Defending Calendar Day Creationism

Genesis 1 and the Advent Break

I want to invite you to take out your Bibles and turn to Genesis chapter 1. Next week we begin the season of Advent. Advent is the four Sundays leading up to Christmas and so during that season we're going to step away from Genesis and preach on the four themes of Advent which are hope, peace, joy, and love.

So if you are a little worn with Genesis, then you get a break. If you've been excited about our study and enjoying it, you still get a break, but just know that we'll be back again in January. It's good when we take on long sections of Scripture, long books of Scripture, to take moments of breaks just so that we do not get bogged down into the minutia of the study.

Especially this, we have been looking at these creation days. It's been the subject for several weeks now and I'm ready to finish this portion and move on to other things. Today's title is called Defending Calendar Day Creationism and it is simply what it sounds like.

I want to make a defense of why I believe the six creation days are six calendar days as we would understand regular 24 hour period days. But I'd like to make a correction if I could and I hate to start with a recognition of my own errors, but that's just the reality.

I am not sinless, but I'm also not faultless when it comes to my teaching. Last week I said something that was incorrect and I need to correct myself. Last week I said that koalas eat bamboo and my daughter googled it during the sermon and told me as soon as it was over, Daddy, you're wrong.

Yeah, where's she at? I'm calling her out this morning to let me know that koalas don't eat bamboo. Pandas eat bamboo and that's what I had meant to say when I was expressing how there are shark teeth animals that are basically vegetarian in their diet and I said koalas.

Koalas eat eucalyptus leaves just in case you're wondering and so my daughter clarified that with me right after the service and I've been waiting 144 hours to come and correct myself just so you know that's how long a week lasts and so I've been waiting all that time just to come back and correct myself.

But that is again doesn't change what I said just simply is a factual error that I that I made this morning we're going to do something a little unique we're going to read the entire chapter of Genesis chapter 1 rather than just the first five verses so I am going to invite you to sit while we read I know that for some of you standing for long periods of time is difficult and this is a long chapter but I need to read the whole thing because we're going to look at the days and I want to I want to have read it all so we will stand in our hearts as we normally stand to our feet to give honor to the word of God but I invite you to remain seated seated as I read the entire chapter.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth the earth was without form and void and darkness was over the face of the deep and the spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters and God said let there be light and there was light and God saw that the light was good and God separated the light from darkness and God called the light day and darkness he called night and there was evening and there was morning the first day and God said let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters and let it separate the waters from the waters and God made the expanse and separated the waters that are under the expanse from the waters that are above the expanse and it was so and God called the expanse heaven.

And there was evening and there was morning the second day. And God said, Let the waters under the heavens be gathered into one place and let the dry land appear. And it was so. And God called the dry land earth and the waters that gathered together he called seas.

And God saw that it was good. And 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 heaven to give light on the earth and to rule over the day and over the night and 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 in 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 heaven 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 in the image of God. He created him male and female. He created them. God blessed them. God said, 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 heaven 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 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 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. May God add his blessing to the reading and to the hearing of his word.

May God write its eternal truths upon our heart. May God keep me from error as I preach. Amen. All right. Quite a bit of reading, but I trust that you understand the purpose as we have spent many, many, many weeks in the first few verses of Genesis.

I now want us to look at the whole of the chapter and ask ourselves why. Why is it that we would come to the understanding that this is giving us a narrative of history, a narrative of history that follows a chronological and a sensible order, which is to be understood in a literal sense?

Well, that is my task for the morning to help you understand why I hold this particular view and why we teach this particular view. When we read through the first chapter of Genesis, we notice a lot of repetitive statements.

You probably noticed them as I was reading it to you. The phrase and God says occurs 10 times in the ESV. The phrase let as in let there be or let the earth or let the waters appears 15 times in the first chapter.

Those two together combine to bring us to the conclusion of what we call creation by divine fiat. Now, you remember several weeks ago I explained what divine fiat is. Divine fiat means God spoke the world into existence.

