A. When King David committed adultery with Bathsheba and had her husband murdered so he could marry her, God informed David that the baby who resulted from their affair would become sick and would not survive. Seven days later the child died. (2 Samuel 11-12)  This was more likely an application of the “life for a life” principle (Exodus 21:23) than a punishment for adultery .

But why this was being taught to a 5 year old, and why the teacher turned this specific situation into a general principle is beyond me.  He or she could have taught them that even though David committed these terrible sins,  he was forgiven as soon as he asked, the child went to be with God and was spared a life of illegitimacy, and David was reunited with him after he died. (2 Sam 12:23).

A. You’re correct about the 2 Enochs and the 2 Lamechs, but  I believe the real story behind these 2 lines is to demonstrate the difference between the faithful line of Seth and the rebellious line of Cain. In Seth’s line the seventh man from Adam was Enoch, a type of the Church who was “raptured” and walked with God. His name means “teaching”. By tradition Adam, Seth, and Enoch chose 12 constellations and named them in such a way that as they lay under the stars at night fathers could teach their children about God’s plan for redeeming them from the curse. (This was later corrupted into astrology.)

In Cain’s line the 7th from Adam was Lamech, a type of the world, a confessed murderer and the first polygamist. His children introduced an Earth based civilization focused on the exaltation of man, who by their own achievements would try to redeem themselves.  From these children came animal husbandry, manufacturing, the arts and music, and entertainment.  Lamech’s name means “despairing”.

I don’t believe God ever intended for man to build a civilization and get comfortable here.  I believe His desire was that we would be focused on learning the way into His presence and then teaching it to others.

A. You’re right.  It is confusing and probably incorrect as well.  It’s the first 5 books of the Bible, not the first 4, and they’re called the Books of Moses.  The Song of Moses is contained in Exodus 15 and is only 18 verses long. There are 5853 verses in the Christian version of the 5 Books of Moses and 5845 in the Hebrew version.  This is due to a difference in the way verses are numbered and not because some have been added.   By the  way, some Hebrews scholars say the total should be 5888 verses  since 35 verses from the 5 Books of Moses also appear in 1-2 Chronicles and 8 also appear in the Psalms.  5845 + 35 + 8 = 5888.

As to each verse being relevant to the year corresponding to its number, that would also appear to be highly speculative.  Even if you could agree on the correct number of verses (5845, 5853, or 5888) it’s been estimated that about 200 years have been lost on the Jewish calendar due to various Old Testament judgments.  The current year on the Jewish calendar is 5770.  If you add those years back, you would have exceeded the maximum number of verses attributed to the Books of Moses.

A. Moses was denied entrance into the Promised Land because he disobeyed God. (Numbers 20:1-12) The first time the Israelites needed water, the Lord told Moses to strike a large rock and water came forth (Exodus 17:1-7).   The second time He told Moses to speak to the rock.  But Moses was angry and yelled at the people and then struck the rock again, twice, and again water came out.   So what was the problem?

The water was a foreshadowing of the Holy Spirit that the Lord promised to all who believe (John 7:37-39) and the rock was a model of Christ, who had to be struck (crucified) before the Spirit could be given. But after His death one only needed to ask to receive the Spirit.  By striking the rock the second time Moses was violating the lesson the Lord was trying to teach us.  Jesus only had to die once for us to receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.  After that all we have to do is ask to receive Him (Matt. 7:7-8)  So this was more than a single act of disobedience on the part of Moses.  It was in effect a denial of the sufficiency of the Lord’s death.

When I called, you answered me; you made me bold and stouthearted. May all the kings of the earth praise you, O LORD, when they hear the words of your mouth. May they sing of the ways of the LORD, for the glory of the LORD is great. Though the LORD is on high, he looks upon the lowly, but the proud he knows from afar. Though I walk in the midst of trouble, you preserve my life; you stretch out your hand against the anger of my foes, with your right hand you save me. The LORD will fulfill his purpose for me; your love, O LORD, endures forever— do not abandon the works of your hands.

There are two things the Lord honors above all else, His name and His word. When He promised to restore Israel in the last days, He said, “It is not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I am going to do these things, but for the sake of my holy name, which you have profaned among the nations where you have gone. I will show the holiness of my great name, which has been profaned among the nations, the name you have profaned among them. Then the nations will know that I am the LORD, declares the Sovereign LORD, when I show myself holy through you before their eyes.” (Ezekiel 36:22-23) It’s not because they’ve proven themselves worthy, but because His name was at stake. They besmirched it, and He had to restore it because He’s made big promises to us as well.

