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Not trying to talk you out of salvation, but if you don't believe the Bible, I don't know what kind of salvation you have.

A fully grounded one that thanks Christ for the rock it is built upon. The fact that I take a long view of Creation does not threaten that salvation, and as I have said, Christ will explain the intricacies of where I am wrong in the Hereafter, which thankfully is no way threatened by the fact that I view a Long Miracle through the parable of a Short One.

Praytell, Christ said that "I am the door". What kind of hinges does He have?

<< Praytell, Christ said that "I am the door". What kind of hinges does He have? >>

My humble apologies - I was unaware that English was not your first language.

The English language has some tools which are used for comparative purposes, among them are analogies, similies, metaphors, hyperboles, euphenisms, and others.

This expression is a metaphor, because it doesn't use a comparative term such as 'like' or 'as'. An example of a simile would be "A day is AS a thousand years".

Such phrases would make no sense at all if the comparative object was not LITERAL in the first place. Jesus is COMPARED to a door because He has SOME qualities of a literal door - that doesn't mean He is identical to a literal door, but He is the portal a person must go through to be given salvation (portal, that is another comparative term). The context determines what qualities of the literal object apply to what it is being compared to.

When the Bible says the heaven and earth were created in six days - the term 'day' must be literal, normal, as generally understood, or subsequent comparisons (such as the one mentioned above with the thousand years, or comparisons with weeks, months, seasons, and years given in Genesis) would make no sense at all. To say a day is AS 1,000 years would be meaningless if a day could be anywhere from 24 hours to 20 billion years. To say Adam was 930 years old would mean nothing if he had already lived through two days that were millions of years long.

And the subsequent statement from the same verse, that 1,000 years is AS a day, would make comprehension even more confusing, because then a day could be 1,000 times shorter than a day, rather than 1,000 years.

To summarize - the creation days are literal, they are not being compared to something else. No figure of speech is being used. But the example you gave is a grammatical tool called a figure of speech, specifically, a metaphor.