The Six Days of Creation 1
Sermon Transcript
0:00:14.0
In my personal study of the early chapters of the book of Genesis in preparing for this series, I have felt something akin to walking on holy ground. There is something very sacred about going back to the beginning, even the first 10 words of the Bible, back to that moment of creation and reliving it as best as we can through the pages of holy scripture. Perhaps it’s a high view of scripture that creates that holy moment for me and for you hopefully, but this is a very special study for me. And I hope it is for you as well. When the Apollo 8 astronauts read the story of creation from the Genesis record on Christmas Eve, it rocked the scientific community. It was a holy moment, wasn’t it? And how different from that Russian cosmonaut who came back from his voyage into outer space. And this cosmonaut said, “I found no evidence of a creator God.” How different was the response of these Apollo astronauts who could not restrain themselves from acknowledging the God who created the heavens and the earth. It really was a remarkable thing. It made me wonder what would happen if two astronauts on the next shuttle space mission decided to read from the early chapters of Genesis. I’m sure it would shake up a few things.
0:01:46.9
We’re in the study of the early chapters of the book of Genesis. And you may have noticed that the astronauts read through the creation story up to about the middle of day 3, about, let’s say, verse 10 of Genesis 1. If we were to go on in our reading…and we’re gonna look at the six days of creation in two weeks here. So we’ll get through it all. But if we were to read through the full Genesis record, we might make note of some key phrases and some key words that seem to be repeated throughout the text. They give the text and the story kind of a rhythmic motion to it. Phrases like “then God said.” It appears at the beginning of every day of creation. “Then God said, ‘Let there be light.’” “Then God said…” “Then God said…” We would want to make note of that phrase. There is also a rhythm to the days that appear here. “There was evening and there was morning,” day one. “There was evening and there was morning,” day two. There was evening and there was morning,” day three. We also bump into that phrase, “And God saw that it was good.” We’d want to make note of that. And there are some words that we’d want to highlight here. Some words that are repeated like the word “day.” What’s that all about? You say, well, a day means a day, doesn’t it? Well, you know, some people think differently. We need to talk about that this morning. And the word “kind,” which is sort of like species, and “seeds,” and pay attention to these kinds of words. Because as good Bible students, the repetition of words and phrases tend to unlock the passage to us.
0:03:25.2
And so one of the things that I would like for us to do this morning is to camp out on that word “day” a little bit. And this may seem a little tedious for some of you because some of you, quite frankly, you read through the creation story and you hear day 1 and day 2 and day 3. And you read that and receive it like a normal person would, that it’s referring to a day just like the day I experienced yesterday, the day I am experiencing today, and that 24 hour solar rotation of the earth that I, Lord willing, will experience tomorrow. A day means a day, doesn’t it? Not everybody thinks so. And so before we actually dive into the first day of creation and the second and so on, I want to ask and answer the question this morning why I believe in six literal days of creation. And again, for some of you this may be tedious. You're saying, “Of course I believe that. I believe that as easily as I believe Jesus turned the water into wine and Jesus fed 5000 and Jesus rose bodily from the grave. I have no problem believing that a supernatural God who spoke the worlds into existence can do it all in six normal, 24-hour rotations of the earth. I have no problem believing that. Let’s just get on with it.” But not so fast, because some people view it a little bit differently. They do things with the scriptures that we need to talk about. And besides, Peter said in 1 Peter 3:15 that we as Christians always need to be in the ready position. You know what that is, don’t you? In most sports—I’ll take baseball for instance—there is a ready position. You’re an infielder. You’re in your ready position as the pitcher delivers the ball. We need to be in the ready position as Christians because somebody may come up to you this week and say, “Why do you believe what you believe?” And you kind of have that “deer in the headlights” look. You know what you believe about creation. You know what you believe about the Bible. But can you at that moment get in the ready position and articulate why you believe, perhaps, in six literal days of creation and why it even matters that we would have this conversation?
