Foundations of Our Faith: The Story of Genesis
01/04/2004 - Questions & Answers in Genesis
This morning we want to spend our teaching time answering some of the questions that came out of our recent series in Genesis, especially the early chapters of the book that dealt with the creation of the cosmos and humankind.
We're not going to address the whole creation vs. evolution debate today. We've already done that in previous teachings, especially in the series we did a few years ago called The Case for Faith. Instead, we want to address some of your more specific questions to see how they harmonize with the creation story recorded in the book of Genesis.
As always, our starting point is the Word of God and the truth that it contains. It's important to understand that the issue is not the Bible vs. scientific evidence. Everyone, whether they believe the Bible or not, is working with the same scientific evidence. The issue is how we interpret that evidence. The issue is between the Bible and it's supernatural explanations vs. a philosophy called materialism that explains everything in natural terms.
In his new book called Modern Physics and Ancient Faith, physics professor Stephen Barr of the University of Delaware writes, "The conflict is not between religion and science, it is between religion and materialism. Materialism is a philosophical opinion that is closely connected to science. It grew up alongside science and many people have a hard time distinguishing it from science. But it is not science. It is merely a philosophical opinion that does not allow anything to exist that is not completely describable by physics. And not all scientists share it by any means."
Let me give you an example. Two people can stand at the edge of the Grand Canyon and draw radically different conclusions. The materialist, who doesn't believe the Bible to be true, might say that the canyon was formed by a little bit of water eroding a lot of rock over a very long period of time. And the other one who believes the Bible might say that the canyon was formed by a lot of water eroding a lot of rock over a very short period of time as described by the Genesis Flood. The scientific evidence is the same, but the conclusions are different.
So the answers I'm going to give you to these questions today reflect the premise that the Bible is true, given to us by a God who cannot lie and does supernatural things. Here we go.
Are the six days in Genesis 1 literal 24-hour days or might they be ages of time?
Turn to Genesis 1:3-5, And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. 4 God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light "day," and the darkness he called "night." And there was evening, and there was morning-the first day.
This is a hotly debated question, even among those who believe the Bible to be true. Personally, I've been on both sides of the issue over the years. Although now I'm leaning more towards the fact that they were six literal 24-hour days.
Those who want to interpret the six days of Genesis as "geologic ages" usually do so to accommodate theistic evolutionary theories that demand long periods of time and assume the earth to be several billion years old.
Sometimes they cite verses like 2 Peter 3:8 that 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. However, that passage is not used in the context of creation, but rather in the context of waiting for the second coming of Christ. In other words, what may seem like a long time to us is not long to God and vice versa.
One reason we question the length of days in Genesis 1 is because we all know that the English word "day" can be used in a variety of ways. For instance, consider the following sentence: "In my father's day it took ten days to drive across the United States if you only drove during the day."
In that sentence the word "day" occurs three times. In "my father's day" refers to a general period of time, like an era. In the phrase "it took ten days" the word day refers to a 24 hour time period. And in the last phrase "if you only drove during the day" refers to a period less than 24 hours, specifically the daylight period of time. Even in Genesis 1:3-5 you have two uses of the word "day," the period of daylight within the time frame of the first "day." So in Genesis 1, which is it?
While there are some good arguments on both sides of this question, I believe that creation occurred in six literal 24-hour days. Let me tell you why.
First, that's the natural reading of the text especially when you add the phrase there was evening and there was morning-the first day. Even though God did not create the sun until day number four, you don't need the sun to have a 24-hour day. What you need is a spinning earth, because 24 hours is the time that it takes for the earth to make one rotation on its axis. Apparently, the light source came from God himself.
Second, is the linguistic argument. The Hebrew word for "day" is the word yom. We use it even now when we refer to Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day on the Hebrew calendar. The word yom has a variety of meanings. It can mean day as in daylight or as a 24-hour time period, or as a reference to an era like the "Day of the Lord." However, whenever the word yom is used outside of Genesis 1 with a number in front of it, like first day or second day, it always refers to a literal 24-hour time period.
