Created in Six Days

Today on Renewing Your Mind. Usually what is meant by a literal interpretation of Genesis is the interpreting of the Hebrew word yom, which is the word day, to refer to a single 24-hour period. How are we to understand what these chapters in Genesis are teaching about the days of creation? How long did it take for God to create the earth, and does it matter?

Dr. R.C. Sproul is going to tackle that topic today, and he is aware that there's a bit of a minefield around the creation debate. People on both sides are passionate about their positions. Some take Genesis as strict historical narrative, while others see the first chapters of Genesis as poetic.

It's not an easy knot to untangle. We continue now with our study of the hard sayings of Scripture, and if you recall in our last session, we were looking at the debate that has emerged and has become quite hot at times over the dating of creation. Is the earth of relatively recent origin, or is it to be dated back 12 to 18 billion years ago? And I mentioned that that particular issue is related as well to the question of how we understand the reference to days, the six days of creation in Genesis.

The questions are related, but not absolutely identical one to the other. And I also mentioned that up until the Copernican revolution in the 16th century, church tradition, as a matter of course, interpreted the opening chapters of Genesis and the references to the days of creation as historical, 24-hour periods. And since that time, there has been much debate in interpreting those verses.

Now, before I get into the text itself, let me set something of the framework here of the debate, because it's hard sometimes to keep the issues clear and to keep our eyes on what the issues really are, because there are different parties in this debate. On the one hand, you have those people who are convinced that the Bible is simply the production of human ingenuity and human insight, and that what we have in the book of Genesis is an early Hebrew attempt to account for the world as we find it, a religious kind of mythological teaching similar in scope and style to other Near Eastern mythological cosmogonies, that is, theories of the origin of the universe, such as may be found in the Gilgamesh epic and other sources. Then we have those in our 20th century time responding against the radical skepticism of the 19th century who have taken a higher view of Scripture, but one that is still short of the orthodox view of divine inspiration and infallibility.

For example, Karl Barth, who is normally considered the founder of neo-orthodox theology, allows for the presence of legends and myths within the context of Scripture. Professor Barth was once lecturing in Holland, and in the context of the discussion that followed his lecture, one of the people who was there asked him in German the simple question with respect to the biblical account of the fall. He said, Dr. Barth, sprechen sie schlong, which being translated means did the serpent or did the snake speak? And Barth's answer to that question was this reply, Was sprechen sie schlong?

What did the serpent say? In other words, what Barth was getting at is the question of whether there was a real snake or a real serpent that actually spoke is irrelevant to the theological message of Scripture, that what does count is the message and what the serpent actually said and what the debate was all about with Adam and Eve and so on. And of course, people in that school often deny the historicity of the fall and the historical character of Adam and Eve, not to mention the serpent and so on. And so, you have that school of thought that says the Bible contains historical errors, errors of scientific evaluation, but the thing that is important in the Scripture is its redemptive theme, its redemptive message, and these details of history shouldn't be a concern to us. And yet, from the more conservative perspective, there is this strong commitment to maintaining the traditional view of Scripture, echoing and being faithful to the high view of Scripture that Jesus Himself communicated, and being faithful to the claim of the Bible to be the Word of God. And the basic assumption is that if this is the Word of God, how can it make historical mistakes and so on?

And so, the stakes of how we handle this question of the days of Genesis are indeed very high. Now also, what is involved in this dispute is a question of hermeneutics, and that $60,000 word is one that's not familiar to everybody. Hermeneutics is the science of biblical interpretation. It is involved with establishing the fundamental rules of interpreting the written documents of Scripture, how words are to be handled, how word definitions apply, and so on.

You may not be familiar with the word hermeneutic, but you're certainly familiar with the word Hermes, which is the Greek name of the Roman god Mercury, and Hermes was, in the pantheon of deities in ancient Greece, the messenger of the gods. And so, this term hermeneutics means the science of interpreting messages correctly and accurately. Now, one of the subdivisions of hermeneutics that is very important for biblical interpretation is the question of what is called genre analysis.

