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Always Trust God’s Word

We live in a time when information comes at us like a frenzy. It goes so superfast! The difference between what I had to learn in school and what my parents had to learn is huge. But I still had to go to a physical library to gather information. My kids go onto the internet and they have it.

With information also comes a potential danger. Over the years, I have seen what information can do to our faith and trust in God’s word. Several times I have witnessed Christians cast aside their faith because new information taught that the Bible was incorrect. Many YouTube atheists seem to fall into this category.

It seems good to me, therefore, to have a look at why we should always trust the Bible in spite of everything.

Despite Everything?

Trust God’s word in spite of everything? That’s not very open-minded! Have you ever heard that? I have, quite often in fact. It seems to be the biggest fear of many Christians. Who wants to be labelled narrow-minded. In our drive to be broad-minded, certain things are sometimes pushed aside a little too easily.

I will cite an example without elaborating. I know of a church where the question whether a woman can preach is currently in play. One of the arguments the proponents have is constructed as follows:

Nowadays, women are allowed to participate in all kinds of activities in our society that used to be really reserved for men only.

Then comes their conclusion:

The fact that women were not allowed to do certain things was mainly culturally determined and is a thing of the past. Today, we have no problems with it. So why should we as a church remain stuck in the past?

Again, I am not addressing the example itself. The issue in this video is not whether a woman is allowed to preach or not. What matters to me is the way the case is being argued by the proponents. The way they did it in this discussion is very sloppy and not thought through properly. Moreover, it puts the Bible aside. The argument basically says that, like society, we have to go along with certain changes. It actually says, not in so many words, that the Bible is outdated. The moment someone then comes back with arguments based on the Biblical texts, they are dismissed as legalistic or short-sighted and narrow-minded. Having a discussion based on sound reasoning and with Biblical arguments then seems further away than ever.

In all sorts of discussions and debates, you hear the same complaint. It doesn’t matter whether you are talking about abortion, LGBTI+, or evolution. The discussion can even be about war. As soon as you try to explain your views from the Bible, it is quickly seen as old-fashioned, stupid, and petty.

But let’s be clear about this, a Christian simply cannot, and should not, put the Bible aside. If that means that we are labelled as being narrow-minded and short-sighted, so be it! Paul did not let that stop him either when he wrote Timothy.

2 Timothy 3:16-17

All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: that the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works.

Nor did Paul come with nice story that sounded good.

1 Corinthians 2:1-2

And I, brethren, when I came to you, came not with excellency of speech or of wisdom, declaring unto you the testimony of God. For I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified.

Rejection Begins at Church

Many Western cultures were formed around the Christian world-view. Granted, not everything always went completely according to God’s word, but still, by far most people had a deep respect for the Bible. Not for nothing was the Bible seen as authoritative in terms of morality.

Around 1830, this authority was challenged. Now, there were always those who did not take the Bible seriously, but 1830-33 can be identified as a turning point. In that year, Charles Lyell published the book ‘The Principles of Geology’, in which he proposed that the age of the earth was several hundred million years. With this, he thus deviated from the general assumption that the earth would be around 6,000 years old.

The preachers were shocked! Because, after all, Lyell was a scientist, he who would know what he was talking about, right? Very soon, ministers and theologians started looking for ways to fit those millions of years into Genesis. Later, of course, we had Charles Darwin with his theory of evolution. That too had to be solved. Apparently Adam and Eve may have been the first humans in God’s image, but humanoids had to have lived before them. Thus, God’s own words, and later those of the Lord Jesus, were put aside for human ideas.

For example, we read the following in Genesis 2:24

Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.

God is clearly referring here to His creation of Adam and that He formed Eve from a rib of Adam. Next, we see that the Lord Jesus refers to this when He talks about marriage in Mark 10:6-8

But from the beginning of the creation God made them male and female. For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and cleave to his wife; and they twain shall be one flesh: so then they are no more twain, but one flesh.

When people in our western societies saw that Christian leaders rejected Genesis as literal history, their respect for the entire Bible disappeared very quickly. If church leaders do not even believe this book is true, why should the world base its morality and its other values on a book that modern science has supposedly shown to be false?

