An old preacher from the back woods was teaching a class of children
about how God created man. He said, "In the beginning there was just nothin
at all. One day God was fooling around with some mud, and before you knew
it he had a man. He put that man up against a fence to dry there in the sun.
God liked that man, but he looked kind of lonesome standing there all alone,
so..."Just then a hand went up in the front and a little voice said, "If, as you
say, there just wasn't nothin at all at the beginning, where'd that there fence
come from?" The preacher paused for a moment and then exploded, "Its
them kind of questions that's ruinin religion!"
So often men are careless in their understanding of God's Word. Or else
they read their own ideas into it and then think the truth of the Bible is
endangered because they are confronted with an unanswerable question.
Questions can endanger man's subjective interpretation, but God's Word is
never threatened by questions. All believers who have any contact at all with
the world will have to face up to difficult questions sooner or later. Many
Christians fear to face these questions, not because there are no answers, but
because they do not know the answer. Lack of confidence causes the Christian
to fail as a witness. He knows if he opens his mouth he will get questions fired
at him that he cannot answer, and so he clams up and defends the idea of a
silent witness. The silent witness is inadequate in itself, for it only calls
attention to your self. It is only by word of mouth that you can bring Christ
into the picture, and without Him your witness will only impress others with
what a good person you are.
We need to realize that questions are often an open door to a great
opportunity for witnessing. We read in I Kings 10:1 that the Queen of Sheba
came to test Solomon with hard questions, and he amazed her, for he had the
wisdom to answer them all. We are not Solomon, but we have access to the
wisdom of Solomon, and we can seek the guidance of the same God who gave
him his wisdom. As Christians we ought to take full advantage of people's
questions. Youth and adults alike are questioning everything, and all that
many Christians are doing is lamenting the fact when they should be searching
for answers to these questions.
The question is one of the greatest factors there is in teaching and
learning. In the only reference we have to the boyhood of Jesus we find Him
in the temple asking questions of the scholars of His day. Jesus saw the value
of asking questions, and all through His ministry He was a master at asking
and answering questions. Parents so often fail to take seriously the questions
of their children. Many are like the father in Alice in Wonderland who said,
I have answered three questions, and that is enough,
Said his father; don't give yourself airs.
Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?
Be off or I'll knock you downstairs!
This sounds more like Malice In Blunderland. Parents tend to go to one
extreme or the other. They are either indifferent, or they are over zealous and
elaborate on a subject beyond what the question was aimed at discovering.
Both are illustrated by the boy who came to his father as he was reading the
evening paper. He said he wanted to ask a question. The father did not care
to be disturbed and said, "Why don't you ask your mother?" "Never mind,"
said the boy, "I don't want to know that much about it." Both in society and
in our families we fail to make effective use of the question as a means of
extending the kingdom of God. It is time that we wake up to the great
possibilities for evangelism that are made possible through the questions that
people have. We need to stimulate people to ask significant questions, and
then be prepared to give an answer from God's Word.
There are limitations and dangers, however and we must be aware of
them. Paul warned both Timothy and Titus to avoid foolish and stupid
questions that lead to senseless controversy. There are many questions that
are foolish that they deserve to be ignored. Some people have a knack of
inquiring into the irrelevant and insignificant. A guide at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New York City took a group through and pointed out
various masterpieces. He gave a brief list of the painters, and after he asked if
anyone had any questions. "Yes," said one lady, "How do you get such a high
gloss on your beautifully waxed floors?" I have some idea of how he felt
because I was teaching a group of juniors once and I was explaining an
important Christian truth when a hand went up. I thought it was a good sign
of interest, but it turned out that he must have been reliving a TV program,
for he asked me if I had watched Gun Smoke the night before.
Stimulating the right question is not always easy, nor is it always easy to
have an adequate answer, but every believer should be conscious of the great
possibility of spreading God's truth through questions. You will not always be
a smashing success, but one of the principles of evangelism is: It is better to
have tried and failed than never to have tried at all. Jesus did not always
succeed either, but He always tried. In a sense, this introduction is an end in it
self, for it presents a key idea that we should carry away and seek to apply it.
It is also meant to prepare our minds for the consideration of a very
controversial question on the origin of man.
Can it be that all men have descended from a man who was never born?
We believe that a man must be born of the flesh and then be born again to be
saved. He must be born of the flesh and of the spirit. So we have some unique
concepts of man and birth. We believe that all men must be born twice if they
are to be saved, and on the other hand we believe that all men have descended
from Adam who was not even born once. He was created and not born. Many
find it hard to believe in the virgin birth, but in Adam we have one who had no
mother at all. If one begins by belief in God, then the biblical record is easy to
believe. If one begins with the assumption that God is not, then, of course, the
biblical account is fantastic, for it is impossible for there to have been a man
who was never born. This is the assumption behind the theory of evolution.
Our children have pictures in their textbooks showing that man has evolved.
This is far more fantastic than anything Christians believe, and it takes an
enormous faith in godless matter to believe that all the wonders of the universe
came through mindless evolution.
