Latest / Deep-Grace Diving with Tim Wright and Terey Summers / Episode #9: Does Evolution Disprove the Creation Story?

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Episode #9: Does Evolution Disprove the Creation Story? · Deep-Grace Diving with Tim Wright and Terey Summers

• 0:03
  Thank you.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: Hey everyone, Tim Wright here along with Terry Summers.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: Terry Summers coming to us as always from Phoenix, Arizona in her newly air conditioned room, by the way.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: So she looks much happier since it's 110 degrees outside right now.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_02: I was melting.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: So Terry, we are doing a few weeks here now on the Bible, how to read the Bible.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: And we did a lot of groundwork last week, pretty heavy duty stuff.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: And probably do a lot of it again today.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: We're going to look at how to interpret the Bible,
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: understand the Bible using the story of Genesis chapter one,
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: the creation story as an example.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: And when I was in sixth grade,
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: We were doing a study on evolution,
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: and the teacher sort of wrapped up her session,
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: and she said to me,
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: now,
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: Tim,
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: you don't believe in evolution,
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: do you?
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: And she wasn't being mocking.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: She was just giving me an opportunity.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, no, I think the world was created by God, as the Bible says, and it was created in...
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: six days and we didn't evolve from apes.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: We were created as human beings in the image of God.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: And she just allowed me to share that and didn't in any way belittle me.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: The battle between evolution and some interpretations of Genesis chapter one have
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: led to faith crisis for a lot of people.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of college students go to college and
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: They've been raised to believe in a six-day creation based on the Bible.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: Also, which isn't in the Bible, that the world's only 6,000 years old.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: They get to college and they see the evidence is overwhelming.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: That the world is much older than 6,000 years.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: And that the evidence is pretty compelling that the world did evolve.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: So many students lose their faith.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: And I think needlessly because...
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: if we interpret the Genesis story correctly,
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: it does not in any way,
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: shape,
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: or form conflict with science because they're asking two different questions.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: And as we're going to see,
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: I think that the way that Genesis chapter one is written is telling us this is not
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: a how story.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: This is a who story.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: This is a meaning story.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: This isn't a newspaper account of how the world was created.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: This is a, for lack of a better word, a parable.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: a poem to give insight into how the world was created.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: A few years ago, I was at an event
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: And I was there with my friend, Dr. Michael Gurian.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: And Michael is, he and I do a podcast together.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: And we've been friends for years.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: Michael is Jewish, behavioral scientist, does a lot of work in brain science and so on.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: And we were at an event where he was speaking and he introduced me to this woman
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: who absolutely loves Michael,
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: just adores him.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: She's a Christian lady.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: And Michael introduced us and he walked away and she said, you know, what a great guy he is.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: And she said, but he doesn't get it, does he?
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: That the Bible, that the world was created in six days.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: We believe that according to the Bible.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: And it was created 6,000 years ago.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: And I just smiled and nodded and thought, no, no, that's not what the Bible is saying.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: But she was raised that way.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: And that's a literal understanding of the Bible rather than taking two things seriously.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: When it was written, three things really.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: When it was written, why it was written, and the style of writing, the genre that it is.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: So we're going to look at what the Bible is saying about creation and why I don't
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: think it in any way,
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: shape,
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: or form is in conflict with the evolution story.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_03: Well,
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_03: and I know you know this,
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_03: and I shared in last week's episode of my perspective and calling myself a literalist,
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_03: but then I understood a little bit more as you broke it down or teased it out.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_03: But I want to hold on to that six-day thing.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, yes.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_03: So I'm buckling up and you know, I love you and I trust you.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_03: So I'm excited to hear,
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_03: particularly since you say it's not in conflict and that would maybe be the entree
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_03: to my holding on,
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_03: but letting go.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_03: So I'm ready.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: Well, let's start first of all with to whom this was written.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: We said last week, the Bible wasn't written to us.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's written for us.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: This was written to a group of people who,
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: who had been slaves in Egypt for 400 years.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: They had been surrounded for 400 years by the gods of Egypt.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: And suddenly this God who claims to be the only God intervenes in their lives and
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: rescues them from slavery in Egypt.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: That's pretty impressive.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: But now these people want to know, okay, well, who is this God?
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: What is this God like?
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe this story was told before it was written down,
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: it was told around the campfires as they're out wandering in the wilderness for 40 years.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: They wanna know, is there really only one God?
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: What about all those gods of Egypt?
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: Is God really able to rescue us or did he just bring us out here to let us die?
