As I stressed at the beginning of this study, my focus is on what we can learn from the scriptures themselves rather than how we might find ways of conforming modern scientific discoveries to the Genesis text. If there is ever to be any hope of resolving this issue in the church—or at the very least creating tolerance for alternative points of view—the solution will have to come from careful exegesis of the Genesis account, along with other applicable scriptures.
To begin with, all Christians should be able to agree that the days of Genesis are a form of revelation. Since no human observed the events of Genesis 1:1-27 and 2:5-7, those events could only have been relayed to man by means of revelation. Further, as we have already seen, revelation often comes in the form of symbolism: word pictures that convey truth but are not themselves intended to be taken literally. I’ve already provided some examples of how revelatory symbolism can be misinterpreted, and is sometimes even deliberately obscured by God until the time comes when it pleases him to reveal the full nature of it. These are well-established truths of scripture.
Thus, anyone who approaches Genesis with serious intent to understand it must bear in mind that, as revelation, the account may contain symbolism. The challenge lies in trying to identify the symbolism, if it exists, and to understand its meaning. It is altogether unwise to assume that the account is nothing more than strictly literal historical narrative. Again, I urge the reader to consider how Jesus rebuked his disciples for taking him too literally at times, and how it was actually necessary for him to open their minds and otherwise provide special explanations of his teachings in order for them to understand him properly.
So, with all of this in mind, let’s look at the various elements of the creation account and see what they have to teach us.
The Structure of Genesis One
With the exception of Day Seven, the days of the creation week follow a consistent pattern. Six times, God engages in various creative activities, after which we’re told: “And there was evening and there was morning. Day _____.” The “evenings” and the “mornings” are division points in the account, and this tells us something very important to our understanding of the passage.
In Hebrew culture, what we think of as a typical full day—that is, a twenty-four-hour day—runs from sunset to sunset, or you could say “from evening until evening.” We don’t see this reflected in the Genesis creation account, however. We don’t read “And from evening until evening was one day,” or anything along those lines. Instead, each creative period is followed by an evening, and the subsequent creative period is preceded by a morning. Here is a chart that illustrates this a bit more clearly for the entire creation week:
Thus, we can readily see that the creation days of Genesis are not twenty-four-hour days. Read literally, they are six consecutive daylight periods, book-ended by evenings and mornings. Day Seven is a well-known exception to the rule in that it has no evening, but the illustration provided shows that Day One is also an exception in that it has no morning. Thus, both the beginning and the end of the creation week are open-ended.
The fact that each creation day specifically refers to the daylight hours is further substantiated by the description of Day One:
The earth was formless and void and darkness was over the surface of the deep. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light day, and the darkness he called night. And there was evening, and there was morning, one day. – Genesis 1:2-5
Once light was introduced to the surface of the earth, God “separated” the light from the darkness. Given that light and darkness are naturally distinct from one another, we might well ask how God separated them, and the most obvious answer would appear to be that he did this simply by defining them, just as the text says. He called the light “day” and the darkness “night.” Then we are told that there was an evening, followed by a morning.
Now consider: What are “evening” and “morning”? What do these terms mean? They are times of transition between day and night, between light and darkness. Thus, the creation account itself begins by specifying what is meant by the term “day” in this context: it’s the period of daylight between morning and evening. Nothing is mentioned as occurring during the periods of night in this account; they are times of apparent inactivity.
The Divine Pattern
The significance of all of this begins to settle in once you consider how the ancient Hebrews—as well as the vast majority of those who read this account for centuries afterward—would have related to it. For the most part, people in the ancient world worked in the fields as laborers, farmers, shepherds, herdsmen, and the like. For them, “morning” was when they woke and went out to the fields; “day” was when they actually labored; “evening” was when they returned home from the fields; and “night” was when they rested.
Factoring this into the Genesis account, a picture begins to emerge. God is presented as a landowner overseeing a vast project. He goes to work during the “day,” returns home at “evening” to rest during the “night,” and leaves his dwelling the next “morning” to complete another “day’s” work. I say ‘landowner’ here because his work consists of giving commands, which are obeyed, and observing/approving the results. He is not presented as a common laborer. Note the following from Proverbs 8:29-30, where the Wisdom of God speaks of his role in the creation: “When He marked out the foundations of the earth; then I was beside Him, as a master workman.”
