The Kindness of Six-Day Creation

[This was the main talk I gave at the Fight Laugh Feast Conference 2023. The video/audio for this talk (and all of the talks) is available here.]

Introduction
The title for this talk is The Kindness of Six Day Creation. I want to talk about the kindness of creationism and the cruelty of theistic evolution, and how these tendencies impact society and culture and politics. My basic thesis is that the further Christians and a culture get from a clear understanding of God’s sovereign, personal creation of all things in six days just like Genesis 1 says – the further we get away from that, the further we get from the kindness of God, the less kind we and our world will be and the more cruel it will become. The kindness of autonomous man (man divorced from God’s Word/law) is cruel. And the creative sovereignty of God (the absolute, exhaustive authority of God over all creation) is more gracious than we can ever imagine. The origin of kindness, like all things, is in the Creator God and His creation of all things. You cannot have true kindness apart from the kindness of the Creator. And however you believe this world came to be, that will be a cornerstone of your paradigm for what kindness actually is. Either we will have the kindness of God found His Word, His law, His Christ driving our culture, driving our politics, or else we will have the cruelty of man, making it up as he goes along, crushing the weak and the innocent, often all in the name of science and freedom and being nice. 

The Cruelty of Theistic Evolution
Perhaps one of the most appalling things about 2020 and the so-called COVID pandemic was the collusion of major evangelical Christian leaders with Francis Collins, the then-director of the National Institute for Health (NIH). My friend Megan Basham chronicled this complicity in an article published by the DailyWire back in February 2022, from which I’m drawing extensively for what follows. Tim Keller interviewed Francis Collins in May 2020, which included a digression where Keller and Collins agreed that John MacArthur’s church re-opening represented the “bad and ugly” of Christian responses to the virus. In November of 2020, Rick Warren hosted a special broadcast with Francis Collins in which they lamented Christians who questioned the efficacy of masks. Rick Warren said, “Wearing a mask is the great commandment: love your neighbor as yourself,” before going on to argue that religious leaders have an obligation to convince their people to accept government narratives and mandates. 

When Ed Stetzer interviewed Francis Collins in 2021, pastors were exhorted to exert their authority to get their congregations to get vaccinated, wear masks, and comply with the dominant, mainstream narrative. Stetzer’s Billy Graham Center formally partnered with the NIH and CDC to encourage churches to comply with COVID measures. While Anthony Fauci championed the narrative in secular news outlets, Francis Collins used his evangelical testimony to preach so-called “science” to believers. It later came out that Francis Collins wrote Fauci and other leading scientists asking for a “quick and devastating” published take down of the Great Barrington Declaration – co-authored by our friend Dr. Jay Bhattacharya —  a worldwide consortium of scientists raising questions about the dominant narrative supporting shut downs, vaccines, and masks – arguing instead for the efficacy of herd immunity for most healthy individuals, re-opening businesses and schools and targeted care for vulnerable populations. Emails have surfaced with Collins and Fauci mocking these ideas. Meanwhile, the Gospel Coalition was running articles citing Francis Collins as a respected authority.

So how did Francis Collins become such an evangelical hero? In 2007, Francis Collins wrote a book called The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, and apparently most of the evangelical world collectively wet their pants with worldly lust. Finally, one of the high priests of Darwin had abandoned atheism and came out as an evangelical Christian – and not just any scientist, but one of the chief architects of the Human Genome Project – mapping and sequencing the base pairs of human DNA. As the book’s description puts it breathlessly: “An instant bestseller from Templeton Prize-winning author Francis S. Collins, The Language of God provides the best arguments for the integration of faith and logic since C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity.” And how did Collins propose to integrate faith and reason and science? 

Theistic evolution. 

Plastered on the front of the paperback, the New York Times Book Review proclaims: “It lets non-churchgoers consider spiritual questions without feeling awkward.”

