General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, 59th Session

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General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Yes, Creation!

Kwabena Donkor

Evolutionary thought, Spiritualism and the End of Time

Lee Spencer

How Many Dinosaurs Were On the Ark?

Ariel Roth

Some scientific data that favors a recent creation

Stan Hudson

The Biblical creation is central to the local church

Greg King

Is Biblical Creation Passé?

Nikolaus Satelmajer

Rollin Shoemaker

Sabbath and Creation

Paleontology and the Bible: Science in action

John Baldwin

Why Does a Good Creator Permit Evil?

JoAnn Davidson

...and it WAS good

Jim Gibson

Lions in the Garden of Eden

Richard Davidson

Does Genesis Really Teach a Recent, Literal, Seven-Day Creation Week and a Global Flood?

Tim Standish

DNA and Design

Jacques Doukhan

Creation, the Heart of SDA Theology

How to share creation in outreach on secular campuses

Do millions of years solve the problem?

Ed Zinke

Theistic evolution and the end of Adventism

Ronny Nalin

Dealing with uncertainty

Ted N.C. Wilson

God’s Literal, Six-day, Recent Creation--The Church’s Position

Creation and Evolution: A brief history

Clifford Goldstein

Seventh-day Darwinians

Why does a compassionate creator permit evil?

And what do we mean by the notion of creation in our series, Yes!

This is an important point because there are 2 contrasting models of creation.

1 is a recent historical six-day creation followed after the fall by a global flood during which not all but many of the strata of the geologic column were formed thus making it possible to have a recent creation.

And the contrasting model, as you know, is the 1 that says we need to marry evolution with a god.

And that's known as the deep time theistic evolutionary model of creation.

So 2 different temporal methods of creation.

And the issue I would like to discuss this evening is which of these 2 contrasting temporal methods of creation best address the question of evil.

So let's take a look here and let's start with the God of theistic evolution.

And here we find that God is responsible for evil.

And when theologians want to marry God with long ages, then as you see there, Darwin is saying, my theory works through famine and death and so forth, and disease.

Does that sound like a compassionate creator?

And then when we go to geology, the god of the deep time model actually proves to be a serial destroyer of habitats.

Even Tennyson looked at a quarry and he saw those fossils and he said, a thousand types are gone.

And then biologically, the long-age creator is a serial slayer of species.

And then Tennyson mentioned that nature is red in tooth and claw.

That trauma, here is the point, on a deep time model, that is the original intention of the creator to establish predation and creation through death.

Is that a creator we would want to worship?

And then Calvary And then Calvary is not the wage of sin on a long age model.

In fact, Calvary is only to show that God suffers with us who suffer.

And yet, it was God who originally made creation to suffer in the first place.

And David Hull, who is a, he is an atheist.

He perceptively tells us Christians what our God is if we marry him to the long ages.

He says, the process that is of evolutionary is rife with happenstance and contingency and incredible waste and death and pain and horror, the God implied by the evolutionary theory is not a loving God.

Isn't that remarkable coming from an atheist?

We Christians need to take and listen to what these individuals are saying.

Hull goes on, he is careless and indifferent, almost diabolical.

He is certainly not the sort of God to anyone to whom anyone would be inclined to pray.

You have exactly shown us how the deep time model addresses evil.

Pastor Dwight Nelson in Bering Springs at our Andrews University also agrees.

This is 1 of the strongest statements that he has ever made.

In the holy name of God, Why would the Creator resort to such a bloody method to create those who are in His image?

I have never heard Dwight ever use such strong language as this.

And I think He is correct in making that statement.

And so in sum, theistic evolution does not solve the problem of evil.

And by this we mean, enter, yes, a recent historical creation as the true divine response to evil.

And here we can rejoice really that God is not responsible for evil.

There was a controversy before the first, that is to say before our creation week in heaven and a free moral agent brought in evil and sin.

It begins with Lucifer and look at these famous texts that you and I Seventh-day Adventist read often.

And you were blameless until iniquity was found in you and you said in your heart I will make my, you know, I'll be above God.

Now the Godhead said to the Godhead, not to Lucifer, let us create.

When God said let us make man In our image, Lucifer was not consulted and he was envious for no good reason.

Why would God create, address a created being for advice on how to create.

Now the origin of species is a major cause of the great controversy.

When God said to his son, let us make man in our image, Satan was jealous of Jesus.

He wished to be consulted concerning the formation of man.

Could it be then that 1 of the causes of the great controversy was over the origin of species?

And then Darwin launched his version of the origin of species in 1859.

And these principles delighted, I'm sure, the enemy of Christ.

Because as we've shown, Darwin said, This is how we got here, world, not by divine design, but through warfare and struggle of the fittest and weeding out and pain and horror.

Now the true creation recently in a benign 6 days through God's Word, not death.

Here's a chipping sparrow created by the Word of God and So beautiful.

Here's the same picture of predation, but now on the recent creation worldview, It is not God's original intention.

These kinds of things come as the curse after sin.

And it's like the tip of the iceberg, perhaps with tears, metaphorically.

God is weeping as his creation is retooled for the temporary showing that evil, there's no good reason for evil and that God can eradicate that.

The vegetable kingdom is touched with the curse.

We were in Cape Town, South Africa, and went a little ways up into the felt.

And here Clyde Webster put his hand on those thorns.

I had to take that picture because we recalled that those thorns were never intended to be in God's original creation.

And then the mineral kingdom on the recent creation model has been reduced to a waste place by the flood.

And you can see now that the fatal, toxic weather began, we feel, at the flood, and killer lightning strikes.

God never intended that there should be killer lightning strikes in the Garden of Eden that would start forest fires and so on.

My wife is from Oklahoma and she's very attuned to the weather and she has to watch out for these tornadoes.

Never intended by God to be in God's creation.

You look at the bottom slide there of that soft sediment folding, those mountains through faulting.

God never intended that kind of destruction.

God created this world not tohu, that means a waste place, but to be inhabited.

Now we feel that the receding floodwaters left erosional remnants in Monument Valley.

God never intended his landscape to look like this.

But in the deep time model, God, yes, wanted all this denudation and erosion.

And in the recent six-day creation model, the cross destroys evil, hallelujah, and sin, another hallelujah, in the biblical creation model.

If we have no flood, then the deep time model kicks in and you have all those strata, all those animals living and dying, living and dying ever before humans came.

And that unhinges the causal connection between sin and death.

And Jesus' death on the cross is not the wage of sin And so the atonement is nullified.

You can see the significance of which model we endorse.

Now, the flood builds major portions of the geologic column after the flood.

Series

Yes, Creation!

Why Does a Good Creator Permit Evil?

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

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