Now again, the word genre is not one that we use every 15 minutes in our vocabulary, but it's one that we find in those circles that are interested in the study of English literature, American literature, or any kind of literature, because genre simply refers to the form or kind of literature that is being analyzed. We know, for example, that there are rules for interpreting poetry that are different from those rules that we use to interpret narrative history, because it's a different form of literature. And so, before we interpret a passage in the Bible or in any other book, we first have to identify its literary form or its genre.

What kind of literature is it? Now, in this debate, the plot thickens when we ask, are we to interpret the opening chapters of Genesis literally? Now, when people say to me, are we to interpret the opening chapters of Genesis literally, my standard reply, which is somewhat shocking to many people, is simply, of course.

What other way would we use to interpret the opening chapter of Genesis? I think we're under obligation to interpret all of Scripture literally. But I know that most times when people ask me that question, in fact, sometimes they state it in a negative way, they say to me, R.C., you don't interpret the Bible literally, do you? And, you know, like you are certainly not that uninformed and that naïve and unsophisticated as to interpret Scripture literally, are you?

And I like to shock them by saying, yes, I guess I'm that unsophisticated and naïve as to do that. But then I realize that I have to interpret their words and what they are meaning and what they are saying when they ask the question, are you interpreting the Bible literally? Because usually they have a completely different understanding of what it means to interpret the Bible literally from my understanding of what it means to interpret the Bible literally. Literally, what it means to interpret the Bible literally is to interpret it according to the manner in which it is written. What the Reformers called the sensus literalis or the literal sense of Scripture is the sense in which it is written.

That means you interpret a noun as a noun, a verb as a verb, and you interpret poetry as poetry, epistles as epistles, historical narrative as historical narrative. And so that throws us right back to this question of what is the literary form of these opening chapters of Genesis. But usually what is meant by a literal interpretation of Genesis is the interpreting of the Hebrew word yom, which is the word day, to refer simply and exclusively to a single 24-hour period. Now we look at this literature and we say, how are we to understand what these chapters in Genesis are teaching about the days of creation? There are three or four or maybe even five different ways we can approach the interpreting of the opening chapters of Genesis with respect to these days.

I'm only going to look at the three major possibilities. The first one is that when the Bible speaks of creation in six days, that it means six 24-hour periods, just like our day runs the cycle of 24 hours, morning and evening and so on. So that's exactly what was in view in the writing of creation and what the Bible intends to teach and always intended to teach was that in six days, one day short of a week, God completed the entire work of creation.

That's one view. The second way that this is interpreted is by making use of the broader meaning of the term yom in Hebrew, which can refer not simply to a single 24-hour period, but can refer to a much longer though indefinite period of time. For example, we use the term in a broader sense when we say, well, back in my day, we did things differently from how we're doing it today. Now, we're not making a distinction between 24 hours and 6 million years, but we are using the term my day to refer to my generation maybe within a broader concept of 40 years. Or I can say back in David's day, and that now could refer to a whole thousand-year period or so, but it's indefinite. But we do know that the term day can be and is used frequently in Hebrew in this broader, nonspecific sense.

And so many have taken refuge in that and have tried to get away from some of the problems that we have with modern-day science and so on. Although the modern scientific day for the stages of creation would be days of billions of years, and so that really there is little comfort drawn from this less specific orientation to the Hebrew word day. Now, the third view is somewhat fascinating to me because it is a view that uses the term yom or day to mean, on the surface, 24-hour period, though it is used in a dramatic, metaphorical way. Back at the middle of the 20th century, a Dutch Old Testament scholar, who by the way had a very high view of biblical literature, examined the literary form of these chapters of Genesis and came to the conclusion that Genesis is arranged in a peculiar literary form of style that is more akin to drama than to normal historical narrative literature. There are those scholars who also feel, for example, that the structure of the book of Revelation, the last book in the Bible, is set up like a play that is unfolded in several acts, and that this author, Nicholas Ritterbos from the Netherlands, developed what was called the framework hypothesis, which has had various modifications since, namely that what Genesis does here is speaks of the creation of the universe in six definitive stages, like a six-act play. And the literary framework for this dramatic figurative description of creation is the phrase, morning and evening, the first day.

