in the world?” The implication embedded in this question is a moral one. So, what is the link to the story of evolution?

Well, evolution requires belief in the idea of long ages to be intellectually viable (and even the majority of Christians have come to believe in millions of years of the earth’s history), primarily due to the monumental layers of sedimentary rock seen worldwide that have been interpreted by secular scientists as having been laid down over vast time periods (rather than at the time of Noah’s flood).

Removing Law and Grace

However, within the rock layers is a record of death, disease (including cancerous tumors), and suffering. So, for those who have accepted the evolutionary story, it is hard to reconcile a God of love bringing about the world via untold ages of death and suffering. For example, “What kind of God would use cancer to create?” “How can cancer be considered ‘very good’?”

The atheist evolutionary biologist Jacques Monod summed up the argument perfectly when responding to a Christian interviewer who suggested God had used evolutionary processes to create.

If you want to assume that, then I have no dispute with it, except one (which is not a scientific dispute, but a moral one). Namely, selection is the blindest, and most cruel way of evolving new species, and more and more complex and refined organisms… it is a process of elimination, of destruction . . .

The struggle for life and elimination of the weakest is a horrible process, against which our whole modern ethics revolts. An ideal society is a non-selective society, is one where the weak is protected; which is exactly the reverse of the so-called natural law. I am surprised that a Christian would defend the idea that this is the process which God more or less set up in order to have evolution . . .1

Note Monod’s reasoned response. It wasn’t primarily a scientific objection but rather the obvious moral inconsistency being put forth by the Christian that he thought was inconsistent with the biblical narrative he’d heard.

When sharing the gospel, it is commonplace for Christians to use God’s moral law to prick the conscience of those with whom they are sharing; however, the unbeliever will often take the easy way out and exploit the obvious gap in the argument by pointing to the source of morality itself (God) as being flawed.

As per Monod’s argument, how could we say God’s moral standards of doing no harm, loving others, and wanting the best for one another could come from a being that used a horribly brutal process that violates every one of those ethics? How does “love thy neighbor” comport with “survival of the fittest”?

By saying God used millions of years of death and suffering to create, it opens a gap in the gospel net that anyone can easily walk through. Their (logical) argument is that God is obviously the cause of all the death and suffering in the world, and mankind is simply a victim and, therefore, not responsible. God’s law is deemed irrelevant.

Breaking Biblical Authority

And all of this contradicts the plain reading of Genesis, of course, where God’s Word makes it clear that sin and death in the world are the results of Adam’s rebellion against God’s clear command. But if the supposed millions of years are true, the only logical place one could attempt to place them within the historical narrative is in the six days of creation.

However, that would mean that the rock layers (containing a record of death) were laid down prior to Adam’s sin after God declared his finished creation “very good.” This would mean God’s account as plainly written (both in the Old Testament and New Testament) is false.

“Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned” (Romans 5:12).

Death was declared the punishment for Adam’s sin and is described as an enemy.

“The last enemy to be destroyed is death” (1 Corinthians 15:26).

So, how could God use an enemy of the world as one of his creative mechanisms? There is no good answer—biblical authority is broken, and the fish escapes the gospel net! As a matter of fact, consistent atheists have analyzed this quite thoroughly and used it to hammer the whole idea of the gospel. Take Darwin historian Peter Bowler’s conclusion on the topic.

If Christians accept that humanity was the product of evolution—even assuming the process could be seen as an expression of the Creator’s will—then the whole idea of Original Sin would have to be reinterpreted.

Far from falling from an original state of grace in the Garden of Eden, we have risen gradually from our animal origins. And if there was no Sin from which we needed salvation, what was the purpose of Christ’s agony on the cross? Christ became merely the perfect man who showed us what we could all hope to become when evolution finished its upward course.2

This is why attempting to add “millions of years” and other pagan evolutionary ideas to the Bible is not helpful when sharing the gospel, as it makes God’s grace seems disingenuous. This creates huge tears of inconsistency—out of which most intelligent people will easily squirm—in the very fabric of the gospel message.

This is why many believers have simply given up trying to share the gospel consistently. Their gospel nets have largely been hung out to dry.

Nets Not Cast

For those who do hold to the plain reading of God’s Word in Genesis but are unequipped to deal with evolutionary arguments, they often get shut down as seeming backward and unscientific to a doubting world.

How do you explain dinosaurs? How did Noah get the animals on the ark? Where did the races come from if Adam and Eve were our original parents? What about radiometric dating? All these and many more questions poke more holes in the gospel net—eventually leaving it in tatters.

And for those believers who’ve compromised with evolutionary presuppositions and have attempted to syncretize the story of evolution into the Bible, they often end up casting a jumbled mess of a message, full of inconsistencies and half-truths which fall on deaf ears, and which inevitably collapses into a tangled mix of confused incoherence.

“So, you’re telling me the loving God of the Bible used billions of years of death and suffering to create everything and called it very good? But death and suffering are supposedly here because of Adam’s sin? And Jesus died to pay for the wages of sin—which is death—but there was already death before Adam sinned? And he’s going to return someday and restore the world like it was in the beginning, full of death and suffering? What are you talking about?”

All of that effort can be disheartening, and it demonstrates that what the church has been attempting for decades simply doesn’t work. The story of evolution needs to be taken headfirst, not thought of as a side issue or something that can be adopted into the Bible as inconsequential.

Re-establishing biblical authority by showing people God’s Word can be trusted from the very first verse—and showing how all men are going to be rightfully judged by a holy and righteous God by his moral law—is absolutely vital when sharing the good news of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection in today’s culture.

Mending the Holes of Doubt

Christians must be equipped to mend those gospel nets and employ them more frequently and effectively. And that equipping will only come through the diligent study of God’s Word to know exactly what it says and then the training and application of biblical apologetics to defend and proclaim it.

Biblical apologetics is the study and activity of giving a reasoned defense (as outlined in 1 Peter 3:15) of God’s Word with the purpose of refuting arguments and removing stumbling blocks that conflict with God’s Word as Scripture says:

“We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God” (2 Corinthians 10:5).

And the purpose of biblical apologetics is twofold. The first (the most important) is for believers to build up their faith by understanding and to develop reasoned arguments, showing that the entire history and truth of the Bible (the back story of the gospel) can be intelligently defended.

The second is for the benefit of the non-believer, for these reasoned responses to remove objections (specific stumbling blocks), reinforcing they will have no defense (Romans 1:20) when they face their Creator and to (hopefully) allow us to continue to share the gospel with them.

Take Constant Care of Your Nets

To obey Christ is to obey his Word, which includes the entire body of Scripture. Genesis 1–11 is the seedbed of all Christian doctrines and holds a unique place as far as our ability to defend the Christian faith soundly. However, 2 Corinthians 10:5 has additional instructions on properly combatting false beliefs.

“. . . take every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5).

To take a thought captive is to isolate and examine it in comparison to Scripture so that it can submit to the authority of God’s Word. So, if a thought (like God using millions of years of/or evolution) does not match up to the revealed Word of God, then it should be rejected.

And even further, any “opinion raised against the knowledge of God” should be dealt with intellectually according to God’s Word so that it cannot be used as an excuse by unbelievers. We should stand on the authority of God’s Word and never cede even the most minute piece of ground or compromise God’s Word in any area.

To do so, Christians must examine and take constant care of the net they are throwing to see whether it has any holes in it, and the best way to do this is to constantly compare it to God’s Word, just as the Berean believers in Acts 17:11 did.

Christians should diligently examine and mend the holes in their gospel nets so they can always cast a truly holy, clear, strong, and uncompromising gospel message.

“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Romans 12:2).