Yes, you hear correctly. I put my reproach mostly on ourselves. If, as Christians, we no longer take the Bible seriously, why should non-believers?

As a result, the Bible is no longer respected as a guide. This phenomenon is happening in the world as well as within the church. We see it happening all around us. I only have to mention same-sex marriage, and everyone is already starting to rear their head. Or how about the LGBTI+ discussion? Even within the church, we see increasing acceptance of this hype. Why? Because we want to move with the times, we want to be modern and not missing out on the hype. The loss of biblical authority is mainly due to the compromises we make with secular ideas on, for instance, the origin of creation.

Little Things

I remember well that I had to write many essays when I studied theology in England. In those essays, I sometimes used year numbers of specific events. To indicate whether it was an event after Christ, or an event before Christ, I used the usual English designations B.C. (Before Christ) and A.D. (Anno Domini, in the year of our Lord). One of teachers advised me to rather use B.C.E (Before Common Era) and C.E. (Common Era). That would be less offensive if my essays went through a final assessment in a secular university.

The essays were normally graded by my teachers, who were all Christian, but to get university approval, the essays were sometimes also checked by teachers at the mainstream university, and they were not all religious.

My indignation was great. I was studying theology, the studies of studies! No way, that I was going to replace those wonderful, Jesus-referenced abbreviations with those ugly, far-fetched, worldly abbreviations. My teacher was a bit surprised (and possibly startled by my Dutch clarity). He said this might cause the university to revise my grade downwards. I then told him that it’s fine for them to do something like that, let them try! In fact, the good thing was that you always have the right to dispute such decisions, and you can get a second opinion through an independent third party. It didn’t have to come to that. My grades were never revised downwards.

God’s Word Stands Firm!

It is now 2025, almost 30 years since I was baptised. In those 30 years, I have seen many times, so-called, scientific claims passing by claiming that something in the Bible was wrong. If I had accepted those claims as truth there would have been very little left of the Bible. Let me cite two examples.

Camels in Abrahams time?

In Genesis 24, Abraham’s servant took 10 camels on his journey in search of a wife for Isaac. But in 2014, the New York Times headlined: Camels Had No Business in Genesis.ⁱ

The archaeologists, Erez Ben-Yosef and Lidar Sapir-Hen, used radiocarbon dating to pinpoint the earliest known domesticated camels in Israel to the last third of the 10th century B.C. — centuries after the patriarchs lived and decades after the kingdom of David, according to the Bible.

Oh no! Now what? The Biblical timeline is wrong! We can do two things. Either we start tinkering with God’s word, or we trust that the Bible is ultimately right after all. And what turns out?

The archaeological evidence shows they were wrong. Instead of camels being first domesticated only in 1200 or 900 BC (that’s that 10^ecentury they were talking about), archaeologists now say that Bactrian camels, or two-humped camels were first domesticated as early as the fourth millennium BC.ⁱⁱ Dromedaries were domesticated no later than the last half of the second millennium BC (probably much earlier). Significantly, the Bactrian camel was widely used for long-distance transport in Mesopotamia, Abraham’s homeland, more than 1,000 years before he left for the Promised Land.ⁱⁱⁱ

Ida! The Fossil that Proves our Ape Ancestry.

The Bible teaches that we are all descended from the first humans, Adam and Eve. It also teaches that we are created in God’s image. Earlier we saw what secular geologists think of the idea that this creation is recent. Church leaders were quick to fit the six days of creation into a framework of millions and later billions of years.

But yes, then the idea of evolution came peeking around the corner. Man would be nothing but an ennobled primate. Many Christians did not yet go along with this. After all, this touches directly on who we are.

Genesis 1:27

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

Then came the finale proof, at least according to Mr David Attenborough. In a one-hour television documentary, first broadcast on the BBC on 26 May 2009, Attenborough triumphantly recounted the discovery of an early primate fossil. Darwinius masillae, nicknamed Ida, was believed to be about 47 million years old and was well-preserved.

