In the Beginning pt.2			Genesis 1:1a    tape 116b       2-17-2002 

In the beginning.

We found last week there is a lot at stake in the debate about when the beginning was.  (These arguments are primarily directed at theistic evolution, but apply in varying degrees to other who hold to an old earth.)

What’s at Stake

1. Belief in an old earth tends to require belief in “old evil” – suffering, death & decay prior to sin.

But the Bible teaches the earth was a perfect paradise – without decay, suffering or death, until man sinned.

I made a big deal of that point, because it’s not just an implicit idea we can infer from the text – even liberal scholars agree it is a major theme intended by the author of Gn.

Liberal commentators love to point out similarities Genesis has with other religious writings of the time, and they assume the Jews came up with Genesis by adapting the pagan myths to create their own myths.

One such scholar is Jacobsen, who believes Genesis was dependent on the Mesopotamian version of origins.  
But even after pointing that out, Jacobson goes on to admit there are some radical differences that even he has to acknowledge – radical departures in Gn. from what the people of the day believed.
And the example he gives is the fact that whatever version of origins you look at in that ancient world, they all take “an affirmative and optimistic view of existence…things were not nearly as good to begin with as they have become since…In the biblical account it is the other way around. Things began as perfect from God’s hand and grew then steadily worse through man’s sinfulness until God finally had to do away with all mankind except for the pious Noah” (WBC Theology of Gn.1-11)

Even the liberals understand that the author of Genesis had as an intended purpose the goal of refuting the idea that the earth was created worse than it is now.

The error of old evil is itself quite old, and God wanted to set the record straight in Gn.1.  The world was not created as a mess that is improving, but as a perfect paradise that got messed up.

Whether you take statements in Genesis figuratively or literally, there is no question even among liberal scholars that that is the purpose.

2. Our hope for the future new creation is tied to the first creation.  

The new heavens and new earth we are looking forward to will be good - just as the first creation was originally good.

Isa.51:3 The LORD will surely comfort Zion and will look with compassion on all her ruins; he will make her deserts like Eden, her wastelands like the garden of the LORD.

So if the first creation was really billions of years of painful struggle, who is to say the next creation won’t be the same way if you can’t tell from the text?

In Ro.8:20-24 we learn that decay, death & frustration came from the curse, and we were saved in the hope of that being reversed someday, and paradise being restored.

Jacobsen also points out that the Sumerian myths have a garden of Eden type era when people went without clothes and enjoyed peace with the animals and with each other. 
But it was viewed not as an ideal age of paradise but as a miserable, poverty-stricken existence from which the goddess Nintur rescued mankind.

That’s exactly the same as the modern myths.  Talk to someone who believes in an old earth and generally, when that person thinks back to the beginning of humanity, the beginning of creation, he sees not a perfect paradise, but a primitive misery that’s being improved through evolution.

The very hope of our salvation is tied to the goodness of the new creation that is to come, and that goodness is tied to the goodness of the first creation.

3. The issue is not just the fact that God created.  The question of how He went about it plays an important role in how we think about Him.

Ps 33:8,9 points out that the reason the world should fear God is not just because He created, but because of the way He did it – by divine fiat.  He spoke, and it instantly happened.

Understanding that has an effect on your worship.

It’s the starting point of faith in God.  

The young earth model teaches that God created everything out of nothing.  He didn’t start with any pre-existing material.  Everything that was created in days 1-6 was created ex-nihilo.  

Theistic evolution suggests that God only created one thing out of nothing – that mass that exploded in the big bang.  Everything else God “created” out of already existing matter.

Accepting the first model is the very starting point of faith in God.

Hebrews 11 is the chapter that explains the nature of saving faith.  And it begins by telling us what it means to believe in God as the Creator:

Heb.11:3 By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God's command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible. 

Faith is not believing God superintended the process, or kicked it off, or watched over the world as everything slowly came together.  Faith is believing that everything that was created was created out of nothing.

