From the beginning, the word of God has been under attack by Satan and his
followers and century after century they continue to ask, “Has God really said that?”
What is unfortunate is that there rise up within the church fellow travelers who join
the Deceiver’s attack.
The questioning of the Biblical account of creation is not new, but it is disheartening
that some within the “conservative” wing of Reformed Christianity are taking up
the cause of evolution. Men such as PCA Pastor Tim Keller, Covenant Seminary
professor Dr. Francis Collins, former Westminster Seminary professor Dr. Peter
Enns, and former Reformed Theological Seminary professor Dr. Bruce Waltke have
argued that properly interpreted, the biblical account of creation is compatible with
evolution.
These men and others reinterpret the first three chapters of Genesis in various ways
that allow for an ancient earth and evolutionary development of man. But what do
you do with Adam and Eve? Both Jesus and Paul taught that Adam was not only
real, but the first man and the source of our sin nature and even death itself.
They try to solve this problem by proposing that at some point in the evolutionary
development of “humanoids” God stepped in and breathed into one of them the
breath of life and he became a “living soul” named Adam (Genesis 2:7).
This sounds reasonable, except that it is contrary to what the Bible actually teaches.
God’s Word tells us that the first man, Adam, and his wife, Eve, were directly made
by God. That is, there were no antecedents to Adam and Eve, neither animal nor
so-called humanoids. In addition, there was no death before Adam and Eve sinned.
(Romans 5:12)
Dr. John Murray gives us a helpful exegetical argument from Genesis 2:7:
‘And man became a living creature.’ The term rendered ‘living creature’ means animate
being, creature with the breath of life. In itself this predicate does not express anything
distinctive of man as compared with other animate beings. The designation is generic and is
applied to other creatures (cf. Gen. 1:21, 24, 30). It is all-important to observe this fact. For
it means that it was by the act of impartation, the act of communication from God denoted
by inbreathing, that the entity formed from the dust of the ground came to belong to the
category of animate being. To state the matter negatively, man did not become animate by
any process short of the action specified as inbreathing. If ‘man’ were previously animate,
and the inbreathing constituted him man as distinct from and superior to other animate
creatures, then it could not be said that by the inbreathing he became ‘living creature’.
The inbreathing was not an action superimposed upon an already existing animate being.
(Collected Writings of John Murray, Volume 2, page 8)
Dr. Murray’s argument from the Genesis text is that man did not exist in any form
before God created Adam. Theistic evolution won’t work because according to
Scripture, Adam was not a ‘living soul’ of any kind until God breathed life into him.
Adam was the first man, not the culmination of an ages-long evolutionary process.
We are not here by the accidental and blind process of evolution. We are the
product of God’s perfect planning and sovereign creation. We are “fearfully and
wonderfully made.” We are uniquely made in the image of God Himself. We are the
special creation of the omnipotent God, who made us not for ourselves, but for His
glory and eternal purposes.
This is just one of many arguments for taking the Genesis account of creation at
face value. If you have an interest in this area and would like to investigate more, I
would highly recommend Answers from Genesis. You can go to their website by using
this link: http://www.answersingenesis.org/
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