The book argues that Genesis is allegorical and should not be read as a literal, historical narrative. Collins likewise dismisses Intelligent Design and champions theistic evolution or what he prefers to call “BioLogos” which became the name of the organization Collins founded the same year dedicated to “faith and science working hand in hand.” What does that mean? According to their website, in addition to other boiler plate creedal affirmations, they say, “We believe that God created the universe, the earth, and all life over billions of years.” And: “We believe that the diversity and interrelation of all life on earth are best explained by the God-ordained process of evolution with common descent. Thus, evolution is not in opposition to God, but a means by which God providentially achieves his purposes.” The statement of faith ends with: “We believe that conversations among Christians about controversial issues of science and faith can and must be conducted with humility, grace, honesty, and compassion as a visible sign of the Spirit’s presence in Christ’s body, the Church.”

One wonders where the humility, grace, honesty, and compassion were during the COVID lockdowns? When millions of our grandparents were locked away alone in nursing homes, when millions of at-risk individuals could not access ongoing health care, cancer screenings, or the encouragement of daily work, school, contact with family and friends or just another human being? Where was that honesty and humility and grace when the Great Barrington Declaration needed a “quick and devastating” take down?

But it’s even worse: Megan Basham writes: “He [Collins] has not only defended experimentation on [babies] obtained by abortion, he has also directed record-level spending toward it. Among the priorities the NIH has funded under Collins — a University of Pittsburgh experiment that involved grafting infant scalps onto lab rats, as well as projects that relied on the harvested organs of aborted, full-term babies. Some doctors have even charged Collins with giving money to research that required extracting kidneys, ureters, and bladders from living infants.” Turns out the kind of humility, grace, honesty, and compassion that they’re talking about could just as easily describe Nazi doctors experimenting on the Jews. Apparently this is the visible sign of the Spirit’s presence they’re talking about: an infant’s scalp grafted onto a lab rat. 

Basham continues: “Under [Collin’s] watch, the NIH launched a new initiative to specifically direct funding to “sexual and gender minorities.” On the ground, this has translated to awarding millions in grants to experimental transgender research on minors, like giving opposite-sex hormones to children as young as eight and mastectomies to girls as young as 13. Another project, awarded $8 million in grants, included recruiting teen boys to track their homosexual activities… on an app without their parents’ consent.” One assumes that destroying teenage lives with perverse experiments is just more humility, grace, and compassion. 

I want to be clear: I know that people are complex. People are capable of sincerely holding contradictory views. And I have every reason to believe that Francis Collins sincerely believes what he has done is consistent with his Christian faith. So the point I want to make is not about Collins in particular, although he provides a very appalling example. The point I want to make is that your view of creation has enormous collective downstream effects. And I don’t actually mean this in the first instance for individuals. I mean it primarily for cultures and nations. Individual people really can be very complex and inconsistent. But over time, culture-wide, ideas have consequences. Individual people are not logically consistent, but generally speaking, cultures over time are logically consistent. Bad arguments, bad assumptions, bad presuppositions really will result in their logical conclusions downstream unless they are interrupted by God’s grace or repentance or both. 

Sovereignty, Authority, and Kindness 
The kindness of autonomous man (man divorced from God’s Word/law) is cruel. And the creative sovereignty of God (the absolute, exhaustive authority of God over all creation) is more gracious than we can ever imagine. 

Many have pointed out that in the modern evangelical church, one of the highest virtues is being “nice” and “winsome.” But what this has frequently translated into is a veneer of niceness on the outside, but piles of compromise and cruelty on the inside. Megan Basham notes this external veneer with Francis Collins who is known for having a sort of Mr. Roger’s demeanor, while overseeing this Hellish research. The thing that people don’t realize is that when we compromise God’s Word, we are always opting for cruelty. When we compromise God’s Word, we are always opting for cruelty. The Word of God is the kindness of God. The Word of God is the mercy of God. The Word of God is the grace of God. And when we turn away from His Word, we are turning away from kindness. We are necessarily embracing cruelty. 

So when the Bible opens with, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth… And God said, let there be light,” we need to read and hear those words as words of supreme kindness. They are words of immediate gift and grace from the Word of the Father. He spoke and all the good and perfect gifts came into being from the Father. To explain these words as mere allegories, mere symbols, mere poetry is not merely to strike at the historicity of the text (although it does that), it is to strike at the kindness of God. The direct, personal creation of God is the intentional, thoughtful kindness of God. What kind of God do we serve? What kind of God brought all things into existence?

