I am sure all of you know that in the teaching of Community Bible Church, Jackson Hole Bible College, and Rocky Mountain Ministries we make a big issue of the authority of Scripture and the current hermeneutic crisis across the country. The American church has mixed the influence of postmodernism (there is no absolute truth and truth is whatever you wish it to be) with a lack of education, training and adherence to reading the Bible with a literal, historical, grammatical, contextual approach. Everywhere we find pastors, church members and para-church leaders making the Bible say whatever they want it to. Today many believers are holding to correct doctrine on the work of Christ in the New Testament, yet their view of Genesis is figurative, spiritual, or a distorted and mutilated literal view. They are trying to fit millions of years into the Genesis account.
Ultimately they are trying to mix the word of man (secular historical science) with God’s inspired Word. A mixture sounds noble, trying to make the Creation account more appealing using modern science views but this syncretism has proven disastrous for today’s church and the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. We teach that if you hold a view of millions of years before Adam and Eve, you automatically accept that what is buried in the fossil record existed before Adam’s sin. Since the record includes death, decay, disease, tumors, cancer, then all of this existed before Adam sinned. The strata of rock even has fossils of thorns! Yet God says thorns were a result of Adam’s sin. The Bible is very clear that death and decay etc. are the results of Adam’s sin.
Now it might sound like just an argument from the past with little impact on us today but… ...if Adam’s sin brought about death and Jesus Christ is the last Adam as presented in the New Testament then what did Jesus accomplish on the cross? He certainly would not have died to correct the problem of sin and death. As many teach today, Christ Himself created death as a part of the good creation then if He died to fix the issue of death, the last enemy, then He would have died for His own creative actions! In fact if the old earth position is correct then Christ would not have fixed anything about physical death in Christ’s atonement! Why then would He even have had to die physically? Why a need for a physical resurrection?
This is a critical issue since an old earth view is really an attack on the cross, the Word of Christ and an attack on the person of Christ Himself!
This past week a great opportunity opened up for two of our professors at Jackson Hole Bible College. Dr. Ken Ham and Eric Hovind were invited to be on a TV program on TBN. It turned into a debate with Dr. Hugh Ross, one of the leading proponents of old earth view. This debate is so relevant, and the topic is so important I encourage you to view it as soon as you can. Thousands have already seen it so please join in and get the message out! (as of today, June 6 at 11.45 am EST, 26,209 people had viewed the TBN debate!) You can view it at: http://www.itbn.org/index/detail/lib/Networks/sublib/TBN/ec/RjNW53NDodbPdWZMesby0hMNzxHCg2Kk It is not only an authority of Scripture issue, this issue affects a central theological issue since it concerns significance and implications concerning the blood atoning work of Christ.
Thank you for your continued support of the ministry in Jackson. God bless you,
Don Landis
Teaching Pastor, Community Bible Church; President, Jackson Hole Bible College