David Attenborough said, "This little creature is going to show us our connection with all the rest of the mammals."^iv

In the documentary, he said "the [missing] link, the would have said, until now is missing. Well, it is no longer missing" and the narrator concluded by saying, "She [Ida] could rewrite science; she could confirm Darwinian theory, and debunk creationism; she could also question religion itself."^v

Unfortunately, this find was reason enough for several Christians to abandon their last faith in the Bible. Paul warned Titus about the false stories, and even though he talked about the people of Crete, I think we can learn something from his words. He says in Titus 1:10-11

For there are many unruly and vain talkers and deceivers, specially they of the circumcision: whose mouths must be stopped, who subvert whole houses, teaching things which they ought not, for filthy lucre’s sake.

And Timothy too was warned in 2 Timothy 2:16-18

But shun profane and vain babblings: for they will increase unto more ungodliness. And their word will eat as doth a canker: of whom is Hymenæus and Philetus; who concerning the truth have erred, saying that the resurrection is past already; and overthrow the faith of some.

And again, how regrettable and sad that there were Christians who, among others, stepped away from their faith in the Bible because of these so-called ‘scientific’ findings. Especially very sad because it did not take long to draw the conclusion that the find wasn’t as ‘glorious’ as it appeared at first sight. Five months later, two small articles appeared, tucked away somewhere deep in the caverns of the internet. One article, from BBC News, headlined "Primate fossil ‘not an ancestor’" in which Dr Erik Seiffert says "Ida belonged to a group more closely linked to lemurs than to monkeys, apes or us"^vi The other article, from The New York Times, headlined "Fossil Skeleton Known as Ida Is No Ancestor of Humans" in which experts protested saying "Ida was not even a close relative"^vii

These are just two examples, but we could go on like this for a while. What a misery if you have to pin your hopes on this! It is much better to keep our hope fixed on God’s word, the Bible.

2 Timothy 2:19

Nevertheless the foundation of God standeth sure, having this seal, The Lord knoweth them that are his. And, Let every one that nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity.

Science and the Bible

Science is great, but there is a big difference between what we call, exact science and historical science.

Exact science gives us things like the internet, advanced tools for brain surgery, and new medicines, for example. We don’t need evolutionary theory to practise exact science, for instance. Don’t think that a heart or brain surgeon can only operate if he has a vast knowledge of the hypothetical story of the primordial soup. Exact science is not in conflict with the Bible because it deals with that which you could do in a laboratory, or about how the world works today. It is all based on what you see. You can do experiments and observe what happens. Anyone can repeat an experiment and see if they get the same results. Testable and repeatable science is why we can thus make all kinds of inventions.

Historical science is concerned with what happened in the past, but you cannot do experiments with past events. An example is palaeontology (the study of fossils). Scientists can dig up a dinosaur find and then tell a story about how long ago the beast lived and died. But the scientist’s ideas about how old the dinosaur is cannot be tested directly because it happened in the past without direct witnesses. Even the dating methods used are not free of assumptions. It will be a bit much to explain now, but you can read more about it on this website.

The points on which people attack the Bible are almost all historical events. But we must remember that the findings of those engaged in historical scholarship are always based on presuppositions. Both creationists (those who assume a Biblical world-view) and evolutionists (those who assume a world-view in which there is no room for God nor the Bible) have the same facts, the same fossils, rocks, living things, and so on.

Those facts are interpreted by creationists and evolutionists as evidence for one view or the other, but the facts in themselves are not automatically evidence for creation or evolution. So everyone has the same evidence, just different interpretations.

The difference between creationists and evolutionists is that the former group accepts the Bible as witness. In the Bible, we have eyewitnesses to the great events of the past. Creationists can use those witnesses in historical science to examine the details. For example, they use a small-scale disaster like the volcanic eruption of Mt St Helens in 1980 to explain the global flood and what may have happened during the flood year (Genesis 7:11-19). Evolutionists have to explain things with their own ideas. But because an evolutionist is committed to the naturalistic world-view. That is the world-view in which there is no place for God or the Bible. This obliges them to themselves to come up with explanations in which there is no trace of any reference to the Bible.

