Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire The six days of creation

Instead of continuing to detract from another thread, I'm starting this thread to address the question of the six days of creation, so let's get started:



Was God literally "refreshed"? Did He literally "labor"? Perhaps He did, but I don't think his labor and refreshment is the same as it is for humans. I believe in interpreting literally to the extent reasonable, but I'm inclined to read God's labor and refreshment in Exodus 31 as figurative (metaphorical) rather than literally the same as human labor and refreshment. Also, the text doesn't say six consecutive days. Clearly God could have created the universe and everything in the universe in an instant (or in six seconds or however he wanted to). Why didn't he? To provide a model to us for our work - labor six days and rest on the seventh (and keep the sabbath holy). God's modeling the ideal for the human week didn't require him to "work" on six consecutive days.

No, quite the contrary. Reading something into God's Word that isn't explicitly there and being dogmatic about it is arrogance. That's what I'm pointing out - if God didn't explicitly have it recorded in the Bible, it is speculation. Assuming that the six days of creation were consecutive is trying to fill in something that God didn't specifically address.

Why did God have the term "following day" used in Genesis 19:34, but not in Genesis 1?

Gen 19:34 (NASB)
On the following day, the firstborn said to the younger, �Behold, I lay last night with my father; let us make him drink wine tonight also; then you go in and lie with him, that we may preserve our family through our father.�

I don't know the answer, but I think it points to the fallacy of assuming that the six days of creation were consecutive and being dogmatic about it. If you believe the six days of creation were consecutive days, that's fine, but God didn't have Moses tell us that they were consecutive days like He had Moses tell us the actions that took place in Gen 19:34 happened the day following that of the previous verse.

Why not, the great flood was what, some 4500 years ago and we've managed to go from 8 to 6 billion+ in that time. Not to mention all the incest.

The Book says He "labored". Not much room for interpretation there. I would lay odds that our most knowledgeable bibliophiles will tell us that word has been translated truly since the time of Moses. "Labored" is pretty cut and dried. And so is "the seventh day".

Either "The Hand of God" wrote the Bible and kept it whole, or it did not.

If not...........how are mere mortals to discern which parts are tainted.

If Genesis I, the very foundation of the Judeo/Christian philosophy is a blatant lie......How can any of the tradition stand?

Where have I written that Genesis 1 is a lie or even inaccurate? The text itself isn't inaccurate, but people have assumed things that God didn't specify. The Bible should be read as it is. We can speculate about things not written in the text, like whether the days of creation were consecutive or not, but if it isn't written in the text, God didn't intend for it to be in the text.

Regarding "labored," God isn't human so pretending that He is is going in the wrong direction.

Let's take a look at the "seventh day." Bob hunted for seven days. The first day Bob went dove hunting and bagged four doves. The second day Bob went hunting for deer, but he didn't see any. The third day Bob saw some deer, but none were legal to shoot. The fourth day Bob saw a legal buck, but it was too far away to shoot. The fifth day, Bob found a legal buck and shot it. The sixth day Bob went duck hunting and bagged three. The seventh day Bob went goose hunting and bagged two. In seven days of hunting, Bob bagged four doves, a deer, three ducks, and two geese.

If the day Bob went dove hunting was a Saturday, what day of the week did he go goose hunting?

We don't know because we weren't told in the account. Bob could have gone hunting on seven consecutive days, or he could have gone hunting on 7 out of 10 Saturdays, or he could have gone hunting on five consecutive Saturdays and then have gone duck and goose hunting during his Christmas vacation on a Friday and a Saturday. Point is, one can read the account and assume the days were consecutive, but that is an assumption because only the ORDER of the days was specified; whether the days were consecutive was not specified.

Would you assume the first five days were consecutive if the account had described the events of the sixth and seventh days with "The sixth day Bob went duck hunting and bagged three, and the following day he went goose hunting and bagged two."? If you assumed the first five days were consecutive days when it wasn't specified while it was specified that the seventh hunting day was the day after the sixth day, you are putting your assumption into the account of Bob's hunting by assuming something that isn't written. Compare Genesis 1 to Genesis 19:34.

Since the time of Moses, folks had a pretty clear understanding of the exact meaning of Genesis.

It is only since Darwin wrote "Origin of the Species" that the book of Genesis has been considered open for interpretation.

Why, in the course of several thousand years, was no priest bright enough to figure out that Genesis was not written to be read literally?

How did we mere mortals become so intelligent over the last 100 years?

Reading Genesis literally does not require one to assume the six days of creation were consecutive.

cause if the Bible is the absolute literal word of god than the young earth creationists are right and if they are right our understanding of most any science is complete and total horse chit and voodoo.....if the creation story is exactly as written and not open for interpretation all sciences start falling apart at some point......

if the earth is only thousands instead of billions of years old its not the smartest thing in the world to let a doc preform chemotherapy on you or those you love cause it means we have no real understanding on how to measure radioactive decay which is a huge part of that area of medicine....