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: Should we worship the sun the way that the Egyptians do?
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: Should we worship the waters?
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: What should we and what shouldn't we do?
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  SPEAKER_00: And while we were in Egypt, the Egyptians told us that their God stories were the only true stories.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: Well, is our story the only true one?
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: Is our story true?
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: Those are the questions that they're asking.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: They're not asking, how old is the earth?
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: They're not asking, how was the world created?
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: They're not asking...
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: Which came first?
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: Was it a literal six days?
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: Was it a period of time?
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: They weren't asking about fossils and Big Bang theories.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: They weren't asking even the question,
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: if Adam was the first person created,
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: did Adam have a belly button?
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: They weren't asking any of those questions.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: They want to know, what is their God like?
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: And so this is a story of many that tells the people of Israel who their God is,
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: what their God is like,
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: and how their God is radically different from the gods of the surrounding cultures.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: That's what Genesis chapter 1 is about.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's not about how creation happened.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: It's about the who behind creation.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_03: Got it.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_03: I've never heard that.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_03: I've never heard that perspective.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_03: I've never heard, this is the first time I'm taking that in.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: So remember now, this is written to former slaves.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: And they want to know, how is this God different than the Egyptian gods?
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: How is this God different than the Canaanite gods?
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: And who is this God?
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: By the way, let me give you a couple of fun quotes here.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: This is from John Stewart.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: It used to be the comedy, whatever show it was.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yes,
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  SPEAKER_00: reason has been a part of organized religion ever since two nudists took dietary
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: advice from a talking snake.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: All right, so I think that is very funny, but you see what happens if you take that story literally.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's just nonsense.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: And the writers of that story, by the way, would have known that.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't meant to be taken literally.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: They were using symbolism.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: This is from Richard Dawkins, who is an atheist.
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  SPEAKER_00: You cannot be an intelligent scientific thinker and still hold religious beliefs.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: Say that one more time.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: You cannot be an intelligent scientific thinker and still hold religious beliefs.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
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  SPEAKER_00: Which is absolutely nonsense.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: Because there are all kinds of really intelligent scientists who believe
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: passionately in Jesus,
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: who believe in the Bible,
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: but who understand that the Bible is not a scientific book.
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  SPEAKER_00: The Bible is a story about who this God is.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: Using...
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  SPEAKER_00: The images and the language and the storytelling genres of the day.
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  SPEAKER_00: And so that's what Genesis 1 is about.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: It is not about how the world was created.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: It does not conflict in any way, shape, or form with evolutionary theory.
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  SPEAKER_00: This is a story about God.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: So let's tease out a little bit.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: There are some clues in how Genesis 1 is written that tell us this isn't meant to be taken literally.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
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  SPEAKER_00: So let me give you those clues.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: This is a book that is written based on the number seven.
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  SPEAKER_00: Seven in the Bible is the number for completeness.
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  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
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  SPEAKER_00: That everything that needed to be done was done and it was done well.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: So let me give you some examples.
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  SPEAKER_00: Genesis 1, verse 1, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
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  SPEAKER_00: In Hebrew, that very first verse is made up of seven words.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: Chapter 1, verse 2 is made up of 14 words.
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  SPEAKER_00: Which is seven times, Terry?
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: Two.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: Very good.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_03: I broke out in a sweat.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: I broke out in a sweat right then, Jim.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: Genesis chapter 2, verses 1 through 3.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: Three verses, each of them made up of seven words.
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  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
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  SPEAKER_00: So the creation story starts with a sentence.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: of seven words.
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  SPEAKER_00: The second sentence is 14 words.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then the last three sentences of that story are each made up of seven words.
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  SPEAKER_00: So right away, ding, ding, ding, you should be saying, okay, he's doing something here.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: He's writing symbolically.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: But then you go on and the word God in this story is mentioned 35 times, which is seven times
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_03: You lost me on two.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: So it's a multiple of seven.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: The word land is used 21 times, which is seven times three.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: Three.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: The word skies is used seven times, which is seven times three.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: So part of what he's doing by using all of these multiples of three,
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: and of course,
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  SPEAKER_00: then we have seven days of creation.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: So what he's doing is he's using that number seven,
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  SPEAKER_00: not to say this is a literal seven days,
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: but to say that when this God created the world,
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: however God created it,
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: this God created it fully.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: He created it completely.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: And it is good.
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  SPEAKER_00: It is exactly how God created to be.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: It is fit for purpose.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: It is wonderful.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: It is beautiful.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: It is amazing.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: And so what does that say about God?
