If one believes in millions of years, then this world has always been a deadly place. The question that we naturally ask is ‘Who caused the cancer, disease and violence represented in the fossil record?’ Christians who believe in millions of years of history have a serious problem. The Bible plainly says that God is the Creator, and He called everything that He had made—before, leading up to, and including Adam and Eve, but before their Fall—‘very good’ (Genesis 1:31).
As soon as Christians allow for death, suffering and disease before Adam’s sin (which they automatically must if they believe in millions of years), then they’ve raised a serious question about their Gospel message. What, then, has sin done to the world? According to Christian teaching, death is the penalty for sin (Romans 6:23)—and this fact is the foundation of the Gospel! Moreover, how can all things be ‘restored’ to a state with no death, pain or tears in the future (Revelation 21:4) if there never was a time free of death and suffering? The whole message of the Gospel falls apart if you have this view of history. It also would mean that God is to blame for death.
This phrase sums up the true history of death, as recorded in Genesis, the first book of the Bible. God originally created a perfect world, described by God as ‘very good’ (Genesis 1:31). People and animals ate plants, not other animals (Genesis 1:29–30). There was no violence or pain in this ‘very good’ world.
But this sinless world was marred by the rebellion of the first man, Adam. His sin brought an intruder into the world—death. God had to judge sin with death, as He warned Adam He would (Genesis 2:17, cf. 3:19).
As Romans 8:22 says, ‘the whole creation groans and labors with birth pains’—because God Himself subjected the creation to processes of decay (v. 20).
How can we find a God of love amidst the groaning of this world? By understanding the Genesis account of the Fall, we know that we are looking at a fallen, cursed world. From the Bible’s perspective of history, death is an enemy, not an ally. In 1 Corinthians 15:26, the Apostle Paul describes death as the ‘last enemy.’ Death was not a part of God’s original creation, which truly was ‘very good.’ Based on a straightforward reading of the Genesis account, history can be represented by the following diagram:
Death and suffering is the penalty for sin. When Adam rebelled against God, in effect he was saying that he wanted life without God. He wanted to decide truth for himself, independent of God. Now the Bible tells us that Adam was the head of the human race, representing each one of us, who are his descendants. Paul says in Romans 5:12–19 that we sin ‘in Adam,’ after the likeness of Adam. In other words, we have the same problem Adam had. When Adam rebelled against God, all human beings, represented by Adam, effectively said that they wanted life without God.
Adam’s sin left mankind in a terrible predicament. Even though our bodies die, we are made in the image of God, and thus we have souls that are immortal. Our conscious being is going to live forever. Unless God intervened, Adam’s sin meant that we would spend an eternity of suffering and separation from Him.
The solution was God’s plan to send His Son, the Second Person of the triune Godhead, the Lord Jesus Christ, to become a man—a perfect man—to be a sacrifice for sin. In the person of Jesus Christ, our Creator God stepped into history (John 1:1–14) to become a physical descendant of Adam, called ‘the last Adam’ (1 Corinthians 15:45), born of a virgin. Because the Holy Spirit overshadowed His mother (Luke 1:35), He was a perfect man, one without sin—despite having been tempted in every way that we are (Hebrews 4:15)—who thus could shed His blood on a cross for our sin.
Because mankind’s first representative head—Adam—was responsible for bringing sin and death into the world, the human race can now have a new representative—the ‘last Adam’—who paid the penalty for sin.
In regards to mutations in genes, all you see in the lab is either gene duplications, reshuffling of existing genes, or defective genes (with a loss of information) that might help a bug to survive—say by not being able to bind the drug as effectively. But you never see any new information arising in a cell. Sometimes a bacterium can “inject” information into another one, so it’s “new” to that bacterium—but that information had to arise somewhere, and we just don’t observe it happening. It’s hard to see how any serious scientist could believe that real information can arise just by itself, from nothing.’
Natural selection as a result of competition for food, and having to cope with different environments, but not evolution. If there was no original sin then why did Christ come to die for it?
God bless
Gman
I doubt it.
What motivated those forces to act is more the subject for metaphysics or philosophy.