Objection 37: The days of creation were not literal, twenty-four-hour days, but long indefinite periods, millions of years in length. Therefore Seventh day Adventists are not warranted in using the creation story of Genesis 1 as an argument for the holiness of the literal seventh day of the weekly cycle.
First, we note at the outset that this objection goes too far for the majority of Christians, who worship on Sunday. For the most part, Sunday keepers agree that the days of creation were literal 24-hour days. They argue that the seventh day, the Sabbath, was binding until the Resurrection, after which the solemnity was transferred to Sunday. But the objection before us, if true, would have been valid throughout the history of the world, and hence there was no binding literal Sabbath day at any time in all earth's history!
Second, we note that if the person making this objection accepts the Darwinian/evolutionist view of origins, and thus does not believe that Genesis gives a dependable history of earth’s origins, we would need, in order to address that objection, to go beyond the scope of this book. That issue would need to be addressed by a more basic order of apologetics. In this book, we believe, and we assume that our various objectors believe, that, “all Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness.” (2 Tim. 3:16)
The issue we will address here is whether one who believes in the inspiration of Scripture, and that Scripture is therefore more reliable than “science falsely so called” (1 Tim. 6:20), should read Genesis literally or in some non-literal, spiritual, or allegorical manner.
As to the specific charge that Adventists are not warranted in using the creation story as an argument for the holiness of the Sabbath, we note that this is not an Adventist invention; rather, it is the simple declaration of the Fourth Commandment. “In six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day, and hallowed it.” Ex. 20:11.
Certainly when God spoke those words to Israel they understood Him to mean that the seventh day of the weekly cycle had been blessed, for it was that particular day in the cycle they were called upon to honor. Indeed, there would have been no point to the command that they should work six days and keep the seventh day of the week, in memory of creation, if creation had not taken place on that same pattern—six days God labored and the seventh day He rested. To make the days of creation long periods is to ruin the parallel that God Himself, not Seventh-day Adventists, set up between the days of creation and the weekly cycle of human activity and rest.
The whole creation account is written as a simple narrative. There is nothing in the record to suggest that words should not be understood in their ordinary meanings. In each day of that first week there is “the evening and the morning.” Indeed, that is how each day is marked off. Evening and morning are the dark and light portions of a literal, twenty-four-hour day; evening and morning indicate that Genesis One is describing literal, 24-hour days, not long, indefinite periods of millions of years.
The Hebrew word for “day,” yôm, can refer to something other than a literal twenty-four-hour period. In Genesis one, however, each yôm of the creation week is modified by an ordinal number, as in “the first day,” “the second day” etc. When so modified, yôm always means a literal twenty-four hour day.
One has to wonder why, if the days of creation were intended to indicate multi-million-year epochs, the writer of Genesis didn’t just say that? It isn’t as though ancient people could not conceive of an earth millions of years old. On the contrary, most ancients believed the earth to be much older than the Bible indicates.
For example, Plato believed that the Flood had occurred two hundred million years ago. The Babylonian historian Berosus placed the creation two million years ago. Hindu traditions that were committed to writing 1,500 years ago teach that the earth’s history can be divided up into endlessly repeating cycles of 4.32 billion years, each of which can be further subdivided into 1,000 subcycles of 4.32 million years duration. The ancient Chinese adopted similar teachings of long cycles.
Obviously, the ancients were familiar with “old earth” histories and legends; it is the Bible’s “young earth” narrative that is unique. This is a powerful indication that Scripture was uniquely inspired by God, and not influenced by the surrounding pagan cultures.
In the biblical creation account, God speaks the creation into being ex nihilo (out of nothing). There is no reason this should have taken hundreds of millions of years. The long ages are necessary to allow time for Lyellian geological “history” and Darwinian biological “history”—not because God needed more than an instant, much less more than a day, to speak the creation into being.
The day/age theory assumes that the geological strata are not the residue of the Genesis Flood, but rather a record of evolution over hundreds of millions of years. Hence, the day/age understanding of Genesis (and earth history) presents violence, predation, and death as part of the creation that God declared “very good,” and not as the results of Adam’s sin. It also leaves no geological work for the Genesis Flood to perform.
Furthermore, the order in which animals appear in the Genesis narrative does not always correspond to the order in which they appear in the geologic strata. For example, the Bible teaches that birds were created on the fifth day, and then the land animals on the sixth (Gen. 1:20-25), so birds come before land animals in the biblical narrative. But the fossils of land animals are found in lower sedimentary strata than the fossils of birds, and therefore land animals are thought to have lived many millions of years before the birds ever appeared. Thus, the order in which creatures appear in the Genesis days does not correspond to the order in which they appear in the “ages” of geology.
The plain fact is that there is nothing in the text itself to indicate that the days of Genesis One are anything other than literal days, 24-hour periods. The idea that the days are not literal, but correspond to geological ages, is entirely imported from contemporary origins sciences. It is not textually driven, a fact that is freely admitted by even the most liberal theologians. “The problem with all of these interpretations [including the gap theory and the “day/age theory],” wrote the Left-leaning Adventist theologian Fritz Guy, “is that they are not indicated, much less demanded, by the biblical text; they are simply ad hoc attempts to make Genesis agree with geology.” (Fritz Guy, “Negotiating the Creation-Evolution Wars,” Spectrum, vol. 20, No. 1 (October 1989)) The day/age theory is clearly not derived from the text.
Part of the process of the Reformation was to abandoned the allegories and overly spiritualized interpretations of Scripture that had characterized medieval thinking and return to the literal narrative. An important part of this was to allow Scripture to interpret Scripture. Gerhard Hasel writes:
“We must not superimpose external meaning on [the Bible], as had been the practice during medieval Catholicism. Rather, we should approach the Bible in its literal and grammatical sense. Martin Luther, accordingly, argued for the literal interpretation of the creation account: ‘We assert that Moses spoke in the literal sense, not allegorically or figuratively, i.e., that the world, with all its creatures, was created within six days, as the words read.’ The other Reformers understood the creation ‘days’ in the same way.”
If we allow Scripture to interpret Scripture—if we allow Exodus 20:8-11 to interpret Genesis 2:1-3—we will eschew allegories and figurative interpretations, and accept the plainly intended meaning, which is that the days of Genesis One are literal days.
For the man who believes that the Bible is inspired, and is trying to understand what Moses wanted us to know from what he wrote, there can be no doubt whatsoever that the days of Genesis One are literal days.