The “days” of Genesis are thus strongly indicated to be divine ‘work days.’ Creation is depicted as six successive periods of work completed during the daylight hours, separated by six periods of rest during the nighttime, and ending with an extended period of rest when the entire project of creation is finally finished. The imagery here is unmistakable. It would have naturally resonated with the ancient Hebrews who first received Genesis, and it is supported by other scriptures as well.
For one, consider Jeremiah 7:12-14 and 25, where God speaks against the Southern Kingdom of Judah, reminding them of how he had judged the Northern Kingdom of Israel:
“But go now to My place, which was in Shiloh, where I made My name dwell at the first, and see what I did to it because of the wickedness of My people Israel. And now, because you have done all these things,” declares the Lord, “and I spoke to you, rising up early and speaking, but you did not hear, and I called you but you did not answer, therefore I do to the house which is called by My name, in which you trust, and to the place which I gave you and your fathers, as I did at Shiloh.”
“Since the day that your fathers came out of the land of Egypt until this day, I have sent you all My servants the prophets, daily rising early and sending them.”
In Matthew 20:1, Jesus compares God to a landowner hiring workers to labor in his fields:
“For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard.”
So, yes, there are scriptures that picture God rising up in the morning to do work of some kind, with the Wisdom of God even pictured as a “master workman” laboring alongside of him in the creation process.
As to why God chose to convey the creation process in this manner, we find the explanation in Exodus 16, where the children of Israel observe the Sabbath day rest for the first time. The Lord instructed them through Moses to go out every morning to gather manna except for the seventh day of the week. Note the phraseology used in the account where the seventh day is concerned:
It came about on the seventh day that some of the people went out to gather, but they found none. Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘How long do you refuse to keep My commandments and My instructions? See, the Lord has given you the Sabbath; therefore He gives you bread for two days on the sixth day. Remain every man in his place; let no man go out of his place on the seventh day.” So the people rested on the seventh day. – Exodus 16:4, 13-14, 21-30
This account is the first time in scripture where a seven-day week is described. No application is made to the creation account at this time, but God is clearly setting up a pattern for Israel to follow: six days of gathering, followed by one day where no one was to “go out of his place” (that is, to gather). The people were to rest from working on the seventh day because the absence of manna made it clear that God was not working either. In his six-days-on-one-day-off cycle of providing the manna, God was literally leading the Hebrews by example every day of the week.
A short while later, having laid down this pattern, God explained the reason for it:
Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath of the Lord your God; it in you shall not do any work…For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. – Exodus 20:8-11
It is my conclusion that God employed the work day imagery of Genesis 1 in order to lay out a pattern for his people to follow, based on his own creative activity, and he conveyed it to them in terms that conformed to their natural experience. Young-earth teachers often cite Exodus 20:8-11 in an effort to show that the fact that God laid out six literal calendar days of work followed by a literal calendar day of rest must mean that the creation also took place in six literal calendar days followed by one literal calendar day of rest, but this conclusion is based on purely superficial comparisons of the texts. The alleged parallelism does not hold up to scrutiny.
Revelatory Symbolism v Exact Parallelism
Yes, the book of Exodus tells us clearly that the creation week was revealed as a pattern for the human work week, but a pattern need not be an exact match to the thing upon which the pattern is based. This is not only true in terms of general human experience but also within the context of scripture. Consider the celebration of the Feast of Booths (or Tabernacles), as first described in Leviticus 23. God instructed Moses that the people were to live in booths (that is, tents) “for seven days in the year…so that your generations may know that I had the children of Israel live in booths when I brought them out from the land of Egypt” (23:41, 43). As we can see here, the Feast of Booths was patterned on Israel’s journey through the wilderness—a journey that eventually grew to last for forty years—but the feast that was patterned on those years lasted only seven days.