4. The old earth view has important implications regarding your view of Scripture in general.

Gn.1-11 is a crucial section that is referred to throughout Scripture, and plays an important role in passages about salvation.  The Gospel itself is intertwined with a literal interpretation of Gn.

And if we establish a pattern of taking something figuratively that is not presented by Scripture as being figurative, we set a very dangerous precedent.  

What old earth Christians are doing to Gn.1 is exactly what liberals have done to the whole Bible – take any point they don’t like and make it allegorical so it doesn’t mean what it says.

The liberals are at least a little more consistent.  Old earth evangelicals seem to start out making Genesis allegory in ch.1, and then arbitrarily, at some point in the Bible, they switch over to taking it at face value.

So the question of the age of the earth is important – it touches on the very foundation of your whole worldview, it’s a major factor in your future hope, it effects your worship and shapes your approach to God’s Word as a whole.

When Was The Beginning?

How long ago did this take place?  Billions years ago?  Only thousands?

More importantly, what is the best source of information for answering that question?  Are the scientific data on the issue solid, or sketchy?  

Is the biblical evidence on the question clear, or difficult to interpret?  Does the Bible even address the question?  

Does science address the question?

What scientific information offers clues as to the age of the earth?  What scientific data do we have?

The answer is, none.  Zero.  There is not one bit of scientific data regarding the age of the earth.

The best science can do is examine how old the earth appears.  Most scientists are convinced the earth appears to be billions of years old.

What does the Bible say about how old the earth appears?  Nothing.  Not one word on that subject.

The Bible has statements on how old the earth actually is, but not a word on how old it looks.  

Scientists can observe how old they think the earth looks, but have no data on how old it actually is.

The issue of how old the earth looks to us is a matter of science, not Scripture.  And it’s of minor importance, because it’s possible for something to look a different age than it is.  

The issue of how old the earth actually is is a matter of Scripture, not science.

So what does the Bible really say about when the beginning was?

We know Abraham lived 2000 BC (probably 1997).

But how long from the creation to Abraham?  Let’s start counting from day 6 when Adam was created.  

Gn.5 gives us a full genealogy.

There cannot be gaps, because it doesn’t just say “so&so was the ancestor of so&so”   It give the exact year that each person was born in relationship to his father.

3 When Adam had lived 130 years, he had a son in his own likeness…and named him Seth.

So Seth was born in the year 130 ADS (After Day 6).  

Do you see that there can be no gap between Adam and Seth? 

Adam was still alive when Seth was born.  And not only was Adam still alive, but we know that he was 130 years old.

So if Adam was 130 years old the year Seth was born, is it possible that there was a million-year gap in between Adam and Seth?  No.

What about a 1000 year gap?  No.

100?  No.

1?  Yes.  It’s possible that Adam turned 131 the day after Seth’s birth, so conceivably we could add 364 days in.

When Seth hit age 105 Enosh was born.

Seth was born in the year 130.  So if he was born in 130, what year was Seth 105 years old?   (year 235)

That was the very year Enosh was born.  There can be no gap.

v.9 Kenan was born in the year 325.

That chronology continues without a gap until Noah’s sons were born in the year 1556 (v.32).

In v.10 we meet Arphaxad, who was born when Shem was 100, which was 1656
Then came Shelah in v.12 in 1691, Eber in v.14 in 1721…all the way up to Abraham, who was born in 1946 ADS (v.26).

So Abraham was born about 2000 years after Adam.  And since we know Abraham lived about 4000 years ago, that means Adam came into existence about 6000 years ago.

If we make all the numbers precise, it was 5938 years ago.  If we allow for a little rounding, maybe we could add or subtract 20 or 30 years – maybe even 100 or 200.

Even if we accept every obscure typo and weird textual variant from unreliable MSS that add years, the most you can possibly add is another 6000 years.

