Five months after I accepted Christ as my savior, God called me to prepare for the pastoral and teaching ministry. During the next several months, my financial situation rapidly deteriorated. My house was broken into and burglarized four times. I did not have the money to replace anything that was stolen; indeed, I did not even have the money to replace the glass in the window through which the burglars entered my home. My gas and electric service was turned off because I could not pay the bills. I had no money at all to purchase food, so I ate all of the catsup, mustard, margarine, and other edible things in the house. I got so hungry that I experimented with eating the plants in my yard, but I found that none of them were edible. A cherry tomato vine came up from a seed that happened to fall in my yard, and I was very grateful for the three tomatoes that began to form on the vine.
Two of them ripened well before the third one, and they were the most delicious things that I have ever eaten. Everyday after that, I checked the third tomato, hoping that it would ripe enough to eat it, having had nothing at all to eat since I ate the second tomato. One day, I saw that it was almost ripe, and I was looking forward with all of my heart to the following day because I had decided that would be the day to eat it. But alas! I walked outside the following day to eat it—but it was gone! I diligently searched for it, and I finally found it so badly squashed into the dirt in my backyard that I was not able to eat it. Never in my life had I experience such anguish and despair! I wanted that little cherry tomato with every ounce of my being, but it had been destroyed!
I prayed earnestly on my knees day after day for something to eat, but my prayers for food were not answered. I lost so much weight that when I lay down at night, my nerves pressed against my bones causing me horrible pain. Nonetheless, I spent the daylight hours reading my Bible, and each night I left my Bible open to the 25th Psalm where David wrote, “O my God, in You I trust….” so that, should I die of starvation during the night, I would leave those words as my testimony to whoever might find my body. I had not paid my water bill for four months, and one morning I saw through my living room window a man from the water department turn off my water and padlock the meter. I had no water to drink, and I could not flush my toilet! I went to bed that night hoping that God would mercifully take me home, but He did not.
During this horrible ordeal, that lasted for months, I had no way to get to my church where I had been faithfully attending every Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday night, but no one, no one at all, came from my church to see if I was alright. My faith in God, however, was not shaken and miracles began to happen—miracles so wonderful that I dare not write of them lest I be thought to be a liar. God enabled me to prepare for the pastoral and teaching ministry, and then He blessed me with a wonderful congregation of loving people who loved the word of God.
Today, my knowledge of the Book of Genesis far surpasses Chuck Missler’s, but I do not know it well enough to teach it. My favorite chapters in Genesis are chapters 1-11, and I have read extensively about those eleven chapters in very scholarly commentaries on the Hebrew text of Genesis, as well as articles in academic journals, expository and homiletic commentaries on Genesis, and in a host of other places. Therefore, I occasionally post comments about Genesis chapters 1-11, but I do not presume to teach those chapters. I have a much better education in New Testament exegesis and translation theory, and that is what I teach.
The home in which I nearly starved to death was foreclosed upon. I did not have a car to be repossessed, but all of my good clothes were stolen by burglars. Does this make me qualified to teach Genesis? No, of course it does not. Do the thousands of hours that I have spent studying Genesis make me qualified to teach it? No, it does not. The academic literature on Genesis is enormous and extremely technical, and a good understanding of it requires not only a thorough knowledge of Hebrew, but also a good knowledge of the other ancient oriental languages in which literature pertinent to the interpretation of Genesis is written. God has raised up a number of very fine scholars of Genesis, but I am most certainly not one of them.
How does losing one’s home in a foreclosure and having one’s car repossessed make anyone qualified to teach a subject that one knows nothing about. I am very much more familiar with the book of Genesis than is Chuck Missler, but it would be very arrogant of me to believe that I know it well enough to teach it.
By the way, Hal Lindsey was an assistant pastor of a church in my community until he was fired for insubordination. He took up a collection during a Sunday night service even though he knew that the senior pastor prohibited collections being taken up during any service other than the Sunday morning services.
