“Jesus answered and said unto them, Ye do err, not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God” (Matthew 22:29).

When the Sadducees, who were the theological, philosophical, and scientific elite of the day, came to Jesus with a trick question in an attempt to discredit Him, He responded with the stinging rebuke in our text. While His response dealt specifically with the fact of resurrection and the nature of the after-life, His two-fold evaluation of self-reliant scholars still fits today, particularly in regard to evolutionary speculations.

By the time Darwin had published his book, Origin of Species, attributing evolutionary progression to natural selection, he had probably become an atheist and so set about to ascribe creation to natural causes. He attributed to nature, abilities which clearly belong to God alone. He knew something of the Scriptures, but his memoirs obviously show that he had little understanding of basic Biblical teaching. He felt that if there was a God, He had little power or had not been involved in the affairs of this earth. Most atheistic evolutionists today follow Darwin’s intellectual footsteps.

But what of Christian intellectuals, theistic evolutionists, progressive creationists, or advocates of the framework hypothesis, who claim to know God but yet deny His awesome power in creation? They too reject the clear teaching of Scripture regarding creation, relegating God to the mundane task of overseeing the evolutionary process, reducing His power to something potentially accomplishable by man. Peter aptly describes this attitude when he calls it “willful ignorance” (II Peter 3:5).

It has been suggested by some that all human error can be traced to one or both of these categories: not knowing (and/or believing) the Scriptures and underestimating the power of God. JDM