Today I want us to consider that the Lord created all things in six days. And I don't want to go through a lot of scripture. I'm going to show you a few scriptures. Basically, the title of this is, Why the Church Must Hold to a Six-Day Creation. And I realize I'm talking to people that definitely believe that God created all things in six days. This has become more and more of an issue among Christians. The controversy is not ending. And you would think with all the apologetical work that's been done by theologians that are backed up by credible and good scientific research, ministries like the Institute for Creation Research and Answers in Genesis and others like that, wouldn't you think that the temptation to kowtow to the world scientific community and to compromise with them about the matter of creation in six days would be less than ever before? But that's not true. We can have some sympathy with men like Hodge and Warfield and so many others back in the 19th century who compromised back then. What they did was wrong. And we'll talk more about that later. But at least there seemed to be compelling scientific discoveries that they could not readily answer in their day. And I feel sorry for them, in a way. It must have been a difficult time for them. But now, today, after so much good apologetics, and scientific findings by creation scientists for our theological seminaries to put up with any professor that would suggest that creation might have been done by a process of evolution is nothing short of treason against the inspired Word of God. And there are gospel implications to it. Not that it wasn't sinful before for men like Hodge and Warfield and others to give in on this doctrine, but I think men would be even more accountable now. So, since the OPC, which in times past used to be bold in defending the Orthodox view, is now beginning to compromise on this matter, and since I've learned in the past few years that there are also Reformed Baptists that have also done so, I thought it would be good to give this lesson, which I gave to our own church here a couple years ago. Holding fast to six-day creation is necessary because, first of all, it's necessary because of the clarity and the simplicity of the text of Scripture itself. If you read Genesis 1 and 2, and we're not going to read that this morning, but you've read it many times, if you've read it, you know what I'm talking about. The text is plain, it is simple. And it literally says that God created in six days. And let's talk a little bit about literal interpretation, because that's what one of the seminary students from one of these colleges that Reformed Baptists used to send their children to said to me. He said, well, we all know, because we know Hebrew, we know that this is not This didn't really mean what it says, it's really poetic, it's a poetic language. And it's not poetic, it's historical narrative is what it is, but it's actually taught in some conservative, what we would otherwise consider conservative seminaries. Let's talk a little bit about what a literal interpretation is, what it doesn't mean and what it does mean. A literal interpretation doesn't mean a strictly wooden sense of literalism. We recognize the different literary genres in the Bible. There's historical, there's poetic, there's wisdom literature, which can be both poetic and proverbial. There's didactic, which is for instruction. There's prophetic literature. There's metaphorical literature. There are parables, et cetera. And besides all these different forms of literature, we also recognize that within a form of literature, within the Bible, there can be figures of speech like hyperbole, metaphors, similes, allegories, and all that sort of thing. But this all falls under a literal interpretation. We know what these things are when we see them. Also, we recognize that there are times that there isn't an exact English word to translate a certain Hebrew and Greek word perfectly. And so translators have to do the best they can in those cases. And we need scholars that know the Hebrew and the Greek to help us understand those texts that contain those very hard to translate words. However, we also need to believe the doctrine of the perspicuity of Scripture. The perspicuity of Scripture is basically that Scripture is clear, that it is understandable. When the Scriptures are being studied, metaphor is easily recognized. Like, for example, in 1 Corinthians 10 when it says, that rock was Christ. Well, would any of you think that Christ is an actual rock? Of course that's a metaphor. We know. Poetry is poetry. Metaphor is a metaphor. These distinctions come out in the translations. In our English translations we can see it. We don't need to know Hebrew and Greek to see that. We do not need a priestly office in our seminaries to hold the dark secrets of biblical interpretation in their circles so they can tell us, ignorant laity, that something as important as the only account that we have of the origins of all things doesn't mean what it obviously means in Genesis 1 and 2. We already had a reformation. to deal with this priestly office, and we don't need priestly thinking amongst our seminary people. Genesis 1 or 2 are not difficult chapters to read and understand. They're written so that all of God's people know what we need to know about the origins of things. The Hebrew word for day, yom, translates directly to our English word for day. It can mean other things than a solar day, but when it does, the context is clear and unambiguous. When we say, in Abraham's day, a certain societal function was thus and so, we know it doesn't mean a solar day, but a period of time. Talk about my father's day. We're not talking about a particular day, but we know, you know, when I use language in that way, you know what I mean when I'm saying that. It's clear. And the Genesis passages do not teach day ages, but just plain days. Genesis 1.5, the evening and the morning were the first day. Genesis 1.8, the evening and the morning were the first