Readers reflecting on this may also recall the famous Seventy Weeks prophecy of Daniel 9, where a period of “weeks” is explicitly stated to represent a time period lasting hundreds of years. Specifically, each “week” is a period of seven years. Daniel would have understood this imagery immediately because, per Leviticus 25:1-7, years were grouped together like weeks on the Hebrew calendar, with every seventh year designated a Sabbath year, just like every seventh day of the week was a Sabbath day. These periods are called “weeks” in Daniel’s prophecy because they represent successive, seven-year stages in a work God was doing in the history of Israel and with respect to the person of the Messiah. They are literally divine work weeks—weeks measured in human years.
Remember Gleason Archer’s point about the Hebrew grammar of Genesis 1, how “the first day” should actually be translated “day one,” and “the second day” should be translated as “a second day.” This makes sense when you consider that there was no human work week at the time of creation. There was no “first day of the week” at that time, so the first day of God’s creative activity is simply “day one.” There was no “second day of the week,” at that time, but only a second day of creative activity, and so forth. The creation days are not days of the week; they are instead the basis for the days of the week. Now, this does not prove that they were not successive twenty-four-hour periods, but it does allow for that, especially given the pattern of biblical symbolism and parallelism I’ve just laid out here. It is entirely plausible.
Further, if the days of Genesis are a literal, exact match to the timing of God’s creation week activities, why should the parallels stop there? Read literally, the days of Genesis 1 confine God’s creative acts to the daylight hours. Are we really prepared to argue that God only works during the daylight hours? Does he really work in six-day cycles? Does he begin his work in the morning and finish up by evening like a human laborer? Does he take off one day out of every seven? Does he go home to rest at night? And from what point on the earth is a divine work day to be measured? After all, dawn in one part of the world is seen as dusk in another. When one half of the planet is experiencing daylight, the other half is experiencing night. Yet, the events of Genesis—read as young-earth teachers interpret them—appear to affect the entire globe all at once.
For example, when God was gathering the waters that covered the entire earth into one place, it would have been day on one side of the globe and night on the other; but we’re told that this event happened during the “day” and was finished by evening. That’s only possible if we’re speaking about a fixed location on the globe—or if the term “day” is being used metaphorically for the entire time it took for this event to play out to completion.
Genesis 1:2 says that the Spirit of God was “hovering over the waters,” so we might infer that God’s presence was localized somewhere on the earth when he began the process of shaping the planet,[1] but given that the entire earth was covered with water at that time, it could also mean that God’s presence effectively surrounded the earth—covering all of the waters everywhere. Based solely on the text, there is no way of knowing which it is. Even if his presence was localized in some way, however, his power was clearly acting over the entire earth throughout all of the creation days—during the night as well as the day, during both the evening and the morning.
It is also difficult to understand why the terms “evening” and “morning” appear in the text at all, if indeed we are looking at a strictly literal account. These terms denote periods of transition, from day to night, from night to day, from work to rest, and from rest to work. This entire frame of reference is solar, human, earth-bound, and naturally inapplicable to God, who does not require light to work, is not hindered by darkness, and does not tire or need rest.
As with man, however, the works of God do have beginnings and endings, which might be well represented in human terms by “mornings” and “evenings.” I remind the reader here that Moses, who wrote the book of Genesis, used the terms “morning” and “evening” to symbolize the beginning and ending of life in Psalm 90. Consider also that Jesus himself—through whom all things were created (John 1:1)—uses the terms “day,” “night,” and “light” as symbolic representations in the context of kingdom work in John 9:3-5: “We must work the works of Him who sent Me as long as it is day; night is coming when no one can work. While I am in the world, I am the light of the world.”
“Day” in this passage quite obviously does not refer to literal daylight hours but to a period of productive work for the kingdom of God. By necessity of the contrast Christ draws, “night” must therefore refer to the time when this work will cease, and within this particular context likely has to do with end of Christ’s earthly ministry, given his comment about being “the light of the world.” Thus, he is the “light” during this particular time of “day” when kingdom work is being done. In Luke’s account of Christ’s arrest, he says to those who were sent out to take him: “While I was with you daily in the temple, you did not lay hands on Me; but this hour and the power of darkness are yours (Luke 22:53).” Comparing these passages, it seems that the “night” referred to in John 9 is likely the “hour of the power of darkness” referenced in Luke 22: the effective end of Christ’s ministry.
