Archive for Creation
“When your son asks…” Part 4: How to answer your children’s questions
Posted by: | CommentsIn your endeavor to answer children’s questions, it is important to keep a few things in mind:
Seek to build within your child a Biblical worldview, that is, a Biblical filter for seeing the world. We all have certain lenses by which see all of life through. For the Christian, these underlying assumptions about the world should increasingly conform to the truths of Scripture. As parents, you play a vital role in shaping those assumptions for children, and therefore in answering questions, as in all conversation and instruction with your child, you must consciously strive to help children and teens see the world through the truth contained in God’s word. The Bible is your ultimate authority in instructing your children.
Welcome the questions! Your child’s inquisitiveness is a gift from God and a vital part of their learning and discovery process. However, if you sense that they are asking questions to challenge your authority or avoid obedience, deal with this appropriately. For example, if a simple explanation to a “why” concerning a request does not satisfy a child, say to your child, “First, do what I’ve asked, then I’ll answer any questions you have about it.” This shows your child the importance of obedience, as well as your interest in answering any legitimate questions. A similar answer can be given if the questions come at times which it you are unable to answer. Return to these questions later for further instruction. The time you spend addressing your child’s curiosities, not only teaches them about the world in which they live, but also about how much you love and care for them.
If you don’t know the answer, find it out! Not only should you be honest when you don’t know the answer to your child’s question, but you can also use this as a time to show your child where to turn for answers. Is it a question whose answer can be found in Scripture? Open your Bible, consult a Bible dictionary, or call your pastor or trusted Christian friend for help discovering the appropriate passage. Is it a question about how something works? Check out a book from the library, find a reliable website with information, or call a friend knowledgeable in this area. By so doing, you model to your child the importance of life-long learning as well as share a fun and meaningful learning experience with them.
For more on answering children’s questions, check out the other “When your son asks…” posts:
Part 1: Why Should I Answer Why?, Part 2: The Healthy Lifestyle, Part 3: Death & Tragedy
“When your son asks…” Part 3: Death and Tragedy
Posted by: | CommentsToday I’d like to tackle a tough question, actually a question not just asked by kiddos, but one that many adults struggle with as well—death. When we experience death—be it of a family member, friend, or even beloved pet—or when we see deadly disasters, such as the recent earthquake in Haiti, we are often left with an unsettled “why” question. Perhaps more than any other topic, parents are unsure how to answer these tough questions from their children. At times it may seem easier to give simple answers such as “they’re in a better place” or “it was just their time,” or perhaps avoid the topic all together: My grandparents used to tell a humorous story about my mom as a child and her pet goldfish. Every day when she got home from school, my mom would run to check on her goldfish and feed it. One day while she was at school, the goldfish died. In an effort to avoid heartache, my grandma sent my grandpa to the store to buy a new one, hoping my mom wouldn’t notice the difference. The only problem—the goldfish he brought back was much larger. They put it in the tank and when my mom got home, she ran to check on the goldfish. Fearing her reaction and the ensuing conversation, my grandma soon heard her daughter exclaim: “Momma! Momma! My fish grew today!”
Perhaps you’ve been tempted to spare your child heartache through similar means. But the reality is, death is unavoidable and each encounter with it provides an opportunity to learn, grow, and place faith in our all-loving, all-powerful, Father.
In understanding the answer to this question, we return once again to the three-part story of God’s creation, man’s sin, and God’s redemption.
When God first created the world, it was good, actually He called it, “very good” (Genesis 1:31). There was no death or decay. Violence, disasters, and heartache were unknown to the world. Man experienced perfect fellowship with their Creator. However, in man’s deliberate rejection of the Creator, sin entered the world. This sin changed everything. As God said, “in the day you eat of, you will surely die” (Genesis 2:17), and thusly death entered the world.
This death is two-fold: a spiritual separation from the Creator and physical death (which also brings with it aging and illness). A few weeks ago at the Oatway Children’s Life Group, we learned about the devastating effects of sin, making a “Death came through sin” collage which included pictures of people, places, and animals demonstrating some of the effects of sin. Pictures included dangerous animals, buildings destroyed by disaster, people fighting, dead plants, families plagued by famine, and signs of war and pollution—all of which were not a part of God’s design for Earth but brought on through our sin.
