CREATION IN SIX DAYS? YES, YES, YES
Contrary to secular opinion, early American government officials believed in Creation by God. In a July 4 address in 1783, Dr. Elias Boudinot, then President of the Continental Congress, stated that his reason for advocating an annual Independence Day observance in America was the great precedent set by God Himself.
“No sooner had the great Creator of the heavens and the earth finished His almighty work, and pronounced all very good, but he set apart not an anniversary, or one day in a year, but one day in seven, for the commemoration of his inimitable power in producing all things out of nothing.”
The fact of Creation was also clearly implied several times in the Declaration of Independence, with phrases like
• "endowed by our Creator"
• "created equal"
• "Nature's God”
The first twenty-four state constitutions recognized Biblical Christianity as the religion of their states. Yet today, the Bible, Christianity, and Creationism have been banned from schools of the states that were founded to teach these truths! This happened because of a gross distortion of the First Amendment to the Constitution. The amendment was intended to prevent the establishment of a particular national denomination such as Catholic or Anglican. It has instead been so twisted as to establish evolutionary Humanism in the United States as the quasi-official religion of all our public institutions!
God placed the humans He created in dominion over His entire physical and biological Creation. Humans were His stewards, not to exploit and misuse, but to develop Creation for the good of all and the glory of God (Genesis 1:26-28). Called “The Dominion Mandate," it is still in effect, with its implied responsibility of all men to their Creator for exercising careful and fruitful stewardship over His Creation. Later passages emphasize it (Psalm 8:6-8; Hebrews 2:6-8).
A Christian has responsibilities under both the Dominion Mandate and Christ's Great Commission (Matthew 28:18-20; Acts 1:8) as an "ambassador for Christ" (2 Corinthians 5:20).
• He is commanded to serve with enthusiasm in whatever legitimate vocation he follows.
• No calling is excluded if it is done in obedience to God and His Word (Colossians 3:23-24).
• The Christian is commanded to be a good citizen of the secular government, also because he is serving God (1 Peter 2:13-16).
Effectiveness in witnessing for Christ under the Great Commission is usually contingent on faithfulness under the Dominion Mandate--being good stewards of God's Creation, good workers in our jobs, and good citizens of our countries.
An indicator of the importance of the doctrine of Creation is the emphasis that God has placed on it throughout the Bible.
• Creation is the theme of the first and foundational chapters of the Bible (Genesis 1; Genesis 2).
• The restored creation is the theme of the final chapters of the Bible (Revelation 21; Revelation 22).
• The longest divine monologue in the Bible is God's response to the philosophical disputes of Job and his friends, Job chapters 38 to 41. This response does not deal at all with the issue of human suffering that these men had been debating for 35 chapters, but solely with God's Creation and His providential concern.
• The New Testament has many references to Creation, with the prologue to John's evangelistic Gospel being of special significance (John 1:1-4).
• Every book of the Bible except the three one-chapter personal epistles of Philemon, 2 John, and 3 John contain one or more references to the people and/or the events of the first 11 chapters of Genesis.
Time itself commemorates repeatedly the completed creation of all things in six days. The preaching of the Gospel necessarily includes the preaching of Creation stated in Revelation 14:6-7.
• One of the greatest blessings of studying God's Creation is the increasing sense of wonder and gratitude that it generates. Planning and fabrication of the infinite array of stars in the heavens and animals and plants on the land and in the sea, with systems of incredible complexity and marvelous symbiosis, can only be explained because of an omniscient Creator!
• One of the greatest mysteries of human nature is that intelligent scientists familiar with these phenomena can actually attribute them to blind chance through random mutations and natural selection processes. The only explanation of this strange belief is, as the Apostle Paul says in Romans 1:21-28,
they "became vain in their imaginations. . . . Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools. . . . they did not like to retain God in their knowledge."
The normal response to the beauty and order of the Creation, however, is one of thanksgiving and praise! This is a dominant theme of the writers of the Bible, especially in the Book of Psalms.
Christians are so accustomed to thinking of Jesus in His human form that they overlook the fact--though they know it doctrinally--that He was also our great Creator. We can never fully understand, at least not in this life, the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, but we can believe them by faith.
• Before He was born in human flesh, Christ was One with the eternal Father as God the eternal Son and One with the eternal Holy Spirit–One God, in three persons, the Holy Trinity (Genesis 1:26).
