When we are at our best, Christians display “unity in the essentials, liberty in the non-essentials and charity in all things.” Often attributed to St. Augustine, this motto actually comes from a Lutheran named Rupertus Meldenius, who wrote during the 30 Years’ War (1618-1648), a bloody conflict stoked with religious tensions (http://www.ligonier.org/learn/articles/essentials-unity-non-essentials-liberty-all-things/). I do not take Meldenius to mean that Christians cannot have strong convictions about secondary doctrines. Nor is this an excuse for doctrinal apathy or sloppy thinking. Rather, it champions deep church truths while fostering a spirit of humility.

I say all this because our questions about the age of the earth, the days of Genesis and whether or not there was animal predation before the Fall, all fall (no pun intended) into the category of non-essentials. Please hear me out! I am not saying that these issues lack substance—they can be weighty and substantial, but they are secondary. Good and thoughtful Christians come to the same text and walk away with different conclusions.

So, as we enter into these secondary but substantial doctrines, I’m challenging you to cultivate a hermeneutic of humility. Some of my favorite people disagree with my positions on the age of the earth and days of creation. That’s okay. There’s freedom to disagree and to do so without making the truth ugly. Regarding my secondary positions, it’s possible that I’m wrong. I’m humble enough to admit that, but I’m also confident enough in my position to put it forward for you to consider. It’s possible that I’m wrong, but I’m probably right.

THAT SAID (and repeated as often as necessary), what exactly does the Bible say about the age of the earth?

Evangelical Christians tend to fall into one of two camps: Young Earth Creation or Old Earth Creation (hereafter YEC or OEC). Young earthers believe that God created the universe and earth in six, 24 hour days of one earth week. The earth is no more than 10,000 years old and the apparent age of the planet is explained by God creating it with the appearance of age. Like YEC, Old earthers believe that God created everything, but that He did so a long time ago (around 8-15 billion years ago). Many OEC advocates hold to an old earth, but a young humanity (i.e. the earth is billions of years old, but humanity was created by an immediate act of God around 20-50,000 years ago).

I’ll tell you where I land on the issue later, but for now, let’s open our Bibles to Genesis 1:1. What does the first verse of the first book of the Bible tell us about the age of the earth?

In the Beginning: Point in Time or Period of Time?
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1).

The word beginning is how our Bibles gloss the Hebrew reshit. The issue at hand is whether or not the word is used to convey a period of time or a point in time. If we read beginning as a point in time it pushes us toward YEC. In the beginning, God created everything in an instant and immediately got to work on forming and filling the earth. The time span between God speaking the universe into existence and the days of creation is short. Day one happens moments after the creation of matter, space and time in verse one, followed by day two, etc. But if we read beginning as a period of time, that block of time could be substantial, even billions of years. So, which is it, point in time or period of time?

The best way to approach this is to let Scripture interpret Scripture. Let’s look at how reshit/beginning is used elsewhere:

In the Pentateuch

“…a land for which the LORD your God cares; the eyes of the LORD your God are always on it, from the beginning even to the end of the year” (Deut. 11:12).

With the words beginning and end, we see another merism at work (i.e. two opposites that when put together communicate the totality). Moses’ point in Duet. 11:12 is that God’s care is always on the Promised Land. But note the word beginning. Here it used to indicate a specific period of time, not a point in time.

In the Book of Job

“Though your beginning was insignificant, Yet your end will increase greatly” (Job 8:7).

Once again we see a period or duration of time. Bildad, a friend of Job and not a Hobbit, is talking to Job as he sits in a pile of sores and ashes. He does not have Job’s specific day of birth in mind, but instead a block of time—Job’s early years.

In the Prophet Jeremiah

“Now in the same year, in the beginning of the reign of Zedekiah king of Judah…” (Jer. 28:1).

