While a literal Adam and Eve are important, the death/sin timeline is even more important. The age of the earth is directly related to the cause of death and suffering. If you hold to an old earth, the relationship of sin and death is confusing at best. Death is no longer the result of sin, but existed millions of years before Adam sinned. That directly affects the gospel, and thus is a witch that should be hunted.
Here is where several have a problem... the "death before sin" argument. Of course human death is what Paul is referring to in Romans 5. And, if he's not, what do you do with digestion? It isn't as if animals and man grew butts for the purposes of defecation only
after the Fall. The natural God-given biological and digestive processes that are at work in the gut of man and beast require what we would call "death." You would have to argue that not even bacteria died before the Fall and that human cellular replication began only after the Fall, which would be quite problematic.
The issue here is sola scriptura. The sign gifts were given to authenticate the biblical writers and to authenticate the birth of the Church and its apostles. They were great signs and wonders and they set apart Scripture from every other source of revelation. The modern gift movement is a counterfeit that doesn't even claim to do the type of miracles that occurred at Pentecost. It's a claim of a continuation of revelation directly from God, but doesn't hold up to scrutiny, and undermines Scripture. That is definitely a baby that needs to be thrown out.
I don't think I've ever heard this particular take on this argument. The sign gifts in Acts are largely misunderstood. Firstly, tongues refers to known languages (for that is plain meaning of the Greek). The manifestation of that particular gift happens in Acts only to signify the inclusion of a different group in the Kingdom of God and it served as a sign to the Apostles themselves. Secondly, the gifts (like casting out demons, raising people from the dead, healing, etc.) were to validate the Apostles in the eyes of the people, not Scripture. The Apostles would have no need for any signs and wonders to validate Scripture since they already held Scripture in highest regard and they had seen the risen Christ. So, that line of reasoning is quite poor, and goes outside of the text of Acts.
As far as the modern movement is concerned... Again, there does not need to be a conflation with the continuation of gifts and the continuation of revelation. These are separate issues, and not ever continuationist would argue for or accept "new revelation." In fact, most of us would flatly reject as heresy the idea of "new revelation."
And, to add, your understanding of the sign gifts is quite Anglo-centric. It may be possible, however unlikely, that groups which do not have the Bible in their language and only a preacher of the Bible might see some of those same gifts--new revelation NOT being one of them.
That would be like arguing for honoring only good parents. But that's not the commandment. Honor your parents, the good, the bad, the ugly. Paul tells us we owe our nation taxes, customers, fear and honor. Paul was a Roman citizen at the time, and Rome was no angel. The nations are from God. They protect the innocent and punish the guilty. Paul even calls them ministers. They have their problems, but they solve many more problems. We honor our nation out of gratitude to God, and we hurt our testimony when we don't.
The globalization you speak of is the one God will bring about. But the more recent one is of the devil, and we should be very wary of it. From Got Questions:
The Bible, therefore, shows that any time man attempts “globalization” it is ruled by wicked, ungodly empires. We should oppose globalization to the extent that we understand that it is implemented by Satan, currently the god of this age (2 Corinthians 4:4). It is interesting to note that man’s (and Satan’s) final attempt at globalization will include a resurgence of “Babylon,” which started the globalization effort so long ago (see Revelation 18).
If God separated the nations to slow the progress of evil, we would be fools to try undo it. The world is evil enough divided. Imagine what it could do united. "nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them." We defiantly wanna throw out that baby, also.
Again we have the conflation of issues. First, your reading of the Bible is in error. In Romans 13, Paul does not say what you are saying. Government (as a whole, as opposed to anarchy) is from God. Government is a tool in God's hand against the evildoer, etc. To argue that "Nations" and "Government" here are the same thing is to do violence to the biblical text and Paul's argument as a whole.
Secondly, the nations being separated is, as you say, a demonstration of God's grace. Having a "critical" nationalism is not the same as having the desire for a one-world government. To argue that one has to have a strong nationalism (which, in evangelical/fundamentalist-speak, usually means being a republican) or you support a one-world government is absolutely ridiculous.
And just an additional point, I hate this nonsensical argument. The origins debate is not about science, it's about history. We either accept the history God revealed or we don't. But don't blame science. Science is a method of inferring recurring patterns in nature and making predictions based on those inferences. Science cannot directly investigate the origins of those patterns. Origins is almost exclusively learned from testimony, written or otherwise. If you're looking to science to discover your origins, you've completely missed the point.
The argument isn't nonsensical; the Bible never presents itself as a scientific manual. And, your comments here support the argument you say you hate.
No one is blaming science, whatever that means. No one in saying "the Bible isn't a scientific manual" is directly denying the history. What you're doing here, again, is conflating two things--science and history. It is possible to affirm the biblical history (which I and many others do) and point out the obvious: The Bible gives no scientific details when it gives the history of creation. As far as science goes, insofaras the biblical issues are concerned, it's not "predictions" we're after, but observation. We observe what God has done. The creationists (such as myself) and the evolutionists will look at the exact same set of data and reach different conclusions based on their presuppositions. Therefore, it is possible that the data is wrong or incomplete; it is possible that the right data is misread; or it's possible the right data is applied wrongly because of the presuppositions of the scientist.
The Archangel