Latin fiat means let there be. God spoke the world and it was. And so that phrase occurs over and over and over. God said, let there be. God said, let. God said, let the earth, let the waters. It's an over and over occurrence.

But there is also another phrase that comes up continually in Genesis one that you will notice. And it is the words. And there was evening and there was morning the blank day, depending on what day it was, whether it was the first day, the second day or the third day.

It always is constructed in the same way. And there was evening and there was morning this particular day. This is an obvious literary structure. The Bible, even though it is narrative and true, it still uses literary device and the literary device of repetition is being used.

But why do we see repetition in Scripture? What do we know from our studies of how to study the Bible? What does repetition teach us? It emphasizes truth. When Jesus would speak to someone and he wanted to get their attention, he would often say their name twice.

Simon, Simon, I say unto you, or if he was saying something important, he would say verily, verily, or in English should be more like truly, truly, I say unto you in Hebrew it's amen, amen. It's where we get the word amen.

So anytime there's repetition, it's meant to emphasize a particular truth. And we see over and over in Genesis one, an emphasis on certain phrases, God said, let there be those are emphasized. But there is also an emphasis on the phrase there was evening and there was morning this day.

Now the word day we have not discussed, we've talked about it the last few weeks, but we have not discussed the word. And I do want to address the word very quickly, because you know it in the Hebrew, even if you don't know that, you know, that, you know, you know, the word day in Hebrew, because the word day is the word yom.

You say, how do I know that? Well, you know that the Jewish people celebrate yom kippur. You've heard that you've seen that probably on they celebrate it. Sometimes it's on television in the news. Yom means day.

Yom kippur is the day of atonement. So this word yom is the word for day. Now, over the last few weeks, we have we have said that the word yom can be used in different ways, just like our word day can be used in different ways.

As I've said, you've heard it in my father's day, you could drive across Florida in the day during the day, or in one day during the day. That's that's three different ways to use the word day. And the Hebrew word also has that semantic field.

A semantic field simply means a range in which a word can have certain meanings. And so we understand the word yom can refer to an indefinite period, indefinite period of time, the word yom can refer to a single 24 hour day, or the word yom can refer to just the light part of the day as opposed to the night part of the day, which we would talk about the 12 hours of light.

So we understand the word yom can have different meanings. Hang with me because this is important. I'm about to make an argument that there's only one way to interpret yom in Genesis one. Because even though I've said for weeks, the word day can have various meanings.

I want to prove to you today that the word yom in Genesis one can't have various meanings, because words are always interpreted according to their context. And semantic range is always limited by how a word is used.

You understand that. So we can come to a conclusion about what a word means, not just what it could mean, but what it does mean when it's used in a certain sentence or construction of sentences that gives us the meaning in the word.

So how are we going to make our proof? What argument are we going to make? Well, the first thing I want to point out is that we have in Genesis one, something called cardinal and ordinal numerics. Now, what are cardinal and ordinal numerics?

Well, you know what they are. You just might not know that phrase. A cardinal number is 1, 2, 3, 4. That's called a cardinal number. An ordinal number, first, second, third, fourth, fifth, however far you go.

So cardinal numbers are 1, 2, 3, 4. Ordinal numbers are first, second, third, fourth. Cardinal numbers are used when you're identifying a particular thing, like one dog or two people or three cars. Ordinal numbers are used when you're making lists.

There is 1, 2, 3, 1st person, 2nd person, 3rd person, 4th person. When you're making a list or you're ordering things, you say it's 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th. So cardinal numbers and ordinal numbers. In Genesis one, we see both.

In fact, I'll invite you to go back to Genesis 1 .5. It says, when God called the light day and darkness, he called night and there was evening and there was morning. Your Bible says the first day, correct?

