Introductions
Introductions to stories can be a tricky business. If an author fails to captivate his reader for any reason, he risks losing his audience for good. Credibility is the easiest thing for a writer to lose; and when he exchanges it in favor of seemingly absurd claims he does so at the demise of the reader’s suspension of disbelief. No book is immune to this, not even God’s word. Genesis chapter 1 is the first chapter of the first book of the Bible. In it, God describes the creation of the heavens and the earth. But ever since science began its exploration of the past, the mounting evidence against the young earth described by scripture has cast the credibility of the story into doubt. The question we are left with after carbon dated rocks, starlight, fission track dating, geomagnetic reversals, ice layering, space weathering, lunar retreat and a myriad of other proofs: is the Creation Story even still relevant? In the face of such overwhelming evidence, it would seem unlikely. Yet through the course of this work, we will discover that not only is the Creation Story of Genesis 1 still relevant, but it is not as easy a thing for science to discredit as atheistic scientists would have us believe.
The Creation Story is the most familiar of Bible stories due to its location in the scriptures. Anyone who has ever opened the Bible to begin reading it has likely started where everyone else has: the beginning. But how many of us have taken the time to truly meditate on this passage of scripture to find out all the things it really has to say? Let me show you a few examples of what I mean rather than simply taking my word for it.
The First Story
Did you know that of the 1,189 chapters of the Bible, the Creation Story is the only story in the Bible that shows God doing something that is not in response to something man has done or is going to do? Scientists might call this the control group, for the passage gives us a snapshot of God’s behavior at a time when man’s behavior was not an influencing factor.
After reading things in the Old Testament or going through a terrible personal crisis, many individuals are left with a negative view of God as this harsh, cruel, or evil being. But if we reference the control group and examine God for the five days before man even existed, we see a different picture altogether. What we find God doing in the first five days is creating light in the midst of darkness, dividing the dominance of the waters of the deep over the Earth, bringing the land out of the water and giving it life, creating the celestial bodies of the heavens including the stars, creating the sea and sky creatures, and then the land creatures. Only after everything else has been made, does God form man from out of the dusts of the earth.
Now stop and think about all that for just a moment, because it disguises the profound. Everything described provides the foundation for man’s life on earth.
Imagine for a moment a world full of blind men, how would we have survived as a species? Or suppose the waters of the deep still dominated the surface of the earth, such that whole continents experienced flooding on a regular basis. After some of the dire warnings given by ecologists and environmentalists regarding the threats to our oceans, perhaps you can get an idea of what our oceans would be like without any sea creatures; the water would stagnate and a staple of the human diet would never exist. If there were no plants or land animals, there would be no air to breath and no food to eat. In short, everything God did during the five days prior to the sixth was for the express intent that man be the beneficiary of His work.
Yet even after understanding that, do we truly appreciate the fullness of what God did through his work? Sometimes the only way we ever learn anything is if we try to do it ourselves. So what would this look like if it were all carried out by a human being?
Imagine a father decides one day to spend the next five days, morning and evening, building the most amazing toy his imagination has ever fathomed for his unborn child. While certainly a sweet and sentimental thing for a father to do, there are plenty of men who shop and work hard to provide for their unborn children. But which father does these things five days prior to conceiving of his unborn child with his wife?
More to the point, this amazing toy he makes in just 5 days, is so beyond the scope of our comprehension that one could spend an entire lifetime awake and asleep with it and never fully explore the height, depth, or breadth of all the wonders it contains. Study deeply that perspective for a moment, because aside from anything else you may think you know about God, that is what the Bible describes as His nature when man is not in the picture. Which illuminates the rest of the Old Testament under an altogether different light. Any criticism leveled against God’s behavior during the Old Testament immediately casts our own human condition into suspicion as the culprit, rather than God. After all, what we see regarding God, when He is left to his own devices, is a thoughtful, caring, generous and loving Creator.