That ends the first scene. And then the second stage of creation is spelled out, and then at the end of that it says, and the morning and evening of the second day. And so that these references to days are references more or less to acts in a six-act drama or a figurative framework for the description of the work of creation.

Now, some people cry foul and say that already involves a rejection of biblical authority. But what that hypothesis, whether it's a good one, a sound one, or an accurate one or not, was designed to do was to, again, ask the question, what is the literary form that we're dealing with here in the opening chapters of Genesis? And as one who is the past president of the International Council of Biblical Inerrancy and one that has defended the doctrine of inerrancy all of my ministry, I'm fascinated by this because it is not based on a low view of Scripture, but it is simply struggling with the proper identification of the literary format of Genesis. Because it's not a simple matter to discern at first glance what is the literary structure of Genesis, for example, in the earlier chapters. You have elements in the opening chapters of Genesis that seem very much consistent with normal, regular historical narrative literature. When the Bible describes the Garden of Eden, for example, it locates Eden with respect to certain known historical rivers like the Euphrates. And when you have normal references to real geographical places, that's a normal sign of historical narrative literature. You have characters in this event that include Adam and Eve, who are later included in genealogical tables in the Jewish Scriptures, which is a strong argument in favor of understanding that the Old Testament and the New certainly believed that Adam and Eve were real historical people. They wouldn't be putting their names in genealogical tables without that. It's not like the Romans with Romulus and Remus and having mythological parents and that sort of thing.

So you have on the surface clear elements of normal historical narrative literature by which the normal laws of literary analysis apply. On the other hand, you have the description in Genesis of the garden containing a tree of life. Now, where do we find a tree of life in anybody else's garden?

I mean, we find apple trees and pear trees and orange trees and chestnut trees and maple trees and so on, but so far I don't know of any catalogue of botany that includes trees of life that you can go out and plant a seed like Johnny Appleseed and get a harvest of delectable fruit from them. That, like is found in the book of Revelation, is obviously an image, not a myth, but an image that has a poetic dimension to it that suggests a metaphorical understanding of it. So what I'm saying is that in the early chapters of Genesis, you have a strange mixture of elements that are found usually only in poetry combined with elements that are found only with historical narrative literature, which has led some scholars who have a high view of Scripture to conclude that you have a somewhat unique literary genre that we're dealing with in the opening chapters of creation, and that the point is that A, that the universe did not happen as a cosmic accident emerging from the slime by itself, that the universe is clearly created by a sovereign God, and that affirmation is without any ambiguity in it, and that it was done successively within the framework of six stages. The literary device for indicating those stages, according to the framework hypothesis, is this device of morning and evening a certain number of days. Now, you ask me, do I hold to that?

I can only say to you honestly, I don't know. I have not settled in my own mind the question of the literary form of Genesis, and I'm open to the framework hypothesis, and what I am saying is that to hold that position does not necessarily mean that you've abandoned the authority of Scripture. If somebody could prove to me that the Bible is claiming that the world was created in six 24-hour days, that'd be the end of it for me, but the question is, is that what it actually affirms? What we're wrestling with in this kind of a debate is trying to square an affirmation that is made by sacred Scripture with judgments that emerge from scientific inquiry. Now, we've seen this in the past, how that we're convinced as Christians that the Bible itself teaches that God not only reveals His truth through the Scripture, but also through nature and what we call general revelation. Now, I don't believe that the revelation that God gives in one place ever contradicts the revelation He gives in another place, so that whatever He reveals in nature would be consistent with what He reveals in the Bible, and with what He reveals in the Bible would be consistent with what He reveals in nature because God doesn't speak with a fourth tongue. But sometimes our understanding of what God reveals in nature is incorrect and is corrected by a more clear understanding of what is taught in Scripture. That's easy to see, but we also have to be aware that it can happen the other way, that sometimes the knowledge that God gives to us from nature does not correct what is given in the Bible, but it may correct a misunderstanding of the Bible that we have, which I think is what happened with the Copernican Revolution in the 16th century, and we always have to be open to that possibility. Well, it's interesting to hear how Dr. Sproul wrapped up this message today because, as we'll hear in a moment, in the years after this lecture, someone in fact did prove to him that the Bible claims that the world was created in six 24-hour days, and we'll hear R.C.

explain his change of position in just a moment, so stay with us. Today's message is from the series, Hard Sayings of the Bible. It's 15 lessons in all, tackling some of the more difficult and confusing passages in Scripture. We'll gladly provide you a digital download of this series when you contact us today with a donation of any amount.