But according to most reliable MSS, Adam came into existence about 6000 years ago.

So according to the Bible, the earth is 6000 years plus the 6 days of creation.

“Did God really intend for us to use those genealogies to date the creation?”

There is more than one purpose for the genealogies, but what other purpose could the dates have?

We find genealogies all over the place in Scripture, and never with the dates included except here.

Why?  There are numerous genealogies, but never are exact dates and ages given without the possibility for a gap…except here?  Why?

What other reason could there be besides giving us an idea of the time span?

The point of ch.5 is to show how quickly perfect humanity degenerated to become as evil as it could be when God is not preserving a remnant.

I think it’s also intended to demonstrate that it was a long enough period of time for the earth to become quite populated.  It was not just 3 dozen people who died in the flood.  It was a burgeoning world of humanity.

“But obviously the dates aren’t literal – people can’t live hundreds of years!”

If humanity is evolving and improving with time, that would be a valid assumption.  But if the creation was created perfect and is on the decline because of sin and the curse, it’s no surprise at all that life spans were originally much longer.

Some people have tried to apply mathematical formulas to those numbers to come up with life spans closer to ours.  The problem with all those is not only are they arbitrary, but you end up with people having children at age 5 or 6.

Besides, even if you have never looked into the evidence for Jesus’ resurrection, and so you are not convinced Jesus was God and that He was correct in His view that the Bible is God’s inerrant Word – even if you look at the Bible as a human history book that is subject to error…

…still there is strong evidence for its accuracy.  

The Bible has an unparalleled record of historical accuracy time and time again being verified by archeology.  

And in this case it’s even corroborated by other history.

The Jews weren’t the only ones who kept genealogical records.  

Scholars used to be puzzled by the Sumarian records of the Mesopotamian kings.  They have life spans between 20 and 40 thousand years.

Then it was discovered that the Sumerians operated on a sexagesimal system (a combination of a base 6 and base 10 system.  They have found that the same symbol that represents the number 36,000 in the sexagesimal system represents 1000 in the decimal system).

That puts the Sumerian ages in the same range as the biblical numbers, and if you add up all the Sumerian numbers by that system, you come up with a total time span “nearly identical” to the biblical record (Walton p.281).  (Walton is an impeccable expert on the ANE)

The Bible teaches that Adam lived 6000 years ago.  That is corroborated by history, and Morris makes a strong case that population statistics best fit the biblical dates as well.

But there is another question.  How much time between the creation of the earth and day 6, when Adam was created?

Let me offer a radical theory: The amount of time that elapsed from day 1 through day 6 was 6 days.

That’s what it says.  But did God mean 6 literal days, or a figure of speech meaning billions of years?

The Days

We know there are figurative uses of the word day.  Could this be one of them?

The arguments on both sides, at this point, border on the ridiculous.  

The people who want ‘day” to mean billions of years will inexplicably turn to 2Pe.3:8  With the Lord a day is like a thousand years

First of all, that verse is talking about God’s patience with people in withholding judgment, not about the creation week.

Secondly, what in the world kind of hermeneutic is that?  Are we going to change the word “day” to always mean 1000 years?  
Was Christ in the tomb 3000 years?  
At the flood did it rain for 40,000 years and 40 nights?

Third, that approach totally ignores the rest of the verse in 2 Pe.3:8 which goes on to say in the very same sentence and a thousand years are like a day. 

So if we apply that approach, the creation took 6 days, which equals 6000 years, which equals 6 days!

Fourth, what good does it do to make a day equal a thousand years?  A 6000-year creation week makes the earth only 12,000 years old.  

And fifth, it doesn’t say a day is 1000 years.  It says to the Lord a day is like 1000 years.  It’s still a day.  It just seems like 1000 years to Him.

It’s just a painfully bad argument.

An even worse argument for the day/age theory is this: 

Some say there can be no such thing as a day without a sun and there was no sun until the fourth day.  

