Troy a servant of God and the Lord Jesus Christ.
But God created everything in six days. There's no evolution in that chapter. There's not a hint of evolution anywhere in this chapter. There's no place for an evolutionary theory because you have days. Verse 31, "And God saw all that He made and behold, it was very good." Now God finished His creation, six days, and He said it's very good. Then what does that mean? Nothing was bad. Nothing was bad would mean nothing was inferior. Nothing didn't survive. Nothing sort of, you know, like the plants you plant, nothing died out. You know why? There was no death..there was no death.
You see, when God finished His creation He looked at all of it...in fact it says several times He saw that it was good. And He looked it all over in verse 31 and saw that it was very good, nothing was inferior, nothing didn't survive, nothing had died out or been killed in the struggle for the survival of the fittest. If creation had involved some evolutionary process, then God would have had to said, "Well, the good made it to the end." He didn't say that. And how could there have been billions and billions of evolving years, billions of years of struggle and death and survival in a world where there was no curse? In a world where there was no death? You don't even have death till Genesis chapter 3.
The Apostle Paul makes it absolutely explicit in the book of Romans that it was through sin that death entered the world. There's no...there was no sin in that perfect creation. There was no sin, there couldn't have been death. So there's no place for plants and animals to die...no Fall no sin, no sin no death, no death no evolution. The Fall came and introduced death, death introduced the law of thermodynamics, entropy, the disintegration and disorder. At this point no such thing existed.
So there's no way that you can inject evolution legitimately into this text. And just another thing, when God made everything He made everything full grown. You know, the old, "What came first, the chicken or the egg?" You want the answer, you know the answer? The chicken full grown. God didn't just throw seeds in every direction and unborn life species, He created an absolutely and completely full-grown, fully matured creation that was capable then of reproducing itself, sustaining its life and that's why He said it's very good.
So how did God create? He spoke it in to existence and He did it in six days. There's no way around that. Just to kind of help you a little bit with that. People say, "Well what about the word 'day,' can't it mean something else?" It's the plain old Hebrew word yom, it means day. It's used in the Bible to indicate a 24-hour normal solar day or sometimes to refer to the daylight portion of a day. You might say, "I'll be gone four days," and you mean four days, both day and night. Or you might say to someone, "This has been a beautiful day," and you're referring to the daylight portion of it. You use the word the same way the Hebrews used it.
When yomis modified by a number, universally, without exception, in Scripture it refers to a normal solar day. Now sometimes "day" is used in Scripture to refer to some period of time not precisely defined. Job said, "My days are vanity." Psalm 90 verse 9 says, "Our days are passed away." And that's not defined, but we understand what that means, a period of time. But even at that, day still means some finite succession of normal days, not some vast age of millennial years, or millions of years.
And I think maybe the strongest affirmation, and I need to do this because you can ask the question about, you know, why God took six days, why didn't He do it in six minutes or six seconds? Well, the answer is He took six days because He wanted to establish a pattern. In Exodus chapter 20 He gives us the pattern. "Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy, six days you shall labor, do all your work. But the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord your God. In it you shall not do any work, you or your son, or your daughter, your male or your female servant, or your cattle, or your sojourner who stays with you. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy." God wanted to establish a pattern for mankind. And that pattern was, you work six days and you have one day when you set it aside to rest and replenish your body and focus on worshiping God.
God chose to do it in six days to set a pattern for us.
Now if in fact it took Him billions of years, then the pattern is ridiculous. God's work of creation set the pattern for man who bears His image...six days you work and one day you worship.
Henry Morris in his book, The Genesis Record, says, "God called the light day and the darkness He called night. As though in anticipation a future misunderstanding, God carefully defined His terms. The very first time He used the word 'day,' He defined it as the light to distinguish it from the darkness called night. Having separated the day and night, God had completed His first day's work. The evening and the morning were the first day. This same formula is used at the conclusion of each of the six days...as I read you. It's obvious that the duration of each of the days, including the first, was the same. It is clear that beginning with the first day and continuing thereafter there was a period established of cyclical succession of days and nights, periods of light and periods of darkness." There's no other way to interpret that, no other way at all.
