Implications Of The Age Of the Earth

Genesis 1 and the Creation of the World in Six Days

Okay. So for those of you who got the assignment, so to speak, it's more or less just Genesis 1 that we're going to go over. We'll probably hit on some of Genesis 2 and be hopping around other places, but mostly going to stick there.

But before we start, let's read Genesis 1 on page 1. It's not shifted at all. That's good. Please stand for a reading of God's word. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void.

The darkness was over the face of the deep, and the spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. 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, the first day. God said, let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.

God made the expanse and separated the waters that were under the expanse from the waters that were above the expanse, and it was so. God called the expanse heaven, and there was evening, and there was morning, the second day.

God said, let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear, and it was so. God called the dry land earth and the waters that were gathered together, he called seas, and God saw that it was good.

God said, let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind on the earth, and it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their own kinds, and trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind, and God saw that it was good, and there was evening, and there was morning, the third day.

And God said, let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night, and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years, and let them be lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth, and it was so.

And God made the two great lights, the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night, and the stars. And God set them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth, to rule over the day and over the night, to separate the light from the darkness, and God saw that it was good, and there was evening, and there was morning, the fourth day.

And God said, let the water swarm with swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the heavens. So God created the great sea creatures, and every living creature that moves with which the waters swarm according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind, and God saw that it was good.

And God blessed them, saying, be fruitful and multiply, and fill the waters and the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth. And there was evening, and there was morning, the fifth day. And God said, let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds, livestock and creeping things, and beasts of the earth according to their kinds, and it was so.

And God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds, and the livestock according to their kinds, and everything that creeps on the ground according to its kind, and God saw that it was good.

Then God said, let us make man in our image after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over the livestock, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.

So God created man in his own image, and the image of God he created him. Male and female he created them, and God blessed them, and God said to them, be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.

And God said, behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed and its fruit. You shall have them for food, and to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the heavens, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.

And it was so. And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning, the sixth day.

Amen.

Okay.

The Confessional Doctrine of Creation and the Trinity in Genesis 1

So what we're going over tonight are the various doctrinal implications of the age of the earth. We don't have handouts to give.

Don't worry about that.

We're just going to have to listen and take notes, right? So for a lot of us, we may think that young earth versus old earth is just sort of a senseless debate or something that, you know, good-meaning Christians just are going to disagree with one another on it.

I'm here to say there are some pretty deep implications on a lot of core Christian doctrines that happen even if you take an old earth creationist view. So before we start, do any of you have any ideas?

What are some of the implications that the age of earth might have on things like sin or salvation? Yes, that is a big one, and we'll definitely get to that at one point. Do you have something? Yeah, it's the go-to.

So we're going to go through a lot more before we even get to that one. So we'll start there. We're probably not going to get through all this either, so bear with me. We'll probably have to go through a lot more.

I'd like to point out as well, for those of you who know our confession and our catechism, this is also the view they explicitly hold as well. I'm going to read those sections for us. 4 .1 in the Second London Baptist Confession of Faith, in the beginning it pleased God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit for the manifestation of the glory of his eternal power, wisdom, and goodness to create or make the world and all things therein, whether visible or invisible, in the space of six days, and all very good.

And in the Baptist Catechism, question 12, what is the work of creation? The work of creation is God's making all things of nothing by the word of his power in the space of six days, and all very good.

Now, the first step we're going to cover is actually the trinity in creation ex nihilo, so creation of nothing and from nothing. So if we can look together at verse 26, then God said, let us make man in our image after our likeness.

This is not just an English translation thing. The let us, it is a plural noun being used. Now, you may ask then, why did the Hebrews think that God was only one person? Did they have any concept of him having multiple persons?

Really, this was a sort of overarching long debate for a while, this sort of some understanding of God as two persons, maybe not explicitly, somewhat implicitly over time. There's also some who think that let us make man is actually referenced to God and the angels as the group us.

But for us, we clearly see it as the persons of the trinity speaking about this. And actually, if we look at some Kabbalic texts from the Jews, we can actually see some agreement even with the way of sort of posing how the persons of God come from one another.

So we say that the father, the son proceeds from the father, and the spirit proceeds from the son. This is too complex of language to maybe get into now, but just remember the word proceed, right? So if we look at the Zohar Bereshit, really hard to not say that wrong.

Part A, verse 18, I'm gonna read the English translation. And wind, also spirit, from Elohim, alludes to the spirit of holiness that proceeded from living Elohim and moved over the surface of the waters.