When facing the issue of death in your family, it is important to explain to children that this is not how God intended the world to be. As a loving God, His plan was for us to experience paradise—not pain and suffering. Those came into the picture when we rebelled against His created order. Children (and us adults too!) need to understand God’s love in times of tragedy. Explaining the underlying reason for death and heartache can be a helpful first step in building trust amidst sorrow.
And it doesn’t simply in there. As Paul says, “But thanks be to God for His indescribable gift!” (2 Corinthians 9:15). Mankind is not left in a cycle of heartache as consequence for our sin. Although we fully deserve to experience death and separation from the source of life, God provided a solution. He sent His son, Jesus, to take on our sins through death on the cross and then conquer death through His resurrection. Because of this sacrifice, we can have our sins forgiven and enjoy a reversal of its effects.
Yes, we will still experience pain on Earth, but we have the promise of something more. We have the opportunity to have a relationship with Him right now. We also have the promise that through accepting this gift, we will be with Him for eternity (Luke 23:43). And one day, He will recreate the Heavens and Earth, restoring it to its original state of perfection; we will have new bodies, ones not subject to death, pain, or sorrow.
Explaining this hope to children can provide comfort in the face of death or fear of their own death.
The subject of death does not need to by shied away from and may be a topic to consider discussing with your child before faced with it personally, as it provides a great opportunity for you to speak openly and honestly with your child, helping them to see God’s bigger picture, including His love and mercy. Explore the Scriptures with your child, discovering His promises about Heaven. A book I highly recommend on the subject is “Heaven for Kids” by Randy Alcorn (the adult version is fantastic as well). In this book, Randy Alcorn builds hope and anticipation through understanding the realities of an eternity with our Creator, something that we all need a good reminder of!
“When your son asks…” Part 2: The healthy lifestyle
Posted by: | CommentsHave you ever experienced the “why’s” of a healthy lifestyle from your kids? “Why do I have to eat my vegetables?” “Why do I need to brush my teeth?” “Go to bed already?! Why?” “I’m still hungry, why can’t I have another cupcake?”
A key aspect to raising children is of course teaching them these healthy habits–everything from eating properly to getting enough rest and exercise to good hygiene. Sometimes getting a child to comply with such requests can be like pulling teeth. So how can parents and caregivers use the treasures of Christ’s wisdom to address the “why’s” of taking care of our health?
To begin with, there is creation. As the pinnacle of His seven day creation, God made man in His own image, carefully forming him and breathing life into him. God continues to be the Creator of each person, as described in Psalm 139:13-14 “For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth.”
With the introduction of sin into the world, the matter of taking care of oneself became even more important! Now the earth is filled with illness, disease, aging–as well as the temptation to be lazy, neglectful, and gluttonous! These can make for a sickening combination. Proverbs 25:16 addresses the matter of unhealthy habits and their consequences quite bluntly: “If you have found honey, eat only enough for you, lest you have your fill of it and vomit.”
Through proper training (1 Corinthians 9:27) and Christ’s power (Philippians 4:13), we can overcome these temptations and live as He has called us to, properly stewarding God’s creation.
So, when your teaching your child not too eat too many sweets, to get to bed at the right time, and brush their teeth, you are training them honour the Lord through their faithfulness in taking care of the gift of their lives. People are God’s handiwork and our bodies have been given to us as a gift from Him, of which we are to be good stewards of. Additionally, for the believing child, Scripture teaches (1 Corinthians 6:18-20) that their bodies are God’s temple. Surely such a precious place should be well cared for!
These times of instructing your kids on proper habits provide an opportunity for you to connect the dots between the Scriptures and their life–teaching them about creation: God made them in His image and gave their bodies as a gift; sin: the reason for sickness & temptation to make poor choices; and redemption: through Christ, we have the power to overcome these temptations and live as His temple.
