I left, came back. Left again. Now I’m just trying to find a church I’m certain will be a good fit.
Can I ask you a question, is the answer to this question you have posed a few times, one of your sticking points on returning to the Church?
The Catholic Church has said we are free to take literally the first 11 chapters or not. So its really up to the individual to discern this. And I think that takes a lot of prayer. Is it a sticking point for you that the Church won’t say well of course the earth is 6K YO or of course the earth is 6 Billion YO?
I like this link in the Old and New Testament Hope, and it tells me something of the Creation story and the first 11 chapters without delving into the issue of how old my piece of zircon i picked up in Western Australia and ran through a dating process is.
Zircon from Western Australia is the oldest on earth according to dating techniques. And that indicates how old the earth is. We can’t have a zircon hanging around without the processes to make it. And the soil to embed it.
When they say Diamonds last forever, they really should be saying Zircons last forever.
So if we look at the New Testament and Jesus in the Gospels. Jesus says the only sign this generation will have is that of Jonah. This is in reply to unbelievers or doubters asking Jesus for signs.
The New Testament states that the people of Nineveh will be our judges alongside God. You know the story right, Jonah has to go and tell those in the corrupt city of Ninevah if they don’t repent , God will send down despair on them. The king of Ninevah repents immediately as do all his people and even livestock go into wearing sack cloth and weeping.
Jonah is angry about this and thinks God should be destroying NInevah as it is an enemy of the Israelites. And pagan practices abound in this city.
ok now the word for Jonah in Hebrew is Dove.
Go back further to the creation stories. We find Noah packing up the Ark because God is going to destroy every living thing on the earth except those on the Ark. After the storm quiets down and the rain stops (incidentally Jonah is thrown into the sea because a storm is threatening to destroy the boat he is on, a boat sailed by gentiles. Gentiles who believe in the power of the God of Jonah and are afraid this God will destroy their boat and them in the Storm threatening to Drown them. )
Noah sends out a dove , yes spelt the same as jonah in Biblical Hebrew, that finds no footing, no dry land, no safety, and has to return to the Ark, and Noah who is trusting in God to provide safe dry land. Compare this with Jonah running away from God and his mission and finding no footing and having to eventually return to God and his mission, after being spat out of the sea by a big fish.
Think about that. These are the exegetical issues we should be discerning in the first 11 chapters of the Bible, not man made arguments about the age of the earth.
And of the second time God breathed on humankind