Dr. James Barr a well-known Hebrew scholar at Oxford University who himself doesn't believe that Genesis is true history has this to say about the language of Genesis 1, "So far as I know, there is no professor of Hebrew or Old Testament at any world-class university who does not believe that the writer(s) of Genesis 1-11 intended to convey to their readers the idea that creation took place in a series of six days which were the same as the days of 24 hours we now experience."
Third, is the argument from the Ten Commandments. We read in Exodus 20:8-11, Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. 9 Six days you shall labor and do all your work, 10 but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your manservant or maidservant, nor your animals, nor the alien within your gates. 11 For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.
The pattern for our workweek comes from the six days of creation. God could have created the universe in six seconds, or six minutes, or six hours, but he chose six days with a seventh day for rest. Why? To create the rhythm of a seven-day week.
Think about it. There's no basis for a seven-day week outside of Scripture. The basis for our 24-hour day comes from the amount of time it takes for the earth to make one rotation. The basis for our month is determined by the phases of the moon. The basis for our year is the time it takes for the earth to revolve around the sun. But the basis for our week? Comes from Genesis 1.
It's always been interesting to me that during the French Revolution in the late 1700's when the French wanted to erase everything spiritual in that country in an effort to convert the whole society to atheism they did away with the seven-day week because they found it came from the Bible. So they went to a ten-day week, with one day off every ten days. They kept it that way for twelve years until the country was in chaos and they had to go back to one day in seven. Why? Because inside of each one of us is an anatomical clock that needs to be reset every seven days.
Finally, if you believe that the days are ages, long periods of time, to accommodate for dinosaurs or evolution to take place then you have the problem of death and disease and destruction happening in those ages prior to the fall of man. But the Bible clearly teaches that before Adam and Eve sinned the world was a perfect place and death and disease did not exist. That's why God could say at the end of day six that is was "all very good."
Those are some of the issues that need to be considered in accurately interpreting the six days of creation in Genesis 1.
What about cave men? Where do they fit in the creation story?
I grew up believing in cave men. I remember hearing about the Java Man, the Piltdown Man, the Nebraska Man, and the Neanderthal Man. I also remember seeing drawings in text books of "ape men" whom scientists claimed lived millions of years ago and were supposedly the missing link in the evolutionary theory. I even had nightmares about them once or twice.
What we need to understand is that the classic evolutionary theory needs cave men. It needs a link in the evolutionary chain between the ape and the human being and for the last 150 years or so cave men were believed to be that link.
However, those who believe in the creation story do not need cave men. Personally, I believe that Adam and Eve were "off the chart" brilliant people. They had perfect bodies and beautiful minds at the moment of creation that were untainted by the debilitating effects of sin. That's why I'm not surprised that Adam, with his super intelligent brain, could give names to all the animals or that Noah could construct an unsinkable ship that could survive a catastrophic flood or that Abraham lived in a sophisticated, cosmopolitan city like Ur, 4,000 years ago.
In the attempt to make cave men the missing link, what anthropologists didn't tell us over the years was that the Nebraska Man was constructed from a pig's tooth and the Piltdown Man was built on the modern jaw of an ape. In fact, there was an article on the Piltdown Man in the November 16, 2003, Philadelphia Inquirer titled "Phony fossil, with unknown origins, comes out of storage."
Recently, scientists have also challenged the existence of the famous Neanderthal Man supposedly discovered 1856. Anatomists William Straus and A. J. Cave examined Neanderthals in France in 1957 and concluded they weren't the missing link at all. Instead, they found that they were really diseased human beings suffering from a severe case of arthritis and rickets that softens the bones and caused them to slouch, have a bulbous forehead, sloping shoulders, and bowed legs.
Which caused them to say, "If the Neanderthal man could be reincarnated and placed in a New York subway provided he were bathed, shaved and dressed in modern clothing it is doubtful whether he would attract any more attention than some of its other inhabitants."
The most revealing quote I discovered about cave men comes from Dr. David Pilbeam, professor of anthropology at Harvard University, who gives a very frank and candid assessment of the whole subject and methodology of paleoanthropology, which is the study of ancient human beings.