It's not what it says. In Hebrew, it says day one. Literally, it uses the cardinal form, echad. It says day one. There was evening, there was morning, day one. Now, when you go to the next one, which is found in verse 8, and God called the expanse heaven and there was evening and there was morning, the second day, that moves into the ordinal numbers.

So in chapter 1, verse 5, we see a cardinal number, day one. But after that, the rest of the numbers are ordinal, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th. You say, Pastor, why does this matter? Well, I'm going to tell you why it matters.

Anytime the word yom is given either a cardinal or an ordinal number, it always refers to a 24-hour day period. Now, you can spend the rest of the day going through the rest of the Old Testament and look at every time yom is used, but I can tell you, I've looked at them, and every time there is a number associated with the day, it's not referring to a long period of time.

It's referring to a day or six days or three days. It's never referring to three long periods of time or three spans of time or two spans of time or one span of time. The word yom, when it is associated with a cardinal or an ordinal number, always refers to a single day.

And if Genesis 1 is the only place where that's not so, it would be the absolute outlier in all the rest of the Old Testament because the Old Testament isn't written that way. Now, I want to quote a few people.

The first person I'm going to quote is Dr. Jonathan Sarfati. Now, Dr. Jonathan Sarfati might sound familiar to you because he's preached here before, and I have a really cool picture of me and him shooting together because after he preached, we went and shot together.

But Jonathan Sarfati is a brilliant scientist, and Jonathan came and preached here several years ago. And this is from his book entitled Refuting Compromise. I want to quote what he says. When modified by a cardinal number or ordinal number as used 359 times in the Old Testament outside of Genesis 1, yom always means a literal day of about 24 hours or the light portion of a daylight cycle.

This is true in narrative language, legal writings, prophecy, wisdom, literature, and even poetry. So there must be extraordinary reasons to justify an extraordinary exception if indeed Genesis 1 is the exception.

Does the Bible interpret itself? Do we believe that? We believe the Bible interprets the Bible. That means when the Bible has a particular pattern, we tend to look at that pattern when we're interpreting words and we're interpreting how words are used.

So if the rest of the pattern of the Old Testament tells us that when we have cardinal and ordinal numbers, that that is the relation to a day, we really don't have the ability to say not can't be that.

Must be something else. In fact, the only time we see yom used as a long period of time is when it's used in a prepositional phrase in the day. See, that's a prepositional phrase, which refers to yom as a period of time.

Like if I said in the day of my father or in the day of Dale, sorry, Dale, you know, in Dale's day, that would be a prepositional phrase. That's the way that yom is used when it's referred to long periods of time, not with cardinal and ordinal numbers.

So that's my first argument. My second argument, though, goes, oh, by the way, just just just to solidify, you might have heard of this guy, Dr. John MacArthur. He says this in his study Bible. If you have a John MacArthur study Bible with you, it says this in the notes.

It says days with numerical adjectives in Hebrews always refer to 24 hour periods. Compare that with Ezekiel. I'm sorry, Exodus 28 through 11 with the creation week confirming our understanding of the time element.

Dr. Jason Lyle, astrophysicist, he says whenever yom is used in the Old Testament with either a cardinal or an ordinal cardinal or ordinal number, it always means a literal day. But here's the one that really got me as I was looking these as I was looking at this, Dr. Andrew Steinman, who I know you don't know.

He is the associate professor of theology and Hebrew. What language is this written in? Hebrew at Concordia University says this. He's analyzed Genesis one in detail and he says far from being an exception to the rule, he argues that the pattern is a strong support for a 20 hour day in Genesis.

If the first use is of a cardinal number, what is the force of Genesis 1 .5? The answer lies in the use of the terms night, day, evening and morning. Genesis 1 .5 begins the cycle of the day with the creation of light.

It is now possible to have a light cycle and a dark cycle, which God labels as day and night. Evening is the transition from light to day, darkness to night. Morning is the transition from darkness to night and light to day.

