Angelic,
Morallyangelic said:
Where does it say in the Bible that if I don't believe in a YEC that I am not a child of God? or that I will be judged poorly?
I mean all I ever hear over and over again from MY christian community is that when you have a question you should always rely on scripture for the answer and not the voice of man.
Is believing in evolution any worse in the eyes of a Biblical God then smoking, drinking, or whatever ?
I realize what Genesis says about the creation but where does it say that was meant literally?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Before Henry Morris wrote his book in '68, the only YEC's were 7th Day Adventists. Your Christian community used to call 7DA's cultists. They might still.
What did christians believe before that? Any number of things.
An aside: Where does the Bible say drinking and smoking are sins? It doesn't.
Likewise, I don't think you know what Genesis says. Those who've told you they take it literally ignore a lot of stuff in the book.
Gen. 2:4, The one day of creation was many generations of the heavens. We just got through reading about 6 days. 6 days = 1 day = many generations.
Gen. 1 contains several figures of speech that are used elsewhere in Scripture. Figures of speech are not to be taken literally. The most common one is "evening and morning." It is used two other times in the Old Testament and refers working hard over a long period of time. Paul uses the same expression when he says, "we worked night and day in order not to be a burden to anyone while we preached the gospel of God to you." I Thess 2:9.
Gen. 1:2 places the "observer" of creation on the earth's surface. Everything that takes place until somewhere in Chapter 2 must be viewed from that perspective.
In Gen. 1, 2 different words are translated "make." One requires creation and is used sparingly. The other (more common) is very general and requires no act from God at all but to acknowledge what is occuring. That is, most of the creation account allows pure naturalistic evolution. (I reject evolution for other reasons.)
Who says Gen. 2 is a retelling of Gen. 1? The Bible says no such thing and needs to be considered as if they are 2 separate events.
Cain was driven "from the face of the earth." The exact same noun phrase for what was destroyed by the Flood. Either Cain went into outer space, or the Flood was local.
Cain was driven to a strange people. He was afraid these people would kill him. Eventually, he became the ruler over these people. These were not his brothers as YECs commonly say. His brothers might have spared his life, but they would not make him ruler.
The purpose of the Flood was to destroy Adamites, descendants of Adam, not man in general. There is another word in the passage for man. The Hebrew makes a distinction that no translation makes. All English translations have assumed that Adam was the first man. Scripture declares that Christ is the last Adam. If Adam means man, then there's a problem.
The Nephilim in Gen. 6 are also in Deut. 2. They survived the Flood by being elsewhere.
Adam's descendants have exceptionally long lives which Pharoah finds remarkable. That is, only Adam's descendants had these long lives. No other men did. This is more evidence that Adam was not the literal first man, but was instead some special man.
What you've been told at church is the literal interpretation is far from literal.
Don't lose heart.
) the idea that man was created twice, and has always seen Adam as a type for all mankind. However, they are clearly seperate accounts. A simpler (to my mind) resolution of this issue is to suggest that the two accounts have different sources - and one cannot help notice that we have "God" throughout the first version, and "The LORD God" throughout the second story. IIRC, the former is a translation of "Elohim", which is originally a plural "The Gods" which became considered a plural (a royal "we"?) as monotheism became established; the latter is "YHWH Adonai" - implying a post-Exodus priestly source for the story.
