A revised creation begets a revised gospel

by Peter Milford

Photo 35127837 © Ig0rzh | Dreamstime.com

The death and resurrection of Jesus, the core of the Gospel, are not self-interpreting events. They depend on their context, the framework in which they are interpreted and understood, for their true meaning.

Consider, for example, if Jesus’ resurrection had occurred in the context of reincarnation, as per some Eastern religions. His coming back to life on this earth would be nothing special, as we would all be doing that in some way or another.

And since (at first glance at least) He came back in essentially the same body, it would mean that He was in a sense a failure. Granted, He did not come back as a lower form of life in punishment for evil deeds. He must therefore have demonstrated sufficient evil to have more or less just cancelled out the good. The fact that He came back at all would mean He also failed to achieve nirvana, a supposed state of liberation from endless cycles of reincarnation. So if we imitate Him, we too will fail to progress.

Correct biblical framework

Not surprisingly, a reincarnation framework gives us a totally different gospel to the one Paul preached. When Paul explains the Gospel in 1 Corinthians 15, he writes several times, “in accordance with the Scriptures”. Thus he explicitly grounds the Gospel in the biblical framework.

The Bible supplies its own framework for how we are to understand the death and resurrection of Jesus, summarized as Creation / Fall / Redemption / Consummation (CFRC). I.e., God creates an initially “very good” world which is ruined by the entry of sin and death through mankind’s rebellion, resulting in a cursed creation (Genesis 3, Romans 8:19–22). Jesus’ sacrificial death pays the penalty for the sin of those who believe and trust in Him by grace through faith. Jesus’ work on the Cross will also usher in a creation restored to a sinless, deathless condition, in which believers redeemed by grace through faith will enjoy eternal life in fellowship with God.

A biblical understanding of the Gospel depends on using this framework. However, the majority of the educated world today has a framework for understanding the world’s history which contradicts the biblical one. The dominant creation narrative, or creation myth, is a story of a self-organizing, ongoing creation process, progressing to ever more sophisticated life forms over hundreds of millions of years.

Real history or ‘spiritual’ story?

Both the dominant creation myth and the biblical account claim to give the history of life. This dominant creation story carries the imprimatur of ‘science’, so is it treated as authoritative by vast numbers of people across the world.

Large numbers of Christians today, in seeking to reconcile these two accounts, give primacy to the dominant creation story. They demonstrate this wherever there is a clash of truth claims between the two—for example, the time at which creation happened, or that human and animal death arose as a result of Adam’s sin.

They give the dominant creation story primacy by treating its truth claims as literally true, and the truth claims of the biblical story as spiritually true. I.e. ‘true’ only in some spiritual sense, but not ‘true’ in the ordinary sense of that word, which would mean that the events recounted actually happened, and happened in the way described. So the Creation/Fall part of the Bible’s CFRC framework of world history is revised by them to fit the demands of the world’s creation myth.This has been going on for decades; e.g. leading Old Testament scholar E.J. Young noted this over 60 years ago.

Death and disease: incompatible frameworks

In allowing this modern creation myth to override the biblical creation narrative, however, we will have changed the framework for understanding the death and resurrection of Jesus. So, not surprisingly, revising the biblical creation account results in a revised gospel, one that does not line up with the biblical Gospel in key areas.

For example, in the revised creation story, the billions of plants and animals buried in rock layers worldwide are not the consequences of a post-Fall year-long global Flood. Rather, they are a progressive record of the supposed development of life over vast ages. And they display many instances of diseases, in man and animal alike—such as cancer, abscesses, parasites, and more. The revised creation story tells us that our human ancestors, hundreds of thousands of years ago, and before them our prehuman ancestors, were already suffering from such things during their life’s inexorable march toward death.

These ‘bad things’ cannot therefore be in consequence of Adam’s rebellion. In this revised creation story, there never was a perfect world before sin. This claim is said to be ‘settled science’, and is regarded as completely non-controversial amongst its theologian proponents.

But Jesus demonstrated in His healing ministry and in raising the dead that disease and death are not normal, not the way things were meant to be. Rather, they are enemies (1 Corinthians 15:26).

In Matthew 8:1–17, Jesus’ power over these enemies is on show as He temporarily reverses the effects of this Genesis Curse in healing many from their infirmities. Verse 17 tells us that this was in specific fulfilment of Isaiah 53, where in vv 4 and 5 the prophet foretells Jesus as bearing our physical afflictions as well as healing us from the sickness of sin (1 Peter 2:24). The Bible is unequivocal about the sin-disease connection,¹ as well as that of sin and death.

