The play on the sound of words is indicative of divine judgment.
Do you read and write ancient Hebrew?
According to a couple of sources from translators the verb is the same.
But I'll research your objection.
Author Custance, Donald Barnhouse, GH Pember, G. Bryant Rotherham are a few Hebrew language scholars who
point out "became" is an admissable rendering of the passage.
I mean scholars unlike myself who can translate ancient Hebrew to English.
I have read Donald Whitcomb's book "The Early Earth" as a vigorous criticism of anything but a YEC view of Genesis as you'd like.
It is not as if I have not been exposed to a vigorous defense against Destruction / Reconstruction.
While some good points have been raised, I am going to stick with the earth being found waste and void by the seer because
of a pre-adamic divine judgment.
In the 50+ years that I have been a Christian, I never gave Genesis 1-11 any thought. I just accepted it. But I must admit if you would have asked me, I would have probably said I believed in theistic evolution. That was before we did an intense Bible study on Genesis 1-11 last year. If one wants to be true to the scriptures, there is no doubt about creation being a literal seven days.
I remember two weeks after I came to a saving knowledge of Christ arguing with the pastor's wife that the Virgin Birth took place simply because that is what the Scriptures tells us. Genesis 1-11 isn't any different.
I like F.F. Bruce but even the best of Christians goes off the rails sometimes. As far as the Recovery Bible, I did some research. This alone would make me skeptical of this translation.
What GotQuestions.org has to say about the Recovery Bible:
The Recovery Version of the Bible is a direct English translation of the Scriptures, produced and published by Living Stream Ministries, part of the
Local Church movement. The relationship between the Local Church and the Recovery Version of the Bible may or may not raise questions about its trustworthiness, depending on how one views this particular group. At the very least, one should be cautioned to treat the specific translations and footnotes of the Recovery Version with caution, if not a large dose of skepticism.
The Recovery Version is presented as a formal translation, and most analysts would agree that it uses an extremely literal approach. From an objective standpoint, the text follows reasonably closely to accepted manuscripts of the Bible, with some editorial license in which ones to follow. In some cases, this results in the use of phrases that are nearly meaningless in English. The book also includes extensive footnotes—so many that they could be fairly described as a commentary. The Recovery Version has raised some caution flags over particular translated passages, as well as the content of these footnotes.
The general opinion of Witness Lee’s theology is mixed, and the same goes for the content of the Recovery Version. Both feature confusing and sometimes contradictory accounts of doctrines such as the Trinity and human nature. According to supporters of Local Church, this is just a matter of cultural confusion, and taking all of the commentary in context results in an orthodox view of theology. According to detractors, the Recovery Version is the result of beliefs that are either aberrant or conflicted, or both. Also, the fact that the names and credentials of the translators are not publicly available is a legitimate source of suspicion.
Given that the Bible was not originally written in English,
differences between various versions are not necessarily a problem. And, as compared to cult-specific efforts such as the
New World Translation, the Recovery Version does not appear to have an overtly biased approach to translation. In fact, its stated purpose is to avoid such bias, resulting in sometimes overly literal phrasing. Then again, there are already English translations aimed at literalness, such as the NASB and the Amplified Bible, reducing the need for translations like the Recovery Version.
As a lesser-known and lesser-studied version, it would be impossible for Got Questions to adamantly endorse or condemn the Recovery Version of the Bible. However, given some of its widely noted flaws, it should be handled with caution and only in conjunction with other, less worrisome translations.
What is the Recovery Version of the Bible? | GotQuestions.org
What GotQuestions says about the Local Church Movement (makers of the Recovery Bible)
There are many people, some of them formerly involved in the Local Church, who are absolutely convinced that the Local Church is a cult, or at least a non-biblical and non-evangelical movement. The more we research the Local Church, however, the more we run into widely divergent views of the movement. Due to the major concerns many people have about the Local Church, we strongly advise you to use the utmost caution and discernment before visiting or joining the Local Church movement. Here are some sites at which you could pursue further research into the Local Church / Witness Lee / Living Stream movement:
Witness Lee was the protégé of his predecessor,
Watchman Nee, a well-known missionary in China. The Local Church movement was founded in China by Nee and brought to America in 1962 by Witness Lee. Thus began a long and strange saga of charges, counter-charges, lawsuits, strife, and misunderstandings between the Local Church movement and the evangelical community that has left much wreckage in its wake, and has yet to be fully resolved. Foremost in the controversy is whether the Local Church is a legitimate movement within Christianity or a cult. Statements made by Lee over the years have caused his organization to be described as a cult by such counter-cult organizations as the Christian Research Institute—under both founder Walter Martin and current president Hank Hanegraaff—and the Spiritual Counterfeits Project. However, a 50-page series of articles in a 2009 edition of the
CRI Journal has come out strongly in favor of Lee’s teachings and the Local Church movement.
