Why Genesis? Part Deux

A recent comment on my "Why Genesis?" article read:

Ok, so what if God (assuming He exists and is, in fact, the Creator) kicked everything off with the Big Bang and just let it all simmer until conditions on Earth were ready to support homo Sapiens. What if He then created the Biblical Adam and Eve and placed them here in a special event. The rest would then be Bible history. Kind of.

This would allow us to worship at both alters, right?

This is a question which has driven many many Christians to attempt to somehow square the Biblical record with more recent scientific "findings". Some of the more well known attempts are:

1. Day-Age - The days of Genesis 1 are not to be interpreted as literal days. Instead, the author simply used the word day to mean "an indeterminate but finite length of time". This is like saying "Back in my grandfather's day. . ."
2. Gap - This theory purports a "gap" in time between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2. In other words, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Some unknown length of time later, probably billions of years in fact, the earth was without form and void..."
3. Theistic Evolution - God created, setting "things into motion" and natural processes took over, resulting in the eventual rise of Man.
4. Progressive Creation -God created this, then He waited. Then He created that and waited some more. Finally, after billions of years (4.4 or so billion of them), He planted "a garden in Eden, in the east, and there He put the man whom He had formed [very very recently, but late in the created order of things]."

So, the comment above is sort of an amalgam of Theistic Evolution and Progressive Creationism. Let's examine WHY these modes of thinking contradict the Bible.

1. First and foremost, there are other words in Hebrew for "a long period of time". For example dor means just that: "an age". If God had intended for us to think it took Him a long period of time, he could very easily have said so. He did not. He tells us it took Him only 6 literal days.
2. The genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11 give very detailed information, allowing us to accurately determine the amount of time which passed between Adam and Abraham. The genealogies of Matthew 1 are clearly intentionally abbreviated, as their purpose is to show the ancestry of Jesus rather than the ancestral line of Jesus. The genealogies of Genesis are clearly and specifically delineated to provide for us the ancestral line of mankind.
3. For every argument over the meaning of the word day in Genesis, Exodus 20:9-11 makes it very clear that the true intent was to communicate six literal days:"Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy." (ESV)
4. Jesus himself taught the historicity of Genesis. He referred to Adam, Noah, Lot and his wife, Moses and Jonah during his ministry as real, historic figures. In Mark 10:6, Jesus was addressing the issue of divorce and said "But from the beginning of creation, God made them male and female." Now, if you accept a 4 billion year history for the Earth, with Adam and Eve being either specially created or fully "evolved" within the last, say, 100,000 years, you have a problem. See, the last 100,000 years, if we assume the total 4 billion years as one 24 hour day, they only account for the last 2.16 seconds. That's hardly the "beginning of creation," is it? But, if we go with the Bible, and compare the last 6000 years as our 24 hour clock, day 6 happened only one quarter of one second from the first creative act. That fits nicely with the words of Jesus, doesn't it?
5. To believe in millions or billions of years is to believe in the existence of pain, death and suffering prior to the Fall. Genesis records that all living creatures were initially created vegetarian. Scripture refers over and over again to the "restoration" of things: Acts 3:21, Colossians 1:20. This restoration will things set back to their original state, which Revelation 21:3-5 clearly indicates NO disease, suffering or death.
   
6. Circular Reasoning. Initially, the *illions of years were proposed by eighteenth and nineteenth century geologists. Using uniformitarian assumptions about erosion rates, etc, and starting without a biblical worldview to account for what they were seeing, they "determined" the age of the Earth to be significantly longer ago than the Bible clearly indicates. In fact, even today, fossils are dated according to which layer of sedimentary rock they are found in. This is the classic "geologic column." But they prove the ages of these rock layers, since none of them come with dates attached, by seeing what fossils each layer contain. That is classic circular reasoning, which should lead you, as it does me, to question the validity of either the age of the rocks, or the age of the fossils within them.

All this points to the fact that there is only alter to worship on. Genesis provides us with a very firm foundation on which to build the story of the redemptive work of Jesus Christ of Nazareth on the Roman cross nearly 2000 years ago.


If you've never trusted Jesus as your personal Savior, I urge you to do so. There is a God in heaven who is responsible for your being here. He wants you to love Him, and it hurts Him deeply when we choose to disobey the things He has commanded for us. This is called sin. The Bible records that "the wages of sin is death." This means that, when someone sins, then someone needs to die. He loves you so much, though, that He was willing to step into history and bear your sin and pay your penalty. Paul says in the book of Romans:

"There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit." Romans 8:1-4 (ESV)

God Bless and good night.