One of the greatest honors and privileges we have as Christians is to publicly profess our allegiance to Christ and his Word.
Therefore whoever confesses Me before men, him I will also confess before My Father who is in heaven. Matthew 10:32 (NKJV)
What perhaps were the two greatest betrayals in human history took place in the Garden of Eden and in Jerusalem. The first was perpetrated by the very first humans who were unfaithful to God by putting more faith in the serpent’s words than in their Creator’s. The second was by the Jewish Sanhedrin in Jerusalem when they renounced and condemned to death the Author of Life, Jesus, their promised Messiah.
From Eden to the crucifixion the sin of man progressed from calling God a liar to killing his Son.
Let’s not pretend that you and I are above doing either of those two things. Every time we doubt God’s written Word we commit Adam’s sin. Every time we remain silent about Jesus in front of those who hate him, we participate in Jerusalem’s sin.
All it takes for evil to triumph is for good people to do or say nothing.
Such fundamental infidelities likely would permanently sever any human relationship, but God in his mercy sent his Son Jesus to die for these sins and others so that we might have the opportunity to change our minds, believe the gospel, and declare public allegiance to Christ as Lord and to his Word as being the absolute truth.
It is not sufficient to profess loyalty to Christ but deny the truthfulness of his Word. He is the Word who became flesh. (John 1:14) We either show allegiance to both or we are unfaithful to both.
26 For whoever is ashamed of Me and My words, of him the Son of Man will be ashamed when He comes in His own glory, and in His Father’s, and of the holy angels. Luke 9:26 (NKJV)
The apostle Peter received a second chance after publicly denying his relationship with Jesus. We have received many “second chances” over our lifetimes. In my case, I now realize that I was ashamed of a portion of God’s Word for many years, as are most Christians in the West. I professed to believe that the Bible is 100% true, and thought I did, but now I see that I did not think that the first chapter of Genesis was to be taken at face value. I believed that one has to have a nuanced interpretation of the Bible’s first chapter to properly understand what God meant. Can you imagine any human relationship in which a friend’s words have to be parsed in such a way? We would never be sure what such a person meant.
Scholars, who, in my opinion, have turned their backs on God to some degree, tell us that we must understand God’s words in Genesis or anywhere else they disagree with modern science, as being poetic rather than literally true. We are to understand that God spoke phenomenologically, not literally. This means that his Word only describes the appearance of things, not reality. Once we start down this road, we will end up questioning the entire Bible.
We have to decide who has the greatest authority, God or science.
I now understand that saying and believing such things is comparable to giving God a “slap in the face.”
We betray our Maker by thinking that he speaks in confusing riddles that can only be rightly understood in the “light” of what godless astronomers tell us.
The previous hidden (occult) knowledge and revelations of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton, et. al. deny the truthfulness of the Bible, throwing the entire Word of God into question, and we Christians have bowed to their “wisdom,” much like Peter succumbed to fear when he denied our Lord.
Science has become an idol which many Christians are afraid to confront.
Do we really think that God cannot be trusted to speak in a straightforward way about something so fundamentally important as his creation? Do we believe that the biblical authors were ignorant of modern science; so, God accommodated their ignorance by giving them a false account of how he made the heavens and the earth? Can we not see that we are publicly denying our Lord by being ashamed of his Word? Can we not see that this is equivalent to calling God a liar?
(If you want to see how far afield heliocentrism has taken us from the simplicity of God’s revealed Word, I encourage you to read my article entitled The Genesis Testimony. Faith in heliocentrism requires us to deny the six-days of creation.)
After Peter’s public denial of Christ, he repented, received forgiveness, and was restored. He became a champion of the gospel, ultimately giving his life for the Lord. Ever since God opened my understanding regarding biblical cosmology, I have done my best to make a public stand for God’s integrity and that of the Bible. My prayer is that you will join me in this tremendous opportunity to get it right this time around.
Let us embrace the honor and privilege of boldly proclaiming the gospel, the Lordship of Christ, and the absolute trustworthiness of his Word from Genesis to Revelation.
