A. The Hebrew word for light in Genesis 1:3 is “owr”. It means light, and it was created by God.  God then separated the light from the darkness, giving the world its first day, which consisted of a period of darkness and a period of light.   There’s no reason to believe it was different from any of the days that followed.  When the Bible speaks of lights on day 4, referring to the Sun and Moon, the Hebrew word is “ma’owr” meaning luminary.  The Sun is not the source of light, as the ancients believed, but a place the Lord made to hold or store the light that He had created.  So in effect the Lord gathered the light into an object we call the Sun to illuminate the day, and positioned another object we call the Moon to reflect the Sun’s light and illuminate the night.

A. In Genesis 1:1 we’re told that God created the Heaven and the Earth.  The Hebrew word for created is “bara” a word that’s used only to describe the power of God. It implies starting from scratch.  In Exodus 20:11 & 31:17 Moses didn’t use “bara”.  Instead he used “asah”, a word that means to make something, like a man might take some lumber and make a house.

In Genesis 2:4 he used both words. First God created the heaven and the Earth and then he made the Earth into a place suitable for habitation.  Nothing in the 6 day creation account requires these two acts to be simultaneous.

Then in Isaiah 45:18, a third word was added.  First the Lord created it, then He made it, and then He formed it.  The word for formed is yatsar, which means to fashion something from something else, like a potter forms a vase out of a lump of clay.

Isaiah said the Lord didn’t create the Earth formless.  This seems to be a contradiction of Genesis 1:2 which seems to say the Earth was formless at first.  But if you look at the Hebrew of Genesis 1:2 in its most literal sense, you discover that it reads, “but the Earth became formless and void” instead of “and the Earth was formless and void.” The Hebrew words translated formless and void mean an uninhabitable ruin, implying that some kind of destructive act made it that way.   It appears that something happened between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2 that turned the Earth into an uninhabitable ruin, since God didn’t make it this way. Then we’re also told that darkness was on the face of the deep at that time.

Setting aside the speculation about what might have caused this, it appears that a span of time might have passed between Genesis 1:2 and Genesis 1:3 when God said “Let there be light” and the six 24 hour day creation account began.

This is why I said that I’m OK with an old Earth and a young civilization, and that such a belief is compatible with a 6 day creation account.

A. I accept the Gap Theory as it was originally proposed.  And that is that the most literal translation of Genesis 1:2 is “But the earth became formless and void” rather than “and the Earth was formless and void.” This allows for the creation of angels and the judgment of Lucifer prior to the beginning of the Creation account in Genesis 1:3.  A long gap of time between verses 2 and 3 while the Earth lay in darkness as a result of the judgment (and darkness was on the face of the deep) also reconciles the evidence for an old Earth with the Biblical claim of a young civilization without contradicting the 6 Day Creation story .   Both Jeremiah 4:23 and Isaiah 45:18 seem to support this, being the only other places where the Hebrew words for formless and void are found.

But you can’t use the Gap Theory to explain fossils of dinosaurs, etc. I believe this a case where science is incorrect in its dating.  Nor does it justify a pre-Adamite race of human-like beings. The Bible is clear that Adam was the first man, and Paul said that sin and death entered the world through Adam (Romans 5:12)  The fossil record was created in Noah’s flood.

By the way the description of Lucifer you attributed to Isaiah is actually found in Ezekiel 28:12-19.  Isaiah 14:12-20 is the companion passage to this.

The other day I received an interesting response to my answer stating that the Bible supports an approximate 6000 year history for the human race. This person didn’t dispute the Bible, only our interpretation of it, in disagreeing with my answer.

The essence of his response was that since science has found what it considers to be persuasive evidence that contradicts the literal view of the creation account, then our traditional interpretation of the language in Genesis 1 has to be flawed.

The writer is a scientist and a Christian. He presented a calm and reasoned response claiming that every relevant field of science is in agreement that “enormous amounts of very convincing evidence exists for an old–very old–earth and even for evolution, including humans.”

Now I’ve said before that I’m OK with an old Earth. In other articles I’ve shown how an old Earth and young civilization are entirely compatible with a literal interpretation of Genesis 1. (Read More) But in his view the old Earth includes animals and other life, some of whom later evolved into humans. I’m not OK with that because the Bible says that animals came along on day 6, same as man.

He went on to ask, “So what is more likely, that thousands of highly educated, highly experienced, highly motivated, life-long scientists and thinkers are wrong about immeasurable amounts of finely done, peer reviewed data or that your interpretation of a document which is thousands of years old is ever so slightly incorrect?”

Then he repeated that He’s not contesting the accuracy of Scripture, only man’s interpretation of it.

