WWUTT 810 Q&A Matt Walsh's Old-Earth Creation Dilemma?

A couple of weeks ago I got a question about a tirade from Matt Walsh who was railing against young earth creationism. And I said I didn't want to get into it, but some people emailed and said they really wanted to know the biblical arguments when we understand the text.

Faith Comes by Hearing the Word of Christ

This is When We Understand the Text, a daily study in the Word of God, for faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the Word of Christ. Check out our website at www .tt .com. Here once again is Pastor Gabe.

Thank you Becky.

You're welcome. Hey, I wanted to come back to one of our topics last week. That was about bullying. Okay. We had a question about what does the Bible say about bullying, and you made a comment. It wasn't until I was going back through the podcast, I was doing some editing before I uploaded it, that I heard you make the comment and was like, hey, we didn't come back to that.

Oh, okay. Expound on that. In our little diversions in various rabbit trails. Yeah, we have lots of rabbit trails. That wasn't one of the ones we took. So, you made the comment that when somebody So, here's another rabbit trail?

Right. No, we're starting here. Oh, we're starting. This is the beginning of the podcast. Right. Not a continued. You can't rabbit trail until you get going a little bit. Okay. And then we'll kind of, you know, jump off this path.

Oh, okay. Okay. They reveal themselves as we go here. All right. You find this little nook and cranny and it looks kind of like you're walking down a path and, oh, look at that.

And then you go off path. So, let's walk down the sidewalk together. Now, we're on a rabbit trail. Ah.

Okay. So, in the bullying discussion, we were talking about when somebody bullies you or somebody attacks you, maybe physically harms you, and you made the comment about turn the other cheek. Right. Is it okay for us to contact law enforcement and say, hey, we've been harassed by this person?

And you said, because sometimes people just have this attitude of, hey, you just need to turn the other cheek. Right. And I said that it kind of depends on the circumstance. Maybe you don't want to contact law enforcement because if it's somebody that you have been working on and you know that this would shut the door entirely, it would kind of end the discussion or you feel like you're making progress with this person and introducing them to the gospel and then to contact law enforcement would just kind of bring an end to it.

So, maybe you have a reason for not doing that and maybe that's your reason. But there may be other circumstances where somebody really does physically harm you or threaten you to the point that you need to contact the police or something like that.

And I've had to do that before. Right. And doing so is not going against what Jesus said in Matthew 5 about turning the other cheek. Oh, it's not. Right. Because some people will say you shouldn't do things like that because Jesus said not to.

Right. Let's look at that. So, Matthew chapter 5 starting in verse 38, you have heard that it was said, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. But I say to you, do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.

And if anyone would sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. And if anyone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. Give as the one who begs from you and do not refuse the one who would borrow from you.

Right. This is primarily dealing with lawsuits. So the Jews had gotten very lawsuit happy. Okay. Especially when the Romans were the ones who were trying these cases. So they would go before the Roman magistrate and say, hey, so and so took my pig, you know, or something like that.

Okay. And so there would be these disputes over little things like cloaks and tunics and stuff like that, which is why Jesus made a comment about that.

Someone takes the original Hatfields and McCoy's. Yeah, right. Okay.

Check. Because it just kind of X escalates and it gets worse and worse. Right. And so this had to do mostly with taking people to court. Okay. Now, I think the principle still applies with somebody smacking you on one cheek.

Don't retaliate by smacking them back, because then you're just kind of in a war with one another. Right. But this is, again, letting law enforcement deal with something like that. So it would be to turn it over to the rightful person who is in charge to make a decision over that kind of thing.

Okay. But in a case of like somebody smacking your cheek, why would you need to call the police about that? Right. Now, in our current system in America, if someone were to physically harm you, somebody would smack you.

You could contact the police and say, this person has assaulted me, and then they get in trouble for assault. Right. And according to the law, you would have a case to be able to say that. That's done.

But is it really that big a deal? Right. Is it really that necessary for you to have to go to the cops and say, so-and-so smacked me? Yeah. Or so-and-so belted me one. Now, if he's knocking out some teeth, there's a dental bill he could probably be covering there.

Something to that effect. But that's kind of the principle as it was applied there. So if it's something minor that doesn't need to be a big deal, why are you making it a big deal? Right. Display patience and grace toward the other person, just as God has shown grace and patience to us.