You say, "Well then how did we come up with this ages and billions of years stuffed into Genesis?" Not from Genesis, only factors outside Scripture...false scientific theory imposed on the Bible, higher criticism that attacks the historicity of the Bible and distorted human self-centered philosophies. But, you know, false scientific theory and higher criticism coming from unbelieving scholastics have caused Christian scholars to torture this text with unwarranted interpretations. There's absolutely nothing whatsoever on the pages of Genesis 1 and 2 that allows anything but a six, 24-hour, solar-day creation. It may offend the evolutionists but that doesn't change the truth. And no man fairs well who sits in judgment on the Bible.
Let's ask "when," that's why, lets ask when...when did this happen? Did it happen millions and billions of years ago? Science used to say two billion years but now they've changed it. They lean toward 20 billion and about every year it gets longer. You see. they've never seen anything evolve so they think it probably took longer. But if things don't evolve, what does longer do? It doesn't do anything. If things don't evolve, if matter doesn't randomly organize itself by chance upward and upward and upward, if there's no evidence that it ever does that, what does more time achieve? Since there is no evolution it's not necessary to have billions or millions of years, all you need is six days...that's all you need. Man didn't evolve finally from an ape over five billion years. He was created in the same 24-hours as the apes.
You say, "Well what about fossils?" What about fossils? I'll tell you one thing about fossils, they must have been formed after the creation, not before. They had to be formed after the creation...let me give you a scientific definition of fossils: dead stuff. That is...that's profound but that's it. Fossils, that's dead stuff. And there's no any death. Romans 5:12, as I mentioned earlier, that death came by sin. There's no death before the fall of Adam. You can't have billions and billions of years of billions and billions of things dying and becoming fossils if you don't have death. It is true, there are billions of fossils and there are fossil fields all over the world...massive, massive death did occur.
What caused it? There was clearly a tremendous rain of death all over the earth. There was clearly a massive, massive death and the Bible gives the absolutely accurate information into what it was. It was the universal, world-wide Flood, Genesis 6 and 7. And you can look into the science of that, it's absolutely fascinating. Very likely at that time the once what scientists think was a super continent split up, fountains of the deep were broken up and the earth's surface was changed and tectonic plates collided and pushed up mountains which used to be at the bottom of the sea. That's why you find fish fossils in the Himalayas and in Grand Canyon. The whole earth was fractured. There's not enough rain water falling for 40 days to drown the earth above the Himalayas, in excess of 25 thousand feet in elevation.
There's no enough rain water to fall, the water had to come from somewhere else. And it did. It came up from the ocean floors as lava cracked out and cracked open. The earth's surface cracked open and lava poured out heating the water to a fever pitch and as the water went into steam in to the sky and eventually vaporized again, turned back into water and fell on the earth and flooded the earth in a massive flood. All this...all this tectonic plate activity colliding...these plates colliding, pushing up mountains and all of that, can be traced back to the Flood.
In Matthew chapter 2 verses 37 to 39 it refers to the Flood there. And it uses the Greek word kataklusmos, the word cataclysm. It literally, totally rearranged the surface of the earth and engulfed the entire earth in water. And that massive hydraulic cataclysm is what produced the extinction of many animals instantaneously frankly, or over the periods of the days when it rained, and created this world-wide death that produced the fossils.
Second Peter 3 talks about how God destroyed the whole earth, verse 6, by flooding it with water. That one great world cataclysm produced the ice caps, produced the Ice Age, and explains the fossils. And there's much more on that that you can read for yourself. There's an immense amount of scientific material on the Flood and its cataclysmic impact on the earth.
So, we ask the question...when did this happen? When did all of this...how do we...if we don't need ages and ages and ages and ages and billions and billions of years to form fossils...and by the way, that generally won't do it. I mean, if you take the bones of your dead bird and put them in the back yard, how long will it take before they become a fossil? They'll never become a fossil. The ground would have to open up and crush those bones and hold them there for you to have some kind of a fossil. There has to be cataclysm to create that kind of thing, such as we have already seen in the sediments and the bones that are found, for example, in the terrain surrounding Mount St. Helens...which kind of a cataclysm has the same dramatic effect as would appear to a uniformitarianist, would have had to occur over millions and millions and millions of years. So the Flood answers the problem of fossils and sediment and the rearrangement of the surface of the earth. All legitimate science, frankly, points back to the great cataclysm.
