With the most joy I can say that I'm back to reading Lucy Maud Montgomery's short stories. These are all side stories from the Anne of Green Gables series and just as delightful. You can see how many of them ended up being developed into characters in the series and even completely copied.
Today I read "How We Got to the Wedding," a tale of misadventures in Saskatchewan. Two girls ride a wagon across the flooded plains to get to a wedding in a fortnight. They have all kinds of accidents and mishaps. Within the story is a story that Montgomery wrote in Rilla of Ingleside, same names and everything. The two girls, Kate and Phil, come to a house that Kate believes is her friend's from school who is now married. When they get there, it is locked except for the back window. They go in there and eat the food and sleep on the beds, Kate insisting that her friend would want them to do that.
The people who really own the house wake them up in the middle of the night. A man, woman, and the woman's mother. The man and woman are fuming that these girls are staying on their property and demand that they repay them. Then the woman's mother, Matilda, says her son-in-law is a tightwad and made her daughter the same way. The girls will not have to pay. She made the daughter cook them breakfast and the son-in-law mend their wagon. Then the girls go on their way.
This story is copied with the same names in Rilla of Ingleside only Rilla Blythe and a friend are staying at what they believed was the friend's friend's house.
A Reformed Approach to Science was thankfully short. It was mainly an exposition of what RC Sproul said at a 2012 conference when asked how old the earth was. It was good and orthodox. It still had many holes. Too many people let Nicholas Copernicus ruin their view of science and scripture. It is true that people misinterpret the Bible, but it's just as true that they misinterpret scientific evidence. Luther and Calvin opposed Copernicus, but empirical science proves that the earth does revolve around the sun and that somehow they had read the opposite theory into the Bible.
Keith Mathison insists that we could possibly be doing this today with the age of the earth. I used to believe this when I believed that radio-carbon dating proved the earth to be old. When I learned about all the holes in that method, then I turned my back on it and accepted a much younger earth that looks old because of the flood. There is no empirical evidence to prove the age of the earth. Nobody can step into a TARDIS and see when it was created. There are no copyright dates on the rocks. People insist that radio-carbon dating can prove their age, but it cannot. There are so many pieces to the puzzle unknown. If a fossil is found with a certain amount of fallout from when it died, the radio-carbon clock, cannot tell how many original carbon molecules the species started with when it died. It can't tell if somebody tampered with the results. It's basically an hour-glass where you know how much sand has fallen but you don't know how it started or if someone tapped on the glass to speed up the process.
There is no scientific process to assign an age to the earth, and so it can never disprove an interpretation of the Bible. There is one things for sure, though. If God gave no other concrete evidence of his story, he gave us Jesus. Jesus was really a man in history who really did all the things the Bible claims about him. Both biblical and secular scholars attest to that. I know that he is real, and if he is real, then everything else in his Word is real. The flood was real. It caused billions of dead things to be buried in rock layers and laid down by water all over the earth. God made the earth for the humans, but ultimately for his glory. He always planned on sending Jesus to die for his church. And God was the only one there when the earth was created. He's the only one entitled to define what a day is as nobody else was there. And his world was completely perfect until he allowed Satan to fall and allowed Adam and Eve to sin. If it was not, then there would be no point in Christ coming to save us from death.
Well, back to the original topic of RC Sproul. I admire this man, but from what I can see he is gravely wrong about the age of the earth, and I would like to see more Reformed people defending a young earth. Thankfully bloggers like Tim Challies, David Murray, Al Mohler, and RC Sproul, Jr. defend YEC, and are considered intelligent. This movement is not only backed by legalistic dispensationalists from Liberty University, Bob Jones, or Pensacola Christian School. Real reformed scholars are joining the fight and soon it should start gaining respect.
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