In the theistic evolutionary model, the God of Genesis apparently ignited some kind of impersonal dynomite, and then worked through the mechanism of mutations, violence, chaos, and the slow, suffering extinction of millions and millions of species over billions of years to arrive at the current state of biological life on this planet. Notice this: theistic evolution is an attempt to baptize bloodshed, violence, suffering, and death over billions of years. Of course people like Francis Collins also want to describe this so-called “creation” as God’s gracious gift of life and beauty, but what have they actually done? They have evacuated the actual history of that immediate, personal gift spoken from nothing directly into existence, and instead, they have renamed the churning, mutating, boiling, maming, destroying process of evolution – they have attempted to rename that violence “God’s gracious gift of creation.” The irony could not be more sharp: “BioLogos” literally means “life-word” or “word of life” or “life from the word.” But they have completely redefined what those words mean. Don’t worry, those billions of years of mutations and violence and death – don’t worry: God was orchestrating it all. But that doesn’t make it better. That makes it far worse. You’ve redefined life and gift as suffering and death. It doesn’t make it better to say that God did it. 

But wait. There’s more: There is a law of human nature that we really must get fixed in our hearts and minds: the vaguer God’s sovereignty and revelation, the stronger man’s impulse to fill the void. This is an inescapable concept: it is not whether but which: if God is not all-powerful and if God does not reveal Himself clearly and sufficiently, then the fallen nature of man will always tend to fill the void, like water leveling out after being displaced – sinful men always grasp for any power and or revelation that seems unclaimed, which is always a first step to attempting to grasp all of it. Either God is All-Mighty and the Creator of all things and reveals Himself fully and clearly and sufficiently in the Bible, or else men will come along explaining that God took billions of years and natural causes and time and chance and mutations – and all of it is a rebellious attempt to put distance between God and His Creation, and ultimately between God and His Word. “Did God really say?” is always the prelude to attempts to usurp God’s authority. Questioning God’s Word is always an attempt to create a job opening. Sinful man naturally wants some of that power, some of that Creative authority to shape and remake the world according to its own whims, to fill in the so-called “gaps” in authority and revelation. This is what we mean by “autonomous man” – man apart from the Word of God. Sinners want to be their own gods. 

If there are gaps in the creation narrative, well then, what’s the problem with some gaps in the law of Moses? God didn’t tell us everything about creation – Genesis isn’t a science textbook (they say), which quickly turns into: God didn’t tell us everything about politics, law, or how to organize human society – Deuteronomy isn’t a civics textbook. And by the way, neither is it a biology or anatomy textbook, so who’s to say when life exactly begins or why we can’t experiment on little babies or give puberty blockers to teenagers? You see, it’s not very clear exactly what God made or even what God may still be making. If God spent billions of years throwing away other pre-human species, why couldn’t He still be in process with us? Why wouldn’t we still be evolving and if so, why couldn’t we experiment on little babies? If God used natural selection, and mutations, and the violence of stronger species against weaker ones, why couldn’t he use hormone therapy and fetal stem-cell research? The claims of ambiguity in God’s Word are calculated to decrease God’s authority and increase the authority of autonomous man. And the kindness of autonomous man is cruel.   

When the Kindness of God Appeared
When God speaks, the worlds burst into being. When God speaks, there is beauty and glory. When God speaks, there is life and blessing. And when we had rebelled and listened to the voice of the serpent, God spoke again, and He spoke His own beloved Son into the womb of the Virgin Mary. He spoke His own Word made flesh, and He spoke a new world into existence, beauty and glory for our ashes and shame, life and blessing instead of our death and cursing. 

“For we ourselves also were sometimes foolish, disobedient, deceived, serving divers lusts and pleasures, living in malice and envy, hateful, and hating one another. But after that the kindness and love of God our Saviour toward man appeared, Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost; Which he shed on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Saviour; That being justified by his grace, we should be made heirs according to the hope of eternal life.” (Tit. 3:3-7).