How could God have possibly known how long a day was without a sun?

You’ve got to be kidding.

He can create a universe with a word, but He can’t keep track of time without the sun?  Maybe He was powerful enough to create a watch.

The arguments on the other side tend to get a little silly as well.  People will talk about Hebrew usage and grammar and try to come up with formulas like “This word used with an ordinal number in a certain structure always means 24 hours.” 

That’s not how language works.  

Let me give you some good news.  You do not have to know Hebrew to know how to interpret this word “day.”  It’s used exactly like the English word “day.”

If you look up every use of the Hebrew word “yom” you will find that it is used 3 different ways:
1.	It can refer to daylight hours
2.	It can refer to a 24 hour period
3.	or it can be used in the the phrase “In that day.”  That is a phrase that simply means “when.”  

That’s it.  The word is never used any other way.  You have been told it sometimes means a long, indefinite period of time, but if you look up the references people offer when they say that, they are simply examples of #3.

It’s just like the way we use the word.

If you have never taken hermeneutics, you need to learn an important lesson: you never interpret something by saying, “Will this word bear the meaning I want it to have?”  

Whether you are interpreting Hebrew or Greek or English or Akkadian, or Chinese, the question is always, “How would the original readers have understood this?”

Back in Jesus’ day people didn’t have a problem with a young earth, but now today we do.  But let me say this: there is no Bible-believing Christian anywhere who believes anything other than a 6-day creation.  It was all over after 6 days and nights.

Some of you are alarmed to hear me say that.  The reason you are alarmed is because you assumed I meant literal days, didn’t you? 

Why did you assume that?  Because that’ the normal use of language.

In the sentence right before that, I talked about “back in Jesus’ day.”  You all took that figuratively, because it was obvious that’s how I meant it – to refer to the time when Jesus walked this earth.

You see, you already know how to discern between literal and figurative.

Keep in mind, language is always taken literally unless there is something in what was said that indicates a figure of speech.  So we should begin by assuming literal days.

The burden of proof is on the one who suggests they are billions of years to show from the context why that must be.

Even if God just said “day” in Gn.1 we would be correct to interpret that literally, but the Lord seems to go out of His way to make it as emphatic as it can be that He means a literal day.

They are days.  Regular days.  The kind of days that have an evening and a morning.  Days connected with alternating light and dark.

What more could God have said to indicate literal days?

The argument from science at this point is irrelevant.  The intentions of what Moses was trying to communicate do not vary according to modern scientific theories.  

Whatever he meant, that’s what he meant.  And that message is either right or wrong, but it can’t be changed.

If that conflicts with what some scientists postulate, then you have to decide which is more likely to be in error and reject it as a mistake.

If you don’t think the earth was made in 6 days, you either need to make a linguistic argument for why that’s not really what is being said, or just admit you do not believe Gn.1.  

What was written can never mean what it didn’t originally mean.

And while you are trying to determine how it would have been interpreted by the original readers, keep this in mind: Gn.1 was difficult for them to accept because it seemed to take way too long.  

The ancient Jews were troubled at the idea that what God could do in a moment He stretched out over 6 days.  We have no record of any ancient rabbi being puzzled about how it could be done that quickly.

So the most natural way to understand the word day is literally.

And that seems to be exactly how it is interpreted not only by the original readers, but also by the rest of the Bible.

Moses himself took his own words literally.  If anyone would know what he meant you would think he would.  When we read a little later in Ex.20 he says, 
Ex.20:9-11 Six days you shall labor and do all your work, 10 but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work
Why?
11 For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. 

Do we take the 4th commandment to be that we must work 6 billion years and then take a billion off?

Jesus took them literally.

Mt.19:4 "Haven't you read," he replied, "that at the beginning the Creator `made them male and female,'  

When was the beginning?  According to Gn.1:1 the beginning was 6 days prior to the creation of man.  According to Jesus it was when Adam and Eve were created.  