day. And we see that so forth throughout the sixth day. And then, of course, on the seventh day in chapter 2, on the seventh day God ended all His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day. He's clearly not talking about day ages, but days as anyone reading it would naturally see in the literature itself. You don't need to be a priest. You don't need to be a seminary student to see that. So six-day creation is necessary because the Bible says it was done in six days without any indication that he means for us to not take the text as it is written. That should end it right there. That's enough right there. But secondly, I'd say six-day creation is necessary because of other biblical doctrines that impact the gospel. Romans 5.12, therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men because all have sinned. Romans 8.21, the creation itself also will be delivered from the bondage of corruption. Now, what does this mean, the bondage of corruption? Let me explain this. When did the bondage of corruption come upon creation? Obviously, when sin entered, right? That's when the bondage of corruption came upon creation. Before that, you didn't have that. Death came because of a result of man's sin. But anyone believing in day ages so that they can make room for evolution, stumbles over that very clear biblical teaching. Theistic evolution, that is the term that people use, that people that believe in God, but they also believe in evolution, no matter what form it takes, this teaches that, all of this theistic evolution teaches that there was death before sin. And that's what they claim the fossils teach. But the fossils don't teach that at all. In fact, I got a whole lesson just on that. This is a huge problem. Death before sin? If the wages of sin is death, how could there be death before there was sin? Death coming as a result of sin is a clear and unambiguous doctrine in the Bible. Another big doctrine, and I think that's even more significant, is the doctrine of the federal headship that we find in the scripture, that it falls into jeopardy if you don't hold to six-day creation. Genesis 2-7, and the Lord God formed man out of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being. But if God formed man, if he formed Adam through the process of evolution, how can this verse be true? But even worse is the creation of woman. Genesis 2.21, and the Lord caused a deep sleep to fall on Adam and he slept. And he took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh in its place. And then the rib which the Lord God had taken from the man, he made into a woman and he brought her to the man. And Adam said, this is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman because she was taken out of man. What does the evolutionist do with that? How much does he need to torture the text of scripture in order to teach that it didn't happen this way? Now back to federal headship. And I want us to turn to a couple of passages in Romans chapter 5. Please turn to Romans chapter 5. I want to show what believing in evolution does to the doctrine of federal headship. Romans 5.15 says this, it says, but the free gift is not like the offense, for if by the one man's offense many died, much more the grace of God and the gift of grace by the one man, Jesus Christ, abounded to many. You see what it says, one man. So, think about this. If we evolved, at what point does God make a certain man out of the dust of the earth? And what relationship does this man, out of the dust, have with these other men that evolved? You see what I'm saying? They say we evolved from, you know, apes and stuff like that, right? What does Adam have to do with these other men that evolved? Do you get the grasp and the absurdity of it all? I remember when I was going to take my kids to select a college for my daughters. I refused to send them to a school that didn't believe in six-day creation. And I went to Calvin College in Michigan, which is supposed to be a respected Christian college. And they had this Friday's thing, and he had a lecture, and we're in a lecture hall, and this guy's telling us all about it, and so he asked for questions, and so I asked him, I said, do you believe, you know, do you teach a six-day creation? He said, no, we don't, we do not. I said, okay. I said, then do you believe in a literal Adam? He said, oh yeah, we believe in a literal Adam. You know, he got to thinking, he was, oh, we don't know what he would've looked like. Do you get that? Do you get that what he said? We don't know what that would have looked like. In other words, he's probably some caveman that's not fully developed. It was so absurd, I couldn't believe this. He said this in front of all of us. I would not send my children to that college, let me tell you. I was just appalled. So Adam, think about it, Adam would have had, if Adam was the first man and he evolved, he would have had to have a father and a mother, wouldn't he? Father and a mother that were not human. He would have had aunts and he would have cousins, all of them pre-humans. If Adam was the first man, not considered part of what God calls man, So the text of scripture needs to be taken seriously or we're reduced to this kind of foolishness. Adam had to be a real man. So the text of scripture needs to be taken seriously. Let's step back though and consider for a minute What happens when we cave in to allowing any form of evolution to be considered? Well, the first thing that goes is this, what I mentioned, the perspicuity of Scripture. You've read Genesis 1 and 2. It's pretty easy stuff to read, isn't it? Now, if God didn't really, if he really wasn't telling us what he really did at creation, and yet the plain meaning of the text is that he was claiming to do so, then where else is the scripture not reliable? Now, we really need the experts, don't we, then? If that was the case, if Genesis 1 and 2 really are just, oh, that's just poetic, and he didn't really mean what he said, God, we really need the PhDs to tell us where we can