The challenge of walking with the God who knows me
Names changed throughout except in some cases where the person involved has been or is in ministry.
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If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. 2 Cor 5:17
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Derek’s Blog which comes out weekly to fortnightly is at -
Go to the new more user friendly version - beingrecreated.org
- God's hand on a Process
Philippians 3:15
“And if on some point you think differently, that too
God will make clear to you.”
[By faith we believe that God created the Universe Heb. 11] I am often struck by how tolerant Jesus is of our poor understanding. One of the ways that I see this most clearly is in the development of my thinking on the creation of the world. This has been a progressive thinking, and may even yet have to go through more changes! Yet at each stage the Lord has accepted me, and not rejected me on the basis that I am a heretic with wrong theology. It seems that the Lord desires us to believe the truth. It is the truth that sets us free! Yet on many issues we do not come to truth immediately. It is a process of the development of faith and understanding. This development is not independent of our lives. Our way of life is influenced by what we believe.
Briefly my thinking went through the following stages:
- Scepticism towards God's creation. - Here personal integrity was at odds with the Bible, a disturbing and contradicting period that left great difficulties in my being able to really take hold of the Bible as authoritative.
- Believing God's word. - Here, God's word was believed uppermost. Significant resolution between integrity and the Bible. Now there was a marked scepticism towards what was called a scientific explanation. This scepticism was both towards the explanations of the Creation Science movement and the scientific community.
- Understanding Scientific Process - Working as an engineer, I began to understand at a practical level the limitations of scientific thought. Can one really declare a theory concerning a past event as scientifically proven?
- The numbers don’t add up - The need for expressing things in numbers. The difference between science and philosophy is the use of numbers. Those who believe in evolution consistently avoid the question of the creation of life, since the numbers don’t add up.
- How long 7 days? - A Bible study cleared the way for a new perspective. Here there was integrity between Biblical and what I would think of as a true scientific understanding.
- A different understanding of Genesis 1&2. This influenced my understanding of who God is. This understanding could only be opened up through the last step. Without it, I was not free to make this leap.
It might seem that something so esoteric and irrelevant to life as how the world was created would have no impact on how I lived, yet the reality was that this was a burning issue. On it rested my whole understanding of the Bible and how I should relate to God. If the Bible was not trustworthy on this, then was it trustworthy for anything?
Having come from a more scientific background, one of my early struggles as a young Christian was with the first chapters of Genesis and their description of the creation of the world. However much people tried to explain it to me, that in some way it was scientifically accurate, the whole thing did not wash. It was said that the order of Creation presented in Genesis 1 followed the order suggested by that of the evolutionary model. In some aspects this was the case, but I was looking in detail, and the detail did not work. This conflict put a spanner in the works for believing whole heartedly that the Bible was without error.
Looking back on this time, what stands out to me is the way the Lord responded to my struggling faith. He was with me. He did not come to the rescue straight away, but rather he developed my faith in other ways such that I could be ready to receive an answer in the future. He was not in a hurry, he did not fret, even though there was a marked impact on my faith.
SCEPTIC TO FAITH