Let’s set aside the fact that most of those thousands of highly educated, highly experienced, highly motivated, life-long scientists and thinkers are non-believers who don’t think the Biblical Creation account is even a remote possibility. We’ll consider only the believers among them, because they’re the ones who say that the Scripture is accurate, but our interpretation of it is flawed.

For all the generations from the dawn of creation until the early part of the 20th Century, almost all believers accepted the Lord’s account of the Six Day Creation. So what is it that we’ve “misinterpreted” for all these thousands of years?

It’s About Time

All believers agree that ultimately God is our Creator. So the basic conflict between the differing views of our origin really comes down to the time involved. Evolution requires millions of years, but the Bible says the creation was complete from start to finish in 6 days. Now there’s there’s only one sentence in the entire creation account that concerns time. Therefore the whole argument boils down to a claim that for all these generations we’ve misinterpreted one sentence. That one sentence, repeated 6 times, reads like this. “And there was evening, and there was morning, day (1-6) “ (Genesis 1:5,8,13,19,23,31) Furthermore, within that sentence there are only three words that relate to time; evening, morning, and day. If there’s been a misinterpretation, it has to be in one of those three words.

By the way, let’s address the Bible’s accuracy here in case you’re thinking maybe some words got changed along the way to cause our misinterpretation. According to Rabbinical sources, there are 79,847 words in the Torah, as the first five books of the Bible are called, made up of 304,805 Hebrew letters. Fewer than 2 dozen of these letters are in dispute, and then only for spelling differences. That means the Torah we have today is a 99.99% accurate copy of the one Moses originally wrote. We know this because every letter in Hebrew has a numerical value, so every line and every column of text has a correct sum. In hand copying the text every line was checked for accuracy by adding the sum of its letters and comparing it with the correct total. In the case of a difference, the page was destroyed, and the copyist started over. Remember, these people were entrusted with the very words of God and took that trust seriously.

Three Little Words

With that said, let’s take a look at the three words having to do with time.

The Hebrew word for evening is erev. It’s always translated evening, sunset or night.

The word for morning is boqer. There’s no question that it means morning. Hebrew speaking Jews greet each other at the beginning of each day with “Boqer tov” (good morning).

And the word for day is yomn. As does its English counterpart, yomn can have a figurative meaning as well as a literal one. Of its 2287 appearances in Scripture, 2008 describe a literal 24 hour day. In the figurative sense it can mean a longer span of time, such as in the phrase “Day of the Lord “ in Amos 5:18 where it refers to the 3.5 year long Great Tribulation.

But common sense tells us that when combined with evening and morning, as it is in each of the six references of Genesis 1, it’s meant to be taken literally, a single 24 hour period, because there are no figurative applications for the Hebrew words erev and boqer. And the Bible doesn’t say there were evenings and mornings, it says there was evening (singular) and there was morning (singular). One of each. And that means one 24 hour day.

We also have the first mention of the word day in Genesis 1:5 and it demonstrates the Lord’s intention for the word’s use.

And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and He 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—the first day. (Genesis 1:3-5)

This verse established the way time would be reckoned. First there was evening, the beginning of the dark period, night, and then there was morning, the beginning of the light period, day. This cycle has repeated itself every 24 hours throughout history.

Are we supposed to believe that for almost all of human history the words evening, morning, and day haven’t meant what people thought they meant?

How Could This Be?

In an effort to reconcile the creation account with evolution, some believers try to give the Lord more time to do His work of creation. They call the six days of creation by a new name, “creation days”, implying that each one is more like an age than a 24 hour period. But the accepted meanings of the words evening, morning, and day don’t accommodate this dramatic stretching of time. The Hebrew language has other words for that purpose, so these words are never used to describe an age, especially when used together.

I also realize that some believers don’t accept the Bible as being the word of God. They say it merely contains it. This allows them to discard parts of the Bible with which they disagree. Some discard the entire Old Testament, including the creation account, as little more than a collection of folk tales. But in Romans 15:4 Paul said that everything that was written in the past was written to teach us. In 1 Cor. 10:1-11 he cited a number of events from Israel’s history when the people rebelled and were disciplined. Then he said that these things happened to them as warnings for us on whom the fulfillment of the ages has come. And in 2 Timothy 3:16 he said that all scripture is God-breathed, or as we would say, written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness. In all these cases he had to be referring to the Old Testament, since the New testament didn’t exist yet. Who are we to dispute this and ignore his warnings? The Old testament is the inspired Word of God, just like the New, and is meant to play an important role in a believer’s life.