Having an evening and a morning amounts to having a full day. Again, don't let this go over your head. Hear what he's saying. He said not only do we have the cardinal and ordinal numbers, but we also have the markers evening and morning.

And essentially what he's saying is if you have evening and morning and you have the cardinal numbers, it's basically like how could God be any clearer? If it was six days, how could he have said it any clearer?

That's the point that these guys are making. If it's six long periods of time, then that goes against how we normally interpret the Bible. And it goes against how we normally interpret this word and how we would normally interpret these numbers and how we would normally interpret these days.

You have to have pretty significant evidence to force that type of an exception onto a standard rule of interpretation. You say, well, what's the evidence? Scientific evidence? Well, we'll get to that in a moment.

There is no textual evidence. The textual evidence is not there. There's no reason in Genesis 1 to interpret this as anything other than six regular days, six calendar days. In fact, I want to quote again Dr. Jason Lyle, brilliant guy.

I want to have him in sometime. He's just a brilliant young man. He says this in one of his books. He says in Genesis 1, Yom appears with a cardinal number on the first day, ordinal number on the second day.

We already talked about that. He says, it appears with evening and morning. Any one of these context clues would be sufficient to indicate that the days of creation are ordinary days. Yet Genesis 1 uses all of them.

It seems as if God really stressed the fact to make sure that we understand these are literal ordinary days. It's as if God was stressing the point so that we would not miss it. Paddle Pun, a biology professor at Wheaton College.

And yes, his name is Paddle. Interesting name. But he says this. He says, it is apparent that the most straightforward understanding of Genesis without regard to hermeneutical considerations suggested by science is that God created the heavens and the earth in six solar days.

But I want to quote one other place. And I know I'm reading a lot of quotes today. I'm trying to build a case here, but I'm going to read one of the quotes. This is from Biologos. Now you might have remembered me mentioning Biologos.

Biologos, they don't believe in young earth. They don't even believe in really what we would call special creation. They believe in evolution. They believe in not only an old earth, but an evolution based system of earth.

So Biologos is not on my side. Biologos is not cut from my bolt of cloth. But this is what they say in regard to the old earth perspective. Proponents of the day age view note that the Hebrew word for yom is sometimes used in scripture for periods longer than a day.

However, the uses that are often cited are often, as I mentioned earlier, in the prepositional phrase, which has the sense of when or in certain fixed expressions like the day of the Lord. The expression evening and morning with the first six days makes it unlikely that the biblical author had in mind long periods of time.

So why would Biologos admit that? Because it's the truth. It's clear. What they're saying is they don't care because they interpret it all as parable anyway. They interpret it all as literary device anyway.

But they're making the point that from a strictly literary perspective, there's no reason to interpret these as anything other than six days. There just isn't any reason to other than the argument from science.

And again, those who would argue that would say that science must come into play for our interpretation. Well, I want to I want to say this about that. I've said from the beginning of this series, I am not a scientist.

I am a theologian. I'm an exegete. I'm a Bible teacher, but I'm not a scientist. And I do hear pastors sometimes try to get down into the weeds of the scientific argument. And I'm not willing to go too far down that road because I know where my limitations are.

I did discuss uniformitarianism a few weeks ago. I said, I don't believe in uniformitarianism. That's the idea that the earth has to be old because it takes long periods of time for certain things to happen.

And those long periods of times are necessary for things to happen. And I said, I don't believe that. And I believe in something called catastrophism, which is the opposite geological doctrine of that.

And by the way, if you if you do remember me saying that uniformitarianism is to geology, what evolution is to biology. Because uniformitarianism says you have to have a long period of time for something to happen.

Therefore, there must be these long amount of years for this to happen. It's the same thing evolution says. Evolution says the earth has to be billions of years old, because it's taken that long for life to evolve.

Uniformitarianism said the earth must be that this many years old, because it takes this amount of time for these geological changes to take place. They really do build off of one another. Uniformitarianism gave birth to evolutionary theory.

