The Forgotten Story of Our Earth #5: The Real Story
Every family seems to have its stories, and those stories only seem to go back so far, until the past becomes cloudy. A fog envelops them. I have heard stories of my great grandfather coming to America, making a living for himself, and buying a farm out in Iowa. Imagine leaving everything behind and going to a foreign land. In reality, the settlement of our world is full of stories like that. Then there are always people who choose to stay in one place or another. They dig into the hills or the valleys, or they live on the plain with their families.
If your family doesn’t make a point of telling its stories, the history is lost. But history is our connection to the past. When we have historical amnesia, we lose our identity. Perhaps we even take on a new identity. I could tell you about my great grandfather, because my mother has told me the stories, but I know nothing of the family before that. Each of us is trapped in a finite time period, and beyond those bounds we cannot go. If we are fortunate, there is at least one keeper of the stories in the family. But stories have their limitations, and they can become muddled. If they are not written down, they too will sink into the past.
When we cannot observe the past, and we have no stories to tell us about it, or we discard those stories because we believe they are not true, we tend to make up theories about what we think really happened.
There are stories about events which we have not observed, which we cannot fully confirm. We only have the recollections of eyewitnesses. Take for example, the story of the Titanic’s sinking. Consider that an eyewitness said that the ship broke into two pieces as it sank. Some may not have believed this was true unless they could confirm it by finding those pieces. There are lots of events like that in history. Not everything that is true can actually be confirmed.
The secular story of life on this earth tells us a story that dinosaurs lived about 65 million years ago, and have long died out. But what if your grandfather told you a story told by his grandfather about their farm in a far away country, where the cattle were regularly spooked and raided by creatures that sounded to you to be a lot like dinosaurs? And what if he showed you drawings of the creatures from that time? Would you be inclined to believe him, or would you be inclined to disbelief? Would you tell him that the story couldn’t possibly be true because dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago, long before man came on the scene (according to your preconceived belief system)?
The skeptical are inclined to discount that which does not fit into their preconceived worldview, so when they hear of “legends” from the past that tell them of events that are no longer consistent with the life we presently know, they are inclined to disbelieve those stories. This doesn’t always mean the stories are untrue. In fact, it could mean that our present belief system is simply wrong. In other words, we need a new theory.
In our modern world we like to create paradigms for classifying things. Sometimes, however, events don’t fit neatly into our paradigm. We are told today that the earth is billions of years old. Those who believe what the Bible says, may not even see that this idea is inconsistent with what we learn in the Bible. People who believe that they can reconcile what the Bible says with the ideas of Evolution really don’t understand either Evolution or the Bible. The two are completely incompatible. Anyone who believes that they are reconcilable is only kidding himself.
Each story claims to have the inside track on what really happened in the past. We have to look at the evidence we find on our earth, and then evaluate which story is true from there. An Evolutionist will tell you that there is plenty of evidence to “prove” Evolution. Ask him to show you real evidence. Evaluate the logic of the arguments which are presented.
I believe that when the evidence is evaluated, we can be confident that it is consistent with a biblical worldview. If we read the Bible, we may find a lot of things that are strange to us. For example, miracles seem to be alien to us in our time. In spite of that, there are those even today who hold to stories of things that happen in life which are completely unexplainable.
Another strange idea is that there were men on the earth who lived to be over 900 years old. Because we have no experience of anything like that, we may be inclined to believe that that could not possibly be true. We should not be so arrogant that we are quick to judge those who witnessed such events. We should not be so arrogant to claim that they were simpletons who did not know what they were talking about. Not everything that we uncover in the dust of the earth fits so neatly into our modern paradigms. Who would have thought that we would find DNA in the marrow of long buried dinosaurs a few years ago? If dinosaurs died out millions of years ago, shouldn’t that DNA have degraded by now?
Our preconceived notions might tell us that some biblical events could not possibly be true, but we should not be so quick to judge what people of the past have told us. The truth is sometimes stranger than fiction. Sometimes the past just needs some decoding. Even the stories of the Greeks and “legends” like Beowulf can pass truths onto us.
However, the Bible makes a very special claim to the truth about the past, and it tells the story of life on this earth from the very beginning of our world. It also shares with each one of us a clear message about our purpose in this life. I confess: I do believe what it says, even as much and more than things I have witnessed with my own eyes. It is the real story of our world. –Cal Samuel August
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