0:05:36.9
Well, let me give you five reasons I believe in six literal days of creation. Number one, church history supports a literal interpretation of the word “day” in Genesis. What I mean by that is that the almost universal understanding for the first 18 centuries of church history was that “day” meant a day, a literal 24-hour rotation of the earth, the solar day that you and I understand. Now, I say the almost universal understanding to leave room for the fact that of course there were some people in those first 18 centuries of church history that might have understood it differently. Some people make much of the fact that Augustine didn’t believe in six days of creation, six 24-hour days. Well, no, he didn’t. He thought it all happened in one instantaneous moment. He didn’t believe in millions of years. But, you know, he diverted a little bit from the normal reading of the text. There were people like that. But the vast majority of church fathers and church leaders even through the 16th century believed in the plain and normal reading and understanding of Genesis 1 and the word “day.” The reformer Martin Luther during the 16th century, during the Reformation period, even said, “The days of creation were ordinary days in length. We must understand that these days were actual days, contrary to the opinion of the holy fathers.” And you know that Luther was in sort of a theological boxing match with the Catholic church at that time.
0:07:10.6
Of course, about 200 years ago scientists began to come up with other theories about the age of the earth and began to layer in, you know, their evolutionary hypotheses. These scientists had no vested interest in whether Genesis 1 was believable or not or whether it was true. But theologians began to hear this, and they said, “Oh, we might be wrong. We need to read this differently.” And they came up with a variety of theories to try and fit evolutionary history into Genesis 1, one of which was called the day-age theory. A day didn’t mean a 24-hour solar day. A day means a long period of time. And we’ll talk a little bit about that in a moment. But since then, we’ve come up with all kinds of theories like the day-age theory, the framework hypothesis, the gap theory, progressive creationism, theistic evolution. You go a little bit further in the book of Genesis to chapter 6, 7 and 8, and Noah’s flood was not a global catastrophe. It was a localized flood in the Mesopotamian valley. All of these theories have come up, and in my humble opinion they’ve moved away from the plain, normal, yes, literal understanding of scripture and of the words of scripture in their context. But church history for the vast majority of time has been on the side of an understanding of a literal six-day creation.
0:08:37.9
Second reason I believe it is that in the context of Genesis, yom, which is that Hebrew word translated “day,” in the context of Genesis it does refer to a normal day. Just ask yourself the question, as I read through the text, how would a normal person understand what the text is saying, beginning with the understanding that the literary form of the text is historic narrative. Now, some people want to say that, no, it’s poetry. It’s allegory. We need to take it figuratively. But an honest look, not just in Genesis 1 but really Genesis 1-11, not to mention 12 and following, the book of Genesis is historic narrative, friends. It reads like the front page of your newspaper. And the construction of the text in Genesis 1-11 is really no different than the construction from Genesis 12 and following that talks about Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, all historical figures. That’s the intended meaning by the author. But words matter, don’t they? We talked about this during the 66 series. Words and how we understand words matter. We need to understand them in their normal literary grammatical and historical context. That’s how we get to the intended meaning of the author. And the word yom, which is the Hebrew word “day,” I want to suggest to you that it means—in the context of Genesis 1—a normal 24-hour rotation of the earth.
