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The Longest Week
Creation: The Longest Week Ever?
by Tim Chaffey
For more than 200
years, Christians have been trying to reinterpret the six days of Creation in
Genesis 1 to make them align with millions of years. But every attempt has a
fatal flaw.
“And God saw everything that he had
made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was
morning, the sixth day” (Genesis
1:31).
“The sixth day.” What does that phrase mean to you?
More than 200 years ago, Christians began to question
whether this day truly was the sixth day, instead of the six millionth or six billionth day.
They were responding to an idea, popularized in the late
1700’s, that our planet and universe are much older than Scripture indicates.
They wondered where millions of years might harmonize with
the Bible.
So they scrutinized Genesis 1 and reinterpreted the
days of Creation Week in a variety of ways.
But they didn’t recognize that each of these attempts to
insert long ages into Scripture had fatal flaws (even beyond the alarming fact
that they tried to change the original intent of the language).
Most notably, they place death, suffering, and disease
long before Adam and Eve sinned.
Yet you will still hear varieties of these views. What are we to make of
them?
Is there any justification for changing the meaning of the
Bible’s first chapter?
Many of these views deny the historical reality of the
Bible’s earliest chapters.
This is unacceptable because it contradicts the way
biblical writers and the Lord Jesus Christ understood and taught them.
Luke stated
that Jesus was a descendant of Adam (Luke
3:38).
If Adam were not a real person, this statement would be
absurd.
Paul also
wrote about Adam
(1 Corinthians 15:22, 45).
Peter wrote about Noah and the
Flood (1 Peter 3:20).
Jesus
spoke about Noah and the Flood (Matthew 24:37–38), and He said the first man and woman were created “from
the beginning” (Matthew 19:4).
If Adam and Eve were created after
billions of years of history, then Jesus was not perfect, He was mistaken (or a
fraud).
What about the
positions that do not deny the historical reality of the events and people but
add vast amounts of time to Creation Week? These positions fail as well.
The Fourth of the Ten Commandments instructed Moses and
the Israelites to work for six days and rest for one.
God explained the rationale: “For
in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them,
and rested on the seventh day” (Exodus 20:11).
If Creation Week lasted millions or billions of years, how
could it possibly serve as the model for
the work week described in the Ten Commandments?
Hebrew scholar Dr. Steven Boyd has conducted a statistical
analysis of 522 Old Testament passages.
He found that poetic and narrative passages could be
categorized with a better than 99% accuracy based on the verb usage alone.
Dr. Boyd’s
analysis showed conclusively that Genesis 1 is narrative history, not
poetry.
This means the only way to interpret it properly is as
history, looking for its straightforward, historical meaning.
The immediate context of each appearance of day in
Genesis 1 conclusively establishes their length.
Each day is marked by “evening
and morning.”
A day lasting millions of years would have far more than
one evening and morning.
Throughout the remainder of the Old Testament, when
evening and morning are used together, they refer to a normal-length day.
Each day is also linked with a number (“first
day,” “second day”).
This construction occurs more than 300 times in the Old
Testament, and with only a couple of potential exceptions, it always signifies
a normal-length day.
Furthermore, in the original Hebrew, Genesis 1:31 states
that the final day of Creation Week was indeed the sixth day.
If millions of years had passed, then Day Six could not
have been the sixth day.
Why do Christians question the length of the days in
Genesis but nowhere else?
They do not question how long the days were when Joshua
marched around Jericho or when Jonah was in the great fish.
The truth is that they are trying to find a way to make
millions of years mesh with Scripture.
Yet every attempt to harmonize the Bible with long ages
will always fall short.
The meaning of the days in Creation Week is perfectly
clear.
Each day was the same length as our modern days. The sixth day truly was the sixth day.
A Turn for the Worse
Decades before Darwin, Christians
started developing attempts to harmonize Genesis with millions of years. They all have serious
flaws.
Gap Theory
The gap theory was invented to insert
millions of years after the first verse of the Bible, proposing that God
created a world full of creatures and then destroyed it with a flood prior to
verse two (all before Adam’s sin). Following those verses, God recreated the
world we now know in six days.
Historical Creation
A modified version of the gap theory,
confusingly called historical creation, teaches that God created the heavens
and earth over an indefinite period, but He then prepared the land for mankind
in six days.
Day-Age Theory
Another idea, known as the day-age
theory, suggests that each of the six days was a long period. To span the supposed 4.6
billion years of earth history, each “day” would need to be approximately 750
million years - and roughly three times that long to account for the supposed
13.8-billion-year age of the universe. If this view is taken seriously, we must
wonder how plants (created on Day Three) survived without the sun (created on
Day Four) for hundreds of millions of years.
Multiple Gap View
Some have offered an alternative view
that essentially blends the gap and day-age theories. The multiple gap view
states that the six days were normal-length days separated by gaps of long
ages.
Framework Hypothesis
In the past century, several other
new positions have reduced Genesis 1 to little more than poetry. They imply that it is
okay to ignore most of the details as long as one acknowledges that God created
this world and made man in his image. For example, an idea known as the framework
hypothesis argues that Genesis 1 is semi-poetic, overstressing an
artificial parallelism of the creation days and groping for other elements that
would make room for a nonliteral interpretation of the text.
Theistic Evolution
Proponents of other positions, such
as theistic evolution, ignore the text altogether. Essentially, they allegorize or spiritualize
chapters 1–11 of Genesis and reject many details.
holds a master of divinity degree,
specializing in apologetics and theology and a ThM in church history and
theology from Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary. He is content manager for
Answers in Genesis’ Ark Encounter theme park and author of In Defense of Easter.
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