"A Journey Through the Old Testament" by Elmer Towns

I came across this book in a discussion with Joe Hinman; it is freely available on line here. The author is one of the founders of Liberty University.

It is a history of the world - assuming creationism is right. I thought it might be fun to read it. It starts unconventionally by saying God created a whole bunch of stuff before the creation week:

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” is a summary statement that includes all that went before the first creative day (i.e., heavens) and all the Creation of the next six days. Time and space begin in Genesis 1:1.

Fall of Lucifer

He does this to make room for the fall of Lucifer, of which he say:

The fall of Lucifer occurred before the seven days of Creation.

He goes on to say of angels:

Only three are specifically named in Scripture: Lucifer, Michael, and Gabriel.

That is not actually true; Lucifer is never named as an angel. It is symptomatic of his approach to the fall of that supposed angel, which is to say, he grabs verses from disparate parts of the Bible to conjure up quite the illusion of authenticity. For example, he paints this picture of Lucifer:

Lucifer apparently was the leader among the other two angels and was even called the “anointed cherub” (Ezek. 28:14). His name means “morning star.” There is no reason to believe he was anything like the popular Halloween characterizations of the devil today. In his original state, Lucifer was incredibly wise and perfect in “beauty” (v. 7). He was compared to the beauty of a variety of valuable gemstones (vv. 13-14). Yet Ezekiel records the great indictment against him noting, “Thou was perfect in thy ways from the day that thou roast created, till iniquity was found in thee” (v. 15, KJV). 

And yet, when we read Ezekiel, we discover that it is not about Lucifer at all, as verse two makes very clear:

Ezekiel 28:1 The word of the Lord came again to me, saying, 2 “Son of man, say to the leader of Tyre, ‘Thus says the Lord [b]God,

“Because your heart is lifted up

And you have said, ‘I am a god,

I sit in the seat of [c]gods

In the heart of the seas’;

Yet you are a man and not God,

Although you make your heart like the heart of God—

This is a taunt to the leader of Tyre, and not about any angel! Verse twelve confirms this:

Ezekiel 28:11 Again the word of the Lord came to me saying, 12 “Son of man, take up a lamentation over the king of Tyre and say to him, ‘Thus says the Lord God,

Towns blames the fall of Lucifer for sin, in contrast to modern fundamentalists who insist it was Adam and Eve:

Lucifer’s fall brought the entrance of sin into the perfect Creation of God. 

This is attributed to Lucifer's pride, whichs Town deduces from the verses in Ezekiel 28 about the king of Tyre, and also from Isaiah 14 - which is a taunt against the king of Babylon!

Isaiah 14:4 that you will take up this [b]taunt against the king of Babylon, and say,

“How the oppressor has ceased,

And how [c]fury has ceased!

Towns draws on a handful of other verses from both the Old Testament and New to support this claim, but never, it seems, pauses to wonder why there is no actual record of this great event in the Bible. Why is there no chapter in Genesis that tells us what happened? Why does no prophet ever record the events as told him by God?

Because it is just made up. The authors of the Old Testament did not believe Lucifer (or Satan or whatever we call him) was a fallen angel; they had no clue about any angels falling. Towns (like many Christians) is putting words in their mouths.

So okay, Lucifer rebels against God, and God responds by... Not doing much about it. Towns cites 2 Thessalonians 2, which talks about Satan still being active when that was written, and Towns even admits:

Though there is no indication in Scripture that Lucifer will ever end his rebellious attitude toward God, the time is coming when God will declare an end to his rebellious acts. 

Why did God not actually do anything bavk then? He is supposed to be all-powerful; why does he not exercise some of that power to deal with Lucifer? Of course, Towns does not address that question.

Planning for the Fall of Man

Still in that chapter, Towns says:

God knew man would rebel and that He would have to punish man as He had punished the fallen angels.

How did God punish the fallen angels? Apparently by letting them continue to do their mischief. However, the important point here is that God knew Adam and Eve would eat the forbidden before he had even created them.

Towns goes on:

God devised a plan for him. After man rebelled against God, God gave him another opportunity to be saved and worship the Lord. God’s Son would be judged in the place of man. He would be the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world (cf. 1 Peter 1:20; Rev. 5:6), because God planned to restore man even before man rebelled. Why? “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life” (John 3:16). 

So God's great plan is that he would create mankind, knowing for sure than mankind would rebel, and that God would then curse the whole world. Then he would wait thousands of years before sending his son to sort it out.

Great plan, God.

A better one might have been to stop mankind rebelling, saying by creating them with an understanding of right and wrong, so they actually understood that disobedience was wrong. Or put that damned tree out of reach.

It is almost like he wanted mankind to rebel...

Fall of Man

He skips over the creation week, which is sad. I was curious how he rationalised the earth being made before the sun or how we can see stars thousands of light years away. But then we get to the fall of man. He also fails to mention that God lied when he said they would die that die if they ate the fruit.

Towns admits that Adam was unable to understand right and wrong:

Further, Adam’s moral state differed from contemporary man in that he was in a state of innocence or conditional holiness. He had not yet experienced the difference between right and wrong ...

He does, however, deal with Satan pretending to be the snake:

When Satan tempted Eve... Satan used an actual serpent, so God cursed the serpent for his part in the temptation (allowing Satan to use him). ...