There's not a reason to have to make a federal case out of it. That so applies today. That's really the principle there. Yeah. If someone's running up to you and kind of pushing you and they're trying to instigate something, then just let it go.

Turn around, walk away, don't make an issue out of it. If somebody actually gets to threatening your life or would cause you actual physical harm that could be like debilitating harm, then that would be an instance where you could start to contact the authorities.

But here is not Jesus saying under no circumstance, if somebody threatens or harms you, should you therefore contact law enforcement. That shouldn't be our interpretation of that. We have it in Romans chapter 13 that we need to leave it up to the avenger, the one whom God has appointed to be in charge of the state, to take care of some of those more serious matters.

That's why he has established government, to punish those who are evil and promote the things that are good. That's so true. So that was the return back to last week's topic. Going back two weeks ago, we had a question about a Matt Walsh video and Matt Walsh, first of all, a correction on Matt Walsh.

I said that he wrote for The Blaze and he doesn't write for The Blaze anymore. He writes for Ben Shapiro, The Daily Wire. So that just shows you how much attention I pay to those kinds of things. Anyway, so Matt Walsh kind of went on a tirade on Twitter about young earth creationism and it really was completely irrational, the way that he was responding and treating young earth creationists like they were stupid.

That really was the way that his responses came out. So someone, Henry, I want to say it was, can't remember the name exactly. I apologize to the person who sent me the email, sent me the link to Matt Walsh's video where he took it away from Twitter onto YouTube so that he could respond to some of these young earth creationist arguments in a different forum.

Right. And so I started watching the video and I think I said, I got like 20 or 30 seconds into it and I just couldn't keep going. Well, had I gone just a few seconds further, I would have heard Matt Walsh apologize for his behavior on Twitter.

Really? Because this was not, I didn't want to watch a 45 minute video of him going off on young earth creationists, which is where I thought it was going. Because I was taking the behavior. Ah, your assumptions.

I know. I was taking the behavior that he was displaying on Twitter and trying to translate it into where, he was like, okay, well, I can't. Through your filter, yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's like, I can't, I can't put as many words on Twitter, so here, let me say a lot more words on YouTube.

Right. I was like, I don't want to watch this. So giving Matt Walsh the benefit of the doubt and also responding to a few more emails that I had after that of people going, hey, I really wanted to hear you respond to Matt Walsh there.

The video was too long. I'm not going to go through the whole thing. I'm going to go through about the first 17 or 18 minutes here. If I'll watch more of it later, and if I think that there's more that I can respond to it another time, maybe we'll plug it into a future podcast.

All right. But first of all, I want to play the opening portion of the video where Matt Walsh apologizes for his behavior and then says something that I agree with. This is a topic that's worth talking about.

Okay. So here's Matt Walsh. And for the sake of brevity, I'm just kind of grabbing this in the middle somewhere and I'm going to segment this out. So he kind of comes in in the middle of a thought discussion into a slightly more fruitful venue.

Although I have been told that I'm alienating and may, in fact, lose half my audience with my opinion on this topic. So maybe I should just drop it. That's what I've been told. But I'm not very good at dropping things, number one.

And I like to try to hold people and myself to a higher standard than that. We should be able to discuss an important and interesting issue without getting angry, without getting offended or losing respect for each other and all this kind of thing.

And I know that I need to work on that first and foremost, because in our debates on Twitter about this, I know that I got a bit heated and angry at points. And I regret that. I regret it because it detracts from the topic, which is an interesting and important one.

But sometimes I let my passion run away with me, as I'm sure you've noticed. Something I need to work on. So let me say at the outset that good and faithful Christians reside on either end of this debate.

There's no reason for it to be a source of division within Christians, within the church, within Christianity. But there is reason for it to be a source of discussion. And though I don't question the sincerity or the faithfulness of Six-Day Creationist folks, I do think that their view, when it is preached and argued for, can inadvertently do some harm.

Not inadvertently. It's not like they're trying to hurt anybody, of course. But I do think it can put obstacles in the way, especially for non-believers. And I'll get to that. I'll explain why. So that was rather big of him to admit that he was not behaving well on Twitter.

