As an American, I live in and enjoy a culture where I have a lot of freedom:

Freedom to speak my mind
Freedom to move around
Freedom to create
Freedom to destroy
And the most curious freedom of all…..the freedom to be stupid. “Hey guys, hold my beer, watch this?!?”

In Christian literature, we call this free will. After life itself, it is arguably the most valuable gift from God in the old testament. There were two named trees in the Garden of Eden:

The tree of life
The tree of the knowledge of good and evil……essentially the tree of free will.

Life itself is terribly precious…..terribly valuable.
Free will is terribly precious…..terribly valuable.

We exercise this gift every day. We enjoy it immensely. I cannot imagine life……without free will.

The greatest triumphs of mankind arise from the exercise of free will.

The greatest tragedies of mankind arise from the exercise of free will.

So…..you have to ask…..what was God thinking? I hate to second guess my creator. But, you have to admit……this world would be a lot neater, a lot more organized, certainly a lot more peaceful……without free will. Even if the revocation of free will only applied to rules number one and number two…..Love God….Love everybody else………. this world would be an entirely different place…….a much nicer place. This world would be a much better place………if God revoked free will and forced us to love.

And that brings me to the crux of this post:

Why did God give us free will?

To let us wear a Hawaiian shirt to work (I have).
To let us paint the kitchen dark purple. (I have not).
To let us use the copier at work for personal jobs.
To let us lie to our parents when we miss curfew.
To make war.
To commit genocide.

Not likely.

I believe that God gave us free will for one and only one reason:

God gave us free will so that we could choose to love him………choose to honor him……..choose to recognize his sovereignty.

Or not.

All of the other choices that we make…….are just “collateral damage”.

So we go through our lives making choices……exercising our free will. We really need to keep our eye on the most important choice we will ever make……..in the eyes of God……..the decision to give to God or to withhold from God…….the one thing that he wants from us most of all…..the thing that he wants so badly that he gave us the freedom to keep it from him:

Our Love.

He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?

Micah, 6:8, ESV

“And now, Israel, what does the Lord your God require of you, but to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and to keep the commandments and statutes of the Lord,

Deuteronomy 10: 12-13, ESV

This week I want to expand on last week’s post. The gist of my last post was that the flood and the ark were a “mass extinction event”……..a “return to factory settings”. God intervened in a massive…….some would say a catastrophic……way and cleaned up his creation. He eliminated a large number of creatures……..and a large number of people that just didn’t fit in with his plan for his creation. He preserved a small number of people and “kinds” of animals that fulfilled his vision for his creation. This wasn’t a punishment. It was God simply redirecting his creation in order to get it headed to where he had intended it to go from the beginning. God engineered a “return to factory settings” in the form of a “mass extinction event”. He sent the flood…….destruction……and the ark……salvation. This historical event is described, in detail, in Genesis.

And that brings us, mankind, to where we are today. The first book of the Bible describes in real terms God’s first “mass extinction event”. The last book of the Bible describes in largely symbolic terms…….apocalyptic literature…….God’s last “mass extinction event”. The middle of the Bible deals with the world we live in. The middle of the Bible tells us how to live and thrive in God’s creation. It tells us what we must do…….to meet God’s expectations…….of us and of his creation.

So, what about the coming “mass extinction event”?

Revelation is a notoriously difficult book to interpret. It could be literal, but most scholars say that it is largely symbolic. The details of the end of this world cannot be clearly interpreted from Revelation. Especially, the timing of the end cannot be predicted. But, three things are clear:

The end will be unspeakably horrible.

When it is over, there will be a new world that satisfies God’s original plan…….God’s plan, not yours, not mine.

This new world will be populated with people who satisfy God’s expectations of mankind. And what are those expectations? Love God……love everybody else. Those who do not satisfy God’s expectations will be sent somewhere else…….and it will not be pretty.

This “mass extinction event ” will be the second coming of Christ.

And what that will look like……to you……is completely in your power.

Use your power well.

He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?

Micah 6:8, ESV

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

John 3:16, ESV

I have struggled with Darwinian evolution for my entire life. I have often said that Darwinian evolution will be responsible for more souls in hell than any other idea in human history. My understanding of Darwinian evolution has “evolved” over the years:

Intelligent design explains it all….evolution is not true.

Evolution explains it all….intelligent design is an allegory.

God used evolution to acheive creation.

If you must choose between the Bible and “The Origin of Species”….choose the Bible.

On the issue of life, our culture has split into two camps: Intelligent design and Darwinian evolution.

Either……Or.

That is pretty much where the argument stands today. Each side thinks that the other side is naive, foolish, just plain stupid, or……worst of all……damned.

My Bible reading today is Genesis…….the history of the flood. Noah, his family, and a bunch of animals get into a big boat and survive a catastrophic flood. Then, they climb out and repopulate the earth. I believe that every word in the Bible is important. There is one word in this passage that is critical…….”kind”. The animals in the ark consisted of pairs of each “kind” of animal. Understanding the ark requires an understanding of this one word…..”kind”. Fortunately, the Bible defines it for us:

“every bird according to its kind, everything with wings.”

Genesis 7:14, ESV

So…..in Genesis, a “kind” is a representative of a class of animals. The seven pairs of birds on the ark were representatives of all winged animals. And there is the rub. How do we get from 14 winged animals on the ark to the ten to twenty thousand species of birds on earth today?

Enter Darwin.

The Bible and Darwin both have something to say. They are both silent on other areas. The Bible gives a comprehensive explanation of the origin of the universe, of the creation of life, and of the rescue of “kinds” on the ark. It is silent on how we got from a quite limited number of animals on the ark to the incredible variety of life on earth today. Darwin provides a comprehensive explanation of the variety of life forms that we see today. He is silent on the origin of the universe, the origin of life, and the flood.

