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Our Lord Jesus once said to the leaders of the Jews, "If ye believed Moses, ye would believe me; for he wrote of me. But if ye believe not his writings, how shall ye believe my words?" (John 5: 46-47). In our days is certainly consistent and appropriate that those who have had their faith revived in the first chapters of the Bible should also have renewed confidence in the last part of the Bible. A belief in a real Creation of the world, as recorded in the book of Genesis, naturally implies a belief in the end of the world as predicted in the book of Revelation. A belief in the former destruction of the world by water is in accord with a belief in its coming destruction by fire, each of these destructions being not absolute but regenerative.
This is in fact the line of argument used in that remarkable prophecy of 2 Peter 3: 3-7:
"In the last days mockers shall come with mockery, walking after their own lusts, and saying, Where is the promise of his coming? For, from the days that the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation. For this they wilfully forget, that there were heavens of old, and an earth compacted out of water and amidst water, by the word of God; by which means the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished; but the heavens that are now, and the earth, by the same word have been stored up for fire, being reserved against the day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men."
Two points in this remarkable prophecy deserve special attention:
1. It is a description of the religio-scientific problems of the "last days"; and the class of people referred to are represented as "mocking" at the second coming of Christ, because they have grown accustomed to denying, or "wilfully forgetting," the former destruction of the world by the waters of the Flood. This prediction, as we have seen, is in complete and accurate accord with the present situation; for the doctrine of Evolution is chiefly supported by the accepted theories of geology that there never was a universal Flood. Belief in the current theories of geology and in a universal Deluge cannot be held by the same mind, for they are mutually exclusive: either one makes the other meaningless. And as the popular geology is the foundation of the Evolution theory, so does the latter render useless and incredible what the Bible calls "that blessed hope," the second coming of Christ and the purification of the earth by fire.
2. The mockers here described certainly talk exactly like our modern
uniformitarians
; for they argue that "from the days that the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation." They imply that in the days of "the fathers" some people were foolish enough to believe differently; but since they "fell asleep" we have learned better. It should also be carefully noted that their theory of uniformity stretches back, not to the
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