This means that after this wind blew, a thin layer from the refuse was refined. Just as the filth flies off and away, in this manner it was refined, covered, and purified over and over again until the foulness was left without any filth.

So even in the Zohar, they say that the spirit that's hovering over the surface of waters must be something in a sense separate that proceeded forth from the father, proceeded from Elohim. We would say that is the Holy Spirit hovering over the waters, proceeding from the son and the father.

So with that being the case, all three persons must be present there in the initial act of creation. And another thing to consider is that the way they're describing a thin layer from the refuse was refined just as the filth flies off and away.

When we read this in our translations back in verse two, the earth was without form and void. It's not really giving you a good picture of what the words mean. Without form here is like something of utter chaos, sort of an indistinguishable mess.

That comes very clearly to the Jews reading this and writing the Kabbalah, that they understand that earth, as we see in verse two, is something already present, but it's a mess that God has to put together into some kind of order that we see forward.

Why Old Earth Views Weaken Ex Nihilo Creation and God's Sovereignty

Now, if we look at young earth implications, so if we go with a young earth view and look at verses one and two in light of this, it's describing God as creating the heavens and the earth from a formless void, not from co-eternal matter.

So it's something that he, in verse one, creates the heavens and the earth. He creates that chaotic matter that he then forms in verse two into the creation that we actually live in now. So it's not that he came across some matter that was there along with him that was chaotic, that was equally present, but rather he made this thing as it is.

The spirit hovers over those primordial waters and then changes it into the earth as we see it now. It affirms ex nihilo creation in literal days. God forms all of this with no gaps. We're generally supposed to assume that in verse one, that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth is also including the creation of angels.

Honestly, couldn't get much more on this information wise, but it's a fun thing to look into. There's a lot around this topic. And especially upholds from the question told the catechism where God's making all things of nothing.

So there has to be nothing before verse one in this understanding of Genesis. And if we look at Old Earth though, let's take the other side for a moment and say, well, what if something else is going on here?

So Old Earth creationist views, and especially gap theory, often try to insert a long time period between verse one and two. And this might seem unimportant around the nature of this matter, but just think about what we said.

They agree as well in this view, if they agree that the matter is not co-eternal, so it's not been there for all of time and before time. Instead say God created this matter in verse one. They imply that this matter became chaotic over time.

So God created this matter and just sort of lets it go on for a long time. And the reason they do this is to allow for, say, Big Bang Theory to be correct or for there to be a time period of sin, or not of sin, a time period of death for the animals, a time period of death for the planet as a whole.

And that much of this is just sort of symbolic about what's going on, that God created the animals and everything was left into chaos and he forms it into niceness later, right? So it might be a good question to see, when did gap theory even come around?

Is this something that has been held for a long time or is this something that came about later? Well, it was actually created by Thomas Chalmers, a Scottish Presbyterian minister from the very early 1800s.

And it was sort of this secondary, very unpopular theory until the good old Schofield Reference Bible came around in 1909. And along with popularizing dispensationalism, it also popularized the gap theory as a way of understanding Genesis.

So the Schofield Bible is an old earth creationist Bible. It's really the first reference source you can go to that takes this view. There's a lot around the Schofield Bible we can talk about separate from this that should make you be a little more concerned about why do we even take this view,.

Given that.

Now, I'm just gonna read my note directly here. Between verse one and two, some gap of time would then cause the earth to descend into a chaotic state, which God has to recreate. The key here in gap theory is that they claim the earth became formless and void, not that it was made formless and void.

We would agree it was made formless and void. They would say it was made not chaotically and then left to deteriorate into chaos, okay? And this just sort of at a base level weakens God's sovereignty over the world, suggesting that he may have made some kind of mistake and that he has to recreate this thing that he put together in some fashion.

I've heard this also stated by various people playing with Gnosticism as well, that the earth is just in a permanent cycle. That God lets the earth deteriorate into the chaos and then he recreates earth and history replays itself again and again.

So this same problematic way of looking at stuff has been held throughout other heretical cults and stuff as well. Just like that the earth falls into chaos over time. Now let's be fair though for a second though, old earth creationism does not necessitate co-eternal matter, but it is one of the implied options.

There are two possibilities about matter it gives us. God either created matter in a perfect state, chose not to maintain it and then let it fall into chaos as we've been talking about. Or the chaos itself is co-eternal with God and something he had to wrangle into submission.

That's sort of like the dichotomy to God's theory in a sense where the devil or chaos itself is this equally powerful yet opposite force from God. It again denies his sovereignty over all things. So you have to take this understanding of he created matter, he created us with some specific purpose, some understanding of how those events were going to be ordained for all of life.

