Readers’ commentsP T., Australia, 22 May 2012
Hi. Your article says "4.Feeding 5,000 people (6:1–15);", but the Bible says 5000 males or husbands ἀνήρ. A cross reference can be found in Matthew.
Matt 14:21 (ESV)
21) And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children.
Nick D., Australia, 23 May 2012
One of the key factors that separates Christianity from every other religion, is the fulfilment of prophecy. Satan could not have known that the evolutionary paradigm would be a major piece of his armament in his attack on his arch nemesis. Jesus on the other hand had no such blind spot! Go God!
T. I., Australia, 23 May 2012
What a fatuous statement against science.
Chandrasekaran M., Australia, 23 May 2012
If the desire to keep the Bible not to oppose the scientific community who assert, without experimental evidences, the science of molecules to moral men evolution (thought experiment story aside), there is no suggestion in the Bible that God used the evolution method of mutations and selections and death and sufferings to make the first Adam.
It is only the desire of not causing offence to the evolution-scientific community which tortures the text of the Bible to invent billions of year creation in the Bible text.
...
Edwin M., China, 23 May 2012
Really enjoyed the article and no criticism,an addition to the wonder.
It appears that the word CREATE is not the same as MAKE.
And does reordering qualify as create or rather make.
Gen 1.1 It appears was the molecular forms created from nothing except *GODS* power contained in variation.Without form
Now we have something to SPEAK TOO AND MAKE WITH.
So as *GOD* is not so great a controller as an omniscient organiser.
As LOVE does not control nessacarilly but certainly responds ahead when it can with alluring LOVE.
*HE* certainly has WON MY HEART.!
Why this interjection,because we can have a miracle of creation and or reformation,even formation,for example:
Gen 2:7-8-19 Deut 32:18
2 Kings 19:25 Job 26:13 Rom 9:20
Make and form may be the same,maybe not but suggest intricacy of soul part or life as against plant make for the perfectness of grammer needed.
Thankful blessings to all for time and devotion it takes.Inasmuch as you did to the least of these my brethren - - -. Carl Wieland responds:
Thanks, but one needs to be careful not to push the distinction between create (bara) and make (asah) too far. The Bible makes it plain that they can both mean the same thing, which is why Asah and bara are often used interchangeably. An example is in Genesis 2:4: ‘These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created [bara] in the day that the Lord God made [asah] the earth and the heavens.’ See also the word used for the making/creating of people in Genesis 1:26 (asah) cf 1:27 (bara). In English, make and create can be used to mean the same thing, i.e. they have an overlapping semantic range. Same for asa and barah.
Knut E L., Norway, 23 May 2012
Thanks for a well written and exciting article! Jesus would by no means obey the ridiculous proposals from a fallen angel. Although he could have made bread out of stones, that was most certainly not his way of doing things. To the leaders in Jerusalem, he explained: "Verily, verily, I say unto you, The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do: for what things soever he doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise." (John 5,19) As the article points out, the Lord God created trees, plants etc. and made them grow in specific ways. So from then on, vines grew, drew water from the ground and turned it into grapes. When Jesus performed his first miracle and made water into wine, he did exactly the same he had seen his Father do, and still does all the time, he just speeded up / accelerated the process, as in a "time-lapse". And when he multiplied some small bread into lots of bread and fed a multitude, he did exactly the same as his Father does: Making corn grow and multiply. He simply made it faster that day just to feed the hungry and show his might just as he said. And he "kept it in the family", so to speak: As the Father, so the Son! Oh, that's so typically him! And remember what he said: "What man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone?" (Matt. 7,9)No, that's certainly not HIS way of doing & giving, that is an evil way, typical for the fallen angel. (Has anyone EVER received any good from him?) Let's give praise and honour to our heavenly Father and his beloved Son, our redeemer, saviour and Lord!! Carl Wieland responds:
Just one small point brought to mind by this encouraging comment; when Jesus turned water into wine, some have said it was 'speeding up the process'. But there are no carbon atoms in water, as there are in wine, so it would have required a miracle of creation. Equally, when He fed the 5,000, the generation of greater quantities of bread and fishes than before required miracles of creation. And we do not see any hint that these fish went rapidly through their egg phases, etc. but rather would have appeared as adult (dead and already cooked) fish. In short, He was showing the same sort of intelligence and power required to create living organisms in the first place (Even a dead fish is very complex requiring a great deal of specified information, much more so than a star, for instance).