That’s not a problem with literal days, but it is if the two events are billions of years apart.

In fact, Jesus doesn’t just say beginning, but Mark tells us that He said "at the beginning of creation God `made them male and female.' (Mk.10:6)

The creation of man came at the beginning of creation.  Jesus runs the whole creation week together into a single event.

But if you draw out a time line to scale that extends 15 billion years, and you place the emergence of man at 90,000 years ago (Encarta), if we made a scale model of that it would be like creation began 30 years ago, and Adam arrived 90 minutes ago.

We can understand Jesus referring back to a week – a week that took place thousands of years ago, as a single point on a timeline. 

But how can we explain Jesus’ words with the other model?  

If you were constructing a building, and construction started 30 years ago and is still going on, and just 90 minutes ago a beam was put in place, how could you talk about that beam being put in place at the beginning of the building process?

If you want to accept the world’s ideas about origins, Gn.1 is not your only problem.  You are going to have trouble from the first page of Scripture to the last.

Poetry?
Others say we should not take this as a model of how the creation actually took place, because it’s poetry.

Most Hebrew scholars would not classify it that way, because it doesn’t have the marks of poetry, such as parallelism.  It has all the marks of historical prose.

But if you want to say it sounds poetic to you, that’s fine – call it poetry.  It doesn’t matter, because you don’t interpret Hebrew poetry any differently than prose.

They are interpreted exactly the same: literal statements are taken literally and figurative statements are taken figuratively. 

Ps 119:135-136
Make your face shine upon your servant and teach me your decrees. 
136 Streams of tears flow from my eyes, for your law is not obeyed. 

Make your face shine upon your servant  figurative
teach me your decrees literal
Streams of tears flow from my eyes figurative
your law is not obeyed literal

The question isn’t whether or not it’s poetry.  The question is what parts are intended to be literal and what parts are intended as similes, metaphors, analogies, or other figures?

Figures

A figure of speech is any use of words other than the simplest, normal use for the purpose of achieving an effect beyond the range of simple mechanical language.  

Figures are used for emphasis or to draw a comparison. 

Interpreting figures is pretty easy: just ask yourself this question: “What is being compared to what, and what aspect is being compared?”

Again, this is something you intuitively know how to do, but for some reason people have problems applying it to the Bible.

Someone might say his investment went down the drain.  Is there anyone in this room who is not capable of interpreting that figure?

It’s a comparison.  The condition of the investment is being compared to waste water swirling down a drain.

In what way are the two similar?  Not in every way.  It’s not suggesting the investment is wet, or traveling in a circle.

No, the two are compared only at the point of something having no value and being lost.

Jn.10:9 I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved. He will come in and go out, and find pasture. 

Every person standing there immediately knew this was intended as a figure of speech.  No one thought Jesus was trying to convince them He was an actual hinged part of a fence.

So let’s interpret the figure:
What is being compared?  Jesus and a gate.  What aspect is being compared?  Not every aspect.  Not the appearance, texture, weight, cost, material – only the function.

Now let’s look at Gn.1:3-5  And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. 4God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. 5God called the light "day," and the darkness he called "night." And there was evening, and there was morning--the first day. 

What is the literary form?  The form is historical narrative.  Just compare it to other historical narrative.

Gn.1:3  And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. 4God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness.
Gn.24:45-46  and I said `give me a drink.'  46"She quickly lowered her jar from her shoulder and said, `Drink, and I'll water your camels too.' So I drank, and she watered the camels also. 

So even if scientists can prove the earth looks old to them, that doesn’t mean the earth actually is that old.  It only means the earth is younger than it looks to the scientists.

And, in my opinion, even the arguments for how old the earth appears are weak.

Methods for determining how old the earth looks are population statistics, the rate of decay of the earth’s magnetic field, plate tectonics, helium in the atmosphere, the salinity of the sea, Meteoric dust, erosion of the continents, sediment in the oceans, decay of rocks, layers of rocks, light from space, and others.

