Exodus 20:11 – For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.
When I was a young boy, I struggled with the appearance of the age of the earth and how old the Bible said the earth was. It was very difficult for me to look at everything around me and believe that the earth was not billions of years old like I was being taught in school. The science classes in school were drilling it into my head that the earth was ancient and had been around for countless eons while my teachers in the Lord’s church were telling me just the opposite. It was all very confusing to me and in the end, I accepted the evidence I saw of the apparent age of the earth and for many many years, I thought that the truth was a mix of what God said in the 6 day creation account and what science says. I drew the conclusion that the earth really was millions if not billions of years old and that somehow God slipped some time frames in there somewhere that He just didn’t record for us clearly. I figured we were on a need to know basis and this was something we just did not need to know. After all, the Bible does indicate that there are some things which will always remain a mystery to physical man. I went for many years believing that the earth was much older than the biblical record in Genesis indicated and I perceived no threat to myself over this belief. I figured it really made no difference how I believed on this and that my walk with God didn’t depend on an accurate belief of the creation account in Genesis. In short, I really didn’t think it mattered one way or the other how I believed on this topic. Was I right to believe like this? Was I wrong? Questions like this that came up along the way are what compelled me to go to the scriptures in search of the truth. Hopefully by the end of this lesson, we will all have some things to consider and maybe, just maybe we’ll learn something along the way. I know I did, and my hope is to share what I have learned on this subject with you all here and maybe give us all a fresh perspective on the Genesis account of the Creation.
The belief that God used evolutionary time periods not recorded in scripture during the creation process is called “Theistic Evolution”. Was the earth really created in 6 literal 24 hour consecutive time periods as we understand this in the Biblical record or did God bring the entire creation we see today into existence over vast eons of time by the use of evolutionary processes?
But before we answer that, let’s look at why it’s important for us to know this? In Psalms 19, David wrote, “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork“. When we look around us at the creation, it is hard to take it in that it was all created in 6 literal consecutive days. But we need to know that we serve a God who is more powerful than we can imagine. We need a God this powerful. We need a God that can do what He said He could and would do, and who we can trust in, put our faith in and be confident that He is up to the task He has said He would accomplish. We need a God far more powerful and capable than anything man can create in his own mind. We need a God that we can set forth to all of mankind who is powerful, glorious, trustworthy, faithful and true in a way that no other manmade god could ever compare. And it is just such a God that we serve.
The difference between the God we serve and the gods men devise for themselves and serve is that our God is absolute. He is absolutely Holy, he cannot be tempted (James 1:13), He is absolutely truthful (Titus 1:2), He is absolutely loving (1 John 4:8), he is absolutely consistent (James 1:17), and He is absolutely powerful (Hebrews 3:4). These are some of the scriptures which denote the nature of the God we serve. Certainly this is not all of them, but the ones given here will serve to demonstrate the truthfulness in the biblical account of the literal 6 day creation.
Once we accept in our minds that the God we serve did not create the universe in the way He said He did it, then we have opened our minds to other variables as well. And this is an avenue whereby doubts can creep in. In other words, if God really did not create the universe like He said He did, then what else is there in the biblical account that cannot be trusted? God’s word is holy and trustworthy. We have got to be able to take God at His word and implicitly trust whatever He says without question. If something were found which cannot be trusted, then the entire sum of God’s word could be called into question.
The strongest evidence that evolutionists claim and use to set forth an old earth is the fossil record and the geologic column. The geologic column is said to have formed naturally and uniformly over areas of the earth due to a gradual build-up of sedimentary material over eons of time. Various layers within this “so called” geologic column are said to index certain periods in earth’s history.
Evolutionists have divided their supposed geologic column into a system of divisions called eons, eras, periods, and epochs. While it has changed and will likely change again, there are two major eon divisions which are called the Precambrian (590 million to 4.5 billion years ago) and the Phanerozoic (590 million years to the present). The Phanerozoic is the eon we live in and it is divided into three eras. These are called the Paleozoic, Mesosoic and the Cenozoic. From there each one of these is then divided into periods. We live in the Cenezoic era which is also known as the age of the mammals. The Mesosoic is the supposed age of the dinosaurs and contains the well known Jurassic period which was supposed to be when the dinosaurs lived.
