I believe in God the Father
After completing the lesson the student will be able to:
Describe the Holy Trinity (God)
List at least one reason from scripture why Evolution is theologically incompatible with Christianity
Provide several examples of flaws in the theory of Evolution
Identify what it means to say God is our Father
First Article of The Apostles' Creed - Use your catechism to write in the following information about the First Article of the Apostles Creed. Please copy it word for word below.
Remember, that the creed summarizes what scripture itself says. But don’t take our word for it. Look up the following scripture passages and compare them with your Small Catechism, Article I and explanation. What part of the Creed and/or explanation do we see in each of these verses? Read the following Scriptures and write how they are reflected in the Creed or the small catechism explanation.
How did we all get here? It’s a big question. If we don’t know where we came from, how can we know why we are here or what the point of our lives is?
In the first article of the Apostles’ Creed we confess that we believe in “God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth.” For centuries, Christians everywhere accepted the fact that God created the world as He told us in Genesis 1-2. The questions “how did I get here” and “what am I here for” were driving forces for people in seeking the Lord.
However, since all humans are born with hearts, minds, and bodies in rebellion against God, we have created theories to explain the origins of the world and purpose of humanity without God. This topic is big and one you are guaranteed to encounter (if not already) at school, college, work, on TV, and among your friends. We are only spending one lesson on this so we cannot address everything you might encounter in your life, but we will cover a few basics. Be sure to write down your questions as you read through this lesson, and you can bring them up in class.
Evolution, more specifically the theory of macro-evolution, states that all life is descended from a single celled organism. Survival of the fittest combined with mutation caused that single celled organism’s descendants to change into different species as they adapted to their environment. For example, food is scarce, and the only way for birds to get it is to have a hard beak. All the hard beak descendents survive and reproduce while the soft beak descendents die. Now we have hard beaked birds. But in order for this all to work, things have to die.
Do you remember Genesis 1-3? It said all the animals were created during the 6 days recorded in Genesis chapter 1. We also know that death does not exist until Adam and Eve sinned in Genesis 3 (see Romans 5:12). So, if all the animals were created in those 6 days, and there was no death until Adam and Eve sinned, it is most clear that the world as we know it was created by God.
How can you know the Bible is right?
People, or maybe even your own mind, might question “How can we trust some old book, when all these smart scientists and teachers say Evolution is true?” Now, we could spend hours and even days talking about this, but for the purposes of this class we do not have that much time. Even so, we want you to know there ARE ANSWERS for these sorts of questions and doubts. While we may not be able to talk about all of them in class, we have many resources to help you know that God created the world. Just ask, and we can find the right ones to help you out.
To give you even a taste of why all of these “smart scientists and teachers” are wrong when it comes to Creation, here are some of the serious flaws in the theory of Evolution that you will never hear one of those scientists or teachers tell you:
Irreducible complexity: Even the most “simple” cell is not simple. It has numerous different parts and systems that MUST ALL be present and working at the same time, otherwise the cell can’t work. The difficulty of life both randomly coming together and developing new things (Like eyes, ears, limbs, etc) is incredibly remote. It would be like a working cell phone being created by a tornado going through a scrapyard.
Information creation: Evolution assumes that mutation can create new information in an organism's DNA. The only problem is that no one has ever seen it take place.
Time: And even if it could be shown that a mutation “created” a new piece of information, the fact that it took this long to find it suggests that it is incredibly rare. Even with Evolutionists idea of a Universe that is Billions of years old, there is simply not enough time for a rare mutation phenomenon to create all 8.7 million species of organisms in the natural world.
We talk about God not only in terms of “Creator” but also “Father.” God is Father not because we are comparing him to our earthly fathers but rather because God IS Father, and we name our biological fathers after God.
God is our Father in two ways. First, He created mankind as a whole, and He can even be said to have made each of us individually (Psalm 139:13 “...you knit me together in my mother’s womb…”). In this way, God is the Father of every single person. Second, because in Christ, he has adopted us as sons and daughters (see Ephesians 1:5). In this way, God is the Father of anyone who has faith in Jesus.
As a believer, regardless of whether your earthly father is good or bad at being your dad - or is alive or has died - you are never Fatherless. God is your Father. He cares for you and daily provides all that you need. Your food, family, shelter and even the air that you breathe.
God the Father is the first person of the Trinity. The Church has always held this teaching to be so important, that those teaching differently were (rightly) called heretics and not considered a part of the true church.
The Bible teaches that God is One God (Dt 6:4), but three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (Mt 28:16-20). We will talk more over this as we continue but here is the crucial point to remember: There is one God, yet distinct persons. With our finite human minds, it is impossible to fully understand, but it is the teaching of Scripture; it is how God has revealed himself to us.