0:10:11.5
Listen to this. Yom appears 11 times in Genesis 1, okay. Outside of Genesis, yom appears 359 times when it’s modified by a number or a numeral as it is in Genesis 1. Remember those phrases that we’re going to circle and highlight? “There was evening and there was morning,” one day, day two, day three. Yom is modified by a number. The 359 times that happens outside of Genesis 1 elsewhere in the Bible, each time it means an ordinary day. On every occasion it does. Yom also appears 23 times outside of Genesis with the rhythmic words of evening and morning associated with it. Those same words appear without yom another 38 times. So if you combine those instances, you have 61 times that the text refers to a normal 24-hour day in some association with the rhythmic phrase “evening and morning.” And then finally, in Genesis 1:5, yom appears with the word “night.” And when it appears with the word “night” elsewhere in the Bible, 53 times, it always—not just sometimes, but always—refers to a normal day. So the question is, why should we think that yom inside the context of Genesis 1 means anything other than what it means outside the context of Genesis 1 hundreds of other times. And yet the reality is yom as word…and you can go to any dictionary or go to a Hebrew or Greek lexicon, and you can find a word. And, yeah, it might have several meanings to it, nuanced and understood by the context that that word is in. Sometimes yom does mean a long period of time, like when the Bible refers to the day of the Lord. Well, context helps us nuance the understanding of yom there, but in the context of Genesis 1, it refers to a literal 24-hour day. Now, some people point to Peter, who said in his New Testament epistle that, “To the Lord, a day is as a thousand years.” The problem there in applying that to Genesis 1 is that Peter is using a literary device known as simile. “Like” and “as” are the key words there. He says, “A day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years is as a day.” A simile says one thing is sort of like another thing. It doesn't say this is equal to that. But some have taken that to suggest that, you know, Peter was talking about, you know, man’s timetable and God’s timetable. And we need to do some kind of mathematical calculation there. Even if that was true, how do you end up with millions of years in Genesis 1? You might have, you know, thousands, but not, certainly, millions. But you really can’t take the Peter thing and his use of simile and apply it back to Genesis 1.
0:13:21.4
And here again, scripture, too, interprets scripture. And this is maybe one of the strongest arguments in my mind. If you turn in your Bibles to Exodus 20…let’s go there for a moment. This is the story of the Decalogue, the giving of the Ten Commandments where God gave Moses the tablets. He came down from Mount Sinai and read the Ten Commandments to the people of Israel. In verse 8 it says, “Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.” This was an instruction God gave to the people of Israel. And then if you scroll down to verse 11, there is some expanded commentary between verses 8 and 11. And the rationale for the Sabbath day was this. “For in six days the Lord made the heaven 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.” How did the Israelites, how did a normal, everyday Israelite understand the Sabbath day command here and the rationale for it? Was he to understand that God created the heavens and the earth in six day-ages over millions of years, therefore you’re to keep the Sabbath day-age? No, I mean, the normal person understood this to be a Sabbath day, the seventh day of the week. And we’re to keep it holy, He says. Why? Because God created the heavens and the earth in six days and rested on the seventh. So scripture interprets scripture. And this is not only the inspired Word of God here in Exodus 20. We might even call it the inscribed Word of God, because God Himself, the scripture tells us, took His finger and etched these words and the Ten Commandments and the rationale into the tablets of stone, making them even more authoritative. Scripture interprets the other section of scripture that takes us all the way back to Genesis 1. So context is everything here.
0:15:20.7
Number three, the order of events in Genesis requires that a day refers to one normal 24-hour rotation of the earth. Let me explain what I mean there. Progressive creationists and theistic evolutionists want to take evolutionary history over millions and millions of years and fit it back into Genesis 1 sort of like a square peg in a round hole. You heard Dr. Mortensen from the Creation Museum make this point. The order of events in Genesis 1 through the creation story are different from the order of events in evolutionary history. Let me explain that a little bit more. For example—now, listen carefully on this—the Bible says God created the earth before the sun and stars. Evolutionary history says the sun and stars came before the earth. The Bible says the earth was initially covered in water. Evolutionists say the earth was first a molten blob. The Bible says the oceans came first, and then dry land. Evolution says it happened exactly the opposite. The Bible says life appeared on land first. Evolution says life began in the oceans. Land animals came after the birds and whales before land animals, according to the Bible. But evolution says it happened the other way around. So do you see how difficult it is to take the fallible hypotheses of evolution and fit them back into Genesis 1 when the order of events don’t even line up?
0:17:03.3
Now, what does this have to do with the 24-hour day in Genesis 1? Well, in the third day of creation it tells us that plant life and vegetation…that God created that on the third day. We know that plant life and vegetation and trees and whatnot are dependent upon little creatures on the earth called insects, and even some birds to pollinate that plant life. Well, those don’t show up in Genesis 1 until day 6. And what some creation scientists say is that if there were millions of years between the days, if these were day-ages, then the plant life created on day 3 would have died out by the time day 6 gets around. I suspect you have a plant or two in your house that can survive a day or two without water, but not a day-age or two without water and pollination and all the things that create this symbiotic relationship in the created order. So the order of events are important here.
