Why don't you take God at his word, the whole Bible is the inspired word of God whether is be a metaphor or a parable or even poetry.
I take Genesis 1 very seriously as it was God's way in teaching us about the earth & the cosmos so we don't fall into deception in the latter days.
This isn't a great thing to say. It's quite judgmental of not just me, but majority of Christians in the world. I absolutely do take God at His word. The problem is you're cherry picking verses which you want to take hyper-literally when the Bible frequently expresses literal truths through metaphor, poetry, parables and phenomenological language. In those cases it takes study to discern the truth being expressed, a lateral thinking rather than a literal reading.
A simple and extreme example is Jesus saying that He is the true vine. Taking Him at His word with a hyper-literal approach would lead to an understanding that Jesus is literally a vine. But that's obviously wrong. Would you put up with somebody insisting that you are not taking Jesus at His word if you didn't believe that He is literally a vine? I don't think you would!
So what did Jesus mean then? He meant that He supplies the spiritual nourishment for all His followers (the implication being they are the branches of the true vine). They will not produce fruit without Him. Isn't that a beautiful message? It keeps us focused on Him as our only source of nourishment to help us produce good fruit. Where's anything to do with the shape of the earth there? What possible benefit would it be to insist that Jesus is literally a vine?
This is the approach I take to Scripture. Studying the message of God's words without getting hung up on a hyper-literal reading.
Genesis 1:14 is an example of a verse that you get hung up on. It talks about God setting lights in the firmament. The two words that you get hung up on are "lights and "firmament". I don't get hung up on those because the message to me is that God created the sun and moon that I see in the sky. I don't accept someone insisting that I'm not taking God at His word by believing this message.
When I actually do a study on these words, I see that first, the Bible was not written in English, so I must look at the original Hebrew meanings. When I do that I see that the Hebrew word translated as "lights" also means "luminaries". Luminaries are objects that give off light but they don't have to be their own source of light. Am I taking God at His word if I accept that "lights" can mean the moon is not its own source of light? Yes I am.
The word translated as "firmament" I find can mean "expanse", which is not something necessarily solid. And when I look up Youngs Literal Translation (YLT) Bible, I find this:
"
And God saith, `Let luminaries be in the expanse of the heavens, to make a separation between the day and the night, then they have been for signs, and for seasons, and for days and years," Genesis1:14 YLT
I have been told by a Hebrew and Greek Bible teacher that YLT is a good translation for study. So I know I'm not going too far wrong in using it. But look..."luminaries" & "expanse" are right in there!
Am I taking God at His word by reading Genesis 1 as it is written in the YLT Bible? Yes I am! Because God's word is telling me that He created the sun and the moon and placed them in the sky that I see. To tell me otherwise is extremely judgemental.
The end time deception is not that the earth is a globe. It's believing that God is not God. It's the deception of anti-Christ, that he is God. Trying to claim that globe earth belief is the end time deception is the scaremongering of flat earthers to get followers for their own deception.
Don't forget it's only been 500 years since Nicolaus Copernicus told us the earth was moving sphere, how would he know ? And then Martin Luther warned us of this deception. So forgive me if I'm an ardent flat earther.
It was known that the earth is a rotating globe before Copernicus said it. As far as I'm aware he said this in 1515. However the oldest surviving physical globe model is from the 1490's.
en.wikipedia.org
So obviously it was well known that the earth is a globe before Copernicus.
