Every so often the Creation debate comes up in our circles and there is a funny eddy that will make me burst into laughter if I ever come across it in its natural element.
The conversation goes something like
Pat: Well I think the world took time. It can’t all happen at once. We know there are probable lines of development.
Mike: That isn’t what it says in Genesis.
Pat: Oh thats just poetry.
I’m not here to discuss Day Age Theory or Young Earth. More importantly there are people who believe because Genesis is high poetry, it can not be true. It is only art.
We have so separated art from reality and farther, from the work we do, that an event recorded factually cannot be written in verse.
And if something is written in verse, it is glossing over salient facts.
In high school logic there was a method of debate called taking the bull by the horns. From rampant overuse, I learned that most problems and opposing positions (if I was right) were a feature, not a bug, of the resolution. You had to embrace the sticky point.
So stick with me here.
God wrote the world in poetry.
We picture getting up and going to work in the daily way, involving a hard hat and a shovel or a laptop and a good connection.
We lock in to what is there and work from it.
That is not the way God made the world.
He spoke it, in complete piecemeal portions, in six successive parts, rounded out with the seventh, all to be repeated for all time. Day after day he pours forth speech. Christ sustains all.
God wrote the world in poetry, so Genesis was begun in poetry. We live inside a poem of God.
Each piece and portion was intended to reveal more about Him and bring more glory to Him. He is not lying or obfuscating his methods. He composed — which shows us more about who He is, the point.
Our world was written in Rhyme Royal.
Someone needs to tell Pat and Mike to look on the sunnyside and not be negative.
Further Up and Further In
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