Question:
Can someone be a member in good standing in the FRC if they believe the earth to be billions of years old? Or do you have to believe that the earth is 6,000-10,000 years old?
Answer:
To believe that the earth is billions of years old means that you do not believe the straightforward and unambiguous language of Genesis 1 (and 2-11). Rather, you are embracing (perhaps unintentionally) the great lie of the evolution theory that has been foisted upon our Western culture. The evolution theory is not merely an innocent alternate explanation for the origin and existence of our universe. Instead, it is a brazen attempt, initiated by Charles Darwin, to formulate an explanation for the origin of our world that eliminates the need for an infinitely brilliant, wise, and all-powerful Creator.
Satan knows that our universe—the macro world and the micro world—furnish overwhelming evidence for the existence of God. He, therefore, is the driving and evil force in promoting and sustaining the evolution narrative, thereby blinding man for the inescapable conclusion that this magnificent universe is the work of a magnificent Creator. Paul addresses this in Romans 1, writing, “Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them. For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead” (Rom. 1:19-20).
The emergence and formulation of the evolution lie came at a most convenient time for an unbelieving culture that all too happily embraced a worldview that eliminates God, and thereby any accountability to God. This lie enables the ungodly to reject Scripture and to live as they please, indulging in evil and immoral activity that they merely view as being part of man’s evolutionary progression toward a super human race.
You might ask, “But what about the scientific evidence in support of evolution?” What scientific evidence? No one has ever witnessed the evolutionary process. No one has ever witnessed monkeys evolving into human beings. How strange that there is no evidence of this process anywhere in the world! Should we not expect this process to continue unabated and that our world would be filled with transitional forms of life? After all, once an assembly line gets rolling in a car factory, you can observe the progressive development of a new and complete vehicle at the various stages of its development. So it should be with the “assembly line” of evolution. Therefore, to give credibility to the evolution lie, the idea of it happening over a period of billions of years had to be invented. After all, who can verify what happened a billion years ago?
What about the fossil record? The existence of the fossil record is an irrefutable fact. Amazingly, however, no transitional forms have ever been found. Instead, in the fossil record we find creatures that are perfectly in tact and are exact replicas of creatures existing today. These creatures did not gradually decay and somehow turn into fossils. They were trapped and died instantly. When did this happen? The Bible has the answer: During the global Genesis flood.
Thus, the evolution lie not only denies that our infinitely complex and fine-tuned universe is the work of an infinitely brilliant Designer, God, to whom we owe our existence, but with a satanic master stroke, it also denies that we are morally accountable to this God who has already judged this world once, and will do so again. Our world, as it exists and functions today, is not the result of billions of years of evolutionary progress, but rather, it yields indisputable evidence of God’s catastrophic judgment of the first world. What is left today of God’s original creation is a broken world. Seventy percent of that world is still submerged by water, and the land masses of our globe are the visible pieces of a severely fractured crust. Now the broken plates of our crest are sliding across each other, resulting in earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions. Furthermore, we now have a compromised and unstable atmosphere that produces unpredictable weather, resulting in flooding rains, torching thunderstorms, violent tornadoes, and destructive hurricanes.
Highly trained and competent creation scientists have done extraordinary work in proving the scientific accuracy of the Scriptures regarding the creation account. That should come as no surprise, for the Scriptures are the inspired record of the God who created our magnificent universe. The suggestion that the spectacular complexity of living creatures is the result of billions of years of random and unrelated events is preposterous. Who would believe that your highly sophisticated smartphone merely evolved over billions of years? You know that your smartphone is the product of brilliant engineering. Yet evolutionists would have you believe that your brain—which is infinitely more complex that your smartphone and performs 100 billion functions per second simultaneously—is merely the product of chance. No wonder that an Australian scientist (who is not a believer!) said that evolution is the greatest intellectual hoax ever perpetrated on the human race.
Thus, the notion of billions of years was invented to make the incredible credible, and to eliminate the existence of an infinitely brilliant and all-powerful Creator. And God has provided us with a precise, accurate, and fully reliable record of His creative activity. Satan knows, however, that by undermining (and destroying!) the credibility of Genesis 1-11, he will succeed in stripping the entire Word of God of its credibility.
Sadly he not only has succeeded in doing so in the world at large, but his devious stratagems are also infiltrating the church. Now there are many in the evangelical world who no longer believe that Genesis 1-2 is an historical account of God having created the universe in six 24-hour days. Instead, an effort is now made to merge the creation account and the bogus scientific “evidence” of evolution. The proponents of theistic evolution will argue that God used evolution as the process whereby He created the universe, and thus that the six days of Genesis 1 represent six periods of perhaps a billion years each. Incidentally, that would mean that God would also have rested a billion years before anything else happened.
Why is theistic evolution such a dangerous alternative to the creation account of Genesis 1-2, as well as the record of the Genesis Flood? The evolution theory requires death as an integral part of the process. That would mean that death occurred as a natural phenomenon long before Adam and Eve came on the scene. Furthermore, at what point did the historical Adam and Eve actually evolve and come on the scene? All of this flatly contradicts the unambiguous truth of the Scriptures. The Bible tells us that no human beings existed prior to Adam and Eve, and that death is God’s penalty upon sin. Thus the creation account is absolutely foundational to the essential truths of the gospel. To deny the literacy of Gen. 1-11 is to deny the gospel itself. Jesus Christ, the Author of the Scriptures and the Creator of the universe, therefore repeatedly affirmed the historicity of the Genesis account of creation. The entire body of revealed truth rests, therefore, upon our unconditional acceptance of Genesis 1-11 as the exact and unambiguous account of creation.
To come back to your question, you cannot profess the Scriptures to be the inspired Word of God and simultaneously believe that it took Him billions of years to create our universe. Just as He created Adam and Eve as fully mature human beings, so He created the entire universe as a fully developed and mature structure—a universe He spoke into existence by the Word of His power! We arrive at this conclusion by viewing the universe (and all scientific pursuits) through the lens of Scripture, instead of examining and interpreting Scripture through the lens of secular science.