The word reshit as a period of time is also used to talk about the early months or years of a king’s reign (Jer. 28:1). The NASB glosses reshit with the word beginning, “Now in the same year, in the beginning of the reign of Zedekiah king of Judah…”, while the NIV simply uses the phrase “early in the reign of…” Once again we see reshit used as a period of time and not a point in time. By the way, this is similar to how you and I might use the word beginning:

“At the beginning of the year I’m going to rotate the tires on my car.” Do you mean January 1st or a block of time after the start of the new year?

“At the beginning of my marriage I made a lot of mistakes.” Do you mean day one or that period of time called the early years?

What’s my point? The Biblical evidence suggests that God created over an unspecified block of time, not a moment in time. How long was that block of time? We don’t know, because the word reshit doesn’t tell us. The earth could have sat in its uninhabitable watery condition for a week or billions of years. God’s word choice steers us away from “moment in time” thinking. Hebrew scholar John Sailhamer, in his book Genesis Unbound, suggests that had Moses wanted to tell us that God created in a moment of time, he could have chosen other Hebrew words to make his point (rishonah or techillah), but he did not.

Does this mean that the YEC view is wrong? Not so fast! There are other lines of Biblical evidence to consider and after that, Young Earthers have scientific reasons to embrace their point of view. All I’m saying is that you cannot determine the age of the earth from Genesis 1:1. If you want to calculate the age of the earth, you’re going to have to do the math somewhere else.

Next Week: What about the Genealogies?

As a little boy I was fascinated by dinosaurs. I especially liked the T-Rex, muscle bound in haunches and tale and outfitted with a jagged maw. The sharp teeth of these predators cut into my imagination, so much so that I had to ask my mom if they were mentioned in the Bible. With so many fossils, it was impossible to deny the reality of these creatures, but because their bones threatened the faith of my mother, she answered, “the devil put those bones in the ground to keep you from believing.” I wasn’t satisfied with this answer and put the question in my back pocket for a later time. As for mom, she was doing the best she could with what she had.

I still like dinosaurs! While they may threaten characters in the Jurassic Park series, they need not threaten our faith. So, instead of attributing their bones to the devil, I see the creation of T-Rex and raptors in the first statement of the Bible, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (1:1). The phrase “the heavens and the earth” is a figure of speech called a merism (i.e. two contrasting words that when put together refer to the whole). You could translate it this way, “In the beginning God created everything that began to exist.” Like everything else, dinosaurs were made by God, and like so much of creation after sin entered the world, they succumbed to death.

This childhood story illustrates the unnecessary friction that can come from a clumsy reading (or misreading) of the two books God has given to us: the Book of Nature and the Book of Scripture. The Book of Nature states that some things about God can be known through His creation. In the New Testament, Paul argues that the revelation God provides through creation is sufficient to hold people responsible for believing that God exists and should be worshipped (Romans 1:18-20). The Book of Scripture is God’s self-revelation to us about who He is and how we can be rescued from death through Jesus Christ. When all the facts are known and when properly interpreted, Scripture is always true and never false. This includes what it says about creation, human origins and history in general.

In the last episode I argued that Genesis should be read as theological history (i.e. real people and real events from a God-centered point of view). Most Evangelicals read it this way, but too many of us make the mistake of reading the book of Genesis (Scripture) like its a science text book (the book of nature). Instead of following the rules of good Bible study, which insists on discovering, as best we can, the original intent of the author and what it meant to his original audience, we race to our context with its questions about Darwinian evolution and dinosaur bones.

When God inspired Moses to write, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”, Moses was not entering into a debate with Richard Dawkins. He was writing to Israelites who were likely preparing to enter into the Promised Land. When we remember that Genesis is book one of a five part series (the Pentateuch), we see that the big idea of the passage is that the God of the covenant (Yahweh) is the One who made everything and prepared a good land so that His people might flourish. That’s the message of chapter one. If we are overly quick to read our questions and concerns into the text, we risk missing its original meaning.

