Genesis 1-11 - The Creation Week

Introduction

Genesis 1:31 KJV 1900

31 And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.

Genesis 2:1–2 KJV 1900

1 Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. 2 And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.

Body

Creation week - two accounts

God’s eyewitness account as recorded in Genesis

Man’s subjective hypothesis as to how the universe came into existence

This may seem a bit technical in nature, but please consider:

This is what the vast majority of your co-workers, neighbors, and friends believe

This is what a majority of “Christians” believe, in one form or another

This is what your children, your grand-children, and your great-grand-children are being taught right now.

Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to communicate with them, where they’re at?

Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to answer their honest questions from scripture?

Wouldn’t we be more effective at reaching them with the Gospel if we knew what they believed and why?

Faith vs. Science?

Many would have us believe this is a battle between “faith” and “science”

Faith being a blind, unreasoning faith that will ignore or even contradict logic and science

Science being an impassioned, objective search for truth. Following the evidence wherever it leads

Both are false definitions

In reality, this is a battle between faith and faith

Secular Humanism is a religion

It requires faith to believe in its precepts

It has a priesthood (scientists, media, national public school system)

It has a doctrine and requires obedience and submission to its doctrine (ask any scientist who dared to question it)

The object of their worship is man

Science, properly understood, is derived from the truths of scripture

Colossians 2:2-3 “2 That their hearts might be comforted, being knit together in love, and unto all riches of the full assurance of understanding, to the acknowledgement of the mystery of God, and of the Father, and of Christ; 3 In whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.”

Genesis 1:1 “1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”

Hebrews 11:3 “3 Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.”

Psalm 33:6 “6 By the word of the Lord were the heavens made; And all the host of them by the breath of his mouth.”

Psalm 33:9 “9 For he spake, and it was done; He commanded, and it stood fast.”

Nehemiah 9:6 “6 Thou, even thou, art Lord alone; thou hast made heaven, the heaven of heavens, with all their host, the earth, and all things that are therein, the seas, and all that is therein, and thou preservest them all; and the host of heaven worshippeth thee.”

John 1:1-3 “1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 The same was in the beginning with God. 3 All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.”

Colossians 1:16 “16 For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him:”

Revelation 4:11 “11 Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created.”

Yom - day, daylight, dawn, lifetime, morning, indiscriminate periods of time, long periods of time

Can the usage of the word “Yom” in Genesis 1 actually mean long periods of time? How do we know

Understanding how the Hebrew word is used in context is key

Matthew 19:4 “4 And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female,” - Jesus took Genesis as literal history, and not allegorical

The Apostle Paul took Genesis as literal history, and not allegorical

Romans 5:12 “12 Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned:”

I Corinthians 11:8-9 “8 For the man is not of the woman; but the woman of the man. 9 Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man.”

I Corinthians 15:21-22 “21 For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. 22 For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.”

I Timothy 2:12-14 “12 But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. 13 For Adam was first formed, then Eve. 14 And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression.”

There is no classical Rabbinic support for an ancient universe

All of the ancient translations and paraphrases, such as the Aramaic Targums (TAR-gooms), take the words at face value and translate them as “days,” with no hint that they might mean “ages” in Genesis 1.

The only conclusion you can come to exegetically is that “Yom” in Genesis 1 is meant to be used as a literal, 24-hour day. The only way you can arrive at any other conclusion is eisegetically.

Why is all this important?

Unbiblical views of the creation week - trying to reconcile scripture with science

Day-Age Theory - the idea that “Yom” in this context means an indeterminate amount of time

One of the most popular theories out there looking to explain scripture from a scientific perspective

Also included under this is the theory of Progressive Creationism

God created the major types of the plants and animals at the beginning of the Sixth Day, waits and watches as they evolve naturally within their groups until at the end of this lengthy period referred to as “the Sixth Day”, God creates man of the dust by divine decree

Gap Theory - the idea that there is a long period of time between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2.

This theory states that the universe was already in existence for an indeterminate duration before the Creation Week began (and thus allow for a very old earth, but are still able to maintain God’s recent miraculous creation of mankind.

Other versions of this theory state that the universe was created full-form and populated by a pre-Adamic race only to be decimated by a cataclysmic war led between God and Satan. This war left the earth a wasteland, “formless and void”. This seeks to explain why we find fossilized dinosaur bones that seem to be millions of years old.