In fact, it wasn't it wasn't even really proposed or taught by Charles Lyell, but a few decades before Charles Darwin comes along and he uses it as the basis of his argument for the earth being billions of years old.

Because evolution, as we understand it, going from a single celled organism to a multi celled complex organism can't be done in just a few hundred or a few thousand years. It takes a long time if it works at all.

And I don't believe it works at all. But if it does work at all, they have to have this amount of time to make it work. So uniformitarianism and evolutionary theory oftentimes go together, not always, but oftentimes are held in the same hand.

But as I said, I'm not here to argue whether or not those things are or are not. I'm here to simply say this. There's no good reason to look at Genesis one and say that these are not six days. And if you want to come to me and say, well, the science is settled, here's what I want to respond to you.

No, it's not. Because for a moment, I just want to give you a few scientists who would disagree. I'm not a scientist. I agree. I already said that. John Baumgardner, Ph .D. and geophysicist and leading plate textonics modeler, believes the earth is less than 10 ,000 years old.

Danny Faulkner, Ph .D., tenured astronomy professor at the University of South Carolina in Lancaster, believes the earth is less than 10 ,000 years old. David Graves, Master of Theology and a Ph .D. in the Hebrew department in the Old Testament and Trinity of Evangelical Divinity School, believes these are six creation days, not six indefinite periods of time.

You want me to keep going? I mean, really? You want to hear it all? I've got a whole list. Russell Humphreys, Ph .D. and nuclear physicist, author of Starlight and Time, Evidence for a Young World, obviously believes in the young earth.

Doug Kelly, Ph .D., systematic theologian, author of Creation and Change. Terry Mortensen, Ph .D., history of geology, thesis was on the 19th century scriptural geologists. Jason Lyle, who I already mentioned, Ph .D. in astronomy and astrophysics.

Mike Ollard, Master of Science in atmospheric science, author of An Ice Age Caused by the Genesis Flood and Ancient Ice Ages. Long title, huh? You got it. There's a lot of guys. Okay, I asked. I'm not going to keep going.

But you understand, to say that the science is settled, I can tell you that there are guys who would disagree. Jonathan Sarfati stood in this pulpit and he would disagree. He has written extensively on this.

So if you are interested in the science behind this, I would encourage you to read some of the books by these men. And I would encourage you to read both sides. I have not discouraged you at all in the last several weeks to read Dr. Hugh Ross, who gives the other side, the day age theory.

I will tell you this, though. There is going to be a divide in what you read. And you will notice the presuppositions on one side and the other. The presuppositions on the day age theory is always going to be that the way that we measure age and the way that we measure time and history has been accurate.

And we can agree with those measurements. Therefore, the Earth is four and a half billion years old. The assumption on the other side is that those measurements have not been accurate. And the way that we measure them have not been fair, or at least have not been completely fair.

So, that is my encouragement to you. If you want to know more of the science, do some reading. If you have questions, I'm happy to answer them. But here's what I want to say to that. I don't always have all the answers.

I hope you know that. But I really don't. But I'm willing to stand on my exegetical reasoning. Because that's what I've given you today, is an exegetical reasoning. Why these days are normal days. And why I don't think it really can be read any other way.

Questions About the Sun, Adam and Eve, and Apparent Age

Now that raises some questions. I'm going to finish by going through a few questions that you may have. These are questions that I know I had when I first came to this conclusion many years ago that these days are ordinary days.

And so I want to begin now to look at a few of the questions. You ready? Okay. Number one. How can we say the first three days are 24-hour days if the sun wasn't created yet? That's an argument actually used by Dr. Ross.

He said you can't have 24-hour days if you don't have a sun to create a 24-hour day, period. And ultimately, it's not a bad argument if you're arguing from the other side. But from the perspective that I'm coming from, there was light on day one.

