And now you wrote this:
I don`t know how long it took but I see generations as more than six days.
If you believe as the Bible describes, that God, Himself inscribed the 10 Commandments and obviously did so with his precisely chosen words, you should know full well how long it took to for Him create. He tells you straight forwardly and without minced words.
It is up to you to believe Him. When man chooses his own prideful perspective, as opposed to the straight forward reading of the clearest set of Laws ever written, he willingly blinds himself to God's clear truth.
One in fact calls God a liar if one does not believe Him or what He wrote.
God's creation was the first generation of many things which reproduce generationally. Speaking as a biologist, we routinely refer to generations of plants, animals, human beings, and even bacteria.
The word generations cannot be limited to the context of only generations of human beings. There were no generations of anything -- human, plant, or animal before there was "In the Beginning...."
Some theologians ask: Must we insist that God created in 24 hour periods when the sun was not created 'til the 4th day?
My answer: If you say you believe what God wrote you do. Full stop.
Still for those who require more --there is the Hebrew word, יוֹם pronounced “yom.” The word “yom” as it appears in Scripture over 1400 times means the same thing – a 24-hour day.
The plural form of this word as God inscribes it in the 10 Commandments in Exodus 20:11 is יָמִים֩ pronounced, "yamin." Preceded by the number 6 in Hebrew it can only mean 6 literal days.
God was there. You'd expect that He knows wouldn't you? He didn't mince any other words in the 10 Commandments -- he wrote them to be understood by man concisely. Why would anyone credibly wonder what God meant by the word "yom" in the 10 Commandments, especially when the creation week is used as the singular reference point for understanding what is meant by the term "week" everywhere else?
God’s first creation was time itself – “In the beginning ….” The materialist, coincidentally, as the presumed master of his destiny must likewise create his own “time” to allow for enough fungible time as he determines he needs to invent to make his premise fit his worldview.
It most often results in circular reasoning that goes something like this: “This bone is 1MM years old.” Really? How do you know? “Well, the strata I found it in is 1 MM years old” OK, so how do you know the strata is 1 MM years old? “Well just look at the bone I found in it! The bone is 1MM years old! Why do I seem to always have to repeat myself to the “lesser evolved”? Aren’t you paying attention? Didn’t you hear me the first time?” **sigh**
God created the Sun moon and stars on the 4th day and set them in place as a clock to mark the time interval that He had already defined for a day on Day 1 and continued to define for Day 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7, as He has defined every other day thereafter.
Genesis 1:14:
And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:
In Hebrew Scripture every day recorded sequentially as an ordinal number (i.e., first, second, third, etc.) invariably refers to a 24-hour day. It’s the same word when used in its same context.
So yes, one must insist on the 24-hour day time interval, unless one chooses to harbor a spirit of disbelief and with it an intent to read the history recorded in Genesis in other than a straightforward fashion.
To not read the Creation account in a straight-forward fashion injects confusion where there is none.
But for sake of discussion let me play Devil’s advocate and suppose that one has the freedom to define the days of Genesis any way they’d like.
If the time frame for “day” in Genesis was different than 24 hours - say 1000 years or even 1 million years, explain how it is that flowers are created on day 3, the sun presumably needed to allow them to photosynthesize their life-maintaining energy is not created until a million years later on day 4, humming birds needed to pollenate some flowers don’t show up until yet another million years later on day 5, and the insects and bats needed to pollenate still other flowers in order to reproduce don’t show up until another million years later on Day 6!
It wouldn’t matter if you speculated 1 year per day or 1000 years per day, you’d have no flowering foliage in any case!
Luther wrote:
“The days of creation were ordinary days in length. We must understand that these days were actual days (veros dies), contrary to the opinion of the Holy Fathers. Whenever we observe that the opinions of the Fathers disagree with Scripture, we reverently bear with them and acknowledge them to be our elders. Nevertheless, we do not depart from the authority of Scripture for their sake.” (Martin Luther as cited in E. Plass, What Martin Luther Says: A Practical In-Home Anthology for the Active Christian, Concordia Publishing House, St. Louis, Missouri, (1991), 1523.)
So I'll ask you again: "I believe all that God says and physically wrote with His own finger. Do you?"
FReegards!