And he really wasn't. And like I said two weeks ago, that was one of the reasons why I didn't want to get into responding to that. I didn't want to hear him rant and go on a tirade over young-earth creationism.

And well, his position being day-age creationism. He believes that a day represents an age or a huge span of time. So that interpretation of Genesis 1 is referred to day-age creationism. We're going to get into that as we keep going here.

But he says that, I believe that the young-earth creation position is harmful. And he says I'll explain why, but he doesn't really. Not at least in the 18 minutes that I listened to. So if he goes into it further beyond that.

Well, it is 45 minutes. It is a 45-minute video. But he talks in about like two-minute segments. He'll have an argument and then he doesn't seg well into the next part. So I can tell he's written some stuff down because he's kind of looking down and back up.

This is being recorded in his car. But he's apparently got something on a tablet or I don't know what, phone maybe. Because he's looking down and then he'll look up and he's kind of trying to, okay, let's go on to the next point.

Now where he goes next is he talks about a literal interpretation of scripture. And I think he makes a good argument there. I'm not going to play it because it's lengthy and we're going to try to keep this brief.

But he talks about how the question of do you take the Bible literally, it doesn't make sense. Like what is the point of that question supposed to be? It's a false dichotomy is the term that he uses for it.

Basically, there are multiple different kinds of genres that are used in the Bible. No one takes the Bible literally because no one reads the Bible in exactly a literal way. They read it according to the genre that's being used.

That's the way that we should interpret it. So if we're reading poetry in the Psalms, we should be interpreting it as poetry. If we're reading apocalyptic literature like the book of Revelation, we should be interpreting it according to apocalyptic literature.

If we're reading something that is a narrative, well, we're going to read it in the narrative sense. That's the kinds of genres that you have throughout the Bible. Jesus using parables, for example. And sometimes people take the parables too literally, which was something that we talked about with Luke 15 a couple of weeks ago too with the guy at Bethel Church, Corey Asbury, who was trying to see himself in the story of the 99 sheep and the one that ran away.

But he's missing the point of the parable when he tries to fit himself into the parable that way. So it's understanding the genre that we are reading and interpreting it according to that. And I agree with Matt Walsh on that point as well.

I think sometimes when we start to get into the literal versus figurative or metaphorical discussion or things like that, sometimes we can end up talking past one another. Do you take the Bible literally?

That is a loaded question. And I'm often confused as to how to answer. Well, I want to say yes, but at the same time, I don't believe Jesus actually has a sword coming out of his mouth. So that gets kind of, we get kind of caught up on that particular question.

I agree with him on the literal versus figurative interpretation question, that sort of a thing. But then where he goes next after that is establishing what genre Genesis is in. That's the next question.

What genre is Genesis? Okay. So now we ask, what genre is Genesis? Is it meant to be read? Is it a science textbook? Is it meant to be read as a precise scientific account of the origins of the universe?

Is that why Genesis is there? Is that what God wants us to take from it? Does he want us to study it like we study a science book? Of course he wants us to study it, but is it to be studied as a science textbook?

If you were to isolate Genesis and put it in a section of the bookstore by itself, would it be in the science section? Do you think that Genesis should or can be used as a reference for serious geological and cosmological study?

Could a theoretical physicist kind of check his work by consulting the Bible? A historian who wants to know about Jesus will certainly consult the Gospels. The Gospels and the epistles are essentially the only firsthand accounts that he can consult.

So the Gospels are historical documents. But a cosmologist who's trying to figure out what's going on with the universe will probably not look at the creation story in Genesis because Genesis is not a cosmological resource.

It is a theological resource. It's not going to be in the science section. It belongs in the theology section. It is a theological work, not a scientific one, which isn't to say that it's false. It is still 100 true.

It is still the word of God. But the truth that it contains is a transcendent, timeless truth. So it's true, but you have to know how to read it. So in his argument, he really—and I say this respectfully—he takes a very absurd leap there.

Okay. I appreciate the setup of understanding that there are multiple genres in the Bible. And we have to interpret each genre accordingly. But then his next question about what genre Genesis fits into is, is Genesis a science textbook?

Whoa, what? That's not even the Young Earth creationist argument. No one's arguing that Genesis is a science textbook. No one's arguing that it's a cosmology textbook. But a person's cosmology or an understanding or a study of the origin of life in the universe and things like that can be shaped by Genesis.

