Genesis 1 – The six days of creation
As summarised here, Genesis 1 describes seven days of creation:
- in the beginning – God started creation
- the first day – light was created
- the second day – the sky was created
- the third day – dry land, seas, plants and trees were created
- the fourth day – the Sun, Moon and stars were created
- the fifth day – creatures that live in the sea and creatures that fly were created
- the sixth day – animals that live on the land and finally humans, made in the image of God were created
- by day seven – God finished his work of creation and rested, making the seventh day a special holy day.
There’s a very real danger, I’m sure, of paying so much attention to theoretical questions about the origin of the cosmos that we neglect the much more practical ones about what it means to live as stewards of creation in the here-and-now. But the two things are related, and questions of origin do at least bring cosmology and theology into speaking distance with one another. And, in any case, Scripture itself begins with an account of the origin of the cosmos and so we have good warrant for giving it some air-time.
Christians (and others) continue to be unsure about how to read the accounts of creation in Genesis. I’d like to set out the main options that are available for those who have a high regard for the inspiration and authority of the Bible.
One thing is clear: whatever sceptics may say about the early chapters of Genesis, they were regarded by Jesus and the early church as just as inspired and authoritative as any other part of the Bible (see Mt 19:4-6; Jn 1:1; 1 Cor 15:45, 47; 2 Cor 4:6; Eph 5:31; Jas 3:9; 2 Pet 3:5-6; Rev 22:2). Indeed, all Christians would agree that Genesis 1-3 gives us the basis for understanding the universe as created by God. But beyond that general agreement there is much difference of interpretation.
Here’s an overview:
(Source)
Young earth creationists (YCs) interpret the days as 24-hour, consecutive periods for reasons such as the following:
- The days in Gn 1 are consecutively numbered and comprised of an “evening and morning.”
- Exodus 20:8–11 commands a literal week of six days of work and one day of rest based on God’s original creation/rest week. The two weeks would seem, then, to be of equal duration.
- According to Rom 5:12, “sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin,” but old-earth creationism would have animal death entering the world before the sin of Adam and Eve.
Old earth creationists (OCs) argue against 24-hour creation days for reasons such as these:
- ‘The Hebrew word for “day” (yom) is used in different ways in the creation account. For instance, Gn 1:5 refers yom only to daytime (daylight), not night-time. Also, Gn 2:4, literally translated, speaks of “the yom that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens.”
- God’s rest on the seventh “day” has no evening and morning (Gn 2:2–3), and Heb 4:3–11 portrays this same Sabbath as continuing to the present time.
- Adam could not have named all the birds and animals in 24 hours according to Gn 2.’
(Apologetics Study Bible)
A number of options fall under these main headings:-
1. Seven-Day Creationism
The world was created in series of 24-hour days a few thousand years ago.
This may incorporate a ‘flood geology’ theory, according to which the geological record is the result of the Noahanic flood. This was popularised by Whitcomb and Morris in their book The Genesis Flood.
This view sees Gen 1-3 as literal history, describing how the Universe was created over a seven-day period just a few thousand years ago. It is a view promoted by the American Institute for Creation Research and the British Creation Resources Trust. Its approach to understanding the text of Scripture is straightforward. However, its understanding of science is not straightforward, since the generally accepted view is that the universe is at least 12 billion years old. One attempt to reconcile the supposed biblical date with the scientific data is to suppose that God created the universe very recently, but with the appearance of extreme antiquity. Another approach is to argue that scientists has got their dates completely wrong and that scientific data itself indicates that the earth is young.
This understanding of Genesis 1-3 is open to a number of objections:
(a) there are indications within the text itself that it should be read figuratively rather than literalistically;
(b) this position assumes that creation must have been instantaneous, rather than occuring over an extended period; but the biblical text does not require this;
(c) the notion that God created the universe with an apparent age seems to involve a huge deception; and those biblical passages that speak of nature’s witness to God (e.g. Psa 19:1; Acts 17:22-31) are called into question;
(d) the argument that modern science has made such a series of blunders about the nature and origin of the universe denies the work of so many scientists – both Christian and non-Christian – whose results have been tried and tested by the scientific community. It is easy to raise doubts about this or that piece of scientific evidence, but it is quite another matter to question the whole edifice.
2. The ‘ideal time’ view
The world was created quite recently, but features such as tree-rings, navels, and rock strata would already be present at the moment of creation, suggesting an extreme apparent age.