But now let's see if we can't get a time line on when this all happened. Well we know here...from the creation of the universe to the creation of man was how long? Six days...start counting. From the creation of the universe to the creation of man was six days. Starting in Genesis 5...Genesis 5 you get Adam and then you start with Adam, Genesis 5, and you go to the Flood and you've got a whole lot of people in there and all the years of their life are given. You see it there in chapter 5. You have the sequence...he lived so many years and he had a son, and he lived so many years and he had a son, he lived so many years and he had a son. You add up those, you have six days from the creation of the universe to the creation of man...from the first man Adam to the Flood you have 1656 years. Sixteen hundred and fifty-six years the Flood comes.
Genesis 11 gives you the chronology from the Flood to Abraham...from the Flood to Abraham. It starts out with the children of Noah...Shem, verse 10, goes right on down to Abraham, that's 225 years. Okay? Six days, 1656 years, and 225 years...so something under 2000 years and you're at Abraham.
Start in Genesis 12 with Abraham and go through the Old Testament historical books...Exodus, Numbers, Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, 1 and 2 Chronicles. Just proceed through those books and you have the chronology from Abraham to the Babylonian captivity...from Abraham to the Babylonian captivity..that would be 430 years in Egypt, 40 years in the wilderness, seven years conquering Canaan, 350 years of the Judges, 110 years of the United Kingdom under Saul, David and Solomon, 350 years under the divided kingdom of Judah and Israel, 70 years...350 years and then you have the Babylonian captivity, 70 years. And then you have the return and the rebuilding, 140 years. So, from Abraham to the return and rebuilding of Jerusalem and the rebuilding of the nation Israel you have about 1500 or so years if you add all that up.
Following the rebuilding and the restoration, you're at the end now of the Old Testament, you've got 400 years of silence. So you have about 2000 years, we sort of started out from the creation to Abraham is about 2000 years. From Abraham to the New Testament is about 200 years. And from the beginning of the New Testament to now is about 2000 years.
Archbishop James Usher, a great scholar, by the way, lived from 1581 to 1656, added all the genealogical chronological records of Scripture and said that he felt that the creation occurred in 4004 B.C. Now, you know, the evolutionists just mock that. The world, the universe...6000 years old? But he was no doubt very close to being accurate.
And prior to Charles Darwin, any educated man who suggested that mankind was over 6000 years old was seen as a fool. All historical records fit in to that 6000 years. You can go back and study European history, you can go back and study the records, the Egyptian records, and they all go back no further than that. You say, "Well isn't it possible that some names got skipped in the genealogies?" That's one of the things you hear all the time. "Isn't it possible that some names got skipped?"
Let me tell you something. One very hard thing to prove is what got left out. That is very hard to prove. How can you say some other name should be in there? If it's not there, it's not there. Even if you add a few names that God left out of the genealogy of 5 or the genealogy of chapter 11, the history of Israel, that's set, we know that. And the times from Christ to now, we know that. So if you're talking about that first period of time and you want to give a little space to the genealogies, well, you can add a few hundred years here and there.
Nineteenth century Princeton scholars, William Green(?) and B.B. Warfield both were inerrantists--they believed in the authority of the Bible. But they tried to harmonize the Bible with evolution and the way they wanted to do it was to stretch the genealogies. There's nothing to argue about over the last 2000, there's nothing to argue about over the 2000 really from Abraham to the New Testament period, that's pretty well fixed in history. So they decided they had to stuff some years in the first 2000 and they said there were various generations omitted and that father and begat could skip generations and refer to a more remote ancestor.
Well, there's no evidence for it. William Kelley writes, "Even if Green and Warfield were correct in depositing gaps within the genealogies of Genesis, the most generous assigning of gaps between various generations couldn't add more than several hundred, or at the most maybe a thousand or so years to the ushers chronology. Indeed a more careful look at these gaps will indicate that they really do not change the overall biblical chronology for the following reason. The writer of Genesis defined the length of the patriarchal age in terms of the time between the birth of the patriarchs who are actually listed, not in terms of how many other descendants there may have been who are not listed." You get the point? If you hit the high peaks of the patriarchs and you give the years for those, you can't stuff any more years in between.