Many of those methods seem to be largely ignored by old earth theorists, who seem to focus primarily on rocks and light.

Rocks are examined to determine how decayed they appear to be, and how layers may have been laid down in the geologic column, and those data are combined with theories from biology about evolution to arrive at the present guess that the earth looks like it would look if it were about 4.6 billion years old.

Scientists who believe in a young earth argue from the same data that the earth looks to them like it is only thousands of years old.

Both sides, depending upon the spokesman, can sound very convincing. 

Since I’m not a scientist I’m sure I could be easily fooled.  If you want to look into it yourself,
read “The Young Earth” by John Morris or Creation magazine.

For technical scientific arguments read the TJ Journal. 

The truth is, scientists have been observing the way nature normally works for hundreds, or at most thousands of years.  

But that is really too small a sample to make dogmatic assertions about what was taking place billions of years ago.  We have no way of knowing how conditions may have changed in that amount of time.

Mathematically that’s like observing something for 1 second and drawing conclusions about things that took place 30 years ago based on an extrapolation from that one second alone. 

It might be raining during that one second.  If all the scientists who ever lived, lived in that span of that one second, they might assume it always rains, and that it has been raining for 30 years.

The Apostle Peter points out the fallacy of uniformatarianism – the assumption that just because we observe things one way now, they must have always been that way.

People who commit that logical fallacy scoff at the Bible and call it unscientific.  
2Pe 3:3-4
you must understand that in the last days scoffers will come, scoffing and following their own evil desires. 4They will say, "Where is this `coming' he promised? Ever since our fathers died, everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation."

If we think, “We observe certain tendencies and trends now, and therefore it must have always been that way, and God couldn’t have acted supernaturally.” we are falling into this same error.

So even the evidence that the earth looks old is sketchy at best.  

But I’m no scientist.  Perhaps I have misunderstood the issue, and there is solid scientific reason to believe the earth appears old.  If God allowed the earth to appear that way, even though it was created just 6000 years ago, does that mean God is deceptive?

Deceptive?

Deceit has to do with an intended message, not an unintended inference.

If you tested a rock 5 minutes after the creation, what kind of results do you think you would see?  

The reason they say rocks look old is because elements decay into other elements.  For example, potassium decays and turns into argon at a very slow rate, and so the age of the rock is measured by the amount of argon present.

Are we going to say God couldn’t possibly have created any argon?

Some say yes – God could not possibly have created any argon isotopes in rocks.  Because if God created rocks with argon, or if the trees in the garden of Eden had rings just moments after being created, or if a canyon existed, God would be guilty of deception.  

He would be tricking Adam into thinking that tree was years old when in fact it was only minutes old.

God couldn’t have created a beautiful canyon, because if Adam noticed water eroding the ground at a slow rate, God would be tricking Adam into thinking the canyon was many years old.

They insist that if God wanted Adam to look up at see a beautiful night sky speckled with stars, the ONLY way God could have done that would be to make the stars millions of years before Adam, and then just sit and wait for the light to travel to the earth.

If God just created both the stars and the light having already traveled to earth, He would be guilty of dishonesty.

If we are going to say all that, why wouldn’t God be guilty of dishonesty by making Adam a man rather than a fertilized egg?  

Those things would only be deceptive if God told us to figure out the age of the earth based on observing those things.  But He never did tell us to do that.  Instead He just revealed the creation account to us in the Bible.

Did it ever occur to you that maybe the purpose of tree rings is not for dating them?  Maybe God made the first tree with rings because He likes grains and variety in wood.  

So He created a tree with rings, and then created a method of reproduction, which would cause future trees to develop rings as well.

If the purpose of stars is to be seen on earth, why would God make them in such a way as to be invisible for the first several million years?  To do that would violate their purpose for existence.