Faith, Truth, Trustworthiness
Posted by: | CommentsFaith in God must be built on truth. If you genuinely desire to see people come to faith in God, you don’t necessarily have to prove God -beyond a shadow of a doubt- and you don’t have to refute all the millions of competing theories or worldviews that attempt to do away with God. Nor should you be afraid of the seemingly boundless evidence that points to a multi-trillion year old earth with evolution and apes walking out of the jungle as fully sensible evolved human beings. In my opinion -that sort of thing is illogical, and I 100% absolutely believe in ridiculing it, criticising it, and rebuking it for the silliness that it is. One thing you must and should be willing to do is to provide a sensible, logical, truthful explanation of the reality of God in this world (1 Peter 3:15).
If truth is real (and I know that it is) then that means that there is a singular valid understanding of reality, i.e. truth is absolute and exclusive. All other understandings of reality which do not correspond to the truthful understanding of reality cannot be valid. They are false. God doesn’t have to prove to us that He is trustworthy. He could just as easily wipe the universe out of existence and be done with it all. God doesn’t have to argue with us that He really does exist. God isn’t bound or constrained by anything to make His case to us for His existence. And yet- God is love. This means that while God doesn’t have to prove anything to us, He chooses to offer concrete undeniable evidences of His existence because He is a loving God and He knows that we are better off knowing Him then not knowing Him. God wants us to trust in Him, to believe in Him, and to consider that He is truthful. So He chooses to show us that He is truthful. Though God is not required to show us that He is truthful, for the sake of love, He decides He will demonstrate that He is true to us. Now, God claims that He created the universe miraculously from nothing. And God wants us to know that we can trust Him when He makes this claim. God intends for us to observe the creation and from the creation, He intends that we should come to a realization of Him. This is for our benefit because of His love for us. How do I know this is the case? God says so in Psalm 19:1-4, and this is the same argument that Paul makes in Romans 1:20.
This means that God desires us to observe His handiwork in nature because He loves us and wants us to find Him truthful and trustworthy in the created order. This means that whatever God says about nature or the world or creation must be true. God says that He supernaturally created the world. And there is a mountain of data that demonstrates the validity of this claim showing us that God is true. If man is trustworthy then man’s claim that we came from apes and evolved from monkeys should correspond with scientific data. Yet there is very little evidence to support this claim (virtually none, in fact).
A man’s faith doesn’t have to be illogical. For faith to be truly faith it will require that you embrace the unseen and those things which are hoped for (Hebrews 11:1), but this doesn’t mean that faith is illogical. Are there things in this world that are true and are not explainable? Absolutely: the parting of the Red Sea, the Incarnation of God, talking Donkeys and Serpents, and raising people back to life after they have been dead awhile. The miraculous is mysterious. God refuses to be placed into a neat tidy little box. He always demonstrates His authority over creation and is never bound to the rules of physics or whatever else may govern our physical universe. There is a great deal of mystery when you embrace the infinite Father and come to realize that His manners and methods are way higher and way smarter and way better than our own (Isaiah 55:9). He is in many regards incomprehensible, yet He is a person that chooses to make Himself known, and He chooses to demonstrate that He is true and that what He says is true. And one area that He chooses to make this argument about Himself is in the area of creation verses evolution.
So when a person indicates a desire to believe and trust in God, yet expresses reservations because they’ve been deceived with a bunch of so-called “evidence” that proves the so-called truth of “evolution” or that the earth is trillions of years old, I wholeheartedly engage in the debate. If I am able I will destroy every lofty opinion that is raised against God. I will tear down and annihilate, if I am able, every argument for evolution (2 Corinthians 10:5). I will not hesitate in the slightest regard. Some say that you “…just have to have faith.” I agree. There are things about God that are mysterious that you must accept and embrace by faith, and I will never dispute that. But I will not lay down in front of the bull-dozer of academia and stand idly by while scientists suggest a multi-trillion year old evolved planet is the mother of us all when there is good data that supports the Biblical account of creation and defies the evolutionary hypothesis. I will not put good logical arguments on the shelf in the face of academic ridicule, and say to my struggling friend “You just gotta have faith.” This misunderstands the nature of a relationship with God that is based on trust, and it makes all of the extreme efforts that God goes through in the scriptures to show us that He is trustworthy somewhat confusing. The nature of the struggle is that my friend wants to trustin God, but is wondering if God is trustworthy. And in this arena I know that God has given full license to Christians to pursue that argument to the very end, to defend His honor, to stand for His truthfulness, and to call others to trust in Him. He gives us license to do this in that He did it himself all throughout the history of Israel and most specifically in the person of Jesus Christ.
