Depravity of Man

In my post "Can You Trust Your Senses Or Your Logic?" I touched a bit on the Christian doctrine of the Depravity of Man. I explained that if this doctrine is misunderstood, then it leads to Christianity undermining the ability to apprehend truth. In this post, I want to go a little deeper and build a case for an understanding of the doctrine that does not compromise our ability to apprehend truth; that incorporates the effects of Original Sin on our ability to apprehend truth; and that makes clear that without recognizing God, the amount of truth that can be apprehended is severely limited.

When God created man, He created him "In our image". This is referred to as the Image of God.
The Image of God includes many attributes of man, but today I am going to focus on morality. God created man with the ability to distinguish between right and wrong; good and evil. Even though Adam and Eve disobeyed God's command in the Garden, man still has this ability (Rom 2:14-15). In the Garden, what changed when Adam and Eve rebelled was not man's ability to recognize good and evil, but his propensity to ignore it. Adam and Eve believed that they could live outside of God's law. They were promised that they would be like God, and that they would be able to determine good and evil, if they would act against God. Even though they were not granted those things, man still believes that he can get along without God or His laws and proceeds to ignore the truths that God has revealed. Man continues to do this because he so desires to be the measure of all things.

What changed in the Garden was man's attitude toward his Creator. God told Adam and Eve what was going to happen because of their rebellion. For instance, God predicts that the ground will be "cursed" because of them. God's basically saying that He has His way of doing things that He will reveal; but man, in his rebellion, will refuse God's instructions, and the land will not cooperate because it is not being treated the way God designed it to be treated (Gen 3:17-18).

Man still has the ability to find truth, but he has to work harder at it. Rather than just accepting what God has revealed, man must test, make excuse, and test, then make another excuse (on and on) because his prideful heart does not want to accept where the facts are leading him (back to his Creator). But, if man is to return to his Creator, he must submit to Him, and his prideful heart has a very hard time with that. Man likes the idea of being lord over himself, but when God is Lord, man must sacrifice all the pleasures of the flesh that pull him further from God. Paul discusses this struggle in Romans 7:7-25. Remember, Paul is speaking under the inspiration of God's Holy Spirit- the struggle is there. God never promised that coming to Him would cause us to somehow avoid the struggle with our sin nature.

God created us with the ability to recognize truth when we see it. Sin did not remove this ability. If it did, Paul (by inspiration of the Holy Spirit) would not have penned the words "Test everything. Hold on to the good." (1 Thes 5:21) Nor would Isaiah have quoted God as saying "Come now, let us reason together," (Isa 1:18a). God would allow these things to be included in His Word if we could not trust the results of our testing and our reason.

When man recognizes where the facts are leading him, and proceeds to accept the lead, he is brought to realizing more truth. Until man recognizes that God is his Creator and he must submit to Him, man cannot recognize that God's standard of perfection is beyond what mere man can even hope to achieve. At that point, if man wants to restore his relationship with his Creator, he must be willing to accept the sacrifice that Jesus Christ offers and relinquish the control he longs to maintain over his own life.

Without recognizing God, man limits himself in the amount of truth he can find. When so much evidence points to God, and man refuses to accept it, he spends more time refuting the evidence or looking for counter-evidence than he does in finding more truth about the creation and the Creator (Rom 1:18-25). If man would just realize God's existence, he could make much more sense of the world he inhabits, and of the purpose for his existence.

In the Garden, God did not change (Mal 3:6); the laws of physics did not change (Jer 33:25), and man's ability to find truth did not change (1 Thes 5:21; Isa 1:18a). The only thing left is man's heart (Jer 17:9). If it is to be led back to its Creator, it must be guided carefully toward the Truth.

The contents of this post intertwine with my early post (Nature vs. Scripture). It goes more into man's tests and interpretation of those tests- just because you have the facts does not mean the you will interpret them correctly to find the truth.

For more information check out these articles:

The Physics of Sin by Dr. Hugh Ross
As Man Actually Is by Greg Koukl

How Did It All Begin? Part 3- The Bible and Billions of Years

If you have not already, please read my post "Nature vs. Scripture" before continuing.

In Part 1 of this series of posts, I defined what the Big Bang is and provided a few things that point to it in the Bible. In Part 2, I separated the Big Bang from Evolution. In Part 3, I'm going to show what Biblical evidence convinced me that the Bible has no incompatibilities with the Big Bang's claim of billions of years.

Until about five years ago, I was a strict young-earth creationist. I believed that the Bible had no room for interpreting that the earth was older than about 10,000 years. I was (and still am) a strict inerrantist (I'll publish a post on this topic in the future). I believed (and still do) that the Bible must be taken literally, unless the context leads us to otherwise (i.e. Jesus' parables).

