The Six Days of Genesis   by  Mick Lindgren  06/06/11

My cmnt: Please note, that as with the three interpretations of the Millennium held by Bible-believing Christians, there are three valid interpretations of Genesis One. The 24 hour, consecutive day understanding, the Day-Age understanding, and the Framework position. See my write-up on the Framework understanding here. None of these represents orthodoxy over the others. Actually most of the infighting among Christians is in response to the claims and attacks of the unbelievers on the historicity of Genesis 1-3. All three positions equally resists Darwinistic evolution which is the creation myth of 19th and 20th century secularists and uphold the actual, space-time creation of the heavens and the earth and all life therein by miraculous fiat from God.

The purpose of this paper is to present the argument that the interpretation of the six days of Genesis 1 does not necessarily have to be literal, 24 hour days but rather may be properly interpreted as open-ended periods or intervals covering, at the least, much vaster periods of time.

I have read the position paper on the RCUS website that maintains we MUST interpret the six creation days of Genesis as consecutive, 24 hour periods.   My hope with this brief paper is to persuade the leadership of the RCUS to change their stance to one that allows either interpretation.

I want to note that the interpretation of the days of creation as longer than 24 hours is a position allowed by at least two conservative Christian churches that hold the Reformed faith firmly and historically:  The Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) and United Reformed Churches in North America (URCNA).   

The PCA maintains a website: www.pcahistory.org/creation/report.html – that more than adequately covers this topic.  Their lengthy position paper concludes:

The goal of general revelation along with special revelation is to know God, and thus “enjoy Him forever.”  He has given us rational minds that are capable of thinking His thoughts after Him, particularly as concerns His creation.  Just as the Holy Spirit illuminates our minds as we read His special revelation, so His providence directs the church of Jesus Christ to know the truth of His general revelation.  In the knowing, that truth will indeed set us free.  Until we know, Christ’s Church must not be divided over what we do not yet know.  

The URCNA website links to Churches with which we have Ecumenical Relations which includes the OPC and the RCUS.   Dr. Kenneth Samples is a member of Christ Reformed Church (URCNA) in Anaheim, Ca., and has co-authored several books with Dr. Hugh Ross, an astronomer and astro-physicist, arguing for this interpretation. I have borrowed heavily from their books and others and include my own original arguments as well.

My first argument is that the Christian Church has historically held interpretations of Holy Scriptures that have since been tossed into the dustbin of history and have been more or less quietly abandoned.    

1) A geocentric universe. The Church held Aristotle’s and Ptolemy’s understanding of the world which fit very nicely with several statements of scripture where the sun is depicted as rising, setting and marching across the sky.

Psa 19: 4b-6 ‘In the heavens He has pitched a tent for the sun. Like a bridegroom emerging from his chamber, like a champion rejoicing to run his course, it rises at one end of the heavens and runs its circuit to the other; nothing is deprived of its warmth.

2) The Divine right of Kings.   Another position held by the Church up to and until the establishment of      America.   

3) Usury. It was against canon law for any Christian to lend money at interest.   Numerous scriptures were used to support this position of Christendom that hypocritically used Jews as bankers.     

4) Slavery.  Numerous scriptures were cited to justify the holding of slaves, especially Africans, as wicked and godless descendants of Ham and deserving of their servitude to Christians.  

5) Sunday Sabbath and Blue laws. Canada and America had laws prohibiting the operation of nonessential businesses on Sunday and important Christian holidays such as Christmas.

6) Head coverings for women.  A head covering for women had to be a hat and long hair.  Today, most conservative Christian women in North America wear neither hats nor long hair to worship services.

7)  Husband as head of the wife and the household had to be interpreted to mean that he must be the   primary and only bread winner. Many conservative Christian women now not only hold jobs but are the primary pay earners in their families.

Let me be clear in presenting these points.  I am NOT arguing that the scriptures are in anyway incorrect nor incomplete. I am simply noting that even the Reformation did not disavow any of these interpretations which are now not currently held by the RCUS. I am implying that the RCUS should, at the very least, exercise great care in declaring a scriptural interpretation that may one day have to go the way of the geocentric universe.

My second argument is that the Christian Church did not come to a new and contrary interpretation of these seven points by careful and methodical hermeneutics but rather by the overwhelming evidence of nature and/or the inexorable movement of actual Christians in the Church. In other words the Church had to simply abandon interpretations that were weak and nonessential to the historic Christian faith and message of salvation. This was not a giving in to Liberalism nor Godlessness as seen in many churches in the 20th century but rather a quiet admission the historic interpretation was neither infallible nor necessary.    