A good example was the discovery of soft tissue in dinosaur bones. The creationist had no problem because he had already suggested that dinosaurs were not millions of years old at all. In partially fossilised bones from recent periods, you can expect soft tissue. The evolutionists could not understand how that soft tissue could still be present after millions of years. Soon they were already coming up with solutions. These are solutions, none of which can be tested. Even if the solution put forward would work with bones from a cow that was slaughtered yesterday, it is nigh impossible to verify those findings once we are 1,000 years down the line, so to speak. Neither the creationist’s nor the evolutionist’s findings can be empirically tested. What then remains in this case is the most logical finding: Either the bones were not old at all, or by some extraordinary event, the soft tissue managed to be intact even after millions of years.

The Bible explains much of history in a much more logical way than any other humanly conceived idea. The Bible is the history book of the universe, so it should be our authority when it comes to looking at the past.

2 Timothy 3:16-17

Conclusion

In my examples, it seems mainly that I am talking about the constant attack on the Bible by evolutionists. But nothing could be further from the truth! The Bible as a whole is under attack on many levels. The attacks focus on the morality of the Bible; the patriarchs and whether they really lived; whether the Bible approves of slavery or not, and what about:

The Bible is full of contradictions and inconsistencies;
The Bible is full of violence, genocide, prejudice and injustice, often ordered by God;
Biblical descriptions of nature and natural history are hopelessly at odds with science;
The Bible was written by ancient and primitive people and has no value to modern people;
Christians cannot agree on what it says, so what does it matter if it is true or not.

Nonetheless, I believe that one of the most devastating attacks on the Bible comes from the evolutionist camp, and the attempt by Christians to align the first 11 chapters of Genesis with the evolutionary hypothesis. This dramatical because it carries through to the New Testament. Indeed, it renders Jesus’ preaching implausible. Jesus, and with him the apostles, were convinced of the historicity of Genesis 1-11. They used it in their teaching and letters! This is touching right on who Jesus is. Was He God? If so, then He was obviously fooling people when He talked about Genesis as if it were history. But for many, the conclusion will rather be that He was just a man of His time, He did not know any better.

But we know that Jesus was much more than just human! His words are true and come directly from the Father.

John 12:49-50

For I have not spoken of myself; but the Father which sent me, he gave me a commandment, what I should say, and what I should speak. And I know that his commandment is life everlasting: whatsoever I speak therefore, even as the Father said unto me, so I speak.

Why did Jesus say this? In the verse before, He warns us not to disregard His words.

John 12:48

He that rejecteth me, and receiveth not my words, hath one that judgeth him: the word that I have spoken, the same shall judge him in the last day.

We cannot and should not bend the Bible to our will and liking. Not even if the whole world thinks of us as being stupid or short-sighted. The Pharisees were also very skilled at bending God’s word. Jesus spoke of the Pharisees in Matthew 15:14

Let them alone: they be blind leaders of the blind. And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.

Don’t be guided by anyone who has added or taken anything away from God’s word. Open your eyes and read God’s word, the Bible, for yourself. We have nothing to be ashamed of.

Isaiah 40:8

The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.

AMEN

Endnotes:

i The New York Times Company, Camels Had No Business in Genesis, 10-02-2014, [Internet] <https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/11/science/camels-had-no-business-in-genesis.html>, accessed 21-02-2025.

ii Wikipedia, Bactrian camel, [Internet] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bactrian_camel>, accessed 21-02-2025.

iii David Spoede, Did Abraham have Camels?, [Internet] <https://biblearchaeology.org/research/chronological-categories/patriarchal-era/5060-did-abraham-have-camels>, accessed 21-02-2025.

iv BBC, Exclusive BBC One documentary uncovers our earliest ancestor, 19-05-2009, [Internet] <https://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2009/05_may/19/ancestor.shtml>, accessed 21-02-2025.

v Apologeet, YouTube, [Internet] <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnXkP63lJvA>, text in brackets added by me, accessed 21-02-2025.

vi BBC News, Primate fossil ‘not an ancestor’, 21-10-2009, [Internet] <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8318643.stm>, accessed 22-02-2025.

vii The New York Times, Fossil Skeleton Known as Ida Is No Ancestor of Humans, 22-10-2009, [Internet] <https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/23/science/23fossil.html>, translation by Jurgen Hofmann, accessed 22-02-2025.

Always Trust God’s Word