Posts
Intro:
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The French military genius, Napoleon Bonaparte, was aboard ship in the
Mediterranean Sea on a clear, starry night.
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He was on deck and was walking past a group of officers who were mocking the
idea of a Supreme Being.
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"God of creation, what a joke!" They scoffed.
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But Napoleon stopped, stared at them, and then was sweeping his hands across
the stars of the sky and said, "Gentlemen, you must get rid of those
first!"
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As it was in Napoleon's time, so it is in our time.
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Many people scoff at the God of creation, as Peter tells us, "mocking the
truth and following their own desires" (2 Peter 3:3).
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These scoffers, Peter wrote, "deliberately
forget that God made the heavens by the word of his command"(2 Peter
3:5)
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What is it that scoffers deliberately forget?
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They deliberately forget that our all-powerful Creator made all things in six
days by his all-powerful Word.
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Because of the sinful condition of our hearts, the natural human tendency is to
ignore, deny, or explain away the clear teachings of the Bible.
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When human beings ignore, deny, or explain away the Scriptures, then we are
left with "empty philosophy and high sounding nonsense" which arise
from human centered tradition or thinking, "and from the spiritual powers
of this world, rather than from Christ" (Colossians 2:8).
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Let's be encouraged to be completely unlike those who scoff and deliberately forget.
Let's intentionally remember!
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Let's be encouraged to be countercultural thinkers, i.e., to think in ways
which move against the direction of the tides of our anti-biblical,
anti-Christian culture.
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Let's be encouraged to take God at his word, to trust the Bible's account of
the days of creation as normal 24-hour days.
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To receive Genesis as real history, receive the days of creation as normal
days.
Body:
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Those who try to fit billions of years of deep time into the Bible declare the
days of creation to be long ages rather than days.
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This assumption begs the question to be asked: When does day mean day?
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Of course, the word day is not always meant to be literal.
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E.g., consider the following statement: "In
my father's day, he would go to bed early Sunday evening and rise early in the
morning of the following day, and spend the next six days traveling during the
day, across the whole country." (Sarfati, Refuting Compromise, 69)
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We know that "in my father's day" does not literally mean a specific
day, rather, it's meant figuratively as a vague period of time.
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But it makes no sense to interpret six days traveling as anything but normal
days.
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Combining evening and morning shows that his bedtime and rising occurred over
the course of a normal day.
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The phrase, during the day, also refers to the daylight hours of a normal day.
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Again, this is not an unclear period of time
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Biblical Hebrew also has similar uses for the word Yom, which means day.
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However, just like with the English word, meaning depends on context.
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Genesis 2:4 is a prime example. "In
the day that the Lord God made the earth and heavens..."
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In this case, the use of the word day is from a common expression used
throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, which means "when." (Just like in
the NIV or NLT)
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So here in Genesis 2:4 Yom is used
figuratively as referring to all six days of creation.
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Looking to our passage for today, we see in verse 14 that God creates the sun,
moon and stars and he tells us why.
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"Let them be signs to mark the
seasons, days, and years."
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The plain sense reading of the word days in this verse as normal days is the
obvious reading.
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To read it as long ages of time is simply to interpret this Scripture in a senseless
manner.
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As we continue to look at Genesis 1, let's observe
the days of creation, what do we see?
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First, we see the days of creation include numbers.
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Yom
plus a number occurs 359 times in the Old Testament outside of Genesis 1 and
it always equals a normal day or part of a normal day. (Sarfati, 73-74)
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Second, I have on my bookshelf the
classic Hebrew-English lexicon by Brown, Driver and Briggs and the first
Scripture reference beside Yom (meaning
day) is Genesis 1:5, which defines the meaning of the Hebrew Yom as the passing of the evening and
the arrival of the morning.
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The Hebrew also reveals that the first day is actually written as day one, so
rather than the reading, "the first day," we have the reading, "one
day."
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Well, you might say, so what?
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Let me share this with you: Genesis 1:5 defines
what a day is. With the passing of the evening and coming of the morning is
one day.
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Genesis 1:5 actually says, and evening was and morning was one day.
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Simply stated: evening + morning = one
day
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God has provided his definition of what a day is in its very first occurrence
in the Bible, and he has defined it as a solar day, one rotation of the earth
on its axis.
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With that simple definition of what a day is, Genesis 1 then goes ahead and
uses that phrase five more times to describe the rest of the days of creation.
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Evening + morning + Yom = one 24-hour day.
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This combination occurs, 19 times outside of Genesis 1 and every time it occurs
it means either a normal day or part of a normal day.
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Let me quickly recap when in the Hebrew Scriptures day means day.
- Yom plus a number always means a normal day.
- Yom plus evening plus morning always means a normal
day.
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Now, on each day of creation in Genesis 1, we have Yom plus a number plus the passing of the evening and the coming of the
morning.
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So, we may ask, what's going on here with the language of Genesis 1 and the
days of creation?
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Genesis is using the strongest language it possibly can to communicate to the
reader that these are real, literal, normal 24-hour days.
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To receive Genesis as real history, receive the days of creation as normal
days.
Conc:
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With God in Genesis itself defining the meaning of the day and communicating to
the reader as clearly as possible that the days of creation were normal days, what
reasons could we possibly have in choosing to reinterpret the meaning of the
days of Genesis 1?
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The answers compromise the authority of God's word, place origins science in
authority over the Bible, and head down the slippery slope of compromised
faith.
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Doctors Don Batten and Jonathan Sarfati answer the question of what happens when we discount or disbelieve
that Genesis is real history.
- When we don't believe that
Genesis is real history, the Bible is disconnected from the real world,
rendering it irrelevant. (Batten & Sarfati, 15 Reasons, 16)
- If we disconnect the Bible
from the real world, then we disconnect the real world from God, and faith in
Jesus Christ is rendered meaningless.
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To receive Genesis as real history, receive
the days of creation as normal days.
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