The history of the conflict between Witness Lee and his Local Church movement—also known as the “Lord’s Recovery Movement,” along with their publishing arm, Living Stream Ministry (LSM)—and the counter-cult establishment is far too long for a detailed recounting here, but those who are interested in the full story can access it through the CRI website
https://www.equip.org/PDF/EnglishOpt.pdf. Since the publication of CRI’s retraction of their former stand, churches and ministries have had to rethink and reinvestigate their stand on Witness Lee and the Local Church.
For the purposes of this article, the major causes of controversy between the Local Church and the Christian community in the West will be addressed. The concerns raised by counter-cult organizations about Lee’s teachings center primarily on four areas: the nature of God, the nature of man, the legitimacy of evangelical churches and denominations, and the lawsuits brought against Evangelical churches, publishers, and individuals by the Local Church. We will look at them one by one.
Regarding Lee’s views on the theological doctrines of God and man, the controversy centers around statements which are “red flags” to evangelicals, particularly those in the West. This is an important factor in this discussion because it appears much of the controversy could have been avoided if only Lee and his followers had made an effort to understand the Western Christian culture into which they were moving. Part of the training of Western missionaries sent to foreign countries is sensitivity to other cultures. Unfortunately, in bringing their doctrines to the West, no effort was made to “Westernize” them, and this was the source of much of the confusion, misunderstandings, and recriminations that resulted. For one thing, Lee’s method of teaching—to make radical statements and then balance them elsewhere in his teachings—proved to be antithetical to the Western idea of “say what you mean and mean what you say.” Lee’s doctrinal statements on the nature of God and the nature of man are perfect examples. In one of his messages, he states, “The traditional explanation of the Trinity is grossly inadequate and borders on tritheism” (Life Messages, p. 164). Naturally, this is enough to inflame Western evangelicals, who proudly affirm the doctrine of the Trinity as it has been passed down from the great theologians of our Western Christian heritage. To judge it to be “grossly inadequate” by Lee raised legitimate concerns about Lee himself. Closer scrutiny of Lee’s teachings elsewhere, however, brings to light that they actually agree with evangelical orthodoxy.
The same can be said of his teachings on the nature of man. Some of his most inflammatory statements are in regard to what appears, on the surface, to assert the deity of man. In an LSM publication,
A Deeper Study of the Divine Dispensing (p. 54), Lee states, ”My burden is to show you clearly that God’s economy and plan is to make Himself man and to make us, His created beings, God.” On page 53 we read, “We are born of God; hence, in this sense, we are God.” In the same publication, Lee refers to the Triune God as now the ‘four-in-one’ God, with man as the fourth person. Nothing raises a red flag to evangelicals more quickly than any notion that man is God, because we are rightly taught that it is the original lie from the Garden of Eden (
Genesis 3:5) and is the same lie propagated by cults and false religions such as Hinduism, New Age, and Mormonism throughout history. To the Western mind, at least, imparting the idea of any kind of godhood to those who struggle against the sin nature is disastrous. Western Christians, already steeped in the philosophy of freedom, autonomy, individuality, and the triumph of the human will—and the pride such thinking inevitably produces—need not be encouraged to see themselves as divine. But the CRI researchers found that a closer examination of context and terminology reveals that Lee’s views on the “deification” of man (another unfortunate choice of words and a red flag term) do not really mean that at all. The sentence after the “in this sense, we are God” quote reads, “Nevertheless, we must know that we do not share God’s Person and cannot be worshiped by others.” Herein lies the problem. Putting the two statements together, Lee is essentially saying we are God, but we are not God. It is no wonder that confusion is rampant.
Regarding the third area of controversy, this is what Witness Lee has said in his own publications about Christians and Christianity: “We do not care for Christianity, we do not care for Christendom, we do not care for the Roman Catholic Church, and we do not care for all the denominations, because in the Bible it says that the great Babylon is fallen. ...
As one of the LSM leaders expressed it, “We are not out to proclaim that the denominations are Babylon.” However, Lee’s own statement, quoted above, that “we do not care for all the denominations, because in the Bible it says that the great Babylon is fallen,” seems a direct contradiction, whether intentional or not.
More at site...
Are the teachings of Witness Lee and the Local Church biblical? Is the Local Church a cult?
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