When we have both the creator and the one who wrote the account of the creation using the terms “morning” and “evening,” “day” and “night” in clearly symbolic fashion, is it really so unthinkable that those same terms at the very least could have been used to symbolize the beginning and ending of six successive stages in God’s works in the Genesis creation account?
Again, I remind the reader how God spoke to the ancient Hebrews in terms they could understand within the framework of their perceptions of the world. God did not correct their cosmology because it was not within the scope of his purposes in communicating with them. When Joshua commanded the sun and moon to stand still, he didn’t get a “syntax error” or “We’re sorry, but your call could not be completed as dialed,” because he mistakenly thought that the sun and the moon actually move through the sky. God did not interrupt and say, “Joshua, you need to rephrase your request because that’s not actually how things work.” Joshua’s intent was plain, and however it was that he made it happen, God fulfilled the request without correcting Joshua on the science.[2]
The Seventh Day is Key
In Mark 2:23-28, the Pharisees question Christ concerning why his disciples are picking grain on the Sabbath, when the Law of Moses forbade any work from being done. Christ responds with the story of how David violated the Law of Moses on an occasion when he and his men were in need of food, and then makes the following statement: “The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath.” His point is that the law, including the Sabbath commandment, was not given to harm man but to benefit him.
God does not require rest as human beings do, yet Genesis tells us that he “rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done.” The word translated “rest” is shabath, which can simply mean to cease from activity,[3] and thus need not necessarily imply rest from physical activity (as humans rest); but in Exodus 31:17, God elaborates on the Sabbath, saying to Moses:
“It is a sign between Me and the sons of Israel forever; for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, but on the seventh day He ceased from labor and was refreshed.”
Whereas “rest” is translated from shabath, the word “refreshed” is translated from a different Hebrew word: naphash, which, according to Gesenius’ Hebrew-Chaldee Lexicon means: “to take breath (when wearied [or, to rest, cease from working]).”[4] In modern terms, we might say that the word means ‘to catch one’s breath.’ This word is found in only two other Old Testament passages: Exodus 23:12, where God reiterates the seventh day command so that one’s animals and servants can rest from their labors, and II Samuel 16:14, where David and his companions refresh themselves after a wearying flight from Absalom. Both of these additional occurrences of naphash are used in the sense of resting after becoming weary from some kind of exertion. Thus, it seems clear that God did not present his seventh day rest to the Hebrew people as a mere period of inactivity, but rather, as genuine, restorative rest from labor.
For this reason, I will ask the Genesis literalist again: Does God need to rest as we do? My answer is no—God’s depiction of resting to be refreshed from his labors is not literal, but is instead a pattern he laid down for the children of Israel to follow, and is perfectly consistent with a metaphorical ‘divine work-day’ interpretation of the six creation days. Having portrayed himself as laboring “in the field,” as it were, from dawn to dusk for six days, God then portrays himself as resting to be refreshed from that labor on the seventh day. This is all revelatory imagery, as Jesus said with regard to the Sabbath specifically, “for man”—that is, for the benefit of man. In the creation account, God portrayed himself in very human terms for the benefit of the very human audience with which he was trying to communicate.
In light of this—how the seventh day rest of “refreshing” must be figurative, and how it molds seamlessly into the overall “divine work-day” narrative—may we not then reasonably conclude that the six “days” with their “mornings” and “evenings” are, in all likelihood, also figurative representations that portray God in human terms for the benefit of a human audience?
Is a Figurative Creation Account Deceptive?
Young-earth teachers sometimes argue that if the Genesis creation account is not entirely literal, God would be guilty of deception; but does this follow logically or scripturally? Would it be deceptive for God to picture himself to Israel in human terms, or to picture the creation as a figurative work week? Remember the passages I cited from Jeremiah where God says that he “rose up early” to warn his people. Was he being deceptive by employing human terminology in those instances? Also, consider some of the following Old Testament passages where God is referred to as appearing human or acting in a human manner:
In Genesis 3:8, God is spoken of as “walking in the garden in the cool of the day.” In Genesis 18:1-8, the Lord appears to Abraham as a man in the company of two angels, who are also first spoken of as men. He eats and drinks with Abraham and apparently has his feet washed before going on his way to Sodom. In Genesis 32:24-32, the Lord once again appears as a man and wrestles with Jacob during the night. In Exodus 24:9-10, Moses, Aaron, and various elders of Israel saw “the God of Israel…and under His feet there appeared to be a pavement of sapphire.” In Deuteronomy 23:12-14, God instructs the people to bury human waste outside the camp, and not to leave it in the open, because “the Lord your God walks in the midst of your camp…and He must not see anything indecent among you.” In Joshua 5:13-15, Joshua is confronted by a man who introduces himself as “the captain of the host of the Lord,” whose presence renders the ground “holy.” And for one last example, see Daniel 7, where God is referred to as “the Ancient of Days,” and is described as sitting on a throne, wearing “a white vesture,” and having hair like “wool.”