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  SPEAKER_00: That this God is awesome.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: This is a God who is complete.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: This is a God who whatever God does is good.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: So last week, remember, we started talking about the starting point for the Bible and God.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: Is God an angry God?
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: Genesis chapter 1 tells us, no, this God is a good God.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: And everything that God does is good.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: That's the starting point for the Bible.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's in part what the people of Israel were hearing for the first time, that this God is good.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_03: Would you clarify a little for me, maybe you did and I dismissed it, the number seven of that time?
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_03: Tell me, what is the origin of the number seven meaning complete?
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: I can't say for sure where the origin of it is.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: What I can say is that numbers in the Bible had meaning.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: The number seven is a number for completion and wholeness.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: The number 40.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: For example, is a number of completion.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: So you look at the people of Israel were in wandering for 40 years.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: David, 40 years.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: Moses, 40 years.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus in the wilderness, 40 days.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: So there's something about that number 40,
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: about the completion time for whatever God was doing has now been done.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_00: Wasn't a literal 40 years.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_00: The number three is the number for God.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: The number six is the number for humans.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: So when you look at Revelation and it talks about 666, it's about a human being trying to be God.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, get out of town because there's three sixes.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_00: Three sixes, right?
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's about a man trying to be or a human trying to be God.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_03: Wow, I have chill bumps all over.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: This is wild.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: So again, you always got to ask the question, how did they hear this story?
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: And they would have known.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, seven.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, seven.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, seven.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: This is saying something about God and God being complete and God being good and
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: God getting the job done.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: The second thing that they would know is,
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: hearing the story,
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: is they would hear little vestiges of stories from other creation stories around them,
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  SPEAKER_00: of the other gods.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_00: And as they're listening, they're thinking, well, wait a minute, our God is different than that.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: Wait, our God is different than that.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: One big example,
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: in one of the creation stories that they would have known because they were by
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: surrounding cultures,
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: the world was created when one of the gods,
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_00: defeated another God and split open her head and created the world out of it.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_00: And so when they're hearing this story about a God who there's only one.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_00: And doesn't create out of violence, but creates out of goodness.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: They're thinking, wow, this is a really different kind of God.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_00: And then in that other creation story, human beings were created to feed the gods and serve the gods.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_00: In this creation story, God creates human beings and provides for them.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: This is a God of grace, a God of provision.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: So again, when they're hearing this story, they're not asking the questions we're asking.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: Their first thought wasn't, well, it must have been a literal six days.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: They would have heard the number seven as,
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: yeah,
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_00: what God made was good and complete and beautiful and awesome.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_00: It was created out of love.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_00: And in this particular story, the high point of creation is the human being.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_00: That God created us in God's image.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: And so now we're spending the rest of eternity or life on earth trying to figure out what does that mean?
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_00: And how do we treat other people as the image of God and treat them with dignity and respect?
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: And for those Jewish slaves, former slaves, to hear we've been created in the image of the one God?
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: Slaves?
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_00: Created in the image of one God?
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_00: It would have just absolutely blown their minds.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's the purpose of this story.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_00: The purpose of this story is to take these people who have lived in slavery for 400
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_00: years and transform them from a slave mindset into the people of God mindset.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_00: So that they then can be a light to the world to say, this is a good God.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: This is a loving God, a caring, compassionate God who created you in God's image.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_00: And we want to tell you that story.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_03: So it seems super frustrating to me that right out of the gate with this story,
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_03: how would we know to look at it?
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_03: with these,
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_03: not hidden numbers,
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_03: but I mean this used number of seven that changes how you then,
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_03: it opens up the side windows to the whole thing and breathes in a different
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_03: life to it.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_03: Like,
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_03: like right out of the gate,
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_03: there's some things that sound super specific,
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_03: you know,
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_03: numbers and days.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_03: And at the end of this day and at the,
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_03: you know,
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_03: and I get,
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_03: I understand,
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_03: but like that,
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_03: that is a,
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_03: that's frustrating for me.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely agree.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I can answer that a couple of ways.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_00: One, we talked last week, how important it is to read the Bible in community.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_00: And to read the Bible, not with a closed mind, but with an open mind, with curiosity to ask questions.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_00: So to be able to ask the question, first of all, well, wait a minute.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_00: Science says the world is billions of years old.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_00: There's evidence to say that we evolved.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_00: So how do you square that with the Bible?