What Matt Walsh is arguing for is that our interpretation of Genesis should be shaped by cosmology. That's why I don't like his interpretation or his understanding there. He's got that backwards. Right.

You get what I'm saying? Yeah. So he's saying interpret the science first and then interpret Genesis according to the science.

Yeah. You don't go and figure out what the world is and then go to the Bible and, I mean, that's how you get follow your heart and stuff like that. Yeah, right. Right. Exactly.

Believe in yourself. Yes. I believe in myself. Now let me go see what the Bible says about that. Well, hopefully you find out in Jeremiah 17 that the heart is deceitful. Yes. Nobody reads that one. Yeah.

Let's skip right over that one. Oh, that offends me. Let me go to Romans 3 instead. Your heart is deceitful. Mine is pure. Oh, yeah. That's right. So fine. Let me flip over to Romans and see what that says about me.

All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. There's no one good. No one righteous. I don't like that one either. Let's see what Jesus says about me.

You're evil. Yes. Can't get past this. So yeah. Let's just close the Bible and go back to my work.

Matt's approach to this is wrong. He's got the wrong hermeneutical approach to understanding these things. He's trying to figure out the world. And now I'm going to read the Bible according to how I know the world works.

Right. But the Bible tells us how the world works. Right. Exactly. His whole philosophy of interpretation is flawed from the start. Right. So where he goes next is interpreting the word day as it's used in Genesis 1.

Okay. Now, there are many Christians who insist that Genesis describes a literal six-day creation. And literal six-day creation as in a literal 24-hour day, six days in a week. And they cite as their proof, the fact that it says day.

That's pretty much it. That's the entire, that's all the evidence is the word day. And the word day is in there. The word day does exist. And the word day is true. No one is saying, or at least I'm not saying, that the word day is a falsehood or that it's a lie.

It's not. But are we talking about a 24-hour earth day or some sort of other kind of day? Now I think the latter. I don't take it as a 24-hour day. And so I'm agreeing with many of the great doctors and fathers of the church, Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Augustine, many of the great current apologists and theologians like William Lane Craig and John Lennox, Bishop Barron, along with, by the way, my favorite 19th and 20th century apologists like C .S. Lewis and John Henry Newman.

None of them were or are avowed six-day creationists. And a great many of the great teachers and thinkers of Christianity have from the beginning held that Genesis is not entirely literal, which is really, I think, interesting that you had so many Christians who came to this conclusion before there was modern science to, in my view, basically prove that it was not a 24-hour, six 24-hour periods.

See this conveys how much Matt Walsh actually doesn't understand what he's arguing against. He really doesn't even get the young earth creationist position. And that was the same criticism I made of him two weeks ago.

He says that the reason why young earth creationists believe in six literal days is because of the word day. Because the word day is used in Genesis. Therefore, they believe in six literal 24-hour days.

Now, that's not the argument.

Well, didn't. Isn't that what they said on Twitter was just day?

Maybe that's no, no, there were. I was watching the discussion. I was seeing some of the comments that people were making. Oh, OK. Yeah. And they were saying, no, Matt, it's evening and morning the first day.

And there was evening and there was morning the second day.

Oh, so they were even pointing it out, right?

They're showing that day is qualified with evening and morning. It's like he's not even reading some of the responses that were made to him.

And you know, in anger, I don't always either. Right.

And he did say that he was being irrational. Yeah. In the way that he was making his responses. So maybe he didn't get all of it. Could have been. I don't know. But then he goes on and he says that he agrees with many of the church fathers.

He's claiming that some of the earliest church writers believed that Genesis one should not be interpreted literally, that there were not literal 24 hour periods. Now he doesn't give any evidence of that.

He doesn't actually quote origin or Justin Martyr or Augustine. He just says that's what they believed. And I'm in good company with them. Right. That's actually not what Augustine believed. And believe it or not, I did a what video on that.

So look up. You wanted him. What? Look up the video. Are the six days in Genesis one literal or metaphorical? And there it's a slide that goes by real fast. But it has a segment quoted from Augustine's work.