And where His word is concerned He said, “For this is what the LORD says—he who created the heavens, he is God; he who fashioned and made the earth, he founded it; he did not create it to be empty, but formed it to be inhabited— he says: “I am the LORD, and there is no other. I have not spoken in secret, from somewhere in a land of darkness; I have not said to Jacob’s descendants, ‘Seek me in vain.’ I, the LORD, speak the truth; I declare what is right.” (Isaiah 45:18-19) And “Remember this, fix it in mind, take it to heart, you rebels. Remember the former things, those of long ago; I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me. I make known the end from the beginning, from ancient times, what is still to come. I say: My purpose will stand, and I will do all that I please. (Isaiah 46:8-10)

For those of you who were taught that the New Testament canceled or superceded the Old, Jesus said, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.” (Matt. 5:17-18) In the idiom of the day, the phrase “the Law and the Prophets” referred to the Old Testament. God’s word is final, infallible, forever.

Why is this so important to us? Well, in the first place it’s because God uses prophecy to validate Himself.

“I foretold the former things long ago,” He said, “My mouth announced them and I made them known; then suddenly I acted, and they came to pass. For I knew how stubborn you were; the sinews of your neck were iron, your forehead was bronze. Therefore I told you these things long ago; before they happened I announced them to you so that you could not say, ‘My idols did them; my wooden image and metal god ordained them.’ You have heard these things; look at them all. Will you not admit them?” (Isaiah 48:3-6)

Of all the world’s so-called Holy Books, only the Bible does this. In fact, God uses prophecy as the standard for evaluating anyone’s claim to be God.

“This is what the LORD says— Israel’s King and Redeemer, the LORD Almighty: I am the first and I am the last; apart from me there is no God. Who then is like me? Let him proclaim it. Let him declare and lay out before me what has happened since I established my ancient people, and what is yet to come—yes, let him foretell what will come.” (Isaiah 44:6-7)

All anyone has to do to prove that he’s God is to answer two questions. First, tell us everything that has happened. And second, tell us everything that will happen. God has been doing this very thing for nearly 6000 years now and He’s never been wrong. No one else can make that claim.

So, His word is so important because it’s His proof that He is Who He claims to be. You don’t have to wonder if there’s really a God. Just study His word. You’ll find more proof that He’s who He claims to be than you can muster up to prove that you’re who you claim to be. It doesn’t take any faith to believe there’s a God. It just takes the application of your God-given intellect in a search for Him. That’s why in the New Testament, one of the Greek words translated unbelief also means disobedient. There’s simply too much evidence to deny the existence of God, so the people who do so have to remain consciously ignorant the facts. They have to refuse to know Him.

The second reason this is so important is that we’ve been asked to stake our eternal destiny on the fact that God is reliable. It’s good to know that someone who has asked you to take His word for something so critical values His word so highly, because by the time we find out if He was telling the truth, it’ll be too late. But when Paul wrote “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved” in Romans 10:13 the One standing behind his promise had a 4000 year track record of honesty and integrity, and nothing has happened in the 2000 years following to diminish that record. If anything we have more supporting evidence now than then.

So where your salvation is concerned, God has placed the two things He values most highly on the line, His name and His word. You have every right to feel secure in His hands.

A. According to 1 Samuel 16:14 the Spirit of the Lord departed from Saul, most likely because of his disobedience. I take this to mean that if he had been saved, he lost his salvation at that time.  Remember, the Holy Spirit was not sealed within believers before the Church Age, nor will He be afterward.  It’s a promise given exclusively to the Church.  There is no mention of Saul in the Psalms.

The other day I received an interesting response to my answer stating that the Bible supports an approximate 6000 year history for the human race. This person didn’t dispute the Bible, only our interpretation of it, in disagreeing with my answer.

The essence of his response was that since science has found what it considers to be persuasive evidence that contradicts the literal view of the creation account, then our traditional interpretation of the language in Genesis 1 has to be flawed.

The writer is a scientist and a Christian. He presented a calm and reasoned response claiming that every relevant field of science is in agreement that “enormous amounts of very convincing evidence exists for an old–very old–earth and even for evolution, including humans.”

Now I’ve said before that I’m OK with an old Earth. In other articles I’ve shown how an old Earth and young civilization are entirely compatible with a literal interpretation of Genesis 1. (Read More) But in his view the old Earth includes animals and other life, some of whom later evolved into humans. I’m not OK with that because the Bible says that animals came along on day 6, same as man.