James B. Jordan wrote, "Anyone who opens the Bible to Genesis chapter 5 and 11 will notice that the age of each father is given for the time of his son's birth. Adam was a 130 years old at the birth of Seth, who was a 105 years old at the birth of Enosh and so forth. Thus we appear to have an unbroken chronology from creation to Abraham.
There are no gaps in the sequence. Son follows father in strict succession it seems. The length between Genesis 5 and 11 is established by Genesis 6:7 and Genesis 11:10. Arphaxad was born in Noah's 602 year, thus at first glance there appears to be good reason to accept the chronologies of Genesis 5 and 11 at face value."
Now even if there are some gaps, as I said, and you wanted to stuff them with everything you could possibly think of, you'd never come up with millions of years. At best it's just a few thousand years ago. And then scientists come along and says, "Well I've got a problem with that. What about the speed of light? If God created a star out there and it's X number of light years away, it would take a million years for it to get here. The light can't get here. The fact that we can see the light of the star way out there indicates that millions of years must have gone by."
Well how about this for a wild solution? God not only created the star, He created the light in between there and here. Does that sound impossible? Well if that's too simplistic, let me give you another solution. Hang on. Research has been done on the speed of light.
They've done it in kilometers. The speed of light is generally accepted as being 299 thousand, 792.458 kilometers per second...or rounding it off, 300 thousand kilometers a second. A light year is the distance light travels in a year. "Thus a star might come into being a million light years away from the earth but couldn't actually be observed until a million years later because it would take that long for the starlight to reach the earth from outer space. If this is the case then the solar system has to be immensely older than the few thousands years indicated by the Genesis chronologies. This fact would seem to remove the biblical chronology from serious consideration if we're going to have any honest assessment from science."
Well let me tell you why that doesn't work. First, this comes from some interesting fascinating research by an Australian scientist named Barry Setterfield(?), listen to this. "Arguments that the speed of light has been slowing down and thus traveled much more rapidly in the past would indicate a very young universe in terms of thousands rather than billions of years." Barry Setterfield, an Australian scientist, proposed the decay in the speed of light in his writings called The Velocity of Light and the Age of the Universe. According to Setterfield the first careful measurement of the speed of light was made by a Danish astronomer, Reemer(?), in 1675 and then by an English astronomer, Bradley, in 1728. It's been measured many times since then and is said to have reached an equilibrium at the number I gave you a moment ago. The data indicate that the speed of light in 1675 was about 2.6 faster than today and that it continued to decline until 1960 when atomic clocks began to be employed to measure it. Setterfield chartered a rate of about 5.7 kilometers decrease in velocity per second between 1675 and 1728 and 2.5 kilometers per second decrease between 1880 and 1924 and he kept charting the decrease. He worked out a curve tracing the decay of the velocity of light. On this basis, Setterfield figures the earth was created about 4000 and 40, plus or minus a hundred years.
At the time of creation the speed of light was going so much faster than it does now. If the speed of light has indeed decayed, along with everything else, then the most basic empirical measurement of the age of the solar system would fit precisely into the genealogical chronologies of Genesis. Wow, if you just take those same figures, put them on a curve, you have light being almost instantaneous 6000 years ago.
Does that surprise you? It shouldn't. Moreover, assuming that's correct, that would explain why the dates derived from various types of radio active measurements on physical geological elements such as the half life of uranium 238 decaying into lead over millions of years would all be skewed. The velocity of an electron in its orbit is proportional to the speed of light. Everything changes and what appears to be old isn't old at all if you understand this immense fact.
Hence, radio metric ages in rocks, meteorites and other astronomical objects in conventionally allocated years can all be predicted by the high initial value of sea and accommodated within a 6000 year framework. I don't want to go into any more detail, I've said more than I know now. But I'll tell you this, we can start with a fixed point and the fixed point is Genesis 1. Genesis 1. We don't find anything in science that legitimately cast doubt on the veracity of this creation in six days, six thousand or so years ago.
There were three acts of creation, just summarizing...the universe, animals and man. And man really stands apart, made in God's image so God could communicate with us as intelligent, moral, self-aware beings who can understand abstract symbolic speech and thus can come to know our creator personally so we can worship Him and serve Him forever.