Now let’s take a look at how the Creation Story actually uses the criticism science levels against it to uncover hidden truths regarding this passage of scripture.
More than Meets the Eye
The Creation Story tells us that on the fourth day, God created the stars. Science has shown us that the stars we see in the night sky are light from other suns. In some cases, the stars we see are actually from distant galaxies that are themselves made up of many suns. As all astronomy students learn, stars often come with planets. Many of these planets are made of gas, but some of them are made from rock and ice. And as any geology student knows where there are layers of rock, there are mountains and if there is ice, there may be water and from water come seas, oceans and an atmosphere, complete with weather systems.
The point of all of this is to demonstrate a discrepancy in God’s own described behavior. It took him five days to create our solar system, world and everything in it, but through science we understand that when God created stars on the 4th day He demonstrated just how vast his Creation abilities are. Again, the relevancy may not at first be clear until we attempt to do it ourselves. But for this example we need only defer to our common experience in Math class.
When math teachers stand at the front of the classroom working out a problem from the book on the board for the class to see they often take their time and show their work. But let us be clear, most of them can work those problems out in a fraction of the time. Some do not even need to write anything down but can solve the problem in their heads. What we have discovered then is that the story of Creation is in fact God showing his work regarding a complex problem. There can be no doubt to this. To claim otherwise is to suggest that the creation of life on Earth is somehow more costly for God’s omnipotence than spinning fifty-sextillion other Earthlike planets into being in the span of a 24 hour period whereas it took him six days to complete our own. The logic, much like the math, simply does not add up.
The Master Plan
This brings us at last to the foundation for understanding the relevance of Genesis 1 in the 21st century. Consider the nature of God for a moment as an all-powerful, all-knowing, and all present being. What this nature means is that time is of no constraint to Him. The past, present and future are always before his eternal presence. Which means that during the five days that God was creating the Earth in preparation for man; He would be fully cognizant of Adam’s eventual fall in Genesis 3, but more importantly, the scientific discoveries of the 21st century that would eventually challenge the credibility of His word in the minds of His creation.
We know from the Creation Story that God took the time to consider our human needs when creating this world for us. It likewise stands to perfect reason that He considers our need for authentication to his credibility at our time in history more than ever. To that end, I will demonstrate through the course of the next six chapters that the Creation Story is more than just a story describing the creation of our world. Throughout the Old Testament, we see examples of God employing the prophetic to give authority to His messengers and His message. When a prophet’s word was fulfilled, it authenticated the messenger to the people. In turn, it authenticated the remainder of the unfulfilled message to his people. In that way, they could know that God had spoken to them, and that what He had spoken was worth heeding. Similarly, the Creation Story is God’s prophetic word for our generation. Roughly 3,500 years ago, God explained to Moses how He had created the world. God could have told Moses anything, even simply, “I created the heavens and the earth,” and left it at that. Instead, God took the time to explain the entire six day process. We might presume that God did it to give the basis for a seven day week, but then God merely needed to say to Moses, “I created the heavens and the earth in seven days,” and left it at that.
We know, though, that God did not leave it at that. If we examine the Creation Story we see that God broke the duration of His work up over six days. As we have already learned, that is five more days than God’s power required. This tells us there is something God wants us to see within the work He took efforts to describe for Moses to transcribe, copy and pass down from generation to generation.
In Psalms 90:4 we read that to God, “A thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by, or like a watch in the night.”