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_00: And then some churches will just shut you down and say, science does not trump the Bible.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_00: The Bible always trumps science.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that's not healthy.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why you've got people like John Stewart and Richard Dawkins who make fun
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_00: of Christians who don't take seriously one of the gifts that God has given to us,
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_00: which is science.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_00: Science sort of explains how things come to be.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_00: The Bible gives us the meaning for them.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_00: They're doing two different things.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_00: They're both gifts of God.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_00: But the other thing is, this is where it's really important to read scripture in community with...
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: people who study the Bible and take the Bible seriously as the Bible wants to be taken seriously.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_00: I wouldn't have learned this stuff if I hadn't have been studying it.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: As I mentioned,
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_00: when I was in sixth grade,
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_00: I believed in a literal six-day creation,
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_00: believed the world was 6,000 years old.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_00: And by the way, let's talk about the 6,000, where that came from.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't come from the Bible.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_00: There's nowhere in the Bible that said the world was only 6,000 years old.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: That came...
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_00: From a guy who looked at the genealogies that follow in Genesis,
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_00: and then based on the genealogies and the numbers of years that people lived,
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: from Adam all the way to Moses or whatever,
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_00: calculated was 6,000 years old.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_00: Well, first of all, you can't do that with the genealogies, and I'll tell you why in a moment.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_00: But what he did was he put a footnote in his Bible.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_00: This is called the Schofield Bible.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_00: He put a footnote in the Bible that said the world is 6,000 years old,
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_00: and people read the footnotes and read the footnotes as if they're scripture.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_00: I actually had someone say that to me.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_00: They said, the world's 6,000 years old.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_00: It says in the Bible, it says where?
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_00: And she pointed to the footnote.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_00: I said, that's a footnote.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_00: That's one man's opinion that's not in the Bible.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_00: And this is where we do a real disservice to ourselves when we don't take the Bible
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_00: and read it the way the Bible wants to be read.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_00: He wasn't reading it the way the Bible wants to be read.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_00: What we know now about genealogies in the Bible is
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_00: is that they're not genealogies the way that you and I would do it.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_00: My wife is big into Ancestry.com, and so she's tracing family history.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_00: The genealogies in the Bible serve theologically.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_00: And the theological point is how the people of God continued on.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_00: And so when they would do genealogies in the Bible,
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_00: first of all,
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_00: in the Bible,
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: you'd see some people live to be a thousand years old.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_03: I'm just going to ask that.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_00: Those numbers are not literal.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_00: That's the way that people in the ancient times would honor somebody significant.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, by adding digits to their years?
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_00: So, yes.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_00: So if you want to honor your grandpa and you're writing in the ancient times,
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_00: you say,
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_00: yeah,
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_00: my grandpa lived to be a thousand.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_00: And everybody know, well, he wasn't a thousand years old.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_00: You're just saying he was a significant leader in our tribe, for example.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_00: The other thing that they would do is they would skip generations.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_00: And they might say that Ted is the son of Tom, but Ted is actually the great, great grandson of Tom.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_00: But the other guys in between don't really matter to the story.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_03: So that would shorten the math equation.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, yes.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_00: And just so we understand this,
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_00: in the cultures around the Jews,
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_00: when they created their genealogies,
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_00: people would live 10,
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_00: 15,
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_00: 20,000 years.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_00: So the Bible is really being quite conservative when they say someone lived to be 1,000.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_00: It was, again, we want to understand the writing process
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_00: the literary styles of that time.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_00: And that's how they told stories.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_00: That's how they brought honor to someone was to attach a huge number to the amount
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_00: of years that they lived.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_00: And so we need to read the genealogies that way.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_00: So again, we need to be in settings where we have leaders we can trust and
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_00: who are open to people asking questions,
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_00: number one,
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_00: and then engage with questions and engage with the best scholarly wisdom we have on
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_00: the Bible to date.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_00: And to be fair, we know a lot more about how the Bible works now than we did, say, 80 years ago.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_00: But still, a lot of these things about the creation story, we've known a long, long time.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes we turn them into Sunday school stories
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_00: And in our eagerness to help kids understand the stories,
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_00: we do a disservice because we never unpack what those stories mean.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_00: And then they end up going to college and having the faith just kicked right out of
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_00: them because they can't come back and say,
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_00: well,
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_00: wait a minute,
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_00: that's not what the story's about.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_00: The other problem with taking these stories literally is
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_00: is Genesis 2 is a completely different creation story than Genesis 1.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_00: Genesis 1 organizes it around 7, and the last thing to happen is humans are created.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_00: In Genesis 2, one of the first things to happen is a man is created.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_00: And then the fields are created around the man, and then the woman is created.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, yeah.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_00: Because it's a theological story.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_00: The next problem is, okay, we can understand where Cain and Abel come from.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_00: Adam and Eve had babies.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_00: But then Cain kills Abel,
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_00: and suddenly Cain is afraid that all of these people are going to take vengeance on him.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_00: Well, who are all these people who are going to take vengeance on him?