3. The ‘local creation’ view
Gen 1 refers to a remodelling of a small part of the earth. Geology accounts for the history of the world, while Gen 1 is the record of the re-creation of a certain territory.
4. The ‘Gap’ Theory
There is a long gap between Gen 1:1 (the original creation) and Gen 1:2 (a refashioning of the earth in six literal days).
Verse 1, it is suggested, refers to the original creation, which could have taken place billions of years ago. But then, relatively recently, the earth ‘became’ formless and void due to the ruin and destruction brought about by the fall of Satan. The rest of Gen 1 is an account, not of creation, but of re-creation.
The main objections to this view are,
(a) most scholars do not think that ‘became’ is an allowable translation in verse 2;
(b) there is little support in the rest of Scripture for the account of the fall of Satan required by this view.
5. The ‘Age-Day’ View
The word ‘day’ (yom) is used figuratively to mean an indefinite period of time, as in Gen 2:4. Each epoch is characterised by a distinctive creative act, the order of which corresponds quite closely to the scientific record.
According to this view, the ‘days’ of Genesis 1 are not 24-hours days at all, but much more extended periods of time. It is then argued that Genesis 1 and the fossil record give a concordant view of the order of the creation events.
But,
(a) there is little evidence in the text itself that the writer was using the word ‘day’ in this way. After all, he refers to ‘evening and morning’, and places the whole sequence in the context of a week; and
(b) there are disagreements between the text and the fossil record as to the order of creative acts – for example, in Genesis the tress appear before marine creatures, and evening and morning before the Sun and the Moon.
6. Days of Revelation, not Creation
This view, popularised by P.J. Wiseman, maintains that Genesis presents, not an account of creation itself, but of how God revealed creation to Adam. But Genesis 1:1 does not say that ‘God made known the heavens and the earth’, but that he ‘made the heavens and the earth’.
7. Literary Approaches
Those adopting a literary interpretation note that the cosmos has the appearance of great antiquity, that the phrase ‘morning and evening’ seems inconsistent with the ‘day-age’ theory, and that the gap, postulated by some, between the verse two verses of the chapter is not apparent from the text itself. The ‘days’ of creation , then, constitute a literary framework, which is:
‘designed to teach that God alone is the creator of an orderly universe, and to call upon human beings made in the image of the creator God to reflect God’s creative activity in their own pattern of labor. (Gen 2:2; Ex 31:17).’
(New Geneva Study Bible)
This approach begins by asking what kind of literature Gen 1 actually is. There are indications that the text is theological and polemic in nature, rather than scientific and descriptive. For example, on the seventh day book of Revelation picks up the imagery of Genesis (e.g. ‘serpent’, ‘tree of life’) in a way that suggests that it is being understood figuratively. Then again, the structure of Gen 1 makes good logical sense but less good chronological sense. Once more, there are indications that Gen 1 reflects a liturgical form and hat it was intended for use in worship; it is, in fact, more like poetry or hymn than like scientific history. ‘It is a meditation on the work of creation so that we can understand that the creation is related to God.’
Recognising Genesis 1 as primarily poetic does not turn it into a fable with no truth content or revelatory purpose. Real events can be presented an a symbolic way, just as in Jesus’ parable of the wicked tenants, Mt 21:33-41. Gen 1 is true, but its true is theological rather than scientific. Galileo famously said, “The Bible does not tell us how the heavens go but how to go to heaven.”
If Genesis 1 had been written as a scientific text then, of course, few people would be able to understand it. Moreover, the scientific picture is constantly being modified, and if scientific language were used in Genesis then it would quickly have gone out of date. In Genesis, God communicates truth to all peoples in all ages.
With a robust understanding of Scripture and of science we can with confidence bring God’s two books together – the book of his Word and the book of his works. Since God is the author of both, we need not fear the truth in either, nor suspect that any contradiction will be found between then. On the contrary, they complement one another, so that our understanding of one sheds light on our understanding of the other.
For Grudem (Systematic Theology, 2nd ed.), the strongest argument against a literary framework view is that:
‘the whole of Genesis 1 strongly suggests not just a literary framework but a chronological sequence of events.’
Bibliography
In addition to the works cited above, I have consulted:
Henri Blocher, In the Beginning.
David Wilkinson, The Message of Creation (IVP). Wilkinson is both a scientist and a theologian. He is a Methodist minister and is currently Principal of St John’s College, Durham.