But between the liberal denomination I grew up in and the public schools I attended, evolution was the only explanation of our origins I ever heard until I was well into adulthood. Sure God was our creator, but evolution was the way He did it. No body I knew thought to even question it. It wasn’t till I was born again at age 40 that I heard any teaching about the Creation, and then it was something I had to seek out for myself. I’m sure thousands of you had similar experiences growing up.

In the last 100 years or so, a heresy called the documentary hypothesis has infested liberal theology. This hypothesis makes the claim that Moses didn’t write the Torah, but that it was pieced together long afterward from writings by several unrelated groups. Proponents of this view ask us to ignore the fact that Moses is mentioned by name in 85 verses of the New Testament, and that among them are multiple references to his authorship of the 5 Books of the Torah, including direct quotes from the Lord Himself. Was Jesus unaware of the real authors of these passages He quoted? Was he just going along with a tradition He knew was false, or did He know that Moses had written them?

Stop And Think

As you can see, these reasons for denying the 6 day creation won’t stand the test of rational thought. They’re just excuses people use to disregard the truth.

Most scientists don’t say, “Our science is based on universally accepted assumptions, and yet our findings disagree with the Creator’s account of what He did. Our assumptions must be incorrect. “

Instead they say, “Our science is based on universally accepted assumptions, and yet our findings disagree with the Creator’s account of what He did. His account must be incorrect.”

“For who has known the mind of the Lord that he may instruct him?” (1 Cor. 2:16)

I can understand non-believers searching for an alternative to the Biblical account. They have to find one in order to justify their disbelief. But how can scientists who are Christian actually think man can know more about how we were created than the One who did it, to a point where they can dispute the accuracy of the Creator’s account?

For it is written: “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise; the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.” (1 Cor. 1:19)

The time will come when we’ll know everything, just like God does. At that time we won’t have to take His word for anything. As Paul said, “We will know fully as we are fully known.” (1 Cor. 13:12) Until then I don’t believe we have the right to pick and choose what parts of His Word we want to believe. We certainly don’t have the perspective. “Who has known the mind of the Lord? we’re asked, Or who has been his counselor?” (Romans 11:34) Selah 10-31-09

A. Dinosaurs and “cavemen” are relics from the world that perished in the Great Flood of Noah’s time.  I put cavemen in quotes because the term was invented by non believers to support the theory of evolution, that man ascended from apes.  This theory is inconsistent with the Biblical account of creation so it’s understandable that the Bible doesn’t refer to the descendants of Adam and Eve as “cavemen”.

A. The confusion comes from the fact that we’ve been taught to believe that scientists can prove what they say.  But the fact is, there’s no way to prove the age of those skeletal remains.  So what we’re getting is an opinion based on theories that haven’t been proven because they can’t be observed.  There’s so much that man doesn’t know about the past that he has to make assumptions that may or may not be accurate. History has shown that a great many scientific assumptions that everybody thought were true have eventually been proven false.  The Earth is not flat, the sun does not revolve around the Earth, time is not constant, and so forth.

On the other hand, there was a witness to man’s creation, the One who created him.  He wrote a book about how it happened.  You can draw a time line based on His book and determine when man was created.  He then set about to prove to us that we could believe Him.  He did this by telling us what would happen before it did.  Not once or twice but over and over again for nearly 6000 years now.  And He’s always been right.

So you can believe the scientists who’ve been wrong a lot, or you can believe God who has always been right.

A. Although I don’t write about it much, I’m one of those old earth, young civilization types.  I too believe Earth was populated before Adam, but not by humans.  Adam was the first man.  And I don’t believe the dinosaurs came from those earlier times either. Their fossils are from the Great Flood.

I believe Earth was one of Satan’s home planets before he rebelled.  It was inhabited by angelic beings and was made desolate when he was judged.  I base this belief on 3 things.

1) The literal translation of Genesis 1:2 is “but the Earth became formless and void”, not “and the earth was ….”.

2) In Isaiah 45:18 the Lord said He didn’t create it that way, but formed it to be inhabited.  This implies a pre-Adamic judgment.

3) in Jeremiah 4:23 I believe there’s a reference to this judgment.  Interestingly, the 3 passages all use the same Hebrew words to describe the destruction and that’s the only time in the whole Bible those words appear together.

I believe the creation story begins about 6000 years ago in Genesis 1:3 after a period of desolation whose duration is unknown but could have been millions of years long.

Recently you said that Adam was created about 4000 BC, which means man has been on earth about 6000 years. How, then, do you explain the scientists who claim skeletons of cave men are millions of years old? Just today I read an article that said archaeologists have discovered a water well in Cyprus that is 10,500 years old, by radiocarbon dating. At the bottom of the well was found the skeleton of a woman, that could be as old as the well.  Is the radiocarbon dating the scientists use flawed? How do you explain this?