So, how should we read Genesis 1-3? We should read it with the grain of the Pentateuch. When we do that, all kinds of interesting truths leap from its pages:

• “Now the earth was formless and empty…” (1:2). What earth is he talking about? We rush to read “planet earth” into the text, but what if the text is pointing us to a specific land? In some contexts the word for earth/land (eretz) can refer to earth in a global since (Gen. 18:25), but in Genesis one it refers to habitable space (i.e dry ground) in contrast to water world. However, in the Pentateuch eretz normally refers to the Promised Land and a good case can be made that the boundaries of Eden correspond to the boundary markers for the Promised Land. What would happen if we read the creation of the planet into verse one, but interpreted the days of creation in verses 1:2-31 as more or less interested in telling a people about ready to enter into the Promised Land how God prepared it for His original covenant people Adam and Eve?
• “Now the earth was formless and empty…” (1:2). The phrase “formless and empty” seeks to capture the Hebrew “tohu wabohu” (lit. uninhabitable waste). Deuteronomy 32:10 translates it as “howling waste” and later prophets will use it to describe the Promised Land ruined by the disobedience of God’s people. Read within the context of the Pentateuch, tohu wabohu conveys not a cosmic void, but a waste land where man cannot live. Tohu is not tob (i.e. good). Read within the context of the Pentateuch, tohu wabohu warns readers what can happen to the good land if they break the covenant.
• “…darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters” (Gen. 1:2). In the Pentateuch, water is often an obstacle to inhabiting the land. God must do something about the waters so that people can inhabit the land (Gen. 6-9; Exod. 14-15).
• “The LORD took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden work it and take care of it” (2:15). The words work and take care of roughly translate the Hebrew words abad and shamar. When we read this within the context of the Pentateuch we see that something more than yard work is happening here (see Exod. 3:12; Deut. 30:15-18). To abad is to worship and to shamar is to keep His commands. The call to worship and obey God winks at us through a double-meaning.

Reading Genesis within the the context of the Pentateuch is critical if you want to spiral closer to its original meaning. As Gordan Fee reminds us, “The text cannot mean what it never meant.” Only after we have discovered what the text meant to the first readers can we talk about its significance to the questions of our day: How old is the universe? Did man evolve? Etc. This is just good Bible study.

Nearly every culture has a creation story. Most of them are myth-laden fairy tales, but they make good reading. In Greek mythology, there was nothing but chaos in the beginning, until somehow, the earth (Gaia) emerged and gave birth to the Sky. They made a bunch of babies (six male Titans and six female Titans). One of them was named Cronus and he fathered Zeus. Cronus had a bizarre habit of eating his children, but Zeus managed to escape his dad’s late night cravings. Most of us are familiar with the story from that point on. Meanwhile, the Cherokee nation believed that the earth existed as a floating island, held by four cords and surrounded by salt water. This island had been created by a water beetle, who scooped up enough mud from the ocean floor to form an island.

Modern day creation fairy tales are almost as interesting. In the 2012 film Prometheus, a crew of scientists, archeologists and adventurers travel to a distant planet to discover the origins of humanity, but encounter the threat of creatures from the Alien franchise. Ask any Sci-fi geek and they’ll tell you that these monsters are capable of bringing about a mass extinction event to the human race. Bad news for these adventurers, good news for Alien fans! Having discovered that human life on earth was created by advanced humanoids called the Engineers, David (an android) asks the lone survivor Elizabeth Shaw (possibly a Christian), if she continued to hold to her beliefs:

Shaw: Where’s my cross?

David: The pouch in my utility belt. Even after all this, you still believe, don’t you?

Shaw: (ignoring the question) You said you could understand the navigation. Use their maps.

David: Yes, of course. Once we get to one of their other ships, finding a path to Earth should be relatively straightforward.

Shaw: I don’t want to go back to where we came from. I want to go where they came from. You think you can do that David?

David: Yes, I believe I can. May I ask what you hope to achieve by going there?

Shaw: They created us, then tried to kill us. They changed their minds. I deserve to know why.

