Why don't you believe God created the world in six days?


Email Received:

Why don't you believe God created the world in six days? Do you not have enough faith to believe that God created the world in six literal days? Is that a little too much to take seriously? This is God, I'm talking about! Six, count 'em six days...days means days, not years, not months. Days means 24 hours periods, in America or Israel.


Ted’s Response:

I do believe that God created the universe and the world in six "days." However, I do not believe that they were six 24-hour days. If you were to read all of my Creation commentary, you would understand the reasons why I believe this.

I absolutely do have complete faith that God could have created the universe and the world in six literal 24-hour days. In fact, he could have created it in six nanoseconds, if He had wanted to. Relatively speaking, that actually would have made six 24-hour days be an extremely long period of time.

God is exceedingly patient, though. He waited patiently in the day of Noah while the ark was being built (1 Peter 3:20a), which took many years. God also was patient with Israel for many years (Nehemiah 9:30a). God certainly is patient, often for decades, in waiting for people to come to salvation (1 Timothy 1:16; 2 Peter 3:15). He even is patient in crafting those destined for destruction (Romans 9:22).

There are numerous examples in the Bible demonstrating that God does not rush the things that He does. As such, it would be completely uncharacteristic for Him not to be patient in His greatest task of all time: creating the universe and the earth. God wants for all of us to be patient, which demonstrates one of the fruits of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22). Thus, it would be appropriate for Him to set an example of patience for us in all of the things He does, large or small.

It would have been incredibly atypical of God to demonstrate a lack of patience in jamming the creation of this universe and everything in it into six, literal 24-hour days which, on His time scale, is an infinitesimally tiny period of time. Even billions of years is a short span of time when compared to the ageless, eternal existence of God, even though that may seem very long to us.

Furthermore, several billions of years is not long enough for life to have begun on its own, without God's intervention, much less for macro-evolution to occur. Even many atheistic scientists have come to realize this. They are in a dilemma because they now understand that evolution, from species to species, cannot happen without the assistance of an external intelligence, which we know is God but which many of them call an "Intelligent Designer." The fact is, spontaneous creation and evolution are impossible without God, no matter how old the universe and earth are.

Yes, six is the indisputable number of days. "Six" cannot mean anything other than the number between five and seven, in any language or in any frame of reference.

And yes, today in America and in Israel, the word "day" commonly means a 24-hour period. But the book of Genesis wasn't written today; it was written thousands of years ago, and it was written in ancient Hebrew. In that language, yôm = "day" could mean any of 3 different things:

Here are examples in the Old Testament of the last case above, where "day" (yôm) is not referring to a 24-hour day at all but, rather, to longer periods of time: In none of these cases does "day" (yôm) refer to a 24-hour day. Moreover, the seventh "day", mentioned in Genesis 2:2,3, is not a 24-hour day because we still are in it. God is continuing to rest, during this Sabbath, from His task of creating anything out of nothing. Thus, "day" does not have to mean a 24-hour period when speaking of each creation day in Genesis 1.


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