And all of this really does have political ramifications. Submission to the authority of God, the authority of His Word is submission to that creative Word, that redemptive word, His blessing-word. And thus, when authorities submit to that Word and exert their authority under His authority, in obedience, they rule in righteousness and true kindness. When a husband submits to God’s Word, he leads his wife in blessing and she is glorified and made more lovely. When a magistrate submits to God’s Word, he leads his citizens in blessing and their lives become more fruitful. When a minister of the gospel submits to God’s Word, he ministers life and blessing to his congregation. 

The Declaration of Independence famously says: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…” 

You cannot have life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness or the kind of limited governments that actually protect those rights, unless you have a Creator who has created men endowed unalienably with those rights. You cannot have that freedom apart from that Creator. And the more muddled you are about that Creator and His creation, the more muddled you will be about those rights and how civil governments actually secure them. 

Most people are familiar with this language from the Declaration, including its appeal to “the laws of nature and of nature’s God,” but perhaps we forget that these laws are appealed to in the context of defending a political revolution. It is on the basis of all men having a Creator that men have the courage to throw off tyranny; it is on the basis of the laws of nature and nature’s God that men have the conviction to risk their lives and livelihoods. You cannot have that kind of courage, that kind of conviction, that kind of freedom, or those kinds of unalienable rights unless God the Father Almighty is the Maker of Heaven and earth, in six ordinary days, and all very good. The more muddled our doctrine of creation, the more muddled our convictions about Genesis 1, the more vague and muddled will be our convictions about our salvation in Christ, and therefore, our convictions about political liberty, our unalienable rights, and what governments are for. We have been shown inestimable kindness in this land, and the Declaration of Independence and the ensuing War were some of the greatest acts of kindness in the history of the West. 

Maybe some of you will remember what President Biden said at a campaign stop in Texas, while running for president in 2020: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: all men and women created by — you know, you know, the thing.” Which is probably a pretty good summary of American cosmology and etiology. “Created by – you know, you know, the thing.” Which is why our politics and government are in the state they are in. You cannot get unalienable rights or a just cause for war or limited government from the – “you know, you know, the thing.” Instead, all you get from that kind vagueness is cruelty.

But Christians in many ways have led the way in this muddle. It has been considered acceptable for a century (or more) now for ministers of the gospel to declare exceptions to their Confessional statements on Creation. It has been declared non-essential to the gospel to believe that Genesis 1 is describing millions or billions of years, ages of time, or else is simply a vague, symbolic poem about God’s creative genius, — you know, you know, the thing. And right on schedule, our courage has diminished, our conviction has faded, and our freedom has been sold for a coddling nanny state of regulations, taxes, porn, sex-change operations, and mindless lockdowns. When the doctrine of Creation is considered non-essential, soon your churches, your businesses, and your unalienable rights will also be considered non-essential. 

Functional Theistic Evolution in Christian Homes
But we must not merely sit here and point at all those liberals and think this is entirely their fault. No, in many fundamentalist homes, where six-day creation has been preached, it has been preached with a functional Darwinism in spirit. Instead of this doctrine of creation filling Christian homes with gratitude and joy and kindness, many have taken this good biblical milk and then boiled their kids in it. What do I mean? How many angry atheists and LGBT activists grew up in evangelical families, churches, and Christian schools and co-ops? And so many Christians shrug and say it’s just a mystery why some Christian kids fall away. But how many of them are so angry and rebellious now because of the way their fathers and mothers talked to them growing up? How many creationist homes are functionally Darwinian and theistic evolutionary homes? How many are full of bitterness, critical spirits, grudges, unconfessed sin, and then how many are covered over in a false veneer of niceness? How many Christians try to cover that kind of violence with vague platitudes about how God is at work in it all? Don’t you see that’s just functional theistic evolution? You can’t call your cruelty to your brother or sister, your son or daughter “God working” and then magically get happy homes, healthy churches, or a truly just society. You cannot have that kind of blessing apart from the kindness of God, which is to say complete submission and obedience to the Word of God dwelling in us richly. 