Does all our futile speculation alter any of this? We must deal with God's judgment if the final analysis and He offers us a free gift of Redemption if we will only accept it.

There are a number of ideas (theories if you want to call them that) of how what we can observe scientifically meshes with a literal reading of the Genesis account of creation. However, there are a lot of people who had rather say that "science" is "wrong" or the Genesis account is wrong rather than observing how they aren't necessarily in conflict.

My personal belief is that we as a human race don't know enough to clearly see that there is no conflict between the science and the Genesis account. Throw in some assumptions that people make about the Genesis account, and conflict is imagined where none exists.

Edit to add that I'm excluding macro evolution from science in my above discussion. Obviously some (many) people think that macro evolution is fact and part of the body of scientific knowledge. Many others, myself included, are very skeptical about the theory of macro evolution, to the point of considering it not proven (i.e., not established scientific fact like the science we can replicate in the lab or clearly see by other observation).

There are those who believe a span of time, that is not spoken of, occurred between Gen 1:1 and 1:3.



Did He actually create anything without form? Ever?
How about void? ( what would be the point?)
And here's the kicker, covered in darkness on the FACE of it?
That definitely does NOT sound like Him.

Well, sometime between vs 1 and vs 2 His number one angel rebelled, started a war, and was kicked out.
How long that takes, God knows...

Back to the story, vs 2 goes on to say



How long did that go on?
Almighty God, who is light and created light and all that is in it and part of it, and it all fell into darkness and chaos and became void and without form, broods over it for how long before the stage is set?

Then He steps up to center stage and says (vs 3)
"Light BE!"

And guess what...
There was light.

It could very well be, and most probably is, that both the bible AND the science are correct.

Look across space to the far side of the known universe and tell me how long the light you see has been traveling...

I say several billions of years old planet we NOW stand upon is not so difficult to imagine, or believe, at all.
And I also say if it was important, to Him or us, He would have went into some detail.

He didn't.
Because it's not important.

And if you think it IS important, please explain how or why.

Not to sound like Hillary but

"What difference does it make NOW!!!?"

+1

As I stated in the other thread, I do not care if it was six days as we know six 24 hour days today of if it was sixty thousand years. To argue and bicker that any one's opinion is the only right opinion is right up there in my book with stating only you know the exact number of angels can dance on the head of a straight pin or the exact day, hour, minute, and second the world will end.

My question is how will solving any of the above mess with my salvation or help me better serve the Lord?

in the end does it make a difference? nope...but alot of those that say im flat wrong havent stopped to think what it truly means for me to be wrong....

to Razorback....personally i never understood the whole macro versus micro evolution argument cause all macro is, is a whole lot of micro.....whole lot of small changes add up to a big change.....

I have a little trouble consigning God to the temporal constraints we have in body. In our temporal existence we have creation, a span we call time, and destruction or death. But the spirit is eternal, it cannot be divided. God isn niether created or destroyed so those two anchor points, creation and destruction, do not exist so the whole concept of time God stands outside of. He created it to be sure, creation and destruction, but he is not subject to it.

In 2 Peter 3:8 Peter says "But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day." But that is not really literal in my opinion, it is only a representation. You might as well say billion, or trillion or just move the decimal as far to the right as it goes, which is infinity.

Zero and infinity (or eternity) have one thing in common. If you divide them by any number they remain zero and infinity. That is because they lack the two reference points.

If you directed this to me, the importance is this:

If the Genesis account of creation doesn't specifically state that the six days of creation were consecutive days, why should anyone dogmatically state that the days were consecutive, especially when doing so drives people away from God?

I have no problem with people being offended by the truth, by facts clearly stated in the Bible. However, if something isn't specifically addressed in the Bible and people who might otherwise be receptive to Biblical teaching are driven away by dogmatic assertions about human assumptions, there's a problem. We shouldn't let those human assumptions drive people away.

If people are going to reject God, let it be because they don't accept what is actually written in the Bible, not because of what some people interject alongside what is written in the Bible.

"... evening and the morning, 1 million years.(1st day)
"... evening and the morning, 24 million years.(2nd day)
"... evening and the morning, 142 million years.(3rd day)
"... evening and the morning, another 142 million years. (4th day)
"... evening and the morning, 37 million years. (5th day)
"... evening and.....oops, it actually says evening and morning, the first DAY thru 6th DAY, which seems to indicate 24 hr. periods of time. Seems pretty clear. But then I'm a true believer. Fact is He coulda done it in six nanoseconds, but chose to do it differently, His way. He doesn't very often feel it necessary to consult us.

Yes He coulda done it in millions of years, but scripture says He didn't.

Yes, Spud, from what I've read the majority of Bible scholarship indicates the six days of creation were described in the Hebrew text as literal days like we currently have. However, the Genesis account doesn't state that the six days were consecutive days.

Either that........or the entire Judeo/Christian tradition is as mythical as Zeus and Apollo, and the gods of the Egyptian pantheon.