He went on to ask, “So what is more likely, that thousands of highly educated, highly experienced, highly motivated, life-long scientists and thinkers are wrong about immeasurable amounts of finely done, peer reviewed data or that your interpretation of a document which is thousands of years old is ever so slightly incorrect?”

Then he repeated that He’s not contesting the accuracy of Scripture, only man’s interpretation of it.

Let’s set aside the fact that most of those thousands of highly educated, highly experienced, highly motivated, life-long scientists and thinkers are non-believers who don’t think the Biblical Creation account is even a remote possibility. We’ll consider only the believers among them, because they’re the ones who say that the Scripture is accurate, but our interpretation of it is flawed.

For all the generations from the dawn of creation until the early part of the 20th Century, almost all believers accepted the Lord’s account of the Six Day Creation. So what is it that we’ve “misinterpreted” for all these thousands of years?

It’s About Time

All believers agree that ultimately God is our Creator. So the basic conflict between the differing views of our origin really comes down to the time involved. Evolution requires millions of years, but the Bible says the creation was complete from start to finish in 6 days. Now there’s there’s only one sentence in the entire creation account that concerns time. Therefore the whole argument boils down to a claim that for all these generations we’ve misinterpreted one sentence. That one sentence, repeated 6 times, reads like this. “And there was evening, and there was morning, day (1-6) “ (Genesis 1:5,8,13,19,23,31) Furthermore, within that sentence there are only three words that relate to time; evening, morning, and day. If there’s been a misinterpretation, it has to be in one of those three words.

By the way, let’s address the Bible’s accuracy here in case you’re thinking maybe some words got changed along the way to cause our misinterpretation. According to Rabbinical sources, there are 79,847 words in the Torah, as the first five books of the Bible are called, made up of 304,805 Hebrew letters. Fewer than 2 dozen of these letters are in dispute, and then only for spelling differences. That means the Torah we have today is a 99.99% accurate copy of the one Moses originally wrote. We know this because every letter in Hebrew has a numerical value, so every line and every column of text has a correct sum. In hand copying the text every line was checked for accuracy by adding the sum of its letters and comparing it with the correct total. In the case of a difference, the page was destroyed, and the copyist started over. Remember, these people were entrusted with the very words of God and took that trust seriously.

Three Little Words

With that said, let’s take a look at the three words having to do with time.

The Hebrew word for evening is erev. It’s always translated evening, sunset or night.

The word for morning is boqer. There’s no question that it means morning. Hebrew speaking Jews greet each other at the beginning of each day with “Boqer tov” (good morning).

And the word for day is yomn. As does its English counterpart, yomn can have a figurative meaning as well as a literal one. Of its 2287 appearances in Scripture, 2008 describe a literal 24 hour day. In the figurative sense it can mean a longer span of time, such as in the phrase “Day of the Lord “ in Amos 5:18 where it refers to the 3.5 year long Great Tribulation.

But common sense tells us that when combined with evening and morning, as it is in each of the six references of Genesis 1, it’s meant to be taken literally, a single 24 hour period, because there are no figurative applications for the Hebrew words erev and boqer. And the Bible doesn’t say there were evenings and mornings, it says there was evening (singular) and there was morning (singular). One of each. And that means one 24 hour day.

We also have the first mention of the word day in Genesis 1:5 and it demonstrates the Lord’s intention for the word’s use.

And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and He separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day. (Genesis 1:3-5)

This verse established the way time would be reckoned. First there was evening, the beginning of the dark period, night, and then there was morning, the beginning of the light period, day. This cycle has repeated itself every 24 hours throughout history.

Are we supposed to believe that for almost all of human history the words evening, morning, and day haven’t meant what people thought they meant?

How Could This Be?

In an effort to reconcile the creation account with evolution, some believers try to give the Lord more time to do His work of creation. They call the six days of creation by a new name, “creation days”, implying that each one is more like an age than a 24 hour period. But the accepted meanings of the words evening, morning, and day don’t accommodate this dramatic stretching of time. The Hebrew language has other words for that purpose, so these words are never used to describe an age, especially when used together.

I also realize that some believers don’t accept the Bible as being the word of God. They say it merely contains it. This allows them to discard parts of the Bible with which they disagree. Some discard the entire Old Testament, including the creation account, as little more than a collection of folk tales. But in Romans 15:4 Paul said that everything that was written in the past was written to teach us. In 1 Cor. 10:1-11 he cited a number of events from Israel’s history when the people rebelled and were disciplined. Then he said that these things happened to them as warnings for us on whom the fulfillment of the ages has come. And in 2 Timothy 3:16 he said that all scripture is God-breathed, or as we would say, written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness. In all these cases he had to be referring to the Old Testament, since the New testament didn’t exist yet. Who are we to dispute this and ignore his warnings? The Old testament is the inspired Word of God, just like the New, and is meant to play an important role in a believer’s life.