Tracy and I put our wedding vows on parchment paper and burned the edges.  Now they look like some old document from a hundred years ago.  

Are we liars, deceiving the world?  

We would be if we told people those documents were ancient.  But we don’t.  We are truthful and tell people we created them just 11 years ago.  We made them look that way not to deceive anyone, but just because we like that look.

Keep in mind, just because something appears to lend itself to a certain incorrect conclusion, that doesn't mean God planted evidence designed to mislead us.
 
For example, suppose you were in a discussion with someone in Jesus' day about the solar system.  He points out to you that the sun rises in the morning, travels in an arc across the sky, and goes down in the evening.  Based on that observation, he postulates a geocentric solar system.  
 
You try to point out to him that there is another possibility (the earth could be rotating and the sun fixed in relationship to the earth).  Your friend acknowledges that as a physical possibility, but rejects it based on this reasoning: "Why would God mislead us like that?  Why would He make it look like the sun moves when it really doesn't?"

The answer is, maybe God made it look like the sun moves not to inform us about the arrangement of the solar system, but to provide us with a time to sleep and a fresh new start every 24 hours.  

Are we going to say God is lying to us when we look out the window and the earth looks flat?

If we interpret what we see wrongly, that doesn't mean God misled us, but that we inferred something God never implied.
 
Why did God create the appearances He created?  How about this: it was created to appear beautiful. The appearance of the earth was not designed to give us dating techniques, but to show us the glory of God. 

It makes perfect sense that if God were creating a perfect world, it would be functionally mature.

“What came first, the chicken or the egg?”  The chicken – full grown.

Also, how could we know what took place at the curse? Scripture seems to indicate an instant, obvious alteration of the creation. 

Perhaps that's when the process of decay in general began, and for all we know at the moment of the curse all of matter may have been radically altered - not to indicate anything about age, but to produce an earth that is obviously cursed. 

If you think of if God had cursed a person instead of the earth, perhaps wrinkles and arthritis and bad joints and cancer may suddenly be present, just to make it obvious that the curse was real. 

God cannot be accused of deception just because we misinterpret something He has done.

That’s not deception.  But I’ll tell you what is deceptive – plainly stating something in a way that causes everyone to believe something that isn’t true.

If God inspired an account of the creation that would explicitly convey meaning to the original readers that was incorrect, that is flat out deception.  

Conclusion:
There are people in this world who have extraordinary intellectual capacity, but who will not accept God’s Word. 

Beware of those people.  They will try to intimidate you.  They will belittle your intelligence and try to bully you in to altering God’s Word.

The Apostle Paul ran into those people, but he didn’t so much as flinch.  They couldn’t intimidate him.

1Co 1:17-25
Christ [sent me] to preach the gospel-not with words of human wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power. 

Let those words sink down into your soul for a second.  

If we try to help out the Gospel by molding it to fit human wisdom, the result is frightening: the cross of Christ is emptied of its power!

Those who have hardened their hearts against God will mock you and call you a fool.  They do that because 
18 the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. 19For it is written: "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise; the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate."  
20Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? 21For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. 22Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, 23but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, 24but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. 25For the foolishness of God is wiser than man's wisdom. 

BENEDICTION: 
Isa.43:1-4  But now, this is what the LORD says-- he who created you…he who formed you: "Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have summoned you by name; you are mine. 2 When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you. When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned; the flames will not set you ablaze. 3 For I am the LORD, your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior… 4 Since you are precious and honored in my sight, and because I love you

Review Questions:
1. How do we know the genealogy in Gn.5 doesn’t have large gaps?

Because it gives the age of the son in the year the father died.

2. According to that genealogy, how long ago did Adam live?  
About 6000 years ago.

3. How do we know the days were literal days?

-	Nothing should be interpreted figuratively unless the literal sense obviously wouldn’t make sense to the original readers.
-	They were the kind of days that had a morning and evening.