Jesus, his disciples, and the authors of the New Testament believed in the Biblical account of Creation, with a literal Adam and Eve, and a literal Noah living through a literal global flood. Literally. Most people do not deny these as facts about Jesus and his disciples. Jesus and the New testament authors do refer to the creation, garden of Eden, and flood of Noah as actual events of history (even including Noah and Adam as names in the Genealogy of Jesus).

There are only three ways to turn once you acknowledge these facts-
1. Jesus and his disciples are right about their view of recent, six day creation.
2. Jesus was wrong when he made statements like these (As were the other New Testament writers).
3. Jesus knew better, but he PRETENDED to be a YEC because he knew his audience were YEC.

#1. seems to me to be the only rational position for a Christian. Like I said above, you can be wrong about a lot of things and still be a Christian, but you cannot be a Christian and believe Jesus was a liar or just wrong about things. He was God incarnate, people. Your fifth grade science education and subscription to the Discovery Channel do NOT put you in a position to school Jesus about the way the world was made.

Jesus didn’t have to read Genesis and then try to interpret what it meant. HE WAS THERE WHEN IT HAPPENED. HE is the Creator!

And when did Jesus EVER tell people merely what they wanted to hear? If he was willing to lie to people, he could have avoided getting crucified, but he did not. He could have been more popular and gotten a book deal and done the talk show circuit.  Jesus told the truth, no matter who did or did not want to hear it.

Who is claiming that Jesus might have been a liar? Probably far more people than we know, but here’s just one recent example from the big dumb world of social media: a “Christian” singer named Michael Gungor took to the bloggosphere with his hostility against YEC. After some posting and a few interviews where he showed an amazing lack of self-editing, he said this about WHY Jesus would have talked about Genesis as literal history: “…if Jesus knew that Noah and Adam were mythical, but knew He was talking to people who thought they were real, that’s another possibility.” (Read more about this here)

Gungor here is not alone. There is even a head of a major Christian publishing house who has said similar things in recent years. He admitted that the New Testament does seem to indicate that Jesus was a YEC, but that, in this man’s educated opinion, Jesus was simply mistaken.

Remember when heresy was a thing? When did that stop being a thing?

This becomes one of the top reasons why all of this matters: Once you abandon the Biblical account of creation, you have to do something with the other parts of the bible which agree with the YEC interpretation. If Adam and Eve and Noah aren’t real people, then you have fictional characters in the family line of Jesus, just as if you found Winnie the Pooh in there somewhere. The sweater begins to unravel. Suddenly, Genesis is false for at least the first twelve chapters, the other references to creation through the Bible are mistaken, including in Exodus, Psalms, the words of Jesus (who, on this view, must have been wrong or lying) and the writers of the New Testament (who, while perhaps inspired and directed by the Holy Spirit to write other things- were wrong about all of this Creation and global flood nonsense). Eventually everyone decides that they aren’t sure what part if any they should trust, and so they abandon Christianity all together to go play beer pong.

The fact is, Jesus treated the Genesis accounts as real history and I think if anyone has the authority to make a stand one way or the other, it’s the Creator of the universe himself. Next time I’ll dive a bit deeper into the Old Testament and see that Jesus’ opinion- while controversial and radical to us today- is nothing new.

For a more detailed look into the many references New Testament authors and Jesus make to the events in Genesis, see this article by Answers in Genesis. And remember #JesusLovesYou