These incidents illustrate that the Hebrews were well able to conceive of God as taking human form and acting in a human fashion, including walking, sitting, eating, and drinking, and there is no hint that they found this deceptive. Indeed, given other passages such as the Lord’s appearance to Moses in the burning bush, and references[5] to him appearing in “similitude” (Hebrew – temuwnah, “embodiment, image, likeness”),[6] it is almost certain that they understood that those who encountered God personally had not seen his true essence, but rather, a form he chose to take. This is almost certainly what the apostle John means when he writes “No one has seen God at any time” in John 1:18.
In Psalm 22, David describes the sufferings of Christ in the first-person, as if he were speaking of himself. Is this deceptive? Why would the Holy Spirit inspire a man to describe things that never happened to him as though they had, and without any clarification that he was speaking of events yet to come? How about the parables of Jesus? Were they deceptive? No one seriously argues this. Even though the stories he told were not strictly true in their details, they illustrated truths using familiar settings and characters. The use of parables was a common teaching method throughout the world in those days, and continues to be so to this day. Should we censor Aesop because his fables utilize talking animals and impossible situations to teach moral lessons?
Still, we might well ask why, if the days of Genesis are not literal, “regular,” twenty-four-hour days, but figuratively represent six periods of creative activity, does God does not simply say so and put the matter to rest. In reply, I point out the following:
First, when Genesis was written there was no controversy to address. Again, as some Bible teachers have phrased it, scripture was written for us but not to us. The Genesis account was written to the ancient Hebrews. It was communicated on their level of understanding, within a worldview that was familiar to them, and for two primary purposes:
- God was declaring himself the supreme and sovereign Creator of all things, thus directly refuting the pagan beliefs of the Egyptians and other nations that venerated heavenly bodies, the creatures of the earth, and even human beings, as gods. God wanted the Hebrews to understand that these things had been created and ordered by him, for his purposes, and were not worthy of worship.
- As we have already seen, he was laying out a pattern of work and rest for Israel to follow as the people moved into stewardship of the land of Canaan. The seven-day week formed the basis for their lunar calendar and the various holy days that God would later command his people to observe.
Just as God did not find it necessary to delve into advanced cosmology in his other dealings with men, so it was not necessary to his purposes in laying out these things for Israel. The science of the account, to the limited extent that it exists, is a secondary concern and is presented in very simple terms. God creates the world, subdivides it into three environments: land, sea, and sky, fills these environments with various life forms specifically designed to inhabit them, establishes the basis for a calendar system, and then creates humans to manage the whole affair.
The presentation I’ve laid out of God as a landowner organizing his property in preparation for handing it off to the administration of man seems to gain further credence when you consider the similarities between the Garden of Eden and the Promised Land, which God was giving into Israel’s stewardship—with certain conditions. Just as the garden is described as a place of particular abundance, Canaan is referenced as “a good land,” and a land “flowing with milk and honey.” More important, however, is the story of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden, as it served in part as a warning that God would drive the Hebrews from Canaan if they departed from his covenant, just as he had driven Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden when they disobeyed him.[7]
In Deuteronomy 30:15, God tells Israel through Moses:
“See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, and death and adversity; in that I command you today to love the Lord your God, to walk in his ways and to keep his commandments and his statutes and his judgments, that you may live and multiply, and that the Lord your God may bless you in the land where you are entering to possess it…But if your heart turns away and you will not obey…I declare to you today that you shall surely perish. You will not prolong your days in the land where you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess it. I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse.”