According to this theory, the recent Creation Week would be a re-Creation or restoration of a world that was once destroyed.

Genesis 1:28 “28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”

Replenish = fill in King James English

II Peter 3:6 “6 Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished:” - Speaks of “the world that then was”. In this theory he was referring to the original creation. It’s very obviously referring to the world that was before Noah’s flood.

Romans 5:12 “12 Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned:” - But under Adam’s feet, entombed in the sedimentary rocks of the planet, was God’s testimony to the reality of the existence of death long before Adam; the fossil record; the evidence of a previous world that was destroyed and wiped off the face of the old earth.

This is a distressing example of the Gap Theory method of Bible interpretation. The author is really saying “Scripture says death came through Adam, but science says it came earlier, so we ought to change our interpretation of Scripture because science is our ultimate authority.”

This of course puts death before sin

If death comes before sin, then death is not the punishment for sin, but a natural part of God’s creation

If death comes before sin, then Christ’s death on the cross was a complete waste. Meaningless!

He died in our place to pay the price for our sins. If death is not the punishment for sin, why did He die?

In this case, the basis of the gospel is undone and made completely irrelevant

Theistic Evolution - the theory that the entire Creation account is not to be taken literally, but we allegorize the entire account. God used evolution to bring everything we see to pass, interjecting a divine “nudge” from time to time.

This view pretty much throws methods of interpretation out the window, and serves to destroy the authority of scripture.

Apparent-Age Theory - the idea that God created the universe with the appearance of age

Because science has determined the age of the universe is around 15-20 billion years, and scripture gives us a solid 6,000 years, we must reconcile scripture with science

After all, God created Adam with the appearance of age (full adult), couldn’t He do that with everything else?

This falls apart in several areas

It makes blind speculation upon scripture - something entirely outside of the revelation God has chosen to give us

Although Adam was created as a fully mature adult human, it doesn’t mean he was created with his metabolic and cellular functions also possessing the appearance of age.

If God made the universe to appear older than it actually is, that makes God guilty of deception, at least, and now we need to discover what else God has deceived us about.

Punctuated 24-Hour Theory - the idea that God created everything in literal 24 hour periods of time, but let each “day” stew for eons before moving on to the next “day”

Again, there’s no reason to subscribe to this theory in light of a good exegesis of scripture. Only by inserting our preconceived ideas into the text (eisegesis) can we arrive at this conclusion.

Scientific Creationism - The idea that science actually demonstrates a strict, literal interpretation of Genesis 1, and that we have good reasons to believe what the Bible says about the Creation Week

This seems to serve an apologetic purpose, and it can to an extent, but we must be careful.

We must believe what thus sayeth the Lord based on the merits of scripture alone.

Our faith in God’s Word cannot come because science has proved it true, and we cannot let off believing in the Word of God because science has proven it false.

The Big Bang and Evolution

The grossly oversimplified version of Big Bang Cosmology

Overly simplistic reasons why the Big Bang and Evolution simply cannot work

Singularity is a thermodynamic “dead-end”

No one can adequately explain how stars and galaxies formed

All that should have been produced from the first miraculous event was an ever-expanding cloud of gas

Some mechanism would have to be inserted to cause the gas to collapse locally into stars and galaxies, but not so much that the gas just collapses back into a singularity

As gas collapses, it build up heat and internal pressure. At some point, the gas will begin to expand back out without an external force acting on it

Our solar system was supposed to have been formed from one of these giant gas clouds condensing into the sun, planets and moons

No one can explain adequately how rocky and metallic chunks were able to just stick together and form planets

Conservation of angular momentum a problem for the gas cloud theorist.

Biochemical evolution

No process has yet been able to explain the jump from non-organic materials to even the most primitive life form

Where did the information come from in the DNA molecule?

Macro Evolution

How do we get a dog to become a non-dog?

Beneficial genetic mutations

Even if we get a beneficial mutation, this always results in a loss of information, not a gain!

Variations within kinds, but none outside of them (micro evolution)

In short, there is no reconciling scripture with a purely naturalistic evolution of the universe

Compromise is bad science as well as bad theology

If scripture is our highest expression of truth, then everything else, including science, must be evaluated through its lens

Conclusion

There are many contradiction between how evolutionists say things came to be vs. how God brought everything to be

There are many contradictions between the doctrines of God’s Word and the doctrines of man’s word

Creation vs. Evolution handout

Contradictions handout