John MacArthur’s first message in this year’s Shepherd’s Conference began like this: “Two years ago I started out the conference saying why every self-respecting Calvinist should be a Premillenialist. Last year I started out the conference saying why every self-respecting Calvinist should reject the Church Growth Movement. This year I want to start by saying why every self-respecting Calvinist, Evangelical, and Christian should be a six-day creationist.”
Pretty bold statement! If you would like to listen to the message, you can find it here. Just sign up for a free account and go to the Media Vault. It’s General Session 1 from the 2009 Shepherd’s Conference.
One of the most unique statements in the whole message was this: “Get past the idea that you need to reconcile Scripture with science.” In other words, then it comes to creation, forget science altogether. He even dismissed to a great degree what he termed “so-called creation science.”
Why did he say this? For the simple reason that creation was a miracle. A miracle, by its nature, in unnatural. A miracle can break every natural law in the book. You do not hear of people trying to perform science on Jesus’ walking on water (breaking the law of gravity, perhaps changing the nature of the water). No one tries to figure out how Jesus restored the withered hand of the man in front of the Pharisees. Certainly no one would figure out how a man who had been dead for several days could naturally be raised from the dead.
Yet when it comes to God’s display of miraculous power in creation everyone wants to figure out how it happened naturally. Of course it is unbelievers who primarily reject the biblical creation because they reject God and his power. Why do Christians follow suit and attempt to add biblical authority to the anti-God conclusions of unbelievers whose answer to problems is to add billions of years to allow for more evolution?
There is no need to look at psuedo-science evidence of what unbelievers refer to as a natural event. There is nothing natural about Genesis 1. The questions we ask regarding natural “problems” (e.g. how can plans survive without the sun, how was there light before the sun) stem from forgetting that there was nothing natural in what happened from days one to six.
It really does come down to this. You simply cannot explain a miracle in natural terms. Period.