You can make your request online at renewingyourmind.org, or you can call us with your gift at 800-435-4343. Ligonier Ministries produces many resources each month that provide biblical answers to your theological questions. One of those is Table Talk. It's a monthly magazine that features daily devotions and thought-provoking articles from trusted Christian authors and teachers. When you subscribe, you'll receive 12 print issues a year formatted to fit in most Bibles, a Bible study for each day, and digital access to current and past issues.

You can find out more and subscribe when you go to TableTalkMagazine.com. Well, as I mentioned earlier, in the years after the lesson we just heard, Dr. Sproul participated in a Q&A program on the radio. A listener named Bob wrote in and asked about a literal understanding of the six days of creation, and here's how R.C.

responded. Well, thanks, Bob, for asking that question. You've asked a question, as I'm sure you know, is extremely controversial, not only in the secular culture, but also one that has divided Christians within the church. And it's an excruciatingly difficult question, because on the one hand, the biblical record does not seem to give much room for an old earth, and yet the record of scientific evidence in geological realms, astronomical dating, all of those sort of things, tend to indicate that the earth has been here for much, much longer than what the Scripture would seem to indicate. And that as well has provoked the question of whether we are to look at Genesis and the account of creation as being six regular days, or are they day ages, or there's some kind of framework involved here.

I have to be honest with you, I've vacillated on this question over the years. I used to think that the so-called framework hypothesis of Genesis was a viable option, but a colleague of mine, a former colleague of mine, Dr. Douglas Kelly, has written a masterful book about this question. He's convinced me, I think once and for all, that the biblical account has to be taken in terms of six days. And so I do favor the six-day creation.

Now still, you can hold to the six-day creation and at the same time have questions about the age of the earth. Now this brings us to another area that I think we all need to be careful about, and that is that the Word of God, which is divine revelation, tells us that God's revelation is not limited to Scripture, but that God also reveals Himself in nature, in the creation. And that's why for centuries, Christians have devoted themselves fully to the study of natural science. We think, for example, of Isaac Newton, who believed that his pursuit of knowledge was an attempt to think God's thoughts after him.

As far back as Augustine, Augustine taught, and the motion was seconded later by St. Thomas Aquinas, that all truth is God's truth, and that the Christian ought to seek to know and learn as many things as we possibly can, bringing them all in captivity under the Word of God, but that what we learn outside the Bible may sharpen our understanding of the Bible. Exhibit A for that is what happened in the 16th century with the tremendous scientific revolution with respect to Copernicus and the question of what was the center of our solar system. Was it the sun? Was it the earth? And for millennia, people believed not just the church, but the secular scientists believed that the earth was the center of the solar system.

We called that geocentricity. But Copernicus turned that upside down, and there was fierce opposition to Copernicus and people seemed to think that the only opposition to Copernicus is that which came from the church, not the case. In fact, the most vociferous opposition to Copernicus was from the scientific community because he was overturning a scientific model and paradigm. And yet at the time the church learned something. The church at that time learned from the scientists that they had misunderstood the Scripture. Now in the final analysis, as far as I'm concerned, Scripture gets the last word. But in the meantime, I want to make sure that I'm not forcing upon the Scripture a view that the Scripture itself does not teach. Now that's just a brief introduction, Bob.

This is a massively important question and exhaustive. That's all I can give you for now. So even Dr. Sproul changed his views as he studied more and learned more, and that's a great conviction for me. I hope it is for you.

If R.C. studied and learned more, how much more should we? That's a great encouragement for us. I hope you'll join us next week, too, as we continue the study of the hard sayings of the Bible. The topic will be the hardening of Pharaoh's heart that we read about in the book of Exodus.

Did God make Pharaoh to do evil? We hope you'll join us next Saturday for Renewing Your Mind.