I want to specifically address the geocentric universe. I maintain that the ONLY reason this interpretation was finally abandoned by the Church was the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

That is the natural world, theologically known as general revelation, forcibly overrode the infallible interpretation of the Church on this specific special revelation. This was and remains a huge embarrassment for the Church. No one, anywhere, now holds to a geocentric universe nor uses scripture to argue for it. This monumental shift in biblical interpretation was forced on the Church by proper scientific investigation of general revelation.

I maintain that the overwhelming evidence of proper science shows the universe and the earth to be of great age and great harm is done to the Church and her credibility by using weak and dubious scientific arguments to bolster a 24 hour day interpretation that is neither vital nor necessary to understanding the salvation offered in Christ and His bodily resurrection from the grave.

At this point I need to address Darwinian evolutionary theory. This is the belief that all creatures that have ever lived on earth descended from one common ancestor in an ever increasing branching of diversity. The mechanism that achieves this result and drives this process is descent with modification by natural selection. Random genetic copying errors are said to accumulate over vast eons of time, culled by natural selection, and resulting in new organs, systems, body plans and creatures.

As a scientific theory Darwinism is weakly supported and would probably be abandoned if another naturalistic scenario could be devised. As the only other competing theory is special creation by an intelligent designer Darwinism is the only game in town for scientific naturalists and hence must be defended with often dubious and frequently made up evidence.

Young earth creationists believe that the best way to defeat Darwinism and its implications for special creation by God is to drastically reduce the time available for evolution to work its magic. Hence a 24 hour day in Genesis 1 is seen as a necessary interpretation to protect biblical doctrines of the Fall and man made in the image of God among many others.

Later in this paper I will list just a few of the items that cast real and honest doubt on Darwinism’s credibility and show that at the very least a young earth is NOT necessary to derail Darwinism’s progressive march against Biblical Christianity. 

This leads to a third and obvious point, we hold to a duel revelation theology supported (at least) by Psa 19:1-4; Rom 1:18-19 and Rom 10:18.  Interestingly Psa 19:5-6 was used as a literally true description of the sun moving around the earth and proof of a geocentric universe. It is possible that over adherence to Van Tillian presuppositionalism may cause some interpreters to posit a single revelation theology in practice if not in fact.

I recognize that the Church must exercise caution in jumping too quickly aboard contemporary pseudo-scientific fads, such as Man-made Global Warming and the multiverse conjectures, as these are always driven by political pressures rather than demonstrable, observable, scientific fact.  I also recognize that science and nature are subject to interpretation and so the Church should always exercise caution in adopting any scientific position to bolster any theological claim.

With that said the Church has done much backtracking over Joshua 10:12-14. The long day occurred but the sun did NOT stand still as it does NOT circle the earth. No amount of clever hermeneutics allows for another interpretation. We simply accept the fact of nature and interpret the scriptures accordingly. 

My fourth argument is that scripture itself contains numerous instances where the Hebrew and Greek words for ‘Day’ do not and cannot mean a 24 hour period. This is to demonstrate that no necessary harm is done to scripture nor its interpretation nor its doctrines of salvation and God by interpreting the Genesis six days of creation as being longer than six, consecutive 24 hour periods.

Two instances in Genesis 1-3 are examples.   Gen 2:4 ‘These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens.’   To me this should be the end of the dispute.  Scripture interpreting scripture is always our safest path and here the entire heavens and earth six day creation periods are summarized as one creation period with the word ‘day’.  Obviously from the context the word ‘day’ here cannot mean a single 24 hour period.

Gen 2:1-3 speaks of the seventh day as a day God rested. Heb 4:4-7 references this scripture and seems to tell us that the seventh day continues for those called by God unto the present day. An argument is made that if Gen 1-2 does NOT speak of seven literal days how would we ever be able to understand the Sabbath day.   This argument is specious for several reasons. First we live in 24 hour days and so the analogy to the creation week is easy to grasp no matter how we interpret the length of the day. Second the Sabbath rest is literally on the seventh day but Christians had no problem changing their Sabbath rest to the first day of the week in honor of the resurrection and pointing to the fact that one in seven is the principle observed not necessarily the day of the week. And third, our week of seven days is clearly built around the seven days of creation in the Bible and as a ‘day is to the Lord as a thousand years’ it matters not whether God’s day is 24 hours, a thousand years or ten thousand years. 

My fifth argument is that Adam did not die in the day he ate the forbidden fruit.

Gen 2:17 ‘but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.’   