Amen
Troy
But God created everything in six days. There's no evolution in that chapter. There's not a hint of evolution anywhere in this chapter. There's no place for an evolutionary theory because you have days. Verse 31, "And God saw all that He made and behold, it was very good." Now God finished His creation, six days, and He said it's very good. Then what does that mean? Nothing was bad. Nothing was bad would mean nothing was inferior. Nothing didn't survive. Nothing sort of, you know, like the plants you plant, nothing died out. You know why? There was no death..there was no death.
You see, when God finished His creation He looked at all of it...in fact it says several times He saw that it was good. And He looked it all over in verse 31 and saw that it was very good, nothing was inferior, nothing didn't survive, nothing had died out or been killed in the struggle for the survival of the fittest. If creation had involved some evolutionary process, then God would have had to said, "Well, the good made it to the end." He didn't say that. And how could there have been billions and billions of evolving years, billions of years of struggle and death and survival in a world where there was no curse? In a world where there was no death? You don't even have death till Genesis chapter 3.
The Apostle Paul makes it absolutely explicit in the book of Romans that it was through sin that death entered the world. There's no...there was no sin in that perfect creation. There was no sin, there couldn't have been death. So there's no place for plants and animals to die...no Fall no sin, no sin no death, no death no evolution. The Fall came and introduced death, death introduced the law of thermodynamics, entropy, the disintegration and disorder. At this point no such thing existed.
So there's no way that you can inject evolution legitimately into this text. And just another thing, when God made everything He made everything full grown. You know, the old, "What came first, the chicken or the egg?" You want the answer, you know the answer? The chicken full grown. God didn't just throw seeds in every direction and unborn life species, He created an absolutely and completely full-grown, fully matured creation that was capable then of reproducing itself, sustaining its life and that's why He said it's very good.
So how did God create? He spoke it in to existence and He did it in six days. There's no way around that. Just to kind of help you a little bit with that. People say, "Well what about the word 'day,' can't it mean something else?" It's the plain old Hebrew word yom, it means day. It's used in the Bible to indicate a 24-hour normal solar day or sometimes to refer to the daylight portion of a day. You might say, "I'll be gone four days," and you mean four days, both day and night. Or you might say to someone, "This has been a beautiful day," and you're referring to the daylight portion of it. You use the word the same way the Hebrews used it.
When yomis modified by a number, universally, without exception, in Scripture it refers to a normal solar day. Now sometimes "day" is used in Scripture to refer to some period of time not precisely defined. Job said, "My days are vanity." Psalm 90 verse 9 says, "Our days are passed away." And that's not defined, but we understand what that means, a period of time. But even at that, day still means some finite succession of normal days, not some vast age of millennial years, or millions of years.
And I think maybe the strongest affirmation, and I need to do this because you can ask the question about, you know, why God took six days, why didn't He do it in six minutes or six seconds? Well, the answer is He took six days because He wanted to establish a pattern. In Exodus chapter 20 He gives us the pattern. "Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy, six days you shall labor, do all your work. But the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord your God. In it you shall not do any work, you or your son, or your daughter, your male or your female servant, or your cattle, or your sojourner who stays with you. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy." God wanted to establish a pattern for mankind. And that pattern was, you work six days and you have one day when you set it aside to rest and replenish your body and focus on worshiping God.
God chose to do it in six days to set a pattern for us.
Now if in fact it took Him billions of years, then the pattern is ridiculous. God's work of creation set the pattern for man who bears His image...six days you work and one day you worship.
Henry Morris in his book, The Genesis Record, says, "God called the light day and the darkness He called night. As though in anticipation a future misunderstanding, God carefully defined His terms. The very first time He used the word 'day,' He defined it as the light to distinguish it from the darkness called night. Having separated the day and night, God had completed His first day's work. The evening and the morning were the first day. This same formula is used at the conclusion of each of the six days...as I read you. It's obvious that the duration of each of the days, including the first, was the same. It is clear that beginning with the first day and continuing thereafter there was a period established of cyclical succession of days and nights, periods of light and periods of darkness." There's no other way to interpret that, no other way at all.