Many of us have been taught that the geologic column “proves” that evolution is true and that the Earth is extremely old. However, in reality the geologic column provides extraordinary evidence which demonstrates that evolution is not true and that the Earth is not ancient but these things are conspicuously left out of the textbooks for our children and the literature we read. Here are some interesting facts about the geologic column that we won’t read of in the National Geographic.
Consider the following.
According to the evolutionary theory, mankind appears at the top of the geologic column being represented by only about 1/1000 of the record. To an evolutionist it is unthinkable for evidence of humans to exist in any of the earlier periods of time. According to the geologic record, earth’s massive coal deposits were formed in the Carboniferous period which is separated from mankind by about 250 million years. Human footprints have been found embedded in the coal veins of Kentucky, Missouri, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia and others. The significance of these findings were dismissed as being insignificant.
Further, in 1936, a metal hammer with a wooden handle was dug out of what was supposed to be Cretaceous limestone (dated by evolutionists at 135 million years old) in an area near London, Texas. This metal hammer was found in rock, which according to the geologic timetable, placed someone capable of making a hammer at a period of time in earth’s history when no mammals were present on earth.
The trilobite, a small, marine arthropod with a hard exoskeleton, is considered so important as to be classified as an “index fossil” for the earliest period of the Paleozoic Era, the Cambrian. As an index fossil, anything containing a trilobite fossil is automatically considered to be from the period of time in the geologic timetable corresponding to these animals. Trilobites allegedly flourished a half-billion years before man ever arrived on the scene. On June 1, 1968, William J. Meister was working near Antelope Springs, Utah, and made a discovery that upset half a billion years of the supposed geologic column. He found human footprints with trilobites embedded within the footprint itself.
A Fossil leather sole imprint, with a double line of sewed stitches was found in “Triassic” rock estimated to be 225 million years old. A fossil shoe sole imprint with visible sewed thread was discovered in coal estimated at 15 million years old. Flint carvings were found on extinct reptile bones estimated to be 180 million years old. The discoveries listed here are but a scarce sampling of the evidence that utterly destroys the claim that man was not around in these supposed ancient periods of time represented in the geologic column.
Polystrate” fossils, meaning “many layers”, refers to fossils that cut through at least two sedimentary-rock layers. Probably the most widely recognized of the polystrate fossils are tree trunks that extend vertically through two, three, or more sections of rock that supposedly were accumulated over periods of time covering millions of years. However, organic material (such as wood) that is exposed to the elements will rot, not fossilize. Thus, the entire length of these tree trunks must have been covered and preserved quickly, which suggests that the sedimentary layers surrounding them must have accumulated much more rapidly than what is suggested in the geologic timetable.
Animals’ bodies form polystrate fossils as well. Probably the most famous is the fossilized skeleton of a whale discovered in 1976 near Lompoc, California. The whale is covered in “diatomaceous earth.” Diatoms are microscopic organisms with tiny skeletons. As they die, their skeletons form deposits over a long period of time. But the whale, which is more than 75 feet long and standing almost on its tail at an angle, is completely covered by the skeletons of the diatoms. There simply is no way a whale could have stood upright for millions of years while diatoms died and covered it with their skeletons, because it would have decayed or been eaten by scavengers.
Evolutionists contend that things happen now just like they happened in the past. This is called “uniformitarianism.” The catch phrase is: “The present is the key to the past.” In looking at the Earth around us, some of the numbers that evolutionists have given us just do not “add up.” Evolutionists proclaim that the Earth is 4.6 billion years old. However, consider these three simple illustrations.