It shall come about that as the Lord delighted over you to prosper you, and multiply you, so the Lord will delight over you to make you perish and destroy you; and you will be torn from the land where you are entering to possess it. Moreover the Lord will scatter you among all the peoples, from one end of the earth to the other end of the earth. – Deuteronomy 28:63-64
All the nations will say, Why has the Lord done thus to this land? Why this great outburst of anger? Then men will say, ‘Because they forsook the covenant of the Lord, the God of their fathers…and the Lord uprooted them from the land in anger and in fury and in great wrath and cast them into another land. – Deuteronomy 29:24-25, 27-28
Compare these passages with what we find in Genesis:
Then the Lord God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it. The Lord God commanded the man, saying, “From any tree of the garden you may freely eat; but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die. – Genesis 2:15-17
Then to Adam he said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree about which I commanded you, saying, ‘You shall not eat from it’; cursed is the ground because of you…” – Genesis 3:17
…therefore the Lord God sent him out from the garden of Eden, to cultivate the ground from which he was taken. So he drove the man out… -- Genesis 3:23-24
The parallels here are unmistakable, and they enhance the revelatory imagery of the Genesis account. While I believe that the garden was a real place, I also believe it clearly represents the “place” or “position” of God’s covenant favor, just as Noah’s ark and the land of Canaan would later represent the same thing. By extension, these things also represent the kingdom of God, which is denied to the disobedient.
I find it interesting that, when Israel finally entered Canaan and went to war with the inhabitants of the land, God had the people reenact the creation week in similitude. They were commanded to march around the city of Jericho for seven days—once per day for the first six days, and then seven times on the seventh day. For the first six days, they were not to make a sound as they marched, but on the seventh day they were to shout after circling the city for the seventh and final time.
The text doesn’t tell us why God required any of this, but I believe the reason is because the six days of creation were God’s work rather than man’s; therefore, the Hebrews were to be silent during the time that symbolized those days. Then, on the seventh day, God finally gave the city over to them, just as man took over the work of managing creation on the seventh day of the creation week, when God’s work was finished. The lesson here is that, just as the people did not take Jericho by their own power, but received it as a direct act of God, so man does not have power over creation on his own: creation was given over to man as God’s completed work. God wanted the Hebrews to know and remember that the land they were entering was his, and was being given over to them by his decree, subject to their obedience.
This lesson was then underscored in the incident involving a man named Achan. When Jericho fell, Israel was under instructions to leave everything made of gold, silver, bronze, and iron for the treasury of the Lord. They were not to take any of it. Achan violated the ban, taking some of the forbidden goods of Jericho for himself. His theft went undetected until Israel moved against the next Canaanite city, Ai, and suffered a humiliating defeat. Shortly after this incident, Achan’s sin became known, and he was then taken out and executed. It was only then that Israel was able to successfully take the city of Ai and resume the conquest of Canaan.
Thus, through the ban on the goods of Jericho and their failure at Ai, God tested Israel to see whether they would abide by his authority in the land he was giving them, just as he tested Adam and Eve in the garden he had given into their care. In the same way that Achan ignored the divine decree and took the forbidden treasures of Jericho, with the result that many warriors of Israel died even though they had not violated the ban themselves, so Adam and Eve took the forbidden fruit, and brought ultimate death not only upon themselves but upon their descendants as well (see Romans 5).
A second reason why God may not have clarified that the days of Genesis are symbolic is because he has declined to do our homework for us. He provides enough information in the Genesis account (and related passages of scripture) so that anyone who is curious and willing to study can discern the figurative nature of the presentation. Perhaps this was a form of incentive God provided for men to study his word, as Augustine and Origen seemed to have believed. The writings of ancient Jewish and Christian authors alike demonstrate that careful thinkers did indeed pick up on the clues and devote much thought to them, even long prior to the advent of modern cosmology.
A third reason why God may have used work week symbolism in Genesis 1 has to do with his habit of revealing spiritual truths at certain times and to the audience of his choice. As discussed previously, it may be that the beginning and the end are tied together in some way that will be not be fully understood until all prophecy has been fulfilled, and who is to say when that will be? Just as he spoke through the Old Testament writers in various types and shadows that were not revealed until the writing of the New Testament, so he knew (and I believe intended) that Genesis would not be understood until later generations acquired the necessary understanding of the physical world to comprehend the revelation.