And there was darkness on day one. And the Bible says in chapter 1, verse 5, God called the light day, and he called the darkness night. And he did that three days before there was a sun and a moon. And again, if you have an issue with that, I really encourage you to go to Revelation, because the book of Revelation says that in the new heavens and the new earth, we will have light with no sun.

So the fact that there was a light and a darkness and that that light existed prior to the sun, I don't have any issue with that. And the fact that it's three 24-hour periods is based on a light night evening morning cycle, which continued on and was used later in Exodus chapter 20 to describe an actual work week.

Six days shall you labor, and on the seventh day, you shall rest. Number two, second question. This one actually gets down in the weeds. So don't don't let me lose you on this one. This one, this one is a little complicated.

Isn't there too much time between the creation of Adam and the creation of Eve for it to be one solar day? Now, this actually gets into chapter two, which we haven't studied yet. But you know what happens in chapter two?

God creates Adam, he puts him in a garden, and then he brings the animals to him. And he says, name them. Adam names the animals. And the argument that I've heard from some on the old earth side would say, that takes a long time.

And I'm sure it would. I mean, if you had to name the animals, that's, that's a long time. Then God says, look among the animals and see if there is a fit mate. And that's not as weird as you think it is.

God wasn't saying, see if there's an animal out there that you can mate with. That's not the point. The point was, see if there's a fit mate and there wasn't. Because God wanted to show Adam, he needed a mate like himself, not like one of the animals.

It's not, it's not weird. It's just God's way of teaching. And he says, look for a mate. Adam looked, there was no mate. And God says, okay, it's not good that you'd be alone, put you to sleep, perform the first surgery, take the rib out, create the woman from the rib.

And now we have a woman. And the argument from the old earth perspective is that's too much to happen in one day. You got Adam being created, Adam naming the animals, Adam looking for a mate, essentially.

And then Adam being put to sleep, put through surgery, waking up and he's got a wife. And that's too much to happen in one day. Well, I want to simply respond by saying, no, it's not. It's really not.

It could happen in a day. And I believe it did happen in a day. But also, let me just mention this. Dr. Lyle, in his book, Old Earth Creationism on Trial, it is a very good book, very simple book. He simply says, if you take for an account, all of these things that would happen, it would only take a few hours.

So if Adam was created at the earlier part of the day, he would have had all of this done and everything before evening. So the idea that there was it had to be a certain amount of days because this all takes too much time is is just just not true.

Number three, this is a this is a big question. Why would God fool us? Why would God fool us? You say, what do you mean by that? Well, people say the earth has an appearance of age. Why would God give us something that's intended to deceive us?

That's an important question, because now we're dealing with the character of God, right? If we say God is intentionally adding in age to deceive us, we're saying God is a deceiver. And I hope we don't believe that, that God is a deceiver.

So how would I answer that question? Appearance of age is a matter of interpretation, because on the day that Adam was born, if you met Adam that day and looked at him, you would assume he was about 30 years old, when in reality, he was about 30 minutes old.

You understand the difference. If you saw Adam on the day he was created, all of your understanding of how to determine age would be thrown out the window because it happened in an instant. And the same thing again, it goes back to whether or not we believe creation as a miraculous event or a natural event.

Did creation happen miraculously or did creation happen in a sense of naturalism where it had to be certain things over long periods of time? God doesn't have to wait for Adam to grow up. God didn't create a sperm and an egg and produce a fetus and then produce a baby and grow Adam to 30 years old.

The Bible says God spoke, Adam was. Actually, no, it doesn't. He said he formed him out of the dust of the ground and breathed life into him. I'm sorry, this special creation of Adam was done through the mediation of the dirt.

Same thing happened with the trees, y 'all. God didn't plant a seed and wait. The Bible says they were. He spoke and they were. And this actually, I think, answers the question of the starlight issue, too.

Maybe you don't know what that is. But a lot of people argue we can't see distant stars unless the earth is is very, very, very old because it takes so many years for that light to travel to us that if the earth were only a few thousand years old, that light would not be here.