Sharing Answers in Rockford, Illinois

Friends,

This past weekend, I spoke eight times in Rockford, Illinois.

We had about 60 at the middle school for a church plant outreach on Saturday night. Probably half were teens, several of whom thanked me—and most of them came to my Sunday night talks at another church. Several men at the meeting decided as a result to go to the pastor’s Bible study meeting tonight. Also a sharp, young man, who is an agnostic that the pastor has befriended and has been witnessing to for several months, attended the talk and told the pastor afterward that I had really given him some things to think about. He wants to process things for a few days and then get with the pastor to discuss his remaining questions. Would you lift up a prayer right now for that young man that he would come to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ? Lift up those three men who are coming to the Bible study tonight, that God would work in their lives, too. I don’t know if they are already believers or just investigating Christianity.

The lectures at the other church on Sunday and Monday were well attended and seemed to be well received. This church understands the importance of Genesis and has had an AiG speaker two years ago and another AiG speaker four years ago. But they were eager to learn more and there were also a lot people from the surrounding area who came to hear the talks. A lot of resources were purchased for further study and sharing with others. A number of people came up to me after the talks to ask more questions. One questioner on Sunday night—after I talked about where the millions of years idea came from historically and Noah’s Flood—was a high school foreign exchange student from Germany, who asked what in the Bible ruled out millions of years. I quickly gave him these responses:

1. There is no biblical evidence for millions of years—the idea is shoe-horned into the Bible from outside. But it doesn’t fit, if we pay careful attention to the details of the Biblical text.
2. You can’t put millions of years into the Bible because then you would have massive death, disease, extinction and other natural evils in God’s very good creation before the Fall of man in sin.
3. The numbering of the days and repetition of “there was evening and there was morning” and the creation of the sun, moon, and stars for man to tell time (days, seasons, and years) shows that the days of creation are literal.
4. Exodus 20:11 rules out millions of years because God said He created everything in six days that were equal length with the six-day work week that God told the Jews to maintain. So there are not millions of years before day 1 (gap theory) nor millions of years in each day (day-age theory) nor millions of years between each of the literal days (day-gap-day theory). And there is abundant Old Testament and New Testament evidence that Genesis 1 is history, not poetry, allegory, myth, or some other kind of non-literal, non-historical literature.
5. Jesus said in Mark 10:6 that Adam and Eve were right there at the beginning of creation, not billions of years after the beginning (as would be the case if the earth and universe were billions of years old. Jesus also believed in the global catastrophic Flood of Noah’s Day. So Jesus was a young-earth creationist.
6. Paul says in Romans 1:18–20 that the witness of the creation to God’s existence and at least some of His attributes have been seen and understood by people “since the creation of the world,” implying that, like Jesus, Paul believed man has been in existed as long as the rest of creation. (Minus a few days—which, when plotted on a thousands-of-years timescale from Paul and Jesus to creation, is essentially the beginning of creation. This is understood when speaking in non-technical, everyday language, as Paul and Jesus were.)

This German boy is not a Christian but is living with a family from the church this year and seemed to be really thinking about what I said. Lift up a prayer for him to come to know the Lord Jesus, please.

Thanks for praying.

Terry