• At His birth, He became the Son of Man, God in human flesh, while still retaining His deity and eternal status as Son of God. All three persons of the Trinity were present at His baptism (Matthew 3:16-17; Mark 1:10-11; Luke 3:21-22; John 1:29-34).
• It is the second person of the Trinity, the Lord Jesus Christ, who "declares" God to us in John 1:18.
• We see Him on earth in His human form, hear Him speak through the Scriptures, and sense His presence through the Holy Spirit.
• He created us and then redeemed us from sin (Isaiah 44:24).
Though we may not understand these mysteries, we can know them by faith as true when we read the Scriptures and experience the presence of the Lord Jesus in our lives through His Holy Spirit. We do well to remember that all three persons of the godhead participated in the work of Creation and now participate in the work of conserving, or saving, their Creation.
Modern intellectuals speak of "millions" or "billions" of years just as though they knew what they were talking about! Of course no human being could possibly relate humanly to such numbers.
• The rise and fall of thriving kingdoms two or three thousand years ago is considered ancient history.
• The beginning of real history, events recorded and preserved in actual, written accounts, goes back only a few thousand years at most.
• Anything earlier than that must necessarily be a matter of some degree of speculation since there are no records.
• This was confirmed many years ago by Colin Renfrew, England’s premier archaeological and linguistic scholar. After he argued that 3100 B.C. is approximately the date of the founding of Egypt's first dynasty, he added,
“Mesopotamian chronology is less reliable than the Egyptian, and it does not go back so far. This date of 3100 B.C. thus sets the limit of recorded history. No earlier dates can be obtained by calendrical means, and indeed the dates cannot be regarded as reliable before 2000 B.C. . . . Any dates before 3000 B.C. could be little more than guesswork, however persuasive the arguments and the evidence after that period.”
• Some Egyptologists argue that Egypt's first dynasty did not start until around 2000 B.C., saying that Manetho, the Egyptian historian on whom many depend for their chronological calculations, may not have distinguished whether certain dynasties in the two kingdoms of upper and lower Egypt were contemporaneous or sequential.
Renfrew did overlook one chronology more ancient than that of Egypt, one that would extend history back an additional two thousand or so years. That, of course, is the Mosaic chronology as preserved in the ancient Book of Genesis, which, if accepted, would make the early chapters of Genesis the most ancient historical record in the world.
• Liberal scholars reject Genesis.
• Any dates that are older than that, especially the dates assigned to the supposed geological ages and to the evolutionary history of life, must necessarily be speculative.
• Any calculated age exceeding 6,000 years before the present must be based on some natural process whose rate of operation in some defined system can be measured as it exists now, plus one or more assumptions how it may have functioned in the past. The components of the system must be known as they exist in the present, and then one or more assumptions made as to their state in the past.
• To make an age calculation on a very simple system of only one changing component, the following quantities must be either known or assumed:
Quantity of the component existing now in the system.
Average rate of change of the component in the past.
Quantity of the component at the beginning.
Comment–too much unknown, too many assumptions!
Old-earth and Young-earth views of Creation are extremely different in their conclusions. Attempts to straddle the fence and accept them both will be unsatisfying—scientifically and Scripturally. The Bible, if we allow it to speak for itself, tells of a Creation period of six solar days during which the entire universe was created in a "very good" state. The term "solar day" refers to the time for one rotation of the earth on its axis, today approximately twenty-four hours, resulting in a day/night sequence. According to Genesis 1, light and the day/night cycle were created on Day One and the sun wasn't created until Day Four, so there was no sun during the first three days. In Scripture, however, there is no differentiation between the length of the first three days and the last three, and the entire week is referred to as "6 days" followed by a day of rest.
The Bible itself gives an age for the earth of just a few thousand years. The time of the Creation of Adam would be no longer ago than about 6,000 years. Beyond that, Scripture has been stretched to where it has little meaning. The length of time for the days in Creation Week has been shown conclusively by many Bible-believing scholars to be only six solar days.
• Yom is the only Hebrew word that can mean and always means a solar day.
• It occurs more than 2,000 times in the Old Testament and always infers a literal meaning.
• When the Hebrew word yom is modified by a number, such as "six days," or the "third day" as it is some 359 times in the Old Testament, it always means a literal day.