The literal meaning of Genesis, volume one, book four, chapter thirty three, page one forty one. There you go. And here's here's what Augustine said. God spoke and they were made. He commanded and they were created.

Creation therefore did not take place slowly in order that a slow development might be implanted in those things that are slow by nature. Nor were the ages established at a plodding pace at which they now pass.

Time brings about the development of these creatures according to the laws of their numbers. But there was no passage of time when they received these laws at creation.

I know. It's like he's not allowing God to be God, you know, like God is not able to do this all in one day. Right. So it's got to take time. But see, Augustine.

Yeah. Augustine argued not only for literal 24 hour days, but he also argued that the genealogies that we have in Genesis are exactly those ages. So when it says so and so lived for umpteen hundred years, right, that he actually did live that long.

According to Augustine, all of that should be taken literally. Yes. So there is no part of Genesis that should be interpreted as being figurative. And yet Matt Walsh is trying to say that he's in good company with Augustine.

Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah. Because Augustine believed in day age creationism. Not true. Day age creationism is a very young belief. It's only, ironically, it's only been around for a couple hundred years.

And before that, church scholars were taking the Bible literally on this. That the earth really came about in six days. God spoke it into being and it was. Right. It wasn't that it took this long, plodding pace, as Augustine's pointing out here.

It didn't take this long passage of ages or time. God brought it into existence. And it was. And as Dr. Al Mohler has argued, the universe looks old because God created it with age. Right. Man was fully formed.

Yep. You had fully formed trees, fully formed mountains and seas. These things, which natural science wants to argue, takes millions of years in order to create. And I don't have any reason to argue with that.

Right. If you were to leave it by itself, it probably would take that long. Yep. But God didn't take that long to create these things. He spoke them into existence and they were. And I believe that science is truly on the side of young earth creationism.

We don't get into that, at least as far as what I'm covering today and the arguments that Matt Walsh is making. Maybe he makes those more scientific arguments a little bit later on. But when you really look into the science of it, it is on the side of young earth creationism.

It's pointed out at the Creation Museum. Right. When you go visit in a suburb of Cincinnati, right there on the northern end of Kentucky. Yeah. I highly recommend the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter.

It was awesome. Yes, but we haven't been. We haven't been yet. We need to go. We keep getting invited, but we just haven't been able to go out there yet.

We've not been out that way for a long time. Yeah. Not that route.

Right. We've gone another way, but we've been a little bit further south than there. Quite a bit further south. I don't know. Maybe after G3 in January. Maybe. But it'll just be us. It won't be with the kids.

That's right. We gotta take the kids. Can't just go without the kids.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm trying to think of how to make that work.

Somebody's going to send me an email and go, you can always go twice. Yeah, that's true. Go ahead and go and then take the kids later. This is what's called a rabbit trail right here. So the next segment, Matt Walsh wants to go into an example of what he's arguing for, that the word day doesn't mean a literal 24-hour period.

So he jumps in the Genesis account to day four and uses that as an example. So here's Walsh again. Day four. And God said, let lights appear in the sky to separate day from night and to show the time when days, years, and religious festivals begin.

They will shine in the sky to give light to the earth. And it was done. So God made the two larger lights, the sun to rule over the day and the moon to rule over the night. He also made the stars. He placed the lights in the sky to shine on the earth, to rule over the day and night and to separate light from darkness.

And God was pleased with what he saw. Evening passed and morning came. That was the fourth day. So the sun just came onto the scene. The sun was just created on day four. All of the stars, trillions and trillions of stars all made on day four.

Yet God said, let there be light on day one. He said, let there be light before there was any source of physical light. So the light of day one is not a physical light. It is not a light in the way that we think of it.

There is no sun. There are no stars. There is no moon. There isn't a formed earth yet. The earth is formless on day one. It is a form. It is formless and void, we're told on day one. Does it make sense to assume that we're talking about a 24 hour earth day when the earth is a formless void and there is no sun?

Why should we think that? What's the reason? Imagine yourself standing or floating, I guess, in the midst of a shapeless, formless mass with no sun or moon or stars in the sky. What is a day in that context?

I mean, it could be a 24 hour period, I guess, but there's no reason at all to assume that. Let's think about this. Let's define our terms. What is a day in our current context? What does day mean if we're talking about a so-called literal day?

