Reading The Bible
[*]The LORD, my God, called me to teach some seventeen years ago and to teach I must study a good deal. For the purpose of study it is a great idea to have commentaries from different sources and to compare them but always to research the things they say. There is also a clear and present danger in reading the thoughts of men about the Bible and what is meant by the scriptures. No man or woman should ever read the Bible nor should they read books about the Bible without the Holy Spirit to guide them and that means they study prayerfully and spend time meditating on what they have read.
[*]The most important rule in Bible study to me is to read exactly what the passage says and do not add nor subtract from it. (Revelation 22:18,19) Over the past 17 years I have encountered much false teaching and sometimes I have found a single commentary will present opposing views and leave it to the reader to discern the truth. Two of these “hot” topics are Genesis 6 and the idea of angels copulating with human women. The second one and my topic today is the Gap Theory. In my walk with Christ I have found this theory put forward in one commentary that I refuse to promote and have been confronted better than twenty times on the issue, both in church and on the Internet.
[*]The eye catcher for any student of the scriptures should be the title, “The Gap Theory.” A theory has little and often no basis in fact. In my opinion it is not at all unkind to call a theory an adult fairy tale. For better than a hundred and fifty years the world has been trying to sell the Theory of Evolution as a fact, only to have failed in spite of and often because of the falsification of evidence. For the Gap Theory, failure is even simpler.
[*]First we know that God is unlimited in power and ability because He has revealed the truth of that fact in His creation and then confirmed it in His revelation of Himself in the scriptures. The Gap that has been theorized by men, not God, is an imaginary period of time that God has not spoken of between Gen. 1:1 and Gen 1:2. Having read the Bible through several times and having the Holy Spirit always revealing new truths I will confess that He has never indicated that there is a gap of time missing between the first and the second verses. Further more, to insist that there is is to belittle God and to begin to turn Him into some idol dreamed up by some finite man.
[*]We need to always be mindful that God created the entire universe by speaking it into existence. There is a word in the English language that is misused because God is misunderstood. I am as guilty as the next man of misusing the word but the truth is that there is only one Awesome thing and it is not to be found inside the Creation at this time, that is God. There is nothing that compares to our God!
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