0:18:02.0
Number four, if “day” in Genesis means long ages…and here is where we get into a little theology. If it means long ages, then death did not enter the world as the Bible says and the gospel is compromised. Turn with me to two passages, one in Romans 5. The Bible tells us how death, disease, bloodshed, pain and suffering entered into this world. Evolutionary theory tells us also how all of that appeared in the fossil record. In fact, you can even find cancer, evidence of cancer in the fossil record. Here is how the Bible says all of that came about. Romans 5:12, “Therefore, just as through one man,”—a reference to Adam here—“sin entered into the world, (0:19:00.0) and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all have sinned.” Now go with me to 1 Corinthians 15. 1 Corinthians 15:21 says, “For since by a man,” referring to Adam again. “For since by a man came death, by a man also came the resurrection of the dead,” referring to Christ. “For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all shall be made alive.” What’s the theological point here? Well, the Bible says that death, disease, pain, suffering, bloodshed, all of that happened after the fall, the fall of Adam. In fact, the Lord said to Adam, “If you eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you will surely die.” Now, the Lord did not say to Adam, “You will surely die like the dinosaurs did millions of years (0:20:00.0) earlier as seen by the evidence in the fossil record.” But progressive creationists want to put millions of years between these days. And in essence what you have you is a fossil record that shows death, disease, pain, suffering, and bloodshed before the fall. Now, this is just an argument among theologians. The scientists could care less about this. But whether you're a young earth, literal understanding of Genesis 1 or a progressive creationist that wants to blend creation and evolution, Genesis and evolution, you have to deal with this, you know, death before the fall thing. And what the progressive creationists say is that, “Well, we’re gonna differentiate between death in the animal kingdom and death among men.” But again, God did not say to Adam, “You shall surely die, just like you see in the fossil record of the dinosaurs and the plant life and the animals millions of years ahead of time.” And if that is true, we have another theological problem. We have God somewhere here in the creative order saying that all that He had created was good while He is staring a pile of fossils that reflect death, disease, bloodshed, pain and suffering.
0:21:14.8
I was in the hospital a couple of weeks ago with a family from Immanuel, and got there at the moment their 14-year-old, 15-year-old son passed away. What do you say as a pastor at a moment like that? Well, God saw that it was good, death and disease and suffering and pain and bloodshed. No, what you say is it was never intended to be this way. And we live in a fallen world. And death is a result of a sin that we can trace all the way back to Adam. And we are in the line of Adam. But Jesus Christ came. And you tie it in theologically, okay. I don’t know what to say in those moments of crisis if death and disease and all of that happened millions of years before and God somehow saw that it was good up until the moment that He created Adam. Theologically we just have some problems there.
0:22:23.8
So there is another reason, a final reason that I believe in a six literal days of creation. And that’s because Jesus’s view of creation seems to point to this. Let’s go to a couple passages of scripture. Mark 13:19. Here Jesus is talking about things to come. He’s talking about something called the abomination of desolation that will happen during the Tribulation period. This is prophecy yet to be fulfilled. And He says, “For those days will be a time of tribulation such as has not occurred,” now, listen to this, “since the beginning of creation which God created,”—I love how He kind of just layers that in there—“since the beginning of creation, [in case if you have any doubts,] which God created until now and never shall.” Jesus uses that word “beginning,” and I think that’s worth noting. There is another place He does this in Matthew 19:4, here talking about matters of marriage and relationship. He takes us back to the beginning. “Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female?” Jesus also, in another encounter, refers to the first murder when Cain killed his brother Abel. And He says Satan was a murderer from,”—there’s that phrase again—“the beginning.” The beginning for Jesus was the beginning. It’s the beginning when He made them male and female. It’s the beginning when Satan showed up to be a murderer. It’s the beginning. If all this happened millions of years before, then the beginning ain’t the beginning, friends. And Jesus was misunderstood or misunderstood the idea here.