As stated previously, scripture is clear that God is sometimes willing to speak in oblique terms, using representations that confuse and upset people, and without explaining himself as we might expect. Consider Christ’s “bread of life” discourse from John 6. Here, Jesus so confused and frustrated his audience that many of his own disciples turned away in consternation and no longer followed him. He could have clarified the discourse with a few words—explaining the spiritual application of what he was saying—but he did not do so. God isn’t interested in cultivating followers who have to have him completely figured out before they get with the program. He wants fully committed disciples: men and women of faith such as Abraham, who was willing to sacrifice his son without knowing that he would not actually be required to go through with it in the end. It would not have been much of a test of Abraham’s character had he known the outcome from the beginning; he had to proceed by faith.
Conclusion
In summary, I fully understand why so many Christians believe that the days of Genesis were literal calendar days. On the surface, the text certainly does appear to read that way, and this is probably how a majority of the ancient Hebrews perceived it; yet, this is hardly surprising when we consider that God was handing down a calendar system he wanted the Hebrews to literally follow. We see this most clearly in the Sabbath day rest command. God wanted the Hebrews to literally rest on the Sabbath, so he conveyed his own rest in language that sounds quite literal. Had he made it clear that the creation week days were symbolic, the Hebrews might have granted themselves a great deal of leeway in how they observed the calendar, and this would have thrown key components of the Mosaic system into chaos.
In light of the factors I’ve pointed out in this discussion, along with certain curious aspects of the text that were covered in the previous chapter, I think that at least some of the ancient Hebrews who studied the Torah would have suspected that there was more to the text than could be explained by the straightforward interpretation. As we have already seen, this was certainly true in later rabbinic thought.
Although it is figurative in some ways, the Genesis creation account teaches truth concerning God as the Creator and conveys the general plan by which he implemented his creation and handed it over to man. Teaching science or providing some sort of exact timeline (such as each “day” corresponding to a certain number of years) are not in the view of the text, and there is no need to impose these things on the account in order to make it understandable or somehow more relevant.
Young-earthers may not be persuaded by the interpretation I’ve suggested here, but I hope they will at least admit that this view is a plausible alternative, particularly when weighed against the problems I’ve outlined with a strictly literal view of the account, various “oddities” in the text that were covered previously, and repeated biblical patterns of symbolism and parallelism. Contrary to what some have argued, old-earthers do not “stuff millions of years into the Bible.” We simply argue that the days of Genesis are not literal calendar days; and, in light of this, the age of the earth is an open question.
Next in this series: Misconceptions of Paradise
[1] Old-earth creationist Richard Snoke holds to this idea, believing that the focal point is the land of Israel.
[2] We could speculate endlessly on this. It may have been a localized effect, the way that darkness covered the land of Egypt except in Goshen, where the Hebrews lived just prior to the Exodus. Another example is the darkness that fell on the afternoon of the crucifixion. Given that it was a sign to those who witnessed the event, there is no reason to automatically suppose that it was a global phenomenon.
[3] Strong’s # H7673
[4] https://www.blueletterbible.org/lang/lexicon/lexicon.cfm?Strongs=H5314&t=KJV
[5] Numbers 12:8, Deuteronomy 4:12, 15.
[6] Strong’s # H8544.
[7] Note the Parable of the Vineyard (Matthew 21:33-45). God gave his people the Promised Land, helped them conquer it, subdivided it among them, and gave them a system for overseeing it and managing their mutual affairs (the Law of Moses), but they broke their covenant with God and effectively looked upon the land as theirs to do with as they pleased. When Christ—the heir of the vineyard—came, they killed him. As a result, God judged them and exiled them from the land.
The expulsion of Israel from Canaan resembles the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, and I believe is prefigured by it. God had carefully crafted a world, placed man in an ideal environment within it, taught him how to care for it, and then handed it over to him to administrate. Man then decided to disobey God and go off on his own, with the result that God exiled him from the garden (after prophesying the redemptive work of Christ and sacrificing an animal to clothe Adam and Eve).
I would invite you to check out our Young Biosphere Creationism Facebook page.
ReplyDeleteThanks for this one, too.
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