There are believers who call themselves theistic evolutionists, and they are
convinced that evolution was God's method of bringing man into being. There
is nothing inherently impossible about this being true. If God could make man
of the dust, He could certainly make him from an ape with even less of a
transformation. If Gen. 2:7 would have used the word ape instead of dust all
Christians would accept evolution as orthodox doctrine. There would be
nothing incompatible between the Bible and evolution if, in fact, God did make
man by that process. The point is, the Bible does say dust and not ape.
Neither mud nor monkey is a very flattering origin, so we do not insist on
believing man's origin is from the dust because it is more dignified, but simply
because this is what the Word of God says. That ought to be the basic concern
of the believer. It should be to discover what it is the Bible says, and then he
can considers its relation to all kinds of other questions. We want to explore
several questions.
1. When did man begin? In the 3rd century Julius Africanus placed the
creation of Adam at 5500 B. C. In the 17th century Archbishop Ussher placed
it at 4004 B. C. His figuring really came out to more than that, but it was
rounded off to 4004 because that made exactly four one thousand periods
before the birth of Christ in 4 B. C. John Lightfoot, a scholar of the same
century, narrowed down the creation of Adam to Friday Oct. 23, at 9:00 A. M.
Being a cautious man, says another scholar, he was not willing to commit
himself beyond this.
How can we begin to reconciled 4004 B. C. with the evidence of science?
The most cautious of scholars have dated man back to at least ten thousand
years. The first thing we need to do is to recognize that 4004 B. C. is like the
fence in the story of the backwoods preacher. It is a product of man and not of
revelation. It was arrived at by assuming that the genealogies of Scripture
were always from father to son, but it can be shown that some of the
genealogies skip many generations, and the most obvious being Jesus the Son
of David, even though a thousand years came between them. The Bible does
not set a date for man's origin, and so we need never feel embarrassed about
bones of men being dated much further back than 4004 B. C.
First 5 simply says that man was made before domestic plants were
made. Cassuto, the Jewish scholar, says the terms here refer to fields of grain
which naturally were not in existence before man since they need cultivation to
continue. The atmosphere was such that there was inadequate moisture for
such plants. Man's food products demand rain and cultivation, and so they
did not exist until after man was made. Let men cease to till the ground and
all the other plants in the world will continue to grow, but mankind will soon
starve, for plants of the field will cease to grow. Man was made a farmer from
the beginning.
Verse 6 is added as an explanation of how other plants could grow before
rainfall. The biblical answer to the question, when did man begin, is left open
for a wide margin. Since scientists themselves have a multitude of opinions all
the way from thousand to millions of years, we need not be overly concerned
about the matter at all. We ought to be conservative and not be carried away
with wild speculations, but we need not fear any question on the matter. We
can move with confidence among the discoveries of science without fear that
some future discovery will prove us in error, for the biblical record is such as
to be not subject to error.
2. How did man begin? Verse 7 makes it clear that he was not born, but was
formed. He was molded as clay in the potter's hand. He was a product of what
already existed. He was a combination of earth and heaven, of the material
and the spiritual. He is akin to both the animals and the angels, both of which
existed before him. The text does indicate that Adam was made by a process,
and he was not just called into being. This is where the theistic evolutionists
read in the process of evolution. The problem is that the process here is with
dead matter and not with other forms of living matter, which is necessary to
evolution.
The term for dust is one that can mean loose earth, slime and mud from
watered ground. Man's body is being formed from a very humble source. The
evolutionist contributes to the mud itself what the Bible attributes to God.
Since there is no logical reason why matter and lower forms of life should
develop into such amazing patterns of beauty and design the evolutionist has
to insist on millions of years of process. The assumption being that without
God or any spiritual force sheer matter will produce mind, beauty and design
if given enough time. The Christian rejects this as nonsense and denies it as an
unproven assumption that any amount of time can produce life out of matter.
The body of man came from matter, but only God could breath life into that
matter.
Jewish tradition says that Adam was formed as a man of 20-years-old.
The Bible does not say, but it does make clear that he began as an adult. He
never had the experience of being born, or of living through childhood. Man
is more than matter, for God gave life directly to that matter. We tend to read
too much into this verse and say that this makes man distinct from the
animals. All animals, however, also have the breath of life, for Gen. 7:22
states this. Animals have a soul as well as man, for the soul is simply the life
principle. Our life is the same as animal life, and when the breath ceases the
body dies. That which makes man unique is not mentioned here at all, but it is
in chapter one where it is stated that man is made in God's image. Man has a
spirit as well as a soul. He is spiritual in that he has the capacity to think of
ultimate truths and to commune with God and know His will.
This verse is only telling us how man began and that he is composed of the
dust of the earth and the breath of God. It is simple and sensible, and it is in
great contrast with all the pagan myths of how various gods made man. It is
also in contrast with modern myths that make man in the image of apes. If
you ask enough questions about the alternatives to believing what the Bible
says about the origin of man, you will discover that God's creation of Adam
makes more sense than they do. We need not fear the questions of the skeptic
on what we believe to be the origin of man. We can state with confidence that
man began with Adam, the man who was never born. Every man since has
been born, but not all have been born again. They have not begun a new life
in Christ where they are seeking to know Him and serve Him. The Bible says
that without this second birth we have no hope of seeing God. The only way to
experience it is by trusting in Jesus as your personal Savior. Adam was not
born once, but we need to be born twice to have all God wants us to have for
time and eternity.