Otherwise, it has to be just some equivalent thing with him. And now gap theory often but does not always lead people to theistic evolution as well. Since it does get you saying, well, if matter already evolves independently from God, it's already evolving in its own timeline.

Why can't people and animals be in the same situation? Why can't they evolve independently of God's work? And this actually leads to a form of deism, saying that God's just an inventor who made the earth and then let it go on.

Sort of like I create a computer process, I just run it and watch it run for a while, let it do its thing without any intervention, but that I still create it up front. That's why my Field US program is sometimes like we're God a little bit, creating stuff from scratch.

The difference is, I think, still runs without us. We don't have the ability to come in and really change things entirely and innately as they go on. And we are also stuck with time. God is not even bound by time and looking at the thing that he has made, right?

So real quick, for all of these things around the Trinity and God's aseity, aseity is God's self-existence. So he exists apart from everything else. Taking an old earth creationist view often, and especially gap theory and theistic evolutionary view, begin you on a path of questioning his aseity and his immutability, saying that he has to sort of affect and change the things around him that are outside of his control to begin with.

And this goes strictly against Romans 11, 36 as well. For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever, amen. And so we really have to understand that even the chaos, even these things in some sense come from him, right?

It's not that God himself is chaotic, but he has purposes for making things in the way that he did. Even purposes for, say, letting man fall, even ordaining man to fall. He did ordain Adam to fall so that he could actually redeem us and that we could appreciate and learn about the different majesty and mercies that he does wanna give us as believers.

Sin, Death, and the Fall of Man in Young Earth and Old Earth Views

We're gonna move on to the second set of implications, which are more in Genesis 2, but we can do it without reading Genesis 2. So these implications are how it affects sin, death, and the fall of man, like what Josiah and Braden said this was gonna relate to.

If you look again to the Confession and Catechism, we have some fun questions around this. 6 .3 of the Second London Baptist. They being the root, and by God's appointment, they is Adam and Eve. Standing in the room instead of all mankind.

The guilt of the sin was imputed and corrupted nature conveyed to all their posterity descending from them by ordinary generation. Being now conceived in sin, and by nature children of wrath, the servants of sin, the subjects of death, and all other miseries, spiritual, temporal, and eternal, unless the Lord Jesus set them free.

And question number 19, did all mankind fall in Adam's first transgression? The covenant being made with Adam, not only for himself, but for his posterity. All mankind descending from him by ordinary generation sinned in him, and fell with him in his first transgression.

So we even see in the Catechism and Confession that they're directly linking Adam's fall with the way that sin has passed to us. So for those who don't understand, his posterity is referring to his children, those who come from him.

And ordinary generation is specifically referring to procreation, procreated children. So it's only those who come through procreation that are going to be affected by this. Which is really important when you think of the one person who doesn't come through ordinary generation, who is Jesus Christ.

And so he somehow is kept separate from this. And this is important because Jesus Christ is without original sin, he's without willful sin, he's without all the kinds of sin. And he is the only one that can have that claim.

This is even important in regards to refuting Marian doctrines of the Catholic Church, where they would say that she is also without willful sin, without original sin. Sort of places her in the same position as Christ.

Instead, if all humanity descends from Adam by ordinary generation, we all inherit original sin. He represents all living man, Christ represents all man-made living, okay? I'll say it again, Adam represents all living man, Christ represents all man-made living.

And so for young earth creationism, you at least have an explanation for how all man needs Christ. Is that Christ is the only way we can be made right for the sin that was imputed upon all of us. Now, let's go to old earth for a second and see why this affects anything.

If there's billions of years, it must mean there was death. It must mean there was something predating Adam's fall, which causes man to die. This contradicts Romans 5, 12, which says that death came through sin, right?

And now many old earth creationist views, especially theistic evolution, posit a large population of enlightened humans as the first set of people that man came from. What they do here is they often try to point to Cain going out and finding a wife.

Saying, well, how could he go out and find a wife if all the people he had were within their family? It is a good question, but I mean, the simple answer is that it was his sister. And that if we accept the narrative as it is, they were living for hundreds of years.

We don't really know, well, I think we do know. Someone can do the math, but I believe Adam and Eve were already a few hundred years old by the time Seth came around, just based on the genealogy. But regardless, humanity could have spread out for time.

Just going out and finding a wife could have even just meant finding a sister to marry and to go off with, right? But let's go back again to the enlightened human saying. There's a reason that they posit this, is that to account for the genetic diversity we see in humanity.