There is a great deal to this, but we’re talking about the kindness of God’s creation by the Word from nothing, so let’s simply focus on our words. We are made in the image of God, and one of the ways we reflect His glory is in the power of our words. This was the first task given to Adam in the garden: to name the animals and whatever he called them, that was their name. As God created the universe through naming, we reflect that power and glory in our words by constantly naming what is going on around us. Our words are powerful because they mimic the Word of our Maker. This is why James says that the tongue is like the rudder of a great ship turning worlds this way and that; the tongue is a flame thrower: it has the power to destroy whole worlds. Provers 12:18 says that some words stab and pierce like a sword with violence, but the tongue of the wise gives good health. Proverbs 15:4 says a wholesome tongue is a tree of life, but a perverse mouth can break hearts. Proverbs 18:21 says that death and life are in the power of the tongue, and we eat the fruit of our own mouths. We are either speaking words of life and eating life and feeding life to those around us, or else we are speaking words of death and poisoning ourselves and those around us. Proverbs 26:8 says that lying hates those afflicted by it and flattery works ruin and destruction. A foolish and loose woman flatters and manipulates and makes her home an awful place to live, but a wise woman opens her mouth with wisdom and the law of kindness is on her tongue. 

So what is the dominant tone of your home? What is the tone of your marriage? What is it like to ride in your family car? What is it like at your dinner table? Is the dominant tone kindness and mercy, joy and laughter? Or it is harsh, biting, criticizing, angry, static, constantly correcting with a veneer of niceness, especially when guests are around? The name for that is hypocrisy. The name for that is lying. And it’s a functional Darwinism. You cannot plant harsh words and reap a joyful family. You cannot plant hatred, bitterness, envy, or resentment and then expect to reap fellowship and righteousness in your home. Darwin says that you can get order and beauty out of chaos, mutation, and violence. And theistic evolution claims that God works that way. But that’s a lie, and it’s an even worse lie when you try to decorate it with Bible verses, saying that God is at work through your violent words. No, He is not. Or He may be at work, but He may not be doing what you think He’s doing. You cannot bite and devour one another and call that a Christian home. You cannot graft an infant scalp on the back of a rat and call that compassion. 

No one in this room as spoken perfectly. No one has only planted kindness. Everyone has said things they shouldn’t have. Everyone has been sharp, critical, thoughtless, complaining. So what do we do? The answer is here. We who are unkind must turn to the One who is kind. We must turn to His Word, turn to His Creative Word, that not only created all things in the beginning in six days, but has set about to re-create all things by the Word of His Power, the Word of His infinite kindness in three days. And so what is that Word? The word is this: Because of the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ, If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. There is nothing so damaging as harsh words, lying words, bitter words, biting words, but there is nothing so healing, so restoring, so kind and gracious as the words: “I sinned against you, please forgive me.” If you have made messes with your words, this is the only way to clean them up. If you have stabbed and harmed one another, this is the only medicine that will bring healing to your home. And this is particularly true for husbands and fathers. This kindness is freely on offer to all who ask.

And notice that language: He is faithful and just to forgive us and cleanse us. This is the beginning of true Christian justice. This is the politics of six-day creation. The same God who spoke the light into existence and formed the firmament and made dry ground, and filled it all with stars and birds and fish and animals and man, the same God Who is only Light, invites us to walk with Him in the light and have fellowship with one another as the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all unrighteousness (1 Jn. 1:7).

Conclusion
We have this blood. We know what to do about our sin. If we get this right in our marriages, families, and churches, then He will remake our land. If God turned the keys over to evangelical churches in this land tomorrow, there’s a high likelihood that all we would get is a bunch of Francis Collins running this land.

What Christians lack in this land is not numbers, what we lack is God’s blessing. And the only way to God’s blessing is through the blood of Jesus Christ. This is the Politics of Six-Day Creation. God the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth, Man and Woman in His image, in six days, and all very good. That is His original blessing, and although we’ve thrown it away, He has sent His only Son to restore it to us, so that we might come under that blessing again, so that nothing can stand before us. We must have that blessing, that Creator God, so that we may stand with courage and conviction in our day.