Sorry for the light posting. I have been extremely busy and have not had time to devote to it. I am taking a break from my hectic schedule to post on an AiG article that is one of the most offensive things i have read in some time. The title of the post is How Do I Stay Humble When I Know I’m Right? and is written by Todd Friel, who has no biography on the web site, so we have absolutely no idea what his qualifications are. He also fronts a web site called Wretched, which, likewise, gives us no information than we already had. So, why has this post made me a hateful person? Here's why.
Friel recounts the story of Bob, who gets stuck in the Sonoran Desert near Tucson and has to be rescued. Apparently, Bob is not sufficiently thankful to God for his good fortune and so Todd has this to say:
You would think Bob is either very forgetful or very arrogant. Bob was not the author of his good fortune; he was merely the recipient. The Apostle Paul would rightly ask him, “What do you have that you did not receive?” (See 1 Corinthians 4:7.)“The Holy Spirit taught them the truth.” That has to be one of the most arrogant, myopic idiotic things I have yet read from Answers in Genesis and given the quality of the material on the site, that is saying a lot. “The Holy Spirit taught them the truth.”
Do you know why godly creation scientists believe God created the world in six 24-hour days?
They are brilliant.
They have PhDs.
They understand the plain meaning of Genesis 1 and 2.
While all three of those options may be true, the real reason they know the earth is young is that the Holy Spirit taught them the truth.
In the last few years, Answers in Genesis has become much more strident in its position that if you don't accept a six-day creation, you are not a Christian. This is one more piece that promotes this nonsense. The implication is that if I think the earth is not six thousand years old, I don't have the Holy Spirit. Here is a short, non-exhaustive list of other people who, apparently, don't/didn't have the Holy Spirit:
- Billy Graham
- Francis Collins
- Hugh Ross
- Pat Robertson
- Davis Young
- Carol Hill
- N.T. Wright
- J.I Packer
- John Polkinghorne
- B.B. Warfield
- William Jennings Bryan
- Tim Keller
- John Stott
Joel Edmund Anderson has written about the heretical notions in Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis. Here is yet another example. Friel claims that the Holy Spirit has given special knowledge just to young earth creationists that no one else has.
The people in the list above have/had the Holy Spirit and it guided them to lives of evangelism, helping people come to Christ and living inspired Christian lives. Why didn't the Holy Spirit correct their thinking about the age of the earth?
Now I am quite convinced that the Holy Spirit does guide us and nudge us in certain directions, such as “Maybe you should join the mission field,” or “Go reach out to that person over there.” On the other hand, the Holy Spirit telling someone that the earth is young is like telling someone that, when Jesus wasn't preaching the gospel, he was strangling cats. There is no biblical evidence that He did any such thing, just as there is no biblical evidence that the earth is “young.” While it is true that some interpret the Primeval History as being literal, many, many people of great faith have wrestled for thousands of years to understand exactly what those scriptures mean and I am convinced that God honors those who earnestly struggle with those passages but have faith in Him and his son.
I don't know who taught those brilliant people that the earth was young but I don't think it was the Holy Spirit, and Todd Friel could use a dose of humility.
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