He says, "Perhaps generations of students of human evolution, including myself, have been flailing about in the dark. Our database is too sparse, too slippery, for it to be able to mold our theories. Rather the theories are more statements about us and our ideology than about the past. Paleoanthropology reveals more about how humans view themselves than it does abut how humans came about. But to say that is heresy."
Bottom line is that if we accept the creation story to be true we don't need a missing link. We don't need cave men. Men have lived in caves ever since the beginning of time and still do today. But cave men, as missing links most likely never existed. And Adam certainly isn't described as one them.
What about the dinosaurs? Did they really exist?
Everybody wants to know about dinosaurs. Our six year-old daughter wants to know about dinosaurs. She's studying them in school. Dinosaurs are fascinating creatures and often used to convince us that the world is millions and millions of years old, that dinosaurs lived long before human beings. But is that true?
The word "dinosaur" doesn't occur in the Bible. But that doesn't mean dinosaurs can't be found in the Bible. I think they can. Unlike cave men, there is substantial fossil evidence to indicate that dinosaurs did exist. But the word dinosaur is not in the Bible because the word wasn't invented until 1841 when Sir Richard Owen a famous British anatomist coined the term, which comes from the Greek and literally means "terrible lizard."
So the Bible doesn't use the word dinosaur, but it does use words like dragon, leviathan, and behemoth to describe what I believe we've come to call dinosaurs. In the King James Version of the Bible, the Hebrew word translated "dragon" occurs about 30 times in the Old Testament.
In Job 40, when God is questioning Job we read about a creature that God created that sounds very much like a large dinosaur.
Listen to Job 40:15-19, "Look at the behemoth, which I made along with you and which feeds on grass like an ox. 16 What strength he has in his loins, what power in the muscles of his belly! 17 His tail sways like a cedar; the sinews of his thighs are close-knit. 18 His bones are tubes of bronze, his limbs like rods of iron. 19 He ranks first among the works of God, yet his Maker can approach him with his sword.
That sounds like it could be the description of a brachiosaurus or some other large dinosaur that co-existed with Job. In Glen Rose, Texas, there is a series of fossilized dinosaur tracks and human footprints next to each other. In White River Canyon, Utah, there are cave drawings of dinosaurs and humans together.
I believe God created dinosaurs on day six of creation when he created all the other land animals. He made them on the same day that he made people. So for a time human beings and dinosaurs co-existed. We know before the fall of Adam and Eve that they were vegetarians that posed no threat to human beings.
Genesis 1:30 says, And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air and all the creatures that move on the ground-everything that has the breath of life in it-I give every green plant for food. And it was so.
And that may have been the case all the way until the Genesis Flood. Before the flood came God told Noah to take representatives of all kinds of land animals, including dinosaurs, onto the ark. We already saw in our study of Noah's Ark that there would have been plenty of room for dinosaurs on the ark, especially if they were babies. And no doubt they would have been young because afterwards they were to repopulate the earth. But even if they were full grown, the average size of a dinosaur, according to fossil remains found all over the earth, is about the size of a sheep. They weren't all huge.
So what happened to the dinosaurs after the flood? Well, apparently, they eventually went extinct. The world was a much harsher place after the Genesis Flood. There were changes in topography and climate. They may have killed by man or died from lack of food or disease, genetic problems or other catastrophes like an ice age. Those are still the ways that species die off. Scientists tell us that everyday 1-3 species go extinct.
Today some are saying that dinosaurs didn't go extinct, instead they evolved into birds. In fact, in 1997 at the entrance to the bird exhibit at the Cincinnati Zoo there was a sign that read: "Dinosaurs went extinct millions of years ago-or did they? No, birds are essentially modern short-tailed feathered dinosaurs."
Not all evolutionists agree with that statement. In fact, one leading critic of the dinosaur to bird theory, Alan Feduccia, a professor at the University of North Carolina said, "It's just a fantasy of theirs. They so much want to see living dinosaurs that now they think they can study them vicariously at the backyard bird feeder."