In the biblical framework, Jesus’ death does more than liberate the believer from sin and future judgment. It also brings with it the promise of future liberation for the entire creation from its “bondage to corruption” (Romans 8:19–22). Through His work on the Cross, when this cursed creation is restored (Acts 3:21) death, sin, grief, disease, pain and death will be no more (Revelation 21:4, 22:3).

Yet the revised creation account tells us that many of our illnesses were around hundreds of thousands of years before Homo sapiens arrived on the scene. And also long before any of the supposed ‘ape-man’ predecessors of Homo sapiens were. So this modern creation myth tells us that creation was always filled with things Jesus died to save us from.

It follows that if we apply the framework of this revised creation story, we lose sin as the trigger for the Cross. Humanity loses responsibility for the Cross. All of the ‘bad things’ in creation were there millions of years before Adam even existed. Obviously, if Adam doesn’t exist, he can’t do anything, let alone cause world-wide problems.

But if death were not the result of Adam’s sin, then God must have created a world that included this ‘last enemy’, death! Jesus has to die, sin or no sin, because of how God made the world. The modern creation myth used as a Gospel framework readily implies that Jesus died to fix God’s imperfect creation. Furthermore, according to this revised creation story, death, far from being the consequence of sin, was the engine of creation. The death of vast numbers of less fit individuals is essential for advancement.

We can see in this how replacing the Genesis creation account with the revised version completely changes the meaning of the Gospel. A revised creation begets a revised gospel.

A common response to this dilemma, when it is even acknowledged, is to resort to a quarantine strategy, where either the Garden or the Tree of Life keeps ‘Adam’ safe from the horrors raging in the rest of creation. But this is not only too obviously contrived, it also bizarrely implies that Adam fell into the natural world. It implies we are part of nature today because we are sinful; if Adam had not sinned, we would have remained thus safely quarantined from a horrible world. None of this is the New Testament understanding of how the Cross works. The New Testament does not tell us that the Cross saves us from nature. The response also contradicts God’s declaration that His finished created universe—not just a small garden—was “very good” (Genesis 1:31.

The Fall works backwards?

A more recent way of solving this potent dilemma without abandoning the long-age aspect of the revised creation story is a retroactive Fall. God extends the consequences of the Fall and the subsequent Curse on creation back in time to before the event. This was proposed in recent years by the Christian philosopher, mathematician and theologian William Dembski. Adam becomes responsible for all the suffering and death that took place millions of years before he existed. Applying this to those adaptations of the revised creation story that have Adam at once descended from other creatures yet sinning in Eden, he becomes responsible for the suffering of all his ancestors too.

This ‘retroactive’ interpretation can’t be shoehorned into the text. Moreover, to proclaim it is to arbitrarily ‘split’ the Fall so that only some of its consequences are retroactive. Its proponents accept that Adam walked in fellowship with God in the Garden, and that in that condition he was not going to die physically. And that the Fall ruptured this relationship with God, corrupted human nature, and made physical death inevitable for him. But it is obviously impossible to claim that these very important consequences of the Fall were retroactive. For one thing, it would mean that Adam sinned because he already had a sin nature. It would spell the end of the idea of original sin.

So, only the Curse’s effects on the rest of creation (corruption, disease, death) are allowed to be retroactive. Of course, this still means that the creation God declared to be ‘very good’ was already filled with the things that Jesus died to ultimately save us from.

Sometimes fall-splitters are bold enough to insist that the ‘very good’ in Genesis 1 means no more than ‘works as intended’. But in that meaning, Hell has this same ‘goodness’ too. Putting this version of ‘goodness’ back into the text makes the problem obvious: ‘God saw that it was as good as Hell’.

Refashioning the Gospel

We’ve seen that using the revised creation story as the context for understanding the Gospel reshapes it into a revised gospel, one that is incompatible with the Apostles’ teaching. But reinterpreting the Gospel in this way also comes at the cost of one’s assurance of salvation. If someone thinks they have to correct the New Testament understanding of Jesus’ work because they believe parts of it conflict with what really happened in history, why should they trust its teaching in other areas? If you choose particular interpretations of the Cross because you want to believe them rather than because they are what the text actually teaches, then how do you know the same doesn’t apply to your claim of salvation?

Today there is more evidence than ever to show that the Bible’s Genesis account is scientifically defensible, even compelling in some respects. Believing this revised creation story instead means your assurance of salvation can rise no higher than your ability to deceive yourself. It must be rejected by Christians.

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