If we apply this conversion rate to the six days of God’s Creation Story we come up with six-thousand years. By counting the extensive genealogies in the Bible, we can compute a starting year of around 4000 BC which means that according to the scriptures, from God’s perspective, only six-thousand years of relevant human history have passed since the Creation Story took place. If we then proceed to break up this huge chunk of time into six consecutive millennia we find that we are able to map a day of Creation against a given millennium of time starting around 4000 BC. If this pattern is correct, then we would expect the Creation Story to illuminate the course of relevant human history from God’s perspective correlated through meaningful terms and symbols described on each of the six days described in Genesis 1.
| Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4 | Day 5 | Day 6 |
| 4000 -3000 BC | 3000 -2000 BC | 2000 -1000 BC | 1000 – 1AD | 1 – 1000 AD | 1000 – 2000AD |
Though the table demonstrates a range of nice round numbers, it is important to note that we are dealing with thousands of years. The purpose of this work is not to provide a definitive answer on the precise year that the Creation Story took place. It was Archbishop James Ussher who provided the initial starting point of 4004 BC by carefully calculating the genealogies found in the Bible. But if Ussher’s understanding was inaccurate or his math was wrong, then our starting point would have to shift accordingly. Which means that his year of 4004 BC would put the end of Day 6 around 1996 AD. Rather than give credence to one model over another, I have opted for the imprecise year 4000 BC to keep our focus on the elements of the Creation Story and not on date computation.
What’s the Password?
To again put this all within terms from how a man might do this, imagine a writer preparing to write a book. Since he is a planner he has already thought out the entire story. To keep him on track, he begins by writing a table of contents at the beginning and marks off each section as its own separate chapter. The simple designation of “Chapter 1”, “Chapter 2” and so on, is each accompanied by a brief description of events that are to take place in his story during that section. But because our author is well-established, he has his detractors and they are ever on the look-out for what his next project is so that they can undermine his work and discredit him before his book is finished. Knowing this, and being the planner that he is, our author likes to employ a little encoding in his descriptions using symbols, their relationships, and placements to show up his critics in the end by having put the answers right in front of them the whole time, though they never understood it. To accomplish that task, however, our author requires a few things.
- He has to publish his introduction, long before his story is finished or no one will believe he was the author.
- He really needs to wait until he has some of it written before publishing his intro so that his detractors see him invested in the project and take his venture seriously.
- He must prove through the unfolding chapters that his work fully, completely and relevantly fulfills the encoding published in his introduction
- He must provide the key to decoding his work through his work such that the key authenticates the code and the code authenticates the key.
Once our author has done these things he will have proven his credibility and authenticated his work from the past for the future. Likewise, once God published his Creation Story through Moses in the third millennium He fulfilled items 1 and 2. Over the course of the next four millennia the message remained inert waiting until all the necessary events fully unlocked the encoded details described in His Creation Story. So that when we, in the 21st century, neared the end of the sixth millennium we would have all the pieces of the key needed to decode the introduction and see for ourselves that the Creation Story as a table of contents matches both Biblical history up through 33 AD and on into our time in 2014. This fulfills item 3.
What type of encoding did God use for this venture? Bible codes have had their time in the spotlight, but I do not prescribe to the notion that God would utilize a mechanism so complicated. Authors have often used symbols in their stories to convey obscured meanings. Sometimes those meanings are obvious, but many times we must wait until the author defines them for us through the settings and characterizations in which those symbols are represented. Likewise, to make sense of the symbols we find in the Creation Story of Genesis 1, we must look to the Bible to interpret these symbols for us, rather than applying whatever meaning we might like for them. By revealing the meanings of these symbols in later books of the Bible, God ensured that Moses and the Israelites would not possess all the pieces to decode the prophecy before the appointed time. This fulfills item 4.
As we shall soon see, the Creation Story highlights events in human history relevant to God as shown throughout the Bible. But the Bible stops recording in the first century AD. This means that while the symbols described in the last three days of Creation may be understood using other symbols defined in the scriptures, the actual events they refer to must be found within our own recordings of human history apart from the Bible.
When we do find them, we discover that God did indeed see our complete human history all the way back from the beginning before He even started His work. Which means that when God began creating our world, He chose even the particulars of how He worked it to reveal His prophecy regarding the course of the human race from Eternity’s perspective, thus authenticating the message of scripture as coming from the one and only God.
But like all stories, it is only appropriate to start at the beginning, or as God called it: Day 1.