trust our own senses when we read our own Bibles, right? It's a sad state of affairs when we have to throw out the perspicuity of Scripture. And by the way, this doctrine of the clearness and the plainness of Scripture does not mean that there are not difficult passages and difficult doctrines. Just the year before last, In our fall conference, we had a man come out and he taught us on the doctrines in the book of Job. You ever read the book of Job? And if you're never confused by that, let me tell you, it is a difficult book. But he made things a lot clearer. It was helpful. And I know that like with my studies, I know Matthew Henry. Other great theologians, they help me all the time to understand difficult passages. There are difficult passages. But when these men like Matthew Henry teach us, and we're led to say, when they've taught us something about difficult passages, what do we say? We say, oh yeah, okay, I see it now, it's easy, really. It is in the text, it's plain, and it's easy. I just needed some help clarifying it. Maybe we needed some context, or we needed something to understand something about what was going on in society at that time. What we don't say, we don't say, oh, well, I still don't see it in the text, but since you say so, on account of your superior learning, now I guess that's what I got to accept as the meaning of that passage. We never say that, do you? I mean, do you see the difference? Somewhat often the meaning of a word or a phrase in the original language will really shed light on a passage and we appreciate that from our theologians. And actually on the subject of creation, the original Hebrew does in fact make the meaning clear by the word that I've mentioned for day, the word yom in the Hebrew and the repetition of the phrase evening and morning and the fact that there are numbers in there, it's as clear as it can be, he means a single day. And here's the real danger. If we give up the plain meaning of the passages, we also give up the plain meaning of other passages. And we undermine the entire basis of saving faith. The entire basis of your faith is the reliability of this book. And if this book isn't reliable, your faith is in danger. And that's exactly what happened in the 19th century when our theologians back there caved in on the matter of evolution. The first generation to go astray on something like that doesn't necessarily forsake the gospel. Hodge and Warfield, they didn't forsake the gospel. But succeeding generations will. Warfield and Hodge in the 19th century, they're respected theologians in every other regard, and they were firm defenders of the inspiration of scripture. I've read these men, I like to read these men, they're good theologians in a lot of ways. But they began this erosion of the confidence in the Bible when they caved into the evolutionists and those who followed them in succeeding generations, they took the unreliability of these first chapters in the Bible and they spread it to the rest of the Bible and the great seminaries fell like dominoes. in the late 19th century, early 20th century, and you know that that's the case. Princeton, for example, that had turned out so many able ministers for over 100 years, fell to the unbelievers in the early 20th century. And as the new ministers who didn't believe in miracles, they didn't believe in the virgin birth, they didn't believe in the resurrection and other cardinal doctrines of the faith, were disseminated among the churches. When these ministers were given to churches, the churches rapidly forsook the faith. And this happened in every major denomination in the United States to one degree or another. Now, today, the OPC is caving in on this matter. An OPC minister said to somebody, one of my friends some months ago, or maybe it was a year or so ago, he said, no, I hold the six days. I know that some of these young men coming out of the seminaries now, they don't, but they've got their reasons. They've got good reasons why they don't hold to it, and they're still good men. That was said by a conservative man who did believe in six-day creation. Listen, if you give an inch on that, it's going to take them down. You wait and see. It's sad to see. They believe if you ask somebody in the OPC, they'll say, oh, no, it won't happen that way for us. We won't cave. It won't have that effect from us. Our denomination isn't going to go liberal. They don't believe it'll end up the same way. Well, they can get away with it. by their new twist on the Genesis account called the Framework Hypothesis. Maybe some of you heard of this Framework Hypothesis. What this Framework Hypothesis does, it does not teach evolution. It just teaches that evolution is a credible and a reasonable way of interpreting these passages. You see the satanic twist here? The devil is so, so subtle the way he does it. Nobody from Westminster Seminary would tell you that we believe in evolution. They'll preach this framework hypothesis which opens the door for evolution. And they actually, they teach their students to despise ministries like Ken Ham's ministry and Answers in Genesis. And I know because I've had to deal with this. And so they want to say it's poetry and it's not intended to be taken literally, like I said. And they go on to say that we don't teach evolution. We just say that to interpret it as six days is not a necessary interpretation. That's what they teach at Westminster Seminary. It's not a necessary interpretation to teach. If you believe in six days, like I had one student that said, oh, I don't believe it because the text teaches it. I believe it because without it, you couldn't have a Sabbath. Because of the Sabbath, I believe in six-day creation. Not because the text said it. That was a graduate from Westminster. A Baptist. Now, after a while of me ministering to this young man and helping him, he finally came around. But it was pretty scary there for a while. You know, they don't come right out and deny it. But it's worse than that because it's so subtle the