Can you believe that “Days of Our Lives” has been on TV 60 years? They have 15,000 episodes, and the fact that I’ve never watched one of them or even have the slightest idea of what that soap opera is about is moot. Those “Days” don’t matter. For the Christian’s “Days of our Lives” is not about our days. The Six Days of our Creation are…or they use to be.
Despite the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod’s over 90-year commitment to confessing a six-day creation in its official doctrinal statement The Brief Statement[i], I think that position among that once Confessional Lutheran Synod is in the words of Paul Simon’s “hymn” “Slip, sliding away.” And I played my part.
Till I left 7 years ago I taught what Luther said: If a person doesn’t believe in the forgiveness of sins, it doesn’t matter if he believes in a six-day creation or not.(I actually think in that quote Luther refers to a seven-day creation.) In any event, I think people came to understand me, or Luther, as saying: “If you believe in the forgiveness of sins, what does it matter if you believe in a six-day creation or not?” Based on Irenaeus and St. John, I say, he who doesn’t believe in a six-day creation won’t long believe in the forgiveness of sins. It’s not that a six-day creation is necessary to know or even confess for salvation, but denying it leads to difficulties with salvific doctrines.
In Against Heresies, Irenaeus takes to task those who shun certain foods as evil and wrong treating them as if they were not made by God. He then says that the person who doesn’t believe God made bread and wine can’t believe that He uses them to give them His Body given and His Blood shed on the cross.
St. John records Jesus as saying in John 3:12 (NASB77), “’If I told you earthly things and you do not believe, how shall you believe if I tell you heavenly things?’” The Six-Day Creation is manifestly an earthly thing. The forgiveness of your sins is a heavenly thing. Trying to maintain you believe the heavenly but not the earthly is tantamount to saying you love God whom you can’t see even though you hate your brother whom you do.
Then there is Moses. Jesus says in John 5:46-47 (NASB77), “’For if you believed Moses, you would believe Me; for he wrote of Me. 47 But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe My words?’” Moses records the Six-Day Creation in Genesis. Jesus says if you don’t believe Moses words, how will ever believe His? People who read Moses cafeteria-style are even worse than people who confess the faith of their denomination that way. Cafeteria Catholics will say, “Oh I believe in praying to Mary but not purgatory.” Cafeteria Protestants, and Lutherans too, say, “I believe in the Order of Creation in the church and home but not in the world.” Cafeteria Confessionals are trying to say, “I believe Jesus’ heavenly Words about this bread is His body, but not Moses’ earthly words that “in six days He created” heaven and earth.
As the veteran of hundreds of confirmation classes, I know the next forward edge of battle: “Based on the Bible you can’t require me to confess the earth to be a certain age.” This is true. Although, as I’ve cited before and here again, nothing in this world proves the age suggested by Scripture factitious. “At an LSU symposium, Sept. 1978 as reported in Geotimes, Vol. 23, September 1978, p. 18. Dr. Jack Eddy said, “‘I suspect that the sun is 4.5 billion years old. However…I suspect that we could live with Bishop Ussher’s value for the age of the earth and sun. I don’t think we have much in the way of observable evidence in astronomy to conflict with that’” (Creation and the Modern Christian, 228). Bishop Ussher was a 17th century Irish bishop who computed creation to have happened in 4004 B.C.
Nope, I have never confessed or required an exact date. I only said Scripture required the confession that Adam and Eve were the first people, that there was no death till sin entered the world, and that Scripture doesn’t allow for millions, let alone billions of years. I then sent them home to read Genesis 1-11. Predictably those who were cowed by a six-day creation quailed at the great ages of people in Genesis 5, a worldwide flood in Genesis 6-9, and the “just-so” story, in their view, of the Tower of Babel.
I first heard a member of ELDONA saying, “Well you know it’s the Reformed and the Catholic’s who always want to nail down specific times not Confessional Lutherans.” And about 5 years ago people whom I could not confirm because they denied one or more of the Scriptural things about creation (i.e. Adam and Eve are the first people, no death before sin, or the Bible not allowing millions let alone billions of years) began going to another confessional pastor and confessing, evidently, to his satisfaction.
Hear me well. Those who stumble at the apparent age of things will be encouraged to stumble over just how real the forgiveness of their very visible sins is. Those who stumble over a six-day creation because of what science claims is the stability of the speed of light over great distances are likely to stumble over how far away God’s salvation, forgiveness, and life appear amidst the beeping of the latest scientific medical devices surrounding them on their deathbed. Those who stumble over a six-day creation because of the length of time Uranium-238 takes to decay to Lead-206 under the assumption that science knows the amounts started with and the stability of the rate of decay, will be tempted to stumble over how quickly the forgiveness of sins Jesus bought 2,000 years ago can be applied to a sin today.
I want no part of days like this. Neither do you.[ii]
[i] “We teach that God has created heaven and earth, and that in the manner and in the space of time recorded in the Holy Scriptures, especially Gen. 1 and 2, namely, by His almighty creative word, and in six days. We reject every doctrine which denies or limits the work of creation as taught in Scripture. In our days it is denied or limited by those who assert, ostensibly in deference to science, that the world came into existence through a process of evolution; that is, that it has, in immense periods of time, developed more or less of itself. Since no man was present when it pleased God to create the world, we must look for a reliable account of creation to God’s own record, found in God’s own book, the Bible. We accept God’s own record with full confidence and confess with Luther’s Catechism: ‘I believe that God has made me and all creatures.’”
[ii] These two pictures are from Ken Ham’s material that I got in a 1988 conference. They illustrate well what the Confessional Lutherans are conceding whenever they foreswear any sort of apologetics. I have pointed out repeatedly that in the New Testament only when the Apostles where speaking to Old Testament Jews did they preach Christ as the fulfillment of Old Testament prophesy. With the heathen world they preached based on the Creator God. The very thing we’re so timid to assert, confess. In one of my Adult Confirmation classes, a Ph.D. biochemical engineer was a confirmed evolutionist. When I showed the bottom two slides he all but came out of his chair denying he supported any of the things the balloons advertised. I said that I didn’t think he did, but where do he think those ideas blossomed from? He then said, “So if I don’t believe in a six-day creation, I’m not a Christian.” I replied according to how Augustine said the Bishop of Milan replied to Simplicianus , “Bill, you’re not a Christian because you never come to church.”