0:24:21.1
So He seems to suggest that the beginning of time and life and creation as we understand it is the beginning that is mentioned in Genesis 1. And what’s interesting also is Jesus, with His first miracle, may give us some hint that God created the earth and certainly Adam and Eve and plant life and other things with apparent age. Is it possible that the earth is a lot younger than it appears to be? One of the interesting questions during the middle ages…and it sounds like a silly question, but it was actually a very sophisticated question. It was this. Did Adam have a belly button? Try that on with your 6th grade kids. “Hey kids, did Adam have a belly button?” They’ll chuckle a little bit. But the question was this. Thirty seconds after God created Adam a full adult…let’s just say—I don’t know what age he was—25, maybe 30 years of age. Thirty seconds after that you might look at him and say, “You’ve been around awhile, haven’t you? I mean, 25 or 30 years.” But in reality, he had only been around for 30 seconds. Did Adam have a belly button? Did God create him to appear as though he went through the normal birth cycle? But he wasn’t as old as he appeared to be in that first few minutes.
0:25:48.9
Some have talked about the apparent age of the earth and how Jesus might even give us a glimpse of that with his first miracle. Do you remember His first miracle at Cana of Galilee where He turned the water into wine? And all the guests said to the bride and to the groom, “You’ve saved the best wine until last,” the implication being, you know, the best wine has to go through time and fermentation. But when Jesus turned the water into wine, He surpassed all of that. That wine that was the best wine hadn’t fermented as long as it tasted. And some have wondered—I’ve wondered over the years—whether the first miracle, a miracle of creation, was it a glimpse back to Genesis 1 where God created with apparent age? When He created the trees and the plant life, they were full-grown trees with seeds in them ready to scatter for the next generation. He didn’t create saplings. And that’s possible. It’s possible that one of the arguments for a young earth, along with all the others, is that the earth just appears to look a lot older than it really is. Scientists figured this out on Mount St. Helens when it erupted. And these canyons, like some of the big canyons around our country, Grand Canyon and others, were carved out in a little bit of time. They went in with carbon-14 and radiometric dating and, you know, checked out the lava rocks in there. And they came back millions and millions of years old. We knew because it happened in our lifetime it looks a lot older than it really is. And it made scientists begin to question some of the old dating methods like carbon-14 and radiometric dating.
0:27:32.5
What does this matter though? Why does it really matter that we believe in six literal days of creation or in a young earth versus an old earth? I shared with you some of the theological implications. Let me share with you one other. And this is an argument that Ken Hamm makes. Ken is a former science teacher who started a ministry called Answers in Genesis. They're responsible for the Creation Museum. He asked the question, why do we believe, as evangelicals, in the literal bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ? Why do we believe that? Because some people say it wasn’t a literal physical bodily resurrection. It was a spiritual resurrection. And Jesus wasn’t a real historical figure; He was sort of a mythological figure. There are views like that out there about Jesus. But we here at Immanuel Bible Church are in line with other evangelical, conservative, Bible-believing Christians who because His resurrection was literal, historical, and physical. Why do we believe that? Because the words of scripture tell us that. Now, there is other corroborating evidence that we can bring to the discussion, like there were 500 witnesses that saw the resurrected Christ, you know, post His crucifixion. We can talk about all that. But the first thing is the words of scripture tell us. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15 as he makes a case for the gospel, He died, He was buried, He rose again “according to the scriptures.” Why do we believe in six literal days of creation? Because the words of scripture tell us that. Now, that’s a different starting point than where the scientist is. I understand that. But remember, same set of facts, two starting points, two different conclusions. This is kind of where we are in the discussion here.
0:29:22.0
So with that in mind and with just a moment or two remaining, let’s talk about day one, the first day of creation. It reads like this, verse 2, “The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters. Then God said,”—it’s one of those rhythmic phrases—“‘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.” He defines His own terms. That’s important to remember. “And there was evening and there was morning, one day.” Is it beyond the realm of a possibility that a supernatural God who creates out of nothing, who Himself was the uncreated One, is it really beyond reason to believe the plain and normal reading of this text? It begins with a formless earth. The earth was kind of a wasted, barren, desolate place just moments after verse 1 there. And by the way, the connection there, the connecting conjunction in verse 2, “and,” many scholars says that really connects it to verse 1. So this gap theory thing that there are millions of years between verses 1 and 2…in terms of the grammatical and literary context here in the flow of things, it’s a small observation, but one that some say debunks the gap theory.
