February 12 – God’s Word is Our Primary Guide of Truth
Your skin is literally crawling with millions of harmful viruses and bacteria, yet infections and diseases ONLY start when contamination finds its way inside. In a similar way, the Christian church faces its greatest danger, not from persecution and skeptical attacks, but from those within the faith who twist and distort the Word of God to justify non-biblical beliefs. Combining God’s Word with evolution (and its required millions of years) is Christianity’s greatest internal threat.
You need only observe the reaction to creation conferences hosted on public universities to see this reality in action. Venomous and insulting attacks preceding such conferences by unbelieving faculty and students are not at all surprising – the very idea of a Creator to whom we are accountable strikes at the very core of their belief system. But all too often “Christian” groups show up at such conferences to pass out evolution-promoting literature. And every year thousands of churches set aside the Sunday closest to Charles Darwin’s birthday to celebrate “Darwin Day”! Most Christian Bible colleges and seminaries teach that it is perfectly acceptable to believe that God used billions of years to slowly change pond slime into human beings (i.e. molecules-to-man evolution). Well-funded organizations are spending millions to convince Christians that evolution and the Bible blend seamlessly. Yet, the exact opposite is true.
I recently helped my son tear out almost every wall in his “fixer-upper” home in preparation for a major remodeling. While we were rebuilding, three critical tools were needed: a level, square, and chalk line. The Bible gives us an unchanging standard for understanding not just morality, but history and science also. God’s Word is the only suitable level, square, and chalk line standard with which to interpret these subjects. Almost universally, Christians have compromised God’s Word by making science, majority opinion, or their own experience the absolute with which to judge and re-interpret God’s Word. This is exactly equivalent to bending the square, misaligning the level, or smearing the chalk line to fit a crooked wall. It may work for a while, but ultimately, the structure will become distorted as mistake, builds upon mistake and it will become hopelessly unstable and destroyed from within.
God repeatedly warns us to make His Word – not the teaching of church leaders, scientific consensus, or popular opinion – our primary guide of truth.