What Do You Believe?

             My patents once told me, “Don't believe everything you are told.” It prompted a spark of mistrust against people who told you things that were not true. I was once practicing the clarinet as a youngster and my fingers didn't quite reach all of the holes resulting in a lot of harsh sounding squeaks. I was getting very frustrated and mad at the same time with the instrument and it brought tears to my eyes. A man happened to be in our house at the time who was running for sheriff of the local county. He was trying to get my mother's vote and he proclaimed to me, “Keep practicing, Sonny. Someday you will be playing in a sympathy orchestra.” That is not a typo, but the actual statement of the the man. My mother later proclaimed that the man was not going to get her vote. I did end up year's later playing bassoon in an orchestra but that was not to be my professional career. A lot of things were told to me in my formative years about how we got where we were as a human race. My education told me that we came from an organism in a primordial swamp. Somehow, even at that time, it did not seem possible but that's what my teacher's told me. Genesis 1:1 says, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” 

            Then, there came the day that I believed what the Bible said about every area of life. The Bible has proclaimed much in regard to our creation but the small statement at the beginning says all there is to say about our creation. “In the beginning, God created...” It was once stated that how you believe the first eleven chapters of Genesis will determine how you believe the rest of the Bible. We look at the making of something with our own hands as taking a lot of time. If I were to physically build a house it wold take a year or more. If however, God created the same house, He would speak and it would be there. Both houses look the same. Mine took a year to build, and God's took the twinkling of an eye to build. They look the same. When God created the earth, it had the appearance of billions of years, but He spoke it into existence in an instant. The questions always come up about Noah and the flood and how much water it involved. I believe in a worldwide flood that happened just as the Bible says it happened. I believe in the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah just as the Bible said it did and for the reason that it says it took place. The problem with many people is that they cannot accept what God says about these important things in the history of the earth. The answer to them involves making the first eleven chapters of Genesis as a myth or that God really took billions of years create and to refuse the Genesis account. Don't believe everything you are told except when it comes to the statements that are made in the Holy Bible. You can always rely on what God says as being absolutely true in every detail. That does not mean that we understand it all, but we can rely on what God says is true. How do you look at the first eleven chapters of Genesis? Praise God that we can believe what He says in His Word, the Bible.