You say, "Well then how did we come up with this ages and billions of years stuffed into Genesis?" Not from Genesis, only factors outside Scripture...false scientific theory imposed on the Bible, higher criticism that attacks the historicity of the Bible and distorted human self-centered philosophies. But, you know, false scientific theory and higher criticism coming from unbelieving scholastics have caused Christian scholars to torture this text with unwarranted interpretations. There's absolutely nothing whatsoever on the pages of Genesis 1 and 2 that allows anything but a six, 24-hour, solar-day creation. It may offend the evolutionists but that doesn't change the truth. And no man fairs well who sits in judgment on the Bible.
Let's ask "when," that's why, lets ask when...when did this happen? Did it happen millions and billions of years ago? Science used to say two billion years but now they've changed it. They lean toward 20 billion and about every year it gets longer. You see. they've never seen anything evolve so they think it probably took longer. But if things don't evolve, what does longer do? It doesn't do anything. If things don't evolve, if matter doesn't randomly organize itself by chance upward and upward and upward, if there's no evidence that it ever does that, what does more time achieve? Since there is no evolution it's not necessary to have billions or millions of years, all you need is six days...that's all you need. Man didn't evolve finally from an ape over five billion years. He was created in the same 24-hours as the apes.
You say, "Well what about fossils?" What about fossils? I'll tell you one thing about fossils, they must have been formed after the creation, not before. They had to be formed after the creation...let me give you a scientific definition of fossils: dead stuff. That is...that's profound but that's it. Fossils, that's dead stuff. And there's no any death. Romans 5:12, as I mentioned earlier, that death came by sin. There's no death before the fall of Adam. You can't have billions and billions of years of billions and billions of things dying and becoming fossils if you don't have death. It is true, there are billions of fossils and there are fossil fields all over the world...massive, massive death did occur.
What caused it? There was clearly a tremendous rain of death all over the earth. There was clearly a massive, massive death and the Bible gives the absolutely accurate information into what it was. It was the universal, world-wide Flood, Genesis 6 and 7. And you can look into the science of that, it's absolutely fascinating. Very likely at that time the once what scientists think was a super continent split up, fountains of the deep were broken up and the earth's surface was changed and tectonic plates collided and pushed up mountains which used to be at the bottom of the sea. That's why you find fish fossils in the Himalayas and in Grand Canyon. The whole earth was fractured. There's not enough rain water falling for 40 days to drown the earth above the Himalayas, in excess of 25 thousand feet in elevation.
There's no enough rain water to fall, the water had to come from somewhere else. And it did. It came up from the ocean floors as lava cracked out and cracked open. The earth's surface cracked open and lava poured out heating the water to a fever pitch and as the water went into steam in to the sky and eventually vaporized again, turned back into water and fell on the earth and flooded the earth in a massive flood. All this...all this tectonic plate activity colliding...these plates colliding, pushing up mountains and all of that, can be traced back to the Flood.
In Matthew chapter 2 verses 37 to 39 it refers to the Flood there. And it uses the Greek word kataklusmos, the word cataclysm. It literally, totally rearranged the surface of the earth and engulfed the entire earth in water. And that massive hydraulic cataclysm is what produced the extinction of many animals instantaneously frankly, or over the periods of the days when it rained, and created this world-wide death that produced the fossils.
Second Peter 3 talks about how God destroyed the whole earth, verse 6, by flooding it with water. That one great world cataclysm produced the ice caps, produced the Ice Age, and explains the fossils. And there's much more on that that you can read for yourself. There's an immense amount of scientific material on the Flood and its cataclysmic impact on the earth.
So, we ask the question...when did this happen? When did all of this...how do we...if we don't need ages and ages and ages and ages and billions and billions of years to form fossils...and by the way, that generally won't do it. I mean, if you take the bones of your dead bird and put them in the back yard, how long will it take before they become a fossil? They'll never become a fossil. The ground would have to open up and crush those bones and hold them there for you to have some kind of a fossil. There has to be cataclysm to create that kind of thing, such as we have already seen in the sediments and the bones that are found, for example, in the terrain surrounding Mount St. Helens...which kind of a cataclysm has the same dramatic effect as would appear to a uniformitarianist, would have had to occur over millions and millions and millions of years. So the Flood answers the problem of fossils and sediment and the rearrangement of the surface of the earth. All legitimate science, frankly, points back to the great cataclysm.