There are two main pieces of evidence that convinced me that an old-earth interpretation is perfectly acceptable- without compromising biblical innerrancy or a literal reading.

First, the word translated as "day" in Genesis 1 is yom. In ancient Hebrew, there only existed about 3000 words (for perspective, English today includes over 2 million). Many words were used to refer to many similar things. The word yom has three literal meanings:
1. A 12-hour period, from either sunset to sunrise or sunrise to sunset.
2. A 24 hour period from sunset to sunset.
3. A long, but finite, period of time. (There's another word for an infinite period of time).

Now this only allows for an old-earth interpretation, it does not prove anything. We know that it is possible, but possibility does not equal true. Is there any evidence that yom actually refers to a long, but finite period of time in the text? The second piece of evidence builds this case.

In the original Hebrew each of the days of creation were completed with the statement "evening was, morning was, day X". This is true of all the days with the exception of Day 7. This leads us to believe that we are still in God's day of rest. This would be an example of Day 7 being a long period of time. Revelation tells us that Day 7 is finite (God will create again- the New Creation).
Genesis 2:4 use the word yom to refer to the entire creation period described in Genesis 1.

These two pieces of evidence opened my mind to the interpretation being biblical. Here's a few more that had solidified this idea for me:

1. Adam did way too much (naming all the animals and tended the garden) before God created Eve for that one day to be just 24 hours.
2. When Adam saw Eve, he exclaimed, "At long last!" (in the original Hebrew). Unless Adam was extremely impatient, he would not have said "long".

The most common biblical objection that I run into on this is that God compares His creation week to our work week of 6 days + 1 rest (Exodus 20:11). The claim here is that this verse proves that our days are identical to God's days. I have a couple of counter arguments for this.

The first is just from basic reading of the verse by itself. If you were to replace the word "day(s)" with "period(s) of time", would it make sense? Since another literal definition of yom is "period of time" this is completely acceptable to do as a test. The answer is "yes". Once again, this does not prove anything, it just let's us know that it would be an acceptable interpretation if other evidence is found that pushes us that way.

Second, read it in context. This is the commandment to keep the Sabbath day holy. Nowhere is the equivocation of the length of our days made equal to God's. At best, this is an analogy. An analogy is a description that is used to connect similar ideas, not exact ideas. Considering the fact that the focus is not on the days themselves, but the fact that God rested, makes this a weak analogy, even if you want to take that position. However, whether Ex 20:11 is taken as a literal definition of the length of the day or analogous to the length of the day, it contradicts another scripture.

At this time, I will invoke Psalms 90:4 "For a thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by..." If God's day equals 24 hours (as claimed above) and it equals 1000 years, we have a problem. Exodus and Psalms now conflict. Obviously, Psalms is an analogy (indicated by the word "like"). But that doesn't get us out of the contradiction. 1000 years is not analogous to 24 hours, no matter what kind of mathematic gymnastics you attempt. If we are to assume that Ex 20:11 is an analogy too, then we still have a contradiction.

Whether Ex 20:11 is accepted as literal or analogous, young-earth creationists have a contradiction. The only way to avoid the contradiction (and maintain biblical inerrency) is to recognize that Ex 20:11 is not saying anything about the length of God's days and only that "He rested after six periods of time, therefore we should also".

Third, God established a pattern in The Law of "work six, rest one". He did this in the proper care of farm land. God states that Israel is to work the land for six years, then allow it to rest a seventh year. This pattern is also recognized in God's acts of creation, and in his establishment of man's week (Exodus 20:11). God was only continuing his pattern of 6+1 in the commandment.

The second most common objection is that the text uses the phrase "evening was, morning was, day X". It is claimed that "evening" and "morning" refer to a 24 period. My rebuttal to that is this: evening to morning is at the most 12 hours (unless creation took place near one of the poles). If this was referring to 24 hours, it would have been stated like this: "evening was, morning was, evening was, day X". "Evening" and "morning" are simply referring to the fact that the days began and ended (finite period of time).

For more information on this topic Reasons to Believe has a complete section of their website and several books devoted to it.

Reasons to Believe "Age of the Earth" Web Page
Reasons to Believe "Does Old-Earth Creationism Contradict Genesis 1?" Web Page
Matter of Days by Dr. Hugh Ross
The Genesis Question by Dr. Hugh Ross

Here is a series of blog posts by Billy Pratt from the Ankerberg Theological Research Institute about the issue:

"What is the Meaning of the Word 'Day' in Genesis" Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

In Part 4, I'm going to go a bit more into the theory of Evolution. Did God use evolution as the mechanism for His creation?