What if……instead of either/or……..it is a case of both/and?

What if, the ark wasn’t full of dinosaurs? What if the lizard “kind” was a pair of iguanas? What if God turned evolution loose after the flood to create the awesome variety of life that we see today from a much smaller number of “kinds” that survived the flood. What if millions of species, including the dinosaurs, perished in the flood? This reconciles the small number of “kinds” on the ark with the amazing variety of life today. It also fits the fossil record.

There is another side of the flood/ark. The ark contained a small number of species compared to what we see today. In a post flood world, Darwin’s theory primarily describes the creation of new species……not the replacement or modification of existing species. That means that “survival of the fittest”……the improvement of existing species……the accidental creation of new species…….is a minor aspect of Darwinian evolution. Because this eliminates the need for a new adaptive mutation to work its way through the entire planet, replacing a weaker species, this is a much much faster process. This eliminates one of the biggest problems with Darwin……the fact that there just hasn’t been enough time.

The flood and the ark clearly represent a global reset.

In your cell phone, there is an icon that says “return to factory settings”. Touch the icon and your phone returns to the condition it was in when you bought it. All of the layers of apps and shells are deleted. So are all of the pieces of malware that you have accumulated. So also is all of your data. We tend to think of the ark as the preservation of life. We don’t consider that the flood destroyed an enormous variety of life forms. We understand that the ark preserved many “kinds” of creatures, including a righteous man and his family. But, the flood also eliminated a vast population of bad people. The flood also eliminated a great many species that God saw no value in. In modern parlance, the flood was a “mass extinction” event…….a “return to factory settings”. A great many species, perhaps most species, were eliminated. The ark preserved a small number of good “kinds”. The flood wiped out a large number of “bad” species. Today, we find evidence of them in the “fossil record”…….but they no longer roam the earth.

I think that the failure of our understanding of Darwinian evolution is that we push it beyond its limits. We use it to explain everything. We extrapolate the post flood development of new species to the creation of all species from non-living molecules…..a topic on which Darwin was, in fact, silent.

The failure of our understanding of Darwinian evolution is that we use it to eliminate the need for a creator, God. Instead, we could see Darwin’s theory as a tool, used by God, to expand his creation. Perhaps God uses evolution to give us the vast variety of life forms in the post flood earth.

It is not the theory of evolution that damns us. What damns us is that we use the theory of evolution to eliminate our need for God.

And God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds and the livestock according to their kinds, and everything that creeps on the ground according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.

Genesis, 1:25, ESV

“Woe to him who strives with him who formed him, a pot among earthen pots! Does the clay say to him who forms it, ‘What are you making?’ or ‘Your work has no handles’?

A warning about the created judging its creator,

Isaiah, 45:9, ESV

I generally try to cook complicated topics down into a few simple concepts. It is a whole lot easier, in the crush of daily living to remember…….and act on…..a few simple concepts rather than to follow 625 laws.

So what are the core ideals of Christianity…….concepts that we can…….that we must…..focus on and obey?

Love
Humility

I have tried to fill out the list. But, everything I find actually grows out of those two tenets.

Love is easy to identify as a core value.

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”

Jesus summarizing Christianity in four sentences.
Matthew 22, 37-40, ESV

Love is easy to identify as one of the core values of Christianity.  But, to act on that love……all day, every day……is hard. Fact is, none of us can consistently pull it off. But, at least, we know what the goal is. We know what is expected.

Humility, on the other hand, is much less obvious.  Even worse, humility runs counter to our basic instincts.  It is fairly easy to love. I love my wife. I love my family. I even love my dog. But, if I am being honest,  humility is not always at the top of the list of considerations in my relationships.

So…….today, I want to explore humility…..in the context of our relationship with our creator.

Humility,  at its core is the understanding that the other entity in a relationship is superior to me……to us. The concept is simple. The application of it, however, is tough. Humility……actually, the lack of humility…….is the main reason that secular humanists reject Christianity. Even worse, lack of humility is a failure that plagues many, if not most, people who identify as Christians.

First, the non-believer……the secular humanist. He denies the existence of a “higher power” outright.  Any data point that implies that there is an entity on a higher plane than mankind…….he rejects outright, typically without investigation. He then assembles a construct that tells him that he is the apex being……the top of the pyramid. He martials science and observed fact to support his position at the apex. He fills in any gaps with extrapolations, assumptions,  and theories…….whether there is any proof to support them or not.

Then, the person who identifies as Christian. He  checks the boxes, gets baptized, goes to church, participates in the food drive, etc. But, when he reads the  “owners manual”,  if he reads it at all, at the end of every line, he asks, “do I believe this?…….do I agree with with this?……do I approve of this?” In a word, he gives himself the power of a “line item veto” over the word of God. How can he do this? Simple.  In his heart, he does not accept God’s sovereignty…….God’s absolute sovereignty…….over his life. Rather, he assumes the position of absolute sovereign. His failure is a failure to subordinate himself to his creator. At its core, this is a failure of humility.

His mantra?

“You are not the boss of me!……nobody is.”

I believe that this is the single greatest failure among professing Christians.

So…..What is the solution?

Love Jesus…..God……and act on that love every day because you recognize his absolute sovereignty……his absolute authority over every facet of your life.

Love and humility. This is Christianity.

For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Paul describing God’s love for us, Romans,  8 38-39, ESV

All the inhabitants of the earth are accounted as nothing, and he does according to his will among the host of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth; and none can stay his hand or say to him, “What have you done?”

Daniel explaining man’s relationship with God, Daniel 4:35, ESV