So the serpent, a dumb animal guilty only of being used, got punished. Adam, unable to properly understand right and wrong, got punished. But Satan, the one behind it all, did not! That is God's idea of justice, I suppose.

Unless, of course, Satan was doing God's work, and God wanted mankind to rebel...

Towns also says:

The promise of the seed of the woman in Genesis 3:15 is called the “Proto-evangelium,” or first mention of the Gospel. 

Here is the verse in question:

Genesis 3:15 And I will put enmity

Between you and the woman,

And between your seed and her seed;

He shall [d]bruise you on the head,

And you shall bruise him on the heel.”

This is God is talking to the serpent, and this is confirmed by "your seed", which means the descendants of that first snake (otherwise this is about Satan's descendants). God is telling the snake that Eve's descendants will try to kill the snake's descendants, and vice versa.

Remember, according to Towns this is God talking to the serpent that Satan used. So far so good.

But it seems Towns has now quietly changed his position, and now wants us to think this is God talking directly to Satan, saying Jesus, the seed of Eve, will crush him - and not his seed. And presumably Satan will bruise Jesus on the heel? What is that about?

Towns does not elaborate.

Cain starts to build a city

I am going to jump ahead to after Cain has murdered Abel. There are, at this point, three humans in the entire world - Cain, and his parents Adam and Eve. Nevertheless, Cain heads off and starts to build a city.

He began his family and determined to settle down in a great city he would build and name after his son Enoch. But the use of the imperfect tense in the verb “built” (Gen. 4:17) suggests he never completed that task; the city remained unfinished. 

What a loser he was! He failed to build a great city on his own!

Has anyone ever done that? I doubt it. I appreciate cities were smaller back then, but this is a great city; we have to be looking at at least a few thousand buildings, granaries, smithies, inns and a whole street of shops. That is a lot for one guy to build on his own. And really, what is the point, if you are the only person there?

And qudos to the guy for starting a family all on his own. Anyone else would need at least one person of the opposite sex to do that, but not Cain. Impressive.

Sadly, God was not so impressed, and some time later decided to slaughter the lot of them.

It was the children of the seventh generation from Cain that existed before the Flood which washed them from the face of this earth. 

It was also most of the descendants of Adam and Eve's other children who were washed from the face of the Earth, all but eight of them. But hey, it is not like God is some all-powerful being who can magically prevent all collateral damage.

Oh, wait. It is. He just let the die anyway.

The Flood

As Town says of those evil people:

Noah lived in a world not too unlike contemporary society. Jesus spoke of that society as “eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark” (Matt. 24:38).

Because eating and drinking and marrying people clearly means you deserve to be drowned at God's hand.

We also get this interesting titbit:

First, it had never before rained on the earth.

Seriously? How did plants survive?

More importantly, what stopped rain happening? What was so radically different about the climate that all across the planet there was no rainfall? He later tells us:

Many creation scientists believe the world was surrounded by a heavy atmosphere, just as the Planet Venus is covered with thick clouds today. They call this the “Canopy Theory”; however, the term could convey the idea of a plastic shield which is misleading. 

That does not answer my questions, but does at least tell us what brand of nonsense he is spouting. Nowadays, even creationists have rejected this as so clearly nonsense (see here for example), but Towns was writing in 1989, when this stupidity was still being peddled.

He glosses over the logistics of the ark:

According to the estimates of Morris and Whitcomb (The Genesis Flood, Baker, 1961) this involved about 35,000 individual animals representing all of the known species of animals today. Because many of these were small, they suggest there was no difficulty holding all of them in the ark. The care of these animals on the ark may have been greatly simplified if the animals engaged in hibernation, as do many species of animals today. 

Not that many species hibernate (and as far as I know none that that part of the world), and none of the big animals do. 35,000 animal means each person on the ark had to look after over 4000 animals each. Have you ever looked after a pet? Now imagine looking after 4000 of them - and each pair is a different species. That is about 20 seconds per animal, assuming you work 24 hours a day.

That sounds reasonable....

The Flood was successful in destroying all life on earth which remained outside the ark.

And yet there are still fish and plants. No fish or plants on the ark, and Towns is clear all life outside the ark was destroyed, so where did the fish and plants come from? Perhaps he did not think this through.

The first thing Noah did when he left the ark was to build an altar and offer God a sacrifice. Many of the reported sightings of the ark made during the last 150 years claim the door of the ark is missing. It is generally believed that the door was used as wood for this sacrifice. It involved the offering of one of every clean animal or bird that was placed on the ark.

Imagine you have been on this ark a year running round (at the speed of light presumably) desperately trying to keep these damn animal alive, and then as soon as you get off, Noah goes and kills a whole bunch of them!

Towns does not address the issue of life after the flood. There were no plants - the flood destroyed all living things - and eating meat causes an entire "kind" to go extinct. What did Noah and his family eat? What did those 35,000 animals eat?

Rather than dispersing over the whole earth as directed by the Lord, Noah and his sons appear to have chosen to live together as an extended family. 

I kind of get where they are coming from. Life must have been pretty tough living in a world just wrecked by the flood. Given the choice of walking a few thousand miles in a random direction, and then starting a city there, just you and your wife, or staying right there, with your brothers and parents and trying to work together as a community, I know which I would pick.

And finally

I am not going to go through the whole book, but I do want to highlight this:

He was told to “subdue the earth” which meant man could merge elements to make metal, or cut timber to make furniture.

I wonder what elements are merged together to make iron?