This is definitely not live blogging, but it’s nice to have a little time to meditate on the sessions, and to have a chance to listen to them again.
General session #1 featured Dr. John MacArthur. He opened the message by reading from Genesis chapter 1, with a little emphasis on the words “morning”, “evening”, and “day”. By this time I’d figured out where this message was heading and was not disappointed as he explained that the title of this message was “Why every self-respecting calvinist (Evangelical, Christian) is a 6 day creationist”. He followed up with probably the best line of the message: “If anyone has a problem with that you weren’t listening to what I just read.”
The rest of the message focused on theology of creation. One major point was that creation is not scientific. This of course caught me off guard, but he went on to explain that Creation was a miracle of unimaginable vastness, and miracles are by nature unscientifc for science by definition is something that can be observed, verified and repeated. No human observed creation and it cannot be repeated. Science can be used to disprove evolution, however without revelation from the creator we would know nothing about creation! If therefore the creator chose to, say, write a book about His creation we could expect it to be highly accurate, for no on knows more about the minute details of every law of science than He, for He created them!
The issue for the believer therefore is the authority of Scripture. It is the atheist who says that Genesis 1 recounts God’s creation of the universe and chooses to reject that account who treats God’s Word more legitimately than the Christian who tries to force humanistic “science” into the first two chapters. If we cannot trust God to communicate to us clearly in the first two chapters, how can we trust the rest of scripture to mean what it says?
While the message of the message was not new to me, MacArthur laid it out very well. He then spent the last 20 minutes or so discussing the “greening” of the American church and expressed great concern with a pre-occupation with secular environmentalism that is not based on truth found in scripture. Efforts to “redeem” the planet are doomed to fail because the planet is cursed by God (Gen 3), and will ultimately be destroyed by God and not by man. Man was put on this planet with the responsibility to subdue it and to bring forth riches from it. His application? “Walk on the grass, kill a deer and drill for oil.” This of course is put in a context of doing so with responsibility, but not with the false notion that by somehow going green we will save a planet destined for destruction.
To hear this sermon and others go to the Shepherds Conference web page!