Bottom line is that dinosaurs did exist. They were created by God and co-existed with human beings until they went extinct sometime after the Genesis Flood. To say that they lived millions of years before human beings presents lots of other problems harmonizing with the creation account in Genesis. The biggest problem is that then you would have death and bloodshed, disease and suffering before the sin of Adam. And the Bible teaches that God's world was perfect before then. You have to think through the implications of what you believe. That's good.
Where did the races come from?
The origin of the races or different people groups occurred sometime after the scattering of people at the Tower of Babel described in Genesis 11. That was also the beginning of a multi-lingual world. Up until that time the world was made up of one people group who spoke one uniform language.
Turn to Genesis 11:1-9, Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. 2 As men moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there. 3 They said to each other, "Come, let's make bricks and bake them thoroughly." They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. 4 Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth." 5 But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building. 6 The LORD said, "If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other." 8 So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. 9 That is why it was called Babel-because there the LORD confused the language of the whole world. From there the LORD scattered them over the face of the whole earth.
Based on this story, people groups migrated from Babel, in what is today the country of Iraq, to different parts of the world. Their different mix of genes produced various dominant physical features such as darker skin among people living closer to the tropics and lighter skin in people living further from the equator.
Modern geneticists tell us that variations in skin color, which is really just darker or lighter shades of the skin pigment melanin, can happen over the span of just a few generations.
They also tell us that the biological differences between the races are not that great. In fact, DNA differences are fairly trivial which supports the Bible's claim that from one man God made every nation on earth.
Acts 17:26 says, From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live.
The Tower of Babel broke up a large group of monolithic people into smaller, separate, interbreeding groups. The different mixes of genes coupled with adaptations to various physical climates along with a natural selection process that weeded out those less suited for a region produced what we call "races." But we all came from one man, Adam, so there is no master race and certainly no just cause for any form of racism.
Colossians 3:11 says, Here (in the body of Christ) there is no Greek or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all.
Where did Cain get his wife?
This is a bonus question! It's also a popular question that was asked at the famous Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee back in 1925 and again asked more recently by atheist Carl Sagan in his book Contact that gave rise to the 1997 movie called Contact.
According to Genesis 4, Cain was the first baby ever to be born to Adam and Eve. He was followed by a brother named, Abel, and then a brother named, Seth. Cain later murdered Abel and after that left his parents to live in the land of Nod, east of Eden.
So where did Cain get his wife? Genesis 5:4 says, After Seth was born, Adam lived 800 years and had other sons and daughters.
Adam and Eve had three boys whose names we know and then a whole host of kids, boys and girls, whose names we don't know. So apparently Cain married his sister. Which certainly sounds weird to us today, but wasn't so weird back then. Today it would be illegal for a brother and sister to marry. One reason is because their children would have a very high risk of physical deformity. The more closely the parents are related, the higher the risk of passing on genetic mistakes.
Adam and Eve, on the other hand, didn't have genetic mistakes. They were physically perfect. So there were no mistakes in their genes to pass on. Therefore, the risk of deformity wasn't there and so brother and sister could marry without any potential to produce deformed offspring.
They could also marry with God's approval. God's regulations against marriage between close relatives found in Leviticus 18-20 weren't given until the time of Moses 1,500 years before Christ.
I believe that the purity of the gene pool and a clean, healthy global environment is also why people lived so long before the Genesis Flood. The oldest man who ever lived was Methusaleh who lived 969 years and died the same year that the flood came. Afterwards, life spans decreased dramatically. Noah lived 950 years, but Abraham lived 175 years, Isaac lived 180 years, Jacob died at 147 and Joseph died at 110.
Its interesting that in Psalm 90:10, written by Moses 3,500 years ago, we read, The length of our days is seventy years- or eighty, if we have the strength; yet their span is but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away.
During the course of this series you've asked some great questions that I really enjoyed wrestling with. And whether you agree with me or not, I want you to see that there are reasonable answers to even the toughest questions aimed at our faith. I'm continually amazed by the consistency and trustworthiness of the Bible. If this stuff really turns you on, let me refer you to a website and some resources that I have found helpful. The website is AnswersinGenesis.org.