But now let's see if we can't get a time line on when this all happened. Well we know here...from the creation of the universe to the creation of man was how long? Six days...start counting. From the creation of the universe to the creation of man was six days. Starting in Genesis 5...Genesis 5 you get Adam and then you start with Adam, Genesis 5, and you go to the Flood and you've got a whole lot of people in there and all the years of their life are given. You see it there in chapter 5. You have the sequence...he lived so many years and he had a son, and he lived so many years and he had a son, he lived so many years and he had a son. You add up those, you have six days from the creation of the universe to the creation of man...from the first man Adam to the Flood you have 1656 years. Sixteen hundred and fifty-six years the Flood comes.
Genesis 11 gives you the chronology from the Flood to Abraham...from the Flood to Abraham. It starts out with the children of Noah...Shem, verse 10, goes right on down to Abraham, that's 225 years. Okay? Six days, 1656 years, and 225 years...so something under 2000 years and you're at Abraham.
Start in Genesis 12 with Abraham and go through the Old Testament historical books...Exodus, Numbers, Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, 1 and 2 Chronicles. Just proceed through those books and you have the chronology from Abraham to the Babylonian captivity...from Abraham to the Babylonian captivity..that would be 430 years in Egypt, 40 years in the wilderness, seven years conquering Canaan, 350 years of the Judges, 110 years of the United Kingdom under Saul, David and Solomon, 350 years under the divided kingdom of Judah and Israel, 70 years...350 years and then you have the Babylonian captivity, 70 years. And then you have the return and the rebuilding, 140 years. So, from Abraham to the return and rebuilding of Jerusalem and the rebuilding of the nation Israel you have about 1500 or so years if you add all that up.
Following the rebuilding and the restoration, you're at the end now of the Old Testament, you've got 400 years of silence. So you have about 2000 years, we sort of started out from the creation to Abraham is about 2000 years. From Abraham to the New Testament is about 200 years. And from the beginning of the New Testament to now is about 2000 years.
Archbishop James Usher, a great scholar, by the way, lived from 1581 to 1656, added all the genealogical chronological records of Scripture and said that he felt that the creation occurred in 4004 B.C. Now, you know, the evolutionists just mock that. The world, the universe...6000 years old? But he was no doubt very close to being accurate.
And prior to Charles Darwin, any educated man who suggested that mankind was over 6000 years old was seen as a fool. All historical records fit in to that 6000 years. You can go back and study European history, you can go back and study the records, the Egyptian records, and they all go back no further than that. You say, "Well isn't it possible that some names got skipped in the genealogies?" That's one of the things you hear all the time. "Isn't it possible that some names got skipped?"
Let me tell you something. One very hard thing to prove is what got left out. That is very hard to prove. How can you say some other name should be in there? If it's not there, it's not there. Even if you add a few names that God left out of the genealogy of 5 or the genealogy of chapter 11, the history of Israel, that's set, we know that. And the times from Christ to now, we know that. So if you're talking about that first period of time and you want to give a little space to the genealogies, well, you can add a few hundred years here and there.
Nineteenth century Princeton scholars, William Green(?) and B.B. Warfield both were inerrantists--they believed in the authority of the Bible. But they tried to harmonize the Bible with evolution and the way they wanted to do it was to stretch the genealogies. There's nothing to argue about over the last 2000, there's nothing to argue about over the 2000 really from Abraham to the New Testament period, that's pretty well fixed in history. So they decided they had to stuff some years in the first 2000 and they said there were various generations omitted and that father and begat could skip generations and refer to a more remote ancestor.
Well, there's no evidence for it. William Kelley writes, "Even if Green and Warfield were correct in depositing gaps within the genealogies of Genesis, the most generous assigning of gaps between various generations couldn't add more than several hundred, or at the most maybe a thousand or so years to the ushers chronology. Indeed a more careful look at these gaps will indicate that they really do not change the overall biblical chronology for the following reason. The writer of Genesis defined the length of the patriarchal age in terms of the time between the birth of the patriarchs who are actually listed, not in terms of how many other descendants there may have been who are not listed." You get the point? If you hit the high peaks of the patriarchs and you give the years for those, you can't stuff any more years in between.