Malan G., South Africa, 23 May 2012
This article makes a very good argument. Thank you very much. I have never seen it like this.
michael S., United Kingdom, 23 May 2012
A good point raised by this article, in that it is important to remember that there should not be limitations on God. To stretch creation to an evolution is to go way beyond the scripture no matter what the Theistic Evolutionists say and is to take the glory away from God by effectively asking the question; "Did God create?" It is a little bit like the question, "Did God say?" and we all know who asked that question.
More and more I believe that evolution is the false conclusion men have been led into, they have created the hole, and now God has let them fall into it because it all started with doubt in God, the very thing Satan propagated from the beginning.
It is the height of foolishness to accept evolution which is worldly wisdom when Godly wisdom obliterates it. It is to accept something that comes fundamentally from doubt, and anything that comes of doubt is sin. Those of weak faith are also tempted to accept evolution as Jesus was tempted, and unfortunately they accept this worldly-bread, because they are fooled into believing that men know better than God. A lie.
Joe J., United States, 23 May 2012
I've read this event countless times, but never from this perspective. Absolutely brilliant!
John T., Canada, 23 May 2012
The whole concept of using Satan as a witness to the truth of Genesis 1 (or of anything else, for that matter) is a non-starter. Inasmuch as “there is no truth in [Satan]...he is a liar and the father of it” (John 8:44b), as you acknowledge, his words cannot be trusted on anything – you cannot trust an inveterate liar - and therefore he cannot be accepted as a witness for anything. The very idea is risible.
Apropos to this, even if it were the case that Satan did affirm the Genesis account of creation (and he does not), not only would it be useless for us, but the skeptic would have the better case to make: “Satan says the Genesis account of creation is true, but there is no truth in him and he is a liar, so he must be lying about this and therefore the Genesis account must be false.” Furthermore, it is not true that we can see Satan affirming the Genesis 1 account of creation here; Grigg fails signally to make that case. He writes that when Satan said to Jesus, “’If You are the Son of God, command that these stones become bread,’...[w]hat Satan said in effect was: ‘If you are God, create …!” Griggs then goes on to indicate that it doesn’t matter “whether [Jesus created the bread] from stones or ex nihilo”, yet in Grigg’s own earlier article, “Is Jesus Christ the Creator God?” which he references in footnote 4, he writes, “Some of the essential and distinctive elements of creation, as revealed in Genesis chapter l, as well as elsewhere in the Bible, are...Creation involved the act of God in bringing into being immediately and instantaneously matter which did not previously exist, without the use of pre-existing materials or secondary causes.”) So turning stones to bread would not, by Grigg’s own definition, be an act of creation, but rather an act of transmutation or transubstantiation, in which the subatomic particles that make up matter are simply rearranged.
This fact, then, refutes Grigg’s claim that “Satan was challenging Christ to duplicate in miniature form the instantaneous and fiat creation that happened during Creation Week.” This latter certainly involved more than transmutation; it involved ex nihilo creation, or, as Grigg put it, “bringing into being immediately and instantaneously matter which did not previously exist, without the use of pre-existing materials or secondary causes,” of which turning stones to bread would not be a “duplicate in miniature form.” On the contrary, transmutation was a standard power of ancient gods and so asking for a demonstration of such as a proof of deity would have been an obvious request and would in no way have been linked to Genesis 1 or indicated a belief in the literal truth of Genesis 1. To argue, then, that “truly, this is a remarkable testimony by Satan...to the truth of Genesis 1” is completely unsustainable.
Carl Wieland responds:
I suggest that this argument falls apart in a number of areas, firstly because the notion of Satan as a witness to the truth was clearly in the sense of being both a hostile witness (in the jargon of courts today) and more importantly, an inadvertent witness. (It is not as if Satan was consciously stating "Genesis is true!", the article deduces it logically from his anticipation that Jesus was capable of that act, otherwise the challenge/demand would make no sense). Also undermining this argument is another thing I would have also thought to be fairly obvious, that Grigg was not referring to the bringing of matter into existence so much as he was the ordering of that matter into biological (or in the case of bread post-biological) complexity.
Timothy C., United States, 23 May 2012
While the belief in Creation does not directly affect your salvation status, I think it should be noted that indirectly, believing in some sort of "theistic evolution" (which I consider identical to "atheistic" evolution) can lead you away from salvation by eroding your faith.
Tom J., United Kingdom, 25 May 2012
Hi i enjoyed reading this article, dispite being an atiest, as the theorys are flawed and evidence distant, it does fasion for a fasinating, yet fictional, read on the creationist community and how it validtes its theorys and beliefs although its methods are inconsistant and flawed as are its theorys, creationism does try its best to shove it down the worlds throat even though it has no evidence or scientifc merit, its humourous to me
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