A lot of people assume that we couldn't have come from two individuals, that we would have to come from a large set. And so there's actually a theistic evolutionary organization I wanted to quote from here, they're BioLogos, you may have heard of them.

And there's an article, Adam, Eve, and Human Population Genetics. I'm gonna read what they have to say. All the genetic evidence to date says that the average breeding population of our ancestors has been larger than a single couple for at least the last 200 ,000 years.

This implies either some humans, well, that's the end of the quote. But what we see from that is this implies either some humans have original sin outside of ordinary generation from Adam, or some early humans did not inherit Adam's curse, and were exempt from original sin, okay?

Let's run through why that is. If they say it must have been larger than a single couple, yet all man comes from these people, then there's some of us who have not, in a sense, come from one couple. We could have come from these other branches, right?

And so it's actually important for us to do genealogy to figure out who has sin. Who doesn't have sin? But instead, all of us have sin. Maybe there's some ancestors of ours who didn't have sin. It starts to be a question of how could the Bible make these statements about all man needing freedom from sin, all man needing freedom from death, all man being punished by this.

If, again, all man is actually affected by the ordinary generation of sin. And this is also, Genesis 3 .20 just directly gives us a reason not to believe this. Genesis 3 .20 says, the man called his wife's name Eve because she was the mother of all living, it's in her name, it's an understanding of it.

So it's either, again, some kind of funny joke about how Christ will come through her eventually, and that is all man living. Or it's just what it says, it's all man living. It's just because I didn't look at it, like the Huber here would probably just be more properly understood as all living man.

Right, what I think is really funny, though, about this BioLogos article and this view of there must be a large group of enlightened humans for this stuff to make sense and for genetic diversity to work out.

Is that BioLogos is actually ignoring modern genetic theory in the secular world. And modern genetic theory actually says that all humans are very clearly traced back to what they call the one mitochondrial Eve and the Y-chromosomal atom.

There is, when you take your 23andMe or Ancestry, any of these DNA testing things, they actually have taken all that data. They've taken other data from fossils and other things they found to demonstrate that, actually all humans can be traced back to one man and one woman.

Beyond that, they say that it can't make any assumptions about say, if they were a couple or not. They try to claim that there could be older people in that line. But right now the evidence points to all of humanity has a single woman and a single man that they relate back to.

So actually even modern genetic theory agrees that all of us in this room come from the same pool of genetics, from two people. So it's not unreasonable to assume this. It's actually, even in the secular world, completely reasonable to assume this.

The only thing that we disagree upon are the timelines and the assumptions that can be made from that data. Now they may still be wrong that those aren't like the original two people that they have tracked back.

But regardless, you're not gonna get wider than that from this situation, really. Or you're not gonna get more narrow than one of each. So even theistic evolutionists are actually denying science more than we would be denying science with young earth.

So just keep that in your hat a little bit. Now I think we already have touched on it a little bit, but let's talk about it a little more specifically. This affects soteriology, so the doctrine of salvation, very directly if we have to deal with multiple sets of people that we're coming from.

If death is not the wages of sin as we see in Romans 6 .23, does it make sin less serious? You guys can answer this. Is sin less serious if we've been dying for all of time?

Why?

And if that's the case, what is the cross solving for us at all? We're also told we'll suffer more for being Christ's people, right? You were gonna say something?

I think on what was previously said is because like in Colossians, we're awaiting a greater cause. There's like individual redemption, but there's also a greater cause of redemption.

Mm-hm, yeah, and so what would that greater cause be?

Oh, well, making all things new, because the earth is like figuratively growing, and so if that's not an issue, then we would have a tough time understanding scriptures.

Okay, yeah, so anything else before we move on to prayer? Because we've got more things where we definitely don't have enough time.

To go through them.

Go for it, Daniel.

I love that whole David and it goes all the way back.

Yeah, not trying to throw a stick into people's wheels, though, in regards to this, and not trying to sow doubt. Actually, just giving you something to do homework on, though, is that a lot of those genealogies, they aren't trying to, we'll just say consistent, okay?

How about that?

There are like the genealogy in Mark, I think, especially, it's in like groups of 14 or groups of 12, I can't remember which it is, but it's in different groupings, actually skips a few people that we know are present in the genealogies in the Old Testament.

So there are some who posit that, you know, well, since the genealogies in the Bible are not always perfectly representative of one another and they're not complete, then potentially there are really grand gaps in there that we don't know about in their more symbolic genealogies.

But there's some pretty easy ways to answer this, but go have fun figuring it out yourself. It's a pretty good one. Okay, perfectly at 30 minutes.

Be good. Okay.