Prometheus teases with answers about our origins, but leaves the question of where the Engineers came from and why they should want to destroy us open for a sequel. Atheists and Agnostics need a story like Prometheus because science, by itself, does not have enough explanatory power to explain the origins of humanity and the universe. They need Engineers and science, in place of God, to explain how we got here. My best guess is that modern tales like Prometheus are popular because they put forward a creation story that makes no moral claims on our life. Remember the candor of Aldous Huxley, the author of a Brave New World, regarding his reasons for dismissing a theistic worldview (one with meaning):

I had motive for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently assumed that it had none,        and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics, he is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do, or why his friends should not seize political power and govern in the way that they find most advantageous to themselves. … For myself, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation, sexual and political.

The problem for many non-Christians when it comes to believing the Genesis creation story is not that it lacks explanatory power, but that it posits a God who cares about what we do in the bedroom and with whom we do it. At least Huxley was honest. How brave of you, Aldous!

Enter Genesis. How should we read it? Like other creation stories, Genesis seeks to explain our origins and provides a foundational worldview, but unlike the ahistorical accounts of the Greeks and Cherokees, the author of Genesis expects us to read it as theological history (i.e. real events and real people from a God-centered point of view). A real God spoke the world into existence, created a real man and woman and these two were tricked into real cosmic treason, plunging the world into death and ruin. How do we know that the writer expects us to read these elements in Genesis in a historical context?

The best internal evidence for this is the frequent use of the Hebrew word toledot (lit. generations). It can be translated account or generations and appears 11X throughout the book. Here are a few examples:

• The beginning of the book: “This is the account (toledot) of the heavens and the earth when they were created” (2:4)
• Deeper into the book: “This is the account (toledot) of Terah (11:27)
• Near the end of the book: “This is the account (toledot) of Jacob” (37:2)

What am I getting at here? The use of the word toledot to refer to real people and real events in the later parts of Genesis strongly suggests that the author expects us to read the early chapters as history as well. Moses intended for us to read the account of creation and the fall of Adam and Eve as history, not myth and not poetry (though, like any good story, it does has poetry in it). Any reading of Genesis that ignores this is reading against the grain.

A Few Implications: What is God’s Spirit Saying to Me?
The implications of reading Genesis 1-3 as theological history are weighty and many. We didn’t take the time to explore the text, but here are a few ideas that emerge:

Implication #1: The God who made everything out of nothing has a big heart for people. He formed and filled the land for man’s good (i.e. a place where we could flourish in relationship with Him). The word good (Hebrew tob) is used 7X in the first chapter, 5X in Genesis 2 and 3X in Genesis 3. The care and creativity that God puts into the land so that we can thrive says something about how God feels about us. He is especially fond of His imagers.

Implication #2: Only God can determine what is good for us. He made us and knows what is best for us. The great test in the garden was over this very issue: Would Adam and Eve trust that God knew what was good for them (i.e. not eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil) or could people have the good without God? Note the contrast in the story between “God saw all that He had made, and it was very good” (1:31) and “When the women saw that the tree was good for food…” (3:6). The lesson of the story is clear, you cannot be good and experience the good without God. If you want to experience the good life, you’re going to have to trust God.

Implication #3: God holds us responsible for our choices. Dostoyevsky is right, “If God does not exist, everything is permissible.” Genesis teaches us that we are more than mammals and that God expects us to behave as imagers and not animals. It tells us that morality is not a social-construct, but instead flows from the Word of God. Taken as a whole, chapters 1-3 tell us that God is the compassionate Judge of sinners who displays His righteousness by punishing sin and His mercy by covering our shame and providing a substitute for sin (3:21). If this all sounds familiar (i.e. the good news about Jesus Christ), then you’re reading the text with the grain of God’s Big Story.

In the next episode, we’ll wrestle with the importance of reading Genesis within its context, instead of treating it like a science text book. More could be said and argued. Some of my friends will need more convincing about the explanatory power of Genesis to explain human origins. If that’s you, please check out Lee Strobel’s The Case for Faith and The Case for the Creator. Others will want to plunge deeper into Genesis itself and there are a ton of great commentaries on the market for that. Please let me know if I can point you in the right direction. Stay tuned for more!