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_00: Where did they all come from?
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_00: Where did Cain's wife come from?
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_00: He moves to another town, another city.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_00: Where did that come from?
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_00: So these stories are telling us from the beginning, they're not meant to be taken literally.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_00: These are theological truth stories that first of all,
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_00: shared with former slaves,
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_00: whose they are and who it is that rescued them.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_00: They're theological stories about God, not about how all of it happened.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_00: The story of the fall is,
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_00: is a metaphor, a theological story about sin.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_00: It's not the first sin.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_00: It's just a way of talking about what sin looks like.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_00: We talked about this a couple weeks ago.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's wandering away from God, which is what Adam and Eve did, and then God's response to clothe them.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_00: So the Genesis story
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_00: is a meaning story, a theological story that shows us what God is like, that this God is awesome.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_00: This God speaks creation.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_00: He doesn't have to kill other gods and create someone's head.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_00: He speaks it, and everything God creates is fit for purpose.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's good for purpose.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_00: It does what it's designed to do.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_03: So Adam and Eve are characters in this story.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_00: yes they are they they represent they are used to tell the story of humanity so
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_00: again imagine you're sitting around the campfire and the storyteller has just told
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_00: you this wonderful story about who god is and how god created everything and it's
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_00: so beautiful and then little terry who's always asking questions raises her hand
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_00: and you can sort of see the storyteller groan a little bit like oh here we go again
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_00: and and terry says wait a minute if it's all so good
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_00: then what the heck happened?
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_00: Why does it all seem so broken?
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_00: And so the storyteller says, well, let me tell you a story.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_00: And as Terry's listening to the story, you're not thinking literally about Adam and Eve.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_00: You recognize this is a story that's getting to something far deeper that answers
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_00: your question about why we're broken.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not about how it happened.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_00: it's about what the experience is when we lose ourselves and wander away from God's best.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so again, the writers and using a snake, for example, a talking snake, that's all mythical stuff.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_00: They would have borrowed that from other cultures.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_03: I'm with you on that,
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_03: but I was just getting ready to mention the snake and I was going to ask you to
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_03: have patience with me because it might seem like it doesn't fit in my curiosities,
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_03: but,
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_03: uh,
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_03: And I really stink at remembering verses and where.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_03: So correct me if I've made all this up in my head.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_03: So the snake in the story speaks to Eve.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_03: And I know there's some conversations about it will strike your heel.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_03: But then in somewhere, I recall there being a quote-unquote punishment for that snake that it's...
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_03: serpent feet would be removed and it would have to okay so if that was like where
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_03: does that come into being pertinent to the story this sort of literal thing that as
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_03: we know now um as a rattlesnake was captured in my backyard um that they do slither
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_03: so how does why mention that where's the connection there
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_00: Well, again, some of this is how they would have understood storytelling.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_00: And how they would have understood sort of these mythical creatures coming in and out of their story.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_00: And so you've got this talking snake that walks and they all know,
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_00: well,
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_00: wait a minute,
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_00: snakes don't talk and walk.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_00: So there's something different about this snake.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_00: Let's pay attention to what's going on here because there's no such thing as a talking snake.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_00: So this has been introduced to get your attention.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_00: And it's meant to say that in the midst of this beautiful garden that God has created,
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_00: sort of its paradise,
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_00: its creation,
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_00: that something enters into it that wants to distract us from God.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_00: And then there's a lot of things you could do with a talking snake.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_00: If you had a talking snake come up to you and start talking, you'd pay attention, wouldn't you?