0:31:20.3
“And the earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep.” It’s almost as if God begins as a painter with a blank canvas, this dark, formless earth that in its present form is uninhabitable by living creatures. And the spirit of God shows up in verse 2. Then go back to verse 1. The word “God,” “In the beginning God,” is the word Elohim. It’s in the plural form. And it sparks a little bit of curiosity for those who understand Trinitarianism in scripture. It really explodes in verse 26, “Let us make man in our image.” The trinity is there. But we have a little glimpse of it in verse 1. The veil is pulled back a little bit more in verse when it says, “The spirit of God,” that third person of the trinity shows up. And He is pictured to be brooding over this formless earth. And the picture here in the Hebrew language is like a hen who broods over her chicks. You know that some people say God is watching us from a distance? That He is distant and remote from His creation. He sort of wound it up like a toy soldier and let go of it. And He’s out there doing His other thing. And we’re kind of floating around here in the cosmos. No, from day one we find a God who is up close and personal, brooding over, hovering over His creation. You fast forward through the creation story to the Garden of Eden, and you find this same creator God walking through the Garden of Eden and having conversations with Adam. You fast forward even more to the New Testament, He is Emmanuel. He is God with us. Jesus ascends to the Father, sends the Spirit. He is God in us. He’s not watching us from a distance. He is moving closer and closer and closer to His creation. And we see it in the first created act there when the Spirit of God was moving, hovering, brooding over the surface of the earth.
0:33:25.2
And then He speaks into existence one of the building blocks of life. He says, “Let there be light.” Ask a scientist someday to explain what light is, and he’ll kind of get that look on his face, a little twitch in his shoulder. It’s a complex thing. It’s hard to really explain the properties of light, you know, exactly what is light. Scientists spend their entire career trying to figure this out. God who is light, the scripture says, and who dwells in unapproachable light, spoke light into existence. Now, this is not the sun. The sun doesn't appear until much later. Really until day four, the sun and the stars and the moon. So what is this light? Really don’t know. But it’s not too unreasonable to think that the God who dwells in unapproachable light could put some kind of light source in the heavens on day one. The assumption here is that the earth is already rotating, because you have evening and morning, the first day. And that light source from day one creates the rhythm of life, that solar day, that 24 hours. And that rhythm is repeated throughout day two, three, four, five and six.
0:34:59.0
It’s a holy moment. I mean, to think that God would speak it into existence, that He would even give us the privilege of going back to that moment with Him. We sang it a little bit earlier in the service. How great is our God. I think astronauts Lovell and Borman and Anders sat in that space capsule rotating the earth, looking out of those windows, and they just couldn’t help themselves. Borman says to Lovell, “Grab that Bible you brought along. Let’s send a message back to planet earth.” And they read from Genesis 1. And then the audacity of it, they pray for our planet. Because they're suspended in outer space, we probably looked pretty vulnerable to those three astronauts.
0:36:01.5
I don’t know where you are in this conversation or in this debate or in your biblical or scientific inquiry. But I just encourage you to think for a moment. What if? What if it happened just like the Bible says? Your life and my life matter to God. This book says we’re not an accident. This book says we’re not the product of lightning striking a mud pond. It says that we are the result of the thoughtful, careful, purposeful creator God who loves us. Let’s pray together.
0:36:45.7
Father, thank You for this day, and thank You for Your Word that You have entrusted to us. Thank You for giving us an insight even into a moment that only the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit shared together, in the background with angels singing and praising You for Your creative act. We love You for it, and we thank You. And we honor You today. We stand in awe of who You are. And we want to take the risk in a politically correct culture today of saying we believe You. We believe what You say. And we pray this in the name of Christ our Lord, amen.
0:37:52.4