way they do it. And by the way, they're also forsaking their Reformed heritage in all this, too. Because if I had time, I'd read some stuff that I have on that. But the historical position of the Presbyterian Church has been very firm on six-day creation. The Westminster Confession of Faith spells it out that it's six-day creation. And they artfully get around that. The third thing, oh and a book I would recommend by the way on this if you need it would be a book called The Quest for the Historical Atom. It's by a guy by the name of Van Doodaward. That's a Dutch name if you ever heard it, Van Doodaward. But it's really a very scholarly book, and by the way, that's a book that I really, that God helped me to really turn this seminary graduate around so that he'd come to an orthodox view. But the quest for the historical Adam, I mean, it just completely annihilates the teaching of Westminster and Westminster seminaries. Third thing I want to say is we must hold fast to the doctrine of six-day creation for the glory of God. for the glory of God. One thing the teaching of evolution does is it takes away from God's glory. We all know that. Isaiah 6.3, the angels that are said that they fly over the throne of God and they fly around the throne of God and what do they say? Holy, holy, holy Lord God of hosts, The whole earth is full of glory. I used to wonder what that meant. The whole earth is full of his glory. What do they mean by that? Well, they're talking about the glory of God's creation. It fills the whole earth, isn't it? Doesn't the glory of God's creation fill the whole world? Everywhere you look, you see the glory, the wisdom, and the power of God in everything in God's creation. But those that teach evolution rob God of that glory. When I was taught evolution as a young boy, even though I was a church goer, I never saw the wonder of God in creation. Not until I was saved did I begin to see and admire the wisdom and the glory of God in the created order. Now I see it everywhere. Of course, I can attribute that to my salvation. God has opened my eyes to those things. But it's clear. When you look at God's creation, if you see it as created by God and you see how wonderful it is, but isn't it awful when you see a documentary or something on TV and they're talking about something in nature and they talk about the wonders of nature? Makes me mad when I hear that. The wonders of nature? No, the wonders of God, his wisdom, his power, how he's put this together, how this animal depends on this other animal for existence and how this works together and how it all just is so wonderfully put together. David, looking at his own body, he said, I'm fearfully and wonderfully made and just So many different things, I mean, you know, just like, I mean, have you ever, an illustration I've used is if you go outside and you take a knife and you cut your car, you know, cut the metal on your car, and you go back, you know, but put a Band-Aid on it, you know, go back a week later and take the Band-Aid off, see if it's healing. You say, well, Al, you're crazy. That car's never gonna heal. No, it won't. But if you cut your body, Isn't it amazing you gallo cut? A week later, that thing is all healed up. It's gone. How'd that happen? It's like a miracle. I mean, if you really think about these things, I mean, just even like your fingernails, what would you do picking up a bar of soap if you didn't have fingernails? Things like that. I mean, just silly things. But really, I mean, God is so wise in everything that he's done. The glory of God is seen in every bird that flies and every fish that swims in the water. But our public school teachers are taking all that away from our children. So our children see nothing about the wonder of God in creation. And they're not taught anything about the fear of God as well. Which, by the way, I think has a very great effect. And it's a very great cause, I believe, of all these shootings that we're having. All these school shootings and church shootings and mass shootings that we've got. All this violence. If you study these men that do this, These are men that do not have any fear of God. These are not religious fanatics. I mean, they may be religious fanatics in the sense of an atheistic type of a thing, but they're not afraid of God's judgment. They can kill 50 people, and they're not afraid to stand before God, having killed 50 innocent people. And I believe it's a matter of the fact that there is no fear of God taught in our public schools. What do you think God thinks about all this? Well, does it matter to you if somebody else takes credit for what you've done? I think it matters to God that people give credit to someone else. He says in Isaiah 42, 8, I am the Lord, that is my name, and my glory I will not give to another. It was Psalm 4, verse 2. How long, O you sons of men, will you turn my glory to shame? How long will you love worthlessness and seek falsehood? So, you know, I'm just exhorting all of you. Stand fast in sound doctrine. Do not be intimidated by the devil's lies, even when those lies come from the mouths of good Christian men. You stand on the word of God. The next time you take a walk outside, you look up, look around, marvel, marvel at God's created order, that he's created everything. And glorify God and praise him for his excellent greatness. And I hope this is helpful in helping to stand fast in sound doctrine. Let's pray. Our Father in heaven, thank you so much for what you have done in creation, It is amazing, it's astounding. We marvel and we honor you when we see these things, Lord. We pray that you would help us to stand firm on this and to not give way to anyone that would dare to teach that you didn't create just exactly the way you had Moses write the account in the book of Genesis. Help us to believe it. and help us to also believe that one man, Jesus Christ, came into the world and he undid all of the wicked things that came about through the one man, Adam, who fell. We pray these things in Jesus' name, amen.