(1) Niagara Falls is a waterfall located on the border of New York and Ontario, Canada between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. Erosion has been slowly pushing the waterfall upstream, forming the Niagara Gorge. Before large water-diversion projects were built in the 1950s and 1960s, the falls were receding at a rate of more than 3 feet per year. It is about 27 miles between the two great lakes and Niagara Falls is about half way. If the present were the key to the past then at the present rate of erosion it would take 50,000 years for Niagara Falls to erode the entire distance between the two lakes. It’s only half way now. Of course this is assuming the waterfall has been there all this time and that it started at the mouth of Lake Erie. We cannot know this for certain, but one thing is certain. Niagara Falls has not been around for 4.6 billion years.
(2) Evolutionists believe that the Grand Canyon was formed by the Colorado River gradually over a long period of time. The problem with this theory is that there are over 900 cubic miles of dirt missing from the end of the river. If the small Colorado River formed the canyon, what happened to the 900 cubic miles of dirt? Clearly there was a point in time where a considerable amount of water flowed through the Grand Canyon and not just the Colorado River we see today. What about the Great Flood? Do any of the scientists who are so proud of their geologic time table take that into consideration?
(3) As the Mississippi River flows down towards the Gulf of Mexico, it picks up dirt and sediment from the riverbank along the way. Approximately 300 million cubic yards of sediment is deposited into the Gulf of Mexico by the Mississippi River each year. If the Earth really has been around as long as evolutionists say it has, then the sediments deposited from the Mississippi River would have filled the Gulf of Mexico long ago! Mark Twain commented on this type of reasoning in his book titled “Life on the Mississippi”.
Mark Twain wrote, “In the space of one hundred and seventy six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over a mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oölitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-pole. And by the same token, any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three quarters long, and Cairo [Illinois] and New Orleans will have joined their streets together and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen.” Mark Twain went on to say, “There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.”
It is obvious that when taken all in all, the geologic timescale prescribed for the Earth does not fit the facts. Evolutionists frequently appeal to the geologic column in their attempts to prove an old Earth, and to substantiate their theory of evolution. Of course they conveniently leave out the evidence that disproves an old earth, choosing to run all the evidence through their filters of unbelief in God. The consequences are that we, especially our children, are bombarded by these facts which support an ancient earth but never get to see the whole picture. The actual evidence, taken wholly and honestly, and presented uniformly do not in any way support either an ancient Earth or an evolutionary process of life on the Earth. In short, we never get to see the whole picture in our text books. The consequences for this is that people today either discount the existence of God outright, or they try and combine evolutionary belief and Biblical belief which results in the belief of Theistic Evolution.
But when we look around us at the earth, it looks to be so old. The earth has the outward show of apparent age, and indeed it does. The Bible says that Adam was created on day 6 of the creation. How old was Adam 5 minutes after God breathed into Him the breath of life and he opened his eyes for the first time? He was 5 minutes old. How old did Adam look 5 minutes after he opened his eyes for the first time? Adam and Eve and all the animals and all the plant life on the face of the earth was created mature. Everything had the appearance of age. It can truly be said of Eve that she did not look her age at all. Adam and Eve and the animals were created mature, why not the earth as well. One must make the observation that when Adam opened his eyes for the first time and saw all the plant life and the earth mature with all the environment in place at the time that the earth had to have appeared to be much older than it really was. If God had not have been there to instruct Adam at the first, then based on the appearance of the earth around him, Adam would have drawn the conclusion that the earth was much older than it really was because of it’s mature appearance. When God created the heavens and the earth and all that in them is, they were all created mature and displayed an apparent age that was much greater than their actual age.
Today, not only do we have the apparent age that Adam saw in his time, but we have the added influence of the fossil record. The fossil record and the geologic record support a young earth much more than they do an old earth, but people are not getting the whole picture of it. It’s being run through the filter of the evolutionary mindset before it ever reaches the textbooks and the school books of us and our children. Scientists eager to provide a naturalistic explanation to the existence of the universe turn a blind eye to the evidence supporting the contrary. Not only do they deny it themselves, but they also fail to present all this evidence because it contradicts the current majority mindset. The fastest way for a scientist today to find him or herself standing in line at an unemployment office is to proclaim there must be a god. So in an effort to explain away God, they have devised evolution and they filter out all evidence that contradicts their theories and the present them to the public with cherry picked evidence in favor of their theories.