If we're referring to the calendar, when we say day, well, what we mean is a day is when the earth, as it orbits the sun, makes one full rotation on its axis, thus causing the sun to, from our perspective, rise and set.

But the Bible talks about days before there is a rotating earth, before there really is an earth at all, at least an earth of any discernible shape, and before there's a sun for the earth to rotate around.

Thus, we can already say rather definitively, I think, that we're not talking about an earth day. We're not talking about a 24 hour day because such a thing does not yet exist. So Matt is saying that when we read in Genesis 1 about a day, we should definitively conclude, oh, we're not talking about a literal 24 hour day.

Who thinks like that? I mean, when someone uses the word, yeah, when someone uses the word day, why should you automatically not assume we're talking about a literal 24 hour day? Yet that's his argument.

We should not think it's a 24 hour day first. That should be our first conclusion. Why? Why would that be our first conclusion? Because it's God? I don't know. I just don't get where he's coming from there.

I don't know why they would use the word day if that wasn't what they what they meant.

Right. If someone says something like back in my day, OK, you're going to think of that in terms of the context that they're using. Right. But when somebody says and there was evening and there was morning the first day, you're qualifying it with evening and morning and a number first day, second day.

Why would we assume it's anything other than a literal 24 hour day?

Seems to me that it is very specific for it not to be a real day. No kidding. Right.

That's that's what gets me. It's a stretch of the imagination to think of it as anything other than that. Right now, Matt is saying that because the sun, moon and stars were not created until day four, there was not a day by which we could call a day.

Well, OK, who defines what a day is? Yeah. Does the sun, moon and stars define a day?

Well, the moon's out all the time. So yeah, it's even sometimes the moon's out during the day.

What defines a day? God is the one who has defined a day. And the passage of time was not defined by the sun, moon and stars. And by the way, Augustine argued that Augustine said that with the creation of matter was the beginning of time.

So time started when the earth was formless and void, not when God created the sun, moon and stars. Right. The sun, moon and stars are for our benefit. Right. They're not what creates days. God created the first day.

The sun, moon and stars were for marking time. And again, that's kind of the part that Matt skipped over when he read it himself. And God said, let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night.

There's already day and night. Right. He's creating the sun, moon and stars to separate them and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and for 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 also the stars. And God set them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth.

And again, here, light had already been created.

Right. So by Matt ruling the day, yeah, it means it was already day.

Yeah. Day was already there.

And then you gave it a ruler finally, you know, right.

Here's someone to control it. All this is establishing is God is the one who is the creator of light, not the sun, moon and stars. Right. So likewise, God is the creator of a day. Right. He is the one who establishes the day, not the sun, moon and stars.

Right. He's in control of everything.

And again, so Matt kind of comes at this exactly backwards and doesn't.

Yeah. Kind of weird how he reaches out first and then comes back to the Bible and God.

Yeah, right. Yeah. Which is the error he was making in the very beginning. Right. I'm going to establish the thought first. Yeah. And then I'm going to incorporate that into the Bible. Exactly. That's eisegesis.

Yeah. That's imposing yourself and your own views upon scripture rather rather than letting the scripture be your authority. Right. And of course, he's Roman Catholic. Yeah. So the scripture is not right.

The scripture is not his authority. The church is. Well, it's kind of how he was, I mean, brought up and taught and everything. So it's it's tough to readjust that thinking. It is right.

That just kind of goes to show how much false teaching can plague a person's entire hermeneutic philosophy worldview. And now he's taking that form of interpretation and trying to interpret it or impose it upon the text.

Right. So then the next segment here is he goes into a meaning of day in Genesis. So there he gave the example of day four. And now he's going to talk about what does the word day actually mean? Yeah.

Now, I don't even think we don't even need to get into the translation discussion. If you look at the word in the Hebrew word for day, does it have to mean 24 hours or could it be referring to a broader kind of passage of time?

In English, the word day means either a 24 hour period corresponding with the rotation of the earth. That's one definition. Or a day means an age, a period of time. Can the can day be understood in Hebrew in the same sort of way?

And the answer is, yes, it can be the word day in Hebrew can mean several different things. There are those who say that he that the Hebrew word for day, as it's used in Genesis, cannot ever mean anything but a 24 hour day.