Guest Columnist for The Messenger

April - May 2023
The Messenger

After Palm Sunday, a group (of which I was one) from Concord Baptist Church took a trip to Kentucky to visit the Creation Museum and the ARK Encounter. These two venues were fantastic, turning on our thinking caps and making us hunger for GOD. I believe that GOD placed the ideas for the Creation Museum and ARK Encounter into Ken Ham's heart and mind for such a time as this. During this trip, I was reminded how GOD created mankind (Genesis 2:7) from the dust of the ground and breathed into him the breath of life. Everything that was created before man, was spoken into existence. The animals were too, but they were also given the breath of life, thanks to the presence of the Spirit (Gen. 1:2). Yet they are different from man, in that they only react and make sounds, while man can reason and speak like our LORD God.

YHWH tells us many times in the Bible that we should think things through and test them against His Word. Paul tells us in his letter to the Philippians, what we should measure our thinking against (4:8); in other words, are we thinking and acting according to GOD? In the Old Testament, men failed to obey GOD's first directive, "Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air and over the every living thing that moves on the earth." - Genesis 1:28. YHWH did give Adam a command, "Every tree you're free to eat: but not the tree of the knowledge of good and evil." (Gen. 2:17) You know the rest that Eve listened to the snake and disobeyed; and we all die because of their disobedience.
Remember when GOD placed Adam in the garden; one of Adam's first jobs was to dress it and to keep it (chapter 2, verse 15). Let's go forward to chapter 3, when the serpent implied doubt of GOD's benevolence to Eve. What did she say in response? GOD said, "You can't eat the fruit of tree in the middle, You can't even touch it."  What? That's not what GOD told Adam in chapter 2. Where did she get that from? It doesn't make sense, you can't dress and keep it without touching it. Anyone who takes care of anything. knows you cannot avoid touching. In Revelation 22:18 and 19, the LORD God told John to write the warning of what will happen to anyone who adds or takes away from GOD's Holy Word, unless they admit their wrongdoing.

~ Guest Columnist