And so effective has this been that now we see a whole generation of people who are buying into this evolution and apparent age of the earth and we are seeing a decay in the confidence we hold in the truthfulness and reliability of the Biblical record of the word of God. In our introductory text, inspiration says, “For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh...” (Exodus 20:11. So let’s look a little closer at the actual creation account as it is recorded in scripture.
Genesis 1:3-5 “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.” A better translation would be “one day” as we see in the ASV. The Hebrews measured their days from the evenings to evenings, so the new days start in the evening. The Hebrews did not have names for their days of the week like we do today, such as Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, etc, etc. They merely referred to their days as “first day”, “second day”, etc. So where we would say “we were going to meet on Tuesday”, a Hebrew speaker would say, “we will meet on the third day”, which is “yom sheleeshee” in the Hebrew language.
The first day of the creation was described as one single day with one evening and one morning. Interestingly enough, every single day of the creation was characterized in this same manner.
Genesis 1:8
“And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.”
Genesis 1:13
“And the evening and the morning were the third day.”
Genesis 1:19
“And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.”
Genesis 1:23
“And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.”
Genesis 1:31
“And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.”
Were these six days six literal consecutive days? When you take the rest of the language out and just read the verses which count off the succession of days it looks like literal days are being counted off. The text says “THE” first, “THE” second, “THE” third, “THE” fourth, fifth and sixth day. Each creation day was singular. Each creation day was preceded with the word “THE”. It looks for all the world like inspiration went out of its way to make sure this was not misunderstood.
The narrative of the creation account is historical and not symbolical so the obvious understanding is that all its parts are to be taken in their apparent sense. It is a fact that the word for “day” is often used in the Greek Scriptures as well as the Hebrew (as in our common speech) for an epoch, a season or a time. But yet, this use is always derived from an obvious meaning of such a period of time as warranted by the context. In the creation account the natural day is the literal and primary meaning. When understanding any text we go with the primary meaning unless the context demands we go with the derived meaning.
The meaning of the word day must be determined (like any other word with several meanings) by the context and usage of the author. A plain reading of the text, with its recurrent phrase of evening and morning, indicates a solar day of twenty-four hours. That would have been clear to Moses and his first readers. The context gives no suggestion of an era or geological age. Creation is pictured in six familiar periods followed by a seventh for rest which corresponds perfectly with the days of the week as Israel knew them. The author of Genesis could not have produced a more thorough and comprehensive way to express the idea of a literal “day” than the words that were chosen. There is a complete lack of indicators from the construction of the text which would suggest anything different than a regular 24-hour day. And this is further supported, not only by our introductory text of Exodus 20:11, but also of Exodus 31:1, “It is a sign between me and the children of Israel for ever: for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day he rested, and was refreshed.” The context of both passages in Exodus was of six literal days and referred directly back to the creation account. Exodus was written as a historical account by Moses who led the Israelites out of Egypt. Moses wrote the creation account and he also wrote Exodus. Both references to the creation in Exodus were centered around a literal 6 consecutive day workweek and were thus understood by all Israelite readers in that sense. And it is vital that we try and determine what the author and audience would have understood from the usage of the words in the context. What it meant to them is what it must mean to us. With this in consideration, it is extremely difficult to conclude that anything other than a twenty-four-hour day was intended. It is not in anyway the wording of the creation account that causes people to think otherwise, only the demands of trying to harmonize it with modern scientific reasoning in support of an ancient earth.
And finally, we come to a direct quote in the New Testament by our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. On one occasion when being confronted by the Pharisees intent on tripping Jesus up over the issue of marriage, divorce and remarriage, Jesus made this statement.
Mark 10:5-8
“For the hardness of your heart he wrote you this precept. But from the beginning of the creation God made them male and female. For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and cleave to his wife”
“But from the beginning of the creation God made them male and female.” “The creation” as it is used in this context represents all of what we see in the observable universe. The words, “the creation” here represent everything we see around it qualified as the creation of God. This building we worship in, the skies above, the birds flying overhead are all part of “the creation of God”. Men and women came along on the sixth day of the creation of God which is now roughly 6000 years old according to scriptural chronology. At the time of Jesus’ quote, the creation was about 4000 years old.