• The words "evening and morning," which always mean a true day, define yom some 38 times throughout the Old Testament.
• When the plural form of yom is used, yamim, as it is over 700 times in the Old Testament, including Exodus 20:11, it always means a literal, solar day.
These Hebrew grammar facts will not allow any meaning other than a solar day.
God’s Word itself will not allow any meaning other than a solar day.
• Genesis 1:1 through Genesis 2:4 was obviously intended to give a chronology of events that really happened, just as written.
• Perhaps the most definitive passage was written by God's own finger on a slab of rock so that we couldn't get it wrong, Exodus 20:8-11, the fourth of the Ten Commandments.
- The word "remember" in Hebrew, when used as a command as it is in Exodus 20:8 always refers to a real historical event.
- The word "for" in Exodus 20:11 is usually translated "because" and also refers to a real historical event.
The days of our real work week are equated to the real days of Creation. Same words, same modifier, same sentence, same slab of rock, same Finger which wrote them. If words mean anything, and if God can write clearly, then Creation occurred in six solar days, just like our days.
The context and the way in which the word "day" is used in Genesis 1 implies a literal solar day. If yom means “solar day” in the rest of the Bible, why would Genesis 1 be the exception? Why would God create a controversy in the very first chapter of His Word? How could God, the Author of Scripture, say it any more plainly? He did it all in six solar days!
Exodus 20:8-11 clears up another question: If God is omnipotent, surely He is capable of creating the entire universe instantaneously. Why did He take six days? The answer is simple: to provide a pattern for our work week. We are to work six days and rest one, just as He did. The seventh day rest is a commemoration of His perfect work of Creation.
Lottie Moon, a Baptist missionary to China remembered mostly now for the Christmas offering bearing her name, was indirectly connected to the Creation controversy. In 1881, Lottie Moon was engaged to Crawford Toy, well-known Hebrew scholar, professor of Hebrew at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, and professor of Hebrew and Oriental languages at Harvard University. He studied in Europe, absorbing both Darwinism and the higher criticism and rationalism of German scholars such as Wellhausen, who denied that Moses wrote the Pentateuch. Toy tried to accept Darwin's theories as truth revealed by God.
• To harmonize the first chapters of Genesis with the emerging science of his day, he held that the days of Genesis 1 were geological periods.
• However, as a Hebrew scholar, he knew that the Hebrew text required that the term “day” meant a natural, solar day of 24 hours.
• So he then moved to the view that the writer of Genesis was not describing history but had divided all created things into categories and had assigned them to days for poetic and rhetorical vividness.
• This could not satisfy him because the Hebrew grammar clearly shows that Genesis is written as historical narrative, not poetry.
• Although these new ideas did not agree with his knowledge if Hebrew, they brought him to the point where he was convinced that the proper approach to the Bible was to “take the kernel of truth from its outer covering of myth.”
Lottie was shattered and grief-stricken when she learned of the new theology and liberal beliefs of the man she had once so much admired and now so deeply loved. Toy and Moon's relationship was broken before their marriage. Moon cited religious reasons for calling off the wedding—Toy’s controversial new beliefs regarding the Bible and her commitment to remain in China doing mission work for Southern Baptists. Years later, when asked by a relative if she had ever been in love, she replied, "Yes, but God had first claim on my life, and since the two conflicted, there could be no question about the result." Lottie Moon’s courage in choosing personal suffering rather than sacrificing Biblical integrity continues to challenge in this age of increasing Biblical compromise in the Church. I can only say, what a testimony of faith!
THE INVITATION
★ You can't depend on your own goodness to get to Heaven. We've all sinned (Romans 3:23). Jesus paid the penalty for your sins with His death on the cross and His resurrection (John 3:16).
★ To be forgiven and be guaranteed a place in Heaven, you need to repent of sin, confess that you are a sinner, and believe on the Lord Jesus Christ in your heart (Acts 2:21).
★ You can use the following prayer or your own words, but you must actually believe in your heart that your prayer is real:
Lord Jesus, I believe You are the Son of God. I confess that I have sinned against You in thought, word, and deed. Please forgive all my wrongdoing and let me live in relationship with You from now on.
I receive You as my Savior and recognize that the work You accomplished once and for all on the cross was done on my behalf.
Thank You for saving me. Help me to live a life that is pleasing to You.
In Your name I pray, Amen.