Yet the scripture clearly says he would die in that day. Now according to the rules of interpretation the RCUS is using for the six creation days we must not spiritualize nor otherwise attempt to reinterpret the word day as anything other than a normal, 24 hour day. To get around this we reason  that God meant spiritual death.   Well clearly that did happen according to the Apostle Paul and others. But my point here is: That is NOT what it says. Physical death is the only death we can infer from the actual statement. So I offer the better solution is that ‘day’ means an indefinite period of time. Adam’s physical death did happen when he ate and it transpired over a very long time.  Adam dwelt in the day of his death for the rest of his life which was over 900 years.

My sixth argument is that Sabbath days can be years according to Leviticus.

Lev 25:1-7 ‘The Lord said to Moses on Mount Sinai, ² “Speak to the Israelites and say to them: ‘When you enter the land I am going to give you, the land itself must observe a sabbath to the Lord. ³ For six years sow your fields, and for six years prune your vineyards and gather their crops. ⁴ But in the seventh year the land is to have a sabbath of rest, a sabbath to the Lord. Do not sow your fields or prune your vineyards. ⁵ Do not reap what grows of itself or harvest the grapes of your untended vines. The land is to have a year of rest. ⁶ Whatever the land yields during the sabbath year will be food for you—for yourself, your manservant and maidservant, and the hired worker and temporary resident who live among you, ⁷ as well as for your livestock and the wild animals in your land. Whatever the land produces may be eaten.’ 

Again Sabbaths occur in periods of seven and the length of the Sabbath periods can be days, years or indefinite periods of time.  We do not need seven literal 24 hour days to easily understand that Sabbaths occur after six periods of time with the seventh period being a time of rest.

My seventh argument is the Sabbath of this paper. We do not need seven 24 hour days to effectively counter the materialistic naturalism of neo-Darwinism. Darwinism is a probablistic theory driven by the environment acting on randomly occurring genetic mutations producing extremely modest adaptive improvements in a living, functioning creature.  Even though geneticists know that 99.99% of all mutations are either harmful or fatal to an organism it is assumed that over millions of years the non-lethal ones will accumulate and result in a new organ, system, appendage and ultimately creature.   

Even though this has never been actually observed in either the lab nor in the natural world a Darwinist typically says that since we are here, and multitudes of creatures abound, it is certainly what must have happened. They also assert that since all life is built upon cells which all replicate and function with the DNA molecule this amounts to evidence of a single cell being the ancestor of all of the other creatures that have ever inhabited earth.

Nobel prize winning scientist Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the architecture of DNA, wrote in ‘Life Itself’ that the origin of life is so beyond any hope of unravelling this mystery that the original life on earth must have been seeded by an alien race as only a miracle could build such a molecule functioning in the dizzying array of molecules, proteins and amino acids that form each living cell.      

Stephen Jay Gould, late professor of paleontology at Harvard and a world-renowned scientist and author, wrote that the ‘trade secret’ of paleontologists is that the fossil record does NOT support gradual evolution as proposed by Darwin but rather is marked by long periods of stasis, that is NO change, punctuated by the sudden appearance of brand new organisms with NO transitional types preceding them. The Cambrian Explosion around 530 million years ago is a classic example. Suddenly, that is within 70 million years, all of the major animal phyla, that is body plans that exist on earth, appear in the fossil record, fully developed and functioning. From this irrefutable fact Gould concluded that evolution occurs in punctuated bursts of new creatures followed by millions of years of stasis. This is of course the description of the Genesis account with God suddenly adding new creatures on each new creation day.  

Philip E. Johnson, former professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, took a sabbatical to read everything written on biological evolution and eventually produced the highly readable and influential book ‘Darwin on Trial’ in 1993.  Able to read and absorb vast amounts of data Johnson read the scientific literature produced by Darwinists themselves and demonstrated that the entire theory of evolution is a tautology based upon ‘just-so’ stories (reminiscent of Rudyard Kipling’s tales of how the leopard got his spots) rather than any hard scientific evidence.  ‘Evolution is true because we are here, we are here because evolution is true.’

Lastly, for this paper, probability theory destroys chance as a creator of anything meaningful.

Probability theory is the science that allows insurance companies and casinos to rake in billions of dollars accurately predicting random outcomes.  Most people have no idea how it works and so are susceptible to complete lies such as, ‘A million monkeys typing on a million typewriters  for a million years will inevitably produce all of the works of Shakespeare.’  When in point of fact these mythical monkeys could not produce even one intelligible sentence in that time frame.  Chance is utterly moronic and completely incapable of producing anything other than chaos.       

End.