Notes for
Have Your Ever Wondered-9
How Old is the Earth?
1. Doesn’t science and the theory of evolution get rid of the need for a God in our universe?
2. Doesn’t modern science and carbon 14 dating show that the earth is millions of years old?
3. How do I know there is a God?
Many Christians adhere to the creation of the universe being 6,000 years ago, which causes scientists, intellectuals, and skeptics to ridicule us.
“The fundamentalist argument against the scientific assertion of the great age of our planet-to the effect that God created the earth only about 6,000 years ago, including fossils embedded in rocks-is unworthy of serious discussion…It is now recognized by every intelligent and informed person that the two (Genesis and science) cannot be reconciled.”
Acts 17:11 Now the Berean Jews were of more noble character than those in Thessalonica, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.
Acts 17:27 God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us.
The limit of general revelation is that this makes us reach out to God, but we need direct revelation to understand how to connect with God.
Hebrews 1:1-2 In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son
Both science and the Bible MUST agree if both are truth.
When science and the Bible don’t agree, the problem is that our interpretation of the evidence is wrong.
1. The interpretation of the record of nature is called science.
2. The interpretation of the record of God in the Bible is called theology.
Example 1: Science was wrong and the Bible right.
Leviticus 17:11 For the life of a creature is in the blood
Genesis 1:3-5 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.
1. Some point or period in time; "it should arrive any day now"; "after that day she never trusted him again"; "those were the days"; "these days it is not unusual"
2. an era of existence or influence; "in the day of the dinosaurs"; "in the days of the Roman Empire"; "in the days of sailing ships"; "he was a successful pianist in his day"
There are 10,779 words in our Hebrew Bible.
According to Meriam-Webster.com, there are more than 1 million words in modern English.
The word “yom” is translated 58 different ways in the Old Testament and each time it is translated into a word other than the word “day,” it is still considered a literal interpretation.
1. It is used for day as opposed to night and refers to 12 hours.
Genesis 1:5 God called the light day, and the darkness He called night.
2. It is used to refer to 24 hours.
Genesis 1: 14 let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years
3. It is used to refer to a long period of time for the whole creation process.
Genesis 2:4 This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made earth and heaven.
Dr. William Wilson in his Old Testament Word Studies, says that yom is “frequently put for time in general, or for a long time; a whole period under consideration…
Yom is the only biblical Hebrew word that can refer to a long time period with a definite start and end point.
Indication #1: The sixth day is too long for it to be a 24 hour day.
Genesis 1:24-31 And God said, "Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: livestock, creatures that move along the ground, and wild animals, each according to its kind."… Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground."
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them…
God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day.
What God did on the sixth creative day:
1. God started off by making all the land animals.
2. Then as the closing act of the sixth creative day, God created man, male and female.
3. We find that a considerable interval of time must have intervened between the creation of Adam and the creation of Eve.
In 2:15 The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.
In 2:18 we read, “Then the Lord God said, ‘It is not good for the man to be alone; I will make him a helper suitable for him.’”
Genesis 2:19-20 Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds of the air and all the beasts of the field.
4. In order to compensate for this loneliness, God then gave Adam a major assignment in natural history. He was to classify every species of animal and bird found in the preserve.
5. Finally, after this assignment with all its absorbing interest had been completed, Adam felt a renewed sense of emptiness.
6. God puts Adam in a deep sleep and fashions Eve, presents her to Adam, who is now awake.
Genesis 2:23 The man said, "This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh;
The Man said, "Finally! Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh!
Indication #2 that ‘yom’ in context refers to something longer than 24 hours: The Bible indicates that we are still living in the seventh day.
Genesis 2:2-3 By the seventh day God completed His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done. Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made.
Many scriptures talk about the ongoing seventh day of God’s rest:
Hebrews 4:9, 11 So there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God… Therefore let us be diligent to enter that rest.
Genesis 1:3 And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.
Genesis 1:8 And there was evening, and there was morning—the second day.
This is the only place that the Hebrew words for “evening” (‘ereb), “morning”(boqer) and “day”(yom) appear together in one verse in the whole Old Testament.
Ancient Hebrews didn’t mark the passage of a 24 hour day with the expression “morning and evening”; they most often marked it with “evening to evening” or occasionally “morning to morning.”
The expression “day one” (yom ‘ehad) (from Genesis 1:5) is found only one other time in the Bible-Zechariah 14:7 where it also refers to something other than a 24 hour day.
Zechariah 14:7 (Word for word from Hebrew) And it will be day one which shall be known to Jehovah.
Indication #3 that ‘yom’ in the Genesis creation account’s context refers to something longer than 24 hours: the person who stood in God’s presence and wrote down the creation account commented that a day to God was much longer than a day.
Psalm 80:4 A thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by, or like a watch in the night.
All ancient Jewish scholars and ancient church fathers viewed the creation days as long periods of time.
Jewish scholar Philo (13 B.C. – 45 A.D.) “It is quite foolish to think that the world was created in six days…”
Augustine said in the fourth century: “But at least we know that the Genesis creation day is different from the ordinary day with which we are familiar.”
“Respecting the length of the six created days, speaking generally, there are some differences of views between the Patristic (church fathers) and Medieval exegesis. But the church fathers and Medieval make them to be long periods, not days of 24-hours. The later interpretation has only prevailed in the modern church. Augustine teaches in ‘The Literal Interpretation of Genesis’, Book IV, Section 27, that the length of the six days is not to be determined by the length of our weekdays. Our seven days, he said, resembled the seven days of the account of creation.”
Over the next few years, Ussher and Lightfoot sparred back and forth about when God created the universe and finally agreed that the creation week was October 18-24, 4004 BC with the creation of Adam occurring on October 23rd at 9:00 a.m.
“Now...I'm not a Hebrew exegete. But I will tell you that two of the best-known exegetes of the Old Testament in the American evangelical community are Gleason Archer at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and Walter Kaiser at Gordon Conwell. Walter Kaiser and Gleason Archer are respected in the entire United States as being faithful expositors of the Old Testament. Both of them know eight to ten Old Testament languages, and they both have spent their entire lives in Hebrew exegesis. Both of them believe the days of Genesis are...vast, unspecified periods of time, and are in no way required to be literal twenty-four hour days.”