A. First of all, remember that it’s not God’s responsibility to validate science, but good science will always confirm the Bible.

In using radio carbon dating, three assumptions have to be made. First, we have to assume that the rate of carbon-14 decay has has always been constant.  Then we have to assume that we know what the ratio of carbon-12 to carbon-14 was in the environment in which the specimen being dated lived.  And finally, we have to assume that there hasn’t been any contamination in the specimen itself.

Legitimate scientific research has called the first two assumptions into question.  By definition science requires observation.  We can’t be certain that the rate of decay was the same in the unobservable past as it is today, and we can’t always know for sure that the ratio of carbon 12 to carbon 14 is accurate.  So the older a specimen is, the less accurate the measure.

God is the only one who observed the creation and he told us when it happened.  Claiming to know more than God does about an event only He observed is an indication of man’s arrogance.

At least part of the Creation understands the power of God, and trembles at His presence. The Earth does. And even the demons believe – and shudder. (James 2:19) It’s really only man who holds Him in disdain.

Strange thing is, man’s received the most. We’ve been given dominion over the Creation, free run of the planet. We buy and sell the land as if it was our own, pocketing the profit without so much as a fair-thee-well. We use its resources like there’s no tomorrow, assuming there’ll always be more, and are blessed by its abundant harvests. God provides the air we breathe, the water we drink, the materials for the clothes we wear and the homes we build. His light energizes us by day and His darkness rejuvenates us by night.

If the mix of elements in our atmosphere was changed by only a few percentage points, we’d immediately die. The same goes for a few days without the Sun. Our lives here are so fragile that it’s only by the grace of God that we survive. For these reasons alone we owe Him our undying gratitude.

But He’s done so much more. When Satan tricked our first parents out of their land, and all their progeny out of our inheritance, God provided for our redemption, and Earth’s too. And He didn’t just make us even again. He set aside riches impossible to measure and blessings too numerous to count, all payable to us just for accepting His offer of pardon for our sins.

The sad thing is that every man intuitively knows this. That’s why when Jesus described the day of His Second Coming, He said, “At that time the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the sky, and all the nations of the earth will mourn. They will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of the sky, with power and great glory.” (Matt 24:30)

Nations don’t mourn, but the people who populate them do. They’ll mourn because they’ll realize that they waited too long. That little piece of truth that’s lodged in every man’s heart, ignored for too long, will finally be made obvious before their very eyes, and it’ll be too late. We’re saved by faith, after all, and no faith is required to accept the obvious.

But you’ve accepted in faith what you have not seen, and it has changed your eternal destiny. It’s a promise made by One Who cannot lie, our Creator, our Redeemer, our Lord and our Savior. For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. (John 3:16) In choosing to believe that you’ve accomplished the over arching purpose of your life, and you’ll be rewarded forever.

A. Please read my answer to the Ice age question more carefully. What I said is that traditionally scientists have believed that the Ice Age occurred about 10,000 years ago (which would be 8,000 BC) but that now it appears it was much more recent, and probably ended about 2000 BC, as Abraham was being born.

Here’s a very brief summary of how it might have happened. Assume that Adam was created about 6000 years ago (4000 BC). Using the life spans from Genesis 5 we can determine that the Great Flood came 1656 years after the Creation, or about 2344 BC. The Ice Age was actually an after effect of the Great Flood. Having that much water on the surface of the Earth would have caused its surface temperature to rise and evaporation to increase, resulting in almost constant cloud cover. Because of the cloud cover the sun’s rays were blocked and atmospheric temperatures dropped. The water vapor in the saturated clouds reached the dew point and fell back to Earth turning to snow as it passed through the cold air. This cycle repeated itself until much of the Earth was covered with deep snow which caused surface temperatures to drop. As the Earth became colder the evaporation stopped.  Once the cloud cover had dissipated, the sun “came out” again and the snow and ice on the Earth began to melt. As it did the world’s oceans rose up to 200 feet. (In many parts of the world there are ruins of formerly coastal cities now submerged in up to 200 feet of water.)

This all happened over the 300 year span of time between the Great Flood and the birth of Abraham, which took place 1947 years after the Creation (about 2053 BC). It was during this time that civilizations flourished in the Middle East, because the frequent precipitation during the Ice Age made the Middle East and other areas near the Equator lush and fertile. After the Ice Age ended, the precipitation stopped and the Middle East became the arid desert we see there today.

This is a gross oversimplification, presented just to give you a rough idea of how the Ice Age came to be, according to the “recent” point of view.   While the length of time between the Creation, the Great Flood, and the Birth of Abraham can be accurately determined from the Biblical account, the actual year of their occurrence is just an estimate.