James B. Jordan wrote, "Anyone who opens the Bible to Genesis chapter 5 and 11 will notice that the age of each father is given for the time of his son's birth. Adam was a 130 years old at the birth of Seth, who was a 105 years old at the birth of Enosh and so forth. Thus we appear to have an unbroken chronology from creation to Abraham.
There are no gaps in the sequence. Son follows father in strict succession it seems. The length between Genesis 5 and 11 is established by Genesis 6:7 and Genesis 11:10. Arphaxad was born in Noah's 602 year, thus at first glance there appears to be good reason to accept the chronologies of Genesis 5 and 11 at face value."
Now even if there are some gaps, as I said, and you wanted to stuff them with everything you could possibly think of, you'd never come up with millions of years. At best it's just a few thousand years ago. And then scientists come along and says, "Well I've got a problem with that. What about the speed of light? If God created a star out there and it's X number of light years away, it would take a million years for it to get here. The light can't get here. The fact that we can see the light of the star way out there indicates that millions of years must have gone by."
Well how about this for a wild solution? God not only created the star, He created the light in between there and here. Does that sound impossible? Well if that's too simplistic, let me give you another solution. Hang on. Research has been done on the speed of light.
They've done it in kilometers. The speed of light is generally accepted as being 299 thousand, 792.458 kilometers per second...or rounding it off, 300 thousand kilometers a second. A light year is the distance light travels in a year. "Thus a star might come into being a million light years away from the earth but couldn't actually be observed until a million years later because it would take that long for the starlight to reach the earth from outer space. If this is the case then the solar system has to be immensely older than the few thousands years indicated by the Genesis chronologies. This fact would seem to remove the biblical chronology from serious consideration if we're going to have any honest assessment from science."
Well let me tell you why that doesn't work. First, this comes from some interesting fascinating research by an Australian scientist named Barry Setterfield(?), listen to this. "Arguments that the speed of light has been slowing down and thus traveled much more rapidly in the past would indicate a very young universe in terms of thousands rather than billions of years." Barry Setterfield, an Australian scientist, proposed the decay in the speed of light in his writings called The Velocity of Light and the Age of the Universe. According to Setterfield the first careful measurement of the speed of light was made by a Danish astronomer, Reemer(?), in 1675 and then by an English astronomer, Bradley, in 1728. It's been measured many times since then and is said to have reached an equilibrium at the number I gave you a moment ago. The data indicate that the speed of light in 1675 was about 2.6 faster than today and that it continued to decline until 1960 when atomic clocks began to be employed to measure it. Setterfield chartered a rate of about 5.7 kilometers decrease in velocity per second between 1675 and 1728 and 2.5 kilometers per second decrease between 1880 and 1924 and he kept charting the decrease. He worked out a curve tracing the decay of the velocity of light. On this basis, Setterfield figures the earth was created about 4000 and 40, plus or minus a hundred years.
At the time of creation the speed of light was going so much faster than it does now. If the speed of light has indeed decayed, along with everything else, then the most basic empirical measurement of the age of the solar system would fit precisely into the genealogical chronologies of Genesis. Wow, if you just take those same figures, put them on a curve, you have light being almost instantaneous 6000 years ago.
Does that surprise you? It shouldn't. Moreover, assuming that's correct, that would explain why the dates derived from various types of radio active measurements on physical geological elements such as the half life of uranium 238 decaying into lead over millions of years would all be skewed. The velocity of an electron in its orbit is proportional to the speed of light. Everything changes and what appears to be old isn't old at all if you understand this immense fact.
Hence, radio metric ages in rocks, meteorites and other astronomical objects in conventionally allocated years can all be predicted by the high initial value of sea and accommodated within a 6000 year framework. I don't want to go into any more detail, I've said more than I know now. But I'll tell you this, we can start with a fixed point and the fixed point is Genesis 1. Genesis 1. We don't find anything in science that legitimately cast doubt on the veracity of this creation in six days, six thousand or so years ago.
There were three acts of creation, just summarizing...the universe, animals and man. And man really stands apart, made in God's image so God could communicate with us as intelligent, moral, self-aware beings who can understand abstract symbolic speech and thus can come to know our creator personally so we can worship Him and serve Him forever.
Amen
Troy
