In over 50 years of traveling and speaking on Genesis, biblical worldview, and apologetics, one comment I continue to hear over and over again is, “I grew up in the church my whole life, and I’ve never heard any of this!” Why is it that so few Christians can answer the skeptical questions of our day that attack God’s Word—particularly, Genesis?
Well, I’ll give you three reasons:
They’ve compromised with the atheistic ideas of our day.
So many Christians have adopted evolutionary ideas and added them into Scripture. This makes it impossible to answer basic questions about Genesis because, well, you don’t really believe Genesis at all! Man’s interpretations are your authority, not God and His Word.
Many Christians don’t know what the Bible teaches.
We’re living in a time of rampant biblical illiteracy. Many Christians can’t answer questions because they don’t know what the Word of God teaches.
There’s been a lack of apologetics (faith-defense) teaching in our churches and homes.
Many Christians attend churches that preach “feel good,” or what I call “fluff and stuff,” shallow messages, rather than actually teaching the biblical worldview and wrestling with the questions of our day.
Many pastors purposefully avoid Genesis because they don’t want to be controversial! But Genesis is foundational to our biblical worldview, so avoiding Genesis means that pastors will also avoid talking about hot-button issues that are answered in Genesis, like gender, sexuality, race, sanctity of life, and more. The result is generations of Christians who don’t know what they believe or how to defend the truth of Scripture.
So what do we do about it? Well, we need to raise up generations who know what God’s Word teaches (that means we need to be reading our Bibles!) and are equipped to think biblically, allowing God’s Word to be the authority in all areas, and thus to have answers for skeptical questions.