What happened to the Dinosaurs?
Posted by: | CommentsWhen first exposed to the creation model of earth history, most people usually ask the same question: “What about the dinosaurs?”
The Bible says that all things were created during the six-day creation week (Exodus 20:11, etc.), and this would include the dinosaurs. In the grand scale of creation humans and dinosaurs would have been created on the same day, which is Day Six. The reptilian dinosaurs were (by definition) land animals which were created on Day Six under the category of “beast of the earth” (There were also large marine or ocean-dwelling reptiles created on Day Five (v. 21). Along with all animals and mankind, they were created to be plant eaters (vs. 29,30), for there was no death before Adam and Eve rebelled against God.
Of the many dinosaur fossils found, almost all give evidence of being plant eaters exclusively. This is very significant. Several of the dinosaur fossil types, however, do possess sharp teeth, sharp claws, spikes, armor plates, etc., perhaps used for a variety of offensive or defensive purposes. Of course scientists can never be certain about a creature’s habits when they only have bits of dead bones to study, and most dinosaur fossils are extremely fragmentary, usually consisting of part of a single bone. And many animals alive today that have sharp teeth use them for strictly peaceful ends. The presence of claws, spikes, and sharp teeth may, in fact, be for peaceful self-protection purposes, however this still begs the question: why do dinosaurs need to protect themselves in the Garden of Eden when there is still no death and no violence? In addition, enough is known of dinosaurs to strongly suspect that some of them ate meat. The Bible teaches that during the creation all creatures were peaceful, and there were no predatory creatures. Yet, we clearly have predatory creatures today. How did this happen?
The Bible doesn’t say when they gained the ability to do violence to each other, but I feel it does give us a clue. When Adam and Eve rebelled, God pronounced the awful curse of death on all of creation. In doing so, He not only fulfilled His promise that they would begin to die (2:17), but evidently, He actually changed the genetic makeup of each “kind” so that all their descendants would forever be different. He changed Eve’s body structure so that she would feel pain during child birth (3:16); apparently Eve could, prior to the fall, have children in a relatively peaceful way that did not result in pain. He changed the genetic make-up of the plants (v. 18), so that they would produce thorns. Apparently there were no sharp thorns on any plants prior to Adam and Eve’s sin. He also changed the animals, as well (v. 14), which resulted in the presence of snakes that crawl on their bellies. It is completely plausible that during this time other animals began to morph genetically in response to the curse. Perhaps at this time dinosaurs and other animals acquired or began to acquire body parts designed for aggression or protection. This may be over-speculation, but sin ruins everything, and before long the entire planet was corrupt (Genesis 6:11,12, 7).
In fact, the Bible teaches that creation knows that it is corrupt, and it longs to be renewed. In Romans 8:18-22, Paul mentions that the whole world is groaning in agony until Jesus returns and restores everything to the beauty that it had from the beginning. Isn’t it interesting to look at this beautiful world around us, to observe that it still has a lot of beauty left in it, and yet it has a lot of ugliness in it as well… and that ugliness is our fault. But what strikes me is that as I look at the world, the world looks back, and hopes and waits for things to be made right.
But whatever happened to the dinosaurs? Obviously they all died out. But when and how did this happen? God had told Noah to bring pairs of each kind of land animal on board the Ark, including, evidently, the dinosaurs (Genesis 7:15). Recognizing that as reptiles, dinosaurs would have continued to grow as long as they lived, implying that the oldest would be the largest, there was plenty of room on board the Ark for the younger ones. Thus the dinosaurs on board the Ark probably would have been young adults, no bigger than a cow perhaps. The Flood of Noah would have killed off all the remaining dinosaurs, and there is much archeological evidence that points toward this fact: most fossilized bones are often found in large pits where water runoff would have pooled, and settled as the earth slowly dried out after the flood. But the world after the Flood was much different than before, with much less vegetation and a colder, harsher climate, and evidently the dinosaurs gradually died out. Perhaps they were even hunted to extinction, as would be indicated by the many legends of dragons, the descriptions of which closely resemble dinosaurs.