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_00: You'd be curious.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_00: I've never seen this before.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I'm going to listen.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_00: And it's one way of saying this is how subtle it can be that sometimes things can
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_00: come along and that shiny object looks really good.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_00: Until you discover that that shiny object wants to sort of distract you from God's
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_00: grace and God's love in your life.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_00: So it plays a lot of roles.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_00: And then, of course, it's cursed.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_00: So it's back on the ground to just sort of remind people, yeah, snakes don't walk.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_00: Snakes don't talk.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_00: They slither on the ground.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_00: But they would have understood the symbolism behind that.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_00: And so when we read these stories,
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_00: it in no way,
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_00: shape,
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_00: or form detracts from this being God's word to us.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_00: In fact,
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_00: I think it opens it up and makes it even more amazing just how brilliant this
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_00: writer was to couch this first story using sevens.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_00: And then the beauty of the way,
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_00: just very quickly,
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_00: the beauty of the way that he writes the creation stories in the first few days is
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_00: because people have always asked the question,
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_00: well,
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_00: how can you have day one and have night and day without the sun and the moon?
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_00: That's impossible.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_00: So here's what he's doing.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_00: He's building the first three days of the creation story.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_00: He builds the framework.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_00: He builds the sky.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_00: He builds the land, builds the air.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_00: And then the next three days, he fills them in with the furniture, so to speak.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_00: So day one,
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_00: the sky was built,
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_00: the scaffolding for the sky is built,
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_00: and then the furniture of the sun and the moon and stars are put in,
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_00: or the heavens.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_00: And then the next day,
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_00: we had the sky was created,
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_00: the scaffolding for the sky,
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_00: and then he puts the furniture in,
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_00: the birds of the air,
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_00: and so on.
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_00: And then you've got the ocean and the land,
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_00: and that's the furniture is put in with the fish and with the humans,
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_00: which is how we build houses,
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_00: right?
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_00: We put the framework up and then we fill in the furniture.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_00: We fill in the life.
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what he's doing in this story.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's not a chronological.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_00: It makes no sense if you read it chronologically.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_00: It makes no sense if you try to read it as literal.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_00: And so what people will try to do then is, well, I take the Bible literally.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_00: So I've got to do all of these mental gymnastics to try to make it work.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_00: And it just doesn't work because it's not supposed to work.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_00: The writer never intended for it to work.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_00: So again, let me say this.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_00: I take that story literally.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_00: I take it literally as a symbolic story that's saying something about the awesome
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_00: creativeness of God who creates what is good,
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_00: who is a loving God,
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_00: and who created us to be in special relationship with God and to care for the earth.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_00: That's what the story is about.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_00: And I take that literally within the context of the type of literature that it is.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it makes it far richer than trying to figure out how to shoehorn logic
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_00: into that story when it wasn't meant to be taken as logic,
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_00: but as a theological story about who God is.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_03: So going back to your, was it sixth grade you said, teacher?
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_03: Going back to the teacher that said, so Tim, you don't believe in evolution.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_03: How would you answer her today?
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_00: I'd say, yeah, I think evolution is the way that God created the world.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_03: And so human beings evolved from apes.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I have no problem believing that.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_00: I think that there are some really brilliant thinkers who would suggest that maybe,
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_00: maybe that isn't quite true.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_00: Right,
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_00: but we do know that we've evolved and that human beings have evolved from several
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_00: different subforms of human beings.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_00: But I don't think that that's any less miraculous than suddenly speaking human beings into existence.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, think about that.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_00: Let's say we evolved from apes.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_00: For an ape to develop the thinking capacity to do what human beings do today...
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's miraculous.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's just absolutely amazing.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_00: And it shows to me the creativity of God and the vastness of how God creates and
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_00: shows just how more amazing God is than what we often will do with Genesis 1.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_03: And the one thing that I take away
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_03: no matter where I've have fallen on what side of the fence or whatever is the
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_03: relationship that God has with humanity from Genesis.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_03: Is that not, I mean, that's like, that's the point.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_00: That's the point for the people of the,
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_00: the people who are slaves,
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_00: they're saying you were slaves,
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_00: you were nothing.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_00: And this God comes along and says, you're created in my image.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_00: You're my people.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_00: And it changed the course of human history.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_00: All right, Terry, I think we've gone far enough on this one.
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not sure what we'll come back with next week.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_03: It had nothing to do with my temperature in the room.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_00: So we'll come back,
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_00: and I'm not quite sure what we'll do the next time,
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_00: but we may pick up on maybe another one of these stories just to kind of help us
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_00: continue to get our brains around how the Bible was written and how it speaks such
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_00: grace to us.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_00: So...
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening, everybody.
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_00: Please go to Spotify or Apple if you haven't subscribed or subscribe to RecklessGrace.substack.com.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_00: Pass this along to your friends.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_00: And we're going to get out of here because Terry's choking to death.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_00: All righty.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks, everybody.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_00: Here's a little Morse code to let you know you are graced.