The Foundation of Everything: Genesis

Discover a Solid Foundation for Everything The first pages of the Bible cause great turmoil in the minds of many well-educated people because the words of this book are contradicted by much of what we have been taught in twenty-first-century education. Geology teaches us that this world is billions of years old (deep time). Biology makes use of deep time to allow for the evolution of life. Evolution teaches that it is through death and struggle that life continuously improves and advances. In evolution, death is a vital selection mechanism in the removal of less evolved life forms. This death-selection mechanism is imagined as the means in which random changes in DNA is filtered to advance higher life forms. When one opens the Bible, you are given a totally different scenario. Life was specially created on this earth and not very long ago. The creator of life is not death and struggle as Darwinian evolution teaches. Rather the Creator is an all-powerful intelligent Being. He willfully created the universe, the planet Earth, and all life therein. God imposed death upon all living creatures as a result of the original sin of the first humans and is a curse, not a creator. People of faith and those struggling to discover faith are challenged by this battle between science and the Bible. Many Christian believers have decided to consider the first pages of the Bible to be a myth and not to be taken literally. Who is to say, per this view, that God did not simply use evolution to bring about life? Yet when we stop and are honest with ourselves, this compromise causes an ever-present doubt about the validity of the Bible. After all, if it is not correct on the first page, dare we trust the rest of it? There is much more at stake. There exist issues, questions that people want to ask God, which cannot be answered if the first pages are simply myth. In contrast, these questions are answered when the Bible is allowed to mean what it says; let me explain this further: when people of the twenty-first century approach the first three chapters of Genesis, they are tempted to explain away the clear meaning of the original Hebrew text in order to make the text fit into our cultural understanding of origins. But when we allow the Bible to speak for itself following standard rules of Hebrew grammar, it is amazing how much it addresses seminal questions of life. It is then that a person will build a solid foundation for a jubilant life of faith. The first pages of the Bible lay the foundation for all that follows. You might well say that the first pages of the Bible inform us of how everything came to be and forms the true foundation of everything!