Every Sunday we hear the words echo in our churches: "In six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is" (Ex. 20:11). A synodicalty approved publication of the Free Reformed Churches appropriately includes the statement that "We believe that the days in the creation account in Genesis 1, are twenty-four hour days."¹ The Bible teaches that God created the entire universe in six normal days, only a few thousand years ago. Until a couple hundred years ago, the Christian church has largely taken this view.² Then why do so many Christians today believe otherwise? Today, most seminaries and bible colleges in the United States and Canada do not take the first few chapters of Genesis literally. What has caused this change?

Historical Development⤒🔗

it began before Darwin. Beginning in the late 18th and into the 19th centuries there were three deistic geologists who came up with the idea that the earth was much older than a few thousand years. In Britain there were James Hutton and Charles Lyell, and in Germany there was Abraham Werner.³ Together, these men made the world at large increasingly believe geology proved that the earth was millions of years old.

Already in the first half of the 19th century, some Christian leaders believed these geologists, and began to find ways to harmonize an old earth with the Bible. Thomas Chalmers (1780-1847), a leading Scottish evangelical, began to teach the gap theory in 1804.⁴ (Few people hold to the gap theory today.) In the late 1830s, evangelical Congregationalist theologian, John Pye Smith (1774-1851), argued for a local creation and local flood; both of which occurred in Mesopotamia. In the 1850s, prominent Scottish geologist and evangelical friend of Chalmers, Hugh Miller (1802-1856) revived George Stanley Faber's (1773-1854) day-age theory in the 1850s. This view, that the six days of creation are actually vast ages of time, began to be widely accepted by Christians, and still is today.⁵Increasingly, also, liberal scholars began to treat Genesis as myth.

Then, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the scientific community accepted Darwinian evolution as fact. This caused many debates among Christians about the rela­tionship between science and the Bible. Was Genesis 1 to be taken literally? Are not the facts of (evolutionary) science also part of God's truth? Even some conservative Bible scholars such as A. A. Hodge and B. B. Warfield taught that the earth was millions of years old and that man evolved from animal life forms.⁶ This was a time of turmoil for the church. The wonderful work done by creation scientists in the past half-century was largely unknown to the church at the time, and so those who did not wish to be despised as "out of date" compromised with evolutionary science. Had these men lived today, it is hard to believe they would still take this view.

Reasons for Viewing Genesis Literally←⤒🔗

It is vital to the very root of Christian theology and Christian living to take the early chapters of Genesis literally. There is no scriptural or logical reason for viewing them any other way. Let us consider four lines of evidence.

1. Genesis 1 is written as literal history so we should take it as such.←↰⤒🔗

In the Old Testament, whenever the Hebrew word for day, "yom", is modified by an ordinal (first day, second day, third day, and so on) and a numeral (six days), it always means a literal day. This is exactly what is found in Genesis 1 and Exodus 20:11.

On the fourth day, God created the sun, moon, and stars. Thus it is dear that the last three days of creation were defined by a period of darkness and a period of light from the sun, effected by the earth's rotation. Simply reading Genesis 1 shows you that there is no fundamental difference between the first three days and the last three days of creation.

The creation week is the basis for our seven-day week. God created for six days, then rested on the seventh day. God "blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it," and later identified this as the Sabbath day.⁷  More than once, God made it dear that the "six-days-of-rest-plus-the-Sabbath" pattern was because "in six days the LORD made heaven and earth..." ⁸

2. There is a serious theological problem with the idea that God created the world over millions of years.←↰⤒🔗

If death existed for millions of years before Adam sinned, then death did not come by sin.⁹  What significance would all the Old Testament animal sacrifices have had, if animal death was part of the original good creation? We know that God's curse affected not only people, but all creation.¹⁰ The Bible teaches that "the wages of sin is death and that "Christ died for us" (Rom. 6:23; 5:8). The doc­trines of substitution and blood redemption are null if death and bloodshed ruled the planet for millions of years before there was any sin.

Surely, an all-knowing God could devise a better method of creating the world than a random and inefficient process of evolution. Surely, a loving God would not use the suffering, bloodshed and death of multitudes of animals all to arrive at man millions of years later!

3. The Bible dearly teaches a global flood.←↰⤒🔗

(We must realize also that a global flood and a recent creation stand or fall together. Either the rock layers and fossils were laid down rapidly by Noah's flood, or they came slowly over millions of years.) This is so obvious from the Genesis account that you need just read it to be convinced. Nevertheless, many evangelicals will say that Noah's flood was merely a local flood somewhere in the Middle East.¹¹  However, deducing a local flood from the Genesis account defies all logic. If the Flood was local, why did Noah need to build an ark to escape it? Couldn't he just have walked to the other side of the nearby mountains? Why would God send animals on the ark? Wouldn't there be enough animals in the rest of the world who would not be drowned? Why would birds need to be on the ark? Couldn't they just fly away to dry land? if the Flood was local, how could the water rise to 15 cubits (probably about 8 metres) above the mountains (Gen. 7:20) without flooding the rest of the world? If the Flood were local, God would have broken His promise never to send such a flood again.

4. Jesus and the apostles took Genesis literally.←↰⤒🔗

In Mark 10:6, Jesus said, "But from the beginning of the cre­ation God made them male and female." If the days of creation took billions of years, then God did not make man at the beginning, but nearer the end of earth history, contrary to what Jesus said.

Jesus referred to "the blood of the prophets, which was shed from the foundation of the world" (Luke 11:50). He identified the first prophet as Abel. A billions-of-years timetable would place Abel at the end, not at the foundation of the world. Paul also assumed that people were around from the creation of the world (Rom. 1:20).¹²

Jesus believed in a global flood and used it as a comparison to the final, complete judgment (Matt. 24:37-39). The apostle Peter does the same in 2 Peter 3:5-7, where he describes how "the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished."

Conclusion←⤒🔗

John MacArthur rightly defends the traditional view of creation:

All sorts of theological mischief ensues when we reject or compromise the literal truth of the biblical account of cre­ation and the fall of Adam... It is a necessary inconsisten­cy if one is to affirm an old earth and remain evangelical... In an important sense, everything Scripture says about our salvation through Jesus Christ hinges on the literal truth of what Genesis 1-3 teaches about Adam's cre­ation and fall. There is no more pivotal passage of Scripture...

Evangelicals who accept an old-earth interpretation of Genesis have embraced a hermeneutic that is hostile to a high view of Scripture. They are bringing to the opening chapters of Scripture a method of biblical interpretation that has built-in anti-evangelical presuppositions. Those who adopt this approach have already embarked on a process that invariably overthrows faith. Churches and colleges that embrace this view will not remain evangelical long.¹³