Of significance here is that Jesus Christ, in His own words, placed men and women at the beginning of the creation we see around us. Jesus obviously believed in the literal 6 consecutive day creation account. And who better would know than the one who actually did the creating?
Ephesians 3:9
“And to make all men see what is the fellowship of the mystery, which from the beginning of the world hath been hid in God, who created all things by Jesus Christ”
Colossians 1:16
“For by him [Jesus Christ], were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him”
John 1:1-3
“In the beginning was the Word [Jesus Christ (V14)], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.”
Jesus Christ is uniquely qualified to make the statement that men and women were around at the beginning of the creation. He was there, participating in it in a big way. It is not like He could be simply mistaken in His understanding of Moses’ account of the creation week. Jesus is either right or He is wrong in this statement and since scripture places Him as the chief participant in the creation, and if Jesus is wrong about it, He quite simply lied to the Pharisees when He said men and women were around at the beginning. There is no room in there for billions and billions of years of evolution to have taken place. If there were, then men and women were not around at the beginning of the creation. They in fact came on the scene about 4.6 billion years after the beginning of the creation if we are to believe the evolutionary time table. I don’t want to be the master of the obvious here, but 4.6 billion years as compared to 4000 years of biblical history is under no circumstances to be understood as being in “the beginning of the creation”.
Considering this, theistic evolutionists are now presented with a serious problem. If indeed God used millions or billions of years to bring about the creation and Jesus Christ who was the incarnate form of the word of God, and is therefore God Himself, then God Himself lied in His discourse to the Pharisees. And that lie is recorded by inspiration of the Holy Spirit in the written record of God’s Word.
If Jesus lied then there are some serious consequences to be considered here for Christians. If Jesus lied, he was either mistaken or He was not who He claimed to be. If Jesus lied, then He was not the perfect sinless sacrifice for our transgressions. If Jesus lied to those Pharisees, then He is therefore disqualified as a suitable sacrifice for our sins and therefore cannot serve as our savior and high priest to God. If Jesus lied to those Pharisees then the Holy Spirit lied to us when He said Jesus was without sin. If Jesus lied to those Pharisees, then the whole basis for which we hold our hopes in Jesus Christ begins to unravel and when this consequence is thought out to it’s logical conclusion, we, as Christians are left without a suitable propitiation for our sin and are therefore without hope.
Another consequence to believing in theistic evolution is that in light of Jesus’ statement about men and women being present in “the beginning” is that those who believe this are making Jesus Christ a liar. I know that believers in Jesus do not believe they are making Jesus a liar by believing in theistic evolution, but that is the unfortunate consequence of their belief. We cannot claim Jesus as our savior, and claim to believe Him and to believe in Him if we do not believe everything He said or taught and Jesus Christ declared to the Pharisees, in language that is impossible to misunderstand, that men and women were present at the beginning of the creation.
Based on the facts presented in this lesson from scripture, I believe in the literal 6 consecutive day account of the creation. Furthermore, I believe that for Christians to believe otherwise is to place themselves in a self compromising position. Based on the facts from scripture, not only should we believe in the literal 6 day creation, but it suddenly becomes vital to us that God did indeed create the universe in 6 literal consecutive days, because if He didn’t then we are faced with consequences too horrible to imagine. If God did not create the universe in 6 days, then we are without a savior. If God did not create the universe in 6 days, then we are without hope. If God did not create the universe in 6 days, then we assemble to worship God for naught. If God did not create the universe in 6 days, then we are living a life of hopeless dreams for nothing, serving an imposter who is a savior of nobody.
We know better than that. And if anyone here today holds to the theistic evolution belief, it was not my intention to offend, but it was my intention to challenge your thinking on this subject. Please take what has been presented in this lesson and test it against what thus saith the Lord. I for one, believe that God created the universe in the way He said He created it, in the time frame He said He created it in.