But between the liberal denomination I grew up in and the public schools I attended, evolution was the only explanation of our origins I ever heard until I was well into adulthood. Sure God was our creator, but evolution was the way He did it. No body I knew thought to even question it. It wasn’t till I was born again at age 40 that I heard any teaching about the Creation, and then it was something I had to seek out for myself. I’m sure thousands of you had similar experiences growing up.

In the last 100 years or so, a heresy called the documentary hypothesis has infested liberal theology. This hypothesis makes the claim that Moses didn’t write the Torah, but that it was pieced together long afterward from writings by several unrelated groups. Proponents of this view ask us to ignore the fact that Moses is mentioned by name in 85 verses of the New Testament, and that among them are multiple references to his authorship of the 5 Books of the Torah, including direct quotes from the Lord Himself. Was Jesus unaware of the real authors of these passages He quoted? Was he just going along with a tradition He knew was false, or did He know that Moses had written them?

Stop And Think

As you can see, these reasons for denying the 6 day creation won’t stand the test of rational thought. They’re just excuses people use to disregard the truth.

Most scientists don’t say, “Our science is based on universally accepted assumptions, and yet our findings disagree with the Creator’s account of what He did. Our assumptions must be incorrect. “

Instead they say, “Our science is based on universally accepted assumptions, and yet our findings disagree with the Creator’s account of what He did. His account must be incorrect.”

“For who has known the mind of the Lord that he may instruct him?” (1 Cor. 2:16)

I can understand non-believers searching for an alternative to the Biblical account. They have to find one in order to justify their disbelief. But how can scientists who are Christian actually think man can know more about how we were created than the One who did it, to a point where they can dispute the accuracy of the Creator’s account?

For it is written: “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise; the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.” (1 Cor. 1:19)

The time will come when we’ll know everything, just like God does. At that time we won’t have to take His word for anything. As Paul said, “We will know fully as we are fully known.” (1 Cor. 13:12) Until then I don’t believe we have the right to pick and choose what parts of His Word we want to believe. We certainly don’t have the perspective. “Who has known the mind of the Lord? we’re asked, Or who has been his counselor?” (Romans 11:34) Selah 10-31-09

A. The current names of  months on the Hebrew calendar were chosen during the time of Ezra after the Babylonian captivity.  The Jews had just returned from 70 years in Babylon and chose names that were familiar to them. Thus all of the official names of the Hebrew months have their origins in Babylon.

The same is true of our calendar, although in our case the names are mostly Roman in their origin. The first 6 months are named after Roman gods, July (Julius Caesar) and August (Augustus Caesar) are named after Roman Emperors, and September (7) October (8) November (9) and December (10) are named for their positions on the Roman Calendar, since March (Mars, the god of war) was their first month.

A. The Annals of the Kings of Israel are mentioned 17 times in 1-2 Kings.  They are apparently diaries/records of some sort that documented what were felt to be important events of each King’s reign.  Similar records were kept for the Kings of Judah and are mentioned 15 times in 1-2 Kings.  Some believe they weren’t official documents but were more likely records kept by the prophets who served during each king’s reign. Regardless, these books have never been found and are presumed to have been irretrievably lost.

His one focused contradiction was in Gensis 6:19-21, and 7:2-3.  My response to this was that God was giving specific requirements for certain animals clean/unclean.  And yet he still says its contradictory.

So my question to you, what is God actually telling Noah to do in regards to the animals to be stored in the Ark?

A. In Genesis 6:19-21 God told Noah that 2 of every kind of animal would come to him to be saved from the coming flood.  In Genesis 7:2-3 He further instructed Noah to take 7 of each kind of clean animal as well as 2 of the unclean ones.  Your unbelieving friend sees a contradiction because he wants a reason to doubt.  You and I see no contradiction because we understand that God was simply clarifying His instructions so that enough sacrificial animals would be included.  Therefore it’s not the statements themselves, but our perception of them that’s different.

As is the case with unbelievers, your friend missed the real question that the comparison between the two passages is meant to raise.  And that is, how did Noah know the difference between “clean” and “unclean” animals?  The Levitical system was still over 1000 years in the future. The answer is that the idea of innocent blood being shed for the remission of sin had to have been introduced immediately after the fall to protect fallen man from dying in his sins.  It was only formalized at Mt. Sinai.