Life and death are at stake in Genesis. It is a salvation issue: Genesis tells us who created all things and how he created them. The wonderful tapestry of God’s word unravels when we question its inspired clarity.

In the beginning, on the third day to be exact, there was life: plant life, on the fifth day, fish and bird life; by the sixth day, animal and man. All this, God said, was good, and there was nothing bad: certainly no death.

Christians have held these truths for thousands of years. Only in the last two hundred years, in an effort to accommodate God’s word to the theories of Darwinism, have theistic evolutionists, claiming special knowledge, reshaped the biblical story. 

Playing on the distinctions between special and general revelations, theistic evolutionists conflate their flawed human science with God’s holy truth revealed in general revelation. After all, they note, all truth is God’s truth, and creation cannot lie. Theistic evolutionists rest their faith on the wisdom of men rather than on the power of God (1 Corinthians 2:5).

So, they follow their science and then go back and seek to bring God’s word up to speed. Their version of Genesis might read something like this:

Over the course of billions of years, God caused life to emerge from storms, mud and amino acids. Through random mutations, this life somehow advanced, shark eating seal, lion eating gazelle, and so on. 

Theistic evolution needs death and natural selection in the dark and bloody battleground God made and set in motion. For them, death is good, a necessary tool of God and part of a healthy ecosystem. 

That’s a problem. Scripture says: creation and life were good, all good. There was no death until sin entered the world. Then, as God’s punishment for Adam’s transgression, Adam died (Romans 5:12). This death was spiritual in that Adam’s soul became dead to God, but it was also physical, as God promised Adam “to dust you will return” (Gen 3:19). 

Adam as our representative head plunged the entire human race into total depravity and physical death. And in his fall, all creation came under the curse of God. Subjected to “futility,” the creation “groans and travails” (Romans 8:18-25) in misery. So we see, death is not natural. It is a judicial pronouncement, the execution of a sentence by the most high, just God. Still, God holds the life of man as sacred (read the story of Cain and Abel) and values the life of each animal (Genesis 9:3-4). And the Bible is clear: death is an enemy (I Corinthians 15:26)

If death is simply evolutionary and natural, it needs no atonement. Yet, God in his mercy sent his own son to die for our sins and rescue us from the vanity and emptiness of death (both spiritual and physical). In Christ’s resurrection we have the assurance that we “shall be made alive” (1 Corinthians 15:21-22) and the promise of “eternal life” (John 3:16). Theistic evolution undermines the work of Christ and the purpose of the resurrection. Genesis is indeed a matter of life and death: a salvation issue. 

Sinful man distorts everything he sees in the world and applies this distortion which he calls science to God’s infallible, holy, word. But God tells us just how it happened. He is faithful, true and unchanging, and speaks to us clearly (Numbers 12:8). Who are you going to believe?